Rasputin grinned. “How old are you, my dear Nathalie?”
“Well...” Nathalie pouted. “I am thirty-seven.”
“And Sonia is thirty-eight. I can still find the odd thing to do with you. Go and fetch her.”
Nathalie snorted again. “Come along, Dagmar,” she said. “Uncle Gregory wants us to work for him.”
“No, no,” Rasputin said. “Leave Dagmar here. I wish to be amused until you bring me the Princess.”
*
Sonia listened to the sound of boots hitting the floor of the corridor outside her cell, and hugged the blanket more tightly around herself. The blanket was a concession to the onset of winter; Michaelin did not wish her to die, or even become seriously ill. He enjoyed having her in his power too much. He was clearly a pervert. He had made her strip, that first day in his office, and he had kept her stripped; he had even, from time to time, touched her, stroked her breasts or bottom, put his hand between her legs. But he had never attempted to rape her, he had not beaten her, and he had not inflicted upon her any of the horrendous methods used by the Okhrana, methods she remembered well enough from twenty-one years before. She had survived them then. Surviving humiliation, more than surviving pain, is a good deal easier to achieve at seventeen than at thirty-eight; she had not supposed she would survive them now. But nothing had happened to her, save the humiliation of constant exposure, whenever he felt like it.
And the hose. But even that had been beneficent. When she remembered the way he had used the hose twenty-one years ago — had she not already lost her virginity to his savages she would certainly have lost it to the hose, sometimes a spout of water broad enough to knock all the breath from her body, at others a blade thin enough almost to perform surgery. The hose remained a toy for him to use, but thus far it seemed only for his amusement and her cleanliness. In the beginning she had assumed that he was playing with her as a cat might play with a mouse, choosing his moment to torture her; every day had begun with terrifying apprehension. But over the weeks she had been in here she had slowly begun to realise that he really did not intend to harm her body, no matter what he might be doing to her mind. She was actually being very well treated, given the use of a brush every day to keep her curling dark hair under control, given two square meals, which included two jugs of vodka, a day, given an hour’s exercise in the prison courtyard every morning. For that she was allowed to dress, but she was never allowed to encounter any of the other prisoners, and on being returned to her cell she was forced to strip again. It was as if he wanted her as some living pin-up picture, which he could look at whenever he felt the urge, but which must always be preserved in its original, immaculate form.
But the apprehension remained. What he was doing had to have an end in sight. And the fact was that she had simply vanished off the face of the earth, as far as anyone who did not know the truth was concerned. Even more frightening was the realisation that there was no one in the world who would make the slightest effort to find her. No one on Bolugayen knew anything of what had happened to her, or, presumably, cared; Patricia was in England, and would put the fact of her not having turned up to a change in plan; and Antonina would be living quite happily in her house, drawing money from her account as she needed. Even if Antonina had become aware of her mistress’s disappearance, Sonia doubted she would do anything about it; certainly if she had spoken to Ragosin, he would have warned her off — it did not pay to be inquisitive about the Okhrana. So here she was, and here she would stay, until Michaelin made up his mind what to do with her. Thus she could not hear boots in the corridor without having to control a violent urge to shiver.
The door opened. She remained sitting on her pile of straw, back against the wall, blanket wrapped around her shoulders. But it was not Michaelin today; it was his sidekick, Feodor Klinski. And Feodor was carrying her clothes in his arms. “Kindly dress, Princess.” It pleased both Michaelin and Klinski always to address her by her former title; no doubt it tickled their fancies to be in such total possession of a member of the aristocracy.
Sonia discarded the blanket to pull on her clothes; dressing and undressing in front of this man was no longer the least embarrassing. But she was curious. “It is not time for my exercise,” she remarked.
Feodor gave one of his cold smiles. “You are not to exercise today, Princess. At least, not in this prison.” He even had her hat. Sonia put it on, as best she could; they were not so careless as to leave the long pins she normally used. But how good it felt to be fully, warmly dressed. “Upstairs,” Feodor commanded.
