The doors closed behind them, leaving only Stana, Peter, George, and Militza in the room.
“Do something!” implored Stana. Her face was white. Her eyes were burning as bright as the candles. “Her babies may be dead, but we cannot let her die. Not her! Not the grandest of all grand duchesses. If she dies at my wedding—our wedding—what will they say?”
“I’m not sure,” whispered Militza.
“I know you can do something.”
“What can you do?” sneered George, taking a goblet of wine off the table and draining it. “You’re just a couple of peasants from the mountains!”
“I am a princess in my own right!” retorted Stana, turning to face her husband.
“Really!” he scoffed. “Princess of where? Your father’s not even a king! The real king was assassinated! Your father dresses like a peasant, your palace is made of wood, and you’ve barely got a silk dress between you! I have seen your trousseaux; it would be amusing if it weren’t so pathetic. If the tsar had not paid out for your dowries, to the tune of one hundred thousand rubles a year, you’d still be rotting away in that one-street town you call a capital!”
“It is a capital.” Stana’s voice was quiet. “And it is a beautiful capital, with wide streets and pretty houses. In the spring it smells of juniper and you can hear the waterfalls splashing through the gorges of the Black Mountains. The Monte Negro that fell as rocks from Satan’s sack . . .”
George slowly put his glass down on the table and stared at his wife. Small, lean, and lithe, he wore his brown hair swept back off his forehead, and his neat beard and mustache covered the lower half of his face. He was certainly handsome and yet at the same time unattractive. His cruel eyes were narrow with disdain.
“‘Satan’s sack’! I have never heard anything so ridiculous in all my life! Satan doesn’t exist, any more than there’s a god.” George snorted with derision as he picked up a half-empty bottle of Burgundy. “Your father thinks he’s moving up in the world, consorting with kings. But you two are nothing! And you’ll always be nothing. You’re not even pawns! You’re two out of nine sisters. Nine! You were going cheap, my dear. A few thousand rubles each! Broodmares! Fresh blood, brought here to replenish St. Petersburg’s stock. Just what the tsar ordered! Everyone knows that!” His head wobbled as he smirked.
“You’re drunk,” whispered Stana, her hands beginning to shake as she sank slowly into a chair.
“Of course I’m drunk!” he replied, pouring himself another glass of wine. “It’s my wedding day. Every man gets drunk on his wedding day! It’s the only way to drown the bitter taste.”
“You don’t know what you’re saying,” said Peter, striding towards George. “You’re upsetting everyone.”
“Leave me alone!”
“Listen, my friend, I think you should leave.”
“Leave!” George sneered. “It’s my wedding!”
“Indeed it is. But your bride is very distressed. Let me get you to bed.” Peter moved to take George by the arm.
“Get your hands off me!” shouted George as he staggered towards the door. “I’m more than capable of taking myself off to bed! In fact, I can drink more than this and still rut like a ram!”
Stana looked horrified. The color rose in her cheeks, and her black eyes shone with tears. This was not how she and her little wooden poppets had imagined her wedding day; this was not how she’d imagined it at all. Militza rushed over to hold her hand.
“Don’t worry. He doesn’t mean it.”
“Go on!” George goaded, turning around. “Everyone says you’re a couple of witches. Gossip says you can call up the devil himself, that you’re his daughters! The devil’s daughters! With your black hair and your black eyes from the Black Mountains. Well, get out your cauldron, witches! Give it a stir!”
“You underestimate us at your peril!” Militza hissed.
George simply laughed in her face. Militza stared back at him, the blood pumping through her veins. “Now I am scared!” he scoffed as he left the room. “Very scared!”
“Please!” said Stana, tugging at her sister’s arm, tears now tumbling uncontrollably down her cheeks. “Forget him. Do it for me. Don’t let her die. You promised me. You did. Today . . .”
Militza hesitated.
“You crossed your heart and you kissed me.”
