Rosa and the Veil of Gold (11 page)

“Are you okay?” Em asked. She had left her position against the tree, and come to crouch next to him.

Daniel was touched by her concern. She certainly wasn’t as cold as everybody had said, though he still found her lack of any visible reaction to the day’s events unnerving. She was handling it like ordinary people might handle unexpected guests dropping in.

“You know the worst part?” Daniel said to her. “It’s not just that she moved. It’s because it’s her eyes.”

“I know. As though she was sleeping, but now she’s awake.”

“Why is she awake, I wonder?” Daniel said.

“Rosa said she wanted something from us.”

“To get us lost in the woods?”

“Daniel, we’ve been two days without sleep, walking miles in woodland. I think we’re both in danger of becoming hysterical.”

Daniel shook his head, swallowing a laugh. “If this is you hysterical…”

“I handle things my own way. I’m puzzled and a little afraid. But I know that things often seem worse when I haven’t slept. I suggest we put the bear away, pull close to the fire and try to sleep. Even if it’s only for a few hours.”

He handed her the bear. “You’re right. Though I don’t know how I’ll ever get to sleep with so much on my mind.”

“Let your body take over. Turn your mind off for a while.” Em rolled onto her side, trying to pull her overcoat down over her knees.

“Easy to say.”

“Easy to do, Daniel. If your body needs to rest, all you have to do is let it. Be quiet and still. You’ll feel better in the morning.”

Daniel lay down and closed his eyes. He was anything but comfortable—his legs ached, his stomach gnawed, the ground was hard beneath him—but he was exhausted. He focused on the noises around him. A night breeze in the treetops, the hoot of a distant owl, Em’s sleeping breath, the rustle and pop of the fire, his own heartbeat warm in his ears.

It took time but, at length, he slept.

Em shook him awake some time later. He couldn’t estimate how long precisely, but night had rolled back leaving dim morning light in its place.

“What is it?” he said, his mind still hazy.

Em’s eyes were worried. “Something weird is going on.”

But she didn’t need to tell him, because it became apparent the instant he glanced around him.

“Shit!” He sat up, unable to trust what he saw. They sat in a wide, open field. The stream was gone, the trees were gone, their fire, the branches and all their markers.

“I woke up from the cold, twenty seconds ago,” she said. “I’m as puzzled as you.”

Daniel didn’t point out that “puzzled” fell well short of describing his state of mind. “Could we have wandered in the night?”

“Both of us?” She arched a perfectly shaped eyebrow. “Daniel, Rosa tried to warn us. She said the bear was enchanted—”

“There’s no such thing as enchantments!”

“Well, you explain where we are. You explain the colour of the sky.”

Daniel looked up. She was right, the sky was an odd silver-grey, although clear of clouds. The sun was distant and tinged with violet, lending an odd cast to the landscape.

“I’ve gone crazy, that’s it,” he said. “This is just some wild hallucination.”

“Whatever you say,” Em replied, “but we’re stuck in this hallucination together, and I’m really hungry and I see a cottage in the distance.”

Daniel’s eyes followed where she was pointing. Backlit under the sky, a little cottage surrounded by silver birch puffed smoke from its chimney. Daniel’s body froze. “We’re not going up there, are we?”

“Food, warmth and explanations,” she sniffed, pulling herself to her feet.

He clutched his knees to his chest. “We don’t know what might be in there.”

She yanked him to his feet. His legs were jelly beneath him.

“Get up,” she hissed. “Get moving. This is a serious fuck-up and I have no idea what’s going on, but I won’t let you make it worse by falling to pieces. Move.”

Her anger shocked him out of his pit. He gathered his coat and the bag with the bear in it, and followed her across the field to the mysterious cottage.

The grass was long in places and seeds clung to his jeans. The sky brightened, but he couldn’t guess the time. The air was very still, only the faintest hint of a breeze up high. Em walked ahead of him, her hands out at her hips to touch the heads of the long stems. The surreal light gave a false familiarity to the scene, as though he’d seen it before in a painting or a dream. The cottage was small, little more than a square hut, with fancy carved shutters and a design of suns and moons painted over the lintel. It looked inviting, with its cornflower blues and dandelion yellows; but the garden around it gave quite a different impression, tangled and overgrown with briar and sedge. The silver birch trees draped their heavy branches over the roof and windows.

Em stopped on the doorstep and waited for him. “Are you okay?” she said.

“No.”

“Nor am I. Take a deep breath and keep breathing.”

She lifted her hand and rapped five times hard on the door. Daniel’s body tensed. Moments passed.

