Matrona found her gaze measuring the broadness of his shoulders, and she forced herself to look away, pressing the thoughts back into the dark spots of her mind, calling herself silly and odd, even a little sick in the head. Matrona was an upright woman, and engaged to be married to a fine man. Not only that, but Jaska Maysak was seven years her junior, only nineteen years of age. She needn’t have reminded herself that she used to tend him when he was a child and his mother’s illness had left her bedridden. By all means, Matrona was more an elder sister to him than anything else. It was foolhardy for her to notice him the way she did. The way she had for nearly two years.
He looked up, his dark eyes finding hers, and her stomach rekindled its unease, making her too warm and light-headed.
Jaska wiped his hands off on his apron before approaching. “Matrona! I apologize for not seeing you.”
She smiled—an easy, innocent smile. “I only just arrived.”
He glanced at the jug in her hand. “A repair?”
She hefted the jug. “I was hoping for a remake, actually. I fear this one has been repaired too many times.”
Jaska took the jug from her and turned it over in his hands. He was not as tall as Feodor, or even as tall as Viktor and his other brothers, but he had half a head on Matrona, just as her father had half a head on her mother. A good height, considering—
Stop it, for heaven’s sake, she thought with a frown.
“This is one of the Popov jugs,” Jaska said.
She blinked. “Uh, yes, it is. Feodor came by to fetch milk with it just now.”
He smiled, an upturning of one side of his lips that pressed a dimple into his left cheek. “I’m sure it was a mess for you. And congratulations, if it’s not too late to say so.”
Matrona flushed. She hoped the color would be interpreted as a reaction to the kiln’s heat. “Not at all,” she answered, her voice quieter. She tried to push more energy into it, but her throat had become oddly lethargic. “It’s only been a short time since the agreement was made. Thank you.”
He glanced at her, his dark brown eyes so very different from Feodor’s pale blue. “Agreement? You make it sound so . . .” He shrugged.
Matrona folded her arms. “So what?”
That dimple re-formed. “So formal, I suppose.” He patted the jug. “I’ll make a duplicate; should be ready tomorrow afternoon, maybe tomorrow evening. I can bring it by when it’s finished—or should I take it to the Popovs’?”
Matrona parted her lips to reply, then stood dumbly, considering. Her mother would likely want her to deliver it herself. To take credit for the effort, to bolster Feodor’s affections. She swallowed and answered, “I’ll come pick it up. It’s no trouble.”
“And it’s not there,” came a loud yet papery voice from behind Matrona, who turned with the sensation of needles pricking the length of her spine. Mad Olia hobbled into the workshop, her bowlegged steps uneven, her back hunched with age. A pink head scarf held back her half-gray hair, but a few locks had escaped the folds and dangled over either side of her nose. “And it’s not,” she repeated, brows pinched together. Her faded eyes glared at Matrona, then her youngest son. “I ought to switch your hide. There are worse punishments than being left out in the snow—”
Jaska sighed. “Mama,” he began, but his sister Galina came around the corner just then and, spotting their mother, hurried over to grasp her arm.
“It’s all right. Let’s have something to drink,” Galina murmured to the old woman, avoiding Matrona’s gaze.
Olia grumbled something unintelligible before letting her daughter pull her away, back toward the house.
Jaska’s gaze lingered on them a long moment, his eyes and shoulders drooping as though fatigued. He sighed and turned back to Matrona. “My apologies.”
Matrona shook her head, mulling over Olia’s bizarre words. “What’s ‘snow’?”
“I haven’t the faintest idea”—Jaska shrugged—“but she prattles about it from time to time.” He looked at the jug in his hands, then back at Matrona. “I’ll get this ready.”
Matrona nodded, offered her thanks, and left the workshop, trying to keep her pace respectable. She was anxious to put distance between herself and Jaska—as well as Mad Olia’s ramblings—but it wouldn’t do to appear too eager. She was levelheaded and purposeful, as always. Levelheaded and purposeful.
