Midnight in St. Petersburg (28 page)

Perhaps he was drinking to suppress his fear – fear of the murder plots that the police only ever seemed to foil at the eleventh hour, the bombs, the poisoners and the cars poised to crash into him. But he was a nasty drunk, who got into fights in restaurants. And he was always drunk.

Inna didn't believe
all
the things the papers said, even now, from inside the silken cocoon she inhabited. She wasn't sure, for instance, that she really believed that this new, bribe-taking, malicious, whoring, Madeira-swilling Rasputin dined so regularly with a Jewish banker known to spy for Germany. But still, as people were always saying, there's no smoke without fire.

And now the latest rumour going around Horace's club was that Prince Felix Youssoupoff had gone to the Duma building and told the parliament's chairman that he and a group of friends were secretly planning to do away with Rasputin, thereby rescuing the Empress's reputation and saving Russia from the revolution of discontent that her catastrophic friendship with Rasputin was threatening to bring about.

‘Felix actually asked the chairman to help, can you believe?' Horace said. ‘And that absurd MP, the Jew-hating one, Purishkevich:
he's
been in the Duma press room, too, sounding off about it. He's been saying he's going to help, and intoning, ‘Remember the date, brothers: the sixteenth of December.' That's next week! And: ‘We're going to kill him like a dog.' So not much of a secret! It was all anyone was talking about last night.

‘Of course the chairman said no, but apparently Felix has got a whole team of other helpers as well as Purishkevich. His friend' – here Horace wiggled his eyebrows, to indicate the athletic grand duke who was Youssoupoff's closest ally, Dmitry Pavlovich – ‘and some other officers, and, I heard, the English secret service team who live at the Astoria. Oh, and even his wife. The princess.'

Here Horace had the grace to look ashamed, and laugh in slight embarrassment. Inna smiled too. It sounded so absurd: Felix Youssoupoff's
wife
?

‘All right, that part I'm not so sure about,' he admitted. He let out a long sigh. ‘Well, it's probably
all
just hot air.'

‘People say your Felix is scared of blood,' Inna said cautiously. She didn't want to belittle her husband's worry, but how could he be taking such lurid talk seriously? She hoped that by recalling another popular rumour – that the prince, as a boy, had been so appalled by the blood that came out of the first and only rabbit he'd ever killed that he'd never touched a gun again – she could put Horace's fears to rest.

Horace nodded. But the worry lines were still there, between his brows.

Inna put out a hand and laid it on his. She knew he was short of good commissions – the gangsters making fortunes from the war didn't want miniature scenes from English life when they went to Fabergé, they wanted gold lumps and diamonds like hen's eggs and pearls the size of fists, made into giant ropes of glitter to hang on their molls. And she'd seen how delighted he'd been when Felix Youssoupoff, who'd been away a lot with his wife since getting married, had placed a new order this autumn. Felix was recently back from his estates in the south, while his wife and their new baby daughter enjoyed the last of the Crimean warmth. He wanted to give them both a lavish Christmas gift of toiletry boxes decorated with flowing pre-Raphaelite nymphs in the manner of Rossetti and Millais. Inna remembered how encouraged Horace had been, and Fabergé had been pleased, too. Horace needed his prince.

‘You mustn't worry,' she said.

‘He's still a wild boy, you know,' Horace muttered. ‘Marriage hasn't changed him.'

Inna could privately agree with that. She'd spotted Felix Youssoupoff herself, every now and then, on her Friday nursing trips to the hospital corner of his palace this autumn. He was still tall and elegant and disdainful: the last smart young man left in Petrograd not to be in some sort of uniform, fighting for the Motherland – which didn't seem to embarrass him in the least. She disliked him, because, oh, he was vain. You could see that from the swashbuckling photograph of himself in Tatar fancy dress, fur-trimmed turban, daggers, jewels, the works, that he'd had hung at the entrance to the ballroom-cum-hospital for the nurses and doctors and dying men to contemplate.

