Midnight in St. Petersburg (47 page)

Horace was mortified, Inna could see, though she knew he must also feel as reassured as she did to hear the title ‘your honour' again; a small sign they were past the danger, back in the White world, where it was acceptable to appear to be a gentleman. But there was no gainsaying this woman. She was going to wash that foot, and that was final.

‘Not in front of everyone with their tea, at least,' Horace said, speaking at a normal conversational volume, almost for the first time since they'd left Petrograd.

Inna was glad they'd moved back to the bench outside the stationmaster's room, away from the curious eyes, when, at last, the bandages came off.

The smell … Why, it reminded her of her nursing days; of those boys, lying in the Youssoupoff ballroom, rotting.

He hadn't escaped unharmed after all. He must have been in agony for all these days and weeks. Why hadn't he said?

But she knew the answer. He'd been concerned to keep
her
spirits up, to stop her weeping. She didn't like to think any more why she'd been crying on those first nights in the train. She just shook her head, beyond words.

Horace winced as the woman – Yevdokia, her name was – unlaced his boot and pulled his foot out. He winced again as, very gently, she unwound the filthy scarf underneath. His exposed foot, pink and raw round the heel and ankle, was hot and stank with infection further down. From the middle of the foot to the toes: a mass of purple, yellow, red and white, and, through cracks everywhere, leaking with pus.

‘Into the water with it, there's a love,' Yevdokia said, without a hint of the guilty panic Inna felt at the sight of that infection. It wasn't dark with gangrene, at least not yet, but it was so inflamed that it looked as though it might poison his whole body. ‘Let's get that nasty foot clean, now, eh?'

When his foot went in, Horace breathed very sharply and muttered, then clenched his two hands together in front of his mouth till the knuckles went white.

‘You should lie quietly somewhere for a week or two and let this heal,' Yevdokia was saying. ‘I don't suppose there's any chance of that, is there?'

Horace was too busy rocking back and forth to answer.

Inna shook her head.

‘You'll be stopping at Simferopol, at least?' Yevdokia asked hopefully.

Again, Horace didn't answer. He seemed to Inna have lost touch with the outside world now that someone was finally tending to him and letting him concentrate on his pain. Bitterly reproaching herself for not having found a way to care for him better herself, earlier on, Inna shook her head again.

‘We've got to find a way on to Yalta,' she told Yevdokia. She went over to Horace and put her hands round his shoulders. He leaned back against her and Inna kissed the top of his head. ‘At least, we were heading for Yalta. If,' and she sensed from the quality of Yevdokia's silence that even this was over-ambitious, ‘you think it's safe?'

‘That foot's infected. He won't be able to walk on it. No point in thinking he will,' Yevdokia said briskly. ‘It might turn nasty if he doesn't stop and look after it a bit.' She examined Inna with her bright little eyes. ‘As for where's safe, well, even
we
can't make head or tail of what's going on any more. And we're local. All you can be sure of is that half the gentry of St. Petersburg are wandering round here. And it's not safe for any of you any more, or it soon won't be, not now all the foreign soldiers are leaving. Simferopol's all right still. My brother's there, at the station – a cab driver, he is; he sends word most days. So I can send you to him, and, if you want to go on to Yalta, he's the man who'll know how to get you a ride down to the sea. He might even take you himself. But as for whether it
is
still safe, down there, on the coast … well, I just don't know.'

Inna bit her lip. Here, where they called Horace ‘your honour' and there wasn't a red banner in sight, she'd thought they'd finally reached safety. It only now occurred to her that this might not be the case.

They only had one real plan: to get as quickly as possible to Yalta, and from there the ten or twelve versts down the coast road to Youssoupoff's estate at Koreiz to give him the violin, thereby getting whatever money or shelter or help with onward travel he could give them. Vaguely, they'd thought that if things were safe and stable – if the Whites were winning – they could then sit out the war in the south. But now it didn't sound as though they would be safe here either. No, it was becoming increasingly clear that they would have to exchange the violin for something they could live on, and find a boat out.

‘What have you heard about Yalta?' she asked.

