‘You don’t do them justice, Nikolasha,’ the Countess reproved gently. ‘They make lovely music, too, and sing and dance, and there’s a kind of mumming they do at Easter–’
‘Yes, dousha, I know,’ the Count said soothingly. ‘I didn’t suggest that drinking was all they did – only that when they drink, they do it single-mindedly, and to excess.’
‘You will give Miss Peters the wrong idea,’ the Countess pursued. ‘I’m sure our serfs here are very hard-working, good sort of people. And some of the women do lovely embroidery.’
‘Yes, Irushka maya, I know. I think there’s just time to drive as far as the sawmill,’ he said, changing the subject firmly, ‘and then we can come back past the paddocks and the orchards and the kitchen garden. When you have time, you must show Miss Peters the greenhouses. We haven’t much in the way of ornamental garden, Miss Peters. The change of climate from heat to cold is too rapid here and too extreme to grow many flowering plants out of doors, so we have to rely on greenhouses. There were only two when we first came here. The Razumovskys used them simply to grow potted plants to decorate the house for formal occasions. But I have greatly extended them, added an orangery, and built a whole new range of succession houses, and I mean to do still more in that direction when I have the leisure. I would like to be able to have fruit and vegetables sent in to Petersburg for most of the year. I think you will find them well worth looking at. I got many of my ideas in England. Your gardeners understand such things better than anyone in the world.’
Except the Russians, Anne added inside her head, anticipating his thought. He caught her eye and laughed as if he had heard it.
The Count left early the next morning, and Anne experienced the first day out of his company for a very long time. She felt strangely hollow and listless, which she attributed to the aftereffects of the long journey. She was glad that the Countess said there was no question of her beginning her duties at once.
‘You must settle in first and find your way about,’ she said. ‘And besides, I promised Nikolai to show you the rest of the house.’
Over the next few days, sometimes with the Countess as guide, and sometimes alone, Anne explored the vast, rambling house. The main formal rooms were those she had already seen: the hall, staircase hall, and octagon room, which together were intended to form a triumphant progression in the grand manner of the previous century – the ‘circuit’ – beginning at the main entrance and culminating in the ‘state’ dining-room. This lay to the left of the octagon, and Anne had only glimpsed it in semidarkness, for its shutters were kept closed, and its furniture and lustre bagged in hollands.
To either side of the great hall were four smaller, more intimate rooms, a library, a business-room for the Count, and two sitting-rooms, which the Countess used for privacy, or on dark or cold days when they were more cosy than the octagon room. All the rooms were covered with pictures, struggling for space, frame to frame, and Anne spent many an amusing hour looking at them. They were a motley collection. Some were works by well-known painters – Rubens, Rembrandt, Van Dyck – others by lesser-known Italian artists, endless views of Venice by Pittoni and Tiepolo, and allegorical scenes by Panini and Bonavia; Alexander and the Gordian Knot, Mars and Venus, Rebecca at the Well, the Death of Lucretia.
But by far the most numerous were portraits, some of famous people by eminent court painters, others family portraits by artists unknown. Anne found several of the Countess by the same hand, presumably Grigorovitch, and others of her as a younger woman, by a much less skilled hand. The children were represented, and the Count appeared eight times by artists of graduating skill, from quite good to appallingly inept. There were also portraits of dogs, dozens of horses, and various interiors and views of the outside of the house in a variety of styles. It was an amusing mixture of the priceless and the worthless, and Anne contemplated with interest the mind which could have chosen to display them all side by side.
Upstairs in the central block were four ‘state’ bedrooms, which all led off the gallery in the staircase hall, and a range of smaller bedrooms used by the family. The nursery occupied one whole side of the house, and here the children and Nyanka and her assistant Tanya slept and played. There was a small room designated as the schoolroom, which Anne would use, and Fräulein Hoffnung also had a private sitting-room where she could retire to keep her stern Lutheran Sundays. But unlike an English household, the children were not confined to the nursery. Instead, they had the run of the whole house, and though startled by the idea at first, Anne soon came to feel that it gave the house a more comfortable and genial atmosphere.
The white tower, she discovered, was occupied mostly by the servants, of whom the upper ones had their own rooms there. Other rooms were empty, others again used for storage. There was a great deal to store – furniture, porcelain, carpets, pictures, the expensive, extensive magpie collection of the travelled Russian nobleman. There was a great deal of Italian statuary of various periods, and most of the furniture and carpets seemed to be French – the spoils of the Revolution, Anne supposed. The treasure was heaped, disregarded, in room after room in the narrow circular towers. She wondered if even the Count knew what he had.
The black tower was empty, and unused even for storage. Anne liked to go there alone for there was something intriguing about its stark emptiness. For most of its height it contained no rooms, only a stone staircase which wound round an empty central core, lit by unglazed, arrow-slit windows through which the air blew freshly. At the top of the stairs a solid oak door opened into a large empty chamber, half-moon shaped, occupying half of the tower. Three doors in the straight wall led to a staircase up on to the leads, and into two smaller segments of rooms, in one of which the mad old Princess had immured herself. Oddly, Anne found no atmosphere of gloom up here. The view from the windows at the top of the tower was breathtaking, and she could imagine the self-confined prisoner spending all her days gazing outwards, rather than inwards at her own sadness. On fine days, Anne liked to climb up on to the leads and just sit there in the blessed sunshine, feeling the gentle air brushing her face, and watching the cloud shadows move across the green meadows, the acres of ripening crops, and the distant darkness of the forest.
Yelena was not interested in accompanying Anne and her mother on formal tours of the house, but when it came to the kennels and stables, she could not have been kept away. The stables up at the house were called the ‘white’ stables, to distinguish them from the red, and here the riding and driving horses were kept. Castor and Pollux, Anne was told, were always at her command for taking out the children in one of the light carriages. There was also a team of bays for the berlin, and a very round dun pony called Limonchik – ‘Little Lemon’ – who pulled a little park calèche which seated two. The Count’s hunters were still out at grass, but there were half a dozen road horses, three of whom were broken to side-saddle, two mouse-grey Tibetan ponies, and the Countess’s own chestnut mare, Iskra.
In the kennels were a variety of hunting dogs: English mastiffs, and a flock of elegant, black-and-white borzois, including the Count’s favourite, Zilka, who was nursing a litter, of which, Yelena told Anne ecstatically, her father had promised her one of her own.
As well as getting to know the house and the servants and beginning to learn a little Russian – she fully intended to be able to speak it properly within a year – Anne was learning more of those on whom her future happiness depended. Yelena, she soon saw, had got out of hand, perhaps through the growing indisposition of Fräulein Hoffnung, or perhaps simply because the Russians seemed to have a very haphazard way of bringing up their children, and spoiled them dreadfully, allowing them all sorts of liberties that wouldn’t have been dreamed of in England.