The Girl of the Lake Read online

  The Old Count’s son, whom Mr. D’Arcy called the Young Count, was one of the troublesome thinkers. He’d taken the new philosophies deeply to heart, finding them humane, at least in theory, moderate and achievable. The serfs had been freed long before, in the year 1860, but freed only to economic slavery. The thinkers rose up with ideas to solve these problems: constitutional monarchy, social democracy, anarchism, nihilism, Bolshevism, Menshevism, land reform. The peasants began to covet the fields they worked.

  Mr. D’Arcy gave Bobby a long look. “These are things we can talk about in the future, you and I, should you be inclined.”

  Bobby nodded noncommittally, offered a polite smile.

  Mr. D’Arcy fingered the figurine of the Old Count. “Him exactly,” he said. And then: “But I’m afraid our game starts with the violent death of this man, and with the revision, I should say, of the Young Count’s idealism.” The Old Count, it seemed, had cut off all but the most rudimentary foodstuffs to his peasants after the uprisings of 1905. He made hunting illegal, fenced off the ponds, saw trespassers and poachers hung. Mr. D’Arcy pointed at various places on the map as if the very neighborhoods and shop fronts and carriages were pictured there. The Neva blacksmith, he explained, Iosif Vladimirovich Alyoishin, became enraged when his dog was run over by the mounted escorts of the Old Count’s party, which had come into St. Petersburg to meet with the hated tsar. Iosif, a reader and declaimer of poetry, educated by the decrees of the Edict of Emancipation, eloquent far beyond his station, ran after the carriages, caught up with them at the Neva River Market, demanded restitution.

  “And what do you think the Old Count said to kindly Iosif, Robert? Did he say he was sorry? Did he send a servant down next day with one of his two hundred forty-six dogs? No. The Old Count said this: ‘Well, blacksmith, call on butcher Evanitsky! You and your brothers won’t need your meat ration this month!’ ”

  Iosif forgot himself and leapt, pulled the Old Count out of his saddle onto the cobblestones. And that might have been that, with Iosif hanged shortly, but the crowd surged in. There was no time for rope, no guns, none of that—the peasants pulled up cobblestones and bashed noble brains, carried the bodies through the market square, hung twelve of them on the iron spikes of the fence around the old church. The priest burst out, aghast, held his hands up for quiet, said: “You have proved to God that you are serfs always!”

  Soon he was hanging from the fence himself.

  Mr. D’Arcy gazed at the Old Count’s figurine a long time, said, “I’m glad you’ve picked him out—you’ve a marvelous eye—let us bury him. We’ll need a graveyard before we’re through, I should say! Let us put our cemetery somewhere beautiful, somewhere we won’t have to move it, here in Sweden, perhaps.”

  Bobby flew the remains of the Old Count to Sweden with a slow, solemn hand, lay the fat little figurine on its back. In the ornate box of people he’d seen a priest, so he picked that figure out too, flew it slowly to Sweden, visibly pleasing Mr. D’Arcy, then found eleven nobles one at a time, flew them to Sweden, too.

  Bobby said, “The tsar is like the king?”

  “Bigger than a king! And his work of repression—repression is a holding down by force—the repression in those years was bloody, inhuman. All of life became so. Murder poured from the palace. The Young Count prevented what he could on his own lands through acts of kindness, but saw Iosif to the gallows, saw half the peasant men of the county hung, as well, for merely having been in the square. Then history moved forward. You’ll want to pick out some babies there, and more children, and some teens, and some young adults. Six in ten must be buried. Disease, largely, but common accidents as well.”

  Bobby counted out a dozen babies and young children and youths and maidens, flew them solemnly to the growing pile in Sweden. Mr. D’Arcy stood as if at a funeral, watched each flight to heaven solemnly, none of the familiar adult hurrying or condescension when it came to make-believe.

  When all the dead were safely buried, he said, “World War I broke out in 1914. The Young Count was less young now. His politics, which had formerly urged him toward an enlightened aristocracy, urged him now toward an unpopular parliamentarianism in which a monarch might have some role, however ceremonial. I hope you are following some of this, Robert. Good, good—smart boy—we’ll fill in the gaps presently—we have years to come in our friendship!”

