This is what I can’t stand. When you can’t tell what’s wrong, but you just know, nonetheless, that it’s there.
‘I believe in coincidences,’ says Lev.
‘How’s that?’
‘Sometimes things that seem too improbable, even impossible, just happen.’ He holds my gaze. ‘It’s funny. You are the one who believes she is being haunted, but you are also the more sceptical of the two of us.’
‘You really think it could be random? Meaningless?’ I ask.
‘I didn’t say meaningless. Perhaps your mother heard of this woman, this countess, if she was so famous. Or even read this memoir.’
‘I told you, Mum wasn’t keen on non-fiction. Something else is going on here.’
Lev half-smiles. ‘I see how you are always trying to fit things together,’ he says. ‘Not just what happened to your family, but everything, all around you.’
I don’t know what to say, so I look down at my hands, twist them together.
‘I didn’t say it was bad, Raisa.’
I look up again and this time, he treats me to a real smile. To my shock, I feel a light frisson down my spine, the unravelling of a knot in my stomach that I wasn’t even aware of.
Oh, no, no, no.
‘I’m going to pop out to make a few phone calls,’ I say quickly.
‘No problem. I should run to the supermarket,’ he says.
Alexey’s telephone sits on a three-legged stool in the entry hall. I cradle the receiver as Lev puts on his shoes. The frisson tapers off with the sound of his footsteps. I need to step more carefully. I’m doing so much digging into the past; I don’t want to overturn anything else. I tell myself, more than once to reinforce it, that it wasn’t because of Lev, that whispery little feeling. It was just hearing my former name the way he said it. Like I have never been Rosie at all.
The operator puts me through. Thankfully it’s the weekend and Richard is at home, and I tuck myself into the space between the stool and the wall and I tell him all the things I was going to say in my letters. He laughs at the idea of merry-making cockroaches, says he’s discovered a mouse in our apartment. It’s eaten a hole through one of the cupboards and he wants to call the exterminator but at the same time he feels bad. Maybe he’ll hold off until I come home.
Home: that existence in England that’s sitting there on ice. Waiting for me.
Without Rosie, there’s nowhere to go from here.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Antonina
Tula province, 1917
The travel by train is more than a day’s worth. As the hours pass, Tonya finally begins to enjoy the spicy scent of coal, the incessant rhythm of the wheels. She lies down on her wooden bench to sleep and as she does, there’s a twitch in her belly. A strange sensation, almost unearthly. She turns, and there’s another. Cautiously she runs a hand over her dress, down her ribs, past her belly button, towards her hip bone. But whatever it was has already gone.
The last leg of her journey is a coach that leaves her in Popovka, at the house of Kirill Vladimirovich. Kirill once worked at Otrada as a stablehand, back when Papa could afford that many horses. He is one of her closest friends, the other being Nelly.
But to Tonya’s astonishment, he and Nelly are now married.
The slight, silly Nelly has been replaced by a real wife of a woman. One who offers Tonya soup and honey tea and a place by the pech’, the masonry stove, and announces breathily that Kirill is out at the windmills.
‘I’ve always adored him,’ Nelly says, untying her scarf. ‘You know that.’
‘I thought the same way I did,’ says Tonya stiltedly. ‘As a brother!’
‘I already have a brother,’ Nelly says, matter-of-fact. ‘And he doesn’t look like Kirill.’
Tonya cringes. ‘I plan to go on to Otrada tomorrow,’ she says, to change the subject. ‘Papa doesn’t know I’m coming. How is he managing, Nelly?’
Nelly doesn’t answer. Tonya notices that Nelly is wearing a peasant’s panyova, a long, chequered skirt. The material is coarse, ungainly, unbecoming. It is the costume of grown women. This whole scene is surreal and yet familiar, the simple wooden home with its thatched roof, the animals making noise outside in the yard, the way Nelly seats herself at the wheel. She spins hemp, round and round and round, while the oil lamp gives off a moony glow.
These are the sights and smells of home; this, right here, is surely where Tonya belongs. They sit without conversing further, and Tonya begins to feel sleepy.
‘Is that you, Tonya?’
She jerks upright, nearly spilling her tea. Kirill comes to where she is sitting and gives her a kiss on the head. He is still broad-shouldered, beaming, the same boy who taught Tonya to ride, to fish, and even her sums, when Mama and Papa declined to send her to the village school. Who was once dreadfully infatuated with Mama, so that all Popovka knew.
‘You have such a beard now,’ says Tonya, with affection, but Kirill only pulls out a chair at the table beside her.
A new scent is keen in the air, overcooked and overdone. Nelly has stopped spinning.
Something is wrong.
‘I must tell you about your father,’ says Kirill.
Tonya looks back and forth between them. She’s had no word from Papa in years, but that didn’t come as any surprise. Papa just about stopped speaking altogether after Mama’s death in childbirth, mere months before Tonya married Dmitry, and there was no proper goodbye when Tonya left, only a hand lifted briefly as he looked up from his hothouse roses. It could have been to reach for his pruners.
Quietly Kirill explains that a few village mobs banded together just after the revolution in February. Armed with nothing more than farm tools, they began marching on the estates of the landed gentry, hanging the inhabitants of those estates, setting fire to library collections older than Russia herself. Enacting one thousand years of revenge in one night.
‘They ransacked Otrada,’ says Kirill. ‘But they left it standing, at least. They killed the Prince.’ He sounds strangled. ‘Gutted him. In the conservatory. His handprints were all over the glass.’
Tonya wants to ask what happened to Papa’s body, where it’s buried now. Even if Papa never wanted anything to do with her, she’d rather know. But the words don’t form right, and even as Kirill and Nelly’s faces fill with sympathy, something else begins to brew in Tonya’s mind. The family at Otrada is old and noble, yes, the villagers always used to say; their line can be traced back to the days of ancient Muscovy. But their blood has curdled. Something is rotten. That’s why the Prince and Princess have had no more children, after Kukolka. Why all the babies end up dead. The family is cursed.
Such gossip never bothered Mama the way it did Tonya, of course. They are simple, superstitious folk, the muzhiki, Mama would remark, while staring into her own black-opal eyes in the mirror.
They are jealous of anything beautiful. They are afraid, and all they have is their pitchforks.
Mama was right, but still there are times when Tonya wonders if the village knew her family best. If there was a curse Mama would have seen, if she’d only turned around.
The weeks drift along. Tonya sleeps poorly, spends hours lying in the crawl space above the stove. For the first time in her life, she begins to awaken inside her nightmares. She often finds herself, in these dreams, close to the veranda behind Otrada; in the orchards. She can hear the barking of Papa’s borzois. The French doors are open. Something soft slinks between her legs. It is the family cat, Sery. There is an outline of someone in the doorway.
Mama.
Tonya’s eyes fly open.
There it is again, that twinge at the base of her abdomen. She presses up and down her stomach and the more she does, the giddier she feels. The strange dream is instantly forgotten. She’s felt a hard ridge like this before, but from the outside. It was as big as Mama ever got.