by Olga Wjotas
I was about to agree that it was a sign that we should all do muscle-building and balancing exercises every day, but she went on: “I have been guilty of the sin of pride, and cannot expect to become a professional floor-covering technician immediately. So I have decided that when the general asks me to marry him, I shall accept, and hone my floor-covering technical skills on his dilapidated home. Then when, God willing, he dies, I shall return to town as a respectable widow and ask if anybody requires some woodwork.”
At this critical moment, Sasha emerged from the pantry where he had been washing up. He looked particularly enticing after his exertions, with a healthy glow and slightly damp hair. I had to move fast to stop Lidia getting engaged to the general.
“Why don’t you sit and relax with Sasha, and he can read you a wee bit of The Bride of Lammermoor? I’m sure you’d find it an interesting story.”
Sasha’s smile was like the radiance of the sun after a spring shower. “I will read to Lidia Ivanovna with the greatest of pleasure,” he said.
But Lidia had retrieved her shawl and was moving towards the stairs. “Thank you so much for a wonderful afternoon, dear Shona Fergusovna,” she said. “But I must go and change my dress for the concert.”
I rushed after her. “Can’t you stay for another half-hour?” I said in an undertone. “Sasha reads very well, you know.” I could almost detect a Sid James timbre in my own voice.
Lidia put a hand on my arm. “Please, Shona Fergusovna, it would not be proper. I must go.”
I summoned Old Vatrushkin to drive her home. That left me and Sasha. I marvelled at his lustrous blond hair, his beguiling eyes, his tantalising mouth. If only I had got him sitting beside Lidia, the magic would have begun. But at least this was a perfect opportunity for me to find out more about him.
“Let’s go and relax in the salon,” I said.
“There is no further work for me, Princess Tamsonova?”
“Please, don’t bother with that princess nonsense. Call me Shona.”
As soon as I’d said it, I panicked. Since he was a serf, was he going to try to cut his tongue out the way Old Vatrushkin had?
But instead, he breathed “Shona” in such a thrillingly hushed way that I felt slightly light-headed. “Shona,” he breathed again, and then “Sasha,” lingering on the unvoiced fricatives. “Our names are so strangely similar, as though there were a mystical union between us.”
I think I might have blushed a bit. “Come and have a seat,” I said. “I’d like to get to know you better.”
“I would like that too,” he murmured.
But rather than sit down, he came round behind me and kissed my shoulder. This was definitely not the deferential kind of kiss Old Vatrushkin had given me. And now he was kissing my neck, my ear . . . He smelled fabulous, heady male pheromones mixed with a light citrus cologne. I found myself melting against his muscular torso, my eyes drawn inexorably to those dark-lashed eyes, those chiselled cheekbones, those kissable lips . . .
And then I heard Miss Blaine’s voice as clearly as if she was in the room. “You’re on a mission, girl! You’re not there to enjoy yourself.”
This was utterly wrong. I jabbed an elbow in Sasha’s ribs. He gasped, then imprisoned me in his arms and bore me down onto the floor. It was like being in the coils of a hyperactive python. Every time I wrenched one of my limbs free, it was immediately recaptured. My martial arts expertise is pretty impressive, but Sasha seemed even more proficient. We rolled over and over, crashing into the pianoforte, knocking over occasional tables, the fine Sèvres porcelain shattering around us.
I managed to free an arm and was in a perfect position to deliver a left hook, but one glance at Sasha’s beautiful bone structure and I thought not the face. And the next thing I was trapped again. I was reaching the appalling conclusion that he might actually overpower me when he suddenly let go and lay there, wheezing.
“Forgive me, Shonetchka, my little Siberian tigress, but I cannot match your energy. Perhaps you would give me a few moments to recover?”
I leaped up, grabbed the nearest weapon, which turned out to be an overlooked pastry fork, and shouted, “Are you completely insane?”
Sasha scrambled to his feet, still breathless, and steadied himself against the pianoforte. “This . . . this is not what you wanted?”
“Are you kidding me?” I didn’t even attempt to keep the fury out of my voice. “I’m old enough to be your–” I thought. He was twenty. I was technically old enough to be his grandmother. But there was no way I was going to say that. “–your older sister!”
Very slowly, he straightened up, his blue eyes unreadable.
“Why do you say that?”
“To impress upon you that your behaviour was completely inappropriate and not to be tolerated.”
He closed his eyes and when he opened them again, they were pained and misted. I had an urge to give him a consoling cuddle but decided against it.
“I would plead for you to forgive me, but I do not deserve forgiveness,” he murmured. “But perhaps I can give, if not a defence, an explanation. It seemed to me you ensured that we would be alone together. You told me you would like to get to know me better. You sent away the other guests and you sent away your–”
Simultaneously, he said “major-domo” and I said “footman”.
“You invited me to lunch with you at Lidia Ivanovna’s, you–”
“And you thought that was me sending out some kind of message?” I said with as much sarcasm as I could muster.
“Of course,” he said with such obvious sincerity that I reflected these were different times, different manners. But that certainly didn’t make it all right.
