The Wolf Princess Read online

  “Cathryn Constable knows you have only to give reality a slight push to make it marvelous. A classic winter tale.” — Financial Times

  “Very special, with a spellbinding fairy tale ambiance. Contemporary but deliciously nostalgic.” — The Bookseller (UK)

  “The Wolf Princess has got everything: Adventure, mystery, a touch of romance; elements of fairy tale, good triumphing over bad; best friends; a gorgeous horse — and wolves to boot.” — Books for Keeps

  CONTENTS

  TITLE PAGE

  PRAISE

  DEDICATION

  CHAPTER ONE: The Forest

  CHAPTER TWO: The Visitor

  CHAPTER THREE: The Photograph

  CHAPTER FOUR: The Piece of Glass

  CHAPTER FIVE: The Station

  CHAPTER SIX: The Train

  CHAPTER SEVEN: The Hut

  CHAPTER EIGHT: The Stranger

  CHAPTER NINE: The Vozok

  CHAPTER TEN: The Winter Palace

  CHAPTER ELEVEN: The Princess

  CHAPTER TWELVE: The Dinner

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN: The Frozen Lake

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN: The Chandelier

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN: The Under Palace

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN: The Portrait

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN: The General

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN: The Hunt

  CHAPTER NINETEEN: The Ring

  CHAPTER TWENTY: The Gift

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE: The Wolf Princess

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO: The Wolf Garden

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE: The Ice Road

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR: The Return

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE: The Letter

  GLOSSARY OF RUSSIAN WORDS AND EXPRESSIONS

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  COPYRIGHT

  “Hold my hand, Sophie. We have to leave!”

  It was her father’s voice. She couldn’t see him, but she knew, somehow, that his hair was disheveled and that he was wearing his tatty overcoat, the one with the hem that hung down like a ragged wing. He slipped his hand into hers, clasping it tight, and together they ran through the frozen silver forest. She knew where they were going. Always the same place — a place conjured from his stories, dreams, and memories. At the edge of the trees, they stopped. Their breath scrolled out before them and the snow fell like a heavy lace curtain. Flakes as large as moths fluttered in front of her eyes.

  “Wait, Sophie,” he said. “She’s coming. Can you see her?”

  And his words called up a young woman in a long cloak, her face hidden beneath a hood. Sophie glimpsed a tendril of dark blonde hair. It was covered with snowflakes that changed to diamonds as she watched.

  “Who is she?”

  She couldn’t hear her father’s answer, but he gripped her hand a little tighter and he sang to her … that lovely song whose words she had forgotten. Sophie wanted to ask her father about the woman, but now the song had become a story. He wouldn’t stop telling her the story.

  It was winter. It was snowing. There was a girl lost in the woods. And — Sophie felt her chest tighten with fear — a wolf …

  She felt her father’s hand slip out of hers.

  “Don’t leave me!”

  But he was no longer there. And the sadness and the fear got mixed up with the snowflakes and covered everything.

  “Sophie!”

  No! This voice was from another place. She didn’t want to answer.

  She pressed her face into the pillow, trying to climb back into the forest. To hold herself in the strange dreamtime, where she could taste the cold, clear air like a mixture of peppermints and diamonds … feel the forest all around her … hear the snow creak beneath her feet …

  “Are you awake?”

  Sophie sighed and moved her hand across the bedspread as if to brush snow from it.

  “I am now, Delphine.”

  She tried not to sound grumpy. But the day at the New Bloomsbury College for Young Ladies had started and it would not be stopped. It was too late for dreams.

  She turned onto her back and stared at the ceiling. Why did real life have to be so dull? Why did boarding school seem so … beige? She looked around at the three narrow wardrobes, three flimsy bedside cabinets, and three scratched desks and chairs, and wished for … something else. Something beautiful, however small. Enormous branches of cherry blossom in an agate urn … panels of lace at the window … candlelight … In this cramped, shabby London room, there would never be any beauty or excitement. No secret notes or espionage. No adventures.