The heat from the pottery retreated as the village opened up to green space. Matrona imagined her flush was made of thousands of biting ants, and the soft breeze blew them off her skin as she walked, carrying them back into the wood. Her spine softened, and she fingered the end of her braid, twisting her hair around her fingers as though her hand were a loom. The sun beamed down from overhead, highlighting the milk stain on her skirt. She ran a thumbnail over its crusty edges.
Slava’s home appeared on the path, with its glimmering shingles and blue shutters, the glass-inlaid windows far finer than anything the other village izbas had put in their frames. For a moment Matrona wondered what it would be like to be a tradesman, to own a horse and take her wagon out through the wood to other towns, cities she’d never seen, even countries. To bring back the strange and remarkable things Slava always seemed to have. But the thought left as quickly as it had come, banished so thoroughly, Matrona couldn’t pin down just what her mind had been pondering.
A glint of silver caught her eye from the wild grass just off the side of the path. Stooping down, she picked up the slender item—a paintbrush with very long, very fine bristles. Its handle was tipped with silver and imprinted with an etching of chamomile flowers.
Matrona turned the instrument over in her hands, marveling at it for a moment before looking up to Slava’s house. Surely it was his. Picking up her skirt, Matrona crossed the wild grass to the narrow path leading up to Slava’s porch and portico. It was not the first time she’d knocked on the tradesman’s door, but she was not at all a frequent visitor, and she marveled at the paint and stamped designs around the door frame before knocking thrice.
Matrona waited several seconds, but there was no answer. Hadn’t she seen Slava’s wagon around the back of the house? She knocked again, harder. Stared at the knotted square etched into Slava’s brass door handle. Traced it. Touched it. Turned it.
The door opened onto a short front hall well lit by the windows. “Slava?” she called inside. “Tradesman?”
No answer. She needed to think quickly, for dark things dwelled in the thresholds of houses, so she couldn’t linger long. Matrona glanced at the paintbrush in her hands. She could set it down on the doorstep for him to find later, yes?
As she pulled the door closed, however, she heard movement within the house, perhaps the brushing of a shoulder against a rough wall? She paused for a breath, then pushed the door open again and called, louder, “Slava? Are you home?”
No answer.
“It’s Matrona Vitsin. I found a brush near the path that I believe must be yours . . .” Her voice faded as the heaviness of the quiet house pushed it toward the floor. Pressing her lips together, she moved to set down the paintbrush, but a thump from within stilled her hand.
She straightened. “Slava? Are you all right?” A vision of the aging tradesman filled her thoughts, of him trying to reach her and then tumbling to the floor, breathless, ill, with no one to help him. After gnawing on her lip a moment, Matrona pushed the door open and stepped inside the house.
Matrona had never entered Slava’s home; he always completed his trades off the side of the path. She noted that the interior of the house was simpler than the exterior, though still fine. A staircase at the end of the hall, its banister unpolished, led to the upper floor. There were a few simple paintings on the wall, with simple frames, and Matrona wondered if Slava had painted them himself, if this paintbrush truly was his. She hadn’t known the tradesman to be an artist, but then again, he kept mostly to himself.
“Slava?” she called again with urgency, rounding the corner and spying a rolltop
desk. She touched its fine stenciling, wondering where Slava had found it, for she’d never seen Pavel Zotov, the carpenter and Roksana’s father-in-law, craft something so fine. She passed a chest of drawers, a short table, and some embroidered chairs with high backs of a make she didn’t recognize. “Slava, are you hurt?”
Perhaps he wasn’t home after all. Matrona turned about once, looking for a shadow, listening for a groan, then slipped from the front room into a small kitchen. She spied across the empty room to a short hallway to her right, which dipped down with two stairs from the kitchen floor. Another rustle, deeper in the house, encouraged her to take those stairs; she tried to resist marveling at the aged but lush carpeting underfoot. A door at the end of the hallway was cracked open, spilling out a sliver of sunlight.
