Dmitri and the One-Legged Lady. Michael Pearce

her and then get rid of her. So that’s what’s happened, I reckon. They’ve gone and sold her. Either that,’ said the carpenter with grim satisfaction, ‘or she’s seen it coming and bloody well walked out on them!’

      ‘So what are your impressions?’ asked the Father Superior, as they were walking across the yard to the sleigh.

      ‘Oh, mixed,’ said Dmitri. ‘Mixed.’

      ‘A monastery is like that,’ said the Father Superior fondly.

      One of the pilgrims, a large man in peasant shirt and peasant boots, accosted them.

      ‘I don’t like it, Father!’ he said.

      ‘Don’t like what?’

      ‘This business of the Icon. If you ask me, it’s not accidental.’

      ‘What do you mean, it’s not accidental?’

      ‘I reckon it’s deliberate. Taking her away just when she’s needed.’

      ‘What are you talking about?’

      ‘Well, I’ve come here all the way from Tula especially to ask her something and when I get here, she’s not here!’

      ‘You can ask some other icon, can’t you? We’ve got plenty.’

      ‘Ah, but she’s a bit different from other icons, isn’t she? She knows what it’s all about. She did something for people, didn’t she? When they were starving. Well, I come from Tula, and we couldn’t half do with her now, I can tell you, because we’re starving again!’

      The Father Superior tried to push past.

      ‘Try some other icon. Or stay here for a day or two. We hope to have her back soon.’

      ‘I can’t stay here. Not for long, anyway. I’ve got a wife and children at home. My wife’s sick, otherwise she’d have come herself. “I can’t go, Ivan,” she said, “so you’ll have to. I know it’s not your way, but we’ve got to do something and I can’t think of anything else.” So I’ve come, even though it’s not my way. Besides, I thought the Old Girl might listen to me, she knows how it is for people like me. And now I’ve got here, she isn’t here!’

      ‘We’ll, I’m sorry about that,’ said the Father Superior. ‘We’re doing all we can. This gentleman here –’ he indicated Dmitri – ‘is from the Court House at Kursk and he’s going to look into the matter.’

      ‘Ah, but is he?’ said the peasant.

      ‘What do you mean?’ said Dmitri. ‘Am I?’

      ‘Beg pardon, Your Honour, but you people stick together. It might not be worth your while to look too closely.’

      ‘Why wouldn’t it be worth my while?’

      ‘Because they’re all in it together, Tsar, Church, Governor, all of them!’

      ‘You watch your words, my man!’ warned the Father Superior.

      ‘They’re not just my words, they’re what everyone is saying.’

      The Father Superior turned on him.

      ‘Enough of that sort of talk! You go and find a Father and tell him I told you to have a few words with him!’

      ‘Well, I will: but that’s not going to bring me bread, is it?’

      ‘What you need is not bread but straightening out!’

      Dmitri had an unusual feeling as the sleigh approached Kursk; he felt that he was returning to civilization. This was not how he usually felt about Kursk. Dmitri was all for the bright lights of St Petersburg; and light of any sort, in his view, had yet to reach Kursk. Nevertheless, as the sleigh drew up in front of the Court House, he felt a twinge of, well, not quite affection for the city, more the feeling that a sailor has when after long months he returns to the land. Kursk, though on the very edge, was at least on land; whereas the Monastery was very definitely at sea.

      ‘Oh, that icon business,’ said the Procurator dismissively when Dmitri went in to see him. ‘I wouldn’t spend too much time on that if I were you.’

      Which accorded pretty well with Dmitri’s own intentions.

      Boris Petrovich pushed a pile of papers towards him.

      ‘These have just come in,’ he said. ‘Will you take a look at them? I am going out to lunch.’

      The Procurator was always going out to lunch.

      ‘In our position,’ he told Dmitri, ‘it is important to keep a finger on the social pulse.’

      Vera Samsonova, the junior doctor at the local hospital, said she knew what that meant and that if Boris Petrovich tried putting his finger on her pulse again, she’d stick a syringe in him.

      To Dmitri’s surprise, however, he himself was invited out to lunch. To his even greater surprise, the invitation came from the Governor, whom Dmitri had hitherto supposed to be entirely unaware of his existence.

      ‘Mr Kameron?’ said the tall dark girl standing beside him. ‘What sort of a name is that?’

      ‘Scottish,’ said Dmitri. ‘My great-great-grandfather came from Scotland.’

      ‘But how romantic!’ cried the girl.

      ‘Kameron?’ said the Governor’s wife. ‘Is that the Kamerons of Gorny Platok?’

      ‘Why, yes!’ said Dmitri, amazed that anyone had heard of the small farm where his grandfather presently resided. The estate had once been larger but successive generations of spendthrift Kamerons had sold off land until his grandfather had put his foot down and insisted that henceforth male Kamerons should work for a living.

      ‘Then we have something in common,’ said the Governor’s wife, giving Dmitri her arm and leading the way into lunch. ‘Our side of the family have always been gentlemen.’

      ‘But Mr Kameron no longer lives on his estate. Mother,’ said the tall dark girl. ‘He is a lawyer.’

      ‘Well one has to be something. I suppose.’

      ‘And how do you find the law, Mr Kameron?’ asked the dark girl.

      ‘It is at an interesting stage in Russia at the moment. Miss Mitkin. It could go either forward or backward. Until recently, as I’m sure you know, the only law we had was what the Tsar decreed.’

      ‘Well, isn’t that enough?’ said the Governor’s wife.

      ‘Not always. What if the Tsar himself does something wrong?’

      ‘But is that likely?’

      ‘Not the Tsar himself, perhaps; but what about those who serve him?’

      ‘The Government, you mean?’

      ‘Possibly.’

      ‘Governors?’ said the Governor.

      ‘Well –’

      ‘These are radical notions, Mr Kameron,’ said the Governor heavily.

      ‘Mr Kameron is, of course, very young,’ said the Governor’s wife.

      ‘But in touch with the new tone of the times, don’t you think?’ said her daughter.

      ‘Ah, the tone of the times!’ said the Governor’s wife, steering the conversation into safer channels.

      After lunch the two women retired and the Governor led Dmitri into a pleasant room which seemed to serve as a second sitting room. Its walls were covered with icons.

      ‘Quite nice, aren’t they?’ said the Governor, seeing, and mistaking, Dmitri’s interest.

      ‘And some of them are not without value. They’re all domestic icons, of course. Not,’ he smiled, ‘like the