“They said that, as the soldiers raised their rifles,” Ivan continued, “the prince offered them all a cigarette and laughed.”
“He doesn’t sound very clever,” Marianne said.
“Not clever?” Ivan looked insulted. “He was the most passionate, intelligent man! A poet. A musician. A mathematician. And that was why he could laugh when confronted with those rifles. Because in those last few moments,” Ivan said, “the prince knew he had not died in vain: He had given his young wife and child time to escape into the forest.”
“So he did it to help them?” Sophie said. “But it’s still awful. Because the princess must have left the palace knowing that he would die, that she would never see him again.”
And as she said these words, she thought again of a figure walking through a frozen forest. But was it a dream, or a memory of her father’s story? The more she tried to fix it in her mind, the less solid it seemed, dissolving just as her vision of the palace had done.
“Not awful!” Ivan replied. “Noble!”
He stopped in front of a pair of carved doors, the panels warped and peppered with small holes. There were painted cartouches of young girls in togas carrying flutes. The handle was a brass animal’s paw. Ivan reached into his pocket and brought out another key, much smaller than the one to the front door. It was dark and rusty and wouldn’t, at first, fit into the lock. Muttering under his breath, Ivan freed the mechanism and the doors swung apart.
“It is not the largest bedroom in the palace, but I trust you will be comfortable.”
The room might once have been grand, but like the rest of the palace it seemed to have been locked up and forgotten about for years. On each of the three narrow metal beds, made up with fur rugs and clean, fat-looking pillows, were a pile of clothes and a piece of white paper with a name on it. Sophie could see that the writer had used the English alphabet, but the hand was unmistakably foreign, with loops and curlicues. Her bed was next to the window, just as it was at school. Between the beds were small bedside tables. A few chairs stood awkwardly in the empty space, and leaning against a wall was a long plain mirror, cracked down one side.
Seeing Delphine frown at the clothes, Ivan explained. “I will bring your luggage this afternoon, Miss Delphine. However, the contents of your cases will not be needed immediately. The princess loves her guests to dress up. I know you will want to please her.” He bowed. “I will return shortly.”
Delphine waited until Ivan had closed the door before saying, “I can’t meet the princess if I haven’t got my clothes! I just can’t.”
Marianne pulled off her sealskin gloves. She stared at her hands as if they were entirely new to her, and sank down onto a bed. It creaked as the rusty metal gave under her weight.
“We’ll need to help each other change,” Sophie said, taking Marianne’s name off her pile. “Ivan got us into these coats and he’s not here to help us get out of them!”
Delphine scrunched the piece of paper with her name on it into a ball, then stroked the rich fabric thoughtfully. “These clothes are very old,” she said. “I wonder who they belonged to? Do you think it was one of the Volkonsky princesses?”
What if it was the last Volkonsky princess?Sophie thought. The young woman who had left the palace with her child on the night that had shattered the history of this family?
She unfolded a heavy, wine-colored tunic, covered in embroidery, from the pile of clothes on Marianne’s bed.
Delphine traced the intricate patterns with her finger. “I’ve never seen stitches so small,” she said. “Come on, Marianne — let’s see how it looks.”
The two girls wrapped Marianne in the long tunic and slipped her stiff feet into pointed shoes.
“It’s called asarafan,” Marianne said.
“Oh, save us the guidebook nonsense!” Delphine said. She took a step back and looked at Marianne critically. “If you are going to meet a princess — even a princess you’ve never heard of — you need to make an effort,” she declared. “Will you wear some lip gloss? Just this once?”
Marianne sighed. “It won’t make the slightest bit of difference, Delphine. And it just makes me feel awkward. As if someone’s smeared sticky wax over my lips.” She made a face and jerked her head away as Delphine, ignoring her words, put a glossy finger to her mouth. “Do you think Ivan’s story about the prince is true?” she continued. “I’m not sure how he could know exactly what happened. He described it as if he was actually there.”
“Perhaps someone saw it — or heard it — and wrote it down,” Sophie said. She wanted to believe what Ivan had said, that Prince Vladimir died laughing. She didn’t want to imagine him begging for his life.
“Well, one part of it must be true …” Marianne mused.
“What?” Sophie wanted to go on discussing the extraordinary Volkonskys until they had exhausted every angle of the story.
“The part about his wife and child escaping into the forest.”
Delphine walked across to the mirror in the long emerald-green tunic that had been placed on her bed. With her hair hanging loose, she looked like a character out of a fairy tale. “How do you figure?” she said, looking intently at her reflection.
“Because if he hadn’t managed to save them, there’d be no more Volkonskys. I suppose the soldiers must have thought they’d died in the forest so didn’t bother to follow them.”
Sophie got out of hershuba, still thinking about the princess. How sad she must have been, and yet how brave. And how had she survived in the forest this far north? The cold was, as Ivan said, as sharp as a wolf’s bite. Someone must have helped her in the woods, given her food, offered her a warm hut to sleep in.
Sophie peeled off the rest of her clothes and folded them neatly, just as she would have done at school. They looked ridiculous: flimsy and cheap. For the first time, she saw them through Mr. Tweedie’s eyes. No wonder he had been so insistent on her getting a new sweater. She felt ashamed suddenly: She didn’t want to be the girl in the scruffy clothes anymore. She pushed them onto the floor and kicked them under the bed.
She turned her attention to the clothes that had been left for her. A long skirt, a soft undershirt, and — like the others — a long tunic, which was simpler than theirs but made of the most exquisite silver material. She pushed her feet into silver slippers (how had they known her size? she wondered), then stepped into the skirt, and drew the waist tight with the cords. Then she slid the pale shirt over her head. It smelled of lavender. And then she pulled on the silversarafan.
