LITMIR.BIZ

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flowing tea-gown slid away from her arm to show half a dozen barbaric-looking gold bracelets. ‘Even in this house we have an old aunt living. She is too old and frail for you to meet, she sees no one,’ said Dolly easily.

      I said nothing. Old, Princess Irene certainly was, I thought; frail too, no doubt; but it wasn’t true she saw no one. She had seen me. I was opening my mouth to confess all, when Dolly swept on. ‘One day, perhaps, I will take you up to see her. She is history personified. Do you know, as a girl she danced with Prince Metternich? She was a great flirt. Well, more than that, I’m afraid; one couldn’t say she stopped short at flirting, precisely. So many scandals.’ Dolly laughed indulgently. ‘Never really beautiful, but she knew how to attract. Oh, she was worldly, Tante Irene, and now look what she has come to: a recluse, quite cut off, seeing no one. The sadness!’

      I kept quiet. I wondered if it was true about her being quite cut off. I had got the distinct impression the Princess received exactly whom she liked in the tower.

      Next day, after walking with Ariadne, there was a budget of letters from home waiting for me. I longed to carry them straight up to my room, but Ariadne said no, there was a special visitor in the drawing-room and I must come in and meet him.

      ‘Oh, who?’

      She screwed her face up in a wry grimace. ‘I suppose you would call him a suitor.’

      ‘A suitor? For you?’ I was surprised. She seemed so young.

      ‘Oh, don’t worry, Miss Rose, these things take years and years in Russia.’ She smiled. ‘I’m not supposed to know. But of course I do. Goodness, my nurse told me of the arrangement when I was five. But I pretend I don’t know. My mother understands I know, but she pretends that I don’t, too.’ Then she sighed. ‘I shall have to make up my mind soon or it will be too late.’

      ‘You can choose, then?’

      ‘Oh, I expect so,’ she said cheerfully. ‘Mamma would never force me to anything, but why should it be no? He’s rich, gentle, and quite pretty, I think.’

      ‘We say handsome with a man,’ I said.

      ‘Handsome, then,’ accepted Ariadne blithely.

      In the drawing-room were two men. One was Peter Alex-androvitch and the other – yes, seeing him suddenly through Ariadne’s eyes, he was handsome.

      ‘My Uncle Peter,’ introduced Ariadne, ‘whom you know. And this …’ no doubt from her voice and manner of amused archness that this was her suitor, and that she was enjoying my astonishment … ‘Edward Lacey.’

      I held out my hand. ‘I am very glad to see you, Major Lacey.’ And it was true. I was surprised at how happy I was to see him. How secretive they had been, neither telling me until now of their particular interest in each other. Yet it was a private matter, of course, and not the sort of thing to be discussed with a new acquaintance.

      Ariadne and I had interrupted a conversation about a famous Russian writer who had just, inexplicably committed suicide. ‘He killed himself,’ said Peter Alexandrov. ‘Shot himself through the mouth. Oh, there is a sickness in our society, all right, and where can it all end?’

      ‘It is part of your sickness to have no answer,’ said Edward Lacey.

      ‘Possibly. Or too many answers.’

      ‘Oh, politics, politics, they can never touch us.’ Ariadne interrupted their conversation with gaiety. ‘Let us ignore unpleasantness and have a good time.’

      ‘Wretched little butterfly,’ said Edward, but he seemed to enjoy her prattle. Presently the two of them went over to the piano where he turned the pages and Ariadne played and sang. I suppose it was a courtship in the Russian style.

      The music began, and Peter and I were left looking at each other. Then Peter gave a short laugh. ‘Ariadne knows nothing, and yet she knows everything. She is like an animal that senses instinctively how to lead a happy life. But give her time, she will grow up. The women in our family mature late. But Ariadne will still be happy, it is her gift.’

      Perhaps that was what Edward Lacey liked, and perhaps it was the gift I lacked. ‘Lucky Ariadne,’ I said.

      He smiled. ‘Ah, but you have your own gifts.’

      Our eyes met, and I seemed to read understanding in his. ‘I think I know what you mean; my gift of healing. But it’s such a little thing, perhaps nothing at all, mere imagination.’ I found myself telling him about the boy in the village, about a dog I had once helped, even about a bird’s wing that I had healed. ‘And yet, small as it is, my gift may have ruined my life.’ I was thinking of Patrick.

      ‘Your life is only just beginning,’ said Peter. ‘You do not know what you may become.’

      ‘In Russia?’ I queried, half smiling.

      But Peter said nothing more, and soon the others came back from the piano and suggested that we go out to see the new horse that Edward Lacey had just bought and which was ‘a regular winner’. Then, after looking the beast over, I was able to go back to my room, where I sat down by the window and opened my letters from home.

      My sister Grizel’s was the longest and the least well spelt, and Alec’s was the shortest, produced in his best copperplate hand, and containing one brief sentence about seeing a fox. Grizel produced a string of home news, such as the state of her Sunday hat, the sad disappearance of our best laying hen (a fox was suspected) and the fact that she was invited to a house-party at Glamis and had ‘absolutely nothing to wear and no way to get there except by walking’.

      I raised my head and smiled. I knew that Grizel would get to her house-party – some hopeful suitor would constrain his mother or his sister or his aunt to drive her over – and she would look delightful in her old clothes.

      Tibby’s letter was more down-to-earth; she too mentioned the hen, which was obviously a sore point with the whole family, but blamed the local tinkers and not the fox. She concentrated on health. She told me how the minister was, how his wife was, how the postie’s rheumatism had made him ‘terrible slow’ with his letters lately, and finally she told me how she, Grizel and my brother were. I was delighted to hear that they all seemed in rude health. But as I turned the last page of her letter I saw a frantic postscript which seemed to have been jointly written by her and Grizel.

      ‘My dear Rose,’ wrote Tibby, ‘we have just heard that a terrible trouble has fallen upon the Grahams. Patrick has disgraced himself in India and must leave his regiment in dishonour. We don’t know the details as yet; I dare say we never shall, but I feel for his poor mother.’

      In Grizel’s hand, I read: ‘Rose darling, Patrick is accused of mutiny, who would have believed it of him? And he has fled. No one knows his whereabouts, not even his mother. Well, thank goodness you are not married to him, my love, that’s what I say.’

      But I thought: poor Patrick, poor Patrick. And I also thought how little I knew him after all.

      That night, instead of dreaming about Patrick I dreamt about myself. Troubled, restless dreams in which my own identity seemed lost, and I wandered like a ghost through an unknown countryside.

      I woke in the pale dawn and lay looking as the sunlight began to colour the room. I held my hands up in front of me; ordinary, quite pretty hands, with long fingers and the narrow nails inherited by all the Gowries. Why should my hands be working hands, hands to heal, when the hands of all my forebears – except for the soldiers’ – had been idle ones? And yet I knew my hands must work. I wanted to feel them scrubbed clean and sterile, ready to do what I asked of them. And then at the end of the day I wanted to feel they had achieved what I had asked of them. It wasn’t exactly that I thought of myself as a healer, although I hoped I would be; it was simply that there was a job I seemed born for, head, hands and heart, and I longed to be at it.

      Had Patrick sensed this? Was this, as much as any troubles of his own, what lay behind our break-up? Perhaps I should blame myself

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