  Bobby grinned. He wasn’t having trouble following Mr. D’Arcy—there was the map in front of them, there were the babies: a little cough, a growing fever, and dead. There was the tsar—a king’s king, flashing with jewels, robes purple—a cruel master!

  Mr. D’Arcy smiled, too, just so, and proceeded to give a carefully calibrated lecture in history, how the tsar entered the Great War enthusiastically, how most Russian factions followed him, how the separatist Bolsheviks held back, how the new war brought worse food shortages and more death, how the news was all gossip with no presses operating, how with the lack of food and information, anarchy and insurrection were rife.

  “Now, I must mention Rasputin. Have you heard of him Robert? No? Then listen. Later you can read up and tell me what you think of him!” Rasputin, so Mr. D’Arcy said, was an opportunist, a satyr, a supposed monk, politely said to be “counseling” Empress Alexandra, who at his behest (so it was rumored) made secret deals with the kaiser of Germany, further alienating the people and now the nobility as well. Saint Petersburg itself was torn. The many factions gradually coalesced into two armed camps: the White Army, made up of the Bolsheviks, and the Red Army, made up of the Soviets. Alexander Kerensky and his revolutionary socialists were squeezed into power between these forces. For a young nobleman like Count Darlotsoff, there was no one left to trust. In desperation, winter 1916, he packed his townhouses and took his family to the dacha compound. Companies of soldiers roamed the countryside as brigands, in uniform or no.

  Bobby listened intently and watched the map, from which the story seemed to rise.

  “One day,” said Mr. D’Arcy, “a band of forty came swaggering up the maple lane at Dacha Darlotsoff, straight to the grand doors! Hearing their shouts, the Young Count, though not feeling brave, stood up from breakfast, pulled off his napkin, yanked on his jacket, hefted his sword!” Alone, the Young Count stepped outside, barred the doors behind him, took a stand. Soon his uncles came running from their houses to support him, then his brothers-in-law, his five teenaged nephews, several young cousins, finally the three manservants who hadn’t run off: nineteen youths and men, in all, standing against forty.

  “The oldest was Uncle Pieter, my age now, eighty-one. The youngest, Cousin Victor (who had been named for Victor Hugo), your age, at a guess; he was twelve.” The leader of the renegades spoke: “We come in peace.” He was tall, with roughly cut leather pants, and for a uniform nothing but the vestiges of an officer’s jacket, on its breast a badge from neighbor Simeonov’s chest. The Young Count’s heart pounded. But he was master of the estate and had established himself as a kindly one, generous and fair. He stood tall in his riding boots, said, “If you come in peace, then go in peace,” a rather nice construction, as he thought, and all of the brigands and all of the dacha’s men stood frozen till suddenly the great doors flew open and out raced the Youngest Count, a boy nicknamed Chimp, a baby of five years still in short pants and curls, shouting: “Turks! Huns! I kill you!” Waving his wooden sword and charging with it on an imaginary steed through the men of his family and into the phalanx of soldiers. And just when one would expect in normal times among normal men laughter and relief, a brigand in the third or fourth rank of men—that’s how deep the brave Littlest Count had penetrated—picked the boy up, flung him in the air, caught him by the feet, and dashed his brains out on the stone stairs of the main dwelling. From the criminal’s mates there were cries of disgust, but never mind—the Young Count struck their leader down with his sword, a perfect thrust through the neck, and the old uncles faced the next tier slashing, killing, but were overwhelmed by the advancing r
emains of the forty and were murdered one at a time, dying beheaded, bleating, disemboweled, gushing blood, as the Young Count and the brave young nephews backed up to the great doors. From above, sudden shots—the Young Countess and the Old Countess, as it turned out, firing the sophisticated hunting rifles of dacha Darlotsoff round after round into the band of criminals. And this saved the day: the ragtag soldiers had only three or four old muskets, slow to load. By the time the brigands turned and ran, twenty or more of them were dead on the stairs, piled on Chimp’s tiny body, and on the bodies of the uncles, and the brothers-in-law, and on Feodor, favorite nephew, fourteen years of age, and on two boy cousins, nicknamed Marcel and Louis, and on the cook, the French tutor, and the stable boy, too, the loyal stable boy who’d come up from the village that morning.

