The Lost Souls of Angelkov

by Linda Holeman

  Konstantin’s head shot up and he squeezed her forearm. “I have just requested that you don’t speak like a common woman, and yet you refute me. You are Countess Mitlovskiya. You will learn to behave in a proper manner, and set aside your wilful and childish ways. You’re no longer that child. You are a woman, my wife, and the new countess of my estate,” he said, letting go of her arm.

  Antonina fought the urge to rub the tender area.

  Konstantin wiped his forehead with his gloved hand. “Antonina, I believe we are both weary from the last few days. Don’t let us argue on our first day as man and wife. I only want us to be happy. Let us speak of more pleasant topics.” He smiled at her. “I am renaming my estate in your honour.”

  His comments about her intelligence still stung, but she saw that he was trying to make amends, trying not to let his impatience with her spoil their day.

  “Oh? To what?” She attempted to smile back at him.

  “Angelkov. For my angel.”

  She smiled again, pressing his hand between hers, although the heaviness inside her hadn’t lessened.

  At Angelkov, it took Antonina over a week to learn her way about the house and gardens and surrounding outbuildings, and to memorize the names of all the house serfs. Her husband had made much of his money from a private vodka distillery he had on his estate, complete with a cooperage to build the vats and barrels for the liquor, which he sold around the province and beyond.

  She had chosen Tinka from a weaned litter before she and Konstantin left Pskov, and the little dog was a comfort to her in her new home.

  Antonina didn’t miss her father; things had changed since the incident with the icon. Her mother—well, there had never been any love between them. As for her brothers, they hadn’t been part of her life for the last few years, apart from occasional visits. The only people Antonina did miss were a few of the servants from her home. When she left, she had kissed their cheeks, pressing rubles and religious icons into their hands as she said goodbye to them.

  Other than the belongings from her bedroom, she had asked her father for one thing from home: the lovely rosewood Érard square piano she had played since she was four years old. He’d had it sent to Angelkov, and it was waiting for her when she arrived.

  Konstantin gave her permission to see to the decor of her own bedchamber, a former guest room—not, he said pointedly, his late wife’s. Antonina unpacked her belongings, putting her books on shelves, setting out her small glass and china collections, and requesting that new bedcovers and draperies be sewn in her favourite colours, green and ivory. She liked to sit on the broad, cushioned seat built under the wide window, looking up from her book at the gardens below, and farther, at the countryside spread out before her. In October, the trees lost their leaves almost overnight, and the air was frosty in the mornings. Raisa, the cook, who was married to the head stableman, Fyodor, was agreeable to her requests for meals, and Olga, the head housekeeper, was kind and patient as she tried to explain the ways of running a household.

  The only servant Antonina had difficulty with was her personal maid, Varvara. The older woman was cold and pious, and Antonina always felt she was being criticized, even though the woman never openly said anything disapproving. Antonina knew she had been the first Countess Mitlovskiya’s maid.

  Antonina didn’t see Konstantin during the day, although they ate dinner together most evenings. As well as the distillery, he was involved in a number of businesses that took him from Angelkov into the city of Pskov, and occasionally as far as St. Petersburg. And so she filled her days much as she had at her father’s estate, reading, playing the piano for hours and riding. Some evenings they had company for dinner—Konstantin’s friends—and Antonina took part in many lively conversations, and then played whist and vint with the guests after dinner. In most ways it was as though she were still living her former life, apart from the added responsibilities of running a household: assigning chores for cleaning and maintaining the manor, organizing menus, writing out invitation and calling cards, and arranging and coordinating small parties. But she was lonely in a way she hadn’t been in her father’s home, she realized, because she no longer had vague, undefined but somehow optimistic thoughts about a future.

  This was her future. She was a married woman, with a husband who came to her from his own bedroom, down the long, wide hall, every few nights.

  Antonina remained a virgin for a full three weeks, although not for her husband’s lack of trying.

  Lilya had never expected to see the princess again after she and Lyosha were sold by Prince Olonov to their new landowner, Count Konstantin Mitlovsky.

