Page 45 of Spinning Silver
I was already dressed. The servants bowed to Mirnatius when he dismissed them, and then turned to me as Magreta set the crown upon my newly braided hair. They stood in silence a moment before me, looking, and then they all bowed again, lower; the two serving-girls curtseyed deep, and slipped out of the room hand in hand with their baskets of cloths and soap on their other arms, whispering to each other wistfully. Mirnatius watched them all with more baffled indignation and then abruptly seized his book from where the satchel lay against the wall. Without even sitting down, he roughly drew my face again in quick furious lines and turned to catch one of the servants still going back and forth emptying buckets out of the tub. “Look at this! Is this a beautiful face?” he demanded.
The poor man was very alarmed, of course, and looked at the picture only trying to divine what answer the tsar wanted; he stared at it and said, “It’s the tsarina?” at once, and then he looked up at me, and looked back down at it, and looked helplessly at the tsar.
“Well?”Mirnatius snapped. “Is it beautiful or not?”
“Yes?” the man said faintly, in desperation.
Mirnatius ground his teeth. “Why?What about it is beautiful?Lookat it and tell me, don’t just bleat whatever you think I want to hear!”
The man swallowed, terrified, and said, “It’s a good likeness?”
“Isit?” Mirnatius said.
“Yes? Yes, very good,” the man said, hastily more definite as Mirnatius stepped towards him. “But I am no judge, Majesty! Forgive me!” He bent his head.
“Let him go,” I said, in pity, “and ask the boyar instead.”
Mirnatius scowled at me, but waved the servant off, and he did take the picture to the boyar and thrust it in his hands at the door, as all our retinue crammed into the sledges and sleighs again. The boyar and his wife looked at it, and she touched it with her fingers and said, “How beautiful, Your Majesty.”
“Why?” he snapped, instantly turning on her. “Which features please you, what about it?”
She looked at him in surprise and looked back and said, “Why—none alone, I suppose, Your Majesty. But I see the tsarina’s face again when I look at it.” She smiled at him suddenly. “Perhaps I see what your eyes see,” she said, gentle and well meant, and he whirled away almost breathless with rage and threw himself into the sleigh, leaving the loose page still in her hands.
He drew me a dozen times more that day, one picture after another from every angle he could arrange; he seized my chin and pushed my head in one direction and another in mad frustration. I let him do it without complaint. I kept thinking, unwillingly, of his silent weeping. His book filled with pictures, and he made the servants look at them, and the boyar whose house we stopped at to break the morning. We came into Vysnia a little while after noon, and the sleigh drew up before the steps of my father’s house. We hadn’t quite stopped moving before Mirnatius leapt out; without even saying a word of greeting, he thrust the book into my own father’s hands and said, almost savagely, “Well?”
My father looked through the pictures slowly, turning the pages with his thick callused fingertip; a strange expression was coming into his face. I had climbed out, with a servant’s help, and my stepmother Galina was holding out her hands to me in greeting. We kissed cheeks, and I straightened, and my father was still lingering on the last drawing, a sketch of my face looking out at trees heavy with snow, a single curve for the sleigh’s edge and only the far side of my face visible, just eyelashes and the corner of my mouth and the line of my hair. He said, “She has a look of her mother in these,” and handed the book back to Mirnatius abruptly, his mouth pressed into a line, and turned to kiss my cheeks.
I had never slept in the grandest chamber of my father’s house. I had peeked into it a few times as a daring game, when there were no honored guests in the house and Magreta would let me. It had always seemed to me an imposing, massive room. The windowsills were carved stone, as was the one heavy imprudent balcony that looked away over the forest and the river. “It was the old duchess’s chambers,” Magreta once told me. There were tapestries on the walls: Magreta had helped mend a few, but my own sewing was not good enough to be allowed; I had done a little of the embroidery on two of the velvet pillows that littered the bed, with its funny big clawed feet that I had always liked: the last duke’s crest had been a bear, and there were half a dozen old pieces of furniture still left with the carved feet.
But now the room seemed suddenly small and close and too hot for me after the delicate beauty of the tsar’s palace. I went to stand on the balcony while the servants brought in our things, bustling around me, with the cold wind welcome on my face. It was a little way into the afternoon, the sun going low. Magreta came in scolding along the servants who brought in my box of dresses, but then she came to stand with me silently, pressing my hand between hers, stroking the back of it.
When the others went out and we were alone for a moment, I said quietly, “Will you get one of the other servants to find out where the house of Panov Moshel stands? It’s in the Jewish quarter somewhere. There’s going to be a wedding there tonight, and the driver will need to know the way. And find me a gift to take.”
“Oh, dushenka,” she said, softly, afraid. She brought my hand to her cheek and then she kissed it and went away to do as I’d asked.
One of Mirnatius’s guardsmen came in, one of the soldiers who had come with us from the palace. He wasn’t really a footman, but unlike the other servants bustling in the room, I was not the duke’s daughter to him; I was the tsarina, and when I looked at him, he bowed deeply to me and stopped there in his place, waiting. I said, “Will you go tell my father I would like to see him?”
“At once, Your Majesty,” he said, a note in his voice like the deepest humming string on an instrument, and he went out.
My father came to me. He stopped in the doorway and I turned, still on the balcony, and looked at him with my back straight. His eyes were on me, heavy and assessing as they always had been, measuring my worth, and after a moment he crossed the room and came to join me on the cold stone. Below us, the near-unbroken white of the forest and the frozen river rolled into the blanketed countryside. “It won’t be a good harvest this year,” I said.
I half expected him to be irritated or even angry at being summoned, to speak sharply to me: to him surely I was only the unexpectedly useful pawn. I was not meant to begin sweeping independently around on the board. But he only said, “No. The rye is blighted in the fields.”
“I’m sorry to put you to the expense, but there’s going to be a wedding while we’re here,” I told him. “We’re marrying Vassilia to Mirnatius’s cousin Ilias.”
He paused and looked at me from under his brows for a long moment. He said slowly, “We can manage. How soon after she comes?”
“In the same hour,” I said, and we looked at each other, and I knew that he understood me perfectly.
He rubbed his hand across his mouth thoughtfully. “I’ll make sure Father Idoros is ready and waiting in the chapel when Ulrich’s horses come through the gate. The house will be crowded, but your mother and I will leave our bedroom for them. She’ll sleep upstairs with her women, and I’ll take the one next door, with your cousin Darius. A few other men of your husband’s household can share with us to make room.”
I nodded, and I knew I wouldn’t have to worry about Ulrich finding a way to spirit his own valuable daughter out from under her new bridegroom.
“Will Prince Casimir be visiting?” my father asked after a moment, still studying me.
“He may not come until the day after, I am afraid,” I said. “Our messenger to him was late getting started, some trouble with his horse.”
My father glanced back into the room. The servants were still working, but none of them were near the balcony. “How is your husband’s health?”
