“Quickly, quickly,” Magreta said, dropping her own sewing, and she bustled me up and touched the braid wound around my head that she had put in two days ago; I could feel her wishing she had time to do it over again, but then she shook her head and just made me take off my apron, and brushed my shoes and the bottoms of my skirts. I stood still and let her do it while I considered my vanishing-few options.
Of course there was only one reason my father would summon me during the day to his study, a thing he had never done, when he would see me at dinner that night anyway: someone wanted to marry me after all, and the matter was well advanced. Either there was a dowry already promised, or at least a serious negotiation under way; I was sure of it, even though there hadn’t been so much as a whisper of such a thing when I’d dined with him last.
The haste of it made excellent sense: if he couldn’t avoid the expense of the tsar’s visit, at least he would save the separate expense of my wedding, and more besides; it would serve his consequence and his purse both to make the tsar and his court guests at his daughter’s wedding. They would have to toast me and my husband, and they would have to give gifts whose value would undoubtedly be factored into the dowry under discussion.
But I couldn’t imagine there would be anything for me to like in the marriage. Of course I would have liked to be mistress of my own home, secure from all those dismal alternatives I saw ahead of me, but not in this hurried haste and so clearly for the sake of my father’s convenience. A man who’d marry me like this wasn’t marrying me at all; he was making a bargain for a girl-shaped lump of clay he meant to use at his convenience, and he wouldn’t need to value me highly when my father made it so clear that he didn’t. My best hope would be someone of low rank, a rich ambitious boyar who owed my father fealty, and who was willing to take the duke’s daughter at a bargain price to make himself a high man within the duchy; then I would at least have been worth that much to him. But I couldn’t think of any candidates. After seven years of bad winters, my father’s boyars were spending more time thinking of their lean purses than of their standing in the court. None of them were likely to want an expensive wife.
Anyway, such a man would be very little use. More likely, my father had found a nobleman who couldn’t get a young wife of equal rank otherwise: someone distasteful enough that at least some fathers would hesitate before handing over their daughters. A cruel man perhaps, who would be all the more eager for a girl with a parent who would not object very much to whatever might happen to her.
I went downstairs even so, of course; I had no choice. Magreta was nearly quivering as we went down the stairs. She understood as well as I did what was in the offing, but she did not like to think of troubles before they appeared, so she was dreaming of a good and happy marriage for me, and being the old retired nurse of the mistress of the house instead of mured up in the attic rooms with a neglected daughter. I let her be excited while I wondered if I was about to meet the man himself, and if so, how I could tell whether it was worth infuriating my father by trying to make myself look like a bad bargain. It was an unpleasant scrap of hope to cling to.
But when the door opened, there was no betrothal waiting for me, no one who could even have been the agent of a potential husband; only two Jews, a man and a woman, thin and brown and dark-eyed, and the man was holding a box full of winter. I forgot to think of anything else, to think at all: the necklace blazed cold silver at me out of black velvet, and I was at the window in the garden again with the breath of winter on my cheeks and frost creeping over a windowsill beneath my fingers, yearning at something out of reach.
I almost went towards it with my hands stretched out; I clutched them into my grey wool skirts and curtseyed with an effort, forcing my eyes low for a moment, but when I stood again, I looked again. I still wasn’t thinking; even as my father went and took the necklace from the box I wasn’t thinking, and when he brought it over to me, I looked up at him only in blank surprise: it was all wrong. He couldn’t mean to give such a thing to me. But he gestured with impatience, and after a moment I slowly turned my back, and bent my head to let him put it around my neck.
The room was warm, warmer by far than my narrow rooms upstairs, with a healthy fire crackling. But the metal felt cold against my skin, cold and wonderful, refreshing as putting wet hands on your cheeks on a hot day. I lifted my head and turned, and my father was looking at me. All of them were looking at me, staring. “Ah, Irinushka,” Magreta murmured tenderly. I put my fingers up to brush over the fine links. Even lying on my skin, it still felt cool to the touch, and when I looked at myself in the mirror, in the glass I was not standing in my father’s study. I was in a grove of dark winter trees, under a pale grey sky, and I could almost feel the snow falling onto my skin.
I stayed there for a long timeless moment, breathing in deep sweet cold air that filled my lungs, full of freshly cut pine branches and heavy snow and deep woods wide around me. And then distantly I heard my father promise the Jews that he would give them a thousand pieces in gold, if they would make a crown to be my dowry, so I had been right: he did have a betrothal in mind, and the arrangements were most urgent indeed.
He did not let me keep the necklace, of course. After the Jews left, he beckoned me over, and though he paused a moment, staring at me again, he reached back around my neck and took the necklace off and laid it back into the box. He looked at me afterwards hard, as if he had to remind himself what I really was without it, and then he shook his head and said to me crisply, “The tsar will be here the week after next. Practice your dancing. You will dine with me every night until then. See to her clothes,” he added to Magreta. “She must have three new dresses.”
I curtseyed and went back upstairs with Magreta hovering, like a cloud of anxious birds that go bursting out and fly madly before they settle back into the tree. “I must get some of the maids to help me,” she said, swooping to snatch up her knitting, to have something to close her hands around. “So much to be done! Nothing is ready. Your chest is not half full! And three dresses to be made!”
“Yes,” I said. “You should speak to the housekeeper at once,” and Magreta said, “Yes, yes,” and flew out of the room again and left me alone at last, to sit down by the fire with my own sewing, a white nightgown being elaborated with embroidery for a wedding-bed.
I had met the tsar once before, seven years ago, when his father and brother had just died; my father had come to Koron for the coronation, to do homage to the new tsar or more accurately to the new regent, Archduke Dmitir. I saw Mirnatius first in the church, while the priest was droning through the ceremony, but I didn’t pay him very much attention then; I was so bored that I was nodding on the seat beside Galina in my hot and stiff clothing, until I jerked awake and jumped to my feet when they finally crowned him, with a feeling like being jabbed hard with a needle, a moment even before everyone else was rising so we could acclaim him.
No one else paid very much attention to him afterwards. The great lords dined and talked together at the tsar’s table, paying court to Dmitir, and Mirnatius came out alone into the gardens behind the palace, where I was also playing, of no importance myself. He had a small bow and arrow, and shot squirrels, and when he hit them, he came and looked at their little dead bodies with pleasure. Not in the ordinary way of a boy proud of being a good hunter: he would take hold of the arrows and jiggle them, to make the bodies twitch and jerk if he could, staring down with a wide blank fascination in his eyes.