Sonia obeyed, brain tumbling. She had not been upstairs since the day she had been arrested. But it remained familiar. Here there were people, clerks and agents, stopping whatever they were doing to stare at her as they had stared at her the day she had been brought in. She ignored them as she had learned to ignore all humanity in here, and climbed another flight of stairs to Michaelin’s office, her apprehension growing with every step. Then she stood in the doorway and stared at Nathalie. “My dear,” Nathalie said. “You look perfectly all right, to me.” She sounded surprised.
“I am perfectly all right,” Sonia said, and looked at the desk.
“The Colonel has taken himself off,” Nathalie said. “But he signed the paper before leaving.” She picked it up. “Your release.” She smiled. “Into my custody.”
“I do not understand,” Sonia said.
“I would not worry about it right this minute,” Nathalie said. “I think we should leave this place. It makes me shiver.”
She went through the doorway, and Sonia hesitated only a moment before following. Again the clerks stared at her as she went down the stairs, but no one moved. Feodor was not to be seen. It was cold in the courtyard and she had only a light coat; she caught her breath and shuddered. “You will soon be warm,” Nathalie promised.
The chauffeur was holding the door of the Mercedes for her. Sonia wondered where, if there was as serious a fuel shortage in Petrograd as people said, Nathalie managed to obtain her petrol from — and the penny dropped. She hesitated, and Nathalie urged her forward. How good it was to sit on the soft leather cushions, to have the door closed, to shut out the world behind the drawn curtains. But...she looked at Nathalie, sitting beside her. “It is Rasputin who has had me released.”
“As I tried to tell you so long ago, my dear Sonia, Father Gregory is the best friend a woman can have.”
“And what will he require in return?”
Nathalie’s smile was cold. “You.” She shrugged. “There is no accounting for tastes.”
Sonia’s nostrils flared. “If you think I am going to prostitute myself to that horror...”
“Oh, really, Sonia,” Nathalie snapped. “Your sanctimonious purity makes me sick. Why do you not get a grasp of reality? Consider one or two things.” She held up her gloved hand and began to tick off the fingers. “One: you are a Jew and therefore by definition an enemy of the state. Two: you are a convicted anarchist and therefore a condemned felon. Three: you are a prostitute. You prostituted yourself to live. Well, do not all prostitutes do that? And once you have sold yourself once you are a whore forever more; you may as well wear the yellow card of a licensed streetwalker and be done with it. Four: Michaelin has found the wherewithal to arrest you again. Five: Father Gregory is the only person in all Russia who wishes to help you, or who can help you. And six: if you do not reward him for his generosity, he is going to return you to Michaelin. I do not know what the Colonel has already done to you, but I can tell you that he was both angry and humiliated at having to let you go. Whatever Father Gregory wishes of you, it will have to be better than what Michaelin is going to do to you if he ever gets his hands on you again.” She parted the curtain as the car came to a halt. “We are here. So, now, tell me, Sonia, are you going to get out and go upstairs and be a good girl, or are you going to have me tell the chauffeur to drive you back to the Okhrana?”
Sonia stared at her for several seconds. But she had to s
urvive, if only, now, for vengeance on all those who snapped at her like a pack of savage dogs. Including this woman.
She opened the door and got out.
*
Patricia Cromb pushed open the dingy doorway leading into the equally dingy shop; this was not a part of London she knew at all. But it was the address she had been given, and for all the stares she had attracted as she had alighted from the taxi in her blue serge costume with its black velvet trimming, her blue felt hat with its ostrich feather, her fur muff and the gaiters over her black patent leather shoes, she was not the least embarrassed by or apprehensive of her surroundings. Wherever Patricia was, or whatever she was doing, she always felt entirely at home. The storekeeper peered at her from behind his counter and a pair of horn-rimmed spectacles. “Can I help you, ma’am?”
“I wish to see Mr Lenin.”
The storekeeper’s forehead wrinkled. “I know no such person.”
“Yes you do, little man. Go and tell Mr Lenin that Patricia Cromb is here.” She gave a brief smile. “I will mind the shop for you.”