“You must never assume,” I said severely. “When you assume, it makes an ass out of you and me.”
Sasha looked faintly confused, and I realised that the Russian translation didn’t quite convey the witty wordplay of the original.
“Since you made an honest mistake, we’ll say no more about it,” I decided. “So let’s start again. Tell me about yourself, your family, where you’re from.”
The dark lashes lowered to hide his eyes. “I am forbidden to speak of it.”
“By the tsar?”
He shook his head. “By the countess.”
Then he gazed straight at me, making me catch my breath slightly because his concerned look was even more attractive than his ashamed look.
“The countess is a very dangerous enemy. I beg you, be careful.”
“Don’t worry about me,” I said. “I’m not scared of her.”
“Perhaps you should be. You have twice humiliated her publicly in front of the princess. She does not forget and she never forgives. Even now, she will be plotting your downfall.”
He was speaking so earnestly that I could only imagine the terrible hold the countess must have on him. I was here to help Lidia, not him, but if I was going to get them married, I had to free him from the countess’s pernicious grasp. If he was forbidden to tell me anything about himself, then I would just have to go to the village of N– to find out for myself.
“Anyway, don’t let me keep you,” I said. “I have to go and change for the concert and then go and collect Lidia. She’s nice, isn’t she?”
I watched him closely. That familiar yearning look came into his eyes.
“I feel there is a very great bond between Lidia Ivanovna and myself,” he said.
It was all going well.
“See you later, then,” I said.
“You are so magnanimous, so merciful,” he said in a broken voice. “I have no right to ask, but might you give me a token that we part, if not as friends, at least not as enemies?”
The wee scone. He had made a terrible mistake, true, but he obviously felt really bad about it.
“What do you have in mind?” I asked.
&nbs
p; “This.” He picked up the copy of The Bride of Lammermoor, which had escaped the general destruction. “Would you be so generous as to inscribe it for me?”
“Of course,” I said. I led him into the anteroom, where there was pen and ink, and wrote To Sasha. Best wishes, Shona. “There.”
“Thank you a thousand times. I have no right to ask more, but your full name is so very beautiful, Shona Fergusovna McMonagle.”
I was quite touched that he liked my name. I added Fergusovna McMonagle.
“You are the quintessence of kindness,” he said. “I shall cherish this always.” He gave me a luminous smile.
It must have been the smile that affected my concentration. I accompanied him to the top of the staircase, intending to see him out. But suddenly I slipped and found myself falling through thin air. Even though it would have been a perfect opportunity to focus on Newtonian physics and Einstein’s theory of general relativity, I found myself completely unable to do so. All that flashed through my mind was “terminal velocity”.
The stairs and entrance hall were marble, and I was about to die. I did wonder what would happen to my body. Would my crumpled remains be found back in my flat, baffling Police Scotland’s finest? Or would I simply never reappear in Morningside, and how would they manage in the library without me?
I continued to hurtle towards the unforgiving marble. I had failed in my first mission.
“Forgive me, Miss Blaine,” I whispered.
And then I thought (quickly, because I was falling at quite a rate), the crème de la crème don’t give up in the face of adversity. Are we downhearted? No!
My martial arts expertise includes knowing how to breakfall. I closed my eyes and imagined myself in the dojo. A swift breath in, then a breath out as I landed, slapping my arm on the unyielding floor. I was badly winded, and my head had suffered a nasty crack, but no bones were broken. I was still alive.
And then there were fingers on my throat, pressing into my windpipe till I began to lose consciousness.
Seven
As though from a great distance away, I heard Old Vatrushkin yell, “You devil!”
The pressure on my windpipe disappeared, and there was the sound of a thud.
“If you ever come near her excellency again, I’ll rip your head off your shoulders!” roared Old Vatrushkin.
With an immense effort, I half-opened my eyes and imagined I saw Sasha slumped against the wall, his head spinning round and round. Lack of oxygen was making me hallucinate, subconsciously latching on to the mention of heads.
Old Vatrushkin picked Sasha up as though he were a bag of gherkins and hurled him out of the front door before slamming it shut and locking it.
Babbling incoherently, he rushed over and propped me up in a sitting position. My head felt as though it were spinning even faster than I had imagined Sasha’s was. I tried to speak but no words emerged from my damaged throat.
Old Vatrushkin was weeping now.
“I should never have left you!” he sobbed. “I suspected, who could fail to! But I never thought . . .”
Dazed though I was, it was crucial that I ascertained what had just happened. I swallowed with difficulty and managed an approximation of speech.
“Old Vatrushkin . . .”
His sobs redoubled, but he was beaming. “Oh, your excellency! God be praised, you can speak! May the angels protect you, since I have signally failed to do so.”
“Old Vatrushkin.” It still hurt to talk, but this was important. “Did you just throw Sasha out the front door?”
“Thanks be to heaven, I did.”
“Old Vatrushkin,” I croaked, “that was very rude of you.”
He blinked.
“Your excellency?”
“Sasha was a guest in my house.”
“But, your excellency!”
My head was throbbing and I was going to have the most spectacular bump. I closed my eyes and took a long breath. “What don’t we do? We don’t throw our guests out the front door.”
