“Is this some sort of joke?” The princess’s face was blank, but her lips looked thinner and her voice was sharp. “Ivan?”
Ivan looked distraught. “I followed your instructions,” he started to say. “I brought them here safely …”
The princess was staring at each of them in turn again, as though if she looked at them hard enough she could find something she had lost. Her gaze rested on Sophie. The frown dissolved, a smile spread slowly, and Sophie again felt as if she couldn’t hold the woman’s gaze. It was too bright, too penetrating.
“Soyou…”the princess whispered, stepping toward Sophie. “Youare Sophie Smith.”
“We swapped clothes,” Sophie heard herself say. “Delphine looked nicer in thatsarafan, so we swapped.”
The princess nodded slowly. “No more tricks,” she said. “We won’t have so much fun if you play tricks on me.”
“I’m sorry,” Sophie mumbled, although she didn’t know what she was apologizing for. There had been no “trick.”
“It’s nothing!” The woman smiled at her. “I have a copy.”
She turned and pulled another piece of paper out of the pile, then pushed it toward Sophie.
Sophie looked down at the paper. Everything was in Russian, fat black capital letters she didn’t recognize or back-to-front letters that made no sense. The paper was thick and had a watermark in the middle. It all looked extremely official, not at all like the slips that the school usually sent out for parents and guardians to sign back in London.
“Sign the form,” the princess said quietly.
Sophie hesitated, then wrote her name neatly at the bottom.
The princess snatched the paper out of Sophie’s hand, folded it in half, and slipped it into a large leather wallet. Then, as if suddenly remembering the other forms, she picked them up and slipped them in with Sophie’s, hurriedly smoothing the crumpled sheet Delphine had signed.
For the first time the princess laughed — a loose, rapturous, full-throated laugh. “Now the fun can begin!” she cried. “I want to find out all about you! I want to know every detail of your lives. You are my new London friends!”
She tucked the leather wallet securely under her arm.
“But now, I must leave you for a little while. I have paperwork to attend to, and it is almost the end of the day. You must eat and rest.”
Sophie looked out of the small window. She saw the twilight had deepened. The stars were brighter, like pinpoints of light through a prism. Time seemed to operate differently in the Volkonsky palace. History swirled around like snowflakes; the daylight was held prisoner by the winter. Sophie sighed. It seemed so wonderfully, beautifully, romanticallydifferentfrom anything she had known. And yet, she felt, somehow not different at all.
The princess smiled at Ivan. “You will take care of my precious guests for the moment?”
“Of course, Princess.”
“Think of them as lost diamonds I have found in the snow …” The princess raised the leather wallet to her lips and kissed it, then gazed at Sophie. “Thank you for coming,” she whispered, and ran lightly to the door.
The White Dining Room, surely capable of seating at least a hundred diners, was almost entirely empty, apart from a table at which just three places had been set. There were shadows on the walls where paintings had once hung. At the far end of the room, snow had blown through a hole in a high, broken window and lay in a drift on the dark floorboards. Candles guttered in the candelabrum, the wax already dripping down onto the curved silver branches.
“This place is so run-down.” Marianne leaned across to speak to Sophie and Delphine, dropping her voice as Ivan glanced around. “I suppose the princess has lost all her money.”
Delphine shook her head. “She must have money,” she said. “Did you see her dress?”
Marianne shrugged her reply.
Delphine said, “That dress was expensive. Definitelyhaute couture.”
“Perhaps she’s too cheap to do the place up,” Marianne said as she picked up a large starched linen napkin and put it on her lap.
Sophie watched as Ivan moved silver dishes around on a large sideboard. She wondered about the other servants he had mentioned. And could a princess, couldthisprincess, be cheap? She didn’t want to think it of her, just as she didn’t want to think of Prince Vladimir dying like a coward.
“If the palace has been empty for so long,” Sophie said, “and if the princess has only just returned … perhaps she hasn’t had time to make any repairs.” She looked at the faded pattern on the walls.
“You can tell she’s a princess,” Delphine said, glancing across at Ivan’s back. “Just by the way she looks. Did you see her rings? But I wonder why she wants to live here. She’d have much more fun in Saint Petersburg.”
“Perhaps she doesn’t want fun,” Sophie said.
