Rosa and the Veil of Gold

by Kim Wilkins

  “We have no food?”

  “We’ve lost it all.”

  FIFTEEN

  Rosa looked at Anatoly and Ludmilla differently now. Over dinner, as Anatoly carved the chicken, Rosa read the lines on his face as signs of anxiety, not sourness. Helping Ludmilla fold clothes in the dank little laundry at the back of the house, she saw the older woman’s bony shoulders as those of a mother who has too great a burden to bear. The revenant spirit of a man killed too soon, through some unpredictable circumstance, was a dangerous thing to his young wife. He would blight her life, sap her energy, have her join him. This was the cause of Elizavetta’s sickness.

  But why could Anatoly not cure it? Why could a volkhv of such power and energy fail to banish a single revenant spirit? He was clearly desperate to do so.

  As much as she was puzzled and, although she hated to admit it, concerned about the family’s problems, she simply had to focus if she was ever going to get Daniel back. She allowed a respectful twenty-four hours to feel sorry for Anatoly, but began pestering him for more spells directly after school on Monday.

  “Come then,” he said. “We’ll go out to the grove, away from the farm. I’ll show you a magic knot so powerful that you can take it with you to the other world and keep yourself wholly safe.”

  This time, they didn’t leave by the front gate. Anatoly took her down to the stream and showed her a narrow strip of mud and two stepping stones which led around the side of the brick wall encircling the farm. Once on the other side of the wall, he led her up the muddy bank and past an enormous spruce tree which had twelve knives embedded in its trunk.

  “What are these for?” she asked.

  “Not important. I’ll tell you another time,” he said, taking her hand and pulling her smoothly behind him. “Today, protection knots.”

  They entered a shaded grove. The stream trickled gently beside them, the ground was soft and grass grew only sparsely. Rosa gazed around her. “Is this where you come to do your magic?”

  “Sometimes, yes. Not at night.” He glanced around. “It’s not safe here at night.”

  Rosa knew he referred to Nikita’s visits.

  “Do you ever do magic in the bathhouse?”

  He smiled. “It’s a guesthouse.”

  “You never use it for magic?”

  “Well, perhaps I do now and again,” he said, “but we have seasonal workers who come to stay in the summer harvest, so we need space for them.”

  “Is there still magic in the walls?”

  “I pulled it all out before you moved in.”

  “I see.”

  “Elizavetta was born in there, and Makhar. My father died there, and I hope to die there too, but even a volkhv must be practical, and we have no money for a new building.” He gestured around. “A shaded grove can work just as well, though the magic tends to escape into the treetops.”

  Rosa looked up. Weak sun struggled through the thick branches. She almost imagined she could see it, violet smoke circling the tips of the trees and then diving inside to be absorbed into the sap.

  “Why here today?”

  Anatoly pulled out a length of black wool. “Because this is not just ordinary magic. This is difficult magic; this goes beyond a yammering zagovor.” He handed her the wool. “This knot will be your shield in the other world.”

  Rosa wound the wool over her fingers. “Okay, tell me what to do.”

  “Seven double knots,” he said. “With each one, we name the places you will be safe.” He coached her through the process, and she did one practice run without tying the knots. Then, summoning up the magic in her fingers and wrists, she worked the spell.

  “As I travel on the road,” she said, tying a double knot. “In the field.” Another knot. “Through the crossroads…between the houses…across the seas…into the woods…over the trembling marshes…” She threw the knotted yarn on the ground. “None shall come near me. My word is firm. So shall it be.”

  Anatoly lifted his eyebrows. “Shall we see if it works?”

  “Go on.”

  He took a step towards her, his foot hovered above the yarn and crossed it. His other foot the same.

  Hollow disappointment. “It didn’t work.”

  “No,” Anatoly said. “It didn’t. It’s a good thing you don’t have to protect yourself from me.”

  Something about the cool delivery of these words made her prickle. “I don’t?”

  “Of course not, Rosa, you know that.” Now he was warm again, his arm hooked around her shoulders. “Let me try the knots. Perhaps we have the wrong wording.”

