Miss Blaine's Prefect and the Golden Samovar

by Olga Wjotas

  He certainly didn’t look friendly when he answered the door, noting my crumpled muddy clothes with distaste. “You have disturbed my meditation,” he snapped.

  I was going to say that meditation was supposed to calm you down, so he must be doing it wrong, but that wouldn’t be the best start.

  “Sorry, Padre,” I said. “I’m not one of your parishioners, but there’s something I’d like to ask you.”

  With obvious reluctance, the priest beckoned me into a gloomy parlour. There were two armchairs, but with a disapproving snort, he pulled out a rickety wooden stool for me to sit on.

  “Actually,” I went on, “I’m not even of your faith, but I have the greatest respect for spiritual leaders. Not of mad cults, obviously, but you’re not anything unorthodox. Obviously.”

  He gave an impatient riffle of his breviary. “What do you want?”

  “Nothing much. I’d just like to book you for a funeral.”

  “But why have you come to me? Nobody in the parish has died or is on their deathbed.” He frowned. “Apart from . . . not five minutes ago, I had word of a shocking act of self-destruction.”

  Apparently news got round a small village almost as fast as it did in Morningside.

  “Yes,” I said. “The maid. I’d like her to get a decent send-off. I wouldn’t dream of insulting you by offering you a fee, but I’d be happy to make a very generous donation to your onion dome fund.”

  “Apostate! Do you think you can bribe me into heresy?”

  “Perish the thought. But your church looks as though it could do with a wee bit of refurbishment, and how about a nice Bokhara rug for in here? It would cheer the place up.”

  The priest rose to his feet. “Avaunt!” he bellowed, pointing to the door.

  I didn’t move. “Sit down, Reverend, and let’s finish our conversation. On the great day of judgment, you wouldn’t want to be found to have made a mistake, would you?”

  The priest’s brow furrowed. “What do you mean?”

  “You’re refusing the maid a Christian burial because you assume she killed herself. But you don’t know that she killed herself.”

  A look of cunning came over his face. “I don’t know that she didn’t,” he said.

  “Precisely. This is one of these cases where we have to go on the balance of probabilities. So let’s go over what might have happened.”

  My mind raced. Somehow, I had to take the facts, and mould them into a plausible case for the maid not having killed herself.

  “When she joined me at the station to come here, she was terrified. She said a man had been following her, a big, sinister man. And this man subsequently burst into our compartment with a knife and tried to stab her to death. It could have been this very same man who drowned her in the lake.”

  “What nonsense is this? Who was this man? Why would he want to murder someone as unimportant as a maid?”

  I knew this one. “He was working for the countess,” I said. “Or possibly the count. The countess was jealous of the maid, because the maid was in love with the count.”

  The priest raised his eyes to heaven. “Now I know you are mad. Nobody is in love with the count, not even the countess. Especially not the countess. She would not have been jealous of her maid.”

  “Well, maybe not jealous,” I conceded. “Maybe just cross. She’d already emancipated her.”

  “Then she had already got rid of her. Why would she want to murder her?”

  This line of argument wasn’t going down at all well. I had to think even faster and mould the facts into a different shape. “She didn’t!” I said in triumph. “She wanted to murder me!”

  “Why would she want to murder you?”

  I thought faster and faster. “I’m foreign?” I suggested. “Oh, and I’ve inadvertently humiliated her publicly several times, in front of the princess.”

  The priest stroked his beard thoughtfully. “Go on, my child.”

  Faster than a missile from a Trident submarine. “There’s no doubt that the countess, or possibly the count, sent him after me.”

  “Why would the count want you dead?”

  “He got a bit annoyed with me when I caught him cheating at cards.”

  The priest crossed himself and broke into prayer.

  “Anyway,” I continued, “let’s say the countess hired the big sinister man. When he was following the maid, she was wearing my dress and bonnet. He thought she was me. Yesterday, she went out wearing my coat. He thought she was me and drowned her.”

