‘The grey crepe is my best dress,’ Anne said. ‘The one I wore at dinner last night.’
‘Oh, no, it’s too severe, and cut too high,’ Shoora protested. ‘Besides, it’s not really a ball-gown. She should have something much younger and prettier to dance in, shouldn’t she, Irusha?’ she added as her sister-in-law came in. ‘You aren’t required to dress like Fräulein Hoffnung, you know! You could have one of my gowns to make over, if you like, only they would all go round you twice over, you’re so slender.’
‘No, no,’ Irina said calmly, ‘she must have something new. I have some very pretty figured muslin upstairs which I bought in Petersburg but never had made up. You shall have it to make yourself a new gown – something fashionable and pretty.’
‘Excellent! And I have some ladies’ journals you can look through. This gets better every moment,’ cried the irrepressible Shoora. ‘Just like dressing up a doll!’
Anne felt ridiculously excited. She was to go to a ball and a grand dinner, the guest of a Prince and Princess! She tried to tell herself that she should not care so much for such worldly pleasures, but she was only twenty-three, and her natural spirits bubbled up in her like champagne. To attend a ball in a new gown, to dance! Someone would surely ask her at some point in the evening, even if it were only kind Vsevka Danilov. She would have at least one dance – and what heaven to be at a ball, as a guest, in a new gown!
In her spare time during the next week, she laboured long and carefully over the new gown, and took it to Marya Petrovna to put in the rather ambitious finely stroked gathers she wanted for the sleeves. The material the Countess had so kindly given her was a fine Indian muslin, figured with raised, glossy white spots, and Anne had cut out a very simple but elegant gown, with a low neck, and short sleeves bound with white satin ribbon. She had unpicked the silk underskirt of her crèpe gown to go under the muslin, which was so fine that the dusky pink colour showed through rather prettily.
On the day of the ball, everyone went upstairs very early to dress, the timing being adjusted to Vera Borisovna’s lengthy requirements. Anne had little to do to prepare herself, and was dressed and ready within half an hour. She was sitting in her room reading, to pass the time, when there was a knock on the door, and the Countess’s maid Marie came in to say that her mistress had sent her to dress Anne’s hair. It was another example of her great kindness, and Anne sat before her looking-glass feeling a now familiar mixture of guilt and irritation over Irina Pavlovna’s character, as she watched the maid’s skilful fingers rearranging her hair. Marie brushed it until it shone, then curled it into ringlets and drew them up to the top of Anne’s head, bound them there in a bunch with pink ribbon and some white rosebuds, and then cut and curled her front hair.
‘C’est ainsi que Madame Josephine les porte, mademoiselle,’ Marie assured Anne when she had finished, and then stood back to regard the reflection critically. ‘Mais vous avez besoin de quelque chose – un collier, certainement, et des boucles d’oreille pour completer la toilette.’
Anne produced the pearl earrings that her father had given her, and Marie looked at them rather doubtfully, and handled them with the tips of her fingers.
‘They were my dear father’s last present to me,’ Anne said firmly.
Marie sighed and put them on for her and said bravely, ‘On voit qu’elles sont assez jolies, enfin, pour une demoiselle.’ However, when it appeared that the only thing Anne could offer by way of necklace was a simple gold chain, she rebelled firmly and finally, and scurried off to consult with her mistress.
A little while later, in spite of all her protests, Anne was obliged to accept from the Countess the loan of a handsome necklace of three strands of pearls clasped at the front with a ruby, and a pair of coral and pearl bracelets. Anne was reluctant to wear borrowed jewels, and insisted that she was perfectly happy with her own modest things. The Countess, seated before her mirror with a worried frown, was obliged at last to turn round to impress Anne with the urgency of the matter.
‘Please, for my sake, do wear them! You will not be formal enough without, and Vera Borisovna will take exception if everything is not just so. You really ought to have something better than those, but I chose them because they will go with your father’s earrings, which you were so anxious to wear.’
Anne had no wish to increase her mistress’s burdens, and with this veiled threat of more costly jewels, accepted with as much grace as she could and made her way down to the octagon room to wait for the hour of the carriages. Vsevka and the Count were there, chatting. Both stood as she entered, but Anne’s eyes were for the Count alone. In evening dress, powdered, with a glittering ribbon and star across his chest, he looked so handsome and noble that her heart skipped like a roe, and she would have found it impossible, if challenged, to say anything about Vsevka’s appearance, or even what colour his coat was.
She walked a few steps into the room and stopped, looking at him almost shyly, like a child in her first grown-up dress waiting for approval. He looked at her, and with a whimsical gesture of one hand, he bid her turn around to be viewed.
‘So that’s the new gown,’ he said at last. ‘Yes, it will do very well. I thought at first it was too plain, but after all there is a kind of simplicity, which is very agreeable. I still think,’ he added with a smile to remind her of the other ball, ‘that you should have diamonds, Anna Petrovna. But at least I shan’t have to ask anyone’s permission to dance with you.’
‘No one’s but hers,’ Vsevka commented drily. ‘You have no manners, Nicky! I’ll show you how it’s done. Anna Petrovna, will you do me the inestimable honour of reserving a dance for me tonight?’
Anne tore her eyes from the Count for long enough to smile at Vsevka’s low bow, and say, ‘Yes – thank you – with pleasure. You are very kind, sir.’
‘No, you are kind, mademoiselle. And now, since Nikolasha seems to have been struck dumb, come and sit here by me, and let me pour you a glass of wine. The others will be hours yet. I don’t know what women take so long about up there! I mean, look at you: you have done everything a woman needs to appear ravishing, and you’re still ready at a reasonable hour.’
Anne could have wished Vsevka anywhere but here, as he obliged her to sit down and chatted pleasantly, destroying what she had seen as a tender moment between her and the Count with his commonplace kindness. But perhaps, she reflected a while later, he had been doing it for her sake: perhaps she had been wearing rather too much of her feelings on her face. When the other ladies finally arrived, she was able to greet them with complete composure, and even endured, unmoved, a long and searching examination through the lorgnon by Vera Borisovna, who, in a parure of pink diamonds and amethysts the size of plover’s eggs, was as splendid and glittering and gem-encrusted as an Indian potentate – which, with her sallow complexion and jewel-clasped turban, she even rather resembled.
In the long, pillared and gilded drawing-room at Grubetskaya, the dinner guests assembled: the women deeply décolletée, all bare arms and bosoms, and more jewels than an English lady would have thought quite the thing; the men in silk breeches and stockings, velvet or satin coats, ribbons and stars and orders, dress swords, powdered hair. There was something rather engaging about the evident delight everyone had in dressing-up, even for what Anne had been assured was not the most formal of occasions, and the overt pleasure with which they wore their princes’ ransoms of jewels.