The Jewel of St Petersburg (63 page)

Two fifty-one.

She washed her hands, put on her nurse’s cape. Two fifty-six. She began the long walk down the corridors to the rear of the hospital. She pushed open the double doors and stepped out into the sunlight, so bright after the somber interior that she had to screw up her eyes.

There he was. Viktor Arkin stood against one of the walls, taller than she remembered, noticeably thinner. His forehead and cheekbones jutted through his skin. Her eyes fixed on the gun held loosely in his hand, and for the first time she let into her mind the thought that he might kill her. No, not if she could make him believe she was carrying his child. She walked over to a brightly lit area next to one of the huts, but Arkin didn’t move. A full minute ticked past and she could hear each second click inside her head, but just when she thought he would be tempted no closer he approached, up on his toes like a cat. He stopped five paces from her, and she saw his eyes adjust as he stepped out of the gloom.

“You’ve given me trouble,” he said.

“I’m glad.”

“Where is he?”

“Who?”

“Your engineer.”

“He doesn’t know I’m here.”

He smiled politely, and she had no idea whether he believed her. He shrugged and lowered his gun to his side, watching her carefully. “That may be true. I can’t imagine you would want him to know what a little whore you were in the
izba.”

She didn’t answer.

“So what is it you want?” he asked, suddenly brusque and businesslike.

“Where are all your men? I’m sure they’re hiding somewhere here, a whole army of them inside the huts and down in the cellar.”

He smiled, but this time it wasn’t polite. “No one is here except me. Don’t think I didn’t consider it. I could have taken you captive again and kept you locked up for nine months, then taken the child and slit your throat.”

He had seriously considered such an action; she could hear it in his voice, and the thought made her legs tremble. “I’d have stuck a fork in your throat long before the nine months were up.”

He laughed, genuinely amused. “I do believe you would. If the child is really mine, not your engineer’s, have you considered marrying me instead, or even letting me have the child after it is born?”

“No.”

“I thought not. So what is it you want? We’re here face to face. Do you intend to try to kill me?”

“Don’t think I haven’t thought about it.”

How could he smile? How could he laugh? How could this man not tear his hair out and rend his clothes into shreds after what he did to Katya?

She spread her cape, so that he could see under it. “Look, I am unarmed.”

“That makes me more nervous.” His glance darted around the yard. “I shouldn’t have come.”

“I want you to know, Arkin, that every day that I wake, I feel pain. I will miss my sister for the rest of my life. My mother is suffering, and my father. You and your Bolshevik
cause
have crippled my family.”

She was observing him as she spoke. She saw something darken his face—it could have been sorrow or satisfaction—and tug at the skin around his mouth. She unbuttoned her cape at the neck and let it drop from her shoulders. It was the signal to Jens, and Arkin was far too accustomed to such things not to recognize it as such. Immediately he scanned the hospital windows, but he was the one in the sunlight while they were in the shade and he could see nothing. He started to run. He knew what was coming.

A single shot rang out, the sound like the crack of a whip in Valentina’s ears. Arkin’s right leg crumpled under him, flinging him to the cobbles, but even as he hit the ground he was dragging himself into the shadow of the hut. Valentina looked up at the row of windows on the second floor, at the one belonging to the sluice room where Jens had been hiding since last night.

“Thank you, Jens. Spasibo,”
she whispered.

Arkin was binding his kerchief around a knee that was pouring blood, shards of bone spattered in grisly chunks down his trousers. Valentina stood over him and stared down at his face twisted in agony.

“You’ll feel pain now,” she said harshly. “Pain every day for the rest of your life. Death would have been too easy for you. I want you to suffer like Katya suffered. I want you to hate me every time you put that foot to the floor, the way I will hate you every day that I cannot speak to my sister.”

He looked up at her, his eyes black holes of rage. “One day your engineer will pay for this.”

She seized his hair in her hand and yanked back his head. “If you ever touch him, I swear to you I will destroy the child.” Their eyes locked, and she knew he believed her. She released him and wiped her hand on her skirt. “I’ll go and order a stretcher for you,” she said, and walked into the hospital. By the time she came out with two orderlies Viktor Arkin was gone. Only his blood remained on the cobbles.

Thirty-eight

J
ENS SAW A CHANGE IN VALENTINA AFTER THAT DAY IN THE courtyard. Some of the shadows left her eyes, and her limbs regained the fluid grace that they had lost since the death of her sister. They didn’t talk about what had happened. Neither wished to mention Arkin’s name. To do so would be to invite him back. But there was a new tenderness in their lovemaking and a deeper passion in her music that made him ache for her when they were apart.

Unknown to her he continued to search for Arkin. He dredged through the slums of St. Petersburg once more but found no trace of him, not even a whisper. The man had left the city, Jens was convinced of it. He even sent Liev Popkov to drink the backstreet bars dry, but still no word.
Neechevo.
Nothing. If there were any justice in the world, he’d be dead and buried from gangrene of the leg, but that was too much to hope for. Jens didn’t believe in natural justice. You had to make your own.

Though the official period of mourning for Katya was not over in the Ivanov household, he spoke to Valentina’s parents in private about the wedding, and the ceremony was arranged with a certain amount of speed. Jens was not a man for Russian weddings. They were too long and too solemn for his taste, the ritual too precise. But on the day of his marriage, he was mesmerized by the sight of Valentina in her long white dress, holding her lighted candle, her dark hair twined up at the back of her head, clustered under a white veil with a scattering of pearls that could not begin to compare with the creamy texture of her skin.

