The Jewel of St Petersburg (19 page)

She left him standing beside the car and walked with her mother into the warmth of the bookshop on Morskaya. She’d make him wait. Damn him, she’d make him wait until his feet froze in the gutter.

D
O YOU HAVE A SECTION ON ENGINEERING?”

She spoke quietly so that her mother at the other end of the shop wouldn’t hear. The assistant craned forward to catch her words.

“Indeed we do, miss. Let me show you where—”

“No, just tell me. I can find it.”

She headed quickly for the shelf he had indicated. She inspected the titles, but not many were available: one on bridge construction, several on mining, one on the building of the Kremlin in Moscow. None on tunnels.

Choose. Quickly.

One on cars. He liked engines; he said he liked fiddling with metal. Her finger lay on its leather spine, ready to extract it from its position, when her eye caught the name on a book below it.
Isambard Kingdom Brunel.
She snatched it off the shelf, hurried to the counter, and paid for it. The assistant wrapped it in brown paper.

“What’s that?” Her mother’s voice was curious.

“It’s a biography of Brunel.”

“And who is this Brunel, Valentina?”

“Just an Englishman, Mama,” she said casually. “Look, I’ve bought a book for Katya as well.” She held up a copy of the poems of Charles Baudelaire.

“Will she like that?” her mother asked doubtfully.

“Yes.”

“You are good to her.” Elizaveta Ivanova smiled affectionately. “I want you to know that your father and I are deeply grateful to you for what you did, for saving her life. She is lucky to have you.” She touched her daughter’s hand, the one holding the book for Katya. “So are we. I mean it, my dear.” As if embarrassed by her display of affection, she added more formally, “By the way, Valentina, I forgot to mention. Captain Chernov from the Hussars—I believe you spoke with him at the ball—left his card this morning. He is coming to call on you tomorrow afternoon.”

A
S HE DROVE THEM HOME ARKIN LISTENED TO THE SILENCE in the car. Something had happened in the shop. The spark that had made the girl’s dark eyes challenge him earlier had gone.
There will be no moon tonight.
Her words nagged at him. Yet she couldn’t know about last night. Damn it, she couldn’t.

He needed to speak with Sergeyev. But after the bomb he had to lie quiet. Quiet. He sounded his klaxon at a cart blocking his road because noise was the only way he could keep the other sounds out of his head.
Quiet
was something he could only dimly remember.
Quiet
was no more than a word now. Paradise on earth came at a high price and he was willing to pay it, but the nights were hard. His mind was beyond quiet.

Behind him the mother was filling the heavy silences. She pointed out a new dressmaker’s establishment and promised to arrange fittings for her daughter, suggesting different styles of gowns. As Arkin listened he realized that he liked the sound of Madam Ivanova’s voice. It was brighter than the rest of her. Hearing just her voice as he sat in the driver’s seat, he could picture her without the wary look that was always in her eyes. She didn’t trust people, and she didn’t trust life. Nothing wrong with that. He knew exactly how she felt.

He slowed at a crossroads on Nevsky and heard her daughter say quite distinctly, “Mama, I’m worried about Papa. This bomb attack on Prime Minister Stolypin could be the start of a plan to attack all the tsar’s ministers. They could come for Papa again.”

“Valentina, we have to leave such things for your father to deal with. Don’t interfere. He doesn’t like it. He is the one who makes these decisions, not us.”

“Do they frighten you, Mama, the revolutionaries?”

“Of course not. They are a disorganized rabble. And anyway, don’t forget that we have our army to protect us.”

“Men like Captain Chernov?”

“Exactly.” There was a long uncomfortable silence before Elizaveta Ivanova added, “Please don’t be difficult about this visit by him, Valentina.”

Arkin could imagine them behind him. Believing their Captain Chernov could keep them safe.

A
RKIN WOKE IN A SWEAT. SOMEONE WAS SHOUTING, BELLOWING in his ear. The bed was tangled and he tried to kick his legs free, but they were trapped. Cobwebs gathered on his face in the pitch blackness, threads like hot wires, scorching his skin. Still that shouting. Wouldn’t the bastard ever stop? His head hurt; his heart pounded so hard that his stomach abruptly heaved and he vomited on his sheets.

A different hammering. A fist on a wall.

“Shut the fuck up!” Popkov’s voice.

Too late Arkin clamped a hand over his mouth, and the terrible shouting ceased. It had been coming from his own throat. He sat up in the darkness and yanked his legs to the floor, where the touch of the cold boards on his bare feet brought him to his senses. He came back to his cramped little room above the stables and wiped the sweat from his eyes.

What kind of man has nightmares about the horses he killed? What about the people he’d slaughtered? Each night the dream came to him, vivid images of the black horse with its hind legs blown off, twisting itself in half to sink its massive yellow teeth into what was left of its bloody rear end, trying to gouge out the pain. Its screams splitting the night.

Where were the people? Where were
their
screams?

Dear God, what kind of man was he becoming? He stripped off his soiled nightshirt and stood shivering. The dark suited him. He liked the way it blacked out everything. It was only the future that was bright.

