Polly and the Prince (7 page)

“I cannot see that it makes the slightest difference. It is all arranged. He is coming tomorrow.”

Ned knew it was useless to argue. Polly had the faraway look in her eyes which meant she was planning a picture. She went on eating automatically, and she did not even hear Mrs. Howard’s continued protests.

After dinner she took a lantern and went out to the studio. Nick asked if he could borrow Ned’s fowling piece next day and went to his brother’s tiny bookroom-cum-office to clean the
gun. Ned and his mother settled by the fire in the sitting room.

“What are we going to do about Polly and Mr. Volkov?” Mrs. Howard asked anxiously, setting neat stitches in the
wristband of the shirt she was making.

“I don’t know. She positively glows when he is mentioned. What can we do? She is of age and he is an intimate friend of my employer. I cannot forbid him the house. But a match is out of the question. Though he may be a gentleman, it seems he has not a penny to his name.”

“Then you think he has serious intentions? I cannot be so sanguine. After all, Polly has no money either, and she is not merely of age, she is on the shelf by anyone’s calculation. No, he is looking to amuse himself. We must hope that a flirtation is all he has in mind,” she added ominously.

“You mean...? Surely he would not…she would not…!
She is not a chambermaid, nor a farm girl, after all. And for all Lord John was a Buck of the first stare before his
marriage, I never heard that he had dealings with any but the muslin company—begging your pardon, Mother. He will warn Volkov off. No, I will not believe Polly is in danger of anything worse than a broken heart, and Lord knows that is bad enough.”

Chapter 6

“Good day, Ella. I come to sit for Miss Howard.”

“Good day to ‘e, sir, and a fine day it is. Come in, do, but it’s my belief Miss Polly’s still out.”

“We have appointed time for eleven o’clock.” Kolya sighed. “I shall tell Mr. Howard to give her a watch.”

“That wouldn’t do no good, sir. Miss Polly’d just forget to look at it when she’s got her mind on her pitchers.”

He smiled and shook his head. “Yes, you are right. You not know which way she went?”

“Kolya!” Nick bounced out of the dining room. “I mean Mr. Volkov. Have you been out with Ned, sir? Are you looking for Polly? She was down by the stream, drawing the bridge. She had me sitting on it for half an hour, pretending to fish,” he added in disgust. “Shall I fetch her, or show you the way? It’s just round the
corner.”

“Thank you, I will find.”

Mrs. Howard emerged from the sitting room, looking worried as usual. “Mr. Volkov, I thought I heard your voice. Polly told me she is expecting you, but she is not yet
come home, I fear. It is shockingly discourteous of her.”

“I know Miss Howard means no harm,
madame,
and Master Nick has told me where to find.”

She looked flustered. “Nick, go with Mr. Volkov and show him the way, and then stay with your sister.”

Nick complied without the expected argument. As they strolled down the village street, Kolya asked him why he had been indoors on a sunny morning.

“Ned found some naval charts and a book about navigation in the library at the manor,” he explained, grimacing. “Lord John gave him leave to borrow them for me. I’m sure they’d be very interesting on a rainy day. Still, Bob Brent has to con his book in the mornings too, so I’m to meet him at noon. I don’t see that I need stay with you and Polly, do you, sir?”

Kolya knew perfectly well what was in Mrs. Howard’s mind. Yesterday she had insisted on staying uncomfortably in the studio throughout his sitting. Polly had been too absorbed in her work to take much notice of her mother’s sudden insistence on chaperoning her. Kolya was amused. Anyone who knew Polly’s dedication to her art must be aware that dalliance was the furthest thing from her mind when she was painting.

“I expect she will want to go back to the studio,” he said to Nick. “Is no need to stay, I think.”

“Oh yes, that’s right. Then I’ll be off, sir. You see the bridge?” He pointed. “Beside it there’s a path going down to the bank and she’s just down there. Look, you can see her from here, with all those wretched brats about her.” Nick snorted in disgust, then strode off, whistling a merry tune.

Kolya stopped in the middle of the bridge and leaned on the parapet. Polly was sitting by the slow, meandering stream, where trailing waterweed like mermaids’ hair rippled the surface of the greenish water. Beside her stood a pollarded willow, a giant’s spiked mace. In her sage green pelisse and faded straw hat she could have been the inhabitant of a fairy tale, a wood sprite, casting a spell on the cottage on the opposite bank. Gnomes in brown homespun clustered about her.

