by Joan Lingard
‘Can one of you carry the lantern?’ he asked. ‘It’s not far. Her family lives just along the embankment.’
Raised up above the ground, Natasha could see the coach sprawled on its side, its headlamps smashed. The horse seemed unhurt. He was pawing the ground and steam was issuing from his nostrils in white curls. There was no sign of the crowd that had attacked them. They must have vanished into the night.
‘Bring the horse, would you, somebody!’ said Pyotr.
Two men rushed forward to take hold of the halter. They argued for a moment over who should take it before one gave way. The horse tossed his head a couple of times and snorted, then came without further protest. The rest of the company trailed behind. Pyotr stepped out in front, the snow crunching under his knee-high boots.
Lights spilled from the windows on to the white pavement in front of them. The doors were all closed up. No one else was about. The wind off the frozen river was bitter.
They reached Natasha’s house. Although it was a small palace – a palazzo – it formed part of a terrace and sat straight on to the pavement. A short flight of steps led up to the front door. Pyotr thumped heavily on the door with his gloved hand.
A voice was heard behind it. ‘Who is there?’ Not a soul in St Petersburg would open their door to a knock during times like these.
‘It’s me, Pyotr. I have Miss Natasha. She’s been involved in an accident.’
There was a rattle of bolts and the door opened a sliver to reveal Stepan, the head steward. When he saw Pyotr with the girl in his arms, he widened the opening to allow them to enter. Glancing past them, he saw the crowd on the pavement and the two men in the road holding the horse. He looked alarmed.
‘It’s all right,’ said Pyotr. ‘They helped to pick us up. Can you ask Cook to fetch them some food and one of the other servants to come for the horse?’
‘Go round to the back entrance in the street behind,’ Stepan told the crowd. ‘Wait there.’
He closed the door, fixing the bolts firmly back into place.
‘What’s going on?’ demanded a voice. It belonged to Princess Olga, Natasha’s grandmother.
‘The carriage was involved in an accident, Madame,’ said Stepan.
Princess Olga, on seeing Natasha in the coachman’s arms, cried aloud, ‘Tasha, my love, what has happened to you?’
‘I’m fine, Grandmother,’ said Natasha.
‘You don’t look fine! You’re as pale as the fallen snow.’ The princess liked to be dramatic both in her speech and actions. Now she wrung her plump hands. ‘Carry her to her room, Pyotr! Call her parents, Stepan!’
Pyotr carried Natasha up the broad staircase to her room and laid her on the soft, wide bed. Her maid, Lena, closed the floor-length midnight-blue velvet curtains. The stove in the corner glowed with heat. Natasha let her head sink back into the pillow and Lena came and removed her satin evening slippers and helped to ease her out of her shuba, her long fur coat. She seemed to have lost her fur hat. Perhaps one of the poor, ragged people had picked it up. She hoped so.
Her mother arrived with her grandmother puffing behind her. Princess Olga was immensely fat and puffed with the slightest exertion.
‘I told you it was a mistake to let her go to that party, Eva,’ she said to her daughter-in-law. ‘The streets are not safe.’
‘But she wanted to go, didn’t you, darling?’ Natasha’s mother stroked her hair. ‘And it was just along the embankment.’
‘Those poor people, Mama! They were dressed in rags. They looked frozen!’
‘Don’t fuss, Tasha, my love. Lie still.’ Princess Eva laid a hand against her daughter’s throat. ‘Where is your sapphire pendant, darling?’
Natasha put up her own hand and felt her neck to be bare. ‘It must have dropped off.’
‘Or been stolen!’ said Princess Olga. ‘That’s the most likely explanation. By that mob. The thief must be apprehended.’
Neither Natasha nor her mother said anything. They knew the suggestion to be foolish.
‘Prince Mikhail is here, Madame,’ said Stepan from the doorway.
Natasha’s father entered the room. ‘Is she hurt?’ he asked. He wore the brilliant blue uniform of the Cossacks. He formed part of the guard at the Tsar’s palace fifteen miles south of St Petersburg. The Tsar was not currently in residence, being away at the Front. Prince Mikhail was expecting to leave shortly to join him. In the meantime, he came home every few days to visit his family. He had had a difficult journey through the streets himself. His car – he had bought a Bugati just before the start of the World War in 1914 – had been surrounded by rioters at one point and his aide had been forced to jump out and draw his sword to clear the way. ‘The mob attacked your coach, so I hear,’ he said, pulling up a chair to Natasha’s bedside.