  I was quite pleased. This sounded even more convincing than my first narrative.

  “But she left a suicide note,” said the priest.

  “A note that wasn’t signed. It could have been supposed to come from me just as easily as from her.”

  “True. It referred to many sins,” said the priest with malice. “You look to me like a hardened sinner.”

  I considered reminding him that casting stones was on the banned list, but didn’t want to antagonise him further.

  “Another thing about the note,” I remembered. “It couldn’t have been written by her because she couldn’t write.”

  “Of course she couldn’t write. Nobody here can write except the schoolmaster and myself. She went to the schoolmaster to get him to write it for her.”

  “That’s just ridiculous,” I said. “If she had dictated a suicide note to him, he would have intervened, warned the rest of you, got her some counselling.”

  The priest looked scandalised. “The schoolmaster is a man of utter rectitude! He might act as amanuensis but he would never dream of reading a private note.”

  “Well, I can assure you she didn’t go to the schoolmaster,” I said confidently. “She was with me from the time we arrived in the village until I went to see the schoolmaster, and she was dead by the time I got back. She couldn’t have . . .” Then I paused, uncertain, remembering the visitor.

  The priest noticed my hesitation and was on it like a ferret up a kilt. “What have you failed to tell me?”

  “The schoolmaster did have a visitor, somebody who wanted something written. But it was a man.”

  The priest gave a nasty smile. “Someone sinful enough to take her own life would not hesitate to disguise herself.”

  “Really, I’m sure it wasn’t her.” But my certainty was wavering. I clutched at another argument.

  “I’ve just remembered something else. I was walking past the pond just now, and somebody tried to drown me. That’s why I’m looking a bit bedraggled. He had a beard and I grabbed it and it came away in my hand. The big sinister man had a beard. It could have been fake. So that proves it was me he was trying to murder in the first place.”

  Even to me, it sounded far-fetched.

  The priest shook his head. “What a remarkable capacity for delusion you have. I advise you to go home and repent.”

  “I know you’re not totally convinced, but could you not make an exception just this once? Go on. Nobody need know.”

  The priest raised an accusatory arm. “Now I know you for what you are! You are the Evil One, sent to tempt me!”

  “Now who’s got a remarkable capacity for delusion?” I demanded. “I haven’t exactly got a forked tail and cloven hooves.”

  The priest shook his head. “The Evil One can take many forms to deceive us. I know of a priest in town who was summoned by one of the finest families to discuss the sacrament of baptism. As soon as he saw the infant, he knew. ‘You have been deceived into thinking that this is an innocent new-born babe,’ he said, ‘but it is the Evil One himself. I have never been in the presence of such evil. You must destroy it immediately.’”

  I was indignant. “Destroy a wee baby? I’ve never heard anything so outrageous!”

  “It was the embodiment of every diabolic wickedness. As soon as it heard the priest’s w
ords, its eyes glowed red and it vomited green bile.”

  I was going to tell him that his colleague had been conflating The Omen and The Exorcist when I remembered that cinematography didn’t emerge until the 1890s. A book might make its way through the ether, but it was unlikely that an entire home cinema system would.

  “So what happened?” I asked.

  “This was a righteous, God-fearing family, so of course they destroyed the child. Had they kept it, it would have cunningly learned to control its outward appearance so that nobody knew of its inner iniquity. Much the same as you have done.”

  The whole thing sounded to me like a priestly urban myth. But this man was so rigid in his views that nothing would ever persuade him he was mistaken. Despite my best efforts, I had been unable to come up with a convincing story. For once, I was going to have to admit defeat. I stood up to leave.

  “Yes, go. Who do you think you are, to come and disturb me?” snapped the priest.

  “Just someone trying to do a little good as I pass through, Padre,” I said. “Long story short, not only am I not of your faith, I’m not of your country. I’m from Scotland.”

