The Fifth Doll(12)

Irena’s hard words surfaced in her mind. “I was sick for three days,” she’d said. The food poisoning. Yes, that had been her fault. She’d sensed the milk was turning wrong, but the demand had been so high . . . She hadn’t told a soul—not about that, and certainly not about Jaska.

If Feodor cancelled the marriage, she’d be trapped inside this izba forever, barely esteemed higher than the rag rugs.

A murky image of her doll surfaced in her mind. It can’t be.

The back door to the izba slammed shut, and her father stomped in, brow furrowed. When he noticed Matrona, his bearded lips pulled into a deep frown. “You have a great deal of explaining to do. How will we show our faces at church?”

No slurred words. No twitching. Only anger. Yet Matrona could find no peace in his apparent recovery.

“Well?” pushed her mother.

“I—I never . . .” Matrona shook her head, and her mother stormed forward to grab Matrona’s sleeve and haul her upright. “I—I didn’t mean for the cheese to go bad . . .” Her face flushed, and tears stung her eyes. “I never . . . Jaska, I never acted on—”

“It barely makes a difference!” her mother shouted. “The things you think about that potter—”

Think about the potter? Matrona wondered, her bones feeling as hollow as flutes. How could her mother possibly know her thoughts?

They bubbled up inside her, scraps of past and buried flights of fancy about the youngest Maysak. The times she’d measured his shoulders—his hips—with her eyes. How she’d imagined strolling in the wood with him, wondered about the taste of his mouth, and—

“God help me,” she murmured.

“He wants nothing to do with you,” her mother snapped.

Her father shook his head. “Just . . . go to your room until we can sort this out. I can’t fathom what the Popovs . . .”

He didn’t finish the sentiment. He didn’t need to. Matrona balled her hands into white-knuckled fists and rushed past her parents, hurtling down the hallway to her small room. Once inside, she shut the door behind her, and only then did she let the tears fall. She wiped at them, but that only wet her hands and wrists.

Were all her secrets known, then? Every little sin that had ever crossed her mind, every sour thought toward her parents or other villagers? But they didn’t know about the dolls . . . Surely they couldn’t. No one had asked about the dolls.

She thought of Jaska, and her cheeks burned as surely as if someone had sliced open hot peppers and rubbed them on her face. Even before Feodor, she’d never shared her thoughts about the potter with anyone. Not even Roksana knew about Jaska. Matrona never spoke of him or the Maysaks unless someone else mentioned the family first . . .

Was this the reason for the cross looks Alena Zotov and the cooper’s wife had given her? Because they knew she was a twenty-six-year-old betrothed woman who harbored desires for a younger man—a boy, he was practically a boy—in the dark shadows of her thoughts?

Could they hear what she was thinking right now? A passage from the Good Book bubbled up in her thoughts: “Neither is there any creature that is not manifest in his sight: but all things are naked and opened unto the eyes of him with whom we have to do.”

Matrona collapsed onto her bed and smothered her head with her pillow until her body craved breath. Did her fellow men suddenly possess the eyes of God? Her mind sought out any other secrets she’d buried over the years. Did the villagers now know about the triangle of moles on her left hip? The time she’d lied for Roksana so her friend could visit the granger? What of the test she’d cheated on in school some fifteen years ago? Did they know about that, too?

Shooting up to her knees, Matrona grabbed her tear-spotted pillow and threw it against the wall. She’d spent her whole life trying to do what was right. Trying to keep her parents smiling enough that hard words would never leave their lips. Trying to be good. Even so, she could bear the whole village’s censure—she was sure she could bear it—were it not for the gossip about Jaska.

She wiped her sleeves across her eyes. There was a reason she was twenty-six and unwed. There was not an abundance of bachelors in the village, and she had stayed away from them as a maiden should. As her father had always wanted her to. Only an occasional smile or nod of her head. She had chosen her words to any possible match with care to ensure they could not be misconstrued. Yet she would be punished for this? Who among her family, her neighbors, had not harbored indecent thoughts?

She collapsed back onto her mattress, biting her tongue to control the urge to weep, wishing she could sleep and wake up to a normal world without secrets and without dolls. She did not sleep. Matrona never napped during the day—there was too much to do. Too much required of her.

The walls of her room pressed into her, the slivers in their wood picking apart the rhythm of her breathing.

Spitting Slava’s name like a curse, Matrona pushed herself off her mattress and stepped back into the hall. She heard the mumbling voices of her parents talking in the front room, but she slipped through the kitchen and out the back door to the cow pasture. Work would pull the strain from her body. Work would clear her thoughts. Work would make her sleep.

Matrona churned butter with a vigor that would have surprised her had her mind been present enough to realize it. She lost herself in the familiar pain of her arms and shoulders. She muddied the bottom of her sarafan, hauling hay into the cow troughs and mucking out their tie stalls. She rubbed her hands raw twisting cheesecloths.