Heart of Iron (20 page)

“You don’t understand any Russian?” We had always spoken in English, but I was taken aback to realize he never understood a word I said in Russian, as infrequently as that happened.

He shook his head. “I know, very lacking on my part. Maybe you can teach me on the train… after you explain about the rotmistr and the hussars.”

“Only if you finish telling me about your life,” I said.

“It’s a deal,” he answered. “We better hurry, though, to avoid Nightingale’s men catching up with us.”

“No need,” I said happily. “Those hussars will detain them and perhaps incapacitate them altogether.”

It was so cold that the inside of my nose felt frozen solid, and my lips split and chapped with every breath I took. Jack loped ahead of me, intent on arriving at the train station before the St. Petersburg train, his boots moving through blackened slush with aggravating ease as I struggled after, wondering if I would ever restore the shine to my boots.

We made it to the station just in time. As Jack forged fearlessly ahead, I looked around, dreading I might catch a glimpse of the Englishmen or Nightingale. It did not matter that, rationally, there was no possibility of finding us so quickly, especially waylaid by the hussars — Dame Nightingale had become a creature of a nightmare to me, omnipotent, omniscient, and unstoppable in her malice.

Jack turned around and waved to me. I hurried after him, pushing through the dense crowd with my shoulder. Say what you will, but I took a certain relish and satisfaction in behaving in such an unladylike way. I now understood why Eugenia walked as she did, why her strides were always so long and unrestrained and mannish.

The courier had returned, and he had a letter. A wave of relief washed over me — I did not allow myself to think about everything that could go wrong up until this moment. I tore into the envelope as Jack paid the courier — who looked tired with his stubbly cheeks and red-rimmed eyes.

“Dearest Sasha,” Eugenia wrote.

“Thank you for your thoughtful gift — it was received as well as the notes from your friends. Give them my thanks for housing you for the time of your vacation, even though you do have to miss the season. Your mother was quite distraught about that, but she came to share my view that the warm climes are beneficial for a young lady of your fragile constitution. I hope Sochi is nice, and you are having a good time with your friends.

“Regarding your question — I should be able to take care of your request soon. Unfortunately, the parties involved are both stubborn and inaccessible, but I am certain a small payment will ease my attempts to gain their company. As for our mutual friend who is in the care of Captain Mishkin, he is well and sends his regards. I have started a correspondence with him via the captain, who has been quite kind about it. Your friend expressed his hope for your success, and I join my wishes to his.”

“What does she say?” Jack interrupted my reading. I looked up only to see that the crowd had dispersed considerably, and was probably boarding the outbound train. Jack and I stood nearly alone in the middle of the waiting hall.

“Let’s sit down,” I said.

We found an available bench where I hunkered down and derived a small measure of comfort from being somewhat hidden. “Everything is well,” I said. “She received the documents, and started correspondence with Wong Jun. If we need to find something out from him, we can write to her.”

Jack kicked out his long legs and stuffed his hands into his pockets, sighing impatiently. “Everything takes forever.”

“You’re welcome to leap all the way to St. Petersburg if you want.”

“I can’t.”

“Of course not. So now you have to obey the same limitations as the rest of us mere mortals. Come on, we need to get to Nizhniy Novgorod.”

We walked out into the cold, and hailed a coach cab.

“Eugenia will get those documents before Constantine, I’m sure,” I said as we settled snugly into the dark interior smelling of leather and horse sweat. “I just hope that Wong Jun’s letter will be sufficient when we reach China.”

“It’s better than nothing,” Jack responded. “But the Chinese do not trust foreigners and they know very little about them… us, I mean.”

“And?”

“Sometimes, they think you’re the devil and want you away from them. I can’t tell you how many times I was shot at for no reason.”

“Well, you are English.”

“Is that a good enough reason?”

I thought for a moment. “If there is a war? Of course. You can’t expect people to extend the courtesy you’re not willing to give. I bet the English did not stop to see whether they were shooting at peaceful Chinese civilians or soldiers.”

“How do you know?”

