The Jewel of St Petersburg

Thirty-one

THE DAYS GREW WARMER AND THE CITY DELIGHTED IN shedding its choking shroud of fog. It had grown tattered and stank like an old man’s coat. The golden church domes began to gleam once more as skies brightened and palaces shook off their mood of gloom, throwing open windows so that sunlight could linger in the rooms, settling on armchairs and stretching out on rugs like a ginger cat. The Fontanka and the Moika thawed, allowing boats to set about their business of carting coal and logs to the outlying factories. The streets grew rowdier. Markets sprang up. Hawkers shouted their wares, traders thrust apples and cinnamon, shoes and paintbrushes under the nose of every passerby. St. Petersburg ruffled her skirts and started to smile.

Valentina smiled too. Jens was waiting for her. How could she not smile? He claimed that the walk to the hospital each day exercised his lungs and did him good, but she wasn’t so sure. His breathing was still labored and at times made thin strange whistling noises as he stepped up and down the curbs.

Just the sight of his angular figure, his hair like copper in the last rays of sunlight, and the thoughtful way he leaned his head forward as he paced back and forth made quiet corners of her vibrate with life. This whole business of living became more vivid when she was anywhere near him, more important, more vital. Today in the hospital she had seen her first birth, and she had been stunned. That life should begin with such violence and yet at the same time with such beauty, the new infant so perfectly formed. She had wept.

But even that was pale and insipid in comparison with what happened inside her when she saw her Danish engineer waiting for her. She wanted to hurl herself at him. To wrap her arms around him and devour him. Every day it was the same. Instead she walked over to him, smiled up into his eyes, and took his hand in hers.

BY THE TIME THEY REACHED THE STREET IN WHICH HIS apartment lay, the sky had taken on a muted lilac haze that turned the buildings into dainty dollhouses. Jens had his arm around her shoulders and spoke little, needing to save his breath for walking, so she was entertaining him with a story of how Medsestra Gordanskaya and Nurse Darya had almost come to blows over the loss of a doctor’s stethoscope, each blaming the other till the air in the sluice room was thick with swear words and Gordanskaya’s grand bosom was threatening to pop the buttons of her uniform.

He chuckled, but abruptly she felt his body go rigid. She sensed the laughter draining out of him into the gutter and something darker sliding into its place as he tightened his grip on her shoulder. She followed his gaze and saw a smart carriage with a gilded family crest and liveried servants parked outside his house.

“Whose is it?” she asked, already certain of the answer.

“It’s Countess Serova’s.” He halted his step and looked down at Valentina, his eyes intent on her face. “I’ll tell her to leave at once.”

“Why would she come?” she asked.

“Alexei might be ill.”

Valentina felt a shiver flick up her spine. Countess Natalia Serova was clever. She was more than capable of using her son if she had to. The carriage and the hallway were empty, so Jens started up the stairs two at a time but halfway up he stalled, one hand pressed against his chest as he fought to drag in air. Instantly Valentina was with him, taking his weight on her shoulder. Her arms encircled his waist, and in the icy silence inside her head she cursed the countess.

“How touching.”

The voice came from above. Valentina glanced up. Countess Serova stood on the upper landing in all her finery, a mint green gown with a black cape, a tall black hat with emerald feathers, and a boy at her side. About seven. Green eyes. Beautiful worried green eyes. Eyes that were too old for him.

“Jens has not been well,” Valentina said sharply to the black hat. She did not care to look at the woman’s eyes.

“Dyadya Jens! Uncle Jens!” The boy catapulted down the stairs and slid his young shoulder under Jens’s other arm.

“Spasibo,” Jens murmured. “Good evening, Countess.” On the upper landing he disentangled himself and managed a polite bow. “To what do I owe this pleasure?”

“Alexei was concerned. When we heard you were unwell, he badgered me to bring him to see you.”

Her smile was as smooth as a snake’s tongue. Jens ruffled the boy’s brown hair. “I’m fine.” He unlocked the door to his apartment, but once inside there was an awkwardness that Jens did nothing to ease. He just knelt down in front of her son.

“What have you there?” he asked.

“A present for you,” the boy grinned.

His mother pulled a face. “It was his own idea.”

Under his arm Alexei was clutching a box the size of a shoe box, and he thrust it into Jens’s hands. Carefully he removed the lid and then burst out laughing.

“Well, look what we have here!”

Inside on a bed of straw snuggled a large white mouse, its whiskers twitching, its pink eyes staring up at them with intense annoyance.

“While you’re sick, I thought”-the boy’s eyes shifted sideways to Valentina and quickly veered away again-“he could keep you company. In case you get lonely. His name is Attila.”

“Attila?” Another roar of laughter came from Jens, sending him into a violent spasm of coughing and making the mouse chitter angrily with a display of yellow teeth. “He’s magnificent. The heart of a Hun in a tiny fur coat. Spasibo, Alexei. Thank you. He and I shall be good friends.”

He kissed the boy’s cheek, and the small arms sneaked around his neck and stayed there.

“Don’t cling,” his mother ordered.

The arms vanished. Jens led him to the table and together they sat examining the wonders of Attila, while Valentina and Natalia Serova eyed each other with interest.

“I hear he fought a duel over you,” the countess commented in a low voice.

“Not quite.”

“So his wound is your fault.”

“His wound,” Valentina said stiffly, “is the fault of the man who pulled the trigger.”

“I’m told that it wasn’t the charming Captain Chernov. He is still recuperating in the enviable warmth of the Black Sea. Do you know who fired the shot?”

