Eva Ibbotson - The Secret Countess

Seeing this, Miss Pinfold moved closer to the Countess Anna, as did Mademoiselle Leblanc and Fräulein Schneider and the phalanx of tutors and grooms and servants who surrounded the little girl, waiting for jealousy and tantrums.

They waited in vain. To Anna, the baby was a miracle of which she never tired. She had to be plucked from his side at bedtime and would be found in her nightdress at dawn, kneeling beside the cot and telling the baby long and complex stories to which he listened eagerly, his head pressed against the wooden bars.

Love begets love. As he grew, Petya followed his sister everywhere and his cry of: ‘Wait for me, Annoushka!’ in lisping Russian, entreating English or fragmented French echoed through the birch forests round Grazbaya, along the tamarisk-fringed beaches of the Crimea, through the rich, dark rooms of the palace in Petersburg. And Anna did wait for him. She was to do so always.

As she moved from the idyll of her childhood into adolescence, Anna, still looking like an incandescent fledgling, only ran harder at the glory that was life. She fell in love with her handsome Cousin Sergei, with the blind piano tuner who tended the count’s Bechsteins, with Chaliapin who came to sing gypsy songs in his dark and smoky voice after the opera. She became a Tolstoyan, renouncing meat, finery and the anticipated pleasures of the flesh. It was a bad time for the Grazinskys, as Anna hobbled round the palace in brown worsted and a pair of unspeakable birch bark shoes said to have been made by the Great Man himself in the year before he died. Fortunately, before her feet sustained permanent damage, Diaghilev brought his dancers back from their triumphant tour of Europe and Anna, who for years had hung out of her parents’ blue and silver box at the Maryinsky being the doomed Swan Queen or mad Giselle, now took up with passion the cause of the rogue impresario and the dazzling, modern ballets which stuffy St Petersburg had condemned out of hand.

‘Oh, how beautiful it is! Chto za krassota! ’ was Anna’s cry during these years: of the glistening dome of St Isaacs soaring above the mist, of a Raphael Madonna in the Hermitage, a cobweb, a remarkably improper négligé in a shop window on the Nevsky Prospekt.

There seemed no reason why this fabled life should ever end. In 1913 Russia was prosperous and busy with the celebrations to mark three hundred years of Romanov rule. In the spring of that year, Anna, holding down her wriggling brother Petya, attended a Thanksgiving Service in Kazan Cathedral in the presence of the tsar and tsarina, the pretty grand duchesses and the frail little tsarevitch, miraculously recovered from a serious illness. A few days later, she helped her mother dress for the great costume ball in the Salles de la Noblesse …

‘It’ll be your turn soon, mylenka ,’ said the pleasure-loving countess as she fastened the famous Grazinsky emeralds over her old boyar dress of wine-dark velvet and set the sun-shaped, golden kokoshnik on her abundant hair. For, of course, she had planned Anna’s debut for years, knew to the last hair of their well-born heads the young men she would permit to address, and ultimately espouse, her daughter.

There was just one more year of picnics in the birch forests round Grazbaya, of skating parties and theatricals with Sergei, now in his last year at the exclusive Corps des Pages , and pretty, frivolous Kira and a host of friends.

And then the archduke with the face of an ill-tempered bullfrog and the charming wife who had so dearly and unaccountably loved him, were assassinated at Sarajevo. To the Russians, accustomed to losing tsars and grand dukes time and time again in this way, it seemed just another in an endless succession of political murders. But this time the glittering toy that was the talk of war slipped from the hands of the politicians… and a world ended.

Overnight, meek, devoted Fräulein Schneider became ‘the enemy’ and had to be escorted to the Warsaw Station under guard. Mademoiselle Leblanc, who had aged parents, also left to return to France. Miss Pinfold stayed.

‘God keep you safe, my Little Star,’ the count whispered to Anna, holding her close. ‘Look after your mother and your brother,’ — and rode away down the Nevsky, looking unutterably splendid in his uniform of the Chevalier Guards. Three months later, he lay dead in a swamp-infested Prussian forest, and the flame that had burned in his daughter since her birth, flickered and died.

They carried on. The countess, aged by ten years, organized soup kitchens and equipped a fleet of ambulances at her own expense. Although Anna was too young to enrol officially as a nurse, she spent each day at the Georguievski Hospital, rolling bandages and making dressings. As the shortages and hardship grew worse, Miss Pinfold increasingly took over the housekeeping, organizing the queues for bread, the foraging for fuel.

When the revolution came and the Bolsheviks seized power from the moderates, the Grazinskys fared badly. They had been too close to the court and, with no one to advise them, they tarried too long in the two rooms of their looted palace which the authorities allowed them to use. It was only when Petya was stoned on the way home from school that they finally acted and joined the stream of refugees fleeing northwards through Finland, east to Vladivostock, south to the Black Sea and Turkey.

The Grazinskys went south. They had entrusted the bulk of their jewels to Niannka, the count’s Georgian wet nurse, who was sent ahead with a king’s ransom in pearls, emeralds and rubies hidden in her shabby luggage.

The old woman never arrived at their rendezvous. They waited as long as they dared, unable to believe that she had betrayed them, but were eventually compelled to travel wearily on. In March 1919 they reached Sebastapol, where Miss Pinfold retired behind a palm tree to fish, from the pocket of her green chilprufe knickers, their last remaining jewel, the Orlov diamond, and persuaded the captain of a Greek trawler to take them to Constantinople.

A month later, they reached England.

‘You cannot be a housemaid, Anna,’ said Miss Pinfold firmly. ‘It is quite absurd. It is out of the question.’

‘Yes I can. Pinny. I must . It is the only job they had vacant at the registry office. Mersham is a very beautiful house, the lady told me, and it is in the country so it will be healthy, with fresh air!’

Anna’s long-lashed Byzantine eyes glowed with fervour, her expressive narrow hands sketched a gesture indicative of the Great Outdoors. Miss Pinfold put down the countess’s last pair of silk stockings, which she had been mending, and pushed her pince-nez on to her forehead.

‘Look, dear, English households are not free and easy like Russian ones. There’s a great hierarchy below stairs: upper servants, lower servants, everything just so. And they can be very cruel to an outsider.’

‘Pinny, I cannot remain here, living on your hospitality. It is monstrous!’ Anna’s ‘r’s were beginning to roll badly, always a sign of deep emotion. ‘Of course I would rather be a taxi driver like Prince Sokharin or Colonel Terek. Or a doorman at the Ritz like Uncle Kolya. Much rather. But I don’t think they will let women—’

‘No, I don’t think they will either, dear,’ said Pinny hastily, trying to divert Anna from one of her recurrent grievances. ‘And as for living on my hospitality, I’ve never heard such nonsense. If you and your mother stayed here all your lives, I could never repay the kindness your family has shown to me.’

They were sitting in the tiny parlour of the mews house in Paddington which Pinny, by sending home her savings, had managed to purchase for her old age. Pinny’s sister, who had been living there, had tactfully gone to stay with a cousin. Even so, the little house was undeniably crowded.