The Jewel of St Petersburg (49 page)

“I understand.” Elizaveta proceeded to lay out the cards once more.

For a while nothing more was said, and the fire sent shadows darting up the walls as they both lived with their thoughts. After a while Valentina removed a velvet case from her coat pocket and placed it on the floor as far away from herself as she could reach.

“I will give Papa this,” she said.

Elizaveta flicked a glance at the blue box containing the diamond necklace, but Valentina did not choose to open it.

“It’s from Chernov. The banks will advance credit to Papa on the strength of it.”

Her mother sighed softly. “Thank you, Valentina. I am grateful.”

“You would like it, Mama. It’s very beautiful.”

“Is that what you think of me? That I am so easily tempted by beautiful objects?” Her eyes remained on the cards.

“Why did you marry him, Mama? Why Papa?”

One of her mother’s hands gave a little jump. She dealt the cards in a faster rhythm, but she spoke slowly. “When I was a little older than you, I loved a man whom my parents deemed unsuitable. They paid him money to leave Petersburg.”

“They bought him off?”

“Yes. He went without saying good-bye. After that I didn’t much care whom I married. They chose your father. It was a good match.”

Valentina remained on the floor by the fire, staring intently at her mother until Elizaveta finally lifted her eyes from the cards and met her gaze.

“I’m so sorry, Mama,” Valentina murmured. “Sorry for everything.”

Her mother shrugged and concentrated on the cards. Valentina rose to her feet, moved over to a mahogany cabinet that contained an array of bottles on its shelves, and poured out two vodkas. She walked back, placed one glass on her mother’s card table, and sat on the floor in front of the fire with her own. She gazed into the shifting flames and sipped her drink.

“Why tell me now, Mama?”

“I have my reasons.”

“What reasons?”

“Firstly because I want you to know that men are rarely what you think they are. Don’t ever forget that. Secondly”—she paused and played three cards in quick succession as if trying to bridge the gap between her thoughts and her tongue—“because tonight you have gone.”

“Gone?”

“You have gone from us. I can see it in your eyes, in the way your feet touch the floor as if they know exactly where they are heading. I hear it in your voice. Tonight you have grown up and gone.”

“I’m still here, Mama.”

Her mother nodded. She drank her vodka in one quick movement and asked, “I assume he’s alive, your engineer?”

“Yes.” Valentina said it quickly, the single word tumbling off her tongue. For even the possibility that he might not be alive was too dangerous a thought to allow. Like her mother, she drank down the clear liquid, emptying her glass. She had dosed Jens on morphine, enough to knock out an ox, but in Dr. Fedorin’s guest room his hand had clamped around her wrist, unwilling to let her go even as he slept. She had kissed his fingers.
Trust me, Jens. And I will trust you. Because Mama is wrong. You are the man I think you are; you have proved it to me.

“You’re smiling,” Elizaveta commented.

Was she? She hadn’t realized.

“You’re smiling because you are thinking of him.”

“Don’t you still smile when you think of the man you love?”

Her mother’s blue eyes widened. “Yes, I do.” She opened her mouth to say more but closed it abruptly and swept all of the cards into her hand, squeezing them tight. Tears slid down her cheeks.

“Mama.” Valentina hurried to her mother’s side.

“Valentina,” Elizaveta whispered, “I am so jealous of you.”

Valentina wrapped her arms around her mother’s stiff figure and rocked her gently by the light of the flames.

V
ALENTINA STOOD AT HER BEDROOM WINDOW, IMPATIENT for morning to arrive. The moment that lights started to appear and the servants roused themselves to the new day’s activity, she wrapped herself in her coat and slipped out into the dark. The air bit into her lungs. The stable was swarming with grooms raking straw and rubbing down the horses, whistling snatches of tunes and breaking the ice on water buckets. The air smelled of oats and the sweet scent of hay, and she noticed that the sturdy little mare she had driven yesterday was safely back in her stall. One of the grooms rolled his eyes at her when she headed straight for the narrow stairs that led up to the sleeping cubicles, but she ignored him.

“Liev,” she called, jolting open his door, “you are a rotten shot.”

Popkov was lying flat on his back on the floor, clothed in the same filthy tunic as yesterday, and didn’t make any effort to stand. His eyes were dull and filmy but regarded her with interest.

“The bastard ducked,” he growled.

“You creased Arkin’s skull, that’s all.”

“It was meant for his brain.”

“What was he up to?”

“Revenge, most probably.”

“Revenge can work both ways.”

The Cossack bared his teeth and it was impossible to tell whether it was a grin or a snarl. Valentina sat down on his narrow cot and studied his muscular frame. “The rifle?” she asked. “Back in the study?”

“Of course.”

“Spasibo.”

“Your engineer alive?”

She nodded. “Do you need morphine?”

“Nyet.”

She drew from under her coat the vodka bottle from the blue salon. Instantly his eyes lost their dull haze and gleamed black as sin. She handed it over.

“Try to make it last, will you? At least until after breakfast,” she urged.

He laughed, a booming sound that shook the flimsy walls, and started to open the bottle.

