The Wolf Princess

by Cathryn Constable

  “You will make tea for the princess,” Ivan said. “But not just yet.” He turned to Sophie. “There is something I must show you.”

  “Where are we going, Ivan?”

  Ivan shrugged off his shuba and hung it on a passing statue. “I believed her when she told me who she was. I never questioned it.” He hit the side of his head with his fist. “I was such a fool!”

  “Why wouldn’t you believe her?” Sophie burst out. “She was like a princess! She saved you, brought you here.”

  “I didn’t understand what she wanted,” Ivan continued. “I believed her when she said she wanted some young friends in the palace.” He laughed, a sound more like a bark. “She said she had plans for you. But all she wanted was information to help her find the diamonds.”

  They had been walking up the stairs of a remote tower. Sophie had never been in this part of the palace. Ivan threw open a door to reveal a surprisingly warm and cozy room. A gilt clock ticked on a marble mantelpiece; fur rugs were draped over gilt furniture.

  “When we came to the palace, she asked me to bring the least damaged furniture here.” Ivan sighed. “There was something secretive in her manner I didn’t understand. I kept a key to the room and, although I’m sorry to admit I did that, I see now it was better that I did.”

  He put his hand on Sophie’s back and gently guided her inside. “When she told me to get out of the ballroom, I came here. Then I truly understood what she wanted,” he said slowly. “That was why I tried to stop her from leaving.”

  He pulled a key from behind a gilt clock and unlocked a large marquetry cabinet. Papers slid out all over the floor: photographs of faces, which were followed by more images, charts, maps.

  He was quiet for a second. “I never believed that she would harm you. But the wolf hunt … I knew then. She was a perfect shot — and I saw in that moment she was not aiming for the wolf. She was aiming for you.”

  “So you saved my life?”

  “She thought you knew nothing. The general had ordered it …”

  “She really wanted me dead?”

  “In that moment,” Ivan spoke quietly, “yes.”

  Sophie’s mouth was dry. She bent down and picked up a photograph. A girl in a school uniform standing in a playground. “But … this is me!” She held the photograph out toward Ivan. “At my school in London.”

  “Anna Feodorovna did her research.” Ivan took the blurred picture of Sophie and looked at it. “The general sent his secretary to be sure. He needed to know that there would be no more Volkonskys alive to dispute her claim on the diamonds. No one to come forward and call themselves a prince or a princess when she had taken that title for herself. When she found you, it must have made her desperate,” he whispered. “She had thought she could have all of this without anyone knowing she had stolen it. But in the course of finding out the forgotten story of the Volkonskys, she found a forgotten child. A schoolgirl with a lost family history.”

  “But I knew nothing of this.” Sophie blinked back the tears. “No one had told me anything.” She folded her photographed face in four and absentmindedly pushed the photograph into her pocket.

  “But she didn’t know that,” Ivan sighed. “And if she had found you, if she had made the link, perhaps someone else could, too. She had to be sure that she wouldn’t be discovered.”

  “So, is it really true?” Sophie said. “Am I really a Volkonsky?”

  Ivan found another photograph, very old and grainy. It showed a girl, not much older than Sophie. “This is your great-grandmother Sofya.” Ivan smiled sadly. “You look very like her.”

  Sophie looked into the grains of the photograph of the wolf princess. There was something of her own face, she could see that now. The straight eyebrows. The pale skin. But the expression! How many more years would that open, bright, curious face have before she perished in the woods?

  “Her child was safe,” Sophie whispered. And then she thought about Xenia. An old lady. The daughter of a forgotten Russian princess who had been brought to England. And for what? She died alone. It was so sad. Would her father, Prince Vladimir, have been happy for her to end her days like that? Would her own father be happy for Sophie to live so alone?

  “Xenia was rescued, perhaps by a peasant. Probably sold for bread.” Ivan found more papers. “Sofya was traveling to Arkhangelsk. There had been reports of the British navy waiting there to help the Tsar escape from the Revolution.” He smiled sadly. “But the Tsar never came. Instead, the boat took other travelers … and Xenia Volkonsky must have been one of them.”