‘Father, one of the women had a baby in her arms. It might have been dead.’
‘Hush now, darling.’ Her mother leant over to lay a hand against her forehead. To her husband she said, ‘She is a little feverish, Mikhail.’
‘No wonder,’ said Princess Olga, ‘after such a dreadful experience.’
‘It wasn’t so dreadful,’ said Natasha. ‘The people who helped us were very kind. You’ll reward them, Papa, won’t you?’
‘I already have.’ He sat on the edge of the bed. He looked so handsome, her father, in his uniform. ‘Do you ache anywhere?’
Natasha put her hand to her midriff. ‘There,’ she said.
‘I think she may have damaged her ribs,’ volunteered Pyotr.
‘We must send for the doctor,’ said Natasha’s grandmother.
Pyotr was ordered to go and fetch him, but the doctor refused to come out. ‘Tell them to bind up the child’s ribs,’ he said to the coachman. ‘I am not going to risk my life coming out.’
The news, when Pyotr brought it, was not well received.
‘This is outrageous!’ said Prince Ivan, Natasha’s grandfather, emerging from his study with a glass of ruby red wine in his hand. The colour of his face matched that of the wine. ‘How dare the man refuse to come!’ Such a thing had never happened before.
‘There’s a new order afoot, Father,’ said Prince Mikhail.
‘New order! It’s sheer anarchy, nothing else. The Tsar will have to crush it and do it fast. The trouble is the man’s too soft. No backbone.’
Natasha’s maid began to bind up her ribs. She wound the bandages carefully, trying not to make the patient wince.
‘Where do those poor people live, Lena?’ asked Natasha.
‘In doorways. Under bridges.’
‘But why don’t they freeze to death?’
‘They often do. That is why there is going to be a revolution.’
FIVE
ALEX BEGINS A NEW SEARCH
Neighbours called on Alex and his father to offer help and sympathy. Mr Bell, the minister, said he would run them to Glasgow whenever they wanted to go. They just had to say the word. Duncan thanked him.
‘But I think we’ll leave it in the meantime. We’ll wait.’
‘Phone any time. Even in the middle of the night.’
They knew Mr Bell meant, in case Sonya’s condition deteriorated.
The waiting was difficult for Alex and his father, just as it was for Anna in the hospital. Time, in the house by the loch, moved slowly and heavily. Alex found himself glancing at his watch every few minutes. Often the hands seemed not to have moved since he’d last looked. Usually he found that there weren’t enough minutes in the day to do everything he wanted to do. Whenever the phone rang, his heart somersaulted and he would almost let the receiver drop through his fingers. His mother phoned three times a day.
‘No change,’ she’d say in an exhausted voice.
Alex and his father tried to stay optimistic and cheerful, but at times their spirits failed.
‘We must try to keep busy,’ said Duncan. ‘It’s a pity it’s holiday time. It would be better for you if you were at school.’
‘But then
you’d be on your own all day!’
Alex was glad that he wasn’t at school. He didn’t know how he could have sat still at a desk and concentrated on maths or French. He preferred to be moving, preferably out in the fresh air, with the smell of the sea in his head. He roamed the loch shore in the early morning, unable to sleep once the light had started to seep into the sky and the land. He took Tobias for long, slow walks through the woods and talked to him as they went. He did their daily shopping at the small shop-cum-post office in the village, going in first thing in the morning on his bike.
‘Any change?’ asked Mrs Robertson as she put eggs into a box for him. That was what everyone asked. ‘How many days is that now?’
‘Four.’
‘You’re having a hard time of it at the moment, aren’t you, lad? First, your dad. Then you hear you’re to be put out your house. That’s an absolute disgrace, that is! And now there’s your poor sister.’ She shook her head. ‘They say bad luck comes in threes. You could be doing with a bit of good luck now.’