“I obey your excellency in all things,” said Old Vatrushkin. “Except this.” His brow was creased in anxiety and determination.
“Old Vatrushkin,” I said, “how can I possibly invite anybody round again if you’re likely to throw them out the front door?”
“I am talking only of that devil! He tried to kill you!”
His words made no sense. I must be dreaming. But the way my head ached suggested I was conscious.
“He had thrown you to the ground and was strangling you!” wailed Old Vatrushkin. “If I had been a minute later, you might have been – you might have been . . .” He began sobbing again.
I leaned back against the wall and tried to override the pain. “You have the most extraordinary imagination,” I said. “I keep warning people against making assumptions. Sasha hadn’t thrown me to the ground. I was daft enough to miss my footing at the top of the stairs, and he was rushing to help me. He was obviously checking for a pulse, but just didn’t know how to do it properly. Which is why first aid courses are so important.”
Old Vatrushkin’s mouth was set in a firmly defiant line. “He was trying to kill you,” he said.
“Okay, one question,” I said. “Why would he want to kill me?”
“Because he is a devil!” Old Vatrushkin burst out.
Why was he saying these crazy things, bad-mouthing Sasha? One answer suggested itself. I felt a surge of unease. “Old Vatrushkin,” I said, “are you in love with me?”
“I would not dare, your excellency!” he said. “You are as high above me as the summit of Mount Elbrus is above the depths of Lake Baikal. And, speaking with the greatest respect, you are slightly too old for me. You are also a little too – that is to say, I prefer ladies who are more slender.”
I managed to keep my tone even. “That’s good,” I said. “This is solid muscle, by the way.”
If he wasn’t in love with me, why was he making these extraordinary allegations against Sasha? Of course – he was jealous of the prestige and adulation his fellow serf was enjoying. “Anyway, let’s have no more nonsense about murder plots,” I said. “All I did was slip at the top of the staircase, although I’ve never noticed it being particularly slippy before.”
Old Vatrushkin leaped up the staircase and let out a great cry. “That accursed pickle!”
“I know it wasn’t Branston, but it wasn’t that bad,” I said. “They all seemed to like it.”
But there was no getting through to him. He was beating his breast and blaming himself for almost killing me by dropping pickle on the landing. I distracted him by telling him to clean it up, which also stopped him wittering on about murder plots. But when somebody tried the front door, found it locked and started hammering on it, he sprang up, his face pale.
“Stay there, your excellency! I shall protect you, with my life if necessary.”
He opened the door to an extremely disgruntled maid.
“What’s the idea, locking me out?” she demanded.
Old Vatrushkin was about to speak, but I silenced him with a shake of my head. I couldn’t bear the thought of her histrionics if he convinced her there was a mad strangler on the loose.
“Come and help me change for the concert,” I said in the hope that doing her job would cheer her up. But now that she didn’t do anything except put on airs and my clothes, she got quite grumpy at being asked to help. Serfs really were the limit. I couldn’t begin to imagine how Nanny managed four thousand, two hundred and ninety-nine of them.
The maid looked critically at the dove-grey silk gown I had chosen. “It would suit me better,” she said.
I ran my fingers through my hair in frustration, and winced as I made contact with the tender bump on my head. It was as though the sudden pain was a direct message from Miss Blaine. I was four days into my week-long mission and I had
n’t even started my background checks on Sasha. I had to get moving.
“Tell me,” I said to the maid, “would you be prepared to do something ever so slightly illicit?”
“I knew it,” she said. “I knew you were planning to sell me down the Bosphorus as an odalisque.”
“You’re completely fixated, aren’t you?” I said. “I don’t want you anywhere near the Bosphorus. Before you came here, you worked for the countess on her estate near the village of N–?”
“Yes, I hated it,” she said. “A horrible, boring place. I’m never going back.”
“Ah,” I said. “Would you go back for, say, three roubles?”
A glint of greed appeared in her eyes. “It depends. Why would I go back?”
“I fancy seeing the countess’s estate. Am I right in thinking nobody there knows you’re no longer in the countess’s service?”
“How could anyone know?” she scoffed. “It is a long way – the count and countess would not bear the expense of communicating with the estate unless it was a matter of life and death.”
“So we could go together, and I could tell them I was a friend of the countess’s, and that she had given me her personal maid to accompany me.”
The maid rolled her eyes. “They would never believe that. The countess has no friends.”
“But she might have made friends in town. Especially if that friend was a princess.”
The maid reluctantly acknowledged that this could sound plausible. “I still don’t ever want to go back to that miserable dump,” she said.
“Not even to show off your fine clothes?” I said. “They’ll never have seen you dressed in anything so amazing. Especially this dove-grey gown. They’ll be really jealous.”
She was definitely swithering, but she still wasn’t quite prepared to capitulate.
“If I pretended the countess had sent me with you, that would be a lie,” she said primly. “And lying is a sin.”
“Indeed it is,” I said. “I wouldn’t want to imperil your immortal soul, so we’d better just forget the whole thing.”