  Lilya and Lyosha were taken away in the back of a taliezhka, a rough, open wooden cart, its wheels replaced by runners for the winter, and drawn by a long-coated horse with a ragged collar and rope harness. It was bitterly cold. The driver, a youngish man with half his face stained with a burgundy birthmark, threw Lilya and Lyosha some flea-infested wolf hides to keep off the cold. Lilya was grateful there were two goats tied in the back of the cart as well; although they stunk, Lilya and Lyosha pushed against them for the warmth they generated.

  The driver wore a wolf coat and hat and hunched over the reins, his head down as he drove through the cold wind and occasional snow. He smoked a pipe or chewed sunflower seeds, spitting the shells into the wind. Sometimes they landed on Lilya and Lyosha in the straw behind him. Lyosha cried quietly for the first hour of their journey, then stopped. He fell asleep wrapped in Lilya’s arms, and she prayed he would continue to sleep as long as possible. When it grew dark, the young man drove the horse and cart into a low-ceilinged stable heated by a stove in one corner. When he opened a sack and took out a slab of dark bread and handed it to Lilya, he stared at her intently. Then he took a piece of dried fish and two boiled potatoes from the same sack as the bread.

  “You like some of this?” he asked, and Lilya nodded. “Maybe,” he said, and then, in front of her and Lyosha, ate one of the potatoes. Lyosha coughed, over and over, as the man chewed. As he raised the second potato to his mouth, Lilya understood. She nodded, and he stopped.

  “When he’s asleep,” she said. The driver disappeared. She gave Lyosha the bread and watched while he ate it. Then she held him, humming, until he fell asleep.

  The driver returned, lighting his way with a lantern, carrying the sack.

  She held out her hand. “The fish and potato first.”

  “I don’t have to give it to you,” the young man said.

  “God is watching,” she told him, crossing herself. “And you must bring us hot millet and tea in the morning.”

  He crossed himself as well, then handed her the sack. She put it beside Lyosha. When one of the goats began to nibble on the burlap, she moved it. She was shivering from the cold and from fear, but Lyosha needed more than a dry crust of bread to sustain him. “Will you bring it tomorrow? The millet and tea?” she asked, and the young man nodded. “Hurry up, then,” she said, “and don’t wake him.”

  She took off her outer shawl and gently put it over Lyosha so that his head was covered. She lay back in the straw, and when the driver took her, she bit the shoulder of his foul-smelling coat so she didn’t cry out and wake her little brother. She was just fourteen, and Lyosha only four.

  The journey took another two days. Once Lyosha had exhausted himself coughing and fell into a deep sleep each night, Lilya gave herself to the driver in order to have decent food and another blanket. The village the prince had sent them to was a straggling collection of thatched huts along a road. They were dropped off in front of an izba similar to the one they’d left behind, a one-room hovel made of logs caulked with jute soaked in tar. The man and woman who came to the door cursed their ill luck. They had lost their three children to a fever the year earlier, and while they mourned their deaths, they had also seen it as a blessing from the saints. At least they didn’t have to watch their little ones suffer from lack of food and wretched conditions. The man and his wife could
work longer hours and have more food. Their prayers since then had been that God wouldn’t see fit to have the woman bear more children.

  So when Lilya and Lyosha were set down outside their door, the small sack of their few extra clothes thrown beside them, the man and his wife shook their heads in irritation.

  “We won’t be responsible for the boy,” the man said to Lilya.

  Lilya nodded. “I’ll look after him.” She put her arm around Lyosha’s shoulders and he clung to her, both arms around her skirt, shivering with fright in the frosty air, his lips mauve with cold. “I’ll work to help bring in what we eat. All I ask is a roof from the snow and rain.” Lyosha had stopped asking for his mother the second day in the rocking wagon. Lilya had told him they would never see her again, and that she would be his mother now. “I am Lilya, and this is Lyosha.”

