Midnight in St. Petersburg (27 page)

Then, letting go of her, he stepped forward until he was right in front of the thin man, eyeballing him. Horace was a head taller, and now there was real threat in his face.

For a long moment, nothing happened. Then the policeman pulled back.

‘Don't give me that bigoted nonsense,' Horace said. ‘You've wasted enough of our time. Just let Mademoiselle Feldman sign a statement saying she knows nothing about this suicide, and has never been to Riga, and let her go. Do it now – right now – and I'll drop my complaint.'

Inna, standing to one side now, reached out again for his hand.

After another long moment's eye-lock, the thin man gave in, and flicked a dispirited arm at his subordinate, who sat down at the desk and started scratching away on a form. Inna stood beside Horace, keeping hold of him, of the hand that was anchoring her here in this world.

‘It's all very well for foreigners to go on about bigotry,' the thin policeman grumbled. ‘Here today, gone tomorrow, what do you care? When we're the ones who get left behind with the revolutionaries, long after you've swanned off to Paris or Baden-Baden. We're the ones who'll be blown up or have our wells poisoned or our children's throats slit. By the Jews and Reds.'

‘Just give Mademoiselle Feldman the statement,' Horace said coldly.

The fat policeman handed Inna the scrawled statement.

She took it with her free right hand. She put it on the desk and signed.

Then she turned back to Horace, breathing out a big sigh of pent-up air, signalling, with all the poise she could muster, ‘Can we go now?'

Horace's eyes lit up. Their answer was ‘yes'.

It was his right hand she was holding. But now she was facing him she saw what he had in his other hand: a small velvet box with the looping word ‘Fabergé' on the outside, the size and shape declaring unmistakably what article of jewellery it contained.

Her heart pounding, she began to lead him towards the door.

But the thin one was still glaring at Horace. ‘I mean,' he continued, resentfully, ‘what's this particular Jewish female and her trouble-making going to be to
you
, sir, once you've gone off home to your England?'

Horace shook his head, as if he had nothing more to say to this man.

But Inna answered. Stopping in the doorway, turning back to the two policemen again, she raised her chin. ‘He won't be going back to England.' Her voice shook just a little. ‘He'll be staying here with his wife.' And now she could feel Horace's hope. ‘With me.'

 

PART TWO

1916–17

 

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

It was a beautiful December morning, cold in the startling and brilliant way of real winter. There'd been the first proper snowfall earlier in the week
.
Today's blue sky was spotted with pink clouds.

‘Friday, so it's your night away at the hospital…' Horace said as he opened the pale-gold curtains. Inna sat up, stretching. She nodded sleepily.

On Fridays, nowadays, she took a day off from her job at the Lemans'. Like many other good-hearted city wives, she'd taken to doing a little voluntary work nursing the poor soldiers wounded in the war. Like many city aristocrats, Prince Youssoupoff had turned one wing of his palace into a hospital (though, unlike most, he hadn't actually gone off to fight), and, like many craftsmen, Horace had wanted to cement his ties with his wealthiest patron. So he'd suggested that his wife become one of the Youssoupoff palace's lady volunteers, and now Inna did whatever she could for the soldiers lying in cots crammed into a former ballroom, for one evening and night every week, and made up the time to the Lemans by going on there on Saturday morning, and working till evening.

‘And you'll be going straight on to the Lemans' in the morning,' Horace sounded absent-minded, but then they both knew their timetables too well to need reminding of them. He must be working round to something else, Inna thought.

Horace was dressed already in the austerely tailored dark clothes he wore to Fabergé's. In the hand not occupied with tweaking back the curtains, he was carrying a cup of tea on a tray for Inna, with a sliver of toast and marmalade (she liked the exotic Englishness of that sharp orange taste; it made her feel genuinely foreign to breakfast off it). He put the tray down on the bed beside her and sat down behind it on the oyster satin quilt. Inna looked up at Horace, and beyond him to the austerely high ceilings, dark wallpapers, stiff curtains and curlicued dark furniture of their rented apartment. Along from their bedroom, the drawing room was her husband's territory, full of the scribbles and scratches of the avant-garde art Horace was interested in at the moment. But she'd done what she could to make the rest of their apartment a home for them by covering everything ugly with quilts and lace and cushions in soft warm colours, which she'd piled up like snowfalls on the bed and sofa and armchairs till Horace started indulgently calling the place ‘Inna's nest'.