  “Scotland?” The priest looked alarmed and crossed himself. “The land of John Knox?”

  “That’s the bunny. Sorry, that’s just an expression. Not appropriate in this case, since he wasn’t exactly cuddly and fluffy. More like a raging lion, seeking whom he could devour.”

  “That is from the scriptures! You know the scriptures?”

  “I know more or less everything,” I said. And then I felt I had to elaborate, remembering the litany of the maid’s alleged sins. “That’s not the sin of pride, by the way, it’s a simple statement of fact. I had a very good education. Oh, listen, you’ll like this one – a minister is preaching to his flock, and he says, ‘Miserable sinners that you are, you’ll all be burning in the fires of hell and suffering agonising torments, and you’ll look up at the Almighty in heaven, and you’ll say “Lord, Lord, we didn’t know!” And the Lord will look down upon you and in his infinite mercy and compassion, he’ll say, “Yes, well, you know now.”’”

  I waited for the priest to laugh, but he was just staring at me, his eyes bulging.

  “Just a wee Presbyterian joke there,” I explained. “It’s actually a lot funnier when you hear it in Scots but I didn’t know how to translate it.”

  He crossed himself. “John Knox! Presbyterianism! How can I save my flock?” he moaned.

  “Sorry?” I said.

  “What can I do to persuade you?” he gabbled. “I will do anything, anything at all, if you leave my humble, insignificant parish in peace, and proselytise elsewhere. There is a much more wicked parish in the village of Y–, not fifty versts from here.”

  I leaned back in my chair and stared thoughtfully into the middle distance. “Oh, I don’t know about that,” I said. “I’m on a mission to convert the whole country. I wouldn’t be doing my job properly if I left this bit unpurified.”

  “Please, I beg you, there must be some way I can persuade you to pass us by?”

  I pondered. “No, don’t think so. Right then, I’m off to call a meeting in the village hall, and judging by my past results, they’ll all be good Calvinists by the end of the day. Bye, Reverend. Nice meeting you.”

  I hadn’t got halfway to the door before the priest cried, “Wait! I implore you – what if I hold a funeral for the maid?”

  I wrinkled my nose. “The maid? I’m not really bothered about her any more. I’ll just get on with my converting.”

  “I will give her the finest funeral anybody has ever seen,” coaxed the priest. “Everyone will attend.”

  “Absolutely everyone?” I said.

  “I swear it on the holy icon of Saint Basil the Blessed, Fool for Christ.”

  “Including her mum and dad and sisters and the schoolmaster and his wife?”

  “All of them!”

  “Even if they don’t want to come?”

  “I will threaten them with excommunication if they are not present.”

  “I really shouldn’t . . . but all right,” I said.

  I had promised the maid another three roubles when she had successfully convinced the countess’s household that I was a princess. She had fulfilled her part of the bargain. I handed a banknote to the priest.

  “Here’s three roubles. Organise her a nice catafalque and keep the change.”

  The priest crossed himself and clasped his hands in prayer. “And you promise that if I do all this, you will leave us in peace and unconverted?”

  “I’ll be off on the first train tomorrow morning, your Autocephalousness,” I said. “Pleasure doing business with you.”

  When I got back to the house, I found everyone was dressed in mourning, which I thought was really nice, considering they all claimed they didn’t like the maid.

  “That was quick,” I said. “How did the message reach you so fast?”

  “The message came by the speediest horse available.” It must have come along the main road while I went back through the woodland path. “But how did you find out, madam?”

  “I got it straight from the horse’s mouth,” I said. I thought it was a pretty good joke, but the housekeeper looked baffled. The idiom must be different in Russian.

  “It’s just an expression,” I said. “Anyway, I’m glad you all know. It sounds as though it will be a spectacular funeral, with everybody there. More of a celebration really.”

  The housekeeper stifled a gasp, and I reflected that the concept of a funeral celebrating a life well lived or, in the maid’s case, a life tetchily lived, was probably not yet generally accepted.