  Rosa watched as his grubby fingers unpicked all her knots. The wool was beginning to fray. “You made these very tight, Rosa.” He straightened the yarn in his fingers and cleared his throat. “As I travel on the road…” He went through exactly the same process as Rosa had, casting the knotted yarn on the ground.

  “Now,” he said, beckoning her from his side of the yarn. “Try to cross.”

  She lifted her toes, tried to step over the knots. An invisible blow to the bottom of her foot sent her pitching backwards. She landed hard on her backside.

  “Ow!”

  Anatoly helped her up. “It worked.”

  She rubbed her lower back. “Yes, obviously,” she said irritably. “Why for you and not me?”

  “I’m much more powerful.”

  “But my magic is growing.”

  “Not as quickly as we thought.”

  She remembered the bee in her window on Saturday morning, how it hadn’t responded to her. “It feels like I’m going backwards.”

  “Have you checked on your sapling? Is it still well?”

  “I haven’t looked since the weekend.”

  “Then let us see.”

  Anatoly pocketed the magic knot, and they returned to the guesthouse. Rosa opened the cupboard door, and was appalled to see that the wych elm had withered. The green shoot on the end was spotted and dull.

  “It’s dying.” Hollow panic crept into her stomach.

  “You’ve been saying the spell?”

  “Every morning when I wake.” Was she stuck here forever?

  Anatoly stroked his beard, pulling on its wispy ends. He made a noise, somewhere between a hum of consideration and a sigh of unhappiness. Rosa grew uneasy.

  “What do you think is wrong?” she asked, dreading the answer.

  “It does appear that your magic is diminishing.”

  “But it shouldn’t be.”

  “No. But nor is it unheard of. We did a lot of work in the first week. I have said before it’s like training for a long run. If you do too much too soon, you can set back your cause.”

  “Are you saying I’ve had some kind of training injury?”

  “Ha!” He offered her a reassuring smile. “Yes. That’s how I’d see it. The only thing that would fix it…”

  “A rest,” she said, closing the cupboard door and sagging back on it. “That’s what you’re going to suggest.”

  “Yes, it is.”

  “How long?”

  “Until you’re better.”

  “A day? Two?”

  “I’d leave it a week.”

  Impatience galvanised her body. She launched herself forward and grabbed Anatoly around the wrists. “I can’t bear to wait that long. He could be dead by then. I must get across to find him.”

  “You have no choice.”

  “There must be something. You’re a strong volkhv, couldn’t you send me across?”

  “And be left without my own magic? I have things to do here, very important things.”

  Rosa remembered his trouble with Elizavetta and bit her tongue. “It’s not just the veil I need magic for,” she said. “I have to hide that hire car. The police will be looking for it.”

  “I know you are frustrated, Rosa,” he said, his voice growing gentle as he peeled her from his wrists. “You may still accompany me all this week and watch the magic I perform. You will learn, but passively.”
>
  “But the car—” she said, dropping onto the bed.

  “Don’t worry about the car. Nobody will find it. We’re beyond the edge of nowhere out here.” He sat next to her and stroked her hair. The gesture was fatherly but proprietory. “Leave it a week and don’t worry, Rosa. A week will make all the difference.”

  The days crawled by. She was tired all the time, and this was the only thing that kept her from lying awake at night cursing that she was stuck here, not moving, while Daniel battled on without her. If he had been alone, she would have given him up for dead already. She still hoped that Em could keep them alive until she got there.

  She dragged herself out of bed and dressed for the day, hearing voices in the garden while she brushed her hair.

  “I don’t feel well.”

  “Just sit in the sun for half an hour. It will do you good.”

  “I want to go back to bed.”

  Rosa opened the door of her guesthouse. Ludmilla had Elizavetta by the hand, and was leading her out to a mouldy deckchair she had set up in full sun by the herb beds.

  “The sunshine will help, Elizavetta,” Ludmilla was saying. “The fresh air is good for your lungs.”

  The girl grumbled but allowed herself to be dropped into the seat. Rosa crossed the garden quickly, offering them both a quick wave, and found Makhar sitting at the kitchen table waiting for her.