She pressed it open, half-expecting a bedroom, and instead got a face full of brown feathers. She shrieked and staggered back as a large bird grappled with the door frame before flitting to the opposite end of the room and finding a perch on the windowsill. Pressing a palm to her speeding heart, Matrona gawked at the creature—a red kite, perhaps? Surely such a creature hadn’t gotten lost inside the house! Had Slava acquired the bird on one of his routes? The creature glared at her with a yellowed eye, and he wore a copper band around one of his legs.
Matrona’s hand tightened on the paintbrush, and she took two calming breaths. This must have been what she’d heard, then, foolish bird. She took half a step away from the room, but its interior snared her attention: two tables—one large, one small—took up most of the space, and simple wooden shelves had been nailed into the walls. The glass window, where the kite perched, was too tall to be peered into from outside.
Her lips parted in surprise. Dolls. The tables and shelves all held dolls. Carved wooden dolls, round faced and slightly pear shaped, about the length of her forearm. They were painted in a variety of colors, and many wore head scarves and ornamented clothes. So many dolls. Dozens. Over a hundred, surely.
Glancing once at the watching kite, Matrona walked to the large table. She set down the paintbrush and picked up one of the dolls, its wooden body lacquered and smooth. It bore a remarkable resemblance to Zhanna Avdovin, were she twenty years younger. A coppery kokoshnik framed her face. The doll even had the same light curls and pursed mouth.
She set the doll down, for another caught her eye. She touched it, hesitant to pick it up, but she did, studying the face closely. Pavel. It looked exactly like the carpenter.
She set the doll down and stepped back to examine the other faces, her mouth opening wider with each one, a slow breath trickling into her lungs. Viktor, Sacha, Ilary. And there—that was Jaska, undoubtedly. And on the small table to her left, she found a doll resembling her father. Even the facial hair matched. Her father had not altered his beard in all the years she’d known him.
The kite clicked deep in his throat, but she ignored him and picked up her father’s doll, turning it over. He had this same clothing as well, the blue rubashka with black trim, the matching hat. How long ago had Slava made this doll? All of them? And why?
Gooseflesh rose on Matrona’s arms. She thought to search for her own doll when her thumbnail discovered a seam in the doll’s center, encircling her father’s round waist. It was two pieces, then? It opened?
Gripping the top and bottom of the doll with chilled fingers, Matrona pulled, though the pieces were stiff. The wood squeaked against itself as the top and bottom half twisted—
A thump outside elicited a muted shriek in Matrona’s throat and an eager cry from the kite. Her gaze instantly fixed on the closest window, and the impropriety of the situation hit her like a bucketful of cold water. What was she doing, wandering around inside another villager’s house like this? Touching his things, however odd or fascinating they may be?
Was Slava home?
Matrona hurriedly set down her father’s doll and rushed from the room, through the kitchen and around the chest of drawers, past the stairs and out the front door. She heard the nickering of a horse behind the house, but she ran over the wild grasses and back onto the path, sprinting until she felt the wood at her back. Had he indeed returned home, Slava would not see her now.
She paused to catch her breath. Perhaps it had been foolish to run. She simply could have explained herself, couldn’t she have? She’d only meant to return the brush . . .
It was those dolls . . . so strange and disarming. Matrona had never seen their like before. If Slava had made a habit of creating them, why hadn’t he ever shared his work, even at the annual fair? Were they meant to be secret? What lay inside them?
Wiping sweat from her brow, Matrona hurried down the path, wondering if Feodor still awaited her at the house. She prayed she hadn’t dawdled too badly, for her frazzled thoughts could not bear a scolding. You must be levelheaded and purposeful, she reminded herself. The jug would be made, she would do her chores, and she would forget about the odd collection inside Slava Barinov’s house.
Chapter 2
Matrona’s quick pace left her flushed and breathless by the time she reached her family’s izba. Feodor stood just outside the door, likely on his way home. Matrona forced her legs to slow and her spine to straighten. She tucked those stubborn stray hairs behind her ears.
Feodor looked up and cocked one of his thick brows. “You’ve made good time.”
