The Long-Lost Home Read online

  Penelope listened and pondered. She thought of the Count of Monte Cristo, and of that other young sailor and master of disguise, Simon Harley-Dickinson. She thought of Lady Constance Ashton and her seamstress, Madame LePoint, who could fashion a new gown in a day. Piece by piece, stitch by stitch, a plan took shape in her mind.

  “All I need,” she thought, “is a window of opportunity.”

  BY MIDAFTERNOON VERONIKA HAD PLIÉD to the point of exhaustion. She no longer complained of nerves; in fact, she seemed numb of all feeling except a kind of stone-faced endurance, like a prisoner waiting to be called to the gallows. Any joy she had once taken in dancing had left her, as had her grandiose dreams of being, at twelve years old, the youngest prima ballerina in the history of ballet. Now she simply wanted the ordeal to end. Cranky, hungry, and bone-tired, she demanded to go to her audition at once and get the whole dreadful business over with.

  However, the captain had still not returned from his officers’ luncheon, and Madame Babushkinov refused to go anywhere in this strange city without him. Now she was the one overcome with nerves. Veronika’s shrill, repeated demand that they leave “right now, Mama, right now!” had given her a blinding headache, or so Madame claimed. For the past hour she had been lying on her cot. “Agony,” she whimpered, again and again. “Agony, agony!”

  Penelope offered to go out for ice, a bottle of aspirin, a doctor, anything at all—but Madame insisted that Penelope not leave her side.

  “Where is my husband?” she moaned.

  “Madame, I will look for him,” Penelope volunteered. “I will check every café and gentlemen’s club in Saint Petersburg! Of course, that could take hours. . . .” As you see, Penelope was desperately seeking her window of opportunity. All she needed was an excuse to go out and stay out. How hard could it be?

  “Yes,” Madame said weakly. “All right . . .” Penelope was on her feet in a flash! “I mean no, don’t leave me, Miss Lumley! What if I died right here in this horrible barracks, and Ivan was run over by an omnibus, or killed in a duel, heaven forbid? Who would care for the children then?” Madame closed her eyes and thrashed as if she were at death’s door. “Oh, Maximilian, my precious baby Max! Now I will never see his sweet round face again! Those chubby hands, those dimpled cheeks . . .”

  Exhausted by her own suffering, she began to snore. In despair, Veronika resumed practicing, though by now her legs were like noodles. The twins were horribly jealous to hear Baby Max praised by their mother, and decided to misbehave out of spite. Already they had discovered that the mattresses on their cots were filled with feathers, and they were plucking them out through the mattress ticking, one by one.

  Penelope took deep, calming breaths, as she had been taught to do at school. “If Edmond Dantès could wait fourteen years in a cold, dark prison,” she told herself, “surely I can hold steady until the captain returns. After all, how long can one luncheon last?”

  BUT THE MISSING PATER OF the Babushkawoos did not reappear till evening. It was still light out, for Saint Petersburg is so far north on the globe that on the longest days of the year the sun sets only briefly and it never gets dark at all. These are called the White Nights, and they happen in late June and early July, but even in April the sun did not set until eight o’clock, and twilight lasted well past that hour. (Navigators, take note: Saint Petersburg is at sixty degrees north latitude. That is as far north as the lower parts of Alaska, or the Shetland Islands of Scotland, birthplace of the famously brave and rugged Shetland ponies. However, talk of ponies is best saved for later, for Captain Babushkinov has returned, and he seems to be at a rather high latitude himself!)

  Yes, the captain was back, and very merry, and had a funny medicinal smell about him. He had spent the afternoon gambling, he said! Playing cards with the officers! He had lost a great deal of money! It was all to the good!

  Madame Babushkinov was propped in a chair, a blanket across her lap. Her impatience had long since turned to fury. “Whose money, Ivan?” she asked in a voice like shattering glass. “Exactly whose money did you lose?”

  “Never mind, never mind.” He kissed her sloppily on one cheek. “It is men’s business, and nothing for you to worry about.”

