She spread her cape, so that he could see under it. “Look, I am unarmed.”
“That makes me more nervous.” His glance darted around the yard. “I shouldn’t have come.”
“I want you to know, Arkin, that every day that I wake, I feel pain. I will miss my sister for the rest of my life. My mother is suffering, and my father. You and your Bolshevik cause have crippled my family.”
She was observing him as she spoke. She saw something darken his face—it could have been sorrow or satisfaction—and tug at the skin around his mouth. She unbuttoned her cape at the neck and let it drop from her shoulders. It was the signal to Jens, and Arkin was far too accustomed to such things not to recognize it as such. Immediately he scanned the hospital windows, but he was the one in the sunlight while they were in the shade and he could see nothing. He started to run. He knew what was coming.
A single shot rang out, the sound like the crack of a whip in Valentina’s ears. Arkin’s right leg crumpled under him, flinging him to the cobbles, but even as he hit the ground he was dragging himself into the shadow of the hut. Valentina looked up at the row of windows on the second floor, at the one belonging to the sluice room where Jens had been hiding since last night.
“Thank you, Jens. Spasibo,” she whispered.
Arkin was binding his kerchief around a knee that was pouring blood, shards of bone spattered in grisly chunks down his trousers. Valentina stood over him and stared down at his face twisted in agony.
“You’ll feel pain now,” she said harshly. “Pain every day for the rest of your life. Death would have been too easy for you. I want you to suffer like Katya suffered. I want you to hate me every time you put that foot to the floor, the way I will hate you every day that I cannot speak to my sister.”
He looked up at her, his eyes black holes of rage. “One day your engineer will pay for this.”
She seized his hair in her hand and yanked back his head. “If you ever touch him, I swear to you I will destroy the child.” Their eyes locked, and she knew he believed her. She released him and wiped her hand on her skirt. “I’ll go and order a stretcher for you,” she said, and walked into the hospital. By the time she came out with two orderlies Viktor Arkin was gone. Only his blood remained on the cobbles.
Thirty-eight
JENS SAW A CHANGE IN VALENTINA AFTER THAT DAY IN THE courtyard. Some of the shadows left her eyes, and her limbs regained the fluid grace that they had lost since the death of her sister. They didn’t talk about what had happened. Neither wished to mention Arkin’s name. To do so would be to invite him back. But there was a new tenderness in their lovemaking and a deeper passion in her music that made him ache for her when they were apart.
Unknown to her he continued to search for Arkin. He dredged through the slums of St. Petersburg once more but found no trace of him, not even a whisper. The man had left the city, Jens was convinced of it. He even sent Liev Popkov to drink the backstreet bars dry, but still no word. Neechevo. Nothing. If there were any justice in the world, he’d be dead and buried from gangrene of the leg, but that was too much to hope for. Jens didn’t believe in natural justice. You had to make your own.
Though the official period of mourning for Katya was not over in the Ivanov household, he spoke to Valentina’s parents in private about the wedding, and the ceremony was arranged with a certain amount of speed. Jens was not a man for Russian weddings. They were too long and too solemn for his taste, the ritual too precise. But on the day of his marriage, he was mesmerized by the sight of Valentina in her long white dress, holding her lighted candle, her dark hair twined up at the back of her head, clustered under a white veil with a scattering of pearls that could not begin to compare with the creamy texture of her skin.
As the priest in his epitrachelion robe performed the traditional liturgy, bound their joined hands with his stole, and led them three times around the analogion lectern, circling the Gospel Book, her eyes flashed at him with such a challenge and such desire that he considered scooping her up in his arms right there and then. He couldn’t bear to share her a minute longer. When the golden wedding crowns were held over their heads and the priest in his finest robes chanted the ektenia, he saw the way her glance moved against her will to the church door, as though expecting someone else to slide in. A small crease of concern on her high forehead, a tense touch of her hand when they exchanged rings. The faintest sliver of fear behind the shimmer of her veil.