“There’s nobody home,” Em said, then pushed the door with her toe. It inched inwards. “But it’s open.”

Daniel looked at her silently.

“We’re going in anyway, right?” she said. “We need food.”

He shrugged, uncertain.

She sighed—exasperated—then turned to the door and gently pushed it open. “Hello? Is there anyone home?”

Daniel translated the sentence into Russian as they crossed the threshold. The cottage was neat and bright: just one large room with walls of unfinished pine. A large, square stove, decorated with ceramic tiles and heaped on top with blankets and pillows, dominated the space. Em was already going through cupboards.

“Bread, pancakes, jam,” she said as she pulled the food out and crowded it onto the long wooden table, along with plates and knives.

Daniel hesitated near the other end of the table. “What if the owner of all this food comes back and finds we raided his cupboards?”

“Don’t worry, we’ll leave some money. We haven’t eaten in a long time. Whatever we’ve got ahead of us, we’ll need sustenance.”

Daniel pulled out a chair and sat with her while she spread jam onto the bread and rolled the pancakes and began to eat. Hunger won out over fear, and he reached for the bread.

For a few minutes, the only sounds were the sounds of their greedy eating, and Daniel felt some of the tension leave his body. Yes, fear had made him jittery and shaky, but hunger had played its part as well.

“What’s that noise?” Em said, stopping in mid-reach for another pancake.

Daniel pricked up his ears and listened to the distance. Far off, he caught a whooshing sound, as loud as industrial machinery, but one suburb over. Before he could place the sound, it raced towards them, whooshing and rattling, gathering intensity, barrelling towards the cottage. “It’s coming closer.”

“It’s wind.”

The still air outside was being churned by a vast engine, roaring down on the branches above them, making them bend and snap. Quickly, precisely…a jet plane or a meteor bearing down on them. Daniel moved to push himself out of his chair and run—anywhere—when the wind abruptly stopped. The door to the cottage blasted open, and the owner stepped in.

He was more than six-and-a-half feet tall, with a wild beard and wild hair, rough skin that resembled bark and pale protuberant
eyes. He was dressed in ragged green clothes. Daniel and Em were frozen like prey, with crumbs on their chins and jam on their fingers.

“Who are you?” he asked. The language he spoke was Russian, but a coarse, accented variety Daniel was unfamiliar with.

Em took over, smoothly rising from her chair and dusting herself off. “Forgive us, we thought nobody was home. I’m Em and this is Daniel.”

He stared at her offered hand, paying keen attention to her watch. Then, without shaking her hand, he pulled out a chair to sit with them. “At least you haven’t eaten it all,” he said, spreading jam thickly on a pancake and shoving it in his mouth. “Where are you from?” he said through a giant mouthful. “Sounds like Mir. Am I right?”

Daniel noticed for the first time that the man’s clothes were all on backwards.

“Actually, I’m from Boston originally but I’ve lived in London a while,” Em said. “Daniel’s from Cambridge.”

“Yes, yes. You’re from Mir.”

“So where are we now?” Daniel ventured, dreading the answer.

“Skazki.” The man leaned back and smiled. A chunk of food hung in his beard. “Oh, you’re lost, aren’t you? You’ve never heard of Mir or Skazki?”

Daniel caught Em’s eye, switched to English. “He’s using the Russian words for ‘world’ and ‘story’,” Daniel said.

“None of your strange talk,” the man said. “It’s rude.”

“I’m sorry, but we don’t understand what you mean,” Em said to him.

“You’ll understand soon enough. Whether you believe it is another thing.” He wiped his enormous hands on his trousers and folded them in front of them. “Sorry, I haven’t introduced myself. You can call me Vikhor.”

“Well, Vikhor,” Em said, “I’m sorry that we came in uninvited, but we’re lost and haven’t eaten for a long time. I’ll pay you for your trouble of course.”

“Pay me? In Mir money? That would buy me nothing but a cowpat in this world. Do you have any gold?” Once again, his eyes flicked to her watch.

Em caught his inference. “I have this watch,” she said, “but it’s hardly a fair exchange. It’s worth thousands, and we only had a bit of food.”

“Oh, it’s a fair exchange. You give me the gold, I won’t eat you.”

Em’s cool practicality was stunned out of her. Her eyebrows shot up and her mouth formed a silent “O” of surprise.

“Your timepiece won’t work over here, anyway.” He clicked his fingers and held out his hand. “Come, girl. Give me the gold. I’m pleasant when I’m rich. I’m extremely unpleasant when I’m poor.”

