The Secret Countess Read online

  Eva Ibbotson was born in Vienna, but when the Nazis came to power her family fled to England and she was sent to boarding school. She planned to become a physiologist, but hated doing experiments on animals and was rescued from some fierce rabbits by her husband-to-be. She became a writer while bringing up her four children, and her bestselling novels for both adults and children have been published around the world. Her books have also won and been shortlisted for many prizes. Journey to the River Sea won the Nestlé Gold Award and was runner-up for the Whitbread Children’s Book of the Year and the Guardian Fiction Award. The Star of Kazan won the Nestlé Silver Award and was shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal. Eva lives in Newcastle.

  Books by Eva Ibbotson

  A Song for Summer

  The Star of Kazan

  Journey to the River Sea

  The Beasts of Clawstone Castle

  The Great Ghost Rescue

  Which Witch?

  The Haunting of Hiram

  Not Just a Witch

  The Secret of Platform 13

  Dial a Ghost

  Monster Mission

  Coming soon

  The Morning Gift

  EVA IBBOTSON

  YOUNG PICADOR

  First published 1981 by Macdonald Futura as A Countess Below Stairs

  First published in paperback 2007 by Young Picador

  This electronic edition published 2007 by Young Picador

  an imprint of Pan Macmillan Limited

  20 New Wharf Road, London N1 9RR

  Basingstoke and Oxford

  www.panmacmillan.com

  Associated companies throughout the world

  ISBN 978-0-230-22602-9 PDF

  ISBN 978-0-230-22603-6 EPUB

  Copyright © Eva Ibbotson 1981, 2007

  The right of Eva Ibbotson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  You may not copy, store, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Visit www.panmacmillan.com to read more about all our books and to buy them. You will also find features, author interviews and news of any author events, and you can sign up for e-newsletters so that you’re always first to hear about our new releases.

  CONTENTS

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  For Jane

  PROLOGUE

  In the fabled, glittering world that was St Petersburg before the First World War there lived, in an ice-blue palace overlooking the river Neva, a family on whom the gods seemed to have lavished their gifts with an almost comical abundance.

  Count and Countess Grazinsky possessed – in addition to the eighty-roomed palace on the Admiralty Quay with its Tintorettos and Titians, its Scythian gold under glass in the library, its ballroom illuminated by a hundred Bohemian chandeliers – an estate in the Crimea, another on the Don and a hunting lodge in Poland which the countess, who was not of an enquiring turn of mind, had never even seen. The count, who was aide de camp to the tsar, also owned a paper mill in Finland, a coal mine in the Urals and an oil refinery in Sarkahan. His wife, a reluctant lady of the bedchamber to the tsarina, whom she detested, could count among her jewels the diamond and sapphire pendant which Potemkin had designed for Catherine the Great and had inherited, in her own right, shares in the Trans-Siberian Railway and a block of offices in Kiev. The countess’s dresses were made in Paris, her shoes in London and though she could presumably have put on her own stockings, she had never in her life been called upon to do so.

  But the real treasure of the Grazinsky household with its winter garden rampant with hibiscus and passion flowers, its liveried footmen and scurrying maids, was a tiny, dark-haired, bird-thin little girl, their daughter, Anna. On this button-sized countess, with her dusky, duckling-feather hair, her look of being about to devour life in all its glory like a ravenous fledgling, her adoring father showered the diminutives which come so readily to Russian lips: ‘Little Soul’, of course, ‘Doushenka’, loveliest of endearments but, more often, ‘Little Candle’ or ‘Little Star’, paying tribute to a strange, incandescent quality in this child who so totally lacked her mother’s blonde, voluptuous beauty and her father’s traditional good looks.

  Like most members of the St Petersburg nobility, the Grazinskys were cultured, cosmopolitan and multilingual. The count and countess spoke French to each other. Russian was for servants, children and the act of love; English and German they used only when it was unavoidable. By the time she was five years old, Anna had had three governesses: Madame Leblanc, who combined the face of a Notre Dame gargoyle with a most beautiful speaking voice, Fräulein Schneider, a devout and placid Lutheran from Hamburg – and Miss Winifred Pinfold from Putney, London.

