CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE The Letter
She stood in front of the damaged portraits, one torn with bullet holes, the other a woman without a face.
She reached out and touched the slashed canvas near the young woman’s neck.
This was the first wolf princess. Sofya Volkonskaya.
She had lived here. Sophie had held those very diamonds, now just brushstrokes, in her hand.
She wondered if the Customs Office would let her bring these destroyed portraits back to London.
If Rosemary made a fuss, she could always put them under her bed.
She sighed as she thought about that chandelier drop, now at the bottom of the ice road … Could it really have been from the palace? If so, Rosemary might not be quite so keen as usual on decluttering when Sophie brought the paintings back to London.
Dmitri stood next to her. “We have found you …” he whispered. “We watched and waited and then you came.”
Sophie stared straight ahead; she wouldn’t risk looking at him because she would see the disappointment on his face, but she could see his scar twitching out of the corner of her eye.
“Why are you leaving?”
“I will come back,” Sophie said. She touched the frame of the painting and added, “I promise you I will come back as soon as I am able.” This promise was to the wolf princess as well as to Dmitri. She groaned. “Why do I have to be so young? Why does everyone have to treat me like a child?”
She slipped her hand into her pocket and found the photograph of herself at school in London.
She pushed it behind the cobwebbed frame, but it stuck.
There was something in the way. She felt around with her finger and pulled out a folded piece of paper.
She opened it, but the words were just marks on old notepaper. She couldn’t read any of them.
“Dmitri” — she held the letter out — “do you know what this says?”
Dmitri took the paper and frowned as he murmured through the Russian words. “It’s a letter …” He turned it over. “But I don’t know who for …”
“There’s no name?”
“No … It just says … ‘To … my own’?”
“What else … what else does it say?”
Dmitri scanned the letter. “She doesn’t want to leave …” he said haltingly. “She is very sad … she sends words a very long way … across the sea … across the years … across … tears?”
“It’s from Sofya.”
Dmitri nodded.
Sophie gently took the letter from his hand. “This is hopeless.” Dmitri’s eyes clouded and he looked puzzled. “Don’t you see, Dmitri? This is the only letter I have, the only words I have from anyone in my family that are addressed … well, not to me, but to the me they hoped would happen!”
Dmitri nodded slowly. Sophie went on. “But the saddest thing is … I can’t understand any of it!
Do you see? My father sang me the song, before he died.
Perhaps he did sing the words to me and I forgot them.
He didn’t live long enough to teach me Russian.
My guardian despised him. She never told me anything … if she even knew herself.”
“The Volkonsky song. A lullaby. It was how the wolf princess hid her diamonds …” Dmitri whispered.
“Perhaps that’s why it was important for my father to be a poet,” Sophie said. “Although he may not have known why.”
She stared at the letter again, traced her finger over the strange letters. At the bottom, though, the letters of the Russian version of her own name. COФИЯ, Sofya, Sophie.
“I need someone to help me learn Russian,” Sophie said. She looked at Dmitri’s kind, earnest face. “Will you help me?”
His face was open and relaxed. He nodded. But then almost immediately he turned away. “How can I? You are leaving us!”
Sophie held the letter in her hand.
What should she do? What should she do?
Masha had tied a bright scarf around her head in honor of Sophie’s leaving. She, her mother, and her grandmother had come up from the Under Palace to say good-bye. Sophie kissed Masha’s mother. The babushka stroked Sophie’s cheek.
“I feel I need to ask forgiveness from your babushka … and from you … I did a dreadful thing when I gave Anna Feodorovna the diamonds.”
Masha shook her head. “The diamonds brought her no happiness,” she whispered. “We knew that they would not help her.”
“I’m not sure she understood happiness, really,” Sophie said quietly. “She thought if she was rich, she would be happy.”
Masha shook her head again. “You have to have diamonds in your soul to be happy.”
“The general has them now,” Sophie said. “Perhaps they’ll bring him better luck.”
“Volkonsky diamonds not like that.” She was quiet for a moment.
“What do you mean?”
“They have to be given with love. They cannot be bought or sold.” She squeezed Sophie’s hand in hers. “This the way of the Volkonskys.”
“But they’re his now.” Sophie felt exasperated with herself. “I had them … and I lost them.”