Morality didn't bother Felix Youssoupoff much, Inna thought now. He had graceful manners, and a lisping, clever way with words, and he always bowed politely to her, and exchanged a few pleasantries; but you knew straight away, from the shameless mockery in his eyes, that he was still the vicious child who'd played cruel jokes on servants. He hadn't changed with marriage. He'd always been only interested in his own pleasures; he always would be. But you couldn't imagine him ever actually
doing
anything.

Inna lifted her husband's hand and kissed it. ‘Why are you worrying so?' she asked curiously.

He made a small, uncomfortable sound: half laugh, half sigh. ‘Well, because of the silliest detail. Because of what I heard about
how
he was saying he'd do the murder.'

He paused, gathering words. She waited.

‘Do you remember that novel we all read a while back?
The Silver Dove
? The murder story with the evil peasant mystic?'

Inna nodded.

‘Well, in the book, you remember, the peasant offers his woman to the young gentleman, saying that the three of them will form a Holy Trinity and give birth to a Christ child who will save Russia. But then the peasant gets jealous, and gets his followers to murder the young gent instead?'

She nodded again, feeling suddenly uneasy too. ‘Well, a man at my club had it that Felix has got it into his head to borrow the plot of that book – but, of course, turn it upside down, so that it's the peasant who gets murdered, not the gent. The idea being to lure Rasputin to his home by pretending to offer him his wife – and telling him they must form a sectarian Holy Trinity, and that Rasputin must father on the princess a Christ child, who will save Russia…'

‘He'd be excited … He's vain enough to say yes,' Inna said, almost to herself.

‘And then, once he's in – well, we both know what happens next.'

 

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

When Inna left the hospital the next morning, her head was still full of the frightened boy she'd sat with for half the night, who hadn't had the lucky escape he'd hoped for from the gangrene that had set in while the generals failed to get their wounded out. She was remembering the clutch of his hand, and the sobbing; the smell, which had only really turned her stomach after he'd gone; and the quiet answering anger in the eyes of the doormen, out in the hut at the courtyard gate, when she'd gone to say they'd need to move another body.

But as she came out on to the pretty embankment road by the ice-clagged Moika River, past the yellow-and-green palazzo façades, under a sky thick and low with unfallen snow, the rumour Horace had been talking about was also still with her.

So she wasn't altogether surprised to realize that the man getting out of a motorcar on the otherwise empty road just up ahead was Father Grigory himself. It was just part of the unreality.

He was clearly still lost in the night before, just as she was. But his night had surely been different. He was holding unsteadily on to the door.

He was Rasputin in her mind, by now, more than Father Grigory. She recognized him from the pictures so often published with all the scandalous stories, rather than from her memories. What she saw, above the silver fox fur, was hair that was long, black and greasy, a matted, shaggy beard, and eyes that were deep-set and (as they were always described) piercingly, sinisterly blue. He was scowling and swaying.

He was drunk.

So this is what it looks like to have lost your innocence, Inna thought, staring with horrified fascination.

The virtuous wife she'd become should walk anonymously by. But now he was actually here, so near, she couldn't resist the chance of one more conversation.

She started walking towards him.

He should have taken my advice and got away long ago, she was thinking, taking in the shaking hands, the pitted, blotched skin. Just look at him, and what he's become.

‘Oho,' he slurred, after a first startled glance at Inna. His tone, though vague, became jocular. ‘Whom do I see here?'

He had teeth missing, Inna noticed. She could smell the Madeira (so that part was true). She stopped just out of touching range, and bobbed her head.

‘Been a long time,' he said, still holding on to the car door, but making an effort not to sway too much. ‘Many summers, many winters.'

She couldn't help compassion creeping into her heart. The eyes in that ruined face, now gazing into hers, were still human.

‘What's happened to you, in all these years?' he mumbled.

‘Well, I got married,' Inna began, but then doubt made her voice trail off. He hadn't even said her name, after all, and people said he was a monster with women nowadays. He could just be talking to her because she was young and female …

‘To a good man,' Father Grigory supplied helpfully, ‘whom you loved; a craftsman, you said…'

Inna nodded, surprised and reassured.

‘And spirited,' Father Grigory added with blurred approval. His eyes were a blaze of blue. ‘Not that I liked his politics, but he's young, and the young are always a bit wild. But I could see right off he was a man of integrity. The kind who'd always be true to his beliefs.'