  “There is your business!” Madame pointed at Veronika as if accusing the girl of a crime. “What about her, you fool? She is here to audition for the tsar’s own ballet, and you spend the day losing borrowed money at cards?”

  “I don’t even want to do it anymore!” the girl whined.

  “She can’t dance anyway, hee hee hee!” the boys said, tickling each other with the feathers.

  “Silence!” the captain roared. He looked at Penelope. “You! Yes, you. Governess. Come here.”

  Penelope did so.

  He lowered his deep bass voice, but it was like trying to play softly on a tuba. “Today I had luck,” he said. “But it was all bad luck. I owe a great deal of money to one of the generals. My signature was not enough for him. Fool! Coward! But never mind, never mind. It is the way the world is.”

  He wobbled and seated himself on the edge of the nearest cot. “I must send him a pledge against my debt by midnight tonight. Ah, what have I done?” Groaning, he smacked the tops of his thighs repeatedly. This seemed to calm him, and he looked up at Penelope, a shaggy black dog with bloodshot eyes. “Governess. I need you to bring a small item of great value to the general’s house. Can you do that?”

  Penelope wanted to skip circles in joy, but she forced herself to speak calmly. “Of course, Captain. I will go at once.”

  He swiveled his massive head toward his wife. Madame Babushkinov’s lap blanket slipped unnoticed to the floor as she writhed in her chair. “Oh, no you don’t, Ivan! No!”

  “I will win it back, my darling! Tomorrow, you’ll see, my luck will change!”

  “No, no, no!” she raged, even as she wrenched the princess’s ring off her finger and all but threw it at Penelope. “Fine, here it is. Take it, take it! See if I care! Ivan, you can explain to your mother how you lost her precious emerald at cards!”

  “FORTUNE FAVORS THE BOLD,” AS the saying goes, but it also favors the patient and prepared, and Penelope was surely that. Here was her chance! On her way out, she stopped in the common room to retrieve her carpetbag, which she had earlier hidden beneath the curtained table that held the samovar. In her pocket was the letter from the Imperial Ballet. Once the Babushkinovs realized the letter was fake, and that their governess had run off, it would not take long to put dva and dva together, so to speak. The letter was evidence. Later she would burn it.

  Meanwhile, she left a note of her own, saying that after her errand was complete, she would spend the night at the Saint Petersburg Home for Poor Bright Governesses, as she feared it would be too late to return to the barracks alone.

  Tolstoy was nowhere to be seen, and she was sorry not to have another chance to speak with the interesting young officer. “But he is a writer, after all,” she thought, as she walked quickly—but not too quickly!—to the door. “One day I might discover a book of his in a bookshop, and read it, and that will be very like seeing him again. And who knows? They say writers sometimes base their characters on people they have met. Perhaps there will be some mention of me in his stories.”

  The thought of being turned into a fictional character amused her. How absurd it would feel! A moment later she was on the street, through the window of opportunity at last. “Adieu, Babushkinovs,” she thought, walking briskly, the carpetbag swinging jauntily at her side. “Arrivederci, and farewell! But I will not say do svidaniya, because I have no expectation of seeing you later, or ever again.”

  Was it bittersweet for Penelope to part from the horrible Babushkawoos so abruptly, without so much as a good-bye? They had been her students, after all. Did she feel even a tiny tug at her heart to leave these three vile children behind?

  In a word, no. She had been a prisoner in their house, just as Edmond Dantès was at the Château d’If. The Babushkinovs had tr
eated her badly and were not one bit sorry about it. She wished them no harm, for that was not her way—but nor did she feel obliged to concern herself with the fate of that unhappy, unpleasant, and unrepentant family. “A Swanburne girl may forgive as she chooses, but she is no pushover, either,” she told herself, and felt rather pleased about it, too.

  But blast! What to do about this emerald ring, which could easily pay for her voyage home a hundred times over? She waited to examine it until she was ten blocks from the barracks. Then she could not help herself. She paused in a doorway to retrieve it from her pocket and hold it up to the light. The rectangular stone was the size of a domino, set in a thick gold band with delicate swirling patterns engraved on each side. If fire could be green, this was the green it would be: aglow from within and leaping to catch the light.