  Sophie sighed. “I’m sure my parents had no idea about this,” she said. “My guardian would have told me if they’d known anything.”

  “Anna Feodorovna was meticulous,” Ivan said, shaking his head. “She would not have embarked on such a course of action if she had not been sure. Your guardian will have papers somewhere that relate to your family.”

  Sophie thought of the box of files in her bedroom in Rosemary’s flat. She had once looked inside, hoping to find photographs of her parents, or perhaps letters, but Rosemary had found her and become angry. There had been a particularly vicious argument and, soon after, the files disappeared. Did Rosemary still have them? Would they hold any answers?

  She sank into a chair. “There’s so much to take in,” she said. “It feels so strange. When you think you’re one person … and then … suddenly, you’re another!”

  “You are still the same person,” Ivan said. “It’s just that now you know a little more about where you came from.” He put his arm around Sophie. “But this is how life surprises us,” he said. “I thought I knew one person very well indeed … and I was wrong.”

  “I’m sorry,” Sophie murmured.

  “She was so clever!” Ivan said, struggling to keep his voice calm. “She could have made any life she wanted for herself. She didn’t need to rob someone else of theirs.” He turned away. Sophie glimpsed tears in his eyes.

  After a second, he straightened his shoulders and said, “Let us go and find the others. There are things we must discuss. Plans we must make. We must get you back to Saint Petersburg and Miss Ellis. I think you have lessons at a real Russian school tomorrow!”

  Sophie nodded, but knew that the only lessons she needed to learn would not happen in a Saint Petersburg school. Or any school.

  She swallowed. “Do I have to go back?”

  Ivan looked surprised.

  She said again, more forcefully, “I wish I didn’t have to go back so soon, Ivan. There’s so much I want to find out about, so much I need to learn.”

  Ivan considered this. “We would have to speak to your guardian,” he said gravely. “She is the only person who can decide at this time.”

  “She doesn’t even know I’m here!”

  Ivan frowned, not comprehending.

  Sophie explained, “I really wanted to come to Russia. Isn’t that odd? I always dreamed of snow and a forest … I didn’t know I was dreaming my own history … if such a thing is even possible. But I knew my guardian wouldn’t let me come … I’m afraid you wouldn’t be pleased if I told you what Delphine and I did …”

  “You did what you had to do … But” — Ivan’s mouth crinkled up at one side — “it would be hard to imagine that your guardian would be happy to let you stay here once she has been told. You have no money, the palace is sinking into the snow …” He shook his head. “It would be hard to convince anyone that this was a suitable home for a young girl.”

  Sophie supposed he was right.

  “What will you do, Ivan?” she asked. “I mean, now that the princess, I mean, Anna Feodorovna …”

  “I will settle everything here — for you — if you would allow me to.”

  “But I can’t pay you.” Sophie felt embarrassed. “Like you said, I’ve no money … unless you want to take some paintings!”

  “It would be an honor to serve you.” He bowed his head. “I have no need of paintings.”

  �
�But what then?”

  Ivan frowned again. “I will return to my home in Nizhny Novgorod,” he said. “My mother is old. When I was a little boy, she gave everything to me, the meat from her bowl, the vegetables from her garden. She asked for nothing in return. She deserves to be cared for by someone she loves …”

  “I wish you could stay,” Sophie whispered. “Is there any way you can stay? You could bring your mother here and look after her in the palace!”

  He shook his head sadly. “It is true that I have been happier in the few months I have been at the palace than at any other time, in any other place in my life. I even allowed myself to imagine that I could call it my home one day, if home is that place that you never want to leave … and if you leave it, you look for all your life.” He sighed.

  Sophie put her hand on Ivan’s arm.

  “I am not a prince, Sophie. I was stupid to think that this magical world, forgotten and broken as it is, would make any space for me.”

  “I think you should stay,” Sophie whispered. “I’d like you to stay. It would make it easier for me to go back to London if I knew you were here.”