“I tried to be swift,” she replied. She took deep, slow breaths to quiet her nerves. While she’d not seen a doll for Feodor on the tables, there had been so many, and all the ones she’d inspected had borne a likeness to someone in the village. She suspected he had one, too. Did its outfit match the shirt and vest he wore now, or perhaps the gray rubashka he often favored?
“‘He who hurries his footsteps errs,’” he said, quoting the Good Book.
They met on the path, Feodor leaning his weight onto one lean leg, taking a moment to look over her. His gaze felt like a cool breeze against naked skin, and Matrona tried not to shiver beneath it. Instead, she studied him back.
He was a fairly handsome man. While he did not have a strong jaw, he possessed full lips and a good nose. His brows were thick, and Roksana had teased her that their children would have the thickest eyebrows in the village, for Matrona’s own brows were dark and bold beneath her forehead. He had a narrow torso and waist, and his hips jutted to one side due to how he stood.
Her gaze returned to his face, to his lips. Feodor had not yet kissed her—his proposal had only been accompanied by a chaste kiss on the back of her hand. But Feodor was a reserved and modest man. Still, Matrona wondered when he would kiss her. Not now—the timing didn’t feel right, somehow. Perhaps at the altar. Surely by their wedding night. How strange to think of kissing a man and then giving herself to him only moments later. It sent moth wings up her arms and over her shoulders.
Matrona cleared her throat. “There are places where the Good Book commends haste.” She spoke softly, an effort to keep her defense mild. “It should be ready tomorrow. The jug,” she specified, clasping her hands together before her. She did look forward to learning to love Feodor—truly she did—but it would be so much easier to love him if he would love her first. Then again, perhaps he did, and simply chose not to show it. She had a hard time reading him—his conservative stances and cool blue eyes hid his thoughts.
The image of Jaska’s clay-stained hands on that cracked jug, turning it over with knowledge and a strange fondness, perhaps, burrowed into her mind. She blinked twice, snuffing it out like a wax-drowned candlewick.
“Your father,” Feodor said, dismissing the comment about the jug, “is he well?”
Matrona cocked her head. “Yes, of course. He was this morning. You saw him.”
A nod. “I did, but he seemed tense as I was leaving. Stressed, perhaps.” He rubbed his chin. “I suppose it cannot be helped, with all he has to do and only a daughter to support him. Do see that he’s relieved today, hm?”
“I shall.”
Feodor offered her another
closed-lip smile, another nod, and stepped off the path, heading southward toward his home. Matrona watched him go, measuring his stride, noting the cleanliness of his hands. Though he was a butcher, Matrona had never seen a drop of blood on him.
Despite herself, her mind wandered from blood to clay upon entering her home.
“There’s chores to be done.” Her mother didn’t look up from the brick oven and the growing fire in its belly. As though Matrona had forgotten. As though she ever forgot.
“Yes, Mama,” she replied, passing through the front room, down the hallway, and out the door to the small pasture that lay beyond the house. She liked to pretend it was larger and more verdant, with full fields of grass instead of weed-spotted dirt, but today the whitewashed fence surrounding the land seemed especially close. She saw her father out with one of the cows, checking its ears. He turned suddenly and smacked an open palm against the wooden fence multiple times, then shook his head. Matrona’s lips parted. Stressed, indeed.
Leaving him be, she strode into the barn to finish churning the butter she had started that morning, before her mother had called her in to visit with Roksana and sort through the wedding chest. She pulled up a three-legged stool and began pumping the churn’s handle, her arms and shoulders well acquainted with the exercise. Her thoughts danced over the wedding dress she would wear and its matching headdress. The memory of Esfir’s forgotten rag doll surfaced, and her mind easily slid back to Slava’s dolls.
She very much wanted to ask the tradesman about the figures, but how could she broach the subject? The window in that strange room was too high set for her to pretend she’d seen through in passing.
More than anything, she wanted to return to that room and see the faces of the other dolls. To find her own, her mother’s, Feodor’s. To open them and see what treasures lay inside, if any. How long would it take a man to carve and paint such figures? How long had Slava spent crafting them?
The Fifth Doll Page 2
