CHAPTER ELEVEN The Princess #2
Ivan coughed discreetly and indicated that the girls should follow the princess.
Delphine walked forward confidently, the silver sarafan swishing on the floor.
Sophie could see it was too long for her.
She and Marianne followed her into a much smaller, darker room, almost entirely taken up by a large round table.
In the center was a large candelabrum, the candles glowing, the wax dripping down the gilt branches.
All over the table were piles of paper, some bundled and tied with ribbons, others in perilously high stacks.
The princess was sorting through a small pile in front of her, looking slightly distracted.
Ivan leaned across to push the candelabrum closer.
“Thank you, Ivan, but I don’t need your help,” the princess said. The sharpness of her tone seemed to wound Ivan, and he stepped back from the table into the gloom. “Just a little boring paperwork,” the princess muttered to herself, still shuffling papers. “Ah yes, here we are!”
She pulled out several sheets of paper.
“Your Miss Ellis is extremely strict! Extremely thorough.” She smiled as she laid a piece of paper in front of Marianne. “She would only allow me to take you skating if you signed these papers.”
“Shouldn’t it be our parents who sign them?” But Marianne took the pen that was offered and put her name at the bottom of the paper.
“I think your signature will do nicely.”
The princess turned the paper over without bothering to read it and put it on top of a different pile. Then she smiled broadly as she beckoned Delphine forward. “It is just a formality. I am not expecting any accidents!”
Delphine took the silver pen she was offered and signed her name where the princess indicated.
The princess nodded and picked up the paper.
Sophie watched her every movement, fascinated: The angle of her head, the thick rope of hair, the cut of her clothes made her look quite different from anyone Sophie had ever seen before.
She was smiling as she scanned the page, but it was a quiet, private smile.
Then, as she read quickly to the bottom, the princess’s forehead crumpled in a frown. “But there has been some mistake …”
She tore her eyes away from the page and looked up at Ivan. Sophie saw anger flare in the depths of those large gray eyes.
“You are the wrong girl!” The princess spoke quickly.
Delphine took a step back. “I … I …” she stuttered.
“What are you doing here, dressed like that? That is not your sarafan.”
The woman crunched Delphine’s consent form into a ball and threw it on the floor.
Sophie panicked. She wanted to pick the paper up and return it to the princess so they could go on as before.
But could it be that perhaps they weren’t meant to be here after all?
Perhaps it was Lydia Sedgwick who had been invited.
Or Nadine? Perhaps they would be sent back to Saint Petersburg straightaway and some other girls would get the joy of skating with the princess.
“I’m not the wrong girl. I’m Delphine.”
She looked at her friends as if she suddenly doubted who she was. Sophie wanted to help her friend, but she couldn’t get her tongue to work.
“I’m here with my friends,” Delphine managed to say. “The school trip.”
“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.
“So you …” the princess whispered, stepping toward Sophie. “You are Sophie Smith.”
“We swapped clothes,” Sophie heard herself say. “Delphine looked nicer in that sarafan, 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, romantically different from 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.