As the priest in his
epitrachelion
robe performed the traditional liturgy, bound their joined hands with his stole, and led them three times around the
analogion
lectern, circling the Gospel Book, her eyes flashed at him with such a challenge and such desire that he considered scooping her up in his arms right there and then. He couldn’t bear to share her a minute longer. When the golden wedding crowns were held over their heads and the priest in his finest robes chanted the
ektenia,
he saw the way her glance moved against her will to the church door, as though expecting someone else to slide in. A small crease of concern on her high forehead, a tense touch of her hand when they exchanged rings. The faintest sliver of fear behind the shimmer of her veil.

Not for the first time Jens cursed himself for not raising the barrel of his rifle that day in the hospital courtyard and blowing a hole the size of her crown in Arkin’s chest. Like for like. A bullet for a bullet. But the revolutionary had been wearing body armor that day; Jens had seen the bulk of it clearly under his shirt, and that was why he could be so bold. Whatever lair the bastard had slunk off to now, that knee of his would take a long time to heal. Arkin would not be returning to St. Petersburg in a hurry.

When the ceremony and the elaborate celebrations were finally at an end, Jens whisked Valentina away and drove her at speed in a decorated carriage to their new home. It lay in a quiet avenue near Dr. Fedorin’s house.

“It will be useful to have a doctor on our doorstep when the baby comes,” Jens had pointed out, but she had laughed at him, calling him a worrisome bear, and promised to produce the child as effortlessly as a she-cat sheds kittens. He had chosen the house for her with care. The view of the river, with its surface looking as solid as steel, was for when she needed to sit and be quiet, and the height of the ceilings would form a perfect chamber for her music. The pale polished floors reminded Jens of the dense pine forests of Denmark, and he had brought his reindeer rug to lay in front of the fire. He intended to put it to good use.

He took delight in peeling her wedding finery from her body, while she stood smiling at him and proffering each tempting arm and each slender leg to be denuded. When she was naked and her hair was spread in a rippling fan of satin over her bare back, he led her to the new Erard grand piano in the drawing room and she played for him. Just for him. The lilting notes of Chopin’s Nocturne in E Flat.

As her hands glided over the keys, his eyes traced each delicate notch of her spine. Every line of her was smooth and supple, the curve of her buttocks on the piano stool, the angle of her shoulder, the tip of her elbow. And the exquisite hollow above her hips that was slowly filling as the swell of her belly grew larger.

This woman, his wife, carrying their child. As essential a part of him as the lungs in his chest and the blood in his veins. He moved over to her and kissed the warm top of her head, then each rib on her back and the dainty bone at the base of her spine. All the time her hands kept playing but he heard her sighs of pleasure, and when his arms encircled her, cradling the child inside her, she let her weight lean back against him, as if it belonged there.

“I love you, Madam Friis,” he whispered into her ear, and swept her up off the stool into his arms. “Time for bed.”

She twined her arms around his neck, her eyes bright and laughing at him, swinging her bare feet, her fingers tight in his hair.

“We have forever,” she promised.

C
ANDLES STILL BURNED AROUND THE BEDROOM. THEIR soft flickering light soothed Valentina’s thoughts and turned Jens’s skin golden on the sheets. She kept a hand on his head where it lay next to the curve of her stomach, and she smiled contentedly. Both were asleep—one beside her and one inside her—and she let her mind stretch into the future that was waiting for them. She filled it with new engineering projects for Jens and St. Petersburg’s Conservatoire of Music for herself.

There would be no more St. Isabella’s Hospital, not now, not without Katya to care for. No list to cross off one by one. She had different aims now. Instead she pictured concerts and walks in the park, a small hand tucked in hers, and the world’s biggest mouse palace constantly being redesigned and expanded. Always the sound of laughter. Always the warmth of Jens’s body next to hers at night and that look in his eyes when he lifted his gaze from his book or from his papers and caught sight of her. That moment. As though they were bound under one skin.

She stroked his hair. There would be problems; of course there would. The social order in St. Petersburg was unstable, but she had faith in the power of men like her father to bring it under control, of men like Captain Chernov to hold the line against the strikers. But above all she had faith in men like Jens to build a better world for the workers to live in. Arkin and his ferocious revolution would never succeed; it would just fade away to nothing, leaving the banners and the slogans to be pecked by the gulls that swept in silvery flocks low over the city.

She rested her hand on her stomach and imagined a delicate head with a mass of fine curls living inside her. To be a mother. The thought took her breath away. But it made a sensation that was warm and real beat inside her blood, a feeling that in a strange way she was now larger than herself. Not just physically, but in her love. She smiled, thinking of her own mother.

Elizaveta Ivanova had recently taken to traveling by train to Moscow to stay with an old school friend of hers. Sometimes for only one or two days, sometimes longer. She said she needed to escape from the city where her daughter had died, and certainly she always returned without the lines of tension on her forehead and without the dull sorrow in her eyes. Papa barely seemed to notice her mother’s absences, he was so involved in deals with Minister Davidov, but he had embraced Valentina warmly at her wedding and kissed her cheek with his blessing. The gesture meant much to her. Only her sister wasn’t there to share her joy.

Valentina turned on her side and curled herself around Jens’s sleeping form, entwining her limbs with his and inhaling the scent of his skin. “My husband,” she murmured.

Katya would have been happy for her.