Scarlet in the Snow (2 page)

It was my turn to be surprised. Practical Anya had said something not only acute, but beautiful. I wished I’d thought of it. I made a note of it in my head, to add to my story, the story I’d started when Liza burst in. Happiness makes you generous. That would be the theme of my story. It would be like a magic charm, to work on my own family. And on myself.

Alas! All our efforts – the pretty rose-patterned muslin dress, the coral necklace Anya said would set off my brown eyes, my tidy plaited hairdo, clean face and stiff smile – were for naught, as were my sisters’ rustling, perfumed presences and my mama’s gentle conversation. Not to speak of the honey cake and tiny gingerbread stars and horses painstakingly iced in pink and white by Sveta, and the hot fragrant tea, poured from the best samovar into the best tea-glasses. All of it was for nothing. That greedy old Captain devoured everything without pleasure or thanks, and did not even look us in the face when he finally came to the reason for his visit: how it had ‘lately come to my attention, Madame Kupeda, that your esteemed late husband, my dear Cousin Alexander, neglected to return some items he had borrowed from me’.

This was so unexpected that we all stared at him as though he was speaking in a foreign language. I saw the colour rush out of Mama’s cheeks as she murmured, ‘I’m sorry, Captain Peskov. I don’t think I quite understand.’

He drew a list out of his pocket, adjusted his spectacles, and said, ‘It’s all itemised here, Madame Kupeda, but just so you know: Item 1, an umbrella, black. Item 2, a pair of socks, plain grey. Item 3, a pair of wet-weather galoshes.’ He saw our baffled expressions. ‘It was some years ago. Cousin Alexander called in to see me. It had been raining and his feet had got wet, so I let him borrow these items.’ He sounded like he thought he’d done something very noble. And indeed it must have wrenched what passed for his heart to part with any of his things, I thought, even if
no doubt they were old and shabby and fit to be thrown out. I certainly didn’t remember seeing them in the house.

I saw Mama’s hands clench in her lap and her features harden. I knew that set expression on her face and so did my sisters. We looked at each other, holding our breaths. But all she said was, very softly, ‘And of course you wish your property to be returned, Captain Peskov. As it will be, as soon as I find it. Why, the thought that we might have retained any of your property makes me feel quite . . . quite ill.’

His face twisted in what was clearly meant to be a smile. ‘Oh, but you must not upset yourself, dear Madame Kupeda. I am sure we can come to some suitable arrangement,’ and he licked his lips. We all stared at him. But before any of us could say anything, he added hastily, ‘I understand you’re painting portraits for a living these days. And I fancy having my portrait painted. We can negotiate a suitable fee, from which the value of the items your husband borrowed can simply be deducted, so there would be no need to return them.’ He beamed, well-pleased with himself. ‘Now, what do you say?’

‘What do I say?’ she whispered. ‘I say that if you don’t get out of this house this very minute, this very second, I will not answer for my actions.’ Her eyes flicked to the cake knife. Noting the direction of her look, the Captain scrambled to his feet in panic, spluttering, ‘You’re mad, woman, quite mad! Here I am giving you a favour out of the goodness of my heart and you –’

‘Get out,’ she said, ‘just get out.’ Her voice was still soft but there was such a chilling undertone in it that it was
much more frightening than if she’d shouted, and her eyes were like stones. I got up then, and Anya and Liza too, and together we went to stand by our mother, to protect her . . . to stop her from doing something terrible.

Under our combined gaze, my godfather mutely fumbled for his hat and coat. Just before scuttling out, he hissed over his shoulder, ‘You’ll regret this! Mark my words, you’ll regret this. Your name will be mud. No-one will commission you, I’ll make sure of it. No-one, do you hear!’ The last word ended on a squeak of pain as Mama, after calmly removing one pretty shoe, threw it at his retreating backside, the sharp heel connecting perfectly with its target. And then he was gone, rushing out of the house as if Old Bony herself was after him, howling for his blood.

The old miser was as good as his word, spreading poisonous rumours about us to all and sundry in Byeloka. We heard about it in letters from friends: apparently, from his reports, we lived in a squalid hermitage at the back of beyond, Mama’s loss had quite turned her brain, and as for us girls, we were running wild as wolves and no-one who was anyone respectable should have anything whatsoever to do with us.

Well, as for the last part, that was already true. Since our financial ruin, the large social circle Mama and Papa used to move in had melted away like snow in the spring. Our few remaining city friends were not rich or powerful or influential, so their opinion did not matter to the bigwigs of Byeloka. Mind you, neither did Peskov’s; his reputation was not exactly a shining one, for no-one much likes a miser. Still, enough mud stuck for the Byeloka merchants and their wives, who had been Mama’s main
clients, to think that perhaps their fat red faces and self-satisfied jowls might be better painted by someone else – anyone else. So as the weeks went by the commissions began to dry up, and a couple of clients who’d already had their portraits painted quibbled about the price, demanding a discount. Poor Mama had no option but to agree, for otherwise they would simply not have paid at all and she’d have been left not only with no money but with two canvases ruined by the ugly mugs of their owners.

By the time winter had really set in, our situation was becoming desperate. Oh, we still had more than enough to eat, thanks to our home resources: the barrels of salted meat and cabbage, the wheels of cheese, the rows of jars of preserved fruit and vegetables in the pantry. But the small reserve of money Mama had put aside from the sale of her paintings was dwindling by the day, and soon there would not be enough to afford other things, things she’d tried so hard to keep giving us: magazines, books, new shoes, a new dress, the occasional lace handkerchief or shawl.