  She returned the gem to her pocket and resumed walking. “The ring is lovely, and no doubt priceless. But I will not steal it, and not only because it would be wrong to do so,” she decided. “The stone and setting are much too distinctive not to raise suspicion. If I tried to sell it, the police would be called at once. Still, I see no harm in borrowing it for a short while. The captain said the general must have it by midnight, which gives me plenty of time.”

  She turned the corner of Nevsky Prospect and walked toward Theater Square. There it was! The Bolshoi Kamenny theater, home of the Imperial Russian Ballet.

  Penelope had long dreamed of visiting the ballet, and knew all about it. For example, she knew that bolshoi meant big and kamenny meant stone. It had been named the “big stone theater” to avoid getting mixed up with a small wooden theater that stood nearby. “A big stone, just like the emerald in my pocket. I shall take that as a good sign,” she thought. “Yet as Agatha Swanburne once cautioned, ‘A plan is like a bed: made in the morning, unmade at night.’ I must be prepared for whatever happens.”

  A well-dressed crowd had begun to gather in front of the Bolshoi Kamenny, but she avoided the main entrance and instead made her way to the alley that ran alongside the building. Thank goodness Simon had taught her how theaters work! Here she found the stage door, where the dancers and musicians and stagehands went in and out. She paused for a moment, to prepare. Her Russian would not get her far, but people in the ballet world all spoke French. Admittedly, some time had passed since she had taken French at Swanburne, but how hard could it be to recall a few simple phrases? “Bonjour means ‘good day,’” she reminded herself. “Merci beaucoup means ‘thank you very much.’ And fromage is cheese, which might come in useful if I am offered a snack.” The rest would come back as needed, she felt quite sure.

  She knocked and waited. Moments later, the stage door opened. A man stood there, already impatient. He had the straight spine of a dancer but wore ordinary clothes and a tool belt, and his close-cropped beard was shot with gray. He did not seem particularly friendly, but perhaps he was just busy. “A stage manager! Just what I need,” Penelope thought, for Simon had described the type very well. “A good stage manager is swift and efficient as a London postal worker, and I have no time to waste.”

  She took a deep breath and began, en français: “Good day, mister! I here arrive in look of job. If you please!” She smiled broadly. “I apologize big, very big. My French is old.”

  He lifted an eyebrow at her odd phrasing and answered in rapid-fire French that she could barely follow. “We have no openings in the corps de ballet, mademoiselle. Or among the principal dancers either, unless you are a prima ballerina assoluta, which, no offense, I think you are not.” He gave her an appraising look. “Although your posture is not bad. Much better than your French. Good-bye!”

  She wedged her carpetbag in the doorway. “Wait, wait, wait,” she blurted. “The job I look is sewing. Costumes!” she added, remembering that the French word for costume was, in fact, costume.

  “Ah, costumes! That’s another matter.” He glanced over his shoulder. “The wardrobe mistress always needs help. People scarcely know how to sew on a button anymore, it seems. And they call that progress! Come inside and wait. I’ll see if she’s busy.”

  “Merci, merci beaucoup,” Penelope exclaimed, but he was already gone. She was not entirely sure what the man had said, but it sounded like he was coming back. He had used the word boutons, too. This was another good sign, for she was an excellent button sewer, thanks to a class at Swanburne devoted to that very skill.

  And look where she was! She wondered—and the wondering made her woozy with hope—whether there was a performance scheduled for that night. The people waiting out front had been nattily dressed, after all.

  A moment later the stage manager returned. “Mademoiselle, you’re in luck. The wardrobe mistress is in a frenzy mending the costumes for tonight’s performance, for they are delicate. If you can so much as hold a needle, you will be put to work at once. Follow me.” He sniffed. “I hope you like feathers!”

  Backstage at the Bolshoi Kamenny! It was like being inside an enormous beehive, with a constant buzz and people scurrying everywhere—costumers, stagehands, musicians, the choreographer and his many assistants. Penelope wanted to stop and soak up every detail, but the stage manager glided across the stage at a quick floating trot. It was the noiseless gait of someone who had spent long years moving silently in the dark, so as not to disturb the performance.

