‘By the way, Miss Peters,’ he said as they started off, ‘it has never happened to come up in conversation, but do you ride?’
‘Yes sir – my father taught me,’ Anne said. ‘I like riding very much.’
‘Good,’ he said. ‘Irina likes to ride, and it makes it more pleasant for her if she has a companion when I am away.’
‘Oh yes,’ said the Countess. ‘I shall be able to show you something of the countryside, too. There are lots of places too far off to walk, where one cannot take a carriage.’
‘I have no habit, madame,’ Anne mentioned.
‘Oh, but you can make yourself one, I’m sure. Nikolai says you are very skilled with the needle.’
‘I’ll bring back the cloth from Petersburg,’ the Count said. ‘You shall tell me what colour you like.’
‘You are too kind, sir,’ Anne began, remembering by contrast how Lady Murray had bid her make over one of her old dresses for the Embassy Ball; but the Count only looked surprised.
‘Nonsense. You must have a habit if you are to ride. Ah, look, you can see the church now. I always think it looks prettiest glimpsed through the trees like that.’
The church stood on the main road, which went to the right to Petersburg and left to Kirishi, opposite the beginning of the track leading down to the house, where, in England, there would have been wrought-iron park gates. It was a little white church with a blue cupola, and small, narrow windows. To the left of the door was an arched recess in the wall in which was painted a Byzantine virgin in a dark red robe against a sky-blue background, her head ringed with stars.
‘We go to mass here every Sunday and on Feast days,’ the Countess said. ‘We have no chapel in the house, and I prefer the mass in a small church like this rather than in one of the fashionable churches in Kirishi. It is simpler and more sincere, I think. I suppose, Miss Peters,’ she added with a faintly anxious accent, ‘that you are a Protestant?’
‘Fräulein Hoffnung is a Lutheran,’ the Count said briefly, ‘which is rather trying for her.’
For whom – the Fräulein or the Countess? Anne wondered. ‘I was brought up in the Church of England,’ she said as neutrally as possible. It was too early as yet to judge how far the quantity and quality of their alien religion would affect her relationship with the Kirovs. Possibly the Fräulein would be able to enlighten her on that.
The coachman had halted the carriage in the feathery shade of a stand of three false acacias, their trunks white with summer dust, and the Countess now asked in that same, faintly anxious voice, ‘Would you like to see the church, Miss Peters? It has some fine icons.’
‘Yes, very much,’ Anne said firmly, and was rewarded with a relieved smile. They all got down, and stepped out of the bright sunshine and into the cool darkness of the interior. It seemed very empty to Anne, who was used to English churches full of pews or chairs. The floor was of black and white marble, whose chill struck through the thin soles of her sandals, laid in a chequerboard pattern with the points reaching away to the closed altar-screen gates. They were of black wrought-iron, tipped with gold, and elaborately designed, like the gates of a palace. Beyond them, the sanctuary lamp gleamed faintly red.
The air was full of the dry, lilac odour of incense – a strange smell, like dead beauty, Anne thought, like a butterfly or a flower, pressed in a collection, only the sad, dried husk of its living self. After the bright light outside, it seemed dark in the church. Under the cupola, a lustre like an iron cartwheel on a long chain bore a petrified forest of virgin candles, ready for the next service. Around the walls, there was the muted glimmer of small lamps, each flickering flame faintly reflected in the gold of its icon. Near the door, there was an ancient silver font, the engraving worn almost smooth by generations of ardent hands. Against the wall on one side was a narrow wooden chest, and on the other a painted board, almost like an inn sign, depicting the Crucifixion. There was a wide, scarlet wound in the pierced side, and the long dark face was wrenched in a very human agony. The board was supported by a wooden pole on a heavy base, and on the top of the pole was a sinister skull of Adam, glaring sightlessly up into the shadows of the roof.
Anne had been prepared to feel disapproval of the idolatry, or merely an indifferent interest in the architecture, but as she wandered slowly down the church looking at the icons, she found herself unexpectedly moved. The emptiness, the space around her (what was it the Count called it? Prostor! Did everything in Russia give that feeling?); the faint smell of incense; the absolute simplicity of the place allied with the passionate beauty of the dark Byzantine madonnas cradling their infants’ heads, and the intensity of suffering in the faces of the saints; and the dim, glimmering gold and the dark vivid colours all combined to give her a strange feeling of exaltation, which she did not understand, and was not sure she entirely approved of, yet which she did not want to lose. Stepping out into the sunshine and normality, she experienced a sense of loss.
Behind the church, there was a small churchyard, bounded by a low, white-paling fence, and grouped around it to form a square, there were a number of buildings with which Anne was to become very familiar. To one side of the square were the priest’s and deacon’s houses – plain, wooden buildings roofed with wooden shingles – the living quarters being reached by an external wooden staircase, for the ground floor of each was used for storage and for keeping animals.
On the opposite side was another similar structure, slightly larger, occupied by the steward of the estate and his wife and children. To the side of it, a road led away, Anne was told, to the peasant village, and to a large house like a sort of barracks, where the estate workers lived. Next to the steward’s house was a smaller one, divided into two sets of living quarters, one upstairs and one downstairs. Below, Anne was told, the estate painter lived. She imagined at first that they meant he was the man responsible for painting the fences and barns, but when she ventured on the idea, the Count laughed.
‘No, no, I mean painter as in portrait painter! There are plenty of examples of his work around the house. Irina will show them to you. I am lucky in him – he is very good, but he has never been to Petersburg, so he doesn’t know it. If anyone ever discovers how good he is, he will be quite spoiled, and I shall lose him, as sure as fate. Naryshkin would like to have him – his painter can’t even get the eyes on the same level! Grigorovitch has painted Irina several times, and the children, and all my favourite horses. You must sit for him now you are here, Miss Peters.’
‘I, sir?’ Anne said, startled. The Count smiled genially.
‘Yes – why not? The children will be glad in years to come to have your likeness, and Grigorovitch might as well have something to do to keep him occupied.’
Anne had never had her likeness taken, except by other girls at school, for practice in sketching, and the idea intrigued and rather embarrassed her. She wondered if the Count were saying it to tease her, but then she could not think why he should, and dismissed the idea. If he really wanted the children to have her portrait, she would not object. In her blue dress, perhaps…
Upstairs from the painter lived an old woman whom the Countess had brought with her from her home in the Caucasus, and since Yelena clamoured to be allowed to visit her, the Countess took Anne up to meet her too. Yelena ran ahead up the steps calling, ‘Marya Petrovna! Marya Petrovna! It’s me!’ and Anne and the Countess followed holding Natasha’s hand, while the Count walked off to speak to his steward.