  “We are Masha and Osip,” the woman said, and turned, going back into the izba. Osip followed. Lilya, holding Lyosha’s hand, picked up the sack. Without looking at the driver, she and her brother went into their new home and closed the door.

  Did Lilya miss her parents? The blacksmith and his wife had never given her any affection; they were worn out from hard work and disappointment. She did, however, want to be back in her home, where she knew everyone and everything. On the journey from her old hovel to this new one, she’d told herself she would never care about a place again, since she could, in a moment, be sent somewhere else. The one thing she would never let happen was to be parted from Lyosha, the only family she had.

  She thought, at times, that she would die for him.

  Lilya was also sad at the thought that she’d never have another glimpse of Antonina Leonidovna. She had never known anyone who smelled sweet all the time. Sometimes, as they sat and talked, she took deep breaths, marvelling at Antonina’s scent. During the time of their friendship, she scrubbed her face and hands and arms to the elbow and rebraided her hair every Sunday. Her parents thought she was cleaning up for church. She was glad she didn’t have to explain why she changed out of her patched weekday skirt and blouse and put on her Sunday clothing, a newer, cleaner version of the same outfit.

  At night, with her parents asleep on the long, wide stove, warm in winter and cool in summer, and she and Lyosha on ragged blankets on the floor, she thought only of Antonina.

  When Antonina pushed up her sleeves in the heat of summer, Lilya stole glances at her arms. The hair on them was slight and pale, almost invisible, and Lilya was certain it would be silky to the touch.

  She also thought of Antonina’s lips, and the way they felt when she kissed them. Lilya had ended their friendship, and yet it hadn’t protected her after all. She didn’t know why Antonina had told her father about their friendship, but she knew it was because of it that she and Lyosha were sent away.

  When Prince Olonov had burst through the door of their izba followed by his men, she jumped up from the bench. “Lilya Petrova?” he said, and she swallowed.

  It was as though she had waited for this. She had committed a sin by loving the princess, and she knew that in some way God would punish her. Everything went very still as she watched what happened next. Even when her own father cried out as he was whipped, and her mother and Lyosha screamed in fear and confusion, she couldn’t hear them.

  In their new home in the village owned by Count Mitlovsky, Lilya cared for Lyosha in the same way she had in their izba in Kazhra. Every night she slept beside him, waking when she felt him stirring in his sleep and guiding him to the pail near the door, keeping him steady as he relieved himself. The one time she hadn’t wakened in time, he’d wet the piles of rags they slept on. This had earned her a hard slap from Masha as the acrid odour filled the low-ceilinged hut.

  In the mornings, she wiped his face and smoothed down his dark hair with her damp hands. She made warm plasters for him, patting them over his narrow chest each evening to lessen his cough. She darned his clothing, and found replacements when they grew too small or patched. Shivering, wrapped in all of her shawls, she’d be on the church steps in the middle of the night on the day the monthly charity baskets were scheduled to arrive. She was first to grab what she could of the winter items—boots and socks and coats sent to the villages by the landowner.

  Lilya’s life on the new estate was much as it had been in Kazhra. Osip and Masha were not cruel, but deadened. They were, as Lilya’s parents had been, worn out from a lifetime of hard work with no reward but the hope of a better afterlife.

  For those first frigid winter months, when there was only the white blankness of the fields, Osip carved wooden spoons, the sugary, musty odour of his cheap tobacco filling the izba. Masha tatted delicate lace with a shuttle. She taught Lilya how to do this, and Lilya quickly surpassed the woman in both speed and ability. Some of the finest pieces Lilya and the woman produced were given to the church for vestments; other, more substantial pieces were sold at the weekly market in the next larger village, along with Osip’s spoons.

  In the spring, they got up at daybreak and went to the fields, planting wheat and corn, sunflowers, sugar beets and flax. Like the other children too old to be carried but too young to work, Lyosha followed Lilya up and down the rows. They came home as it grew dark, prepared a simple meal and spoke little.