“There will be a price,” declared Militza, slowly turning to her sister.
“There is always a price.” Stana nodded in agreement. “We both know that.”
“What price?” asked Peter.
“Don’t ask questions,” Stana shot back. She turned once more to face her sister. “You heard them as they left. Our life isn’t going to be worth living if she dies—”
“Very well then,” Militza replied. “Call Brana and tell her to get my things.”
THAT LONG, HOT AUGUST NIGHT, THE COURT HELD ITS COLLECTIVE breath. And the fact that the Grand Duchess Vladimir survived to see the pale light of dawn was, according to Dr. Sergei Andreyevich, nothing short of a miracle.
All the next day, snippets of gossip flew back and forth, recounting how the doctor had apparently prepared the grand duke for his wife’s imminent death. They’d been spotted taking a late-night walk through the gardens at Peterhof, where the grand duke had nodded repeatedly, tugged anxiously at his mustache, and looked very grave indeed. Come daybreak, when the good doctor returned to the yellow salon to find the grand duchess sitting up, awake, he could not believe his eyes. He never questioned Militza as to her methods—and she never offered up any explanation.
The Vladimirs went on to hold a discreet burial for one of the babies just outside the grounds of the family church on their estate at Peterhof. It was quiet and quick, the spot unconsecrated but peaceful; a young silver birch tree was planted, and the priest kindly said some prayers. But as to what happened to the second baby, the other clot, and who exactly the shuffling old woman who tidied up the yellow salon was, no one ever knew.
And just as Stana had predicted, the result of the grand duchess’s double miscarriage was a rigid, intractable frostiness that was colder and more impenetrable than the frozen taiga itself.
For in lieu of any concrete details that she could recall, the Grand Duchess Vladimir simply created her own story, her own narrative, which, rather than placing the sisters at the heart of her recovery, blamed them for her terrible plight in the first place.
“They are the sort of women who could sour milk with one glance,” she would say, taking a sip of champagne. “All I can really remember was the distinct smell of goat,” she’d declare, laughing uproariously. “Goat!”
“Goat!” they’d laugh. “The Goat Princesses!”
Truth be told, what Maria Pavlovna could remember of that long, white night perturbed her so much she preferred not to think about it at all. It haunted her in the early hours and whispered to her from the quiet shadows. So, like most things unpleasant or taxing, she simply decided not to engage with it. She liked to flap anything disagreeable and unlikable away with a little waft of her fan. It was far better to tell a different tale, much easier to sow different seeds.
And the court of St. Petersburg proved to be the most excellent and fertile of grounds; it wasn’t long before the sweet, heady, lemon musk of goat could be smelled in the most unlikely of places.
Chapter 3
November 1, 1894, St. Petersburg
IT HAPPENED AGAIN!” DECLARED STANA AS SHE MARCHED into Militza’s cavernous red salon on the second floor of the Nikolayevsky Palace on Annunciation Square. Dressed in a dark green skirt with a matching fitted jacket, she flounced towards the crimson velvet divan, plucking her black gloves off one finger at a time. “I was just coming out of the dressmaker’s on Moika, and I heard two women giggling, whispering, always whispering, about the terrible smell of goat. Again!” Her black eyes narrowed as she flopped onto the divan and, slapping her gloves down on the marble-topped table, crossed her arms firmly across her chest.
/> “Who were they?” asked Militza, sitting up. She closed her copy of Isis Unveiled, by Helena Blavatsky, and rearranged her navy silk kimono. Despite the late hour, approaching three, she had not yet dressed for the day. While other society ladies had already donned their diamonds, muffled themselves in furs, and called a troika with a bespoke, livery-clad postilion to the door to pay their daily calls, Militza had spent the morning going through a package of esoteric books that had arrived from Watkins, Cecil Court, London.
“I didn’t know who they were, and neither did George.”
“George was there?”