He raised an eyebrow. She loved the way he always did that, just a bit, when he was about to make a request. ‘I thought I might dine out with my dear old boy from the City Duma, tonight, since you won't be there? I know you find him dull…'

Sitting up straighter herself, Inna wrapped the pretty lace peignoir he'd given her on her birthday about herself and reached for the teacup. ‘Of course,
darling
,' she said with a smile (using the English word for ‘darling', which she knew made him laugh). ‘You'll have a lovely time talking politics together. Much better without me.'

Monsieur Shreider, the white-bearded mayor of Petrograd – and Horace's client, who, like all of them, must be wined and dined every now and then – was a decent man, she knew: full of solid, good-hearted, bourgeois virtues, and a mine of information. But she did find him dull: not just because of his clunking gallantry (all those toasts to ‘the ladies, God bless 'em!') but also because of his wartime talk about turning more factories over to make munitions, and the corruption of the big tycoon class, and the rest of it. And she couldn't abide the restaurant they went to either. These days Sadko's was all profiteers and red plush and beefsteaks and too much dark wine and brandy. It was characteristically sensitive of her husband to spare her. She wrapped her hands round the delicate china of the cup and breathed in the steam, scented with heady Assam leaves (she'd developed very English tea-drinking habits, too, since marrying Horace).

‘I particularly want to see him…' Horace was saying as he leaned over to kiss the top of her head: an affectionate, low-key gesture. She felt his lips on her hair. ‘… because there were such extraordinary new rumours at the club last night. Shreider's my most political client, and I
would
like to find out if there's any truth in any of it.'

Inna sipped. She was aware of his slight tension but not especially worried, because there were always rumours. Of course there were. Russia had been at war with Germany and Austria for more than two years. The generals were hopeless, and the Germans were advancing. The Great Retreat last year, as the foe moved forward, meant the city was now packed with hundreds of thousands of extra angry, hungry people: deserters from the army (the men who'd refused to go into battle without boots or guns), the limbless (the ones who hadn't refused), and the landless (the peasants whose villages were now in German hands). They joined the jobless (the former workers of all the factories not making munitions) massing in the streets. With so many people in town, starving so near the plutocrats and wartime profiteers, and with the papers censored so hard that they conveyed none of the reality, rumours were only to be expected.

If it wasn't rumours, it was singing: while the destitute marched angrily through the streets, the poor who still had something left to lose complained through song. All the doormen at the Youssoupoff palace, all the salesmen on Nevsky and all the urchins in the gutter were, this week, singing the same sarcastic song, putting words in the mouths of the spoiled city rich, who were getting richer while they starved:

‘We do not take defeat amiss,

And victory gives us no delight;

The source of all our cares is this:

Can we get vodka for tonight?'

There'd be a different snide, hateful song next week, Inna thought, because the government was as hopeless as the generals. Beyond patriotically changing the German-sounding city name of St. Petersburg to the more Russian-sounding Petrograd, back when hostilities started (the German embassy had been ransacked, too, and German Christmas trees burned), and beyond silencing criticism in the newspapers, what had any ministers achieved? It had been left to good-hearted individuals to set up a bit of a hospital here, or organize some charity supplies to the soldiers there, because no one official was doing anything. Not that it was all the ministers' fault, either, since, while the Emperor was off at military headquarters, making a mess of running the war, the Empress had been here in the city, making a mess of running the country. She'd been dissolving parliaments – they'd had three Dumas in just a few years; a fourth one was sitting now – and banning papers and people, and changing ministers every few days or weeks, till no one knew who was in charge of what, or why, and everyone just whispered, all the time, trying to make sense of things.