  It was the last of these, a gaunt and angular spinster with whose nose one could have cut cheese, that Anna inexplicably chose to worship, enduring at the hands of the Englishwoman not only the cold baths and scrubbings with Pears soap and the wrenching open of the sealed bedroom windows, but that ultimate martyrdom, the afternoon walk.

  ‘Very bracing,’ Miss Pinfold would comment, steering the tiny, fur-trussed countess, rigid in her three layers of cashmere, her padded capok lining, her sable coat and felt valenki along the icy quays and gigantic squares of the city which Peter the Great had chosen to raise from the salt marshes and swamp-infested islands of the Gulf of Finland in the worst climate in the world.

  ‘Not at all like the dear Thames,’ Miss Pinfold would remark, watching a party of Lapps encamped on the solid white wastes of the Neva – and receiving, on the scimitar of her crimsoned nose, a shower of snow from an overhanging caryatid.

  It was during these Siberian walks that Anna would meet other children who shared her exalted martyrdom: pint-sized princelings, diminutive countesses, muffled bankers’ daughters clinging like clumps of moss to the granite boulders of their English governesses. Her adored Cousin Sergei, for example, three years older than Anna, his face between the earmuffs of his shapka, pale with impending frostbite and outraged manhood as he trudged behind his intrepid Miss King along the interminable, blood-red facade of the Winter Palace; or the blue-eyed, dimpled Kira Satayev, hardly bigger than the ermine muff in which she tried to warm her puffball of a nose.

  Yet it was during those arctic afternoon excursions that Anna, piecing together the few remarks that the wind-buffeted Miss Pinfold allowed herself, became possessed of a country of little, sun-lit fields and parks that were for ever green. A patchwork country, flower-filled and gentle, in which a smiling queen stood on street corners bestowing roses which miraculously grew on pins upon a grateful populace . . . A country without winter or anarchists whose name was England.

  Anna grew and nothing was too good for her. When she was seven her father gave her, on her nameday, a white and golden boat with a tasselled crimson canopy in which four liveried oarsmen rowed her on picnics to the islands. Each Christmas, one of Fabergé’s craftsmen fashioned for he
r an exquisite beast so small that she could palm it in her muff: a springing leopard of lapis lazuli, a jade gazelle with shining ruby eyes . . . To draw her sledge through the park of Grazbaya, their estate on the Don, the count conjured up two silken-haired Siberian yaks.

  ‘You spoil her,’ said Miss Pinfold, worrying, to the count.

  ‘I may spoil her,’ the tall, blond-bearded count would reply, ‘but is she spoilt?’

  And the strange thing was that Anna wasn’t. The little girl, wobbling on a pile of cushions on the fully-extended piano stool to practise her études, gyrating obediently with her Cousin Sergei to the beat of a polonaise at dancing class or reciting Les Malheurs de Sophy to Mademoiselle Leblanc, showed no sign whatsoever of selfishness or pride. It was as though her mother’s cosseting, the fussing of the servants, her father’s limitless adoration, produced in her only a kind of surprised humility. Miss Pinfold, watching her charge hawk-eyed, had to admit herself defeated. If ever there was such a thing as natural goodness it existed in this child.

  When Anna was eight years old, the gods tilted their cornucopia over the Grazinskys once again and, in the spring of 1907, the countess gave birth to a son whom they christened Peter. The baby was enchanting: blue-eyed, blond as butter, firmly and delectably fat. The count and countess, who had longed for a son, were ecstatic, friends and relations flocked to congratulate and Old Niannka, the ferocious Georgian wet nurse with her leather pouch containing the mummified index finger of St Nino, filled the house with her mumbling jubilation.