  “History this morning, Roshka,” he said. “You promised to tell me about Ivan the Terrible.”

  Rosa could have wept. History lessons with a nine-year-old. How was it possible that she was stuck in this mundane cycle? “Let me use the bathroom and make some breakfast. It’s only a quarter to nine.”

  “Hurry, then.”

  “Start reading ahead. I want you to read three pages before I sit down.”

  “Ivan the Terrible came to the throne in 1547, aged only seventeen…” His little voice followed her down the hallway, earnestly reading out of his history book. On the way back from the bathroom, she noticed Elizavetta’s door was ajar.

  Makhar read on. “In 1553, he gave the order to build St Basil’s Cathedral in Moscow, to celebrate victory over the Tatar Mongols…”

  Rosa hesitated half a second, then went in.

  The stale air was thick with the smell of sleep and dust. The bed, an old timber four-poster, had curtains hung around it. An ancient dresser, stained dark brown, provided the space for nearly a dozen photographs in frames. Rosa bent to study them.

  Elizavetta, plump-cheeked and smiling—almost unrecognisable—in the arms of Nikita. He was in his late teens, with the easy smile of a man who has never wanted for female attention; thick dark hair growing over his collar and falling into his eyes, a navy T-shirt and blue jeans. The next photo featured him in a serious pose, staring straight into the lens with a full-lipped pout. Then a photo of Elizavetta and Makhar with Nikita leaning in behind them. Rosa quickly scanned the rest. Nikita riding a horse. Nikita drinking from a beer can. Nikita and Elizavetta in wedding apparel. Every photo featured Nikita. There were none of Ilya.

  “In 1560 his wife died, and he went mad with grief…” Makhar diligently continued reading, his voice muffled down the hallway.

  Rosa turned, assessed the bed. Nobody would know. She parted the curtains and knelt on the mattress, flipping up the pillow. The place every superstitious teenage girl keeps her most precious things. A lace handkerchief: inside, a lock of dark brown hair and a gold wedding band. The inscription inside the ring read Elizavetta and Nikita, eternal love.

  Rosa hid the items again and moved to the window. She peered around the edge of the curtain, and could see past the laundry and out to the hives. Anatoly and Ilya, in their bee-protection suits, were busy scraping wax from frames. What did Ilya think of this room? It was little more than a shrine to Elizavetta’s first husband.

  Footsteps in the hall. Rosa turned. Makhar was standing in the doorway.

  “Roshka?”

  “I thought I saw a rat.”

  “We don’t have rats. Papa scares them away with magic.”

  “Just a shadow then.” She had her arm around his shoulders. “Don’t tell Luda. We don’t want her to worry about rats.”

  “I don’t want her to worry about anything,” Makhar said, and Rosa knew he understood she had been snooping. “I’ll close Elizavetta’s door so nothing else gets in.”

  It was Ilya’s job to collect the mail from town every Monday. Makhar found this occasion profoundly exciting, although none of the letters were ever addressed to him. He and Rosa were taking a science lesson in the woods—a thin excuse for Rosa to smoke a cigarette—and he had already acquired a healthy collection of grasshoppers when the sound of the car echoed down the long dirt road nearby.

  “That’s Ilya,” Makhar said, ready to discard his jar of grasshoppers with careless haste.

  “Wait, wait,” Rosa said. She had only just lit a cigarette. “Why are you so excited? Are you expecting something?”

  “Sometimes my aunt in Moscow sends me a comic book.”

  “How often?”

  He shrugged, time being immaterial. “Sometimes.”

  “Okay, we’ll go back. But slowly. I want to finish this cigarette.”

  “Smoking’s bad for you, Roshka,” he said, running ahead. He tapped the trees with his palm, muttering a song under his breath.

  Rosa took a last quick drag and butted her cigarette. “I’ll race you,” she called, and they dashed back to the house.

  They arrived at the same moment as Ilya dropped a packet of letters on the kitchen bench. She thought of her request to Vasily, and tried not to look too hopefully towards the pile.

