“Aren’t you too old for fairy tales and legends, Annabel?” he asked.
“What has age got to do with that?” she replied, without raising her eyes from the book she was reading. The cover was made out of leather and had a vintage look to it. The title glittered in golden Italics.
Anastasia.
His eyes settled on her face. In the light of the yellow flickering flame in the lamp on the table, he could see how pale her face looked. The stew on her side table had gone cold. It clearly did not get her attention.
“She hasn’t been eating too well lately,” he thought.
“You didn’t eat your stew. Why, you didn’t like it?” his voice had a grim tone to it.
She just shook her head.
Words had been becoming a rare commodity between them. He couldn’t remember the last time he had a full conversation with her.
There was a time when they would both sit down for tea in the parlor by the fireplace, and have long discussions over Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, or Dante. Those discussions would sometimes become heated and turn into arguments. Her face flushed with blood, skin gleaming red, as she passionately, argued as to why ‘War and Peace’ was a great piece of art and how it was more than just a book that contained 700 characters.
“They are 700 Lives woven together to create this beautiful complexity we call time and space, each having a meaning, a history, a future of its own.”
“But …they are just characters …” he would try to say something in return, but she would stop him with a raised hand…
“You will never understand,” she would say, walking out in rage and shaking her head over his ‘lack of understanding’ of Russian literature.
Hands in his pockets, he took a few steps and stood beside the window. The mists seem to have taken over the city of ‘St. Petersburg’. He glanced back without changing his posture much and she was still there in the rocking chair with her book. He turned his face back to the window.
The mists continue to swirl in the silence, like the hush of death.
Ivanovo peaked inside the room and saw the duke standing by the window. The stew on the side table had gone cold.
“He still hasn’t eaten anything,” the butler said to himself.
He felt sad for the duke. After the duchess Annabel’s death, Duke Razmov had closed himself in the solitude of her room. It had been days since the funeral. He could see the still rocking chair in the room, a book laid crumpled on the carpet with the cover up. In the light of the lamp, the title gleamed.
Anastasia.
The butler shook his head in dismay and walked away.