  Just school.

  Delphine sat up in bed and stretched. Yellow hair flowed around her face and shoulders. She looked like a marble princess on a church tomb who had just woken up after a thousand years of restful sleep.

  “What’s the weather doing?” Weather only mattered to Delphine, of course, so she could decide what to do with her hair. And Sophie’s bed was next to the window. Delphine asked the same question every morning.

  Sophie sat up. For a moment she gazed at the photograph of her father on the windowsill. The picture had caught the dreamy, quizzical expression she thought she remembered, as if he had just seen or heard something that interested him. She pulled back the curtain.

  The window looked out onto a narrow street of tall houses, and she had to crane her neck to get any view of the sky. Even when it was wild with sunshine, the street was dank and depressing. Today, beads of rain drizzled down the dirty panes, so there was hardly any need to check the sky, which happened to be the normal London color — dishwater gray.

  “It’s amazing how much water there is in the sky above London,” Sophie said.

  “It’s been like this for four days,” Delphine replied. “Do you think the rain ever gets bored? Do you think it ever wants to do something else with itself other than fall on drab old London?”

  “It rains in Paris, doesn’t it?” Sophie said.

  “Of course! But even the rain in Paris is beautiful.”

  “I wish it would snow,” Sophie whispered. She wondered if the dream of the winter forest would come again. Could she make it come back?

  “Snow? Are you mad?” Delphine shuddered. “It ruins your shoes.”

  “But that wouldn’t matter,” Sophie said. “We would wake up and everything would look so different … Maybe it would even be different. Like a fairy tale. Wouldn’t it be amazing if, just for once, it was cold enough for snow?”

  “Such weather is only perfect on the piste,” Delphine said firmly. “With skis attached to your feet.” She stretched again and yawned prettily, like a cat. “Shall we wake Marianne?” She swung her long legs over the edge of her bed and wiggled her toes. The nails were painted metallic green. “If we don’t, she’ll miss breakfast again.”

  “What is this fascination with breakfast?” A girl with thin dark hair emerged from under a brown quilt cover, her face bleary and puffed with sleep.

  “Hey! It speaks!”

  The girl blinked like a mole and felt around on her bedside cabinet for a pair of slightly bent wire glasses, then pushed them onto her face. “Why are you walking around on tiptoe, Delphine?” she said.

  “To improve circulation,” Delphine responded, then stopped and threw her head between her knees to brush her hair. “And this is to prevent wrinkles.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” sniffed Marianne. “There’s absolutely no scientific evidence for that.”

  “And you haven’t got any wrinkles,” Sophie pointed out. “You’re much too young.”

  “It is the French way,” Delphine shrugged, as if that were answer enough. She flicked her head back up, then twisted her hair into a bun on the side of her head and pierced it with a hairpin. Being half French seemed an awful lot of wo
rk, Sophie thought. And took an awful lot of time.

  “Oh, but there is something to wake up for today!” Marianne kicked back her quilt with an unexpected burst of energy. “It’s Thursday. We get the results of our geography test!”

  Sophie groaned. It was always such an effort not to feel squashed between Marianne’s high academic standards and Delphine’s equally high grooming standards. Mostly Sophie couldn’t be bothered to resist the pressure; she’d got used to the feeling of being squashed by now, anyway.

  She checked her watch. “We’d better get dressed.”

  “Give me twenty minutes,” Delphine said, pulling on a pale pink silk robe and heading for the bathroom.

  “Twenty minutes?” Marianne made a face.

  “I couldn’t take that long even if I did everything twice,” Sophie said.

  “Which is why I look like me … and you look like …” But whatever Sophie looked like, Delphine couldn’t find the word for it. She stopped suddenly and stared, as if something had just occurred to her.

  “What?” Sophie said.

  “You’re actually quite pretty,” Delphine said. “Good eyebrows. Perfect skin. But no one notices because you always forget to brush your hair. And don’t even get me started on that school sweater you wear — it’s full of holes.”