Yevdokia responded with gloomy gusto. ‘Oh, Yalta. Well, with all those royals there – the Dowager Empress and half the court – of course there must be Reds buzzing round, and every other kind of anarchist and assassin, too. Bees to a honeypot. Stands to reason. That's why there are English ships waiting to take her highness away – though she won't go. Not yet. She says her presence is stabilizing the country. But it's only a question of time till Yalta falls too.'

The sunlight, which a moment before had seemed so welcome, seemed to be thickening and congealing. Inna shivered. So Yalta was not the paradise of peace she'd imagined. Soldiers were circling it; men with knives in their teeth and murder in their hearts were creeping through the bushes … But here, at least, in the station, all was quiet. Here felt safe. There were bees buzzing nearby, and an avenue of trees with white-painted trunks stretching away down the road. Wild flowers shone in the fresh green meadows all around.

‘Perhaps,' Inna said ‘we should stay here for a bit, until my husband gets better?'

She was surprised to feel Horace stop his quiet, painful rocking.

‘No,' he said, firmly, and she was surprised, too, at how strong his voice was. ‘Let's bind up my foot. We've got a train to catch. We've got to get to Yalta.'

‘All right,' Inna said, making an effort to keep her face composed, grateful she did not have to take responsibility for the decision alone. They would continue.

*   *   *

‘If there are English ships off Yalta, then there's more reason than ever to get there fast,' Horace had been saying all the way to Simferopol. He'd been full of his new hope. ‘Whether or not we find Youssoupoff, an English ship has a duty to me. The captain will take us on board, with or without the Dowager Empress, and evacuate us. Which we might well need, if things are looking so uncertain.'

He'd lain, thinking, gazing out at the innocence of the countryside.

‘Maybe that would even be better,' he'd said, eventually, as night fell. His eyes were glittering as he touched her hand; feverish probably, Inna thought, fearfully. ‘If we just got on the English ship, and never managed to deliver the violin at all … if you actually
played
that violin, and really did take Europe and America by storm … well then, to Hell with Felix Youssoupoff, don't you think?' He laughed, too wildly, and she stroked his hand.

She'd so seldom seen Horace vulnerable, as he was now, and a part of her feared that laughter of his, that clutching at straws. He was putting too much faith in shadows, she thought. But all mixed up with her alarm was something else: a soft, magical tenderness. It wasn't an entirely unfamiliar feeling, she realized. As it stole through her, even while she worried about the clamminess of Horace's hand under hers, she was trying to pinpoint when she might have had this same urge to protect him before, this dizzying sense of having missed the obvious, this dawning awareness that everything might, after all, be simpler than she'd seen.

And then she remembered. It had been years ago, in the Stray Dog cellar, on the night Horace had taken on the policemen who were harassing her, and she'd realized, just as his attack on them faltered, that he also meant to propose to her afterwards. When, unexpectedly, she'd been visited by this strange serenity, this understanding that the answer to the questions she'd been asking had, all this time, been right under her nose.

It was why, as they'd climbed the stairs up from the cellar that night, she'd laughed softly when he'd given her the box containing the ring he'd bought and then, not knowing quite how to put the question, paused. It was why she'd gently taken it from him and slipped the ring on her finger herself. Because everything else was confusion – the animal heat of the body, the tumult of the moment – but it was Horace she loved.

Horace had always tended so carefully to her, and encircled her so fully with his love, that she hadn't needed to think very much about her feelings for him. It had only really been on this journey, now that she'd seen his frailty as well as his kindly strength, that she could fully understand the strength of the love that she bore him. But, for all the confusion that she'd felt, in these past months, hadn't a part of her always known this, deep down?

It was Yasha she'd watched, the last time she'd seen him, as he strode into the courtyard and rescued them. But, she also now remembered, with a rush of emotion that went far beyond the affection she usually owned to feeling for her husband, it was Horace she'd turned to. And it was Horace who'd brought her away from Petrograd, towards safety. It was Horace she wanted to start a new life with.

‘I don't care about taking Europe and America by storm, or impressing the world,' she said, very tenderly, wanting, more than anything else, to put Horace's feverish mind at rest. ‘All I want is to have a normal life somewhere safe with you. Everything else can wait.'

