But just the same, Feklusha would not confess.
Nanny went to visit her prisoner several times in the course of the day, but she kept stubbornly repeating her refrain, “I didn’t steal anything. God will punish Maria Vasilievna for harming a fatherless child.”
Toward evening my mother came into the nursery.
“Aren’t you being a trifle too harsh with the miserable girl, Nanny?” she said with some concern. “How can you leave a child without food all day?”
But Nanny would not hear of clemency. “What are you thinking of, my lady? To take pity on such a one as that! Didn’t she almost manage to bring honest people under suspicion, the low, nasty thing!” she asserted with such conviction that my mother was unable to go on insisting and left without lightening the young criminal’s lot by one iota.
The next day came. And Feklusha still refused to confess. Her judges were already beginning to feel a certain uneasiness when suddenly Nanny went to see our mother at dinnertime, with an expression of triumph on her face.
“Our little bird has sung!” she said happily.
“In that case,” Mama very naturally asked, “where are the stolen things?”
“She still won’t tell us where she hid them, the nasty thing!” Nanny replied. “She prattles all kinds of rubbish. She says, ‘I forgot.’ But just let her sit under lock and key for another hour or two—and maybe it’ll all come back to her!”
And indeed Feklusha made a full confession toward evening, describing in great detail how she had stolen all these articles with the object of selling them later. Since no convenient occasion had presented itself, however, she
Sofiia Kovalevskaia, A Thief in the House
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had kept them hidden for a long time under the thick matting in the corner of her little closet. But then, when she saw that the disappearances had been noticed and that the thief was being hunted in earnest, she got scared. First she thought she would simply put the things back where they belonged, but then she was afraid to try that. So she wrapped them all up in a bundle inside her apron and threw them into a deep pond on the other side of our estate.
Everybody wanted so desperately to find some solution to this painful affair that Feklusha’s tale was not subjected to very close scrutiny. After some lamentation over the needless loss of the articles, all satisfied themselves with her explanation.
The culprit was released from detention and a short, just sentence was pronounced over her. It was decided to give her a good hiding and then send her back to the village to her mother. Despite her tears and her mother’s protests, this sentence was carried out immediately. Afterwards another girl was sent to serve the nursery in Feklusha’s place.
Several weeks passed. Little by little order was restored in the household, and everyone began to forget what had happened. But then one evening, when everything was quiet in the house and Nanny, having put us to bed, was getting ready to retire for the night herself, the door to the nursery opened softly. The laundress Aleksandra, Feklusha’s mother, was standing there. She alone had stubbornly resisted admitting the obvious and continued to maintain without surcease that her daughter had been “harmed for nothing.” There had already been several strong altercations with Nanny on this point, until Nanny finally gave up and forbade her to come into the nursery any more, deciding that it was useless to try to reason with a stupid peasant woman.
But this time Aleksandra had such a strange and meaningful expression on her face that Nanny took one look at her and immediately realized that she was not there to repeat her usual empty complaints, but that some truly new and important event had occurred. “Now you just look here, Naniushka— look what a thing I am going to show you,” Aleksandra said mysteriously. And, looking cautiously around the room to make sure that no outsider was there, she drew out from under her apron and handed over to Nanny a mother-of-pearl penknife—our beloved knife, that very knife supposedly among the stolen loot Feklusha had thrown into the pond.
When she saw the knife, Nanny spread her hands helplessly. “Wherever did you find it?” she asked.
“That’s just the point—where I found it,” Aleksandra slowly drawled out her answer. She said nothing for a few seconds, evidently taking pleasure in Nanny’s discomfiture. Finally she said ponderously, “That gardener of ours, Filip Matveevich, gave me his old pants to darn, and I found the knife inside the pocket.”
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Chapter Three
This Filip Matveevich was a German who held one of the leading positions in the servants’ aristocracy. He received a rather large salary, was a bachelor, and although to the unprejudiced eye might have seemed no more than a fat German, no longer young and rather repulsive with his typical reddish squared-off sidewhiskers, still our female servants regarded him as a handsome fellow. Hearing Aleksandra’s strange testimony, Nanny couldn’t take it in for the first minute or two.
“But how could Filip Matveevich get hold of the children’s penknife?” she asked in confusion. “After all, he practically never goes into the nursery! And anyway, how could it be possible that a man like Filip Matveevich would take to stealing things from the children?”
Aleksandra gazed at Nanny in silence with a long, mocking stare. Then she bent down right to her ear, and whispered several sentences in which the name of Maria Vasilievna was repeated more than once. Little by little a ray of light began to penetrate into Nanny’s mind.
“Tut, tut, tut . . . so that’s how it is!” she said, waving her hands helplessly. “Akh, you humble one, you! Oh, you no-good woman, you!” she exclaimed, filled with indignation. “Just you wait, we’ll make you come clean!”
It turned out (as I was later told) that Aleksandra had been nurturing suspicions of Maria Vasilievna for a long time and had observed that the seamstress was carrying on a secret love affair with the gardener.
“Well, then,” she told Nanny, “judge for yourself. Would a fine lad like Filip Matveevich love an old woman like that just for nothing? She was probably buying him with presents.”
And indeed she soon became convinced that Maria Vasilievna was giving the gardener both gifts and money. Where then was she getting these things? And so she set up a regular system of espionage over the unsuspecting Maria Vasilievna. The penknife was only the final link in a long chain of evidence.
The story was turning out to be more fascinating and diverting than would have been possible to predict. Within Nanny had suddenly awakened that passionate detective instinct which so often slumbers in old women’s hearts and incites them to rush fervently into investigating all sorts of complicated affairs which do not concern them in the least. And in this particular instance, Nanny’s zeal was spurred even more because she felt that she had deeply wronged Feklusha, and she burned with the desire to atone post-haste. Right then and there she and Aleksandra formed a defensive and offensive union against Maria Vasilievna.
Since both women were filled with moral certainty of the seamstress’s guilt, they resolved upon an extreme measure: to get hold of her keys and (seizing an opportunity when she would be away) to open up her trunk.