Sometimes people said the Empress was interfering so destructively in government on purpose, to weaken Russia, because she was German, and, to her, the Kaiser was Cousin Willy. Because, secretly, she wanted the Germans to win.

How confusing everything was. Inna put her cup down, rubbed her eyes and stretched, letting her descending arm sweep down Horace's head and back. Horace called her his Sleeping Beauty on these late Friday mornings. She'd sleep again when he'd gone, as she'd need to be fresh for the hospital tonight; because it was only then that she was confronted with the disturbing misery of outside.

Inna often felt pleased she didn't have to look too hard into the swirling darkness outside any more, or try too hard to understand what was going on, or plan several anxious moves ahead, now that she had the dusty calm of this rented flat to retreat into, and the safety of her husband's foreign name. And, of course, there was kind, knowledgeable, unflappable Horace, who would always keep them both out of trouble, and who thought every problem through so intelligently that they could live without fear, or as close to it as anyone could hope for nowadays. Horace had held her close in the night, last night as so often, tenderly attentive to her body's needs; and she'd felt the protective softness she always did when she heard his groan of pleasure at the end, when his breath eased as he held her and whispered about love. Horace knew everything, from how to deal with the authorities to when not to make love to avoid having a baby. This was marriage: shelter from the storm; a warm cushioned nest; this great, shared kindness. Horace would look after her, however frightening the world beyond their door. Horace would keep her safe.

‘There are always rumours,' she said now, picking up the toast and nibbling at the nearest edge.

‘But this one was about people we know. They're saying Felix Youssoupoff is planning to assassinate Rasputin.'

Inna didn't stop eating, although she felt uncomfortable even hearing that name. The Rasputin who was written about so scandalously in the papers all the time in 1916 seemed nothing like the commonsensical Father Grigory she'd known long ago. But, she thought – letting her mind slide away from wondering how Father Grigory had become so different, because the man he was now had no place in her comfortable life with Horace – people do change. She certainly had: she'd become sleek and loved and well cared for.

Their paths had diverged, but she'd heard a lot about Rasputin over the years. People claimed that the Empress was flailing about in the dangerous way she was because she was so under his influence. They said he knew secret country ways of easing the inherited blood sickness her little boy suffered from:
gessenskaya bolezn'
, the Hessen disease; her German family's curse on Russia. So the Empress couldn't say no to Rasputin. And perhaps it was Rasputin, more than the Empress, who wanted the constant change, the leapfrog of ministers, because he was evil, and corrupt, and hell-bent on the utter destruction of everything.

Not all of what Inna had read and heard was bad. Inna had privately rather liked the argument that had made Rasputin so unpopular with the aristocracy back on the eve of the war: that he was opposed to fighting over the Balkans. He'd apparently told the Empress for years that it would never be worth shedding a single Russian peasant's blood to protect other, lesser Slavs living under Austrian rule. But he hadn't been around to dissuade the Emperor from rushing to war with all the patriots of Europe in the summer of 1914 after that assassination in the Balkans.

Rasputin hadn't been around because he'd been in hospital in Siberia, fighting for his life.

That was the moment Inna had stopped being able to understand Rasputin's strange and frightening story, beyond knowing that it was not for the person she was becoming.

Rasputin had been in hospital in Siberia, fighting for his life, because he'd been stabbed in the gut by a religious maniac. The maniac was a syphilitic woman with no nose, a follower of his religious enemy, Iliodor, who'd run after him with a bread knife. Afterwards she was locked up (though Iliodor somehow got papers and left Russia for America; people said the secret police had helped him go).

Rasputin had told people the war might never have happened if he had been well enough to talk to the Emperor, in person. But he was too late. By the time he came back to Petrograd, months later, bitter, ghost-white, with black-ringed eyes, the war was already raging. That was when he seemed to have changed. He'd taken up women, they said: street women, society women, gypsies, orgies … And drink, because, as he took to growling in the restaurants he spent his nights in, ‘Why not? I am a man like any other.'