  He smiled at her, but his eyes were sad. “This is not a fairy tale, Sophie. How would I live? How would anyone live here without millions of rubles? The princess …” He shook his head. “I will always think of her that way, I think … Anna Feodorovna took money from the general on the understanding that she would find the diamonds … Without the diamonds, the palace cannot survive.”

  Sophie felt faint. “I had them,” she whispered. “I found them. I gave them to her. For the general. He was threatening her. They were in the chandelier.”

  For the first time, Ivan looked angry. He controlled his face, but Sophie could see his jaw clench. His words, when they came, were calm, but Sophie could hear that at any second his emotion could break through. “He won’t be able to do anything with them.” He was speaking to himself. “I will make sure that the world knows that she got the diamonds by lying and that he is a common bully and a thief.” He said something else in Russian that Sophie didn’t understand.

  “But it won’t help, will it, Ivan?” she said sadly. “I mean, it won’t make it possible for us to stay.”

  “Nyet.” He spoke sternly. “You will have to grow up to become even more beautiful and marry an oligarch!”

  Sophie grinned. “Volkonskys marry for love, though, Ivan. Not for money!”

  His smile broadened. “It’s true,” he said. “Voy Volkonsky.”

  Marianne and Delphine were waiting in the White Dining Room. Masha had given them glasses of tea, and sat staring at Delphine with something like awe. They jumped up when Sophie walked into the room.

  Delphine seemed to be in shock. “I think you’re the first princess I’ve ever met,” she said.

  “Masha has told us!” Marianne laughed. “Do we have to curtsey or something?”

  “All day!” Sophie said. “Morning, noon, and night.”

  “Do you think Miss Ellis has even noticed that we’re missing?” Delphine said. “She’ll get into terrible trouble once we tell our parents.”

  “I’ll call mine from Saint Petersburg,” Marianne said. “Ivan says we can leave as soon as we are ready. And I know they will want me back in London.”

  “My mother will cancel everything, and come and get me,” Delphine said. She looked at Sophie. “You know you can come and stay with us in Paris for the holiday.”

  “Or with my family,” Marianne added. “My parents are always happy to have you. We’d better go,” she said, standing up.

  “Will you let me say my good-byes first?” Sophie looked at her friends.

  “Of course,” Marianne said. “It’s horrible leaving people behind without saying good-bye.”

  Sophie slipped toward the door. “Masha,” she said, more enthusiastically than she felt, “before I say good-bye to your mother and your babushka, will you ask Dmitri to help me with something?”

  She stood in front of the damaged portraits, one torn with bullet holes, the other a woman without a face. She reached out and touched the slashed canvas near the young woman’s neck. This was the first wolf princess. Sofya Volkonskaya. She had lived here. Sophie had held those very diamonds, now just brushstrokes, in her hand. She wondered if the Customs Office would let her bring these destroyed portraits back to London. If Rosemary made a fuss, she could always put them under her bed.

  She sighed as she thought about that chandelier drop, now at the bottom of the ice road … Could it really have been from the palace? If so, Rosemary might not be quite so keen as usual on decluttering when Sophie brought the paintings back to London.

  Dmitri stood next to her. “We have found you …” he whispered. “We watched and waited and then you came.”

  Sophie stared straight ahead; she wouldn’t risk looking at him because she would see the disappointment on his face, but she could see his scar twitching out of the corner of her eye.

  “Why are you leaving?”

  “I will come back,” Sophie said. She touched the frame of the painting and added, “I promise you I will come back as soon as I am able.” This promise was to the wolf princess as well as to Dmitri. She groaned. “Why do I have to be so young? Why does everyone have to treat me like a child?”

  She slipped her hand into her pocket and found the photograph of herself at school in London. She pushed it behind the cobwebbed frame, but it stuck. There was something in the way. She felt around with her finger and pulled out a folded piece of paper. She opened it, but the words were just marks on old notepaper. She couldn’t read any of them.

  “Dmitri” — she held the letter out — “do you know what this says?”