V
ALENTINA REALIZED IMMEDIATELY THAT CAPTAIN STEPAN Chernov was drugged up to his eyeballs. His pupils were tiny pinpricks at the center of misty irises and his mouth had lost its firm line. It was loose and pliant as though it belonged to someone else. Clearly his doctor believed in pain control for his patients as much as she did.

She sat quietly by his bedside and listened to his mother cry. Countess Chernova, a delicate woman wearing too many ropes of pearls, was seated in a gilt chair on the opposite side of the bed, sobbing into a tiny lace handkerchief that struck Valentina as inadequate for the job. She could find no sympathy in her heart for the mother of the man who had sworn to kill Jens. She had come here for the sake of her own parents, and it was the last time she would play the role of fiancée. She refused to touch him. His right hand lay on the quilt, but she would rather chop it off than pick it up. This was the offending hand that had gripped the dueling pistol with such relish. His parents had announced their intention of whisking him away as soon as he was strong enough to travel to their dacha on the Black Sea, where the weather was warmer and the healing would be faster.

“Valentina,” Stepan Chernov whispered, “come with me.”

He tried to smile but it was beyond the strength of his drugged muscles. He had lost a large amount of blood from a stomach wound and had hung all night on the edge of survival, but this morning he had rallied and was making improvement. That was what his father, Count Chernov, had told her.
Rallied. Improvement.
She had shut her ears.

“I can’t come with you.” She spoke clearly, so that there would be no mistake in his foggy brain. “My sister is ill, so I can’t leave Petersburg.” She offered one crumb of comfort to the ghost-white face on the pillows. “When you return, we will talk again,” she said, and rose to her feet. “I might even play the piano for you.” She couldn’t quite hide the faint trace of a smile.

Thirty

J
ENS HAD BAD DREAMS. IN THE DARK HOURS WHEN LIFE is stretched in some indefinable way, so that reality becomes flexible and consciousness is elusive, the wolves came. He knew he was in Fedorin’s house and that wild animals did not roam the carpeted stairs and bedrooms in the heart of Petersburg, and yet they came nevertheless. At first he could just smell them, the same feral stink that existed in the house where the woman lay in bed with her dead children.

But when he tried to sit up to drive them away, they leapt on his chest with a snarl and sank their fangs into his flesh. He felt their tongues, hot and smooth, lapping the blood from his heart. Again and again he told himself it was a bad dream, but how could it be? He could see their red eyes. He could smell their oily breath. With an effort he punched one in the jaw and heard it grunt. That would teach it to stay away. He lay back, satisfied.

I
T WAS DAYLIGHT WHEN HE WOKE, THE KIND OF DAYLIGHT that is so white and hard it pushes between the eyelids and prizes them open. It took a moment for Jens’s battered brain to recognize where he was or to work out why the hell he was flat on his back in a strange bed, but everything slotted into place the moment he saw her. Waiting for him to come back to her.

Valentina was seated on a chair beside the bed, a small and delicate figure between its heavily padded arms, her dark gaze fixed on him. Something about the stillness of her made him think she had been there a long time. When she saw he was awake her eyes widened with a lift of her long eyelashes, and it made the damaged flesh of his chest tighten with pleasure. Her mouth curved into a slow smile that warmed the blood in his veins.

“How do you feel?” she asked in a gentle voice.

Still she didn’t move. He wanted to touch her. “Like there’s an elephant stamping on my chest.”

Her smile grew. “Don’t let Dr. Fedorin hear that. Elephants aren’t allowed upstairs.”

When he laughed, the muscles behind his ribs seemed to explode. He started to cough, blood seeping from his mouth, and she watched him with a rigid unreadable expression, her cheeks stiff and pale. When he finished, she used a red washcloth to wipe his lips.

“Don’t talk,” she ordered. “Don’t laugh either.”

He lay struggling for breath, fighting off the damn elephant, and let his eyes feast on her. She was wearing a warm green-and-russet-colored dress, like a forest nymph that had crept into his room by mistake. It had a high neck with twelve tiny perfect pearl buttons at the front. Her hair looked as if she’d been out in the wind, but maybe she’d just been running her hands through it. That thought, the idea of her doing so in distress, was like a cold finger placed at the base of his throat.

“Are you in much pain? Don’t speak. Just nod or shake your head.”

He shook his head. Their eyes held tight to each other.

“Good,” she said.

“Kiss me,” he whispered.

“Go to sleep.”

“Kiss me.”

He pushed his hand to the edge of the bed, but she did not move forward to take it.

“Keep still,” she ordered. “You mustn’t tear anything inside.”

“Kiss me or I shall leap from this bed and chase you around the room.

“You don’t deserve a kiss.” Her face was solemn and her eyes fierce. “You almost got yourself killed.”

With a wrench he sat up and seized her wrist, pulling her out of her chair toward the bed.

“Don’t!” she shouted at him. “You’ll do more damage and tear the stitches.”

He drew her close and kissed her. Her lips were soft and yielding but her dark eyes remained open, furious with him.