Playthings on At Home

Tatiana Vorontsova

July 24, 2020 9:59 PM

Playthings by Tatiana Vorontsova

For as long as Tatiana could remember, her papa’s office had been one of her favorite rooms in the house. It was spacious, airy, and – most significantly – had a glass roof.

The cost, she understood, had been tremendous – the glass was so thick a man could walk on it without fear, so clear it did not distort the views it gave of the sky at all, and it was under a number of enchantments to prevent it from breaking, and to enable it to repel snow and bird droppings and other things that could spoil the views – but as far as she was concerned, it had been worth it. In the summer, as now, the whole room was bathed in natural light, showing off the elegant appointments and shelves and shelves of books and valuable art pieces. In the winter, though, when it was dark, it had been a small child’s paradise to play in, at least for Tatiana.

In the winter, Volshebnaya Derevnya got very few hours of light, or even twilight. Most of the time was cloaked in darkness, which required massive expenditures of candles and torches and oil lamps simply to allow them all to get around the house safely. In Papa’s office, there were sconces along the walls which held torches behind sheets of glass, and mirrored trees of candles nearer his desk, which allowed him to work more easily – and which turned the room into a sort of boundless night, the darks, at least at first, made all the darker by the pools of light. The games she had played, and dragged her siblings into…She had led ‘mysterious forest rites of the ancient Slavs’ (a subject she knew next to nothing about, but had had fun playacting at), but her favorite game had been pretending that they were a caravan crossing some wild lonely place, taking light and warmth back to civilization, along with any other luxury goods she could think of offhand or make props out of. Many times, she had brought her favorite oil lamp (a heavy stone one a child was unlikely to drop on herself or the floor, but still prettily carved and painted to look like a swan, with wicks emerging from its mouth and the tips of its raised wings) into the office during playtime and convinced Grisha and Katya to sit closely around it with her, pretending it was a fire, pretending the elves scrubbing the soot from the walls were barbarians surrounding them, or wild animals about to attack them….

Now, of course, she was too old for that, and – more to the point – Grisha and Katya would no longer play with her when she asked, so she only got to do things like that when she could convince Alyosha to ask her, and even Alyosha was beginning to think of himself as big and disagreeable. It was enough to make her want to slap her siblings, if not enough to keep her from smiling as she walked into Papa’s office with Katya, even though it was well-lit enough today that she could not have played much right now even had her siblings been agreeable. Aside from the usual sources of artificial light, it was also daylight – the middle of the roughly five hours they could expect today, between ten and three-thirty.

“Tatianochka, Katen’ka,” her father boomed from the other end of the room. “Come, come.”

They both approached, and both made slight bows, as to near-equals, to Monsieur Polyakov, then slightly deeper ones to their own father.

This was an annual ritual, but for all of that, Tatiana still felt a thrill of delight looking at all the jewels spread out on tables for her and Katya to select Christmas presents from. She smiled and nearly clapped her hands, though she stopped short when she saw a hint of a smile on Feodor Polyakov’s face. Straightening her face, she allowed her hands to drift as casually as possible back down to her sides before she made the shallowest imaginable dip of her head in his direction. Aleksandr Polyakov was rich enough, as a jeweler, to warrant a certain amount of respect, but Feodor was only a little older than Tatiana herself - a fact which was hard to ignore.

Not, of course, that she was on intimate terms with the son of her jeweler, or with any young men in the village or in Russia. They had danced together on a few occasions, and he was one of the crowd which had kept talking about how pretty she was the past two summers, when Mama and Anya had tried to convince her that being a lady was an occupation with a few redeeming features, but their acquaintance did not go much deeper than that, unless one counted Tatiana thinking he was rather good-looking in reality.

She did not consider this strictly a point in Feodor Aleksandrovich’s favor. It was nice enough to look at him, certainly, and a certain…extra niceness to dancing with him, but also a tension that went with it that she wasn’t sure she liked, especially since she knew he didn’t mean a word he said when he complimented her. He was just close enough to her socially that they could, well, socialize, but just far enough beneath her that he would have been trained from birth to flatter girls like her – assuming he didn’t simply enjoy the game, as many young men were reputed to. Beyond that, even, was the idea she couldn’t quite avoid that he also knew he was good-looking, and that he enjoyed the sort of power – unreal, but there for all that it made no sense – this could, if a girl was stupid, give him over his superiors.

Like now – when she straightened her face, he smiled even more, as though she was amusing! Tatiana made to toss her hair, but it was all securely piled up and pinned up on the back of her head. Instead, she purposefully looked away and honored his father with a smile instead.

“It is good to see you again, Monsieur,” she said warmly. “Do you have anything interesting to show me?” Monsieur Polyakov had known her for as long as she could remember, and had long since become accustomed to her asking endless questions about his wares; for several years, now, he had usually made it a point to find something unusual or rare or at least interestingly designed and bring it along, just to show her for her amusement, and she did not expect him to begin to fail her this year.

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