  “Sorry, I shouldn’t have said that.”

  “I’m honoured that you feel able to speak so freely in front of me, madam,” said the housekeeper.

  “And I’m happy you’re honoured. Anyway, I’m leaving first thing tomorrow, so I’ll just go and pack.”

  “But you have no maid, thanks to my wretched daughter’s thoughtlessness. Let me come and help you.”

  The housekeeper proved quick and efficient, cast in the same mould as Old Vatrushkin.

  “Such a tragedy, such a tragedy,” she muttered. “Your poor fur coat.”

  “You know what would be nice?” I said. “I think the maid should be buried in it.”

  “That beautiful coat in an unmarked grave? Excuse me, madam, but how could you suggest such a thing?”

  I stopped in the middle of folding up an afternoon dress. “But it’s not an unmarked grave. She’s having the finest funeral anybody has ever seen, remember?”

  The housekeeper dropped a spare pelisse. “The priest has agreed?”

  “Of course,” I said. “That was what I was talking about when I came in. What were you talking about? Why are you all in mourning?”

  “Why, madam, because the count is dead.”

  Eleven

  “Dead?” I repeated. “Another duel?”

  The housekeeper shook her head. “The countess’s bust.”

  “Ah well,” I said, remembering how the general had got wedged in her cleavage, “I suppose he died happy.”

  “His skull was split open like a watermelon,” said the housekeeper. “They think he dropped his pen on the study floor and when he went to pick it up, he accidentally nudged the table and dislodged the bust.”

  The marble bust. I had been in the count’s study. I had seen that bust. I had tried to move it and I knew it couldn’t be dislodged accidentally. The count must already have been lying helpless on the floor when someone dragged the bust to the edge of the desk and let it fall on him. This had been deliberate. But who would want the count dead?

  “Tell you what,” I said. “You’ve been working so hard at sorting out my packing. Why don’t you sit in that easy chair and we’ll have a nice glass of tea together.
”

  I summoned the serving maid, who poured the tea and gave us each a dessert bowl filled with kutia, a delicious cracked wheat and poppy seed pudding that always goes down well at Russian funerals.

  I took a spoonful. “I’m sorry I can’t stay for your daughter’s send-off,” I said.

  The housekeeper snorted. “You’re lucky. We’ve had a message from the priest telling us we’ve all got to be there. Still, at least there’s more pudding to look forward to.”

  The serving maid had now left and I felt able to speak confidentially. “I sort of gave you a bit of a wrong impression when I arrived. The countess doesn’t actually know I’m here.”

  “I don’t understand, madam. Then how could the countess have given you her maid to accompany you?”

  “Because the maid wasn’t her maid any more – the countess emancipated her.”

  The housekeeper’s hand flew to her mouth. “No!”

  “Yes, and then I gave her a job.”

  “She became your serf? And you allow her to be buried in your beautiful coat? You are truly the kindest owner anyone could wish for! On behalf of my wretch of a daughter, I thank you.”

  “Speaking of owners, how do you find the countess?”

  The housekeeper’s lips tightened. “She is a monster. She cares for nothing and nobody. She came from a country family and married the count only in order to win status and position and live in town. She blamed her husband for the unfortunate incident we are forbidden to speak of that obliged them to live in the country. She never forgave him, and she made all our lives a misery. It was a blessing for us when he was finally pardoned and could go back to town.”

  “Still, that’s pretty rough, having to wait twenty years for a pardon.”

  “He would never have bothered asking if it hadn’t been for her,” said the housekeeper. “Nag, nag, nag, say you’re sorry to his imperial majesty, and after twenty years of her going on and on about it every day, he finally cracked and apologised. The tsar sent him the most generous reply imaginable: he said he’d realised just afterwards that he’d mistaken a nine for a seven and that the count hadn’t cheated at all. And now that the count had apologised for his outrageous insolence, he could come back to town any time he liked.”