I had spun the silk and then I had knitted it with the finest needles in the vines and flowers of the duke’s crest, so that every feast day when they laid it down on their table they would look at it and think of their patron, who showed them such favor. And then, yes, nothing came of it; a fever came instead. The boyar’s daughter died before the wedding, the boy married some girl less well-connected, and all my hours and pain were folded in paper and put away into the duchess’s cupboard for when she needed another gift to give.
“Thank you, Edita, if you can spare it,” I said. It was a kindness, a kindness and an apology both, because she had not been wise enough to give me a little help herself, and make it our work. So when next the duchess needed a notable gift, she would not have a tablecloth folded in paper to take out, and it was Edita who would have to see a gift made, without a pair of spare hands upstairs that she could easily put to use. And now Irina had a gift to give, a gift she needed because I had saved her looks enough that her father had not just left her upstairs to become a pair of spare hands for her brothers’ wives; her father had put a crown on her shining dark hair that I had combed, and given her to a demon for his wife.
“Well, of course, after all your pains on it,” Edita said, more easily now that I had accepted her apology; they all smiled at me, relieved, because I was too old and tired to dance with them and be haughty as I should have been with the tsarina as a mistress, and I would not take too much from them to pay the old debts they had laid up with me; it was too hard to collect. And oh, I wanted to creep back upstairs to the little rooms and put my hard chair close to the small fire and shut the door again. But it was too late.
We finished our tea and she brought me the tablecloth, and Nolius made me a little drawing of the streets where the house was, and I took them upstairs. The duke was out on the balcony with Irina. Their faces looking at each other were dark shapes with the grey sky behind them, a pattern knitted mirror-fashion; she was tall as he was, and she had his nose. I kept my head down and hurried into a corner for the few minutes until he left her. “Thank you, Magra,” she said absently when she came back inside afterwards, looking at the tablecloth in its paper half unfolded on the bed. She took her small wooden jewel-box and opened it: a heavy silver chain and twelve squat candles of pure white wax lay in the bottom of it, and she put the tablecloth in atop the rest. She touched it with her fingers, but she did not see it really; she was not thinking of tablecloths and thread and the time that made them one. She did not have to. I had let her sleep, and so now she could think of crowns and demons instead, and she had to, or she would die.
She closed the box as the tsar came into the room on a wave of servants: he had come to change his clothes. He looked at Irina coldly. “Have you anything else to wear?” he demanded, even as he threw himself into a chair and held out his legs one after another; the servants drew off his boots, and then he stood and put himself in the middle of the room and did nothing while they sprang to take off his coat, his belt, his shirt, and his trousers, everything.
“There’s the blue dress,” I whispered to Irina, which I had been sewing for her. It had been put aside in the rush before the wedding: it could not have been finished in time to go into her box, and it was not grand enough truly for a tsarina; I had been making it for her to wear at her father’s table, to set off the thick braid and give a little color to her face. But then she had driven away with her box in a sleigh with the tsar, and I had been left behind alone in the cold rooms. And I knew soon they would at least put some other maids in there with me, but I hoped at least they would let me stay in them, so I took the blue dress out and worked upon it though it hurt my hands, meaning to make it for the duchess instead, something I would have crept downstairs and given to Palmira where the duchess could see, and I hoped like the dress enough to keep me sewing for her. So it was finished.
Irina nodded to me. I did not go for it myself. I went out and found one of the other maids and told her to go bring the dress down from the cold rooms, and she did it because I was important now enough to spend an hour having tea with Palmira and Nolius and Edita. I went back inside and Irina was standing by the balcony again, staring at the forest while the tsar stood all naked before the fire, dismissing this coat and that shirt and this waistcoat, out of the bags and boxes piled like a small fort made in the room. None of us mattered, of course, but it was not that he did not care because we were servants: even Galina or the duke would not stand there forever naked before a mirror while they picked through every shirt of their wardrobe, as if they did not need to be ashamed of their nakedness in their own heart and cover themselves. But the tsar stood as though he might go out of the room and put himself just so before everyone’s eyes as easily as put anything on; as though he only troubled himself with clothing for the pleasure of its beauty, and if nothing satisfied him, he wouldn’t bother, and would put everyone else to the trouble of looking away from him, or having to pretend he wasn’t naked before them.
But for Irina, I opened a screen to make a hidden place in the corner of the room, and then the girl came down with the blue dress, and we helped Irina to put it on there in the small dark corner. When we had finished putting it on her, we folded the screen away, and the tsar was dressed at last or nearly: he wore a coat of red velvet and a waistcoat of red embroidered in silver, and they were putting on fine shoes for him with lines of glittering red jewels sewn along the seams. He stood and turned and looked at Irina with cold displeasure, and said, “Get out,” to all of us, and I had to go. I looked back at her for a moment from the door, but she did not look afraid; she stood looking steadily back at him, my cool quiet girl with nothing showing in her face.
They came out again a little while later, and the dress wasn’t what it had been; it was wider and more full, and the blue shaded from deep strong color at the waist out to pale grey at the hem with a waterfall of petticoats spilling out beneath it, and silver embroidery tracing every edge with red jewels winking out of it at me that I had never sewn onto it. She was carrying her jewel-box in her arms, and the long sleeves had become gauze thin as a summer veil with more red jewels in twisting lines drawn over them, as though he had sprinkled drops of blood upon her, bled out of his red coat. I closed my hands on each other and dropped my eyes as they passed, not to see. I had made the dress like I had made the tablecloth, out of pain and long work, and I knew how much of both it had taken to make it. And so I knew how much that dress would have cost, that he had put her in, and I did not want to think of how it had been paid.
* * *
Wanda and Sergey went downstairs to help with the wedding. “Will you come, Stepon?” Sergey asked me, but I shivered, remembering all those people crammed together, in the rooms and in the streets, more people than I knew there were in the whole world. So I said, “No, no, no,” and they didn’t make me, but they went, and after a while the sun started to go down, and I started to not like being alone in the room. I was all alone with nobody, not even goats, and Wanda and Sergey were gone. What if they had really gone again? What if someone had come looking for them and they had to run away? I opened the window and stuck my head out and looked down, and when I did that I could hear noise from all the way down on the ground. There were a lot of people outside the house and some horses too, but it was dark down on the ground already, even though the sun was still coming in the window, and I couldn’t see anyone’s faces. I couldn’t see Wanda or Sergey. There was one woman with yellow hair but I wasn’t sure if it was her.