The Property of a Lady - Elizabeth Adler [31]
As the beast had danced uncertainly around her, prodding her with its paw, she dimly recalled Misha telling her that wolves preyed only on dead human flesh and rarely attacked the living, but she could hear more of them, a pack running from the forest toward her. Suddenly there was a terrible screaming and snarling, and she had looked up to see Viktor tear the throat from the first wolf and then turn and rout the pack already feasting on, Anouska’s body. Then he had returned, whimpering, to her side. His liquid-brown eyes had gazed beseechingly at her and blood dripped from a torn ear.
The urge to survive had surged through her like a burst of life-giving heat; she was just eighteen, and despite all the horrors the power of youth made her long for life. And besides, she had a responsibility. She had to save Misha’s daughter. She had tried to sit up then but her legs refused to obey and her heart pounded so fiercely she could scarcely breathe. Then suddenly everything had gone black and she knew no more until she woke and found herself here, in Yeventlov’s house at Ivanovsk.
Sofia came to sit beside her. Taking her hand, she said, “Thank God you are all right, Missie. If it weren’t for you, my granddaughter would have perished along with the others. My only consolation from this dreadful night is that Misha did not live to find out how his wife and his son died.”
Missie’s heart felt as if it were being wrenched from her body. She stared at Sofia, and the old lady nodded sadly. “Oh, yes,” she whispered, “I am sure Misha is dead. I feel it here.” She struck her heart with a clenched fist. “Why? I ask. My son was a good man. Like his father and his grandfather before him, he was an exemplary landowner. He cared for his people with proper fatherly Russian tenderness. He fought for their rights in the Duma, the Parliament. So why, Missie? Why did they kill such a good man? Who else will care for them as Misha did?” Her dark eyes were filled with anguish as she whispered, “And how could they do what they did to Anouska?”
She turned away, staring tearlessly into the blazing stove. “Yeventlov could not find Alexei’s body,” she said at last. “He said the wolves must have already devoured it.”
“Oh, but—” Missie began, then she stopped herself suddenly. There was no point in hurting Sofia even more by telling her about Alexei. She had enough to bear. And anyhow, she knew there was no hope for him. Turning her face to the wall, she drifted into unconsciousness. When she awoke again, the shutters were still tightly closed and only Madame Yeventlov was awake, busy kneading a coarse black rye dough at the table. Sofia lay on a straw mattress by the stove with Xenia in the crook of her outflung arm. The dog lay close by them, but there was no sign of the others and Missie guessed they were sleeping in the other room.
Madame Yeventlov nodded to her, smiling. “So, you are awake at last,” she said quietly. “Now you will be ready for that soup. Oh, yes,” she added, stifling Missie’s protests with an uplifted hand, “God knows you will need your strength as well as your wits about you if you are to survive.”
Sitting in a hard wooden chair at a pine table scrubbed to whiteness from years of Madame Yeventlov’s good housewifely attentions, Missie listened as she told her their plan.
Yeventlov said the trains were unpredictable. The only thing that was certain was that everything was running late. The depots had run out of coal for the steam engines and were now using pine logs that burned at a great rate, often leaving the trains stranded without fuel in the middle of the snowbound countryside. Yeventlov had