  “Well, it’s the only one I’ve got. And stop staring at me like that!”

  Delphine shrugged. “You should think about these things.”

  “But why?” Sophie said. “No one ever takes any notice of me.”

  “There’s no point saying anything to her, Delphine,” Marianne said, putting on her robe. “She’s happy the way she is.”

  Delphine wagged her finger. “Trust me, one day you will want to make a good impression.”

  “Well, I’m never going to meet anyone important,” Sophie said. “So it won’t make any difference if I have holes in my sweater or not.”

  “You wait!” Delphine said. “Someone important could turn up today!”

  “That’s about as likely as snowflakes in summer,” Sophie laughed.

  They were seriously late for breakfast. The smell of damp toast rose to greet them as they made their way down the back stairs, their shoes squeaking on the linoleum floor. Just as they reached the bottom, they heard a heavier tread ahead of them and saw the corduroy-suited figure of their deputy headmaster. He turned as they tried to slip past him.

  “Good morning, girls,” he said brightly, checking the time on his watch. “You’d better hurry.” His gaze rested on Delphine. “I would think about finding a less time-consuming hairstyle in the future, Delphine, if I were you.”

  Sophie put her head down, stared hard at the floor, and tried to make herself invisible. She knew she could get past most teachers without them really noticing she was there. It was one of her most useful skills.

  But not this morning.

  Mr. Tweedie cleared his throat. “Sophie?” he said, just at the very moment when she thought she had escaped. “A word?”

  “But I’ll be late for breakfast, sir,” Sophie said. “You said so yourself.”

  “It won’t take long. I’m sure the others can get you something.”

  Delphine and Marianne took the hint and made a dash for the refectory, Delphine mouthing “sorry” as she went.

  Sophie tried to avoid Mr. Tweedie’s concerned gaze. He didn’t so much frown as crumple up his face when there was a problem. “It’s the sweater, Sophie,” he sighed.

  Sophie tried to rearrange the offending knitwear so that the holes weren’t so apparent.

  “And your shoes,” he continued. “Ballet shoes — the sort tied to your feet with ribbons — aren’t on the uniform list, are they?”

  She shook her head.

  “I wonder, Sophie, if you’ve written to your guardian yet about your clothes? We did agree you were going to do that, didn’t we?”

  At the word guardian, an image of Rosemary — a middle-aged woman with blonde-gray hair cut in a boyish crop, sitting poker-straight on a stool in her small, neat kitchen — flashed in front of Sophie’s eyes. She and Rosemary had nothing in common with each other, were not related in any way. But rain, a borrowed car, her widowed father’s tiredness, and an unexpected turn on a dark country road had all combined one night in a fatal cocktail to make Rosemary and Sophie lifelong companions. As the only friend of the family the authorities could reach after the accident, Rosemary had taken Sophie in as a temporary measure, until a relative of the newly orphaned child could be found. But Sophie’s father had not lived what Rosemary called a “settled life.” Sophie’s mother had died when Sophie was a baby, and her father had taken her to live in many different places. He’d talk about magical journeys, about the next place they would go. Friends were scarce and, it became apparent, relatives were nonexistent.

  “Rosemary is very busy,” Sophie said, putting a finger into one of the smaller holes in the sleeve of her sweater and hooking it over her fingernail in an attempt to hide it. She looked up at Mr. Tweedie’s crumpled, kind face and smiled with more confidence than she felt. “She really does have a lot on her plate at the moment, and I don’t like to bother her …” Sophie didn’t want to add, when she is away. Better that the school didn’t know just how much time Rosemary spent out of the country. It would only cause problems.

  “But it’s not just the sweater or the shoes, Sophie, it’s all your clothes.” Mr. Tweedie sounded strained. “Everything you wear is just so …” He stopped. “You must understand that it’s not that I mind, but it’s better for you if you blend in. Look in the Lost and Found.” Mr. Tweedie gave her one of his I-mean-it faces. “Before Mrs. Sharman sees you.”

