Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire

(Ruritania, January 18--)

*POP*

Cinders scattered onto the hearthrug as another chestnut burst in the ashes, and Katija squealed. "You forgot one! You forgot one!"

Fourteen-year-old Liesl, dropping to her knees to beat out the sparks, gave her small sister a patient look. "I did not, Ekaterina, and you know it. Put the blame on Hilde and Linde - Mama gave them the chestnuts to prick..."

"Pooh! You're a great deal too fussy, Katija," Linde said, raking the remnants of the nut out from the soft ash with the fire-tongs, and shelling it quickly with much blowing on scorched fingers. She tossed the fragments to her twin and pulled out another one for herself, cracking the blackened shell against the hearth with the poker.

"See? The burst ones are the best. This one's all burnt on the underneath, look, and -" she dug sharp little teeth into the unburned side, and crunched - "it's not cooked."

"I told you not to put them in so deep," Hilde said smugly, licking her fingers. "I told you - if you put them next to the coals they'll burn - ow! you beast -"

She wound her own fingers into her sister's dark curls and yanked in retaliation, and the twins rolled over and over on the rug, pinching and yelling. Liesl traded glances with their mother, sighed, and directed the squabble away from the direction of the fire with one judiciously-applied foot. There was never any point trying to intervene between the twins. The only thing that equalled the vigour with which they fought each other was the united front which they presented to the outside world.

"When is Vati coming?" Jenija asked plaintively for the fourth time, from her refuge in her six-year-old sister's lap. Katija tried to hush her, but the little girl batted her hand away. "Why doesn't Vati come?"

"Your father's downstairs with the Gräfin, Jenushka," Magda told her youngest daughter patiently, not without a certain twinge of annoyance towards her absent husband. Since he'd come home, Jenija above all had been clinging to him as if afraid her father might disappear again if she let him out of her sight. Couldn't he see how much his daughters missed him? Couldn't he see how much of their childhood he was losing, every time he went off to sea?

"It's because of the village, isn't it, Mama?" Katija said, squirming round to look up at her mother as Jenija wriggled. "It's because of the snow -"

"I like having the villagers here," Linde interrupted, from her momentary position atop her twin's struggling shoulders. "Hilde and me played with Hanek and his friends all yesterday, and we played King of the Castle, and Hilde and me won -"

"Only because you said he had to let both of you up at once," Liesl pointed out, twitching another chestnut dextrously out of the ash and peeling it in her lap. She shook the fragments out from her skirts onto the glowing coals, where they curled for a moment and then burst into flame.

Linde shook her sister's comment off. "Hilde and me always do everything together," she pointed out with undoubted truth, before subsiding with a squeal as Hilde took advantage of her twin's distraction to launch a counter-offensive.

"I want to go and play with Marushka," Katija said firmly, tipping Jenija off onto the floor and standing up. "I like Marushka. I wish we were snowed-in every year."

Magda sighed. "Ekaterina, it's too late. Marja's mother has enough to do without an extra child underfoot - and there's little enough room for the villagers as it is. Wait for tomorrow, and we'll see..."

"And you'd miss Vati," Liesl said, laughing and jumping to her feet. Even the twins rolled apart at that, exchanging glances of mutual alertness. In the silence that followed, Magda could hear her husband's familiar step coming up the stairs, followed by another, lighter step, still distant but equally familiar, running swiftly up after him. Despite herself, she smiled.

"Vati, Vati!" Jenija struggled to her feet and ran towards the door as it opened, to be caught in her father's arms and whisked up into the air.

"Karl," Magda said softly. Their eyes met above their youngest daughter's head, in the instant before the other four flung themselves upon him. They held, as always, everything she had ever needed to know.

"What, no chestnuts left?"

The owner of the second set of footsteps had reached the doorway unnoticed in the general commotion, and was surveying the room rather plaintively, with the air of one who was not accustomed for his entrances to be ignored. "I was distinctly promised chestnuts..."

