Lily waited until they were left alone. A table discreetly placed in a corner, behind a small tropical forest of broad-leafed plants, had been put at Sandilands’ disposal. And not for the first time, judging by the warm greeting and the swift accommodation from the maître d’hôtel. The rest of the diners who crowded the room had already embarked on their sponge puddings and custard; some were as far advanced as brandy and cigars. All were loudly talkative, cheery and unbuttoned. No one was paying the slightest attention to the quiet couple in the corner.
‘It’s a frightening vision,’ Lily said. ‘Deliberately so. The princess told us all — do you remember — that no photographic equipment is allowed any longer in Russia. The country’s being laid waste, people are fleeing their homes or starving to death, massacres are going on, and what do the rest of us see of this? Nothing! The painting is an allegory. It’s a scream of protest, a warning, a cry to the world for assistance from whoever sees it. It shows the trackless wastes of the artist’s homeland but in the forefront there’s a deep, freshly dug grave. Reminiscent of a plague pit. It’s standing ready to receive its cargo of corpses. We know this from the crosses lining up in the background. Crosses made of human bones. Russian bones.’
‘Is that what you see, Wentworth? An allegory? Is that all?’
Lily looked at him in puzzlement. ‘Isn’t that enough? A foreshadowing of disaster for the Russian people? The death of a great empire?’
‘No. You haven’t looked closely enough. Look — we’ll finish up here and go back. We’ll pass a magnifying glass over the paintwork. And I’ll fill you in on our goddess. I called her the “Morrigan” after the Irish deity but I see I may have been poking about in the wrong pantheon.’
Joe talked on while Lily concentrated on her lamb and mint sauce. ‘She’s really Morana. In Russian and Slavic pagan religion, Morana was the goddess of death and winter. A beautiful girl with black hair and light skin but endowed also with wolf’s teeth and clawed hands. And she has form — she’s known to have killed her own husband, the god of fertility. She’s a dangerous goddess of darkness, frost and death.’
‘I begin to think you see one of these charmers around every corner, sir. Herr Freud might suppose you were frightened at an impressionable age by an odd-looking nursemaid!’
Joe reflected that Miss Jameson would never have dared to tease him so blatantly and wondered why he allowed it.
‘And is there any remedy against this recurrent nightmare?’ she wanted to know. ‘Or is Morana invincible?’
‘Apparently not. No. It’s her only useful attribute: she can be overcome — if only temporarily. She’s the spirit of winter, after all, and winter passes into spring. Even on the Russian steppes. Just to be quite certain they were rid of her, the country people used to make a straw puppet representing Morana and throw it into the river.’