The Samovar Girl

by Frederick Ferdinand Moore

The packets of rubles were now concealed in a lot of discarded peasants’ clothing. The various garments had been distributed through the house, but Katerin had gathered them in her father’s room, and was ripping them open, while Michael was preparing the stove for the money by removing the zinc facing against the tiles.

It was the evening of the day on which Shimilin had visited them. Katerin was ripping open old gray coats which smelled of stables and were covered with patches, breeches contrived out of cloth and the old skins of animals, uncouth jerkins which had originally been padded with cotton against the cold of many long-gone Siberian winters.

The windows were blanketed to keep the candlelight from being seen in the street below, and father and daughter talked in low tones as they worked, while Wassili and the old woman below in the kitchen kept a sharp watch against intruders.

Michael stood on a bench and worked out the screws which held the zinc plates in place against the wall. It was now so cold in the room that his breath showed white in the light of the candles, for they had let the fire in his room die early, and the door to Katerin’s room was kept closed so that the heat might not escape from it.

“Be careful lest the metal sheets fall and make a clatter,” warned Katerin as she stripped open an old coat, and released a shower of packets of rubles of large denomination, from which the face of the dead Czar smiled up at her wistfully from the engraving. The rubles made a colorful pile at her feet—blues, crimsons, and yellows, some worth a hundred rubles, some worth a thousand.

“Now!” said Michael, as he lifted off the top plate. “We are ready for the hiding—and my back is nearly broken, too. May Zorogoff break his neck if he ever finds where it is hidden!”

Katerin got to her feet and looked up at the rude clay tiles and the stone blocks mortared in behind them. The fire did not touch the tiles—they merely retained the heat and radiated it slowly into the room. And between the stone blocks and the tiles there was an air space, wider in some places than in others, so that the thickness of the packets of money would have to be gauged for the crevices they were to fill.

Katerin began filling the spaces under the zinc plates above the stove door. Then the plate above was put into place, and the aperture behind it packed with money. They worked more than an hour before they had disposed of the bulk of the packets. They could hear the calling of the sentries in the streets. At times Michael and Katerin stopped and listened to the cracking of the frost in the timbers of the house, and once they put out the candles when they thought they heard the gate to the courtyard being opened cautiously. But the noise proved to be but a whim of the wind with the boards hanging loosely from the roof of the old wagon-shed.

When all the zinc plates were back in place, Katerin took a piece of candle, and putting charred sticks of wood back into the stove, she so arranged the candle that when she lighted the wick and closed the iron door, a flickering light appeared through the holes in the door.

“We have a fire in the stove,” she said to her father. “Who is to look for paper rubles in a burning stove? When the soldiers come to search, you have a fire going in an instant. And the wood can burn and not harm the rubles.”