The daily walk was usually, by request, to the red stables and the farm buildings. The dairy was a favourite haunt – both children loved to watch the cows being milked, or the cheese being turned out – and they usually finished up at Marya Petrovna’s, to stroke the pig and hear a story. The old lady had a fund of Russian folk-tales and fairy-tales, usually involving talking animals and retribution by the world of Nature on human beings who thought too well of themselves. The children could never have enough of these, and would sit at her feet while her nimble fingers drew the embroidery silk back and forth, or flashed amongst the lace bobbins, as though they were weaving the story right there before their eyes.
With Marya Petrovna’s professional touch in the making-up, Anne’s riding habit was soon ready, and the Countess donated a smart hat with a veil, hardly used, from her extensive wardrobe. Looking in the mirror the first time she tried them on, Anne saw herself with new eyes. The colour was perfect for her, and together with the smart cut of the habit made her appear striking, where before she had always felt herself to be pleasing enough, but insignificant.
The Count provided her with a bay mare called Grafina, who had pleasant paces and a good mouth, and thus mounted she took out Yelena, riding astride on Tigu, one of the Tibetan ponies, or sometimes accompanied the Countess on the beautiful chestnut Iskra, whose name meant ‘Flame’. The Countess adored her mare with a passion, and the two were in obvious sympathy with each other. The Countess rode well, and with unexpected boldness. She seemed a different person on a horse. Fräulein Hoffnung said that this was because she was from the Caucasus, where children learned to ride before they could walk.
‘They are great horsemen, the hill people,’ she said. ‘Madame rides like a Cyclops, like all her family. They’re great horse-breeders, too. Iskra is a Karabakh – their special breed, famed all over Russia for swiftness and beauty. I don’t know much about these things, but I do know that Karabakhs can cost anything up to eight hundred roubles.’
On Sunday mornings, when the family went to mass, Anne would sometimes take her work and go and sit with Fräulein Hoffnung in her sitting room, and from the talks they had at those times, Anne learned a good deal about Russia, and about the family’s history. The Kirovs were the third family Fräulein Hoffnung had worked for, although she had been with them for most of her life. She had been governess, and then chaperone to the Count’s sisters, until he had married and produced children of his own, when she had transferred to his service. Thus she had known the Count since his boyhood.
‘He was the sweetest-tempered child I ever knew,’ she said. ‘His own son is the same, my dear little Sergei – not so little now, I suppose, though I can hardly think of him at cadet school when it seems only yesterday that I was watching him take his first steps. But he is the same sweet-tempered boy his father was. It often works that way, you know – the apple tree grows apples, and the thorn tree thorns.’
‘And when Sergei is not at school, does he come here?’
‘He visits from time to time, but he lives mostly with his grandmother, the Count’s mother. She is very fond of him and likes to have him with her. Grandmother-hunger, we call it. Of course, he has his cousins nearby in Moscow, but I sometimes think it is a pity he should not see more of his other sisters – and his new mother, too. But the Dowager Countess is a very determined woman, and it’s not to be supposed… It was she who chose the Count’s first wife, Sergei’s and Lolya’s mother, and she was very fond of her, so it’s hardly surprising that she wants to keep Sergei with her, to remind her.’
She sighed and relapsed into a contemplative silence. There seemed to be several intriguing hints here about the family’s relationships, but Anne did not yet know her colleague well enough to judge how she would react to probing on such matters. Fräulein Hoffnung was fiercely loyal to the Kirovs, After a while, Anne asked her if the Kirovs were particularly kind and generous, or whether the treatment she had received were the general rule in Russia.
‘Ah, Miss Peters,’ Fräulein Hoffnung said, putting down her work to clasp her thin, age-freckled hands at her breast, ‘since I first came to Russia forty years ago, I have met with nothing but kindness and respect everywhere I went! Always I ate with the family, not just when they were alone, but on the grandest occasions; taken to the ballet and the opera, to balls; given such presents! Ach, das is doch ausgezeichnet! Everywhere, I was welcomed. That is the Russian character, to make one welcome. I cannot begin to tell you!’ She reached into her reticule for a handkerchief to dab at the corner of her eye.
‘So it isn’t just the Count and Countess?’ Anne said.
‘Ach, no! I could have been married once, you know,’ she said, nodding her head significantly. ‘A young man of very good family addressed me – this was when I was much younger, of course – and not only did the Count – the present Count’s father, you understand – give his blessing, but the young man’s family set aside all consideration of a dowry. Where else in Europe would you meet with such generosity?’
‘Why didn’t you marry him?’ Anne wanted to know.
Fräulein Hoffnung drew a deep sigh and picked up her work again. ‘Ah, my dear, I couldn’t leave my young ladies, dear Annushka and dearest Shoora! When a woman becomes a governess, she gives up all thoughts of love and marriage.’
The crisis of discipline with Yelena was not long in coming. One evening the Tchaikovskys came for cards and supper, bringing with them their grown-up son and daughter, Vassili – or Basil, as he preferred to be called – and Olga. The young Tchaikovskys were the leaders of the smart and fashionable younger set, and Anne had heard so many tales of them that she had been quite nervous about meeting them. They were talked of as inseparables going everywhere together, and despite Basil’s being nearly thirty, and Olga twenty-seven, they firmly refused to get married, each declaring that no one could match the other’s beauty and intelligence. They had large allowances, and divided their time between Moscow and the newly fashionable Crimea, from which they had just returned after visiting an aunt and uncle of whom they had expectations.
As so often in life, Anne found the reality less daunting than the reputation. The young people were expensively dressed in the ‘high French’ style that was fashionable amongst the wealthy, and despite the difference of their ages and sexes, they looked remarkably alike: both tall and slender, with dark, high-nosed faces, thick black hair, and rather bulging, pale-green eyes, like translucent, ripe grapes. They had the air of being handsome, which probably, Anne reflected, served rather better than the reality; and while they spoke with a great deal of self-assurance, neither, to her notice, said anything either very clever or very original.
The Countess was clearly daunted by them, and their parents intensely proud of them. The Count, with his most inscrutable smile, encouraged them to talk, laugh, and give their opinions more and more freely as the evening went on, occasionally catching Anne’s eye with a look of unspeakable innocence. It was well for her self-esteem that he did, for in the young Tchaikovskys she met for the first time in Russia something of the attitude she had grown accustomed to in England. Olga looked her over once sharply on being introduced and dismissed her as beneath her notice, and thereafter never spoke to or looked at her again the whole evening, while Basil looked down the neck of her gown as he bowed over her hand, and each time she spoke, used the opportunity to ogle her in a manner Anne thought both lascivious and patronising, as if she ought to be grateful to be thought worth leering at.