  Mr. D’Arcy took a long breath, stood erect, puffed his cheeks, blew out a series of sighs, looking over the length of the map as if he were staring out across the great expanse of Russia herself. Bobby flew the broken body of Chimp to Sweden first, then those of the three old uncles, one at a time, full ceremony each, then the others. He huddled the remaining family—mostly women and children—behind the Young Count, pictured the great wooden dacha doors closing safe behind them, imagined the shouts, the tears, the triumph of the women upstairs muted instantly by the tragedy they hadn’t been able to forestall but only interrupt.

  Mr. D’Arcy lowered his voice, continued his story. That evening, only two hours later, barely enough time to drag in the dead family members for lying-in, a score of brigand bodies still splayed out on the steps, the remains of the motley band returned with a disgruntled hoard of peasants from beyond the ponds. These hundred men hid behind the piled bodies, then stormed the great doors. The Young Count and his nephews and nieces and daughters, armed one and all with elegant and thoroughly modern hunting rifles but little skill among them, fired from the downstairs windows into the advance killing many, wounding many.

  “Even my children fought, made murderers by those they killed!”

  Upstairs at the dacha, the Young Count’s pretty wife loaded rifles for the Old Countess, who was a masterful shot, picking off brigands like so many blackbirds in the stubble of rye. The brigands and their peasant conscripts were no better armed than earlier, died in growing heaps, but a handful managed to set the dacha doors on fire, filling the house with smoke. Then four of the beasts climbed the stones to the second story, surprising the Old Countess, who was still firing on their brothers. They overwhelmed her and tossed her bodily out a grand window. She broke on the ground below in sight of her son, died without a sound while the four brigands handed down their prize, the Young Countess, who scratched at their eyes, called them dogs. One could not shoot for fear of hitting her. One could not give chase, either, not with six young women and girls unprotected in the house.

  Mr. D’Arcy fell into a deep silence while Bobby flew the dead to Sweden. First, the Old Countess in her plumpness, crack shot, then the rest.

  The Young Count didn’t know it at the time, of course, but this was the February Revolution in progress. The year was new, 1917. His darling wife carried off! His mother defenestrated! His horses gone. His barns afire. As for men, only the young German was still alive, that mere gardener’s assistant, a coarse country boy the Young Count had never been fond of.

  Bobby flew the tutor, the cook, and the stable boy off to Sweden, one by one. The Young Countess he held in his hand a minute—she’d only been carried off, perhaps to be rescued—so beautiful, the figurine he’d picked, the most beautiful of them all, flowing long red hair, red and silver gown. Mr. D’Arcy gazed at her, too, at length shook his head very slightly. “She mustn’t have lived long at their hands,” he said.

  To Sweden with her.

  Around St. Petersburg Bobby could see rivers of blood, smoke pouring from dachas, flames enveloping the finest houses in the countryside. Children carried off! Gentle milk cows slaughtered by starving roamers!

  Mr. D’Arcy said, “Now—tell me, Robert.” He was starting to pronounce Bobby’s formal name just the way the part-time French teacher at West School did: Ro-bear. “If you are the Young Count, what do you do next? Remember—you have two living daughters and three nieces, aged sixteen down to seven, a lapsed nun for governess, a brave if stubborn young German gardener left. The only other adult is your sister-in-law, who has always been called Monique rather than her Russian name, which was Evgeniya. Now—tell me, tell me—what is your course of action?”

  Bobby checked the figurines. What Mr. D’Arcy had said, his eyes closed, was exactly true: the Young Count was surrounded by eight, and only one a man. And Bobby didn’t know what to do. His own heart began to beat in his own thin chest, all of him safe in this rich man’s map room except his imagination. First thought that came to his careful head was of heroics: “The gardener and I go to rescue the Young Countess! The women hide? The women and girls hide in the tornado shelter!” This from The Wizard of Oz.

  Mr. D’Arcy smiled at that suggestion briefly, said, “The German gardener is but seventeen, I should say, a hulk, quiet but impassive. And the house, remember, is smoking at the doors. These girls—all very lovely! Babies some of them, two of them your daughters! And Monique crying and moaning—she’s lost her head—no help there. Do you see?”

  Bobby thought desperately, gave a desperate answer: “We have to gather everyone and leave!”

