The girls felt awkward. No one spoke. The princess checked her watch.
“I can’t bear it,” she said. “I can’t sit here …” She smiled at the girls. “Come with me.”
They followed her.
“What’s going on?” Delphine kept an eye on the woman’s back, her hair pinned in elaborate braids. But the princess did not reply.
Up a broad staircase, toward a pair of double doors, lyres painted on the panels, wolves with open mouths; snarling or singing, Sophie couldn’t tell. They were outside the gallery! The princess reached into the pocket of her skirt and pulled out a key.
Sophie would see the place where Prince Vladimir had faced his murderers.
Before the princess unlocked the door, she turned to Sophie. “Perhaps you will see something I have missed,” she said. “Come on!” She put her cold fingers on Sophie’s hand. “Come and meet the family!”
The princess opened the door onto a musty-smelling void. Sophie heard the rasp of a match being lit and shaky plumes of candlelight danced on top of long candles. She gave each girl a single candle and then picked up a heavy, many-branched candelabrum and walked to the center of the enormous room. Faces loomed out of the darkness.
“The Volkonskys!” the princess announced, her white arm extended as if she were making an introduction.
There were hundreds of portraits: beautiful women with white shoulders and lapdogs; little boys with long hair and satin coats standing, like miniature adults, next to large hunting dogs or statues; men in arrogant poses, ignoring Sophie with their hooded eyes.
“Look at this!” Delphine called, and Marianne followed her toward a huge portrait of a dark-haired beauty in an extravagant ice-blue ball gown.
“There are so many of them!” Sophie turned around and around, holding her candle higher. The portraits covered every inch of the vast room.
“Correction!” The princess walked farther into the room. “Wereso many of them.” She fixed her gray eyes on Sophie. “Just think! At this moment, in all of Russia, there is only” — she counted the fingers on one hand — “yes, just the one Princess Volkonskaya.”
“I’m sorry,” Sophie said.
“Not as sorry as me.” The princess chewed her lip and stared hard at Sophie. “Sometimes I think it would be better for everyone if there were not even one Volkonsky left. Perhaps things would be simpler …”
“You mustn’t say that!”
“You are right.” The princess inclined her head. “I must not say that.They might hear me.” She glanced up at the massed ranks of Volkonskys. “But don’t you think there comes a time when a family should just cease to be? A time when they have outlived their usefulness? Why shouldn’t the Volkonskys move over and let someone else have a chance?”
As she said the wordsmove over, she gave Sophie a little shove. It was so unexpected that Sophie’s candle tilted and hot wax splashed onto her hand.
“But Princess!”
“Let me introduce you,” she went on, ignoring Sophie’s protest.
Sophie looked around at the hundreds of portraits. “You know who they all are?”
“I know they’re all related to the last Volkonsky princess.”
“To you,” Sophie whispered.
“Is there another princess in the room?” There was a teasing note in her voice. “But tell me … which do you like the best?”
Sophie walked through the gallery, staring up at the portraits. She came to a stop by a picture of a young man with dark hair brushed across a high forehead, a smile playing at the corner of his mouth. He stood in a frogged military uniform, long-limbed and relaxed but with an easy confidence. A saber was looped to the side of his breeches.
Covering the portrait was a mass of bullet holes.
“Yes, Sophie,” the princess breathed. “Our brave Prince Vladimir.”
So this was the young, brave prince. He had the softest, kindest face, Sophie thought. No trace of hardness or ruthlessness in those eyes. The way the prince’s head was tilted, as if he had just heard something interesting, reminded her of her father’s photograph, the one on her windowsill at school. Sophie had the unsettling notion that perhaps this painted prince could hear anything she said.
“Do you think he was handsome?” the princess asked her.
Sophie said, “I’m not sure …”