  Seeing this, Miss Pinfold moved closer to the Countess Anna, as did Mademoiselle Leblanc and Fräulein Schneider and the phalanx of tutors and grooms and servants who surrounded the little girl, waiting for jealousy and tantrums.

  They waited in vain. To Anna, the baby was a miracle of which she never tired. She had to be plucked from his side at bedtime and would be found in her nightdress at dawn, kneeling beside the cot and telling the baby long and complex stories to which he listened eagerly, his head pressed against the wooden bars.

  Love begets love. As he grew, Petya followed his sister everywhere and his cry of: ‘Wait for me, Annoushka!’ in lisping Russian, entreating English or fragmented French echoed through the birch forests round Grazbaya, along the tamarisk-fringed beaches of the Crimea, through the rich, dark rooms of the palace in Petersburg. And Anna did wait for him. She was to do so always.

  As she moved from the idyll of her childhood into adolescence, Anna, still looking like an incandescent fledgling, only ran harder at the glory that was life. She fell in love with her handsome Cousin Sergei, with the blind piano tuner who tended the count’s Bechsteins, with Chaliapin who came to sing gypsy songs in his dark and smoky voice after the opera. She became a Tolstoyan, renouncing meat, finery and the anticipated pleasures of the flesh. It was a bad time for the Grazinskys, as Anna hobbled round the palace in brown worsted and a pair of unspeakable birch bark shoes said to have been made by the Great Man himself in the year before he died. Fortunately, before her feet sustained permanent damage, Diaghilev brought his dancers back from their triumphant tour of Europe and Anna, who for years had hung out of her parents’ blue and silver box at the Maryinsky being the doomed Swan Queen or mad Giselle, now took up with passion the cause of the rogue impresario and the dazzling, modern ballets which stuffy St Petersburg had condemned out of hand.

  ‘Oh, how beautiful it is! Chto za krassota!’ was Anna’s cry during these years: of the glistening dome of St Isaacs soaring above the mist, of a Raphael Madonna in the Hermitage, a cobweb, a remarkably improper négligé in a shop window on the Nevsky Prospekt.

  There seemed no reason why this fabled life should ever end. In 1913 Russia was prosperous and busy with the celebrations to mark three hundred years of Romanov rule. In the spring of that year, Anna, holding down her wriggling brother Petya, attended a Thanksgiving Service in Kazan Cathedral in the presence of the tsar and tsarina, the pretty grand duchesses and the frail little tsarevitch, miraculously recovered from a serious illness. A few days later, she helped her mother dress for the great costume ball in the Salles de la Noblesse . . .

  ‘It’ll be your turn soon, mylenka,’ said the pleasure-loving countess as she fastened the famous Grazinsky emeralds over her old boyar dress of wine-dark velvet and set the sun-shaped, golden kokoshnik on her abundant hair. For, of course, she had planned Anna’s debut for years, knew to the last hair of their well-born heads the young men she would permit to address, and ultimately espouse, her daughter.

  There was just one more year of picnics in the birch forests round Grazbaya, of skating parties and theatricals with Sergei, now in his last year at the exclusive Corps des Pages, and pretty, frivolous Kira and a host of friends.

  And then the archduke with the face of an ill-tempered bullfrog and the charming wife who had so dearly and unaccountably loved him, were assassinated at Sarajevo. To the Russians, accustomed to losing tsars and grand dukes time and time again in this way, it seemed just another in an endless succession of political murders. But this time the glittering toy that was the talk of war slipped from the hands of the politicians . . . and a world ended.

  Overnight, meek, devoted Fräulein Schneider became ‘the enemy’ and had to be escorted to the Warsaw Station under guard. Mademoiselle Leblanc, who had aged parents, also left to return to France. Miss Pinfold stayed.

  ‘God keep you safe, my Little Star,’ the count whispered to Anna, holding her close. ‘Look after your mother and your brother,’ – and rode away down the Nevsky, looking unutterably splendid in his uniform of the Chevalier Guards. Three months later, he lay dead in a swamp-infested Prussian forest, and the flame that had burned in his daughter since her birth, flickered and died.

