just outside Malinov and our breath came in white vapor. The oven was making quick work of the last of our birch logs and the room was cold, but the tallow candle on her bedside table showed Mamka’s forehead shone with fever. She pulled at the neck of her nightdress and gulped air. Maybe consumption, an old midwife had said the week before, charging extra for a night visit. Maybe not.
I combed Mamka’s hair, long and waved about her shoulders, and helped her slip into a bed jacket of her own making, the silver embroidery down the placket some of her best work. I placed a pearled headdress on her head, her own mother’s kokoshnik. How the sickness had aged her. Though not yet forty years old she looked at least ten years older there in the shadows, but the hollows under her cheekbones gave her a regal look. That made sense since her father had come from a good family, had been a respected teacher, and had even seen the royal yacht.
Mamka held up one hand. “Don’t get too close, lyubov.”
“Hush. Save your strength for the reading. And don’t forget to ask the countess if I can work for her.”
“You’re better off staying safe here with me.”
I stepped away from the bed. “I can’t stay cooped up forever.”
“Don’t be cross, Inka.”
I knelt by the bed and took her hand in mine. “I imagine she pays a good wage.”
What was it like in the estate? Images of stylish ladies like the tsar’s daughters, the grand duchesses, floated before me. Their white dresses. Leather shoes.
“Please may I go?”
“Perhaps.” She stared at the flickering candle. “Maybe they need kitchen help?”
“Ask. She will say yes if the reading is good.”
Mamka folded her arms across her belly. “I’m afraid, Inka.”
“This will be the last reading, I promise, no matter what Taras says.”
“Stay close?”
“Of course.”
The rain grew louder on the roof. Would it leak on our special guest?
I set a cup of boiled milk on the bedside table for the countess and placed our one chair close to the bed, but just far enough away for our visitor to think she might escape contagion. Predicting the future for clients had become harder on Mamka, for as she grew older the visions became more vivid, too real, but people came all week looking to have fortunes told and the money helped us buy food.
“My cards…” Mamka said, patting the bed around her.
I took her grand oracle cards, tied with a red cord, from my pocket. They felt good, smooth and worn, French cards: Cartomancie Française, but written in Russian. Each card was a little colored masterpiece and, best of all, rarely wrong. I handed them to her and she held them to her breast.
I placed the linden plank on which Mamka performed her marvels across her lap, then lit a lump of frankincense and watched smoke curl up through the rafters, past the dried herbs hanging there. She felt it encouraged the spirits. It encouraged the clients, too, since the scent covered the sweet odor of sickness. Why do people risk death just to peek at their future?
Taras, who took care of us in his own way, waited in the shed and watched it all through his favorite crack in the wall. He had lived there for as long as I could remember; sleeping among the tools Papa had taught him with, so clever, until he went away for two years to prison in Siberia, a place that had changed him in every bad way possible.
A jangle of bells, a coachman’s Whoa!, and a woman’s voice came all at once outside and I hurried to the door. I heaved it open and the candle flame grew brighter, as if it expected the guest, then settled. Outside our door the troika came to a stop and the two black horses pawed the ground. In the back of the open carriage sat a lady in a sable hat, up to her neck in a polar bear fur rug.
The countess.
The coachman threw off the rug and she stepped down and through the doorway, dabbing her handkerchief at the wet little dog in her arms. As she passed, I almost reached out to caress the thick fur of her sable shuba. What a coat it was, deep red, the beads of rain collected there glittering in the candlelight.
A servant in a green jacket took his place near the door as the countess stepped to the beautiful corner, the saw-toothed shelf