Kolya laughed at his fancy. Like many of the local buildings, the cottage she was sketching had a brick lower storey and an upper storey hung with rounded tiles. He thought it must be difficult to draw. At any rate, Polly was so absorbed in her work that she had not noticed his arrival, though now and then she addressed a smiling remark to her audience of wondering village children.

As he picked his way down the narrow, muddy path to her side, the children scattered.

“Kolya! I mean, Mr. Volkov.” Her smile of greeting made him forget any lingering exasperation at her absentmindedness. “Is it eleven already? I forgot to listen to the church clock.”

She was half guilty, half laughing. Rather than seem to reproach her, he avoided the question. “I come to escort you back to the studio.”

“That is kind of you, but I have decided I want to paint you outdoors, perhaps on horseback. The light in the studio seemed too cold this morning, when outside is all golden April sunshine.”

“Is not enough room here for my horse,” he pointed out. He wanted to remove her from this spot where they might be seen together by any passing busybody. “Besides, better you finish first the picture you have started. Perhaps we sit in the garden?” That would be the perfect place, hidden from prying eyes yet visible from the house, so not needing a chaperone.

“Yes, I have done so little perhaps we could,” she said consideringly. Already lost in thought, she gave him her sketch book and folded her little canvas stool.

He took it from her, tucked it under his arm with the sketch book, and helped her up the muddy slope to the road. She was hardly aware of his presence, his hand under her elbow. He was reminded of walking with her to her home in Tunbridge Wells—but then he had been a ragged fellow. Now he was once more clad as befitted his station, though not in the magnificent green and red uniform of the tsar’s own
Preobrazhensky
regiment of the Imperial Guard. Colonel Prince Nikolai Mikhailovich Volkov, eldest son of the Minister, was not accustomed to being ignored by young ladies, even of the highest rank.

Though he laughed at himself, he was piqued.

Polly drifted at his side, not speaking until they turned into the drive which led to the back of the house, their feet crunching on gravel.

“Yes,” she said then with satisfaction, “I believe I can transfer it outside without much change, which probably means I ought never to have tried it indoors in the first place. Will you sit on the bench under the cherry tree?”

For the next hour Kolya had no cause to complain of neglect. When her gaze was not on his face it was on his growing likeness on the canvas. She asked him to tell her about Russia, and he knew she was listening because her questions were intelligent and to the point. Having once completed the planning in her head and taken up pencil or brush, she worked by a sort of instinct combined with practised technique which required only part of her attention.

The only thing she was completely unconscious of was the passage of time.

“Miss Polly,” Ella called from the back door, “the master’s home and the missus wants to know if you mean to eat your luncheon. And she says to ask Mr. Volkov if he’ll kindly step in and take a bite.”

“Already? All right, Ella, we are coming. Will you be able to stay a little longer after luncheon, sir?”

He was tempted. He had always been an active man, but after the ceaseless struggle for survival of the past few months it was pleasant to lounge in the sun and talk to a pretty girl.

There was a soothing quality to Polly’s listening. Kolya realised that in describing his country, as opposed to the adventure stories he had told Nick, he was somehow letting go of it, setting himself outside it. In spite of his determination to build a new life in England, he had been unknowingly clinging to the idea of going home. Holy Mother Russia must be put behind him. Tsar Aleksandr would never forgive an officer who had flouted his authority, and Tsar Aleksandr was in his prime. It might be thirty years before a new reign brought the hope of pardon.

They had reached the house before he said, “I am sorry, Miss Howard, but your brother is expecting that I go with him again this afternoon. I must learn. I do not mean forever to sponge on my friends.” Enough of solemnity. He grinned. “Is fine English idiom,
nyet?”

She laughed and nodded, pleased with his pleasure.

* * * *

The April days slipped past, sunshine sparkling after showers, green buds bursting on oak and elm, the cherry in bloom and every coppice carpeted with bluebells reflecting the sky. In St Petersburg the ice on the Neva would be breaking up with its thunderous, crackling roar, but Kolya had no time to think of St Petersburg.