  In the refectory, Sophie took a thick white plate out of the plastic box stacked next to the counter, chose the least bruised banana and a glass of watered-down orange juice, and put it all on a tray. Then she joined Delphine and Marianne at the long trestle table. They were the last, and already the kitchen staff were moving around and clearing things away.

  “What did Tweedie want?” Marianne had propped her physics textbook up against her bag on the table. Sophie remembered there was a test today. She’d completely forgotten.

  “Sweater alert.”

  “He does go on,” Delphine said. “You should just agree with everything he says. That usually stops him.”

  “He’s got to do his job,” Marianne said, her eyes still scanning the page. “Did you know that the angle of incidence is equal to the angle of reflection?”

  Delphine rolled her eyes.

  “And did you know it’s the first of March?” Sophie said quickly, trying to distract Marianne. “That means the list should go up this morning.”

  “What list?” Delphine took a small piece of butter and placed it on the edge of her plate. From this she put an even tinier piece on her knife and spread it on a minuscule fraction of toast. She then bit into the buttered toast, before repeating the procedure. Sophie calculated that at her current speed, it could take Delphine up to ten minutes to finish one slice. (Marianne, no doubt, would be able to calculate it to the second.)

  “Where we’re going in the last week of term,” Sophie said, peeling the banana. “The class trip.”

  Delphine shrugged. “You know we won’t get to go anywhere interesting or exciting. They save those for year twelve.”

  “We’ll probably get Cooking Country-Style in Thomas Hardy’s England,” Sophie sighed.

  “Or Franco-Belgian Battlefields,” added Marianne, raising her gaze from the textbook. “If we’re really, really lucky.”

  “Well, that’s all right if you’ve only ever been to the coast of Cornwall,” Delphine said.

  “But I love Cornwall!” Marianne protested.

  “It’s just not very chic, is it?” Delphine went on. “Not like the Île de Ré, where you can wear tailored shorts and nice little canvas shoes.”

  “I want to get on the Saint Petersburg trip,” said Sophie.

  There. She�
�d said it. And she’d promised herself that she wouldn’t. She knew from experience with Rosemary that asking for anything was the surest way of not getting it. She bit her lip. There’d be no chance now. If only she’d kept her mouth shut for just a while longer.

  “Dream on!” Marianne laughed, stuffing the textbook into her bag. “You know there’s no hope of that.” Deep down, Sophie knew she was right. Only those taking Russian for A-level exams had any chance of going.

  “Anyway, why would anyone in their right mind want to go to Saint Petersburg before the summer?” Delphine shivered. “It will be far too cold in March.”

  “But snow in Russia! That’s the whole point!” Sophie hugged her arms to her chest. “Anyway, I’m used to the cold. Rosemary’s flat is freezing. She thinks central heating is immoral.”

  “It is very bad for the planet,” Marianne said primly. “But how do you keep warm without any proper clothes?”

  “Rosemary gave me an old mink jacket to wear in bed.”

  “So, central heating is immoral, but killing innocent animals for their fur is fine?” Marianne said.

  “Well, they’re very old furs. The animals would be dead by now anyway. And it feels like wearing something from a different world …”

  “That’s not the point!”

  “But don’t you ever lie in bed at night and think about being someone else?” Sophie continued.

  Delphine raised one perfect eyebrow. “Someone other than me?”

  “When I wear that coat,” Sophie rattled on, “I’m not plain old Sophie Smith … I feel like I’m some beautiful countess, running away from an empty life of parties and balls to find my destiny … with the Cossacks … and I am traveling across Russia wrapped in furs on a night train … and under my pillow” — she knew she sounded crazy, but she couldn’t stop — “are a box of sugar mice and foil-wrapped chocolate cats with red sequins for eyes … and … a … p-pistol.” She reached the end of the sentence because she hadn’t known how to stop before saying “pistol.” By the expression on Marianne’s face, she might as well have said “penguin.”

  “A pistol?” Delphine’s face creased in incomprehension. “What do you … ?”