The Birds Fall Down Read Online Free Page B

said Nikolai. ‘We’re none of us in very good health. We don’t want to be here in Paris, so it doesn’t suit us. There’s an old Russian proverb—”
    “Yes, yes,” said Tania, and turned to the door, but was met by Hélène, followed by the two women servants whom the Diakonovs had brought from Russia: Pyotr’s wife Katinka, the stout old cook, and Vissarion’s sister, Aglaia, the Countess’s elegant and jaundiced maid. Laura thought they looked like characters out of those boring Marivaux plays that she always had to dodge being taken to see at the Comédie française, for in the house they wore dresses belonging to another age, with full skirts and tight bodices made of thick grey cotton, with neckerchiefs of white linen and white stockings. Now they seemed more like players than ever, for they looked at Tania with great eyes before they kissed her hand, and there was an emphasized devotion in their kisses, while they cast sidelong glances at Nikolai so plainly pitying him for his ignorance of some impending calamity that he would certainly have ceased to be ignorant of it, had he not been sealed in himself. When they kissed Laura’s hand they mimed the same sort of fear, and she stiffened with fear. Was her mother perhaps going to leave her father? But she was wrong. There was some other calamity here. As Hélène took her mother’s coat from her she said in an undertone, “They say the Countess will be back in a minute and you must not worry. It appears there is a vigil service in their Church—in your Church—this evening, it’s one of your saint’s days.”
    “It’s the day of Constantine and Helena, the Great Monarchs,” murmured Aglaia, an inch or two above Laura’s hand.
    “Isn’t Laura Eduarevna like her mother?” Nikolai asked them.
    “The image, the image,” the two servants chanted together, and Katinka murmured to Tania, “The Countess didn’t feel like going to our church in the Rue Darou, so she’s just stepped round to the chapel in the Countess von Krehmunden’s house in the Avenue de Bois—”
    “Do you mean to say she’s well enough to go out alone?”
    Katinka and Aglaia exchanged another dramatic glance. “Oh, there’s no question of that. Even if she’d felt like doing anything so rash, we wouldn’t have let her. But she was taken by Monsieur Kamensky.”
    “Ah, that excellent little Kamensky,” sighed Tania.
    “Indeed, we don’t know where we’d all be without him. It’s a pity he can’t be here all the time. But he has to follow his profession. However, he’s back now, and he’s out with her this very minute, and he’ll bring her back as soon as he can. But you know how devout she is. She’s probably forgotten the time. And if the poor lady was happy, he wouldn’t like to bring her back to a sense of what was going on.”
    “Not even to remind her about you,” said Aglaia.
    “Soon we will have to give a great ball for our little Laura,” said Nikolai. “Your grandmother will stand beside your mother at the head of the staircase as she stood beside your mother at her first great ball, and you will stand beside your mother.”
    “Madame Tania hasn’t changed since her first ball,” Katinka said to him, in the tone nurses use to children when they are telling them to eat up something, and Aglaia spoke in the same style. “Nobody will know which is the mother and which the daughter.”
    “Laura will be wasted in England,” Nikolai told Tania. “The English have next to no ceremonies. She should have been coming to us in St. Petersburg now. She might have stayed with us for a long time. She might have been a demoiselle d’honneur at court as you were.”
    “I couldn’t do it,” said Laura, looking up into his clouded amber eyes. She felt she had to make him understand that. She knew he was disgraced and had now no influence at court, yet he had this magicianly air, she was afraid he might be able to bring about impossible things, including