He found his studies unexpectedly fascinating, and his admiration for Ned Howard’s expertise grew. As they rode about the estate, overseeing drainage and ploughing and planting, dealing with tenants’ problems, he told Ned what be knew of farming in Russia.

Serfs with nothing to gain from their labours were lazy and careless, and they strongly resisted any attempt to introduce modern methods. Kolya did not tell Ned that once he had planned to free his serfs as soon as he inherited the vast Volkov estates. That moment would never come. To reveal that his father was Prince Volkov, one of the wealthiest and most influential men in Russia, was worse than pointless: it might spoil his friendship with the Howards.

Even thinking him merely a private gentleman, Ned was always deferential to his pupil, though he would have scorned to toad-eat. Polly, on the other hand, had not a deferential bone in her body. She treated with the same placid friendliness the village children who gathered around her easel and Rebecca Ivanovna, Lady John Danville, whom Kolya brought one afternoon to see her paintings.

When her ladyship bought a flower study and agreed to sit for her portrait after removing to Loxwood Manor, Polly was pleased, but she did not fawn.

Kolya flattered himself that for him Polly’s smile was just a bit brighter than for anyone else, her greeting more eager, her leave-taking tinged with regret. That did not mean that she learned punctuality to please him. Often when he arrived for his sittings, he had to chase off after her across the countryside. She would be sitting on a knoll, under an oak tree, sketching Five Oaks; or, closer to home, painting a cottage garden gay with orange pot-marigolds and heavy-scented purple stocks, or the mallards in the stream with their glossy spring plumage. They would walk together back to the house, loaded with easel, box of paints, stool, huge green umbrella, and the wet canvas in its protective sling, discussing painting techniques and the
philosophy of art.

She usually remembered to tell someone where she was going, but Kolya was learning the way her mind worked and soon found he could guess where she might be.

She would not let him see his own portrait. “The subject of a portrait is rarely completely satisfied,” she explained with the seriousness which enchanted him, “so until I
am satisfied there will always be a temptation to change it to suit the model, not myself.”

The April days slipped by, and every day Kolya found himself more attracted to the absentminded artist.

* * * *

In the middle of April, Lord John’s cousin Lady Graylin and her husband, Sir Andrew, came to stay at Five Oaks on their way to the Continent. Sir Andrew had been posted to Switzerland as Consul General and he had promised to take Teresa to Paris
en route,
though her pregnancy was beginning to show. Lady Graylin had never allowed such minor considerations to hinder her.

Kolya had known the Graylins and their little girl in St Petersburg, and he was glad to renew the acquaintance. He also knew, from his visit to London in 1814, two of John’s friends who turned up a day or two later.

“Repairing lease, don’t you know,” said Mr. Bevan jauntily over the port after dinner on the day of their arrival. “The Season’s more exhausting than ever, what with the coronation coming up. Besides, you can’t go on honeymooning for ever, old chap. Mind you, I’m not saying I blame you. Dashed restful female, Lady John, not for ever dashing about and chattering.”

“She don’t lie about languishing on a sofa, neither,” put in Lord Fitzsimmons, who had recently inherited a barony and was forced to contemplate settling down. “Be damned if it don’t make a fellow think it wouldn’t be so bad to be leg-shackled after all.”

“I say, no need to go so far as that, Fitz.”

The rest of the gentlemen laughed at Bev’s alarm, but it set Kolya to thinking. He had once seriously considered marrying Rebecca Ivanovna. Polly had the same restful quality as the younger woman, without the shyness. Of course, her dedication to art, while admirable, was bound to prove inconvenient at times, but... He pulled himself up—for the forseeable future he was in no position to support a wife.

“Shall we rejoin the ladies?” John suggested hopefully.

In the drawing room they found that, emboldened by Teresa’s encouraging presence, Rebecca Ivanovna had decided to hold her first dinner party. She was not yet ready to tackle the local landowners, but the vicar and his wife and daughter were agreeable and uncritical, and there was a widowed Danville cousin who lived in a cottage on the estate.

“And I thought perhaps the Howards,” she went on, “if you do not object, John? Mrs. Howard is a thoroughly respectable woman, and I found Miss Howard most amiable. We could send the carriage for them.”