Liesl wriggled free from her father, flushing a little at being caught in such a childish position, and gasped. "Oh, Graf Danilo, I'm sorry -"

But the new arrival's grey eyes were twinkling. He raised an eyebrow at her mode of address. "Verehrtes Fräulein..."

He made her a low bow, as if to a young lady of the court. Liesl grinned and jumped on him, wrapping her arms around his neck. "Uncle Danik!"

A moment later, the joint assault of the twins brought Danik, staggering, to his knees, so that Katija could kiss him. Karl Osman, with Jenija still twined firmly in his arms, watched his lord and master succumb to overwhelming odds on the floor of his own parlour, grinning broadly. For once in his life, he wasn't about to lift a finger to rescue him.

"Anyone would think I hadn't seen you since last night," Danik complained, laughing, as the twins finally let him sit up. "What's this?- " he ran a finger along the chain of a small pewter locket on Hilde's neck - "a present from St Nicholas?"

"It was my mother's," Magda said, from where she still sat by the fire. "Show the Graf, Hilde... I promised it to her when she should turn eleven," she went on as the child worked the catch to display the tiny picture inside, "for she's loved it since she was a tiny girl; but she begged for it so hard to wear this winter that I could not refuse, though if truth be told their eleventh year will not be out until Dreikönigsfest is past."

"Born on the twelfth day of Christmas," Danik nodded. "And well I remember that year..."

"Yes, you had my husband in China, I believe," Magda said, a little more sharply than she had intended. "And brought us back sheets of silk, fit for a fine lady - and what was I to do with those, with two babes new-born and all the care of the castle on my shoulders beside?"

"Magda -" Danik stretched out a hand to her with the look of shamefaced appeal that had softened her heart since the days when he'd been a gawky boy, forever knocking over his mother's trinkets, and she the one who had to hide the remains, and she relented.

"You meant it for the best. I know. It was lovely stuff in truth, and mayhap when Liesl weds -" she smiled as the girl blushed - "I'll find some fitting use for it at last. But there are times, Herr Graf, when I'd change any number of your outland gifts for a few months more with my Karl by my side."

"I know full well that you and Osman are both far more than I deserve," Danik observed wryly. "Nay, don't deny it - I 've seen it in your face often enough, and I know it myself. Without you, how else would I keep my feet on the ground?"

He rose to his feet, one arm around each of the twins, and came over to drop a kiss on her cheek. Magda reached up to ruffle his fair hair, sighing, as if he had been one of her own children.

Danik settled himself by the fireside with Hilde and Linde, long limbs folding under him, while Osman sank down into the chair beside Magda and slipped an arm around his wife, resting his cheek against her hair. Jenija nestled over from his arms into those of her mother, but kept her hand firmly clutched around his. After a moment Katija came and leaned up against his knees.

For long minutes there was no sound save contented breathing, and the soft hissing of the coals. Liesl quietly spread a few more chestnuts into the ash.

"My mother says the passes are closed on both sides of the mountains," Danik observed at length, watching light flicker among the cooling embers.

"Not quite." Katija's head had grown heavy in her father's lap. Osman gently slipped a cushion under the sleeping cheek. "A party came through yesterday up from Strelsau. There'll be no news through from Trieste, though, for another month, by my guess."

"Mmm..." Danik roused himself with a start, juggling between scorched fingers the hot chestnut Liesl had just handed him.

"My thanks, Mistress Elisaveta..." He inclined himself gravely from the waist in her direction, the courtliness of the gesture somewhat undermined by the indignant squeak that ensued as he dropped the hot nut accidentally into Hilde's lap.

Liesl wrinkled her nose at him and shelled her own chestnut neatly onto the hearth.

"You're going away again!" Linde said eagerly, sitting upright and ignoring her twin's complaints. "We want to come with you, Uncle Danik, and see pirates and palm-trees and wanton women with rings through their noses -"

"You'll see no such thing, Sieglinde!" Magda was more than a little shocked. If this was what came of letting them romp with Hanek and the village lads, then it was high time her girls became young ladies.