But a flicker of something long forgotten went through her, all the same: a memory of that strange little Scriabin tune, with all its dancey double-stops, that she'd once played for the Lemans; and how, as her bow flew over the strings, she'd felt as light as if her feet had stopped touching the ground.

That feeling, she thought suddenly, might be happiness, and it was what Horace had always wanted her to feel. Perhaps that private, joyous lightness was what her father had felt, too, playing the violin she could now just recall lying smashed on that floor beside him? Wasn't that ability to make your own brief happiness a more real kind of freedom than the kind the revolutionaries talked about so incessantly, as they replaced one form of bondage with another?

Perhaps it showed on her face, whatever she was feeling, this unfamiliar, painfully sweet twisting of the heart, because he smiled as if in relief. But his words answered hers. He was still repeating, ‘Yes, we'll be fine if we can only get to the English ship,' when, suddenly, he fell asleep.

*   *   *

Despite the brilliant spring sunshine, Yalta was locked down when they arrived: shops boarded up, shutters across windows, seagulls squealing. It was all eerily quiet.

Yevdokia's brother Selifan, as fat as she was, had driven them from Simferopol. Inna had struck a deal with him, that he'd see them out of Russia within the week, with all transport, accommodation and food included, in return for the amethyst pendant, to be delivered at journey's end. Selifan had borrowed a rough farm cart for the trip – he wasn't risking his own smart little carriage on the coast road, not these days, when you never knew whom you might meet round the next corner, he said darkly. And he had brought them straight to this deserted hotel on the seafront and knocked till the scared old watchman, the only person left on duty, opened.

The two men clearly knew each other. They'd muttered together for some minutes, until finally the old man – who had trembling hands, and cloudy blue eyes, and looked as though he hadn't shaved his white prickly chin for days – nodded, and led Inna to a room on the ground floor which, though dusty and in twilight because of the closed shutters, did have a pair of made-up single beds.

Wheezing crossly, ‘Heavy, i'n't he,' Selifan half carried, half dragged Horace to the nearest of the two. ‘And hot. Burning up.' He looked around the room. ‘There's no food, and no light. But he'll bring you tea in a bit.'

‘And hot water, please,' Inna said, ‘to bathe his foot. We'll get a room for you, too, of course,' she added as she drew a quilt over her husband, and stroked his forehead, and hoped she could afford whatever the no doubt enormous price would be. She could see how important it was to make Selifan feel appreciated. He might be surly, but he knew how things were done here. She didn't want him just to take off in the night. She'd need him tomorrow, after all, to drive her and Horace along the coast road, as they looked for the Youssoupoff estate at Koreiz, or to go looking for English ships, whichever of the two seemed the better course in the morning.

But Selifan only shook his head, making the jowls flap on his greasy chin. ‘I don't need a room. I'll sleep with the horses,' he said. ‘I don't want any scallywags messing about with them. We'll be off early, will we?'

‘To Koreiz,' she agreed, thinking of Youssoupoff.

He nodded. ‘Where the English ships are,' he replied, as if in confirmation, ‘that'll be taking the Dowager Empress away.'

Inna stared. ‘But she won't go,' she stammered. ‘Your sister said.'

Selifan blew out his fat cheeks in disgust. ‘Oh, that's all changed. Things have got too dangerous for any more of her stubbornness. The old bloke at the door here was telling me just now. The Reds are on their way, for sure, and she's said she'll go if they'll also take all the aristos who want to get out – and they all do, believe me, every single toff who was here. They're desperate to get away before the Reds find them. Haven't you noticed how quiet it is? They're all camping out up the coast near where she's staying – making their own dinner, even, who knows? They've left their servants behind to take their chances here, so they've got no one to do it for them any more. The English sailors are building a special jetty there so that Her Imperial Highness doesn't have to come all the way to the port here to embark, and none of them wants to miss the big moment. The word is that the jetty will be ready by tomorrow. So I expect your Prince Youssoupoff will be there, fighting for his place on the first-class deck like everyone else. It'll be madness. But it's the place to head for.'