He was a fairly handsome man. While he did not have a strong jaw, he possessed full lips and a good nose. His brows were thick, and Roksana had teased her that their children would have the thickest eyebrows in the village, for Matrona’s own brows were dark and bold beneath her forehead. He had a narrow torso and waist, and his hips jutted to one side due to how he stood.
Her gaze returned to his face, to his lips. Feodor had not yet kissed her—his proposal had only been accompanied by a chaste kiss on the back of her hand. But Feodor was a reserved and modest man. Still, Matrona wondered when he would kiss her. Not now—the timing didn’t feel right, somehow. Perhaps at the altar. Surely by their wedding night. How strange to think of kissing a man and then giving herself to him only moments later. It sent moth wings up her arms and over her shoulders.
Matrona cleared her throat. “There are places where the Good Book commends haste.” She spoke softly, an effort to keep her defense mild. “It should be ready tomorrow. The jug,” she specified, clasping her hands together before her. She did look forward to learning to love Feodor—truly she did—but it would be so much easier to love him if he would love her first. Then again, perhaps he did, and simply chose not to show it. She had a hard time reading him—his conservative stances and cool blue eyes hid his thoughts.
The image of Jaska’s clay-stained hands on that cracked jug, turning it over with knowledge and a strange fondness, perhaps, burrowed into her mind. She blinked twice, snuffing it out like a wax-drowned candlewick.
“Your father,” Feodor said, dismissing the comment about the jug, “is he well?”
Matrona cocked her head. “Yes, of course. He was this morning. You saw him.”
A nod. “I did, but he seemed tense as I was leaving. Stressed, perhaps.” He rubbed his chin. “I suppose it cannot be helped, with all he has to do and only a daughter to support him. Do see that he’s relieved today, hm?”
“I shall.”
Feodor offered her another closed-lip smile, another nod, and stepped off the path, heading southward toward his home. Matrona watched him go, measuring his stride, noting the cleanliness of his hands. Though he was a butcher, Matrona had never seen a drop of blood on him.
Despite herself, her mind wandered from blood to clay upon entering her home.
“There’s chores to be done.” Her mother didn’t look up from the brick oven and the growing fire in its belly. As though Matrona had forgotten. As though she ever forgot.
“Yes, Mama,” she replied, passing through the front room, down the hallway, and out the door to the small pasture that lay beyond the house. She liked to pretend it was larger and more verdant, with full fields of grass instead of weed-spotted dirt, but today the whitewashed fence surrounding the land seemed especially close. She saw her father out with one of the cows, checking its ears. He turned suddenly and smacked an open palm against the wooden fence multiple times, then shook his head. Matrona’s lips parted. Stressed, indeed.
Leaving him be, she strode into the barn to finish churning the butter she had started that morning, before her mother had called her in to visit with Roksana and sort through the wedding chest. She pulled up a three-legged stool and began pumping the churn’s handle, her arms and shoulders well acquainted with the exercise. Her thoughts danced over the wedding dress she would wear and its matching headdress. The memory of Esfir’s forgotten rag doll surfaced, and her mind easily slid back to Slava’s dolls.
She very much wanted to ask the tradesman about the figures, but how could she broach the subject? The window in that strange room was too high set for her to pretend she’d seen through in passing.
More than anything, she wanted to return to that room and see the faces of the other dolls. To find her own, her mother’s, Feodor’s. To open them and see what treasures lay inside, if any. How long would it take a man to carve and paint such figures? How long had Slava spent crafting them?
Her arms strained, but Matrona churned steadily, pushing past the ache, letting her thoughts settle into the quiet between beats. Never again, she thought with a frown. That was the most likely outcome. She’d never get a chance to study the dolls, not unless she could figure out a way to persuade Slava to display them without revealing her secret. She would have to think on it more.
The butter was stubborn, and by the time it was ready to salt, her back promised soreness in the morning. She stretched out her limbs in the privacy of the barn, then set about milking the cows. By the time she’d finished the evening milking—usually her father’s job—prepared cream for tomorrow’s butter, and set the rest of the milk in barrels, her mother had produced cabbage and potatoes on the table. There was also pork butt, courtesy of Feodor.
As Matrona washed her hands in a pail, her mother asked, “Is your father not with you?”
Matrona shook water from her fingers and wiped them on her skirt as she peered outside. “He wasn’t in the pasture . . .” She hadn’t seen him since that afternoon, she realized.
A knock on the door called their attention. Her mother sniffed. “Now who could that be?”
Slava’s name passed through Matrona’s mind, quickening her pulse. Wringing her hands, she followed her mother back to the front room, only to discover it was not a knock on the door they’d heard, but a knock on the wall beside the brick oven. By her father’s forehead.
“Papa?” Matrona asked, gawking at her father’s body. His hands were pressed against the wall, and he was banging his head repeatedly against it, none too gently.
“Good heavens, Marlen!” her mother exclaimed, rushing up to him. She took his elbow, and Matrona’s father stopped the banging at once, pulling away from the wall, his expression dazed. Matrona hurried to him and pressed a palm to his red forehead, then to the side of his neck. No fever.
“What’s wrong?” Matrona asked.
Her father shook his head, his beard brushing across his chest. “I just . . . I just can’t think my words.”
“What are you rambling about?” her mother asked. “Think your words? You’re sounding like Mad Olia Maysak, you are!”
“Don’t contrary me to that woman!” he shouted with a raised finger, which caused Matrona’s mother to drop her hand from his arm. Matrona’s pulse sped quicker. Her father so seldom raised his voice, and never to his wife.
“Papa, please,” Matrona tried. “You mean, don’t compare you . . . ?”
Her father scratched his ears and shook his head. “Let’s eat. Eat. Let’s eat, and I’ll feel wall again.”
“Well again,” Matrona whispered, and her mother turned to her with lips cinched tight as a barley bag. Sighing, Matrona quieted and led the way to the table, feeling powerless.
Dinner passed in general silence, minus a few grunts from Matrona’s father, who held his fork in a fisted hand almost like a babe would and seemed to have a hard time swallowing. Throughout the meal, Matrona’s mother kept shooting pointed glares at her, silent warnings not to speak. In return, Matrona mouthed, Doctor? but her mother simply shook her head. After her father retired early, leaving them to the dishes, her mother said, “He’ll be fine in the morning.”
He was not.
Chapter 3
Matrona watched her father as villagers came to the house to retrieve milk for their breakfasts. He seemed . . . itchy, the way he twitched and scratched or occasionally rubbed himself against the wall. Because he refused to stay abed, her mother tried to keep him to the back of the house where he wouldn’t be seen. His hands lost their dexterity, leaving him unable to complete the evening milking, which settled the bulk of the work on Matrona. He spoke little, and when he did talk, his words were garbled. At lunch, he refused to eat, instead choosing to stand at the fence on the far edge of the pasture, staring off into the wood like an injured stag that knew a hunter lurked just beyond those trees.