"Well, I'll own I did have the South Seas in mind." Danik raised a mocking eyebrow, unrepentant. "But not for any such disreputable reason, I'll have you know, young fire-eater. I've a mind to tweak the tail of the English, down in the Caribbees..."

Linde ignored that. "Please can we come? Please?"

"You'll set foot on that ship the day the Graf's own lady invites you there, and not one hour before," Magda said firmly. Wanton women, indeed. If only the twins were more like Liesl... but her eldest daughter was hanging on Danik's words, her eyes shining.

"Will there be sugar-cane? And bread-fruit, and bananas, and the black men singing in the fields?"

"Not the last time we were down there, at least," Danik told her, meeting Osman's warning eye. "Murder and yellow fever, more like. You wouldn't like it, 'Lisaveta. Hurricanes, too."

Osman frowned. "Hurricanes, aye. If you're serious, my lord -" Danik nodded - "it'll take a while to get the ship fitted out. If we're to make the cruise this year, before the hurricane season, we'll need to leave as soon as the passes are clear."

Magda stirred, but said nothing. Murder and yellow fever... she'd heard, in private, the tales her husband had seen on that reckless cruise to Hayti, before they were first wed, and they were nothing fit for the children's ears. Danik had been lucky to escape with his life.

"There's a young merchant in Martinique I was recommended once - not so young now, by my reckoning - who might serve as our first port of call," Danik was saying. He caught Magda's eye and smiled. "No politics, Magda. Not this time - the Ruritanian alliance almost got us all lynched, and better nations have tried and failed in Hayti. We'll keep to safer ground."

"One of these days we'll stow away," Hilde was muttering sulkily to her sister, and Osman, always so indulgent, frowned.

"You will not, Brunhilde. I'll have no ship I sail endangered by children. When you are old enough to understand what you're asking, then perhaps we'll see."

"At all events," Danik said quietly into what threatened to become a family shouting-match, rising to his feet and gazing out of the narrow window, where swirling flakes could just be seen in the lamplight, "if this snow holds out no-one will be leaving for a month or more."

He grinned. "It will be a crowded New Year, I think. Are all the village up here now, Osman? How are the cellars holding out?"

"Oh, we've food enough," Osman assured him with some relief. "A couple of families are still down in the village, but there's no shortage of willing hands to make the trip every so often to check they're all right, and it's as well to have someone down there to keep an eye on everything that had to be left behind."

Danik gave him an amused look. "To hear my mother speak, you would think that every mean stick of furnishings in the whole of Bad Hortig had been dragged up here on the end of a rope, and left to moulder in her precious corridors. Myself, I think we should do this every year. I don't think I've ever had the pleasure of celebrating Christmas with quite so many people before."

"The children have certainly enjoyed it," Magda agreed, shifting Jenija's sleepy weight in her arms. "For the mothers, I think to be turned out of their homes by the snow is less of a game... Karl, will you take Evgenija up to bed? And Katjia should go too, I think -"

But Danik had swung round and was holding out his arms for the little girl. "May I?"

Magda smiled, yielding the youngest of her brood up to her godfather's care. The Graf took a ridiculous pleasure in the child - as did her own husband, if truth be told. It was as well Jenija was as yet too young to be spoiled by it.

Danik settled the child more firmly in his arms and bore her off upstairs, murmuring a stream of charming nonsense into an ear that was almost certainly far too sleepy to appreciate it. Six-year-old Katija, roused from her slumbers, protested briefly that she was far too old to be carried, then surrendered to being swung up on her father's shoulder and swept off to bed.

Magda, having duly kissed them all goodnight, sank back into her chair, sighing a little. Outside, the wind was rising again, bringing more snow down from the mountains all around to fuel the drifts that threatened the road. Sealing them in, she thought a little guiltily, for another month, perhaps; into their warm little world, here at home by the fire, where she could reach out for Karl at night and find him there...

"Have another chestnut, Mama?" Liesl said softly. "I know you like them. I saved a couple just for you." She slipped her arm around her mother, laying her cheek against Magda's own, and Magda, turning suddenly, buried her face in her daughter's dark hair and held her very tight.