The Witches of St. Petersburg

by Imogen Edwards-Jones

“Who’s that from?” asked Peter with vague interest, looking over the top of his newspaper. Sporting his navy silk dressing gown and monogrammed maroon velvet slippers, he had yet to dress for the day.

  “Father.”

  “What does he want now? Not more guns? I am intrigued to know what he did with the last forty thousand. And quite how you managed to procure those, I have no idea.”

  “They were a present from a grateful emperor on the birth of his fourth daughter.” Militza smiled at her husband as she opened the letter.

  “No one is grateful for four daughters,” replied Peter, taking a sip of coffee.

  “Queen Victoria had five,” retorted Militza. “God rest her soul.”

  Peter coughed. “What does your father want?”

  “Money . . . Grain . . . More money.” Militza skimmed the letter, turning over the pages. “He wants to build more roads.” She put the letter down before adding with a small shrug, “He is trying to drag Montenegro into this new twentieth century.”

  “A lofty ambition, I am sure,” agreed Peter, twisting the corners of his dark brown mustache. “But a little hard to do with one hand tied behind your back financially.”

  “That’s why he has daughters in high places.” Militza smiled, breaking off a small piece of black bread. “I heard someone call him the father-in-law of Europe the other day!”

  Peter looked less amused. “Why can’t he ask your sister? Why is it always us Russians who end up paying?”

  “Well, Zorka is dead, so I am not sure she is of any use.” Militza held the piece of bread to her lips and stared defiantly down the length of the highly polished rosewood table at her husband.

  “There is no need to be sarcastic. I am well aware your sister died . . .”

  “Along with her son.”

  “Along with her son,” repeated Peter.

  “Andrei was his name. And she was twenty-five!” Militza’s laugh was a little hysterical. “But such is the lot of us women. You either burn us at the stake or drown us along with all our healing properties and our worldly powers. Or you try and kill us with children. And if we don’t die having them, then we kill ourselves trying to have them.”

  Peter ignored his wife. He’d heard this little speech quite often, especially late at night when the two sisters got together with their tarot de Marseilles, reading palms or runes, always returning to the land of witches, mavens, and wanderers where women were once revered for their intuition and powers and not burnt at the stake for witchcraft.

  “Actually, I was thinking more of Elena, now that she is queen of Italy,” he eventually replied.

  “She’s only been queen for just over twelve months!”

  “Even so,” continued Peter, slowly squeezing the white tip of his cigarette between his thumb and forefinger before extinguishing it in the malachite ashtray in front of him, “it isn’t good to ask too often, for too much. People start to begrudge you. It’s annoying. Especially when your position is so precarious.”

  “Our position,” corrected Militza as she fixed her husband with a dark stare. “Ours, my darling, for you and I are linked. Our position is linked. Our privilege is linked, as is our access. We ride high together.”

  She reached across to a small scarlet bottle sitting next to her empty glass. She picked it up, removed the lid, and carefully squeezed the rubber-topped pipette, drawing up some liquid from the bottle before swiftly delivering a river of droplets onto the surface of her own protruding, curled tongue. She sucked the tincture back, with a relishing hissing sound, half closing her eyes.

  “High? But for how long?” Peter put down his newspaper. “Your friend—”

  “‘Our Friend,’ that’s what Alix calls him now. And I rather like it.”

  “Our Friend is not terribly popular, you know. There are mumblings, there’s talk.”

  “There is always talk. That’s all there is—talk.”

  Militza’s pulse was beginning to race. It was difficult to ascertain whether it was her growing irritation with her husband or merely the powerful effects of Dr. Badmaev’s cocaine elixir.

  “There is no need to be so bad-tempered,” continued Peter. “I was just passing on what I had heard.”

  “What? Snippets you picked up at the banya while chewing gherkins and drinking vodka? I am not sure those sources could possibly compare to the tsar himself—to my source, the apex of power!”

  “Well, you probably know the other rumors then?”

  “Probably.” Militza shook her head. She inhaled, expanding her chest, preparing to enjoy whatever her husband said.

