The Jewel of St Petersburg (42 page)

Jens remained where he was near the door. He was not invited to take a seat.

“Popkov was not the only one who could have been killed,” Valentina said in a flat voice. “You took a terrible risk.”

“I couldn’t leave him there to be kicked to death in the straw.”

“I know.” Valentina shook her head as if to rid it of something. “Where is Liev now?”

Jens directed his response to her father. “He’s in a stinking prison cell. That’s why I’ve come. He needs your help tonight or I swear to you he will not be alive in the morning.”

Katya moaned. “Papa! You must help him.”

Ivanov ignored his daughters, his attention still on Jens. “Why did they release you?”

“Because I had nothing to do with the grenades. And because”—he paused, considering how far Ivanov could be pushed—“I have friends at court. You and I both know, Minister, this city functions on who you know and on what favors you are owed.”

Ivanov blinked, considering exactly what that meant. He took out a cigar from a silver humidor on the mantelpiece to give himself breathing space but didn’t offer one to Jens.

“So do they know who planted the grenades?” Jens asked.

“It was Viktor Arkin,” Valentina told him. “Our chauffeur.”

“Did he confess?”

“No,” Ivanov growled. “My daughter saw the box at the back of the garage last week—without realizing what was in it, of course. He must have moved it in case the Okhrana came sniffing around. I’ll have the traitor shot if ever they track him down.”

“Has he disappeared?”

The minister inhaled heavily on his cigar. “He’s run off. A damn revolutionary. In my own home. God curse the man, I hope his body is washed up in the Neva and his eyes are eaten by crabs.”

“He was a good chauffeur. I liked him.”

All attention turned to Elizaveta Ivanova with her water glass in her hand. It was the first time she had spoken.

“He was never impudent,” she continued, “the way the Cossack horseman is. Or as filthy.”

“Papa
^?
”

It was Katya who called for him. She held out her hand, a pale thing that lingered in the air, and her father came quickly to her, taking her hand in his. “What is it, little one?”

“Do as Jens says, Papa. Please. Help Liev.”

Jens witnessed the struggle within the man. His desire to please his younger daughter over a worthless servant, in the balance against his ruthlessness in political maneuvers. But there was something more within the man, something that intrigued him. It was fear.
What is this minister of the tsar so afraid of?

“Katya, my dear child, you don’t understand,” Ivanov said soothingly. “I know you are used to this ignorant Cossack, but—”

“Used to
?” Valentina interrupted.
“Used
to? It is a little more than that, Papa. This
ignorant Cossack
has worked in your employ all his life; he watched his father die because of who you are and because he rode out to find me that day. Liev Popkov detests this infestation of Bolsheviks the way he hates an infestation of rats in his stables. Yet you are going to leave him to die in a stinking Okhrana prison cell?”

“Yes.”

“You can’t.” She leapt to her feet, breathing hard. “You must make a telephone call to the chief of police to demand his release right now,” her voice was shaking, “or I—”

She glanced at Jens and something unguarded in her expression alerted her father. He turned on Jens immediately. “What the hell are you doing here, Friis? Why are you interfering? Is something going on between you and my daughter?” He did not wait for any response. “Get out!” he shouted. “Get out of my house! Stay away from her, do you hear me? I forbid you ever to enter my house again.”

Jens turned to Valentina. “Come with me? Now. Leave this house with me.”

It was a murmur but it echoed through the room as if he had shouted. His words seemed to pull something loose inside her. Her limbs grew soft and the rigid muscles of her face slackened as her gaze held his. The rage gave way and in its place a look formed in her eyes as languid and tender as any she’d given him in the privacy of his bedroom. For one foolish moment he believed she would come.

Her lips parted, and he drew her wrist into his hand. “Come with me,” he said again.

She let her wrist lie between his fingers, but her head turned back to her father. He could see the effort it took, the tension in her neck.

“Papa,” she said, “if you do not demand Popkov’s release immediately tonight, I will ask someone else who will.”

“And who might that be?”

“Captain Chernov.”

“No,” Ivanov spoke quickly. “Valentina, listen to me. I cannot permit our name to be beholden to the Chernovs or they will think you too weak and insignificant to be worthy of the agreed marriage.”

Agreed marriage.
The words scraped against Jens’s mind. It had gone that far.
Agreed marriage.
He released Valentina’s wrist abruptly. A curt bow to her mother, that was all, and he strode from the room.

W
AIT!”

Jens was swinging up onto Hero’s back and closed his ears to her shout. He needed to ride fast, to pound the image of her sweet treacherous mouth from his skull.
My heart will never have anything to do with Captain Chernov,
she had promised. On her sister’s life she had promised. Not her heart maybe, but her marriage bed.

“Jens!”

She came flying through the darkness into the stable yard and hooked an arm around his foot in the stirrup, so that if he rode off he would drag her with him. He looked down at her pale upturned face, at her shoulders shivering in the cream silk, and he felt his heart turn over.

