The Lost Souls of Angelkov (55 page)

For Antonina, it’s good to be in the music salon again. The way Valentin moves his bow over the strings, evoking and
shaping and colouring the sounds so that her heart expands to fill her chest, gives her a deep sense of gratitude for the happiness she knew with her son in this room. She remembers so many lovely hours, so many weeks and months and years as he sat at the piano and played with such commitment and expression. When he turned on the padded bench, his eyes bright, asking, “How did I do with that last movement, Mama? Were the trills light enough? What shall I play now?”

Misha. She glances at the rain-streaked windows. The weather is definitely turning; winter is so close. Is he warm?

Long before dusk, Lilya always comes in to light the candles and lamps, a subtle clue that it’s time for Kropotkin to be on his way. She is unusually slow in these simple tasks, lingering too long at each one, watching the violinist with an almost petulant expression.

Antonina wonders what’s got into the woman. Why does she appear so sour? It’s quite evident that Lilya doesn’t like having Valentin at Angelkov, and surely it isn’t because it means she has the simple extra job of serving them afternoon tea.

It’s only after the third or fourth time Lilya has made a big show out of lighting the lamps that a thought crosses Antonina’s mind: could Lilya be jealous?

Almost as soon as the idea comes to her, she dismisses it. Why would Lilya be jealous?

Lilya thinks she understands what’s happening: Valentin is falling in love with Antonina. It is natural for Lilya to think this; she assumes that no one could be around Antonina for any length of time and not fall in love with her.

She can’t tell what Antonina feels for Valentin, although she does try to gauge her in a breezy, conversational way.
How long will Mr. Kropotkin stay at the estate of the prince and princess? Is he married? Where is his home? Will he return to St. Petersburg when the Bakanev nieces leave, or might he stay in the area, teaching other landowners’ children?

Antonina is straightforward in her answers to Lilya’s casual questions as the woman straightens the bed or hangs up a gown after one of Valentin’s visits. But when Lilya makes small criticisms of him, saying,
He certainly eats a great many cakes every time he comes, and did you see? He held a piece of sugar in his teeth and drank his tea through it—a sure sign of his peasant roots
, she expects—hopes—that Antonina will laugh and agree with her.

Instead, Antonina speaks to her sharply. “Your job is to serve the cakes, Lilya, not count how many are consumed.” Lilya thinks, then, that Antonina cares for Valentin Vladimirovitch in a way that has nothing to do with how he plays the violin.

Lilya knows that Grisha too is angered by Kropotkin’s visits. Each time the violinist arrives in the yard, Grisha escorts him to the front door, watching as he is led to the music salon by Pavel.

She watches Grisha’s face when he brings Kropotkin to the door, and she now believes that what she had begun to suspect a few weeks earlier is true. Grisha has strong feelings for the countess. But she knows the countess can’t possibly care about Grisha; he is only her steward. So she will use Grisha to derail Valentin.

Nobody will come between her and Antonina.

O
n the afternoon of one of Valentin’s visits, Grisha has, as usual, escorted him to the front door. But as he’s going back down the veranda steps, Lilya calls his name. She’s right behind him: where did she come from?

“Lilya! Why are you creeping up behind me?”

“I must talk to you.”

He can almost swear she’s being coy. “What do you want?”

“Not here. We have to speak privately. I’ll come to your house.”

“No. Say what you wish right here.”

Lilya looks over her shoulder. “Tonight, after she’s in bed, then. Come to the kitchen.”

He’s annoyed with her heavy-handed attempt at intrigue. “What is it, Lilya?”

“It’s about Misha,” she says, and his annoyance falls away. He thought she knew nothing about the kidnapping, nothing about Soso’s or his own involvement. And yet looking at her now, he wonders if he was wrong.

“What do you mean?”

She lowers her eyelids, still staring at him in that odd, sly way. “We’ll talk about Misha later, in the kitchen.”

Since the violinist had started coming to visit the countess, and Lilya had seen Grisha’s reaction, she had acted quickly. She is now ready to talk to Grisha.

Because she recognized Soso’s writing on the wood around the horse’s neck, Lilya knew that he had to be somewhere in the vicinity of Angelkov. While the realization of what he had done to the horse chilled her, it brought back old thoughts. For a few troubling days last April, Lilya wondered if Soso had, in some way, been involved in the kidnapping of Mikhail. When he’d left the estate shortly after the boy had been taken, she’d been glad to be rid of him, and convinced herself it wouldn’t have been him. Everyone had called the kidnappers Cossacks, and Soso wasn’t a Cossack.