  “That Maria Fyodorovna has sent a team of spies to France to find out about Our Friend. The tsar’s mother doesn’t like the way Philippe is with her son, doesn’t like the way he has managed to get such a position at court, doesn’t like the secretive meetings, the furtiveness of it all, and she doesn’t trust him.”

  “The Dowager Empress has sent spies?”

  “Secret agents. They’ll report back to her.”

  “When?”

  “Soon. And the problem is, we both know what they’ll come back with . . .”

  Militza was shocked. This was news indeed. She reached forward to pick up the red bottle again. More elixir. She needed to think and she needed to think fast.

  “I think you should stop taking so much of Mr. Badmaev’s bloody potion.” Peter nodded towards the bottle. “I hear he’s prescribing half of Countess Ignatiev’s salon these days. It’s ridiculous. The man doesn’t seem to be able to cure anything except stubborn nervous diseases, mental maladies, and disturbances of the female physiology.”

  “Tell that to the tsar and all those patients he’s put forward for ministerial posts. And anyway, he’s a doctor,” she replied, raising her fine, large black brows. “Dr. Badmaev, if you please. Not ‘Mister.’ He knows what he is doing.”

  “Well, everyone trusts a doctor! Don’t they?”

  Militza nodded, staring out of the window towards the large fountain in the garden and the calm sea beyond. “Yes, they do,” she said slowly. “I think I have an idea.”

  AND AS WITH ALL IDEAS, MILITZA FOUND IT MUCH BETTER FOR the person to “come up with it” themselves. So it was a few days later that Alix announced, while taking a small walk through the fragrant rose garden just to the left of the long terrace at Znamenka, that she’d thought of something simply splendid. The fact that Stana had planted this suggestion in her head when she’d visited for luncheon the day before was neither here nor there.

  “I think,” Alix declared, as she spun her parasol, “I think that Nicky should make Our Friend an honorary doctor.”

  “Oh!” Militza stopped in her tracks and clutched her heart in ostentatious excitement. “How clever of you! That is such a good idea.”

  “It just came to me,” continued Alix, with a small shrug and a curl of a smile. “He has been so incredibly helpful and loyal, he deserves something. Don’t you think? It seems such a shame that he has not been recognized.”

  “Absolutely.”

  “I suggested it to Nicky at breakfast this morning and he wasn’t completely sure, but I explained it would help with Dr. Ott and the others . . . It would be nice for him to have a position. An official role. I feel they look down on him sometimes. I see their faces when he speaks. I know he has an appalling southern accent, but then I speak Russian with such a terrible thick accent too! And no one thinks any the less of me for that!”

  “No,” agreed Militza, fighting the smile on her face, “I think most people find your accent . . . charming.”

  “Yes.” Alix nodded. “Charming.”

  How could she not hear the sniggers and the titters when she opened her mouth to speak Russian? Militza wondered. Had she become inured to the antipathy at court? So used to the frosty reception she received that she no longer felt it? Is it possible to have one’s feelings so hurt that one ceases to feel at all anymore?

  As they continued their walk, arm in arm, down the
gently sloping lawn, through the thick line of cedar trees, towards the sea, Militza remembered a story that Alix had once told her about her early days in Russia and about how she’d always felt “quite alone and in despair.” She’d described an afternoon’s drive that she and one of the more unpleasant ladies of the court, Countess Vorontsov, had taken along Nevsky Prospekt, when they’d come across a beggar asking for alms. He’d approached the carriage with his hands outstretched, and she, Alix, had been so touched by his plight and his kind eyes, she’d given him a few coins from her purse. The beggar had smiled gratefully at her. “That was the first smile,” she’d told Militza, “I’d received in Russia.” And she had been there for over a year.

  Now even the beggars don’t bother, thought Militza as they paused on the brow of a hill to catch their breath, staring out to sea. Perhaps it is preferable, then, that she no longer notices.

  “Perhaps we could ask the French?” suggested Alix. Militza stared at her blankly. “To give Our Friend a doctorate?”

  “I don’t think that is a good idea,” Militza said hurriedly.

  “Oh?” Alix looked a little surprised. She was not a woman used to being contradicted.