  They carried on. The countess, aged by ten years, organized soup kitchens and equipped a fleet of ambulances at her own expense. Although Anna was too young to enrol officially as a nurse, she spent each day at the Georguievski Hospital, rolling bandages and making dressings. As the shortages and hardship grew worse, Miss Pinfold increasingly took over the housekeeping, organizing the queues for bread, the foraging for fuel.

  When the revolution came and the Bolsheviks seized power from the moderates, the Grazinskys fared badly. They had been too close to the court and, with no one to advise them, they tarried too long in the two rooms of their looted palace which the authorities allowed them to use. It was only when Petya was stoned on the way home from school that they finally acted and joined the stream of refugees fleeing northwards through Finland, east to Vladivostock, south to the Black Sea and Turkey.

  The Grazinskys went south. They had entrusted the bulk of their jewels to Niannka, the count’s Georgian wet nurse, who was sent ahead with a king’s ransom in pearls, emeralds and rubies hidden in her shabby luggage.

  The old woman never arrived at their rendezvous. They waited as long as they dared, unable to believe that she had betrayed them, but were eventually compelled to travel wearily on. In March 1919 they reached Sebastapol, where Miss Pinfold retired behind a palm tree to fish, from the pocket of her green chilprufe knickers, their last remaining jewel, the Orlov diamond, and persuaded the captain of a Greek trawler to take them to Constantinople.

  A month later, they reached England.

  1

  ‘You cannot be a housemaid, Anna,’ said Miss Pinfold firmly. ‘It is quite absurd. It is out of the question.’

  ‘Yes I can. Pinny. I must. It is the only job they had vacant at the registry office. Mersham is a very beautiful house, the lady told me, and it is in the country so it will be healthy, with fresh air!’

  Anna’s long-lashed Byzantine eyes glowed with fervour, her expressive narrow hands sketched a gesture indicative of the Great Outdoors. Miss Pinfold put down the countess’s last pair of silk stockings, which she had been mending, and pushed her pince-nez on to her forehead.

  ‘Look, dear, English households are not free and easy like Russian ones. There’s a great hierarchy below stairs: upper s
ervants, lower servants, everything just so. And they can be very cruel to an outsider.’

  ‘Pinny, I cannot remain here, living on your hospitality. It is monstrous!’ Anna’s ‘r’s were beginning to roll badly, always a sign of deep emotion. ‘Of course I would rather be a taxi driver like Prince Sokharin or Colonel Terek. Or a doorman at the Ritz like Uncle Kolya. Much rather. But I don’t think they will let women—’

  ‘No, I don’t think they will either, dear,’ said Pinny hastily, trying to divert Anna from one of her recurrent grievances. ‘And as for living on my hospitality, I’ve never heard such nonsense. If you and your mother stayed here all your lives, I could never repay the kindness your family has shown to me.’

  They were sitting in the tiny parlour of the mews house in Paddington which Pinny, by sending home her savings, had managed to purchase for her old age. Pinny’s sister, who had been living there, had tactfully gone to stay with a cousin. Even so, the little house was undeniably crowded.

  ‘It’s all right for Mama, Pinny. She isn’t well and she’s no longer young. But I . . . Pinny, I need to work.’

  ‘Yes, Anna, I understand that. But not as a housemaid. There must be something else.’

  But in the summer of 1919 there wasn’t. Soldiers back from the war, women discharged from the armament factories and work on the land – all haunted the employment agencies seeking jobs. For a young girl, untrained and foreign, the chances were bleak indeed.

  The Grazinskys had arrived in London two months earlier. Virtually penniless, their first thought had been for Petya. The countess had caught typhus in the squalor of the transit camp in Constantinople and was too weak to do anything but rest, so it was Anna who had braved the Grand Duchess Xenia at court and extracted from that old friend of her father’s the offer of Petya’s school fees at a famous and liberal public school in Yorkshire.