Debra Dean - The Mirrored World

In the carriage returning home, I drifted off listening to our mothers speculating whether one who was so well-connected as Colonel Petrov might ever deign to take a bride with little to offer.

“With no family to please, he may indulge his own whim.”

“He could do better.”

“Of course. But there is no law written for fools. Consider the match that Count Sheremetev made for his youngest son last year. She brought nothing but a few sticks of furniture and a pleasing face.”

Once home, I followed Xenia and Nadya to our room at a drowsy distance. Nadya was in a fury, pulling ribbons and combs from her hair and leaving a trail of these obstacles in the darkened passage. “You think only of yourself,” I heard her accuse Xenia. “You set your eye on some drunkard, and when he does not ask you to dance, you make a fool of yourself and spoil both our chances.”

I mewled for Olga to undress me and put me to bed, but she did not heed me.

“What is this, kitten?” she asked Nadya.

Nadya brushed her off like a flea from her bosom and squared off to Xenia. “Admit it. You did it on purpose.”

Xenia did not deny the charge. “I only rearranged the order to put us with our right partners.”

“Right partners!”

“I am going to marry him.”

It irked Nadya beyond endurance when Xenia said things she could not possibly know. “Spare me your drivel. He was amusing himself with you, and you are the only one who did not see it. And what of me? I suppose I am to marry the old man you stuck me with?”

“Yes.”

Nadya sneered. “And how shall you explain this to his wife and children?”

Xenia shook her head, puzzled. “I do not know.”

On a day in April, some months after the Empress’s ball, the house was made ready—we did not know for what, only that the floors were being scrubbed, the carpets beaten, and each window polished inside and out. Lyuba could not be bothered to make our breakfast, and we were given only bread, after which Olga took us to the banya that we might also be scrubbed. It was not our customary day for bathing, and we were eaten by curiosity to find the cause for all this. Olga only shook her head. “Someone is coming to dine, but that is all I shall say.”

“He must be someone of importance,” Nadya prodded. “Is it Uncle Kolya’s commander?”

Olga gave a look that said she knew well enough but not even the torments of the rack would loosen her tongue. “You will know soon.”

“It is your husband,” Xenia said to Nadya.

So far as I knew, our mothers had not yet narrowed to a single person the possible candidates for Nadya’s hand. Still, had Xenia said that the moon was a pancake, I should have believed her.

“How do you know?” Nadya demanded.

“I dreamt last night that an egg rolled in the door. Lyuba picked it up and was going to use it for a cake, but then she gave it to you instead.”

“What piddle!” Nadya said, but she was pale.

Though most of Xenia’s dreams had no more relation to our lives than a hand does to a sack of grain, on some few occasions a remembered dream of hers had replayed itself in our waking lives. Once, she had dreamt of a hare, and the next day a hare had come onto the path where we were walking. It stopped, rose up on its hind legs, and in the manner of a person who sees someone on the street he thinks he may know, it looked at us briefly before springing away. Another time, she dreamt of someone drowning, and a week later a boy in the village fell into the river and was lost. As Nadya had said, even a blind pig finds an acorn once in a while. Or maybe it was only that Xenia was more attentive to all the minute shifts and eddies in the atmosphere that pass beneath the notice of others—a rustle in the grass, a whisper in the servants’ hall.

Whatever the explanation, Aunt Galya came to our room later that day to oversee our dressing for dinner and instructed Olga to change Nadya’s skirt.

“There is someone coming whom I’m anxious you should impress.”

Outside, there was the rattle of an approaching carriage and horses, and with it the baying of hounds. Aunt Galya sprang to the door. “Nadya, hurry,” she scolded, as though Nadya had been dawdling. “We mustn’t keep him waiting.”

From the window, we watched the carriage clatter into the courtyard, trailed by a roiling pack of dogs. A footman leapt down, opened the carriage’s door, and with difficulty helped to extricate its contents. The low door and narrow step from the carriage necessitated a hazardous shifting and resettling of the occupant’s considerable girth, but once he was aright and rebalanced on his spindly legs, we saw it was the elderly gentleman with whom Nadya had danced at the ball. He made his slow way to the door and was lost to our view.

“Stop looking at me,” Nadya hissed, and when this had no effect, “You don’t know a thing. You cannot.” She bit her lip, turned, and ran after Aunt Galya.

My father and the egg-shaped gentleman were taking their leisure in front of the stove, and after they had finished their vodka we all retired to the dining room and took our customary places round the table, excepting Nadya, who was seated directly across from our guest that he might have an unimpeded view of her. His glass was filled first, and then my father lifted his own.

“My family is honored by your presence, Kuzma Zakharovich. In your long service at court, you must have dined in very auspicious company.”

“What’s that?”

“I’m honored, sir, to have you at my table.”

The good man nodded absently and began to eat, freeing us to follow. At first, I kept my eyes on my plate, stealing only occasional glances by first lifting my napkin to my lips, but each time I looked, Kuzma Zakharovich was so intent on his food that I shortly dispensed with the subterfuge. He worked at the meat, his lower lip thrusting out wetly and then receding, thrusting and receding, and his jowls rolling like a ship in heavy swells. Stopping to wet the mess with a slurp of wine, he then continued until, with a final effort, he swallowed the morsel.

My father was not himself a man given to easy conversation. He tested various themes without success before he hit upon the solitary enthusiasm of Kuzma Zakharovich beyond his digestion.

“Have you had good hunting this season?”

The gentleman’s countenance brightened visibly. “At Peterhof this past month, the Empress’s guests shot three hundred and twelve fowl. A goodly number of them wild geese.”

Between mouthfuls of soup and eggs and pickled cabbage, Kuzma Zakharovich privileged the table with an accounting of various takes, divided by the quantities of each species, and, further, by the individual tallies of each member of the party.

“…of these, Count Betsky shot sixty-eight.” Kuzma Zakharovich paused, allowing us to digest this number and himself a spoonful of mushrooms. “Twenty-seven of them quail,” he added. “However, the official tally counted only twenty-three, as four were winged and not recovered.”

What would it be to sit at breakfast and dinner for the rest of one’s days and listen to a droning recitation of favored personages and the creatures that had fallen for their sport? I watched with horrified fascination a bit of bread wobbling on his lower lip.

“…of course, these numbers are nothing as compared with those of our dear reposed Empress.” Kuzma Zakharovich’s eyes grew rheumy.

The late Empress Anna Ioannovna had been a devoted huntress—she was said to keep loaded guns at various posts throughout the palace so that she might walk down a corridor and shoot at gulls through the windows—and it was she who had made Kuzma Zakharovich Grand Master of the Hunt. So continually had he been at her side—praising her aim and advising her how she might stock her parks next season with tigers from Siberia or peacocks from India—that he was widely thought to have her ear. As a consequence, his company had been sought after and endured, and his first marriage to a niece of Count Peter Saltykov had excited much envy.