Daniel saw Em hesitating and panicked. “Just give it to him, Em,” he said. “The guy’s some kind of psycho.”

Vikhor shook his head. “You Mir folk are such idiots. Do you think I’m a murderer? A thief? Yes, I murder, yes, I steal. But I am neither of those things. I am a leshii. Do you know what that is?”

Daniel felt his stomach turn over. Impossible conclusions were falling into place. Vikhor called this place the world of story, he looked like a cross between a man and a tree, and a leshii was a wood demon from Russian folklore.

“Where the hell are we?” he said, terror making his voice thin.

“You’ve crossed the veil, boy,” Vikhor said, standing and forcibly removing Em’s watch. He dangled it in front of his eyes, then pocketed it. “Welcome to the land of enchantments.”

Rosa slipped out of the guesthouse at twenty minutes after midnight, careful to close the door quietly behind her. The sky was clear and the moon shone brightly above. A breeze had freshened and the tops of the trees rustled and shushed. Rosa pulled up the hood of her coat and shoved her hands firmly in her pockets. Head down, she made her way along the fence and past the hives. The bees still darted about and hummed their tuneless melodies. The windows of the Chenchikovs’ house were all dark. Moonlight fell obliquely on the roof, illuminating a ghostly streak of smoke from the chimney. She didn’t realise she was holding her breath until she was out the heavy front gate, locking it behind her.

Was she afraid of Anatoly Chenchikov? Perhaps. It was hard to be entirely comfortable around a man who cast two shadows, and whose eyes reflected the world upside-down.

She crossed the rutted driveway and stopped for a few seconds to look around. This tree? Or that one? Everything looked different by moonlight; the strange, inverse shadows made liars of the landscape. She headed into the woods and lit a cigarette.

Took a moment to enjoy the first drag.

“Aah,” she said. Then coughed, checked behind her that nobody had heard, and kept walking.

“
Elizavetta!
”

Rosa stopped, turned sharply. The man’s voice, an urgent whisper, had come from somewhere near the Chenchikovs’ front gate. Careful to be quiet, she backed up a few steps and hid behind a tree to look.

Nobody there. The white brick fence was bathed in moonlight. She scanned left and right, but saw no-one.

“
Elizavetta!
”

The voice was oddly disembodied, coming from everywhere at once. “I’m over here,” Rosa said. Her voice was loud in the quiet dark. She waited a few moments. Nothing happened. He didn’t speak again. She figured she mustn’t sound like Elizavetta and continued on her way. Was this why Anatoly liked to lock up so tight? To stop young men from visiting his daughter? Elizavetta was nineteen and already onto husband number two, so Rosa couldn’t argue with his logic.

She kicked her toe on a fallen branch and glanced down for a second, when a noise ahead caused her to look up. About a hundred yards away, leaning against a tree, was the figure of a man.

Rosa’s heart jumped instinctively. He hadn’t been there just three seconds ago. How had he got in front of her so quietly?

She stopped and tried to make out his features, but he was entirely in shadow, as still as the tree he leaned on.

“Are you looking for Elizavetta?” she said.

No answer.

“She’s sick. I don’t think she leaves the house.”

Again no answer. He was motionless and dark, and Rosa wondered if he wasn’t a man at all, but a statue out here in the woods. She advanced a little further, readying herself to laugh at her conversation with a wooden doll, when the shadow detached itself from the tree and streaked past her, towards the house. As though he hadn’t seen her at all.

Rosa watched him go, then doubled back to follow him, stubbing out her cigarette on a large rock.

Voices ahead. She slipped behind a tree and peered out.

At the edge of the woods, the figure of a man and the figure of a woman. His face was still in shadow, though Rosa could now see his hair was dark. The woman, however, was lit by moonlight. Her hair was long and as pale as Makhar’s, her skin almost ghostly, and she wore a long blue nightgown. They were embracing violently, like lovers who were forbidden to meet.

Rosa presumed the young woman was Elizavetta. “Maybe not
that sick after all,” she mumbled to herself as she turned to make her way through the woods towards the veil.

Two cigarettes later she found it. A hum lay on the air, and the vaporous colours were easily visible to her second sight in the dark. They fell in an undulating curtain, about ten feet high, in a long span which tapered off just at the edge of her sight. She walked towards it. The field dipped and fog had gathered in the low-lying areas. She spread her arms and took a breath, walking right into the veil.

The instant she touched it, the colours disappeared. Out the other side, still in the field, she turned. The colours had returned. She tried again. Once more the curtain disappeared the moment her body came into contact with it. Back and forth she went, growing warm and annoyed.

