It was so cold in that little house after Irina left, and outside the white trees seemed to have crept closer to the windows, as if they wanted to reach their branches in. I kept the heavy fur rug clutched around my shoulders and dragged the chair to the oven and sat there shivering while I ate another helping of the porridge, my bones sore so that I could feel them rub one against the other at every joint, a little pain every time I moved. But worst of all was to be there alone, with the terrible winter outside. I put another stick on the fire and stirred it to have a brighter flame leaping, like a little bit of company, and to chase away that cold dark outside that would not change. It was no place for an old woman to be, a tired old woman. “Stay out of the woods or the Staryk will snatch you, and take you away to their kingdom,” my mother would say, when I was a little girl. And now here I was hiding in their kingdom like a mouse, and what when the fire went out, and what when the porridge was gone? At least there was a great deal of wood in the box next to the oven.
It was a peculiar housekeeper who lived there. While Irina had talked to that strange Jew girl, I found strawberries and honey and salt and oats, and six enormous balls of rough yarn, uneven as lumpy porridge, beside an old-fashioned spindle. It caught on my fingers, but the wool underneath was good; it had only been spun without carding or care, by someone in too much of a hurry to do it properly. My lady the duchess would have cracked my hand across the knuckles with her stick if I had made such a mess in her sight. Not the duchess now, of course—Galina was a good manager, but she spun very indifferent; nor Irina’s mother before her, who when she would spin at all made thread that shone like alabaster off her spindle while she stared out the window and sang softly to herself, and never looked at the work of anyone else’s hands. But the duchess that was, before either of them.
She had gone to the convent long ago, of course; ten years dead now I had heard, God keep her in his sight. I had seen her last on that terrible day when Irina’s father broke the city wall, in the battle that had made him the duke and helped to put the tsar’s father on his throne. We watched the smoke of the fighting together from the palace, all of us her women close together, until the smoke began to move into the city. Then she turned away from the window and said, “Come,” to me and to the other girls, the six of us not married, and took us down into the cellars to a little room far in the back, with a door fitted out of the stones of the wall, and locked us into it. That was the last time I saw her.
It was so cold and dark and close. That place felt near again to me now, in the cold dark little hut with the deadly winter pressing in. We held to each other and wept and trembled. And they found us anyway there, the soldiers. They found everything in the house—jewels, furniture, the sweet little golden harp that Lady Ania had played, before she died of the fever; I saw it smashed in the hall. There were so many of them, like ants that find any crumb anyone has left unswept.
But by the time they broke open the door to that little room, it was very late in the night; they were already tired out, and it was only a few of them; most of the men had fallen asleep. They only found us because we were all so frightened by then, we thought it had been days, though it was only hours, and one of the girls had begun to rock and say that no one would ever find us and we would die there walled up. We all caught the terror from her, so that when we heard voices passing, first one and then the rest of us began to scream for help. So when they brought us out we fell into their arms weeping, and they were kind to us, and gave us some water when we begged them for it, and one of them was a sergeant, who took us up to his lord and told him we had been locked up in the cellars.
Erdivilas, Baron Erdivilas he was then, was in the duke’s study, already at home there, his own papers everywhere and his own men coming in and out. It didn’t seem very different to me, either. I had only once or twice been there. I was not so pretty that the duke would send for me, and not so ugly that the duchess would have me go, when she wanted to send him a message. The new duke had a harder face than the old. But after he looked us over he said, “Just as well. Take them up to the women’s quarters and tell the men to leave them alone; we don’t always need to be brutes. Do what you can for the others,” he told us. I tried as best I could, and when I couldn’t do anything more, I went and spun the wool that was left in my lady’s rooms, and made many skeins of fine thread while in the city they put out the fires, and so when things were settled a little more, he kept me on in his household, as he did not keep anyone who did not make themselves useful enough.
I was grateful for it, like I was grateful to be let out of that cellar room even by enemy soldiers. I had no husband and no dowry and no friends. My mother had been the wife of a poor knight who lost his little land to gambling and the Jews. He had gotten her a place with the duchess and went out on Crusade to die, and the duchess had kept me with her women out of kindness when my mother also passed—the same fever, that winter year, and she was sorrowful over Ania; I was only a few years younger. But I was no longer young when the city fell, and she went to the holy sisters even before I was out of the cellar.
There was no one else left for me. There was not anyone for me, there had not been since my mother died. I stayed on in the women’s quarters and spun, and still the years went by and by, and my hands began to ache if I spun too much, and my eyes began to see less well for fine sewing. So when Silvija, Irina’s mother, died with the stillborn boy, I did not stay with the other ladies dutifully weeping. I crept away into the nursery where the little one slept. No one liked her, as no one had liked her mother, because they did not seem to care to be liked. She was too quiet, all the time, and though she did not have her mother’s strange eyes, still she seemed to be thinking too much behind them. Irina was sitting up in the bed when I came in, as if she had been woken by the wailing. She was not crying. She only looked up at me with those dark eyes and I felt uneasy, but I sat down beside her and I sang to her and I told her everything would be all right, so that when Erdivilas came to the room he found me already tending her, and told me to keep doing it.
I was glad for it, to have a place secure again, but after he left the room, Irina still looked at me too thoughtfully, as if she understood why I had come to look after her. Of course I came to love her very soon anyway. I had no one else to love, and even if she was not mine, I had been let to borrow her. But I had never been quite sure what she felt for me. Other little children would go running to their nurses and their mamas with open arms and kisses. She never did. I told myself all these years that it was only her way, cool and quiet as new-fallen snow, but still in my secret heart I had not been truly sure, not until the tsar sent men to bring me to hurt her with, and I saw that it would have worked. Oh, it was a strange way to be happy.