The Property of a Lady - Elizabeth Adler [69]
“Viktor,” Anna breathed, coming to sit at Missie’s feet. “The dog my mother always talked about.”
Missie nodded. “When she was a child, Viktor was your mother’s best friend. Her only friend,” she added sadly.
“What next?” Anna demanded.
“Even though he was wearing an old tweed jacket, I thought he looked commanding and very Russian,” Missie said. “He was very tall, his shoulders were broad, and he moved like an athlete. His blond hair was thick and very straight, and he wore it longer than was usual in those days, brushed back from his forehead. His eyes were slate-gray set very deep, and he had high cheekbones that gave his face rugged planes and angles. He was the handsomest man I had ever seen.” She paused for a minute and then she whispered, “And I have wondered ever since if time really did stand still as our eyes met.”
Anna drew in her breath in a little gasp and Leyla peered anxiously at her. They all knew that Missie had been in love with Misha, but this was the first time she had ever put it into words. The darkness had fallen, and as the moon sailed higher in the sky she could just make out Anna’s fair head resting against Missie’s knee as she listened.
“Your grandfather was one of the richest men in Russia,” she went on. “As well as the villa at Yalta and the St. Petersburg mansion, there was the summer house next to the tsar’s at Tsarskoe Selo and the country estate at Varishnya, your grandfather’s favorite. It was the exact opposite of the St. Petersburg house. It wasn’t the least bit grand, and it was one of the oddest houses I have ever seen. It was built all higgledy-piggledy, as if it had started out quite small and extra bits were added over the years as the family needed more space. It was L-shaped with wings sticking out and extra storeys stuck here and there, and the style was what I suppose you might call Russian rococo with a squashed-looking green-gold dome over the great hall. Outside, each bit of the house was painted a different color like a gay patchwork quilt. Inside there were no corridors, just a series of long narrow rooms that led one into the other, and all the floors were made of wide wooden planks, cut from the elm trees on the estate and polished to a beautiful mellow golden-brown slipperiness—just right for little feet like your mother’s and her brother Alexei’s to slide on. In summer, the tall French windows would be thrown wide to catch the breeze and even on the hottest days it was always deliciously cool. And in winter when the arctic wind howled outside, the huge tiled stoves roared in every corner and Varishnya was the coziest house in the world.
“And it was always full of people. All the old Ivanoff relations lived there, and their friends who had come to visit and somehow never gone home again: the maiden aunts, the widows, and the cousins. You always knew where they were by the smell of mothballs and peppermint and the click of their knitting needles and the whisper of gossip. It was strange how they always seemed to know the latest scandals, even though they had not been to town in years.
“And then there were the servants. It seemed to take dozens of them to run the big house—it must have had close to a hundred rooms though no one had ever really counted, and of course even among the servants there was a hierarchy. At the top was Vassily, the butler and major-domo who had been there since Misha’s own grandfather’s time. He was old and very doddery, but Misha refused to ask him to retire. He said Varishnya and the family were the old man’s entire life and that