Mama looked more and more haunted while Liza and Anya’s faces grew longer by the day. As for me, I embarked on a secret money-making project. The most famous literary magazine in Ruvenya,
The Golden Pen
, ran a big writing competition every year, with large cash prizes, and you could enter up to three stories. Why shouldn’t I enter? I had been writing since I was little, and because I also read a lot, I knew my stories were not bad at all. I told no-one about my project; it would stay a secret unless and until it worked out. So, in my best hand, I
made a good copy of what I considered to be my three best stories, including
The Three Sisters
, the tale I’d started the fateful day Captain Peskov came to visit. (I was very proud of that one.) I gave myself the pen-name A.A. Fenicks, which I thought sounded intriguing, maybe even a little foreign, and certainly not like that of a girl of nearly seventeen living in some benighted hermitage in the provinces. I took my stories in their envelope, carefully stamped, to the post office next time we were in Kolorgrod, our small local town, giving as return address the post office itself, for I did not want anything to come to our house. The competition results would not be announced till well into the new year, and I had already devised a little plan about how I was going to tell the post office we were expecting a letter to arrive for a cousin called Messir Fenicks.

Days passed. A week. Two. Three. Christmas came – not very merry, this year. Well, in truth it hadn’t been since Papa died. Oh, we tried; we made pretty paper decorations for the tree, Sveta baked a beautiful cake, and Mama had made us each a present: lovely wooden brooches, painted with our own exquisite miniature portrait. Anya’s wore an emerald tiara on her ebony-black hair and emerald earrings in her ears; Liza’s had a sapphire circlet on her brow, with a filmy veil over her hair like new-minted gold; and mine had hair the colour of fresh autumn leaves touched with the last of the summer sun, and a single magnificent ruby like a flame on a fine chain around her neck. I thought it was as if each of us had looked in a magic mirror and seen someone like us but touched with unearthly glamour, like a princess in a fairy tale.

‘You
ar
e my princesses,’ replied Mama when I said this. She kissed us all in turn. ‘You are my princesses, more precious than any jewel, and dearer to me than anything in the world.’ Then she sighed, and I knew what she was thinking.

‘Oh, Mama,’ I cried, ‘I wish I
could
make magic – real magic – not like that of Grandmother Dove!’ She was the village enchantress and a good old soul, but her spells were small, her magic little. She could make warts go away, improve a squint and weave a simple love-spell, but that was as far as it went. The kinds of things you heard the great enchanters and enchantresses could do – bend time and shapeshift and change destinies – well, they were as far beyond Grandmother Dove as the moon.

‘You do have real magic, my darling, each of us does; we only need to find it,’ said my mother gently. But that did not satisfy me, for it sounded to me like the kind of thing a parent says to stop you from dreaming of impossible things. ‘Mama, if I could find magic to change things for us, I’d do anything to get it, even hire myself as a servant to Old Bony if I had to!’

‘Don’t say things like that, little one,’ cried Sveta, overhearing me. ‘Old Bony has long ears, and if she should chance to hear you . . .’ Crossing herself, she glanced fearfully at the darkened window, as if expecting at any moment to see the grey-skinned skull-face of the fearsome forest witch grinning at us with all her sharp teeth.

‘Yes, if she hears you, Natasha,’ said Liza, grinning, ‘that old witch will have your heartstrings for her hair-ribbons, so watch out!’

The thing is, Liza does not believe in Old Bony or great enchanters or even the poor little spells of Grandmother Dove. The only kind of magic she believes in is the spell of riches – the magic dust of money, the glamour of wealth – and truth to say sometimes I think she is right. If we had money, poof! All our troubles would disappear, swept away in the whirlwind of good fortune. As for Anya, she does believe in magic, but only in the sort that will somehow bring a prince to her door and take her off into a world of cloth, gold and purple velvet – a world where there’d be a beautiful new gown for every day of the year. If Grandmother Dove could work that spell, Anya would long since have beaten a path to her door, and I’ll wager she too would go into service with Old Bony for it. Not that there’s any danger of that for either of us. For who has seen Old Bony these days? Not a single soul. Not once in a hundred years has she shown her long thin nose and sharp teeth to people anywhere. Who knows, maybe her brand of magic, the magic you hear of from the old stories, cannot survive in our modern world of telegraphs and trains and typewriters.

It’s said that Christmas has its own magic and perhaps that’s true, for only a week later came some good news, in the shape of a messenger from Count Igor Bolotovsky, a wealthy landowner who lived two or three hours’ drive from us. In a note, the Count said that he had just remarried for the second time, to a woman much younger than
himself. It was her birthday very soon and he had decided that he wished to give his new bride a portrait of herself as a present, and he wanted Mama to paint it. Clearly, he had not heard Captain Peskov’s rumours, or if he had he didn’t care. He would pay well for it, he said. But there were two conditions: first, it was to be a surprise, so Mama could not go to his house to paint a likeness from life, but must take it from the photograph he had enclosed. And second, as the Countess’s birthday was in a week’s time, the painting must be ready and delivered to his mansion within the week.

Normally, it takes Mama anything from two weeks to two months to complete a portrait. To do one in just a few days, without even the subject there for sittings, would be a hard undertaking, especially as she had come down with a bad cold. But equally there was no way Mama could refuse the Count’s imperious request, not with things being the way they were. Besides, this was the first time he’d ever commissioned her, and it might be the start of something good. So she began work immediately, shutting herself up in her studio all day and much of the night, with Sveta and I running in and out keeping the little stove in the studio well fed with wood so she could stay as warm as possible.