  “The French . . .” Militza’s mind was whirring. How could she tell her that Our Friend had in fact been arrested five times in France for practicing without a license? Not that there was any doubt that Monsieur Philippe had special powers. Of course he did. It was, Militza reasoned, just a great shame that the French authorities were the last to realize them. “I think a Russian doctorate, a Russian medical diploma, would be much more fitting for services in Russia, to the Russian court, to the Russian tsar himself,” she declared. “Rather than anything Our Friend achieved in Paris. Although he has clearly achieved a lot in Paris, and in France, the whole of France, of course,” she swiftly added.

  “Yes,” sighed Alix. Her voice suddenly sounded a little weak. “You know best.”

  “Let’s ask him tonight,” suggested Militza.

  She turned away from the sea and looked up the hill towards Znamenka. Its huge neoclassical facade stretched expansively before her. Three stories high with a large domed roof tower, plus endless bedrooms, ballrooms, salons, dining rooms, servants’ quarters, its own greenhouses, stables for one hundred horses, cellar, and kitchen gardens, it was an impressive and imposing sight. The weak afternoon sunset made its yellow and white frosted pillars glow a pale orange, and if she squinted slightly, she could see several white dots, the children, playing on the terrace. Militza smiled to herself and sighed with a gentle contentment.

  She turned back. Alix was looking pale in the wind. Over her shoulder, the sun dipped behind a thick cloud gathering on the horizon. She shivered; her white chiffon ensemble rippled against her.

  “I am cold,” she said, closing her flighty parasol and wrapping her arms around herself. “And tired.” She looked up at Militza. Her pale blue eyes appeared to be fighting back tears.

  “Are you all right?” Militza moved swiftly, placing her hands on Alix’s shoulders.

  “Yes, yes,” she replied breezily, avoiding looking Militza in the eyes as the wind whipped loose strands of hair around her face. “Just tell me,” she stammered, fighting to get the words out as her lips shook and her nose started to run. Try as she might she could not stop her tears. “Tell me . . .” She was inhaling and exhaling, shivering and stammering, trying to keep in check the bubbling brook of emotion that was desperately busting out of her. “Tell me it will be all right. Tell me it will.” At last she sobbed and at last she cried, but instead of cleaving to Militza, she stood there on the clifftop, rigid, her fists clenching, her pale golden hair flying around her face, biting her bottom lip as the tears streamed down her face.

  “Yes, it will,” Militza said, moving towards her and wrapping her in a tight embrace. “It will all be fine.” She slowly kissed Alix on the cheek and then on her soft, sensitive mouth.

  “Goodness gracious!” announced Alix, pulling away swiftly and rapidly searching in her pocket for her handkerchief. “Look at me.” She stared down her damp, milk-soaked shirt. “Even my breast is weeping.”

  Chapter 13

  December 1901, St. Petersburg

  MILITZA WAS SITTING IN THE BACK OF THE COVERED carriage, swathed in silver fox, watching her sister. From low in her seat, her stole covering half of her face, she stared through the gaps in the fur. She wasn’t sure if Stana could see her staring; perhaps she didn’t care. Either way her behavior was verging on the flirtatious. In fact, it was not verging on the flirtatious, concluded Militza; it was completely flirtatious. Stana was sitting close to Peter’s elder brother, Nikolasha, very close, a large diamond necklace glinting around her neck, laughing at his every word, touching the back of his gloved hand, letting her sable fur hang loosely around her shoulders, exposing her pale white throat to his gaze.

  “I promise you, you will enjoy it,” she said, stroking the sleeve of Nikolasha’s greatcoat. “The Black Salon is among the highlights of St. Petersburg nightlife.”

  “Better than the gypsies in the Islands?” Nikolasha had certainly been drinking; otherwise it was unlikely he’d be so candid about his choice of after-dinner activity.

  Stana sat upright, opening her pretty mouth with faux prudishness. “I didn’t think you were the sort of man to frequent the gypsies?”