Not for the first time Jens cursed himself for not raising the barrel of his rifle that day in the hospital courtyard and blowing a hole the size of her crown in Arkin’s chest. Like for like. A bullet for a bullet. But the revolutionary had been wearing body armor that day; Jens had seen the bulk of it clearly under his shirt, and that was why he could be so bold. Whatever lair the bastard had slunk off to now, that knee of his would take a long time to heal. Arkin would not be returning to St. Petersburg in a hurry.
When the ceremony and the elaborate celebrations were finally at an end, Jens whisked Valentina away and drove her at speed in a decorated carriage to their new home. It lay in a quiet avenue near Dr. Fedorin’s house.
“It will be useful to have a doctor on our doorstep when the baby comes,” Jens had pointed out, but she had laughed at him, calling him a worrisome bear, and promised to produce the child as effortlessly as a she-cat sheds kittens. He had chosen the house for her with care. The view of the river, with its surface looking as solid as steel, was for when she needed to sit and be quiet, and the height of the ceilings would form a perfect chamber for her music. The pale polished floors reminded Jens of the dense pine forests of Denmark, and he had brought his reindeer rug to lay in front of the fire. He intended to put it to good use.
He took delight in peeling her wedding finery from her body, while she stood smiling at him and proffering each tempting arm and each slender leg to be denuded. When she was naked and her hair was spread in a rippling fan of satin over her bare back, he led her to the new Erard grand piano in the drawing room and she played for him. Just for him. The lilting notes of Chopin’s Nocturne in E Flat.
As her hands glided over the keys, his eyes traced each delicate notch of her spine. Every line of her was smooth and supple, the curve of her buttocks on the piano stool, the angle of her shoulder, the tip of her elbow. And the exquisite hollow above her hips that was slowly filling as the swell of her belly grew larger.
This woman, his wife, carrying their child. As essential a part of him as the lungs in his chest and the blood in his veins. He moved over to her and kissed the warm top of her head, then each rib on her back and the dainty bone at the base of her spine. All the time her hands kept playing but he heard her sighs of pleasure, and when his arms encircled her, cradling the child inside her, she let her weight lean back against him, as if it belonged there.
“I love you, Madam Friis,” he whispered into her ear, and swept her up off the stool into his arms. “Time for bed.”
She twined her arms around his neck, her eyes bright and laughing at him, swinging her bare feet, her fingers tight in his hair.
“We have forever,” she promised.
CANDLES STILL BURNED AROUND THE BEDROOM. THEIR soft flickering light soothed Valentina’s thoughts and turned Jens’s skin golden on the sheets. She kept a hand on his head where it lay next to the curve of her stomach, and she smiled contentedly. Both were asleep—one beside her and one inside her—and she let her mind stretch into the future that was waiting for them. She filled it with new engineering projects for Jens and St. Petersburg’s Conservatoire of Music for herself.
There would be no more St. Isabella’s Hospital, not now, not without Katya to care for. No list to cross off one by one. She had different aims now. Instead she pictured concerts and walks in the park, a small hand tucked in hers, and the world’s biggest mouse palace constantly being redesigned and expanded. Always the sound of laughter. Always the warmth of Jens’s body next to hers at night and that look in his eyes when he lifte
d his gaze from his book or from his papers and caught sight of her. That moment. As though they were bound under one skin.
She stroked his hair. There would be problems; of course there would. The social order in St. Petersburg was unstable, but she had faith in the power of men like her father to bring it under control, of men like Captain Chernov to hold the line against the strikers. But above all she had faith in men like Jens to build a better world for the workers to live in. Arkin and his ferocious revolution would never succeed; it would just fade away to nothing, leaving the banners and the slogans to be pecked by the gulls that swept in silvery flocks low over the city.
She rested her hand on her stomach and imagined a delicate head with a mass of fine curls living inside her. To be a mother. The thought took her breath away. But it made a sensation that was warm and real beat inside her blood, a feeling that in a strange way she was now larger than herself. Not just physically, but in her love. She smiled, thinking of her own mother.