“What is this? The Spanish Inquisition?”

The countess gave a cold smile that went no farther than her lips. “I am curious. You know what Petersburg is like, so many wicked rumors.

“So many wicked people.”

Valentina’s challenging stare did not please the countess. She looked away, and Valentina took the moment to walk over and stand behind Jens, one hand on his shoulder as she bent and laughed at the mouse’s antics. Alexei was giggling uncontrollably at the size of the animal’s testicles. He and his mother didn’t stay long, but before they left, Jens knelt once more, kissed the boy’s cheeks, and promised to design the most elaborate mouse palace a rodent had ever possessed. He held the eager young body to him.

“Will you come when you’re better?” Alexei asked shyly. “To take me horse riding again?”

Jens hesitated. Seconds ticked past in the room, seconds when the countess didn’t blink.

Valentina stepped forward with a smile and patted the child’s shoulder in the sailor suit. “Of course he will. Anyway he will want to bring Attila’s new palace for you to see.”

Jens looked at her for a long moment, then nodded to the boy. “Of course.”

As the countess drifted from the room with a rustle of her silk skirts, there was an unmistakable look of triumph on her face.

VALENTINA PUSHED OPEN THE HEAVY DOOR TO THE CHURCH and entered the building, accustomed now to its musty odor. The domed space should have pressed down on her with the weight of prayers but didn’t. It felt empty.

“Father Morozov,” she called out to the tall figure in black who was lighting a candle under one of the gilded icons to the Virgin Mary.

He turned with a patient smile. “Back again, I see.”

“Back again.”

She stood in the center of the marbled floor. Around her the murals and icons and votive candles glowed solemnly, the long sad eyes of saints directed at her as though she were the sinner, the liar. Not the man in the long black robe. But she knew different. Under the gentle smile and the kind words lay a tongue that dispensed lies more readily than it dispensed absolution.

“Have you seen him?” she asked.

“I tell you today what I told you all the other days: Viktor Arkin doesn’t come here anymore. You are always welcome in this church, my child, but this is a place of peace and prayer, not of persecution.”

“When did you see him last?”

“I told you. Not for weeks.”

“Do you know where he is?”

“No.”

“Are you sure?”

“I’m certain.” His pale eyes folded at the outside edges, as crinkled as tissue paper, when he smiled. “I’m not lying to you.”

“Have you heard anything new?”

“Only that he was injured.”

“Badly?”

“I don’t know. But I was told he’d left for Moscow. How true that is, I don’t know.” He touched the crucifix that hung from his neck.

“Tell him from me, Valentina Ivanova, that he cannot hide forever.”

He smiled his priestly smile at her and blew out the lit taper in his hand. “This is the house of the Holy Lord, my child. Let him bring peace to whatever it is that is driving you to seek this Viktor Arkin so relentlessly.” He made the sign of the cross with two fingers.

“Thank you, Father, but I would prefer it if he brought me the information I seek.”

“I cannot help you there.”

Valentina saw the watchfulness behind the gentle eyes, the bright mind that denied her help. She swung away and hurried from the church. Behind her the priest’s voice echoed in the damp empty space. “May God bless you, my child.”

HAS SHE GONE?”

Father Morozov nodded. “But she will be back, comrade.”

Downstairs in a stuffy back room in the church, Arkin was seated at a table beside a mountain of red-printed pamphlets. He was folding each of them to hand out at the next meeting, running a thumb-nail along the crease with a spurt of irritation. “Why doesn’t she give up?”

“She is tenacious, that one.” Morozov patted a hand on the heap of pamphlets that declared, UNITE! POWER TO THE WORKERS! “Like you,” he added.

On a stool in the corner a nickel samovar burbled softly and an uneaten pirog lay beside it on a tin plate. The priest glanced over at it. He frowned.

“Viktor, if you want your wound to heal you must eat. You must sleep.”

“Not yet, Father.”

“When?”

Arkin lifted his eyes from the pamphlets. He was thinner-he had noticed that himself, his cheeks hollow between the sharp bones of his face-and the gray of his eyes had grown darker. Even Elizaveta Ivanova had commented on it. She liked to stare at his eyes for long periods, as though the secret of who he was could be found in them if she looked hard enough.

“When the job is done,” Arkin said. “When the Romanovs are buried in a pit. Then I will lead a normal life again.”

The priest’s face folded into deep furrows. “It may be too late then,” he said softly. “You may have forgotten how.”

A LETTER ARRIVED FROM CAPTAIN STEPAN CHERNOV. JUST the sight of its envelope with its crest crisply stamped on the seal made Valentina want to tear it into a thousand pieces. She took it into her father’s study and handed it to him unopened.

He read it in silence. “The captain is in Switzerland,” he informed her, “taking a spa cure for his injury. He doesn’t expect to be back in Petersburg till the end of the summer.” She heard the relief hiding in his words. They looked at each other with understanding, and she nodded.

“Not long, Papa. You have till then. Whatever loans you have secured against the Chernov necklace will have to be repaid or relocated by the autumn because I will have to return the jewelry to him then.”

“If you cared at all for your sister, you would marry the man.” He crumpled the letter in his fist.

Valentina shook her head. “Please, Papa. It must be possible to find the money. Somewhere. Sell everything. Sell our house in Tesovo or even sell…”

Her father sank low in his chair behind the wide expanse of his desk, which was piled high with manila files and folders that threatened to topple on him. His cheeks were the dull color of overripe plums. “The banks already own everything we possess, Valentina. But I will try.”