He nodded several times, wistfully, as aware of how he himself had fallen. But the confusion Inna had felt when he'd started praising her husband was now turning to something nasty in the pit of her stomach.

He wasn't talking about Horace at all. He was remembering something else: the box of revolutionary leaflets in the lobby, the shouting in that tiny enclosed space, on another winter day, long ago.

She took a deep breath and shut her mind to the memory. ‘Ah,' she said, with the kind of thin social smile she had learned for evenings with the gentlemen of Fabergé. ‘A misunderstanding, I think? Because that young man went off to fight for revolution.' Making an effort, she broadened her smile. ‘My name now is Wallick,' she finished, with an attempt at brightness that sounded hollow, even to her.

Father Grigory gazed at her for a moment, as if he hadn't understood. Then he burst out laughing. ‘Oh, you married the
Englishman
!' He rocked forward against the motorcar door and wiped his eyes. But he was still smiling, eyes travelling down her body, taking in her button boots and well-cut coat. ‘Well, well; now
that
will have got the police off your back.'

Inna swallowed hard. She didn't want him to see how his laugh had stung, or how disturbed she felt by the suggestion that she'd married only for papers, and had lost her innocence just as surely as this wreck of a man standing too close to her.

She shouldn't be talking with a dissolute drunk, she told herself, with something close to panic.

‘I'm so sorry we can't talk more, but I'm in such a hurry,' she said, beginning to retreat, in tiny steps. She was aware of a flash of fuddled surprise in Father Grigory's eyes – those still honest eyes, unchanged, despite the ruin of his face.

As she edged past the car, and nearer the safety of the street corner, she added, in a small voice, ‘Well, goodbye,' before walking, straight-backed and as tall as she could make herself, round the corner.

But once she knew he couldn't see her, she realized there
was
, after all, something she should have been saying to him back there.

She should have warned him about the rumour Horace had heard. He'd helped her, once, after all. Even if there was nothing else left for her to say to him now, she should have said that.

She clenched her fingers into her palms, inside her glove, a gesture she often made, but whose origin she'd all but forgotten. She squared her shoulders and turned back.

But she only got as far as the corner.

Father Grigory was still there, leaning heavily against the open motorcar door. But there was someone else tipping out of the other side of the vehicle, making a second door creak: another man, younger and leaner, wild-eyed and bare-necked and giggling, clearly still in night-time dream-world too.

It took her a moment to recognize Felix Youssoupoff, mostly because his hair, usually slicked down so neatly above his dandyish, tailored clothes, was standing up like a scarecrow's.

Inna drew into the shadow of a doorway, trying to make her fogged mind work normally. If it hadn't been for the rumour, she might not have found it so strange that these two had been out drinking together, because Munya had introduced them once, hadn't she? Thinking back, she felt briefly sorry for Munya, who must have assumed that Father Grigory's virtue would rub off on to Felix. Looking at them now, you could see that it had all happened the other way around.

Inna hesitated, not wanting to rush back now she had seen Felix, so she saw the stumble as Felix staggered around the car, saw Father Grigory guffawing, then leaning down and hauling up his drinking-mate, then slipping himself, into the same yellow-grey pile of pavement snow. They were too drunk to care. She heard the princely whinny of laughter, and then she saw Felix pushing Father Grigory's head back against the wheel of the motorcar, and bringing his own face close; saw the older man's acquiescence, the straggle of hair, the rough hand wavering on the slimmer, smarter back. And she also saw the chauffeur's shoulders, inside the car, rigid with embarrassment. He'd been there all along.

She turned away, hating Felix Youssoupoff, the triumphant possessor, the casual corrupter, the robber of virtue, but also relieved that the latest rumour had been so wrong, and that it was kissing, not killing, that she'd been witnessing. She felt relieved, too, as she started lifting and lowering her feet to plod carefully, winter fashion, through the brown city snow towards the Lemans', that she now had something else to occupy her mind instead of that disturbing laugh of his, which, just for a moment, had made her so unsure about the way her own life had turned out.