“That is how wars are.” I wiggled my fingers, trying to find a suitable way of explaining this phenomenon. “They are fought in a very general way. Chinese shoot at English, English shoot at Chinese, and no one stops to verify credentials. I just hope that with the war over they at least look at your papers before shooting.”

“Of course,” Jack said. “At least, for the Europeans. I hear that the Manchus and the Taipings happily shoot each other on sight these days. Some of the Taipings have defied the Manchus by wearing their hair long and loose rather than in a braided pigtail as the law requires.”

“I am not surprised if you consider how the Manchus enforced their hairstyles.”

Jack gave me a long look and laughed. “You know quite a bit about Chinese politics, don’t you?”

“No, just what Chiang Tse told me.” I peered out of the window of the cab, to avoid meeting Jack’s gaze. “I hope he is well.”

We caught the train to Nizhniy Novgorod with no trouble, and as soon as we settled in our couchette compartment, I stretched on one of the seats and slept, exhausted. Even the whistles of the train could not rouse me.

They could not rouse me, but they colored my dreams — I dreamt about being on the train, swaying, clanging, sparks flying from the chugging iron wheels. I stood by the glass door at the tail end of the last carriage, watching the tracks recede in a dazzling flash — shining metal, hoarfrosted ties. And I saw a dark figure cutting through the brilliance. My heart jumped to my throat as nameless unreasoned dread enveloped me and the figure approached, fast, faster than the train could travel.

It was Dame Nightingale, running in a strange, simian gait, her impossibly long thick arms with giant hands dragging on the ground aiding her. She ran almost on all fours although remained upright. Nightingale thrust her massive arms forward, grabbing onto the crossties, and pulling the rest of her behind; her neck had elongated and her eyes, unblinking, fixed me with their hypnotic stare.

I sat upright before I even realized I was awake, and came to awareness gasping for air, my arms outstretched, reaching or pleading. My eyes snapped open a split second later.

Jack who was reading on the seat opposite of mine carefully considered me, his eyes especially pale and gray that day. “Bad dream?”

“Not just a dream,” I said, and rubbed my eyes. “The waking reality is altogether lacking in cheer as well.”

He laughed. “We’re safe here, at least for now. Rest, sleep, read.”

I stared out of the window instead. Dazzling white all around us, with black dots of crows and the blue smudge of forest on the horizon. We passed an occasional small station, where the locomotive did not deign to stop, and the village women, wrapped in woolen shawls, holding chickens and geese plump and ready for Christmas, watched the train as it sped by, momentarily locking eyes with me and losing this contact as our carriage flew by. It seemed fitting, such great speed so contradictory to making more than fleeting human connection. I thought of it for a while, as villages and their wooden cottages half-buried in white appeared outside of the train and melted back into brilliantine mist of snow and cold; the faster we went the less time there was to simply look. Then again, I couldn’t really complain — because of this speed, we would be in Nizhny Novgorod in a few hours, and then the train would take us all the way to Kazan, Perm, Yekaterinburg, Omsk, Novonikolaevsk, Irkutsk, Ulan Ude, and finally… Beijing.

“Have you ever been to Siberia?” I asked. “I wonder what Irkutsk is like.”

“It’s a trading town,” Jack answered. “Trading with China — there’s gold and silk and tea. Lots of mosquitoes in the summer, but now everything is frozen solid. Even Yenisey is frozen, I reckon, and it is such a grand river.”

“What else?”

He shrugged. “As I understand it, the town not that large, really. There’re traders, a lot of Chinese, and the railroad business. Some furriers go through every now and again. There are some local tribes, herding caribou or whatever it is they herd, but I’ve been told that ever since the Russian Empire took a foothold there, they’ve declined. A price of progress, I suppose.”

“What about Ulan Ude?” I asked. In my anxiety, I was eager for any information about new places, however vague or incomplete. I wished I had a book of some sort — only there were no travel guides for Siberia, because who would go there voluntarily, on their leisure?

Jack scratched his head. “In Ulan Ude, there are Buryats who look Asiatic… I only know what Nightingale told me.”

“Nightingale? How did she know that you were going to Siberia?”