It was the bear, of course. She had been Daniel and Em’s ticket to cross. Rosa had known all along that the bear was enchanted, and those enchantments had taken Daniel and Em across the veil. Rosa needed enchantments of her own. Her mother’s bracelet? Even if she could get it back, Anatoly had said it was pitifully weak. No, she needed incantations, spells, the help of a strong magician. Somebody like Anatoly Chenchikov. She sat in the grass, leaving her second sight open so she could watch the colours move and hear their low, strange hum. Voices and music came to her, distant and faint. Nothing clear enough for her to understand or recognise.

She tried to imagine Daniel, what he was thinking. Had he realised the danger he was in yet? Or did he still think he was wandering some uncharted part of Russia? Rosa drove her fingernails into her palms. If he was dead already, it was all her fault. She should never have called him, involved him with the bear. She should have let him go home safely to England to forget about her. Deep down, had she wanted to see if he still loved her? Because when Daniel looked at her with love in his eyes, the most forbidden of fantasies wove their seductive spell: sunlight, picket fences, flowerbeds, children’s voices.

Blood began to ooze from her hands and she uncurled them. The pain was a comfort to her, a way of sharing Daniel’s distress. A sudden, clear memory of her mother sprang to mind. It was a week
after her father’s death and Rosa had woken in the night. A shaft of light had spilled from Ellena’s half-open bedroom door. Rosa had crept out of bed to look, and watched her mother unseen. Ellena sat on the floor, her legs crossed. There had been a glint of metal, a sharp intake of breath. Rosa had felt frightened and backed away. The next morning she had seen an interlinked design of tiny arcs scored into the flesh around Ellena’s left ankle. One for each day that Rosa’s father had been dead. In the weeks that followed, the design grew, a simple and beautiful pattern of guilt and loss.

Rosa climbed to her feet. She had to accept the inevitable. She wasn’t crossing the veil tonight…perhaps she wasn’t crossing it for a week or more. Instead, she was going to be a nanny and a housemaid. Anatoly Chenchikov was her best hope for the next step in the adventure.

A thunderous hammering at her door the next morning roused Rosa from a deep sleep. For a moment she was disoriented, sitting up and checking her watch. Ten minutes past nine. It was unusual for her to sleep so late.

“Just a second,” she said, throwing back the covers and pulling on a skirt and blouse. She opened the door, still smoothing back her hair, to see Makhar standing on her doorstep.

“School starts at nine, Rosa Petrovna,” he said.

“I’m sorry. I overslept.” She rubbed her eyes. “So it’s school this morning?”

He nodded. “School in the morning, honey jobs in the afternoon. I do half a day school, but I only get a short summer break. Papa and Ilya have gone to town,” he said. He thrust a dog-eared exercise pad into her hands. “Can we do school down here in the magic house?”

Rosa drew the little boy inside and closed the door. “As long as you don’t mind working on the floor.”

“I made you some breakfast,” he said, producing a sandwich from his schoolbag.

“What’s on it?” she asked tentatively, taking it from him.

“Honey.”

Rosa bit into it. She had never tasted raw honey, and was surprised by its thick, gritty texture. She could hear a light rain
pattering outside. Makhar was already settling cross-legged on the floor next to her bed.

Rosa sat next to him, licking honey off her fingers. “Listen, Makhar, we’ll do one lesson down here, but I’m going to need coffee and a bathroom pretty soon.”

“Can we do maths? I love maths.”

“We can do maths,” she said, stretching her legs out in front of her.

Makhar frowned, peering at her ankle. “Did you scratch yourself, Rosa?”

Rosa tucked her foot away. “It’s nothing,” she said. “What’s your favourite? Multiplication?”

“Long division,” he said.

Rosa bent her brain backwards, trying to remember long division. “Ah…long division.”

“I’ll show you,” he said, taking the exercise pad from her and opening it up to a page full of maths.

She leaned over and looked at the sums. “Yes, I remember this one. Okay, let’s do twenty-four into six thousand and six.”

He was an eager student, his tanned fingers clutching his blunt pencil earnestly. He needed little help, and after four sums was bored.

“You want me to make it harder?” she said. “We could do ones with decimals.”

“Elizavetta hasn’t shown me decimals yet.”

“Well, maybe I can show you.” Rosa thought about the young woman she had seen outside the gate last night. “Makhar, what does Elizavetta look like? Is her hair the same colour as yours?”

He wrinkled his nose. “She’s not as pretty as you.”