  “So, Makhar,” she said, settling with the little boy at the table. “Shall we go on with long division in decimals tomorrow?”

  Anatoly descended on the mail, began flipping through the envelopes casually. One caught his eye and he pulled it open to read.

  “I’m sick of long division,” Makhar said. “Can we do something else?”

  “If you like. Percentages?”

  “Elizavetta makes a pie if we do percentages. Then we cut up little percentages to eat.”

  “Then we’ll make a pie.”

  Anatoly sniffed, and threw the letter in front of Rosa. “For you,” he said tersely. “Are you careful who you give our address to?”

  Rosa was momentarily stunned. “Did you open my mail?”

  “It’s from somebody named Vasily.”

  “My uncle in St Petersburg. It’s private. You shouldn’t have opened it.”

  “No secrets here, Rosa,” he said.

  Rosa’s blood was burning. She quickly glanced over the letter: a few stern words about his hopes for her return, but mostly chat about golf and business. No mention of her mother’s things. She wondered if he still intended to send them. “I have a right to private correspondence,” she said, biting back her anger for Makhar’s sake.

  Anatoly didn’t respond. He continued leafing through the mail. Ludmilla arrived with an empty laundry basket under her arm, and Ilya gave Rosa a sympathetic smile. She tucked Vasily’s letter into her waistband and touched Makhar’s snowy hair.

  “All done for the day,” she said.

  “Time for lunch,” he said.

  “Set the table, Rosa,” Ludmilla said.

  Rosa’s lungs filled with frustration. “I won’t be having lunch today,” she said, rising and going to the door. “I’m going to have some time to myself.” She resisted slamming the door as she left.

  Shortly after dinner, when the sun was still low in the sky to the west but night had already come to the east, there was a hesitant knocking at the door of Rosa’s guesthouse.

  “Ilya,” she said, surprised to see him there on her top step.

  He glanced around nervously. “Can I come in?”

  “Of course.”

  He had something under his coat, which he had folded both his arms over. She showed him in and closed the door.

  “Would
you like coffee?”

  Ilya shook his head. “No, no. I shouldn’t stay. Anatoly thinks I’m washing out the honey drums.” He pulled open his coat and handed Rosa a package, wrapped in brown paper. “This came for you in the mail today.”

  Rosa took it gently. “It’s from Vasily. Why did you…?”

  “I know what he’s like. I knew that if he saw it he would open it. I’m sorry I didn’t find your letter before he did, or I would have set that aside too.”

  Rosa eyed the package. “Thank you so much, Ilya. I’m in your debt.”

  “You can repay me by not saying anything to Anatoly.”

  “I certainly wouldn’t tell.” She took his hand firmly. “You must stay and drink coffee with me. I have sugar and milk now, and fresh coffee.”

  He hesitated, watching her fingers. She withdrew them. “Please.”

  “Yes…all right.”

  “Sit down,” she said, throwing the package onto her bed. “I need to talk to you about something.”

  As she boiled the kettle, the breeze freshened overhead making the trees whisper and hiss. From the corner of her eye, Rosa saw Ilya stiffen. “Don’t worry,” she said. “I’m sure it’s just an evening breeze.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  She turned to him. “I’m talking about Nikita. You know that.”

  He looked down and away, picking at the worn upholstery on the arm of the chair. “Nikita is dead.”

  “How did he die?”

  “An accident in the woods.”

  “A death not-his-own,” she said, then finished making the coffee in silence. She handed him a mug and sat on the end of the bed, her legs pulled up underneath her. “Ilya, I know. His spirit is still out there, isn’t it? Anatoly can’t banish him.”

  Ilya was very still. He closed his eyes and drew a deep breath, speaking almost inaudibly. “He will though.”

  “Nikita is making Elizavetta sick.”

  Ilya opened his eyes, and Rosa was struck again by the oddness of them. One was dark, and seemed warm and soft; the other was light, and seemed flinty and cool. As if he could not decide to be either open or closed to her. “Some nights, Nikita pulls Elizavetta’s spirit from her body—”