  “Well . . .” Nikolasha blushed a little, unable to tell whether she was joking or not. “Don’t all men?” he stammered. “After too much Madeira at the Cubat or the Donon? They say there is nothing more beautiful, more full of soul and melancholy, than to hear Varya Panina sing? There’s many a man in St. Petersburg whose huge debt and frequent visits to the moneylender are due to nights of carousing in the Villa Rhode. Or so they say.” He hesitated. “Some would spend their last thousand just to spend the night, hypnotized by wine and song, till dawn in Novaya Derevnaya.”

  “Personally, I am not overly fond of gypsies,” replied Stana, biting her bottom lip as she leaned in closer, slowly turning the button on his coat with her white gloved fingers.

  “Really? I would have thought their bright clothes—the red, the violet, the purple—would appeal to you. Surely their dark exoticness must remind you of home?”

  “No, just her wedding party,” Militza muttered through the tail of her silver fox. What was her sister doing, flirting so heavily with Nikolasha? “Look,” she said, as she glanced out of the frosted window, “we are here.”

  IT WAS GONE MIDNIGHT BY THE TIME THE THREE ARRIVED AT 26 Kutuzov Embankment, and the Countess Ignatiev’s salon soirée was in full swing. Having tired of a rather boring dinner at Grand Duchess Vladimir’s, where the young actors and singers who were supposed to arrive from the Mariinsky Theatre had failed to materialize, they had agreed to continue the evening at the Ignatievs’—it had been Stana’s suggestion, as she was loath to let the handsome Nikolasha disappear off into the night. She had spent most of the summer in the company of her children, had seen her sister obviously and the tsarina, but with George in Biarritz, she’d been deprived of male company. Not that she ever enjoyed her husband’s company: his wits were too slow and his conversation too dull for her liking. Nikolasha, however, was bright and sharp and rather attentive.

  “My darlings!” declared the countess as the butler showed them into the raspberry drawing room. “Grand Duke,” she added, looking up at the imposingly tall and immaculately presented Nikolai Nikolayevich, “you are very welcome.” She smiled. Dressed in a House of Worth evening gown of black velvet, embroidered with silver leaves and with a large frill across the shoulders, the countess looked extremely glamorous. Gone was the yellowed court dress; popularity was clearly suiting her. “What an evening! What an evening. Tout le monde is here. How wonderful that you are here also! Your friend Philippe is next door!”

  Weaving her way through the crowd of guests and the dense, sweet-smelling smoke, Militza spotted Dr. Badmaev in the corner.

  “My dear,” he said, put
ting down his clay pipe and getting out of his chair. His eyes were smiling as he came over to kiss her. “I didn’t know you were coming this evening.”

  “No, neither did we,” replied Militza. “We were having such a very boring dinner at the Vladimirs’, discussing the Christmas bazaar and the problems in Manchuria, waiting for some actors to jolly things up, but when they didn’t arrive, we made our excuses.”

  “Manchuria? How interesting.”

  “You would think.”

  “Was anything said?”

  “I am not sure many in the room knew where it was!”

  He leaned forward and muttered into her ear, “His Imperial Majesty and I have been discussing the very subject recently. He thinks I should travel there myself. He says I might be able to help, opening up some diplomatic channels, handing out some small change, lining a few pockets.”

  “I could think of no one better to calm troubled water than you,” replied Militza.

  “Or you!” Dr. Badmaev smiled.

  “Now you flatter me.”

  “I don’t believe so.” He smiled again. “I hear the tsar is giving your father thousands more rifles, mountains more grain, and more rubles than he’s spent on any of his palaces.”

  “You are remarkably well-informed.”

  “Isn’t he arriving in St. Petersburg next month?”

  “Once again, may I remark on the reliability of your sources?”

  “It is amazing what you pick up at my simple little apothecary,” he laughed.

  “Or, indeed, during your little personal consultations.”

  “I hear also that your Friend, next door, is going to be made a doctor.”

  “Such a lovely idea. The tsarina came up with it herself!” It was Militza’s turn to smile.

  “I didn’t know the German had any ideas of her own.”

  “Oh,” replied Militza. “I take it you don’t approve?”

  “Approve of him? Or the doctorate?”

  “Both.”

  “Of neither, I am afraid.”

  “But he is a man of God!” Militza’s response was reflex.