Thirteen

T
HE COUNTESS’S SON WAS FEARLESS. JENS COULD NOT DENY that. He bobbed over every obstacle Jens set him to. He was not a talkative child, but as he spent his days incarcerated with a dry stick of a tutor, who could blame him for keeping his words locked inside his head? But he would release great whoops of childish joy when his stubby little pony took off in sudden darts of energy, the boy’s heels drumming its fat sides. A trickle of sun flashed through the trees, sending arcs of light bounding across the trails.

“Alexei,” Jens called over his shoulder, “let’s head down to the stream.”

“Can I jump it?” the boy yelled.

“You fell off last time.”

“It didn’t hurt.”

His mother had complained that her son’s shoulder was black for a fortnight and had forbidden them to jump the stream again till he was older.

He grinned at Jens. “I won’t fall.”

“Promise?”

“I promise.”

“Keep your heels down, boy.”

They barged through the undergrowth to where the stream carved a path through the black earth. The boy’s cheeks were red. Jens watched his small hands tighten on the reins; a quick kick and the pony gathered itself for the jump, but at the last moment Alexei yanked hard on the reins, forcing the pony to skid to a halt. The small figure leapt out of the saddle and dropped to his knees in the freezing water.

“Get out,” Jens ordered.

But the boy was holding a dog. Or rather, a dog’s head. The large brown body lay under the water, but Alexei had lifted its head above the ice to allow the animal to breathe. He was stroking its wet muzzle, pulling weeds from its eyes.

“Alexei, leave it. It’s dead.”

“No.”

“Come out of the water. You’ll freeze to death.”

“No.”

Alexei had never defied him before. Jens swung from his saddle and heaved the lifeless animal out of the water. It was a large hound with rough black fur and white young teeth. It lay limp in his arms, soaking his clothes, and with Alexei still hanging on to one of its dripping ears, they waded back onto dry land.

“I want to bring it home,” Alexei said.

“Why?”

The boy clutched the sodden head to his chest. “If I die in a river, I want someone to bury me.”

Jens couldn’t argue with that. He strapped the dog onto the pony’s back with his belt, then lifted Alexei onto Hero and swung up behind. He wrapped the shivering boy in the folds of his coat and rode fast.

“Uncle Jens, did you ever have a dog?”

“Yes. When I was a boy, a strong sled dog. All heart and teeth, he was. Gave me a few scars to remember him by. Every boy should have a dog.”

The small head nodded, then swiveled around, and eager eyes gazed up at him.

Jens sighed. “I’ll speak to your mother.”

Fourteen

J
ENS CALLED ON VALENTINA AS HE’D PROMISED. HE STOOD on the doorstep and felt as awkward as a young dolt from the fields with straw in his hair. It was laughable. He had wined and dined the finest ladies of St. Petersburg’s elite without batting an eyelid, except to flirt with them. Yet this tender slip of a girl could make his feet feel too big and his shoulders too broad just by turning her head on that neck of hers and letting her velvet brown eyes study him for a moment too long. There was a music in her movements that made others clumsy, even in the way she had uncoiled from the filthy floor of the sleigh and settled on the seat beside him. As smooth as the breath of a summer breeze on the Neva.

The door was opened by a liveried footman who showed him into the reception hall. Impressive indeed. Jens glanced around at the gilt chandelier and the marble statues that lined the niches in the walls. Russians loved to display their wealth as ostentatiously as peacocks unfurl their gaudy tails.

“Miss Valentina is engaged at present. In the blue salon.”

The footman was a wiry fellow with a narrow face and extraordinarily large hands. Jens passed him his card.

“Please inform her that I am here.”

The footman vanished. So she was engaged at present. Maybe a friend from school? It was the custom for the ladies of St. Petersburg to drive around to each other’s houses in the morning handing out their visiting cards, and then to call on each other in the afternoon for tea, followed by a string of engagements and parties in the evening. It was nothing for a woman to change her dress six or eight times in one day. Jens thought about Valentina’s words in the moonlight:
I want ... more.
He couldn’t blame her. But nursing? That was a different matter.

“Miss Valentina will see you now.”

He entered the blue salon. Presumably it must have been furnished in blue, but he didn’t notice. All he saw was Valentina: her slender form seated on a brocade sofa, hands quiet in her lap, her back straight, too straight. He had the feeling something was making her uncomfortable. Was it his intrusion? Yet she smiled at him, rose to her feet, and held out her hand.

“How kind of you to call.”

Her manner was formal, as though she’d never been curled up against his chest on an icy road in the dark.

“I hope I find you well.”

“Very well, thank you,” she responded. “Though I’ve felt the cold these last few days.”

Her dark eyes held his for a moment longer than necessary, and there was that teasing spark in them before she lowered her lashes and turned away with a rustle of silk.

“Let me introduce you to Captain Stepan Chernov.”

Only then did Jens notice the other occupant of the room. A fair-haired captain of the Hussar Guards, a broad handsome face with a confidence that came from having killed people. Jens had seen it before in the military, that belief in their own invincibility after they’d fought in battle and survived. But today there was no stink of blood on him, and he made an impressive figure in his immaculate uniform and highly polished boots. Jens bowed politely and thought about putting him to work in one of his tunnels. Dirty him up a bit.