The storekeeper gave a gulp, then turned and hurried through the bead curtain over the inner doorway. Patricia took a turn around the shop, moving restlessly as she always did when the adrenalin was flowing. The storekeeper returned. “If you will come through, Mrs Cromb.”
Patricia followed him through the bead curtain and up a flight of steps. Olga Krupskaya waited at the top. Once she had been an attractive girl, Patricia remembered, with full features and a full body too. Now both features and body looked scrawny, and were not helped by the wire spectacles, behind which her eyes in recent years had started to bulge in a most unattractive fashion — she claimed it was the result of a thyroid condition. She had also, over the years of exile, lost much of her humour. “You were told not to come here except in an emergency,” she remarked by way of greeting.
“I always ignore what people tell me to do, Olga,” Patricia pointed out. “And even less what they tell me not to do. Besides, this is an emergency.”
Olga looked frustrated, as she invariably did when trying to converse with this aristocrat who had always, even in the direst extremity, managed to convey the impression that she was slumming in even talking to people so far beneath her. “What is this emergency?” Lenin asked from the doorway.
Patricia smiled at him. She really was very fond of him, although the years had perhaps been even less kind to him than to his wife. He was now quite bald except for a fringe of red hair, although he had attempted to make up for the absence of hair on his head by growing a straggly beard. He had also lost weight, and wore a perpetual air of strain. “I will tell you about it,” she promised, and swept past them both into the small, badly furnished living room, taking the bottle from her handbag and placing it on the table. “Vodka.”
Olga made a face. “I am trying to get him to drink less.”
But Lenin was already unscrewing the cap, nodding to his wife to close the door. “I did not suppose people like you ever had problems.” He held out a glass.
Patricia sat down, sipped, and shuddered. She never drank vodka at home, as Duncan did not like it. “Everyone has problems,” she pointed out. “I have a son who is determined to join up the moment he is eighteen, and that will be in a week’s time.”
“What do you expect, of a bourgeois?” Olga asked, contemptuously.
“That sort of problem does not concern us,” Lenin said.
“I am sure it does not,” Patricia agreed. “However, I am equally sure that Sonia does concern you.”
“Sonia? She is not even a bourgeois. She is an aristocrat. She is our enemy.”
“Sonia is no longer an aristocrat, and she was never your enemy. She shared our exile with us. She is one of us. That she married my brother was an act of necessity, to save her life. And he treated her shamefully. Now she is in deep trouble.”
“What sort of trouble?”
“That is what I want you to find out.”
“Me?” Lenin sat down, pouring himself a second glass of vodka and topping hers up. Olga, apparently working on the theory that if you can’t beat them join them, poured one for herself.
“Listen,” Patricia said. “When this stupid war started, I wrote Sonia and invited her to come to England where she would be safe, until it was over. It took her some time to make up her mind, but in the summer she wrote and asked if the invitation was still open, because she would like to come. I wrote back and said of course she must come. That was in August. And I have never heard another word. That is eight months ago.”
“So? She has probably changed her mind.”
“I do not believe that. When I did not hear from her, I wrote again. And this time I got a reply. Last week.”
“From Sonia?”
“No. From some woman called Antonina Rospowa. She says that she is Madame Bolugayevska’s housekeeper. She says that in September, Sonia just disappeared. She said she was coming to me, had made all the arrangements, and then just disappeared.”
“When was this letter dated?”
“Just before Christmas. It took three months to get to me.”
“The Okhrana,” Olga said.
“That’s what I think, too,” Patricia said. “I mean, if she had been taken ill or something, this woman Rospowa would have heard. I did think she might have gone down to Bolugayen, because, since Alexei died, Sonia’s son Colin is now Prince. So I wrote my mother-in-law, Anna Bolugayevska. And got a very odd reply. Aunt Anna said they knew nothing of Sonia, nor did they wish to. Nor did she say anything about Prince Colin. Or his sister or his stepmother. The letter said nothing at all, except to enquire after Duncan and our children.”