Elizaveta Ivanova had recently taken to traveling by train to Moscow to stay with an old school friend of hers. Sometimes for only one or two days, sometimes longer. She said she needed to escape from the city where her daughter had died, and certainly she always returned without the lines of tension on her forehead and without the dull sorrow in her eyes. Papa barely seemed to notice her mother’s absences, he was so involved in deals with Minister Davidov, but he had embraced Valentina warmly at her wedding and kissed her cheek with his blessing. The gesture meant much to her. Only her sister wasn’t there to share her joy.
Valentina turned on her side and curled herself around Jens’s sleeping form, entwining her limbs with his and inhaling the scent of his skin. “My husband,” she murmured.
Katya would have been happy for her.
RASPUTIN WAS RIGHT. VALENTINA COULD ADMIT IT NOW and laugh. It was a coincidence, nothing more, she told herself. After a winter that was milder than usual and a spring of relative peace in the factories, she gave birth to a daughter. Not just any daughter. As she held the little bundle of snuffles and tiny clutching fingers, she knew that this was the most perfect being ever created. How could she not be? Look at her father.
Valentina could not stop smiling. Or crying. She touched each eyelid, each wrinkled ear. She gazed at the plump little lips and the tiny heart-shaped chin. She loved the way Jens didn’t wait for Dr. Fedorin to open the bedroom door to him but entered with eager strides that stopped dead when he saw her and the child. She could see that however much he had prepared himself, he had no idea it would be like this. Like an earthquake inside him. And then the grin on his face, so wide she thought it would crack his cheeks. With the gentlest of movements, he sat on the bed.
“Valentina, are you—”
“I’m sore and battered,” she interrupted, “not a bit like shedding kittens.” She held his daughter out to him, and his arms enfolded the small bundle in a possessive embrace.
For a long time he held her, his head bent over, staring down at his daughter, at her flame-colored curls still damp on her head. Only when the tiny mouth popped open in a silent yawn did he laugh and look up at Valentina. The love in his eyes was naked and it felt as if they’d stepped out of this world.
“I hadn’t realized,” he said tenderly, “how my life was not complete before. Not without this child in it.” His voice was shaking. “She’s beautiful.”
Valentina smiled. “Let’s call her Lydia.”
Thirty-nine
ST. PETERSBURG, RUSSIA FEBRUARY 1917
STOP THE CAR!”
Valentina shouted the words to Jens as he steered the motorcar through the crush of traffic in St. Isaac’s Square. Rain was sheeting down, bounding off umbrellas and off the car’s roof, splashing in the gutters. Whenever it rained, Valentina noticed—even after more than five years of marriage—the way Jens’s quick eyes checked each drain they passed to ensure that it was clearing the water flow efficiently.
“Stop the car,” she said again. “Please.”
“What is it?”
They were driving back across the city, returning from a visit with Lydia to Valentina’s mother, but Jens had insisted they leave early because he did not want his wife and child on the roads after dark. She didn’t blame him. In February the daylight hours were short, and the mood of the city had grown ugly. It was bitterly cold, and nearly three years of war against Germany had brought terrible defeats and humiliation for Russia, with wounded soldiers pouring back home, unfed and uncared for, begging in the gutters. Public fury at the tsar had erupted not just in strikes this time but in barricades in the streets. Shops were destroyed, bricks were hurled through windows, and firebombs reduced businesses to rubble.
“Death to Capitalists” was the shout that echoed through the city.
Rationing was severe. There was a shortage of bread, no khleb to fill the empty bellies of the workers, no flour, no milk, no butter, no sugar. Queues formed outside bakeries and butcher shops from dawn to dusk in the bitter cold.
Valentina could feel the hatred in the air. Taste it like acid on her tongue. Eight million Russian soldiers killed, wounded or taken prisoner in the trenches, Tsarina Alexandra labeled a treacherous German whore by the masses, and Tsar Nicholas so out of touch that at this critical time he had left Petrograd to go to army headquarters. Petrograd. Even after three years, the new name for St. Petersburg still did not fit easily into Valentina’s mouth. It had been changed to avoid any contamination from the German-sounding word. Since the start of the war in 1914, anything and everything German was to be despised—including the tsar’s wife.