But after Felya’s murder, she thought about it again: just because the men were dressed as Cossacks, and carrying Cossack sabres, it didn’t mean they actually
were
Cossacks.

She turned it over and over in her mind. Why did Soso brutally kill the horse Grisha loved? Why? Lilya thought long and hard about why he would want to anger Grisha. The more she thought about what was written on the board—
This is what happens. You don’t do what we say
—the more she thought that if Soso had been involved in the kidnapping, maybe Grisha was involved as well.

She needed to find Soso, and confront him.

It didn’t take her long. Soso was clever in some ways, but not quite clever enough for her.

She had Lyosha hitch up one of the Orlov Trotters to a cart, and drove, alone, to the village of Borzik, halfway between the Angelkov estate and the city of Pskov. Borzik wasn’t the village where Soso and Lilya had lived before moving to the estate, but the village of Soso’s grandmother. Although she was long dead, he had loved his grandmother, and had often spoken to Lilya of visiting her in her izba on the edge of town. He had also fairly regularly visited cousins who lived there after he and Lilya were married. He told her he was always welcome: whenever he stopped by, there was a bed and vodka waiting for him.

As she entered Borzik, Lilya almost immediately spotted Soso, lumbering down the muddy street in his bearskin coat. She knew he liked to wear it because it made him look bigger. She called his name, and he didn’t look either happy or displeased to see her, merely surprised. “What are you doing in Borzik, Lilya?”

“I thought you might be here. I want to talk to you, Soso.”

“I’m not coming back to Angelkov.”

“That’s not what I want to talk about. Where are you living?”

Soso gestured to an izba down the street. A downcast donkey was tethered at one side. “At my cousin Max’s.”

“Take me there so the street doesn’t hear our business,” Lilya told him, and he walked ahead of her, dipping his head under the low lintel as he went inside.

Holding the sack she’d brought, Lilya glanced at the dirty knife and spoon on the table, the pot stuck with dried buckwheat porridge, the scattered blankets on pallets on the floor. She heard the rustle of cockroaches in the filthy straw packed between the walls and the floor to keep out
the draft. The donkey brayed outside the door. “Just you and Max are here?”

“His wife is tending her mother in the next village.”

“Holy Mother of God, Soso, what a swine you’ve become.”

He laughed and looked pleased, as if she’d given him a compliment.

“I’ve brought you something,” she said then, pulling out the bottle of good vodka she’d taken from the cellar at Angelkov. “And sausage and bread. Salted milk mushrooms, too.” The mushrooms were a favourite of Soso’s to eat while drinking vodka. “Sit down,” she told him, and he threw his coat on the floor and sat on the bench on one side of the table. She sat on the other side, wiped the knife on her skirt, and sliced the sausage and put it between thick slabs of Raisa’s high, light bread. She handed it to him along with the open jar of mushrooms, then pulled the stopper out of the vodka with her teeth and pushed the bottle across the table. He looked at her and she smiled.

“What do you want?” he asked, taking a big bite.

“I’ve missed you, Soso. My bed is cold,” she said, then was quiet as he ate. He turned away once, to spit something onto the floor. She took one mouthful of the vodka but let him drink the rest of it. She had time.

When the bottle was empty and the mushrooms were gone and he looked at her across the table with the bleary look she knew so well, she went to him and took his hand. “I missed you, Soselo,” she again said, nodding at the pile of blankets. “Come.”

He followed her. Lilya murmured encouragement, pulling up her skirt as she lay down. Although Soso was drunk,
he wasn’t too drunk. Later, she rested her head on his chest and let him fall into a snoring sleep for half an hour. Then she gently shook him out of his stupor, her head still on his chest.

“You should hear how the countess still cries over the boy,” she said. “It’s hard to be near her.”

Soso breathed loudly through his mouth, then smacked his lips and swallowed.

“Whoever took Mikhail Konstantinovich—those Cossacks—are real men, afraid of nothing. And they taught Grisha a lesson when they beat him,” she said, hearing Soso’s stomach digesting the food. “It serves him right. You’d think he owns the estate, the way he swaggers around, so boastful.”

She waited for Soso to speak. When he didn’t, she gave a low laugh. “The countess has turned into a stuck-up tsarina now that she’s the landowner. She and Grisha are making life impossible for those of us left. I hope God punishes them.” She crossed herself.

“If not God, we’ll do it,” Soso said, and Lilya waited a heartbeat. “Just like we showed the old bastard.”

“What do you mean?” she asked, her hand on Soso’s chest. “Don’t tell me … Soso,” she breathed, “was it really you? Did you have something to do with the kidnapping?” She leaned on her elbow and widened her eyes at him, a proud wife.