“Good-bye, Valentina.”

“Don’t go.”

“I have no reason to stay.”

“Jens, I love you.” Her eyes blurred and tears strayed down her cheeks. “Only you.”

He smiled at her sadly, bent down and kissed the top of her head. “It seems love isn’t enough for you.”

With a kick he urged the horse forward, so sharply that it broke Valentina’s grip on his leg and at the same time snapped something within him. As he cantered from the yard he didn’t look back.

H
ER FATHER’S STUDY WAS EXACTLY THE SAME, HIS DESK full of papers, his cigar box open. Out in the hall she could hear the whisper of a broom over marble flooring. The cough of a footman, the creak of a stair. The same sounds. As though nothing had changed. As though her world didn’t lie in pieces on the cobbles in the stable yard. She tried to concentrate on what her father was saying, but all her ears could hear was the deadness in Jens’s words:
I have no reason to stay.
All she could see was the look in his eyes. The imprint of the hard muscles around his shinbone was embedded in her hands, and she couldn’t unclasp her fingers in case she lost it. It was all she had left of him.

“Papa,” she interrupted, “there is no
agreed marriage.”

He placed both his hands on his desk and leaned his weight on them, in need of support. “Valentina, please don’t make more trouble for me than I have already.” He spoke so quietly it unnerved her.

“Very well, Papa. But first, deal with Popkov. Please make the telephone call.”

He didn’t argue. He walked over to the black telephone on the study wall, wound the handle, and requested the number from the operator. Whoever it was he talked to, it was brief, a few curt commands. Valentina heard the words
chief of police
, but that was all. When he returned to his desk he sat down heavily, placed his elbows on its surface and his chin in his hands. He looked at her with dull dismayed eyes.

“It’s done,” he said. “Now go.”

“Papa, we couldn’t leave Popkov in the hands of the Okhrana.”

He gave a grunt and lowered his face into his hands. The patch on the top of his head showed where his hair was thinning, and the sight of that small human weakness triggered in her a sudden rush of sorrow for him.

“Papa, I want you to understand that I will not marry Captain Chernov. Nothing will make me go to the imperial ball at the Winter Palace with him.”

The stifled grunt came again, but he didn’t look up. “I need you to.”

She shook her head. “I’m sorry, Papa.” She walked toward the door.

“Valentina,” her father muttered, “he has no money.”

“Who has no money?”

“Your engineer.”

A pulse thudded in her chest. She stood with one hand on the door. “He has enough.”

“Enough for you perhaps, but not enough for me.”

His heavy chin was bunched in his hands, his eyes were observing her, and she could see where his gold signet ring had made a dent in his flesh.

“Papa, why would you want his money?” She gestured around the room at the fine English rifle on the wall, at the French landscape paintings, at the leather-bound books on the shelves. “I don’t understand. Why?”

His eyes blurred. They changed from brown to mud. The veins on his whiskered cheeks drained of blood, and she saw his mouth go slack. For a second she thought he was having a heart attack.

“Papa
^?
”

The moment seemed to stretch until it touched the walls.

“Papa
^?
”

She moved toward him, but he pulled himself up straight. “Very well. I will tell you why I need the money, Valentina. It’s simple. I am bankrupt. Don’t look so shocked. I’m in debt. To banks. To money lenders. Even to thieving Jewish merchants. To anyone who would take my promissory note. Let me tell you that if you don’t marry Captain Chernov, I shall go to prison for embezzlement. Your mother will die in a pauper’s grave and your beloved sister will be turned out on the streets.”

He released a long sour breath, as though it had been building up inside him for months, and fastened his gaze on her.

“Is that what you want, Valentina?”

A
RKIN LAY ON THE FLOOR. HIS BED CONSISTED OF A COUPLE of sacks flung down on flagstones and his blanket was a priest’s ceremonial vestment. A candle burned in a tin lid at his side. It was ironic. Here he was, seeking refuge in the house of the God he despised and finding it hard not to feel grateful to him, just the way his mother had always done. He lay on his back and imagined the church with its icons and its glut of prayers towering over him. Protecting him.
Spasibo.
Thanks. The word grew hot in his mouth and he parted his lips to let it escape.

A rat scuttled in the shadows, its feet scratching like saber tips on the stone floor. Saber tips haunted his mind. Sharpening themselves on it whether he was awake or asleep. The pain in his shoulder was less now, the wound beginning to heal, but the pain in his heart grew worse each hour he lay here. He stared up at the great black timbers above his head and tried to think. The room was unheated and the air so cold now that it was impossible to sleep, but he had no wish to, not while his mind was like this.

“Spasibo,”
he said aloud. “Thank you.”

It was not for God this time. It was for Father Morozov, for giving him refuge. Morozov claimed he was a servant of his God, but he was wrong. He was a true servant of the people of Russia, and no tsar could rule such a man.