As soon as Jens stopped the car, Valentina jumped out and raced across the square, her coat plastered against her legs by the driving rain. She ran to the placati, the notice boards with newspapers and posters displayed for people to read. In this foul weather there was not the usual crowd huddled in front of them. That was why she’d seen it.
The flash of red. The scrap of scarf that Varenka had promised as a warning so long ago.
She had prepared herself for this moment—not yet, don’t let it be yet. Her hand reached out and she saw the rain spattering her glove, the wind snatching at torn posters that screamed POWER TO THE PEOPLE, and four crows hunched like black heathens on the cathedral dome behind. The strip of red material was nailed to the notice board, sodden and ragged, but it was there. Waiting for her to see it. She wrenched it off the board.
MAMA, YOU’RE ALL WET.”
As Valentina slid back into the car, Lydia’s small hands patted at her cheeks, wiping away the raindrops.
“What was that about?” Jens asked.
“It’s Varenka’s.” She held up the red piece of cloth. It dripped onto her lap.
Jens slowly shook his head. “After five years of nothing from her.”
“Jens, it’s a warning. She promised it as a sign of when the revolution was close. Remember?”
“Yes, I remember.” He stared grimly ahead through the windshield at the blurred figures scurrying through the rain. “Dear God, now the bloodletting will begin.”
WHAT ARE YOU DOING?” JENS ASKED.
Valentina looked up from her sewing and smiled. He was on his knees on the floor, building a railway station out of wooden blocks with Lydia. At four years old her young face would crease with concentration as she balanced one on top of another, careful to imitate her father’s technique. She was wearing a navy velvet dress with lace collar and cuffs, but she had pushed up the cuffs and tucked her skirt into her underwear to stop it from getting in her way as she worked. Valentina sighed indulgently. Her flame-haired daughter wasn’t turning out quite as she expected. Tawny eyes that missed nothing and a determined preference for playing with model trains with her father instead of the magnificent dollhouse Valentina had bought for her last birthday.
“Valentina”—Jens sat back on his haunches and studied her with a lift of one eyebrow—“the maid does our sewing. What are you doing?”
Her needle
froze midstitch. She lowered her voice. “Getting ready.”
She slid a golden rouble from her pocket and pressed it into the section of hemline that she had opened up in the plain brown dress that was sprawled over her knees.
His eyes lifted from the stitching to her face. She saw his throat swallow. “My dearest Valentina, have we really come to that?”
“Yes. I believe we have.”
Lydia laughed, crowing with delight as she abandoned her bricks. “Can I play too, Mama?”
LENIN WAS COMING BACK. THE GLORIOUS VLADIMIR ILYICH Lenin was at last returning from his enforced exile in Switzerland. Arkin recognized the moment for what it was: the end of the Romanovs.
After five hundred years of tyranny, they were finished. Now that the people would have a figurehead to rally behind, nothing and nobody would stop them. Not the tsar. Not his troops. Not his pathetic attempts at silencing the outcry of the proletariat by dismissing the Duma. The air spat fury. The streets of Petrograd were on fire. Not just the shops and the capitalist businesses, but the ground beneath the feet of Russians. It was burning. Scorching away the old ways, ridding Russia of injustice and fear.
Arkin lit a cigarette, inhaled as he flexed and unflexed his damaged knee, and looked around his office. It was small, but it was all he required. Posters on the walls: WORKERS UNITE! and VICTORY TO THE PEOPLE! A huge image of a clenched fist and of a peasant stamping on the Romanovs’ double-headed eagle. A desk, a telephone, a cabinet, a typewriter. And stacks of rectangular white cards. Hundreds of them. He kept names on cards, names and details.
On top of the pile in front of him was one name: JENS FRIIS—DANISH ENGINEER. He picked it up between two fingers and struck a match on the leg of his desk. The flame flared. He held it under the card and watched it eat it up as the card curled and crackled and died. He dropped it into the metal bin at his feet.
The Jewel of St. Petersburg Page 40
