CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE The Wolf Princess
“I won’t come with you!”
“I don’t think you have a choice!”
As Sophie was pulled toward the door, the chandelier shivered.
She looked up. Dmitri parted heavy ropes of crystal and stared down at her.
The expression on his face made her feel ashamed.
She had disappointed him. But what could she do?
The diamonds were Anna Feodorovna’s, and although Sophie hadn’t wanted them to be given to the general, they were not Sophie’s to keep.
Dmitri turned his face away. Anna Feodorovna held Sophie firmly by the elbow and they walked down the corridor.
In her other hand, she held the papers tightly.
“I don’t understand.” Sophie had a sour taste in her mouth. She swallowed.
“You are a silly, stupid little darling,” the princess told her in that musical peal of bells that was her voice. “I had hoped that I would bring you here and then … oh, then … the magic would start!” She sighed.
They were moving down a narrower corridor with a much lower ceiling. It was more desolate than anywhere Sophie had seen in the palace.
“I should have got rid of you when I had the chance,” the princess continued.
Why couldn’t Sophie understand? The princess was speaking English. They weren’t difficult words. But what did she mean by them?
“Got rid of me?” Sophie said slowly.
The princess sounded exasperated. “But Ivan interfered. I would have said it was an accident, of course, that I was aiming for the wolf and you got in the way, but I suppose there would have been too much fuss anyway. Even though we are so far away, stories get out. Your idiotic friends would have told tales. How annoying that your stupid headmistress insisted they come, too. And then who knows? Someone might have remembered something about you. They might have claimed to be related to you and the whole situation would have been unmanageable.”
“Princess,” Sophie whispered. “You’re hurting my arm.”
The woman took no notice. Her face was set straight in front of her. Sophie tripped and almost stumbled, but the woman’s grip held her up. A draft soughed up the blighted corridor. Shadows flung themselves over the two figures like cloaks.
“Please let me go.” Sophie thought she might cry.
Perhaps the wolves had heard them, for they sent up a lupine chorus that became louder as the princess dragged Sophie on, laughing as the wolves cried out.
“I should have had them shot when I arrived,” she said. “I’ve had a constant headache from their stupid noise!”
There was a sour, dank smell in the corridor.
“What have I done?” Sophie felt her arm burning from the princess’s tight grip. At Sophie’s words, the princess looked as if she had been slapped on the cheek. She pulled Sophie closer to her and stared into her face. Sophie saw a blue vein throb in the woman’s temple.
“Don’t you understand?” she whispered. Sophie watched the woman’s pale tongue. “All these stories about the wolf princess. You are the wolf princess, you little fool!”
“But …”
“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 name Xenia, 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 said I was 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 I use.” 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 should become related.” 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’s mine. 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 swapped sarafans 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 …”
“You ruined 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.
“Don’t like my rough ways?” she laughed. “Well, that suits me. Because I don’t much like you!”
She reached into her pocket and got out a key. The wolves kept up their chorus, louder now, as she unlocked the door.
Sophie took a step back, but Anna Feodorovna, without turning around, reached out and grabbed a handful of Sophie’s hair.
“Not so fast,” she muttered. Snowflakes hurled themselves over the two of them as she opened the door an inch.
“If only you had done as I asked, and not spoken to Dmitri,” she whispered into Sophie’s ear, “I might have kept you here for a couple of years. I might have let you play princess for a while before I got bored of you … and did … THIS!”
She pushed Sophie through the door and out into the snow.