“He told me I was hearing things, being hysterical, foolish. He said I was making it up. You know what he’s like. If it doesn’t please him, he doesn’t hear it.” She sighed, hugging her arms more tightly around herself. “Honestly, Militza, it has been five years—and I thought it would be better after the children. That’s what Mother said, didn’t she?” Stana’s voice cracked a little. “‘Have children as soon as possible, they respect you more.’ Didn’t she say that?”
“Children are power.” Militza nodded. “She used to say it all the time.”
“All the time,” agreed Stana, picking up her gloves and throwing them back down on the table in frustration. “Well, it’s made no difference to me. Pregnant within three months of marriage, and with a son at that!”
“Surely George is delighted with Sergei and little Elena? Two children in two years, and one a son—it’s more than I have managed.” She laughed a little. “Any husband would be satisfied by that!”
“One would have hoped,” declared Stana, tugging at the covered buttons on her left sleeve and then her right. “One might have thought so.” She sighed and looked out towards the window.
It was beginning to snow outside. Large, fat white flakes were falling swiftly, swirling in the wind, like the flurries of blossoms buffeted by the breeze that the sisters had run through as children in the orchards of Cetinje. Except here the sky was not a bright, clear cobalt blue but a flat, yellow, impenetrable gray.
“It really is truly miserable here. Don’t you think?” Stana asked, looking back at her sister. Her dark eyes were clouded with melancholy. “Miserable,” she repeated. She slowly shook her head. “And now winter is coming, again.” She gestured towards the window. “And George will be frustrated and angry, again. For no matter how many elegant court dresses he buys me, I’ll still not be embraced by the beau monde. It frustrates him, you know, our lack of invitations. And as the season approaches, it galls him even more.”
“But—” began Militza.
“We are, of course, invited to the official events. To the balls. Those numerous, endless balls. But to the dinners, the luncheons, the soirées—no.”
“We are not very much either,” said Militza, gesticulating to her dark silk kimono. “The rest of the city might be looking forward to not seeing the light of day for three months of parties, but I shall be very well rested!” She laughed dryly. “And now I have little Marina as well . . .”
“How is Marina?” inquired Stana, with a brief smile.
“Growing up fast, she’s over two and a half, can you believe it?” Militza smiled, stroking her flat belly.
“Good.” Stana nodded slowly, as if thinking about something else. “But the difference is that Peter has his position,” she said suddenly, “his money, his status. He has his estates to manage, his paints, his drawings, his books on architecture. George has nothing. He has no real title, no land because his family home was sold to clear their debts . . .”
“But he was brought up in the court.”
“With a mother in exile and a marriage no one could speak of.”
“The grandson of Nicholas I. His mother was the tsar’s favorite child.” Militza paused and shivered a little. “Imagine being so close to power you can taste it, only for it to suddenly slip away, it’s enough to send you mad. Don’t you think? It would corrupt the soul.”
“Well . . .” Stana shrugged her shoulders. “I barely see the man, hardly talk to him. I’m like a window to him—I honestly think he actually sees through me.” She laughed dryly. “He tries hard not to acknowledge my presence. All he really wanted was a mother for his son. He’d run out of governesses and I was a cheaper alternative!”
“That’s not true.”
“Then what deal did our father make? Drinking brandy round that dinner table at your wedding?”
Militza shook her head. A heavy silence came between them. It was difficult not to feel that they were both pawns in a game they had yet to comprehend.
There was a knock at the door.
“Excuse me, Your Imperial Highness,” announced a butler, dressed in burgundy livery, his head bowed. “Everything is prepared for you downstairs.”
Stana looked across at Militza and smiled. Despite everything, an afternoon in her sister’s company always made her feel a little better.
They followed the butler’s padding footsteps along the marble corridors that led from one ornate salon to another, past high-arched windows with views out onto the square. They walked alongside Corinthian half columns and on towards the immense U-shaped staircase with its sixteen gray granite columns and elaborate vaulted ceiling, with ornate black iron-worked balustrades featuring doubled-headed eagles. Their entire palace at Cetinje could fit into the staircase alone. Still they continued on, through one great hall after another, each more elaborate than the last. The most beautiful was the Moorish room, with its star-tiled floor and carved walls painted in red, blue, and gold.