Jack made a face, shook his head. “Sasha, what do I have to do for you to stop suspecting me at every turn? We talked about Siberia while discussing the possibility of land war with China, after Russia is taken care of. She thought if the south of China is already overrun by the Taipings, a strike from north would finish it. But these are idle speculations.”

I nodded. “Sorry, I did not mean to accuse you.”

“It is of no matter.” He still frowned, and unrolled the booklet detailing some adventure or another of one Dick Turpin. It didn’t seem a good time to ask him more questions, and I decided to let him be.

I remembered about my letter to my mother, and settled to write some more. I could mail it from Nizhniy Novgorod, I told myself, or any other city on our way — the stops were supposed to last anywhere from half an hour to two hours, sufficient time to mail it whenever the letter was finished. In truth, I think I just enjoyed the opportunity to write down my thoughts. The act of writing was as important as my intent to mail it to mother.

“It is difficult for me to think about that,” I continued, “and my thoughts, unless they are pinned to the paper with my pen, get away from me. I know that you fear deep in your heart I will end up like Eugenia, and you think it would be a tragedy. While I have not made up my mind, I can see many benefits to such an arrangement, at least until the emperor turns his attention to the inheritance laws. Unless I am legally allowed to possess property while being married, I will surely feel much less conflicted on this matter.

“As it is now, I would have to surrender everything that is mine by birth to the dubious care of whatever man that becomes my husband, and how am I to know that he would be wise in its dispensation? Moreover, why does the law seems to think I would not be capable of making decisions about what belongs to me? In our classes, we always hear that a woman’s or an Asian’s brain is inferior to that of a European man. Yet the Chinese and the girls get grades as good or better than any Caucasoid male, even in classes which are designed and taught by European men — as are the texts we study. It surely seems to me that women would be capable of administering an estate — Aunt Eugenia certainly is — and the Chinese are capable of taking care of their own country.

“And this brings me to another concern, dear mother. I know how indifferent to politics you are (I am not talking of the palace gossip here), but please do bear with me this one time. I fear our contempt for our own Asiatic origin has blinded us to who our allies truly are. I wonder how the world would be reshaped if Russia allied itself not with the degeneracy and false superiority of European empires, but with the might of the Orient?”

Just as I wrote these words, the train slowed down and soon stopped entirely. I looked up to peer through the window, and discovered it had completely frosted over. I scratched at the frost with my fingernails, and saw an iced over wooden platform which could not — I hoped it was not — be Nizhniy Novgorod, for its apparent lack of any interesting architecture or cathedrals.

“Why are we stopping here?” I asked Jack.

He shrugged, without looking up from his penny dreadful. “Probably picking up some passengers. Some chose to board in remote regions to avoid the crowded stations for personal reasons. More discreet that way.”

There was a small hut on the platform, as I could discern after pressing my cheek to the frozen windowpane to melt the frost. A pavilion with a flat roof on which the snow mounded like sugar in a sugar bowl, and three wooden walls. Inside it were two figures, bundled up against the cold in what looked like fur cloaks made of the skins of the entire contents of Noah’s ark — no two pelts were alike. The whole gave an impression of a moving cat-and-dog fight as they started to shamble slowly toward the train, dragging behind them two fairly large sea chests.

They came through the doors of our carriage a moment later, and even though the carriage was almost empty, took a compartment across the aisle from us. I studied their chests, covered in intricate carvings of whales and fishes and dragons, and secured by wide leather straps. The two chests occupied most of the floor of the compartment, and the passengers had to carefully arrange their feet shod in heavy boots with fur spats. I couldn’t help but feel they were overdressed for the weather, even if it was frigid outside.

It took the new arrivals a while to unburden themselves from their fur hats, fur gloves, fur everything. Their cloaks were lined with gold-colored silk, an unexpected flash of refinement.

I noticed Jack was watching them too: his pose, while seemingly nonchalant, was wound with hidden tension — his right hand dangled between his knees, still holding the booklet, but his left was thrust into the pocket of his coat. His feet rested flatly on the floor, his leg muscles tightening under the fabric of his trousers.