  During their first summer, the villager Iosef Igorovitch, called Soso, put in a request to the landowner that he be allowed to marry Lilya Petrova. His first wife had been a sour, lazy thing, and had died after four years and as many miscarriages. Ten months had passed since she’d succumbed to typhus, and he wanted someone to cook his meals and warm his bed at night. There were no other single girls in the tiny hamlet, and so when Lilya arrived, he kept an eye on her, watching to make sure she was a hard worker. When he learned that the child always at her side was her brother, he didn’t like the idea of another mouth to feed, but still, he couldn’t be choosy.

  When his appeal to marry the recently purchased serf was granted, he came to the door of the izba and told Osip that after harvest he would marry the girl living with them.

  “You have to take the child as well,” Osip said.

  Soso looked into the dim hut. Lilya had stopped chopping carrots on the wooden table and was staring at him. The boy was on his knees under the table.

  “All right,” he said. Osip held out his hand, and Soso shook it.

  Lilya studied Soso. He was tall and barrel-chested, his shaggy dark hair cut in an unflattering bowl shape under his peaked cap. But his clothing was cleaner than that of most of the villagers, and instead of the crude sandals made from the bark of lime trees, he wore leather boots. Lilya suspected he wore his Sunday clothes, and was glad he had bothered to dress in his best to be introduced to her as her future husband.

  He smiled, and although he appeared confident, the slightly tremulous smile told Lilya that he was nervous. The clean clothing and smile were enough. She had to marry someone soon. She estimated he was ten years older than her, but at least he didn’t have a litter of lice-ridden children she would have to take on. Without hesitation, she nodded her agreement.

  After that, Soso came to the hut every few evenings. He didn’t say much, and Lilya thought him dull. Sometimes he brought a wrapped fish or a pocketful of boiled eggs. But on one visit he squatted in front of Lyosha and reached into his pocket to pull out a small chunk of hard sugar. As he handed it to him, Lyosha gave Soso one of his rare smiles, and Lilya thought he might not be so bad.

  Lilya and Soso were married a month after her fifteenth birthday; Soso was twenty-six. She and Lyosha moved into the single-roomed hut Soso had lived in with his first wife. It had the same oven made of clay on an earthen floor, the same rough table and benches against the walls as every izba. The only ornamentation was a small shelf for the tallow candles that were lit on holy days, and a stamped metal icon of the Holy Mother in its frame.

  On their wedding night, Soso found out that his new wife wasn’t pure. He stopped, looking down at her, and slapped her, hard, on both ch
eeks, then continued. It was never spoken of.

  He treated Lyosha with indifference, neither kind nor cruel. He was sometimes annoyed by the attention Lilya gave to her little brother, but felt he was fortunate to have been given permission to marry such a pleasant-looking, hard-working woman. Like her brother, she didn’t smile often, but when she did, he felt something like pride.

  He imagined their lives would continue forever as they were now. He and Lilya would work the fields, and Lyosha would soon be old enough to be of real help. They would have their own children, but not too many who lived, he hoped, because that would prevent Lily from working, and be more mouths to feed.

  Antonina had been the Countess Mitlovskiya for a month when she first saw Lilya. It was early October, and the day was uncharacteristically warm and humid.

  Antonina, with a manservant behind her, was slowly riding down one of the roads that ran between the golden fields. The peasants were reaping wheat, and some had stopped for their midday meal of boiled potatoes and raw onions and slabs of dark bread.

  Antonina noticed a young woman tilt back her head to drink, water running down her chin and onto her neck. The woman tapped a cork back into the flask with the heel of her hand, then shaded her eyes as she looked up at the figure on the horse. Nobody came down this muddy track between the fields, well off the main road, except the estate owner or his visitors.

  “Lilya,” Antonina said, and Lilya dropped the flask. It bounced on the ground and lay at her feet.

  She looked directly into Antonina’s face without smiling. Around her, other peasants were bowing, their skirts and tunics rustling.

  “Leave us,” Antonina said, and with the same rustling the peasants backed away until it was only Antonina and Lilya, the manservant and his horse a few paces away.