“For Donia,” he explained. “She spent so many years in the cramped rooms above the bakery, she isn’t keen on trading them for our upstairs apartments. I was hoping you would help me fix it up, to surprise her.”
We closed the shop early, bundled into our furs, and trudged four miles north from the village through the previous day’s snow. Nestled into the very edge of the forest was the house, a wooden cottage with a stone chimney that had intricate woodwork around the roof and patterned shutters. The windows were broken, the paint chipped, the shutters sagging.
My father glanced over at me. “You have to see its heart, love. Look past the flaws.” He fished a key out of his pocket and unlocked the door.
We stepped in, onto creaky wooden floors overstrewn with dirt and leaves that had blown in through the broken windows. The wallpaper was torn and faded, the carpet in front of the dead hearth threadbare. But even so, my father was right—it had a good heart.
He took my hand, like he hadn’t done since I was a young child, and led me quietly through the whole house: parlor, sitting room, kitchen, then upstairs to the two bedrooms and private lavatory. We climbed one more creaky staircase to a charming attic room, with a sloped roof and large window overlooking the woods. It was in less disrepair than the rest of the house, and I got the feeling it hadn’t really been lived in by the cottage’s former occupants.
I loved it instantly.
My father could tell. “It’s yours, if you want it. I doubt Donia will want to climb up this way very often.”
I hugged him, because I knew he’d picked the room out specifically for me.
We tramped back down to the main floor. “Can we really afford it, though, Papa?”
He smiled. “I signed the papers this morning.”
This wasn’t quite an answer, but I reasoned with a little careful planning and penny-hoarding, we could make it work.
We walked back to the bookshop in the gathering dark, discussing what needed to be done to make the cottage livable. It started snowing again, but I hardly felt the cold, warmed by my father’s love for me, and knowing that not even a stepmother could take that away.
AFTER WEEKS OF WORKING ON the house in shifts—mostly my father and me, with Rodya helping when he could—my father finally deemed the cottage ready for Donia’s approval. Rodya took the afternoon off from the clockmaker’s, and the three of us waited at the bookshop for her to join us. I was nervous and jittery. This would be the first time I’d really met my almost-stepmother. I’d invited her to dinner on several occasions, but she hadn’t been able to come, too occupied arranging the sale of the bakery to pay for her late husband’s debts.
She swept into the shop all bright and bustling, an expensive-looking fur coat fastened around her shoulders, a gold-embroidered sarafan just beneath. She reminded me of an arctic bear: tall and broad, with rosy cheeks and strong arms from years of kneading bread and shoveling loaves in and out of ovens.
She greeted my brother and father, and then approached me with her arms outstretched. “Echo! Dear!” She embraced me in a careful manner, like she wished to give the appearance of affection without getting overly close to me. She kissed the air on both sides of my face. “Well. Let me look at you!” Her tone was too bright. Her eyes swept me up and down, lingering at first too long on my scars and then too briefly. She repeated: “Echo. Dear.” It was in a more false-sounding voice than before.
My father’s glance flicked anxiously between us, and I tried to smile to put him at ease. “Shall we go and see the house?”
We left the shop, my father and Donia leading, me and Rodya behind. It was Sunday, and winter was beginning to fade from the world. The air held the faintest hint of springtime—everything should have seemed fresh and new and hopeful. But my heart was a tumult of unease.
We climbed the hill that looked down onto the cottage, and Donia gasped in delight. “Oh, Peter, how lovely!”
She was more subdued once we actually entered the house. Her eyes swept around the rooms with relentless scrutiny, lingering especially long on the curtains I’d sewn and the rug I’d bought from the town seamstress and lugged all the way from the village. We followed Donia up to the attic room, where I had a sudden moment of panic she would claim it for her own.
But my father came to my rescue. “I thought this would do very well for Echo. What do you think, my dear?”
Donia glanced about again and gave a regal jerk of her chin. “I can’t think the room would have any other use—it’s far too inconvenient. Yes, Echo may have it.”
I looked aside at my father in time to see him wink at me.
Back downstairs again, Donia took one more turn through the lower floor, nodding as she rejoined us by the hearth. “It will do, Peter, it will certainly do!”
My father breathed a sigh of relief, suddenly all smiles.
Donia beamed at him. “It only wants a woman’s touch. The curtains will have to go at once, of course—they’re perfectly dreadful—and that rug, too. We’ll need furniture.” She raised her hand to forestall my father. “Not the furniture from your apartment, dear. New furniture, and new linens and carpets. We will have to manage with just that for now.”
“Just that?” My father studied her quizzically.
“I’ll need a writing desk eventually, all new wallpaper, certainly, and a piano. I was quite the songbird, you know, when I was small. I’ve longed for a piano these many years—”
“The wallpaper is new,” I interrupted.
Donia fixed her dark eyes on my face. “I beg your pardon, Echo?” Her tone turned her meaning to: “How dare you speak to me!”
“The wallpaper is new,” I repeated. “I picked it out myself, and I know where to get more to match, when we can afford it. I sewed the curtains—I thought they brightened the room considerably. I’m sorry you don’t like them.”
Donia frowned. Her dislike pulsed toward me with the intensity of a heatwave, but she only said in a mild tone, “You ought to have consulted me first. They are not at all to my taste.”
“Though I’m sure Donia greatly appreciates your efforts,” my father put in, gently.
Donia glanced at him, then back at me. Her jaw tightened. “I’m sure I do, however misguided. Now, Peter. About the furniture.” And she turned her back to me.
Rodya tugged me firmly outside.
We paced around the back of the house and sat on the stoop. I stared at the patch of earth where I’d spent a whole afternoon pulling out brambles, planning to grow vegetables when the weather got a little warmer—if Donia allowed it, that is.
Rodya bumped my shoulder with his. “Don’t mind her, Echo. She’s just jealous of Papa’s affection for you.”
I chewed on my lip and stared into the woods, straining for glimpses of green on the bare, black branches. I thought I saw a flash of white between the trees, the sudden gleam of an amber eye. But then I blinked and there was nothing there. “She hates me because of my face.”
“That isn’t true.”
“Of course it is.” I tugged my kerchief off my hair, closing my eyes and leaning into the wind. The scars still hurt sometimes, a twinge of pain when the weather was turning.
“You have to stop disparaging yourself. No one gives a damn about your scars.”
“I give a damn,” I said fiercely.
“Then stop. There isn’t a single thing you can do about them, and you’re too brilliant a person to waste your life bowing and scraping to dimwits in the bookshop. No matter how much you might deny it, Echo Alkaev, you are extraordinary. You have been since the moment you were born.”
I reached up to touch my scars, but Rodya caught my hand and laid it in my lap again. “Write to the university. Please.”
I refocused on Rodya, tracing every line of his dear face, and hope sparked inside me. “I’ll write them,” I promised.
CHAPTER THREE