  Dmitri took the paper and frowned as he murmured through the Russian words. “It’s a letter …” He turned it over. “But I don’t know who for …”

  “There’s no name?”

  “No … It just says … ‘To … my own’?”

  “What else … what else does it say?”

  Dmitri scanned the letter. “She doesn’t want to leave …” he said haltingly. “She is very sad … she sends words a very long way … across the sea … across the years … across … tears?”

  “It’s from Sofya.”

  Dmitri nodded.

  Sophie gently took the letter from his hand. “This is hopeless.” Dmitri’s eyes clouded and he looked puzzled. “Don’t you see, Dmitri? This is the only letter I have, the only words I have from anyone in my family that are addressed … well, not to me, but to the me they hoped would happen!”

  Dmitri nodded slowly. Sophie went on. “But the saddest thing is … I can’t understand any of it! Do you see? My father sang me the song, before he died. Perhaps he did sing the words to me and I forgot them. He didn’t live long enough to teach me Russian. My guardian despised him. She never told me anything … if she even knew herself.”

  “The Volkonsky song. A lullaby. It was how the wolf princess hid her diamonds …” Dmitri whispered.

  “Perhaps that’s why it was important for my father to be a poet,” Sophie said. “Although he may not have known why.”

  She stared at the letter again, traced her finger over the strange letters. At the bottom, though, the letters of the Russian version of her own name. COФИЯ, Sofya, Sophie.

  “I need someone to help me learn Russian,” Sophie said. She looked at Dmitri’s kind, earnest face. “Will you help me?”

  His face was open and relaxed. He nodded. But then almost immediately he turned away. “How can I? You are leaving us!”

  Sophie held the letter in her hand.

  What should she do? What should she do?

  Masha had tied a bright scarf around her head in honor of Sophie’s leaving. She, her mother, and her grandmother had come up from the Under Palace to say good-bye. Sophie kissed Masha’s mother. The babushka stroked Sophie’s cheek.

  “I feel I need to ask forgiveness from your babushka … and from you … I did a dreadful
thing when I gave Anna Feodorovna the diamonds.”

  Masha shook her head. “The diamonds brought her no happiness,” she whispered. “We knew that they would not help her.”

  “I’m not sure she understood happiness, really,” Sophie said quietly. “She thought if she was rich, she would be happy.”

  Masha shook her head again. “You have to have diamonds in your soul to be happy.”

  “The general has them now,” Sophie said. “Perhaps they’ll bring him better luck.”

  “Volkonsky diamonds not like that.” She was quiet for a moment.

  “What do you mean?”

  “They have to be given with love. They cannot be bought or sold.” She squeezed Sophie’s hand in hers. “This the way of the Volkonskys.”

  “But they’re his now.” Sophie felt exasperated with herself. “I had them … and I lost them.”

  “Better lost,” Masha whispered, “if having them hardens the heart.”

  “What are you going to do, Masha?” Sophie said sadly. “You and Dmitri and your mother and babushka?”

  Masha looked up, trying to smile, but her eyes were wet. She sniffed and wiped her nose on her sleeve.

  “We’ll watch,” she said. “We’ll wait. For our wolf princess.”

  Sophie ran down the steps to join the others, who were already tucked under their bearskin rug on a new vozok, this one smaller than the sleigh swallowed by the ice, and painted a cheerful, defiant red. Dmitri didn’t look at her. She knew he was upset about her leaving. She mustn’t cry; she didn’t want to embarrass him or herself.

  The bells of the vozok rang out as Viflyanka snorted through the snow. They wound around the birch forest, Sophie unable to stare at the trees without feeling a pull of deep sadness. How long would it be before she could return? Her whole life she had dreamed of having a home, and now, having found that place, she had to leave it. She wished she could have said good-bye to the wolves, but was grateful that they were out in the forest, hunting, as they should after their months of confinement. No wolf garden would ever be large enough for them, nor any meat — however expertly chopped by Dmitri — be as enticing as their own kill.