  And Mr. D’Arcy snapped back: “Just leave the dacha with all its furnishings, all your wealth, all your beloved objects, papers, portraits, pets?”

  Bobby, trying to be in character, said, “But the brigands will be back!”

  Mr. D’Arcy, not acting, not at all, almost in tears, said, “Leave the dacha and go . . . where? Where will they not be intercepted? Where should their flight take them?”

  “The forest!”

  “Exactly—the forest.” Mr. D’Arcy closed his eyes, leaned back in his chair, rested a moment before plunging on. He told of the fires in the forest, the brigands lurking there, no escape route obvious.

  Bobby smelled the smoke, saw all the blood, saw the corpses of the old uncles so lovingly arranged on all the couches of the grand drawing room, the nephews laid out on the floors beside their fathers. He said, “We’d better get going! Let’s move!” He looked at the crackled old map, saw a stream named Ota just there where the dacha was marked in Mr. D’Arcy’s own ink. He said, “To the stream? Is there a canoe?”

  “Well thought, Robert. Except that, of course, the river Ota is quite frozen.”

  “A sled!” cried Bobby.

  Yes, a sled. The Young Count and his daughter Petra (the only girl capable), along with the dour gardener, loaded one of the dacha’s formal sleighs with food and firearms and family papers fast as they could, then escorted trembling Monique and the younger girls down to the ice, none too soon: a mob in the hundreds approached, bearing torches.

  Bobby bit his nails, said, “We have to hurry!”

  “Hurry, Robert, yes. The girls mounted the sleigh on their own. Monique, we had to push. And Dort and I acted as horses, took up the trace bars, pulled the sleigh out onto the Ota.”

  “Safe,” Bobby said. “Safe!”

  “Hardly,” said Mr. D’Arcy blackly.

  “NO HOMEWORK TONIGHT?” BOBBY’S father said at dinner.

  Bobby, lost in thought, had to scramble to keep his cover, said, “Report.”

  “Report?” his mom said.

  “On the, um, Russian Revolution.”

  “Oh, I know a thing or two about that,” Bobby’s father said. “Romanovs. Rasputin. The tsar and tsarina and tsarlings eating too much caviar! It all leads them right down into World War I.”

  “Yes,” Bobby said. “But the worst of it comes well after World War I begins!”

  His father and mother both looked at him a long time, proud as pizza pie. Their faces said it all: Bobby finally taking an interest.

  His dad said, “Let’s get out the Encyclopaedia Britannica af
ter supper!”

  BOBBY RAN INTO THE woods, took the commando route, even crawled to the front door of Harbinger Hall—he was a long-lost nephew, a brave boy bringing news of the river Ota. At the great doors of Mr. D’Arcy’s stone house, he didn’t even have to knock: Hilyard was there. “Master Robert,” he said.

  “Hi,” Bobby said.

  “Mr. D’Arcy will be down from his bath in a moment. You are to wait in his study.”

  Yesterday, Bobby had had to ask Mr. D’Arcy to stop the game: bus time. And Bobby had worried about this in the night, feeling he might have offended the old man. He stood in the study not touching anything (Hilyard had said he had best not), only examining the grand bookshelf, trying without luck to pick out the secret door. Soon Mr. D’Arcy shuffled in, wearing a silk smoking jacket like the Young Count himself might, the jacket over pajama pants, lamb’s-wool slippers.

  “Good morning, Robert!” Ro-bear. “I see your smile is with you! You are ready for more of my dismal story, more of our game, I should say.”

  “Yip.”

  “But first, Hilyard has made me realize that there are some questions to ask of you. First: your family. Are you Robert Mullendore?”

  “Uh, yip.”

  “And your mum, is she the Ann Mullendore who volunteers with the garden club?”

  “Yip: Ann.”

  “So the redoubtable Hilyard did recognize you, I should say. The second question is about your studies: I’d made the rather glib assumption that this for you was a holiday week of some nature. Hilyard says no. So: why are you not in school?”

  Seven lies went through Bobby’s head, but the truth bobbed up in the light of Mr. D’Arcy’s clear eyes upon him: “I am skipping.”

  “Skipping. I believe I know what that means. Dort says he saw you of a morning a month ago, creeping through the woods, then again perhaps twice, and then yesterday of course, leading up to his making your acquaintance.”