CHAPTER SIXTEEN The Portrait
No one came to fetch them. No clothes had been laid out. Delphine unpacked the rest of her suitcase, placing piles of skirts and vintage silk blouses on a chair.
“I forgot my ballet flats,” she said, sounding cross.
Sophie looked down at her own now rather crumpled clothes, then pulled on the Volkonsky silver sarafan over her jeans. Delphine smiled her approval.
“What should we do?” Marianne asked. “Should we go and find someone?”
Sophie rubbed a circle on the frosted window and looked out onto the park below.
She let her eyes relax and felt the morning twilight seep into her mind.
She thought about last night. Dmitri’s hand …
was he all right? And his sister, Masha.
The image of them sitting next to each other, shoulders touching.
And their story of the last, lost Volkonskys.
But there was something else about the way they talked whenever the princess was mentioned.
Surely they should have been pleased a Volkonsky had once more returned to the palace?
They didn’t like the princess — that was clear.
And what did they mean about respect for the wolves?
She thought about how the princess had reacted at the lake when Sophie had shouted “wolf”…
“The wolves have been taken care of … You saw nothing.” Why would she deny their existence?
“I’m starving,” Marianne said, sighing. She looked around for the supper tray, but it had gone. “Who takes the things away?” she asked, blinking. “We never see anyone, do we?”
Sophie was about to tell them about the Under Palace, but felt, suddenly, that it would sound ridiculous. Later. She would tell them later.
“Ivan seems to do most of the stuff.” Delphine shrugged, checking her reflection. She had twisted her hair into two yellow coils on either side of her head. “Oh, let’s go and find someone!” she said. “We can’t sit around here all day. Are you going out like that, Marianne?”
“Don’t start!” Marianne snapped. Her hair was unbrushed, and she was wearing scuffed loafers. Her shirt hung out beneath her sweater. Her cheeks flushed and she glared at Delphine.
“I’m just saying …” Delphine looked flustered.
“I don’t care what I look like!” Marianne pulled her sweater down. “Can’t you get that through your head? And no one else cares, either. It’s just you …”
“Marianne …” Sophie took her arm, gently.
Marianne sat down on her bed and took off her glasses. She rubbed her eyes. She looked as surprised by her outburst as the others. “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “You look lovely, Delphine. It’s just … I’m not interested in the same things as you.”
“I know,” Delphine said quietly. “I think when I’m nervous … I get more anxious about what I’m wearing.”
“Look, I’ll brush my hair,” Marianne said and, picking up her brush, gave it two quick strokes. Hair floated up with static. “Thing is,” she said, putting on her glasses, “whatever I do, I always look the same!”
In the corridor, everything was quiet.
“Do we even know where to go?” Marianne asked.
“They’ll have left food for us in the White Dining Room.” Delphine sounded confident. “Like yesterday.”
The princess was seated at the far end of the table.
She was dressed in an elegant blue skirt and high-necked voile blouse, an enormous fur draped over the back of her chair.
She was wearing red lipstick, and her mouth looked as full as a peony.
Her head rested in her hand as she stared straight ahead.
She pulled the fur stole around her shoulders as if she were cold, picked up a small cup stained with lipstick, stood up, and came toward them.
Close up, she had dark circles under her eyes and Sophie could see tiny grains of powder on her nose.
She had painted two thin black lines on her upper lids, the ends flicked up.
But they seemed to have interrupted the fine dimensions of her face, making her look less remarkable.
The princess passed a hand across her forehead. “I couldn’t sleep,” she said. “So much paperwork!” She looked frail, not like the day before. “And we have a guest arriving today! A very important guest. His name is General Grekov.”
“Princess!” Ivan appeared in the doorway, carrying a tray of bread rolls.
“Ivan?” Sophie saw the princess hastily try to control her expression.
He carried the tray toward the sideboard. His hair was unkempt and he had left several buttons on his jacket undone. He didn’t meet the princess’s gaze. Instead he busied himself arranging plates, putting glasses on the table.
The princess jumped when he dropped a handful of cutlery, and spoke to him sharply in Russian. He bent down to pick up what he had dropped, and Sophie saw that his hands were shaking.
The princess sat down. She asked for more coffee, then just stared at the walls, as if imagining paintings that no longer hung there.
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. “Were so 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 words move 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 …”
“Does he remind you of anyone?”
Sophie stepped right up to the portrait.
She could now distinguish the brushstrokes that made up his mustache, the dabs of pigment that flushed his cheeks.
She gingerly put a finger up to the holes in the canvas.
How many bullets there had been! She could have told the princess that something in his appearance reminded her of her father, but she knew that would sound ridiculous.
Her father, an English poet, and a not very successful one at that, had nothing to do with this brave Russian soldier.
“He doesn’t remind me of anyone,” she said, shaking her head. “But then, he’s not likely to. I don’t know many Russian princes who were murdered in front of their own paintings.”