“Down here,” said Militza, lifting the hem of her kimono.
“I remember.” Stana nodded.
Both of them had trodden this route before.
“One second . . .” Militza paused as she turned back towards the butler, who was poised at the top of the stairs, his buckled shoe slightly recoiling; he was not a servant who ever ventured below. “When is my husband due home?”
“The grand duke will be home this afternoon,” replied the butler, his tone not entirely courteous.
“Any particular time?”
“This afternoon.” He bowed.
“Then we must be quick,” said Militza. “Come.”
DOWN THEY WENT, CLINGING TO THE THIN METAL HANDRAIL to steady themselves, their silk leather-soled shoes slipping a little on the well-worn staircase. As the smell of cabbage and boiled meats increased, so the light began to fade. A few minutes past three in the afternoon, after just over six hours of daylight, it was already dusk below stairs. Oh, how Militza found those long, dark days depressing! How she hated the weak sun, barely able to raise its head above the city skyline for months at a time. She was born of the south, of the land of apricots and almonds, and such a protracted twilight made her listless and melancholy. And with few afternoon calls to make, the sisters could play only so many games of cards, enjoy so many massages at the banya, before those long afternoons really began to pall and they found other ways to amuse themselves.
“Do you have it?” asked Militza, walking into the crepuscular kitchen. Brana stood up. Her pinched face was bound in a tight gray handkerchief, and she reached into the pockets of her long black cotton skirt to retrieve a perfect white egg. She proffered it.
“Freshly stolen?” asked Militza.
“From right underneath her feathered belly,” came Brana’s grinning reply.
“Shall I do it?” asked Militza, deftly picking up the warm egg between her thumb and forefinger. Her long fingernails curled around the edge of its shell as she held it expertly up to the candlelight.
“Go on.” Stana shrugged. “I am a little out of practice and you were always so much better at it than me.”
“Are you ready?” asked Militza, looking at the round-faced lady’s maid.
Sitting at the end of a lengthy wooden table in the center of the room, its walls festooned with copper cooking pots and pans, were the elderly housekeeper, two younger housemaids, and Natalya, Stana’s lady’s maid
, who was nervously clasping her hands and licking her plump lips, a round bulge protruding out from under her skirts. She must be six months gone, at least.
“Oh, I’m more than ready, I’m excited, Your Imperial Highness,” she said, fluttering her sandy eyelashes. “Honestly, I don’t mind either way.”
“But you’d like a boy?” suggested Militza, sitting down.
“Just so long as it’s healthy,” said Natalya, giggling anxiously. “I have heard your mother doesn’t need eggs—she can tell what sex a child is just by looking at your belly!”
Militza fixed her with a dark stare. “Who told you that?”
“I did,” interrupted Stana. “But my sister is just as talented.” She patted her maid’s pink hand to reassure her. “She predicted my Sergei and Elena perfectly.”
Militza could feel a wave of irritation. Why was Stana always so indiscreet? The maid didn’t need to know about their family, their business. Ever since the wedding the sisters had deliberately decided to keep their “customs” to themselves. And although there was an embryonic interest among the more enlightened at the fringes of St. Petersburg society, it was not so long ago that witches were being hounded, ducked, and burnt. Women still had to make cakes and hold “phantom” tea parties if they were going do something so rudimentarily primitive as tasseomancy—reading tea leaves. So both she and Stana had to be careful to protect themselves. They had not survived, along with generations of other wise women, without the use of their substantial wits. In fact, they had both so overtly and wholeheartedly converted to the Russian Orthodox faith on the eve of their marriages that no one could possibly question their piety or probity.
The Witches of St. Petersburg Page 4
