A Stairs - Eva Ibbotson

‘With me?’ said Petya excitedly. ‘Will you dance with me?’

‘Of course, galubchik.’

‘No,’ said Tom Byrne. ‘First with me.’

‘I’m sorry to disillusion you both,’ said the earl, ‘but as Anna’s host at Mersham I undoubtedly have first claim.’

Petya’s face blazed with pride and happiness. This was like the old days, with men fighting to dance with Anna.

What an idiot he’d been! For ar moment he’d really thought…

‘She’s a marvellous dancer,’ he told the earl of whom, as a partner for his sister, he thoroughly approved. ‘Especially when she waltzes. Fokine said when you play Anna a waltz you can see her eat the music. She goes round and round and she never gets giddy!’

Rupert smiled enquiringly at his hostess. ‘A waltz could perhaps be arranged?’

‘Very easily, I think,’ said Minna to whom nothing that had happened had come as a surprise.

Rupert turned to Anna. ‘May I have the pleasure of the first dance, Countess?’

She lifted her face to his, not even trying to hide her blazing joy. ‘You may, my lord.’

And so they went together into the ballroom to dance for the first and last time in their lives, the ‘Valse des Fleurs’.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

A great deal had happened to Tchaikovsky’s sumptuously orchestrated showpiece to turn it into a suitable waltz for the ballroom, but Mr Bartorolli was not dismayed.

‘Told you,’ he said to his first violinist when Minna came with her request, ‘I had a sort of hunch,’ - and lifted his baton.

It begins slowly, this well-loved, well-remembered waltz. The preluding is gentle, the phrases soft and pleading, the dancers have time to smile in each other’s arms, to catch their breath. But not for long. Soon the familiar phrases try out their plumes, begin to preen, to gather themselves up until reality is swept away in an intoxicating, irresistible swirl of sound.

To this waltz, born in a distant, snowbound country out of longing for just such a flower-scented summer night as this, Rupert and Anna danced. They were under no illusions. The glittering chandeliers, the gold mirrors with their draped acanthus leaves, the plangent violins, might be the stuff of romance but this was no romance. It was a moment in a lifeboat before it sank beneath the waves; a walk across the sunlit courtyard towards the firing squad. This waltz was all they had.

So they danced and neither of them spoke. As the music began and his arms closed round her, he had felt her shiver. Then the melody caught her and she moved with him, so light, so completely one with him that he could guide her with a finger. Yet as he held her he had no thought of thistledown or snowflake. Here, beneath his hands, was tempered steel, was flame…

He checked, reversed, and she followed him perfectly. It seemed to him that she could fold her very bones to lie against his own. And tightening his arms, drinking in the smell of green soap, of cleanliness personified, which emanated from this changeling countess, he allowed his mind, soaring with the music, to encompass their imagined life together.

He had not wanted Mersham - had returned to it reluctantly as to a burden he must face. In the few weeks she had been there, Anna had changed all this. Her feeling for his home was unerring, as inborn as perfect pitch in music. Bending to arrange a bowl of roses, standing rapt, with her feather duster, before the Titian in the morning room, bringing in the mare at daybreak, each time she seemed to be making him a gift of his inheritance. Like those dark Madonnas on the icons whose patient hands curve up towards their infants’ heads, Anna’s every gesture said: ‘Behold!’

Anna, in his arms, was without thoughts, without dreams. Rupert had imagined her folding her bones to shape them against his. She had done more. She had folded her very soul, given it into his keeping - and danced.

‘Oh, God!’ said the dowager softly. And then to Minna, standing beside her. ‘Did you know?’

‘That Peter was her brother? I guessed almost as soon as he came. Or did you mean…?’

She did not finish. There had been no scandal yet -only a drama of the kind that any hostess must delight in. Her Harry had led Muriel first on to the floor; Tom, good soul that he was, was dancing with Lavinia; other couples had quickly joined in and were swaying and swirling beneath the glittering chandeliers. Yet it seemed to Minna and the dowager that there was no one in the ballroom except those two.

‘If only they would talk,’ said the dowager.

And indeed the silence in which those two danced was as terrible as an army with banners. Only Muriel, armoured by her outrage at Anna’s presumption as she gyrated heavily in the arms of her host, entirely failed to see what had happened.

‘What an extraordinary business,’ said the Lady Lavinia, lurching in her skirted codfish costume against the long-suffering Tom. ‘Is she really a countess?’

‘Yes.’

Tom had seen Susie come in. She was dressed as a gypsy and accompanied by her mother in the costume of a Noble Spanish Lady - and by that stout bullfighter, Leo Rabinovitch. If only he could get to Susie it would be easier to bear what he had seen in Rupert’s face.

‘Muriel doesn’t like it, does she?’ continued Lavinia with satisfaction. ‘She looks as though she’s swallowed a porcupine.’

Tom glanced at Rupert’s fiancee. Muriel certainly looked angry, but he could see no sign on her face of distress or pain.

But now the music was gathering itself up, manoeuvring for the climax. Mr Bartorolli had done all he could. With his fine social antennae he had understood exactly what was happening. The ball might be for the stiff, white-wigged lady in silver, but it was about the young girl with her ardour and her Byzantine eyes who seemed to be one flesh with the young Earl of Westerholme. So he had played the first repeat, the second, demanded -to the surprise of his orchestra - a reprise. But now there was nothing more to be done. For the last time, the melody soared towards its fulfilment, the dancers turned faster, faster … and with a last, dazzling crescendo, the music ceased.

It was over.

They drew apart and for a moment Anna stood looking up at him, dazed by the silence.

Then, for the last time, she curtsied.

If it hadn’t been for that curtsy, Rupert would have left her then and there. He expected no more miracles. But what she made of that gesture, combining her former respect and humility with the elegance, the lightness of the ballroom - yet all of it, somehow, heart-breakingly on a dying fall — was more than he could bear.

‘Come outside for a moment. You must be hot.’

She shook her head. ‘No, Rupert.’

He did not hear the denial, only that she had used his Christian name - and followed by every pair of eyes in the room he led her out, still protesting, through the French windows and on to the terrace. Nor did he stop there but, as familiar with Heslop as with Mersham, led her down a flight of shallow stone steps to an arbour with a lily pond and a stone bench, protected by a high, yew hedge.

‘Anna,’ he said, guiding her to the seat, ‘I shall do what is right. I shall not jilt Muriel. The mistake is my mistake and I will live by it. But if you have any mercy tell me just once that you feel as I do? That if things had been different …‘He drew breath, tried again. That you love me, Anna. Is it possible for you to tell me that?’

She was silent, and suddenly he was more frightened than he had ever been. Then she turned towards him and gave him both her hands to hold and said very quietly: ‘I have no right to tell you, you belong to someone else. But I will tell you. Only I will tell you in my own language so that you will not understand. Or so that you will understand completely. Listen, then, mylienki, and listen well,’ said Anna - and began to speak.