“Do you think I would give a damn about you if you weren’t? Why do you think I brought you here?”
Sophie tried to twist her elbow out of the woman’s grasp. But she was unable to move. Was this what Dmitri had meant when he had asked her to think what she was about to do? Had he been trying to warn her? But if he thought she was in some way related to the Volkonskys, why hadn’t he said anything? Had he, too, realized only at that moment what he had done?
“How can I be … how can I be the wolf princess?” She didn’t want to cry in front of the woman.
“The lost Volkonsky child!” Anna Feodorovna spat at her. “All the other Volkonskys dead! Killed, murdered, gone! But there was one, just one child that escaped!”
“But how can that have anything to do with me? I am English!”
She snorted. “You might be English now … but like so many people in your stupid, tiny, ridiculous little country, your ancestors came from somewhere else!”
“That can’t be true!”
Anna Feodorovna didn’t answer immediately, but looked at Sophie as though deciding what to say. She bit her lip. “That is what was so thrilling about you when you first arrived here. I thought you would know something of who you were. Would even guess why you had been brought here.” She laughed. “But it was the most amazing thing! You knew nothing.Nothing!”
“But there isn’t anything to know.” Sophie wished that her throat didn’t hurt so much. And that her head would stop throbbing.
“Of course not.” She leaned in closer. “But haven’t you ever been curious about your family? And what a family! Such a sad story, too …”
She frowned as if she felt genuine sorrow. “It made me so unhappy when I first found out. How Princess Sofya Kyrilich Volkonskaya, our dear, sweet wolf princess, had to leave her home in the middle of winter nearly a century ago. Such ugly, blood-soaked times, worse if you had a title or land or money … or a set of priceless diamonds hacked out of your own mine.” She shook her head. “And that should have been the end of the Volkonskys!”
She took a step backward from Sophie, although she still held her tight. With her other hand she grasped the handle of a door. “She got nearly as far as the White Sea and then the snow claimed her. She was a fool to travel alone like that. Only a desperate woman would have considered making such a journey.” She shook her head. “Perhaps if she had left the child behind, she would have escaped. But she was a devoted mother.” The woman sighed. “They never found the child, you see. And that’s what interested me. It would have been the first thing that a wolf or a bear would have eaten. But nothing was ever found. Not a boot or a hat or a cloth to wrap the child in. Where had he gone?”
She ground her foot into the loose stones on the floor. It made a rasping, grating sound.
“I found myself thinking … what if someone had found the child, in the woods, and taken it to safety? There might be some Volkonsky prince living up near the White Sea!” She raised an eyebrow. “But I couldn’t find any child, and I did look … and so then I thought, what if someone took the child and put it on a ship … I didn’t know where he might have gone, but I started to look around, see what I could dig up.” She laughed. “And I found an old woman, very old. Living alone. She would die soon, but did she have any relatives?”
The woman looked at Sophie, her eyebrows raised. “Did you ever meet Xenia? She was still alive when you were born.”
As the princess said the nameXenia, an image did fall, quite perfectly formed, into Sophie’s mind. Stairs to a flat. Spider plants on a windowsill. A Pekingese that yapped and yapped. A woman so old that Sophie had been frightened; laughter because Sophie refused to sit on her lap. Sparkles at the old lady’s throat. Diamonds? A present pressed into her hand as she left,a piece of glass…
The princess sighed. “But Xenia had never known that she had escaped from being murdered in Russia, had barely remembered being plucked from the frozen arms of her mother in a silver birch forest. How could she tell her son? Or her granddaughter? How could she tell them what she didn’t know herself? But somehow, between the forgetting and the loss, there was a song and a child named Sophie. And I thought that, in time, Sophie and I might meet …”
“But that means” — Sophie shook her head — “that we are related. If I am a Volkonsky and you are a Volkonsky …”
“Who saidIwas a Volkonsky?” The woman looked at Sophie as if she had said something completely stupid.
“But that’s your name,” Sophie whispered.
“It’s the name Iuse.” Anna Feodorovna raised one eyebrow. “After all, I found the palace, I uncovered the history. I set myself the task of finding the Volkonsky diamonds …” She put her finger to her lips. “Oh!” She smiled. “Have I said too much?”
Her eyes glinted. She leaned forward and grabbed Sophie’s hand.
“Don’t shrink back into the shadows like that,” she purred. “Once I brought you here, it occurred to me that you were so pretty, so amiable, that perhaps we shouldbecomerelated.” She grabbed Sophie’s chin and tilted her face up. “I could just get you to give everything to me!” She held up Sophie’s piece of glass. “And now an extra diamond! This alone is worth a fortune.”
“But that’s my father’s.” Sophie tried again to twist away from her grasp. “It’s glass.”
“It’s a Volkonsky diamond, you fool,” she hissed. She put it around her own neck, knotting the string where it had been snapped. “And now it’smine. You … and the Volkonskys … really have lost everything now.”
“Give it back!” Sophie tried to snatch back the glass drop that the princess shook in her face, taunting her. “My father gave me that!”
“You are so stupid!” the woman crowed, dropping the diamond into her pocket. “Everything about you is just like a Volkonsky! Of course I soon realized who you were, even though you swappedsarafans with your silly friend. That’s when I took the knife to that stupid, smiling portrait; I had plenty of time to look at her face. You are so like her …”
“Youruined the portrait? But why would you do that?”
“I saw the way Dmitri looked at you. I knew what they were thinking, down there, in their stinking kitchen. It wouldn’t be long, despite my threats to throw them out or shoot them, before they’d realize, before they’d say something.”
She turned her face and spat onto the floor. Sophie gasped.
