‘Oh, but it is perfectly true, I promise you. There are much stranger stories than that in this great land of ours! Well, after that, the young Princess sold it to the Razumovskys, who tore down the east front, which used to house the ballroom, and rebuilt it with the octagon room and the terrace as it is now because they had spent a very happy year in England on their honeymoon tour and wanted to be reminded of it. It’s based on a house called Kirby Hall, in your Yorkshire, and they had English bricks brought over specially to make it look as like the real thing as possible.’
Anne burst out laughing. ‘Now I know you are teasing me! You must tell me the real story, if you please.’
‘I am perfectly serious,’ he smiled. ‘Why should you doubt it?’
‘But surely this is your family home?’ Anne said. ‘Your father and grandfather must have lived here before you; but by this account, it has had four owners in eighty years.’
The Count shook his head, turning her towards the terrace steps. ‘It’s not like that in Russia. Until very recently, all the land belonged to the Tsar, and even the richest of the noblemen only held their estates on sufferance. They could be, and were, transferred from one appointment to another, from one part of Russia to another, be deprived of their estate or awarded a new one, all at a moment’s notice; so they had no roots in one place, as your old English families have.’
‘And might they not refuse?’ Anne asked.
‘The Tsar had absolute power. Everything in Russia, every stick and stone, every man, woman, child and beast, belonged to him, to do with what he liked.’
‘That seems very strange. Did no one – a rich provincial lord, for instance – ever try to challenge the power?’
The Count smiled rather grimly. ‘Emperors have been murdered before now. But all power flows from the imperial throne, reward as well as punishment, and we Russians are born to the system. It’s in our blood. And it would be impossible in any case for any provincial lord, as you say, to raise the army necessary for rebellion. There is a very old law which says that a man holding any position of authority over an area may not hold land in that area.’
‘I begin to understand,’ Anne said. ‘A rigid system, but strong.’
‘I suppose things may change in the future,’ he went on, ‘but it’s only since the charter of 1785 that we have been allowed to own land as our legal property – a mere eighteen years, far too short a time to change the habit of centuries.’
‘So you feel no particular attachment to this house?’ Anne reverted to the original point, and sounded so disappointed that the Count laughed.
‘To the pomestie – the estate – none at all, but only a man devoid of humour could feel nothing for a house as eccentric as this! But I dare say I shall sell it in a few years’ time, and buy another pomestie somewhere else,’ he added cheerfully. ‘We Russians have restless feet – we do not like to stay in the same place for very long together.’
‘It is very different from the English way,’ Anne said thoughtfully as they mounted to the terrace. ‘There every man making his fortune longs to buy a piece of land, and to build a house, to plant and improve, and hand them down to his sons and sons’ sons. But I suppose if you have never been able to own the land, it would be different.’
‘And the land here in the northern territories is so poor it is not worth improving. In the north, it runs in the blood to take a crop or two and then move on.’
‘Very poor husbandry, sir,’ Anne said sternly. ‘What happens when you run out of land?’
‘We go out and conquer the next country, of course,’ the Count said with a smile. ‘Why do you think Russia is so big, Miss Peters?’
The Countess and the children were waiting for them on the terrace. ‘Is he talking nonsense, Miss Peters?’ she asked with a smile. ‘He has a very strange liking for confusing and confounding people. Now you must meet Fräulein Hoffnung, whom Nikolai has told you about, I’m sure.’
Anne stepped forward to shake the hand of a thin, elderly woman, whose face was drawn and pinched with long endured pain. But the eyes were kind, and the handshake cordial, and she said to Anne in strangely accented French, ‘Ah, mademoiselle, I am very glad to meet you. My little Lolya will be in good hands, I am sure, and I hope she will be a good girl and do my teaching credit.’
‘I’m sure she will,’ said Anne. The Countess now drew her attention to the stout person who was holding Natasha by the hand.
‘And this is Nyanka, the children’s nurse, who was my nurse, too, when I was little. Nyanka, this is the Barishnya Peters.’
Nyanka was a fat, comfortable-shaped woman, dressed all in black with a white apron, and a kerchief tied about her head. It was difficult to tell her age: she might have been forty or sixty. Her face was brown and wide, the weathered skin shiny across the cheekbones like a rock worn smooth by time. She had a strong, eagle’s beak of a nose, and bright black eyes under surprisingly fine eyebrows. Anne thought she must have been very attractive in her youth, perhaps even beautiful, with that mixture of power and delicacy.
Around her neck Nyanka wore a series of crucifixes in graduating sizes – a large wooden one on a leather thong, an elaborately carved one made of mother-of-pearl, and a small, very beautiful one of blue enamel on a silver chain – together with a copper medal of St Nicholas, and a phial made from a small animal’s horn, held in a filigree case, which Anne learned later was supposed to contain the blood of one of the obscure Georgian saints she venerated. Anne thought there was something unexpectedly similar about her and little Natasha, standing beside her holding her hand, in the way both of them watched her gravely and silently with bright, almost feral eyes.
‘I think, my dear,’ said the Countess to her husband, ‘that you had better show Miss Peters something of the estate before it grows too hot. The house can wait for another time.’
‘Whatever you say, my love,’ the Count agreed. ‘Shall I order the barouche, and then we can all go together?’
‘Oh yes please, Papa,’ Yelena said passionately. ‘And may I ride on the box with Morkin, please? Because he promised he would teach me how to drive, and he keeps forgetting, and if I am there he can’t, can he?’
Half an hour later the barouche drew up outside the house, and Yelena urged Anne to come and meet the two large white horses which were harnessed to it. ‘They are called Castor and Pollux, after the stars, you know,’ she told her importantly. ‘They are my great friends, and I always bring them sugar. Nyanka keeps her tea-sugar for me to give to them.’
The horses were pure white, with pink muzzles and ruby eyes, and thick, pale eyelashes, and their topknots had been tied up with blue ribbons which fell forward over their eyes. They bent their heads eagerly to Yelena’s hands, and blew and nuzzled exploringly for the fragments of sugar in her small palms. The coachman, Morkin, stood by their heads, watching with a proud smile that revealed a lone yellow tooth like a standing stone in his lower jaw. He wore a tall beaver hat, like an English coachman, decorated with a favour of blue ribbon to match his horses, but below that he was all Russian, in a peasant tunic and trousers, and soft boots which made his ankles turn over. He said something to the Count, evidently about Yelena, who smiled at him happily under the horses’ whiskered muzzles.
‘Morkin is very proud of Yelena,’ the Count translated to Anne. ‘She has never had any fear of horses, and he often tells the story of the time when she first learnt to walk, and escaped her nursemaid and wandered into the stables. Morkin found her in one of the stalls, holding herself up by the leg of one of my hunters, quite unafraid. The horse had the reputation of being a kicker, but he never offered the slightest harm to Yelena.’ Yelena now, having had her gloves forcibly put on by Nyanka, climbed with Morkin’s help up on to the box, while the Countess, with a foolish little flowered hat and a white lace parasol against the sun, took her place inside the barouche with Natasha on her lap. The Count helped Anne in beside her, and took the pull-down seat for himself.