  And there were the ballerinas, warming up. Their hair was slicked back into tight buns that sat high upon their heads, the better to emphasize their extra-long necks. Stage makeup made their eyes look enormous, and their long, knobbly-kneed legs disappeared into wide feathered tutus that bounced comically when they moved. It was as if a whole flock of Berthas had been set loose backstage! But these were not flightless birds. On the contrary, they jumped and soared as if the laws of physics did not apply at all.

  “Mademoiselle?” The tap on her shoulder was sharp, the voice pointed. Penelope turned. With a wave of his hand and a few whispered words, the stage manager handed her off to the wardrobe mistress. This lady also wore her hair in a bun, but hers was pure silver. Her gaze was direct but not unkind. She had the uncompromising look of a former dancer, “or a Latin teacher at Swanburne,” Penelope thought, suppressing a smile.

  “You are here to work?” the woman said, in slow, deliberate French. She mimed the act of sewing. It seemed she had been warned that Penelope was not fluent.

  “Yes, thank you.” Penelope followed her to the far side of the stage, which was concealed from the audience by rows of heavy curtains. “These must be the wings,” she said, remembering what Simon had told her about the world backstage.

  “No.” The woman scooped an armful of tutus from a bin and dumped them in Penelope’s arms. “Not the wings. The feathers.”

  It was true. All of the tutus were covered with feathers. Apparently the evening’s ballet was bird themed, and there were dozens of these fragile tutus on hand. With a brief demonstration, the wardrobe mistress showed Penelope how to stitch fresh feathers to the bare spots. It was simple if ticklish work, and Penelope mastered it quickly. The wardrobe mistress was soon satisfied and left her to carry on unsupervised, for the performance would begin in less than an hour and she had a long to-do list to attend to.

  Penelope worked quietly, waiting. When she was certain no one was near, she put down her sewing and examined the rest of the costumes, which were hung on large garment racks by the wall and stored in labeled boxes. There were fancy dresses made of silk and velvet and chiffon, men’s breeches and brocade vests, miles of taffeta and endless lengths of ribbon, and countless boxes of tiaras and leather slippers.

  “What lavish costumes,” she thought. “One could hardly fashion a disguise for a scullery maid or a stowaway out of these elegant fabrics. But for my purposes, they ought to do quite well.” She made her selections, and soon she was back at work.

  “PLACES! PLACES, PLEASE!” THE STAGE manager called. Moments later, cued by a downward strike of the conductor’s baton, the music swelled and filled the the
ater. Like sailors hoisting a mighty sail, burly stagehands hauled thick ropes hand over hand to roll back the stage curtain, and the performance began.

  For those in the audience, it was as if normal time had stopped, as they were transported by the seemingly effortless wonder of it all. For those putting on the show, it was a different matter altogether. For three long hours the orchestra played, the dancers danced, and Penelope sewed as if her life depended on it. Who could have foretold that all those years of stitching pithy wise sayings onto pillows would prove so useful? When anyone came near, she mended tutus. The rest of the time she busied herself sewing a different sort of costume. She had found most of what she needed on the garment racks, but she wanted a heavier fabric to make a warm cloak. Luckily she found a large quantity of attractive red velvet hanging at the edge of the stage.

  “In for a kopek, in for a ruble,” she told herself as she sliced away at it with a pair of scissors. “That is what Agatha Swanburne would say, if she were here and familiar with Russian currency. If I intend to accomplish my goal—which I do!—I must dive all the way into the pool, so to speak, and not tiptoe ’round the edge.”

  As she worked, she snuck awestruck glances at the stage. The Imperial Russian Ballet, laid out before her like a picnic! For years she had dreamed of seeing them perform, and naturally she had always imagined herself seated in the theater, like everyone else, but there was something magical about watching the dancers from backstage. The way they transformed into such airy, weightless beings while dancing, when offstage they were all earthbound muscle and sweaty concentration! Truly, it was a marvel.