The Jewel of St Petersburg (38 page)

“The rail workers,” Arkin informed him. “This depot has gone on strike in support of the apprentices.”

“It’s starting,” Karl said quietly. “Isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

The boy straightened his back and puffed out his bony chest. “Comrade Arkin, Comrade Father, I am proud to be a part of this great—”

“They’re here!” a voice in the crowd cried out. “The rail workers are here!”

Immediately the air filled with eager shouts, and a phalanx of about a hundred or more men in navy caps and work jackets crowded into the sidings, fists punching the air.

“Father,” Arkin murmured under his breath, “give thanks to your God from me.”

The priest closed his eyes and smiled. One of the rail workers, a big burly man with a voice to match, climbed up on a rusting flatbed and launched into a rallying speech that swept the apprentices into a frenzy of excitement. Not even the icy curtain of snow could chill the heat that roared through their veins or the anger that built into something as hard and sharp as the Admiralty spire. Arkin was satisfied with his morning’s work.

“Horses coming,” an apprentice near the back called out.

They’d sent in the army. The apprentices and rail workers were slow to react, but Arkin leapt up onto the steps of a decrepit carriage. “Get ready. Troops are coming.”

From under jackets and coats, iron bars suddenly appeared. The sound of hooves grew louder, clattering over cobbles, until the veil of snow seemed to part like the Red Sea to reveal the platoon of scarlet uniforms on horseback, capes flying out behind. They halted and spread out in a long line, blocking access, leaving no chance of escape.

Panic started. It flickered from boy to boy, quick gasps and nervous shouts, but they took their lead from the railway workmen. They regarded the sabers with wide eyes as each soldier held his sword out in front of him, its blade flat to the sky. Snow settled on them as if to soften the threat.

“Disperse immediately!”

The order came from the captain at the head of the line. He sat astride a magnificent stallion that was eager to charge, its forefoot scraping at the dirt, raking through the trampled snow. The rider fixed his gaze on the rail worker on the flatbed.

“Disperse immediately!” he ordered again.

Arkin moved. He threaded his way through the apprentices and emerged at the front of them, nearest the soldiers.

“The boys are doing no harm.” He spoke calmly.

The captain glanced at him, and something in what he saw made him stop and look again.

“Who are you?” he demanded.

“A comrade of the apprentices. Captain,” he said sharply, “do not provoke trouble here today. We do not want bloodshed.”

The captain’s mouth curved at one side, revealing a satisfied smile. “Don’t we?”

“No. These young boys are—”

“—dangerous.”

“No. They are voicing their dissatisfaction and demanding to be listened to.”

“We want justice,” Karl insisted at his side. He was clutching an iron bar with his two fists.

“Then, young troublemaker, justice you shall have.”

With no warning the captain stretched forward and flicked his saber through the air. A faint whistle, that was all. Arkin was fast, but not quite fast enough. He yanked his young friend back on his heels, so that the saber strike intended to open up the boy’s pale throat just caught his nose and split one side of his nostril. Crimson spurted down his chin.

The railway workers surged forward. Angry words were hurled at the horsemen. Tempers flared. Metal bars and tools were brandished until the demonstration was on the edge of violence. It was to avoid exactly such violence that Arkin had involved the apprentices in the first place, but now he dragged Karl back from the front line. He inspected the boy’s face. He was holding a hand to his nose, blood twining around his fingers, but his eyes were on fire. Fury, not fear, was making his arm shake in Arkin’s grip.

“Get behind the railway workers,” Arkin ordered. “Prepare the apprentices to give support.”

The boy disappeared. Snow fell heavily in dense white veils and voices grew louder. The Hussars’ attack, when it came, was lightning fast. The horses sprang forward, sabers scything right and left, silent and brutal. Screams rang out in high-pitched voices, and the snow on the ground turned crimson as feet skidded under hooves. Metal bars crashed down on the troops, crushing bones and twisting heels out of stirrups until uniforms vanished under a mass of workmen’s boots. Yet the sabers continued to strike with expert skill, again and again, laying bare a back, slashing open a cheek, a throat. Charge, regroup, charge. Even the snow in the air turned scarlet as the horses wheeled in formation up and down the railway siding.

Arkin snatched Sergeyev’s small pistol from under his coat. Six times he took precise aim, six times slamming a bullet into a scarlet chest. The strikers fought back with fury. Horses crashed to their knees. Helmets fell to the ground. Arkin threw himself into the battle, dodging blades, parrying blows, all the time working his way nearer to the tall blond captain on the devil-black stallion.

Arkin found Karl’s body. His young eyes were wide open, staring up at the falling snow, but glazed and lifeless. Flakes settled in his lashes and melted on the warm eyeballs like tears. Arkin broke the neck of the soldier standing over him with his saber still dripping on the snow and dropped to his knees beside the boy. He closed the young eyes. Nothing was sacred in this world. Not even the innocents. He snatched up the saber and with a roar of rage went to work on the scarlet uniforms.