“She does not wish to know Sonia, since the divorce,” Olga said.
“Well, that is obvious. But if she is again in the hands of the Okhrana…Michaelin...my God, can you imagine what they will do to her?”
Lenin poured himself a third glass of vodka. “I can imagine very well,” he said.
“I must know where she is, Vladimir.”
“What do you suppose you can do about it? You? An exile.”
“We are all exiles,” Patricia pointed out, with great patience. “Will you help me?”
“You mean, will I help Sonia. I do not see what I am supposed to do.”
“Last time we spoke you were boasting of the agents you had in Russia. In Petrograd. Even in the Okhrana.”
“Well,” Lenin said. “Maybe I was exaggerating.”
“But you do have agents in Petrograd,” Patricia insisted. “Surely they can find out something.”
Lenin got up, picked up the bottle of vodka, by now half empty, and then corked it and put it down again, to be enjoyed later on. “You are asking me to risk my people,” he said over his shoulder. “To help someone who turned against us, no matter what you say. If I do this, what do I get in return?”
Patricia raised her eyebrows and glanced at Olga. in all the twenty-one years she had known this man, which included sharing prison and exile and then escape with him, he had never once shown the slightest sexual interest in her. While she...he had a magnetic personality. She loved magnetic personalities, which was a characteristic Duncan entirely lacked. I am probably an even more wicked woman than Aunt Anna, she thought. But then, have I not always intended to be that? “What do you wish?” she asked, heart pounding.
Olga snorted. “Your money, of course.’’
‘‘I will tell you what I wish, when the time comes,” Lenin said. “All I wish now is your promise that you will give it to me.”
Patricia smiled. “Yes, I promise. But my promise only takes effect when you bring me news of Sonia.”
*
Gleb Bondarevski stood on the lower porch of Bolugayen House and squinted up the hill. It was again summer. The second summer of the war. And at last things were going well: Russia had found a general who could win battles! His name was Brusilov, and his offensive, begun without any of the usual preliminary bom
bardment or mass movement of men, had taken the Austrians entirely by surprise; they were fleeing in every direction, so it was said.
Gleb supposed one had to credit the Tsar with the victory; it was he who had selected Brusilov. So then, long live the Tsar. And even the Tsaritsa, no matter what they said of her in Petrograd. Gleb was a monarchist, simply because he was entirely against change. His father had been butler on Bolugayen, and before that, his grandfather. Gleb, horn towards the end of his father’s life, could not remember his grandfather. But his father had told him of the upheavals of sixty years before, when Tsar Alexander, coming to the throne at the end of the disastrous Crimean War, had endeavoured to free the serfs, and when the Countess Anna and the Princess Dagmar had fought each other for control of the estate, with the Englishman Colin MacLain in the middle, until Maclain had taken them both over, so to speak. Old Igor Bondarevski had endeavoured to avoid choosing sides, had always obeyed whoever had been in power, however briefly. It had not merely been a matter of survival. It had been a matter of the family — the Bolugayevskis —and the preservation of Bolugayen. That was all that was important in life. And Gleb had determined that that was all would ever be important in his life, too.
In this regard he was at odds with a good many people in the village, people he had known all his life and who in many respects were his friends. But it distressed him to observe, and to hear, how so many of them had virtually no loyalty to the family. They were concerned only with their own small prosperity, and remained on Bolyugayen and obeyed the Princess and Monsieur Boscowski simply because their parents and grandparents had always obeyed the Bolugayevskis, and they could think of nothing better to do. They did not seem able to realise that the smallest prosperity of the average muzhik on Bolugayen depended entirely upon the prosperity of the family, and that this went for all the big estates throughout Russia. They did not seem able to appreciate that were power to be taken away from the Tsar and the boyars, in the name of that scurrilous word democracy — which might have worked for a few thousand Greeks in an unsophisticated age but which had to be a catastrophe for over a hundred million Russians scattered over twenty million square kilometres in an age of newspapers, radios and rapid transport — the whole fabric of the state would collapse, and with it their livelihoods.
The Red Tide Page 20