“Better lost,” Masha whispered, “if having them hardens the heart.”
“What are you going to do, Masha?” Sophie said sadly. “You and Dmitri and your mother and babushka?”
Masha looked up, trying to smile, but her eyes were wet. She sniffed and wiped her nose on her sleeve.
“We’ll watch,” she said. “We’ll wait. For our wolf princess.”
Sophie ran down the steps to join the others, who were already tucked under their bearskin rug on a new vozok, this one smaller than the sleigh swallowed by the ice, and painted a cheerful, defiant red.
Dmitri didn’t look at her. She knew he was upset about her leaving.
She mustn’t cry; she didn’t want to embarrass him or herself.
The bells of the vozok rang out as Viflyanka snorted through the snow.
They wound around the birch forest, Sophie unable to stare at the trees without feeling a pull of deep sadness.
How long would it be before she could return?
Her whole life she had dreamed of having a home, and now, having found that place, she had to leave it.
She wished she could have said good-bye to the wolves, but was grateful that they were out in the forest, hunting, as they should after their months of confinement.
No wolf garden would ever be large enough for them, nor any meat — however expertly chopped by Dmitri — be as enticing as their own kill.
Dmitri stared straight ahead. She sensed his disappointment in her, as if she were betraying him for a second time: the first time by giving the diamonds to Anna Feodorovna, and now by leaving him and his family behind.
Marianne and Delphine must have realized how difficult it was for Sophie. They sat under the bearskin, not speaking.
The white train was waiting, steam pouring from the funnel. Ivan helped the girls down and opened the carriage door, checking his watch. Then he turned to Sophie and offered his hand to help her into the train. “Princess,” he murmured.
“Give me a moment,” she whispered. She traced the lines of the wolf’s head painted on the carriage door.
The open jaw, the sharp teeth no longer looked frightening to her; instead they gave her a feeling of reassurance.
It told her something about herself, the girl who had never known anything about who she was or where she came from: If you were a Volkonsky, you fought like a wolf to protect what was dear to you.
She stood on the tiny platform. The snow was falling lightly.
She looked into the woods, those trees she had dreamed about so often.
And through them, now, she could see the wolf pack.
They loped toward her, each one in its favored position.
They seemed so much a part of the forest and the snow that they could not exist in any other place, she thought.
Viflyanka whinnied, but Dmitri calmed him. The wolves hung back.
Vladimir and Sofya, she realized in that clear moment, had done so much — given up their lives — to ensure there would one day be a Volkonsky on this estate.
And now she felt as if she were letting them down.
They had died to save their child, but she, their great-granddaughter, was going back to London.
Why? Perhaps she didn’t deserve to be a Volkonsky after all. Perhaps she was a coward.
The forest and the snow and the wolves seemed to spin around her. It was just a moment, a single moment in her life, and yet it was like looking at everything through the drops of the chandelier. Everything was contained in it. She wanted to be brave. She wanted to trust in what she was feeling.
Could she perhaps have another, different sort of life?
She blinked back tears and turned to her friends.
This was going to be hard. But not as hard as doing the wrong thing.
She realized, as she stood on the edge of the woods of the Volkonsky estate, that she was more than one person.
She was Sophie, yes, but she was her father, too.
She was Xenia, Sofya, Vladimir, a collection of all these people.
As she looked at her hands in their sealskin gloves, moved her feet in her valenki, and breathed a cloud of misty breath into the clear, northern air, she was any number of lost Volkonskys, their portraits all waiting to be discovered in the gallery.
Sophie took a breath of the cold forest air that had enchanted her in her dreams. She looked at the puzzled faces of Marianne and Delphine.
She smiled. Yes. Now she felt properly happy in a way she had never felt before.
Because she understood something about herself.
And she knew, with a certainty that knocked in her chest, what she would do.
“You were right, Marianne,” she said, her voice light. “You and your theories …”
“What do you mean?” Marianne’s glasses had fogged up, which gave her a bemused look.
“That theory you told us about. The day we found out we were coming to Russia. About everything in the universe leading to one place, and that we can only be in that one place because it’s the right place for us.”
“I don’t think that Dicke put it quite like that.” Marianne frowned. “He was talking about weak nuclear forces …”