T
HE WOMEN WORKED HARDEST. VALENTINA QUICKLY became aware of that fact. In St. Isabella’s Hospital the women worked hardest and were paid the least, yet they didn’t complain. They just treated the male nurses with a deference Valentina felt they didn’t deserve and the doctors like gods incarnate.

She worked hard and spoke little. She didn’t mind that she spent most of her time in the sluice room scrubbing things and sterilizing equipment. That was a good part, the instruments. She handled them with respect, finding unexpected pleasure in their fine steel edges and baffling shapes. She liked the way each one had a specific purpose: a clamp, a probe, a syringe, and many that she could only guess at. Each day she and her fellow novice nurses were given an hour of instruction in which she focused her mind with the same intensity as when she learned a new piece for the piano. During her time in the wards, she asked clear questions and paid close attention to the answers.

“You’re a good listener,” one of the patients told her.

St. Isabella’s was a hospital for the poor. It had been set up more than one hundred years earlier at the insistence of Catherine the Great, but there were never enough beds and never enough wards. An unending stream of the sick and the dying stumbled through its doors, but many were turned away with no hope of finding treatment elsewhere. But Valentina was learning to lock things out of her head. Like the man this morning lying on the steps outside, dead as a dog. People with money didn’t use hospitals. They were places you went to die. Doctors would come to the houses of respectable people, numerous times a day if necessary, and treat patients in their own bed. They even performed minor operations there. Only for a major operation did a wealthy patient enter a hospital.

Valentina plunged her hands deep into soapy water and started scrubbing a speculum, but after a minute she lifted her hands and inspected them. Red and raw, with hairline cracks around the knuckles. She felt a ripple of shame. A nurse’s hands, not a pianist’s hands. She hated herself for caring.

A door swung open behind her. “Ah, there you are. We need you.”

Valentina turned, suds dripping to the floor. It was young Darya Spachyeva, the nurse she met the day she came for her interview, the one with black hair and the swear words. Her wide smile was missing today.

“Do you know,” Valentina asked, “that you have blood all down your neck?”

“You have to come,” the girl said. “Quickly.”

T
HE AIR LAY THICK AND HEAVY. WALKING INTO THE MEN’S ward was like wrapping her face in a stale blanket. Blood and fear and a deep raw anger packed the room so full that there was little space for anything else. Bodies lay everywhere: on beds, on mattresses on the floor, on thin blankets, on bare boards. Too many, far too many.

“What happened?” Valentina demanded.

“The Hussars.”

“An attack?”

“Well, they weren’t playing with their nice shiny sabers for nothing.”

Valentina could see their smooth unlined cheeks. Young men with dreams that had been shredded. Blood streamed from their heads; gaping wounds yawned open on their shoulders. They had fought, on foot, against men on horseback.

“Chyort!”
Valentina swore.

Captain Chernov had kept his promise.

“Darya”—her pulse was thudding in her ears—“where do I start?”

N
URSE IVANOVA, TAKE THESE. BE QUICK.”

Medsestra
Gordanskaya thrust a pair of shears into Valentina’s hand and moved with calm efficiency to the other side of the ward, where Darya was struggling to prevent a man with a bandage over his eyes from crawling toward the door. Valentina laid a gentle hand on the patient in front of her. He was lying facedown.

“Hello, I’m
Sanitarka
Ivanova.”

She kept her voice firm and reassuring. With the shears she snipped through the material of his jacket from its hem right up to its collar, then the same with his shirt. Two long parallel cuts ran down his back like scarlet tram tracks. She bathed them with antiseptic, but as fast as she mopped up the blood, more flowed onto his white flesh. It needed stitches. All the time she worked, she talked to him. His frightened eyes, as he tilted his head to one side, kept darting up at her.

“The doctor will be here any moment,” she assured him. “A few stitches, that’s all you’ll need.” She placed a dressing pad on the wound and pressed hard to stem the flow. “You’ll soon be back at work.”

“They were waiting for us. Determined to finish us off this time.”

“Were you marching?”

“Nyet. No, just gathering in our factory yard. Me and the other apprentices.”

“The soldiers attacked you in the factory yard?”

“No.” His eyes fluttered closed and opened again, small fragmented movements, and a smear of vomit slid from his mouth. “We went down to the railway sidings to have talks with the rail workers. Their foreman was . . .” He started to sob, raw animal sounds.

“Hush, you’re safe here.” She touched his hair on the back of his head and it was stiff and matted with blood. She stroked his cheek. His neck.

“Nurse,” he whispered, eyes closed, “I can’t move my arms.”