Rosa had to smile. “You only think that because she’s your sister.”

“You’re really pretty. Mama said so last night to Papa after you were gone. She sounded really mad about it.” Then with theatrical gaucheness, he clapped his hand over his mouth and said, “I’m not supposed to say anything.”

“About what?”

“I’m not supposed to say anything about anything.”

“Perhaps you should stop then,” Rosa said. Obviously Ludmilla had warned him about family secrets. “We can just concentrate on
learning decimals. I don’t want to know any of your magical secrets. Though they must be just about bursting out of you.”

He smiled with excitement, his imagination seizing on the idea of magical secrets. “Sometimes they are, like fireworks in my tummy.”

“That sounds painful.”

“It is.” He put his hand around his belly and pretended to moan and groan. “Oh, oh, magical secrets! They burn!”

Rosa pounced on top of him and tickled him. He fell over backwards, screaming with laughter. “Stop! Stop!” he squealed, his face growing pink. “Stop tickling!”

“I’m not tickling. I’m just trying to get the secrets out.”

“I’ll never tell! Never!”

“Not even one? One little secret?”

“If you stop tickling me, I’ll tell you one,” he laughed.

She abruptly stopped, and he lay beneath her gazing up with new adoration, his chest heaving with laughter.

“Okay,” she said in English, just in case somebody was listening outside. “Tell what happened to Nikita.”

Makhar swallowed his last mouthful of laughter and adopted a suitably sober expression. “He died.”

“I know that much, but how did he die?”

“Elizavetta killed him.”

Rosa narrowed her eyes. “Are you making that up?”

“No.” His eyes were all innocence. “It was an accident.”

“Tell me about it.”

“Elizavetta and Nikita used to fight a lot. She never fights with Ilya. I like Ilya a lot better.”

“He seems very nice. Go on. She and Nikita fought?”

“They had a big argument and Nikita went off into the woods, which he always did. But he didn’t come home that night and Elizavetta and Papa got really worried and went out the next day to look for him. Papa found wolf tracks and went back to get the gun. They thought that a wolf had caught Nikita. I wasn’t there so I don’t really know what happened next. When they came back, Nikita was dead with a hole in his head and Elizavetta was crying and went to bed and didn’t get up until Papa brought Ilya home for her.”

Rosa was so astounded by the story and so puzzled by its incompleteness that she didn’t know which question to ask next.

Makhar bit his lip. “You won’t tell Mama that I told you?”

“Of course not,” she said, helping him sit up again. “But how did Elizavetta—”

“Makhar! Rosa!” Ludmilla’s voice was directly outside.

“In here!” Makhar called, pulling his exercise book onto his lap.

The door swung inwards, and Ludmilla peered in. “What are you doing?”

“Rosa Petrovna’s showing me decimals,” Makhar said.

Ludmilla turned her attention to Rosa. “Classes are in the house, at the kitchen table, from nine o’clock sharp,” she said. “I thought I told you that.”

“I overslept,” Rosa said. “I haven’t slept so well in ages. And then when Makhar came to wake me, he asked if we could do one class down here—”

“In all household matters, you should follow the advice of my husband or me. Not our nine-year-old son,” Ludmilla said frostily. Rosa fought back the indignant reply which had sprung onto her tongue. Instead, she smiled sweetly and said, “I’m sorry.”

“I have breakfast waiting for you,” Ludmilla said.

“I already ate the sandwich Makhar made for me,” Rosa replied, “but I’d love coffee.”

“I think we have some coffee in the pantry.” She held out her hand to Makhar. “Come, boy. We’ll give Rosa Petrovna a chance to get ready for school properly, and we’ll start at ten today.”

They left and Rosa quickly pulled on some shoes and ran a brush through her hair. All she had to do was play nice and do what Anatoly wanted for a day or two. Surely that couldn’t be too hard?

The coffee was instant and stale, and she longed for a cigarette. Makhar was a keen, bright pupil, especially of maths, and not at all perturbed by the constant interference of his mother, who hovered about and admonished him for everything from putting a decimal point in the wrong place to slinging his arm affectionately around Rosa’s neck and calling her Roshka.

After an hour of maths, Rosa needed a break.

“Makhar, you are too clever for me,” she said. “Let’s take five minutes to relax and then work on English lessons.”

“I’ve been writing a story in English,” he said proudly.

“I’d love to read it.”

“I’ll get it,” he said, racing off down the hallway.

Rosa went to the kitchen bench and put the kettle on the hob again. Ludmilla was mending clothes on the sofa.