The Red Staircase. Gwendoline Butler

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СКАЧАТЬ last we went aboard the John Evelyn. The light was fading fast. I was unsurprised to find that over an hour had passed. I remember Prince Michael’s smile as he finally went away, which accentuated rather than took away the emptiness of his eyes. He smiled, not for me or with me, but because of me; I was quite sure of it.

      After I had unpacked, I went on deck again to watch the Thamesside slipping past. The ship had sailed almost immediately on our coming aboard. My cabin was small, but I had it to myself. I had arranged my clothes, put out the silver-backed hairbrushes that had belonged to my mother, and around them placed the photographs of Grizel and young Alec, Tibby and my brother Robin. My pantheon, as naughty Alec called them. Four faces where there had once been five; one god had gone from my pantheon. Again, I tried to repress bitterness, but the taste of it remained in my mouth even as I stood on deck and watched the lights of London and her satellite suburbs, Greenwich and Woolwich, disappear into the dark. The water grew rougher as we felt the pull of the open sea.

      I had made myself a hooded cloak of thick plaid, and lined the hood with fur from an old tippet handed down in my family for generations and at last consigned to me. ‘Bring warm clothes,’ my old Russian cousin had written. I pushed back the hood and let the soft fur fall across my shoulders in unaccustomed opulence; and I wondered what the future held in store for me. I suppose every girl wonders this, but I had special cause.

      Then Edward Lacey came up behind me. I recognised him by the smell of Turkish tobacco and Harris tweed that I had already identified as peculiarly his own. He moved to my side, he took out his pipe.

      ‘Do you mind if I light up, Miss Gowrie?’

      ‘Oh, no, please do. I enjoy the smell.’ I had smoked a cigarette myself once, but I did not tell him; he seemed to find me puzzling enough already.

      He struck a Swan Vesta, and the tobacco smouldered fragrantly. He took a puff or two, then the pipe went out. Pipes always do. But he did not re-light it. Instead he stood there looking into the murky river, glancing at me from time to time.

      I kept silent. I was aware he was studying my face. I suppose I was studying his in return. We had met only briefly the day before, but now, embarked on our voyage, conscious that we should be much in each other’s company over a long period, it was as if we both knew we were about to move into a new kind of intimacy. As a type he was not new to me; I had seen plenty of his sort come up for shooting parties at the big house. Such men were sophisticated, worldly, and hard to know. Not the sort of person I really felt at home with.

      ‘So,’ he said, as if recapping what he had already established, ‘you are the strong-minded young lady who likes medicine and healing the sick? I must warn you that you have a sceptic in me.’

      ‘Why, Major Lacey – ’

      ‘I mean, as far as women’s education is concerned. I just don’t like to see it overdone. Seems all wrong to me.’

      ‘You seem to know a lot about me,’ I said shortly.

      ‘Well, I do in a way. A potted biography, Dolly Denisov gave me. She’s got a knack of putting things in a nutshell.’

      ‘Accurately, I hope.’ I spoke with a certain asperity.

      ‘Yes, she’s reliable, is Dolly. And then, of course, I know your cousin and old Erskine Gowrie, too. Not that he’s seen much these days. Not the man he was. No, Dolly told me all about you. The medicine and all that. I thought you’d be a tough, dried, hockey-stick of a girl.’

      ‘And I’m not?’ I enquiried, thinking that, after all, not everything about me had been relayed to this man through the channels of Emma Gowrie and Dolly Denisov. Not Patrick.

      ‘Not a bit,’ he said cheerfully. ‘But I ought to warn you – you’ve captivated Dolly’s imagination. And that can be dangerous.’ He was half laughing, but half serious. ‘All Dolly’s swans have to be swans, you see. Ask Mademoiselle Laure about that.’

      ‘And who is Mademoiselle Laure?’

      ‘Oh, a sort of French governess they keep there,’ he said vaguely. ‘On the retired list. Except I believe she teaches French to Ariadne still.’ There sounded an ambiguous side to Mademoiselle Laure, I thought.

      ‘Thank you for the warning. I need this post. The pay is good and I am poor, which is a state, Major Lacey, you probably know nothing of. You have certainly never been a poor, unmarried girl with her way to make.’

      ‘Touché,’ he conceded.

      I needed desperately, too, to get away from my home, but no point in telling him that if Dolly Denisov had not. It was my own private wound, for me to bear and heal.

      ‘But Russia is a dangerous place to come to make your fortune,’ he said soberly.

      ‘I shall hardly do that, working in the Denisov home.’

      ‘No, if that’s all that happens. But one rarely does only one thing in Russia, as I know to my cost. It’s the way things happen there. There’s a sort of persuasiveness to the place.’ He shook his head. ‘Don’t bully yourself too much, Miss Gowrie. Sit easy to the world; it’s the best way to take your fences. Goodnight. I’m off below.’ And he strolled away, calm and friendly as before.

      With a start, I realised he knew all there was to know about me, and was giving me what he thought of as good advice. Something in his cool assumption that he knew best got under my skin. With sudden tears of fury blinding me, I hammered the iron deckrails till my hands ached. ‘Beastly, arrogant man!’ I cried. ‘Stupid and obtuse like all of them! I hate him. I hate all men.’

      I felt better after the explosion of tears, and from then on I started to enjoy the journey. After all, I had done so little travelling that to be on the move was in itself new and exciting. My spirits improved daily, and I even began to enjoy the company of Edward Lacey.

      And now I was almost sad that the journey was ending …

      I came back to the present, to the view of St Petersburg, and to Edward Lacey’s voice. ‘Peter the Great built St Petersburg because he wanted a door on the world,’ he was saying.

      ‘Hadn’t he got one, then?’

      ‘The western world. Moscow was in many ways an oriental capital. He wanted to change all that. He did, too. But I think Russia has been paying the price for it ever since. What a country.’

      We had talked a good deal about Russia during the voyage, and he obviously knew it well. His sister, he had told me, was married to a Russian; she was expecting a child in the autumn. Now he said: ‘I shall hope to introduce you to my sister, Miss Gowrie, when she’s out and about again.’

      ‘Oh, thank you.’ Perhaps he didn’t disapprove of me as much as I had thought. ‘Yes, I should like that. I shall know so few people apart from my godfather and the Denisovs.’

      ‘That will soon change,’ he predicted briskly. ‘The Russians are an endlessly sociable people. The Denisovs will take you around. Dolly Denisov lives for the world.’

      ‘Ariadne is only seventeen,’ I said.

      ‘Never mind, you won’t be cloistered.’ He had his eyes screwed up, staring at the quay. ‘There’s the Denisov motorcar already waiting for you, I see.’

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