The Fifth Doll(32)

She looked away, studying the grass growing between the pottery and the Maysaks’ home, the basement doors, the tips of the wood beyond. A few people passed them, but none looked their way.

Then Jaska’s warm hand clasped hers, and everything else fell away.

“Matrona.” His voice was just above a whisper, his hand calloused and dry. His skin looked tan against hers, the nails clean and trimmed. Clay stained a few knuckles.

Her entire body became a heartbeat.

He looked squarely at her, eyes perfectly level with her own. “I want you to open my doll.”

Her spine prickled, and she pulled her hand from the potter’s grasp. “Jaska, no. You don’t understand—”

“It doesn’t matter. I’ll suffer through it. I need to know what you know, see what you see. I want to know what’s at the center of those dolls.”

Matrona shook her head. “Then let me open the last one and tell you what I see.”

She found herself thinking again about the warning Slava had given her: “You need to separate yourself from the rest of the village.” What did it mean? Would she even be able to speak with Jaska once she finished Slava’s work?

“I need to know for myself. I have . . . questions, Matrona,” he pleaded, keeping his voice low, glancing up once when someone passed by. “I’ve felt it for a long time. These dolls . . . If what you say is true, perhaps my answers lie in Slava’s home.”

“You don’t believe me?”

“No, I didn’t mean that.” He slouched a little, coming closer to her height. “I want to understand this. I want to understand you.”

Matrona tried to swallow a sore lump in her throat. “If Slava knows I told you—”

“That’s why I’m asking you to do it. If I thought it possible, I would go myself—”

“Don’t do that.”

He smiled, one dimple peeking at her. “Please. Just open the first one. If I can’t handle it, we can stop, right?”

“You don’t understand.” Matrona wrung part of her skirt in her hands. “Everyone will know your secrets, Jaska. Including Slava. He’ll know we opened it.”

He leaned back, a sigh passing over his lips. “And he’ll know it was you.”

“It couldn’t be anyone else.” Matrona chewed on her lip, watching Jaska’s expression fall. Slava had never told her not to open the other dolls, had he? Just not to share the secret. Which, of course, she already had.

Even so, wasn’t Slava’s plan for her to replace him, and soon? Once that happened, she would be keeper of the dolls, and they would be in her stewardship. In a sense, they were already hers. Why shouldn’t she open Jaska’s doll?

“Jaska!” Kostya bellowed.

Jaska straightened, though his whole person seemed to wilt. “I have to get back inside.”

“Tonight,” Matrona whispered.

He looked taken aback.

“Tonight, after sunset,” she clarified, “When full dark settles. I think Slava is leaving for another trip, if he hasn’t already.” She thought briefly of Pamyat, but the kite hadn’t attacked her the first time she’d entered the room, and surely the beast was used to her by now. “I can go then, when the others won’t see—”

“Let me come with you.”

She nodded. “But not into the house. I won’t risk that.”

“Agreed.” Jaska clasped her hand as though they were two men making a business deal. But the smile had returned to his face.

Heavens, he was handsome.

He released her and reached for the pottery door. “Thank you, Matrona,” he said, then slid inside. Seconds later, Matrona heard Kostya shouting at him.

Matrona took a deep breath and leaned against the pottery, staring up into the blue, cloudless sky. Her fingers trembled, and she fisted her hands to still them.

One doll. It was just one doll. She’d come this far; Slava would have to be forgiving. And wouldn’t it be a relief to have someone share the burden with her?

Yet as Matrona walked away from the pottery and met the scornful glare of another villager, the still-fresh memories of her humiliation bubbled to the forefront of her thoughts. Jaska would suffer that, too, and it would be her fault.

Then again, he was Jaska Maysak. Surely his secrets were light and easily dismissed. Surely he hid nothing of which to be ashamed . . .





Chapter 11


Matrona made it back to the cow pasture without so much as a glare from her mother or nod from her father. She wiped down the table and equipment in the barn, swept it out, then took to filling the villagers’ dairy requests—Georgy Grankin came by for milk, Nastasya Kalagin came for cheese, and Pavel came for butter. Matrona silently wondered at Pavel as she wrapped up his butter and set it in the basket, which was already filled with potatoes from the Grankin farm. Was his appreciation for white horses so strange? She studied him as he left, trying to piece it together for herself, but Pavel was like every other man in the village, just as his doll was like every other doll.

As luck would have it, Feodor and his father came for dinner that night, an invitation Matrona’s mother had neglected to tell her about until an hour before, leaving Matrona rushing to bathe and dress and make herself look proper for her soon-to-be husband. She stood behind her parents when the Popovs arrived, smiling and trying to look pretty while they exchanged formalities. By the time Feodor took any obvious notice of her, Matrona again felt like a doll—not the complicated, layered one atop the table in Slava’s home, but the forgotten toy locked away inside her mother’s chest, sewn for Matrona’s vanished sister. Forgotten.