Alex agreed. Cycling home, he thought about that. His mother always said that you made your own luck, within reason. What a bit of luck it would be if they could find Natasha’s will. If one existed. Sonya had been convinced that it did. She was sure it must be in the house, somewhere. In her last year, Natasha had become a little odd, the way some old people do, not too much, but a bit. She had started to hide things. ‘Just to keep them safe,’ she would say and smile mysteriously. She had always liked mysteries. And she’d loved hiding things and setting up treasure hunts. Once Sonya had asked her who she was keeping the things safe from and she’d said, ‘Why, the Red Guard, of course! They’d take the skin off your back if they could. You know they murdered my grandfather?’
Sometimes she wouldn’t be able to remember where she’d put whatever it was that she’d hidden and Anna would have to rummage through her drawers and try to find it for her.
So Natasha might have been forgetful and a bit fanciful but, in spite of that, she had remained sharp mentally. She had told Sonya that she’d put the will away carefully, where the Red Guard wouldn’t find it. ‘But you’ll find it, I know you will. You’re a smart girl. You’ll figure it out.’ Then she’d said something about a musket. But there were no muskets in the house!
‘I’m going to search the house again!’ Alex announced to his father when he came in with the shopping.
His eye was caught first by Sonya’s sewing basket. He lifted the lid and took out each item: the ruby and pearl thimble; a set of needles in an unopened packet, made in Paris; a small pair of silver scissors; a silver-backed locket containing photographs of Natasha’s mother on one side and her father on the other. There were hanks of silk thread too, in glowing colours: tangerine, emerald, turquoise, sunflower yellow and royal blue. Some of the colours had dimmed a little, but others were amazingly bright after so many years. He ran his fingers over the satin lining, turned the box on to each of its sides, then examined the back. There was no place here for a will to be hidden.
He went upstairs to Natasha’s bedroom, which they had left as it was before her death. His mother had searched the room before. He felt funny being in Natasha’s room, opening her cupboards, prying in her writing desk. For that was what it felt like: prying. Yet he felt he had no option. If he didn’t, removal men would come and take everything away and any papers or personal objects would fall into the hands of Cousin Boris! The thought of that egged Alex on.
He removed every piece of paper from the desk. Some were just scraps, old bills, notes in Natasha’s handwriting, but he read every word of each one, hoping for some clue. The rest were letters, written in ink now faded, and headed Paris, Berlin, Madrid and London, and dated from the forties onwards. In recent years the letters had become fewer as many of her old friends had died.
Alex turned his attention next to the mattress on the bed. Old people were supposed to think that a good place to hide things like money. Or perhaps wills? He went over every inch of the mattress. Nothing there.
He examined the pillows and took the covers off the chair cushions. Nothing.
He rolled back the carpet. He crawled over every metre of the floor underneath. The dust made him sneeze. There was nothing there but dust.
He went back downstairs to his father.
‘Dad, can you remember exactly what Natasha is supposed to have said to Sonya?’
‘Something about a musket.’
‘Yes, I know that. But what else?’
‘Didn’t she say, “you’ll find me there with a musket”?’
They had looked through all Natasha’s old photographs to see, if by any strange chance, there was one of her with a musket that might give them a clue. But there had been none.
‘When your mother phones we’ll ask her if she remembers any more.’
Anna rang shortly afterwards.
‘It didn’t seem to make sense,’ she agreed, ‘what she said to Sonya. I think Natasha must have been quite confused at that stage. Also, she could be a bit of devil, as you know.’
‘But she did want us to find the will,’ said Alex.
‘True.’ Anna sighed. ‘I believe on another occasion she said something about a white bird giving a clue to the will, or something to that effect.’
After the call, Alex and his father sat in the study brooding.
‘A white bird,’ said Duncan. ‘What white birds do we know?’
‘Seagulls.’ There were always plenty of them on the loch shore. At times, they could be a menace, especially in the breeding season. Once Sonya had been attacked by one. ‘Perhaps Natasha meant us to look near the sea.’ Alex jumped up. ‘I’m going to search the boat shed.’ They had not thought of that as a hiding place before.
He ran down to the loch. A seagull was sitting on the roof of the boat shed. That might be a good omen! Alex tugged open the door, which was inclined to stick. The shed was in a sorry mess. They had been meaning to clear it up for ages. Where to start? To tidy the place might be as good a way as any other.
He began by dragging out their old dinghy. Before setting it aside on the grass, he examined every inch, though he wasn’t hopeful about finding anything there. For, after all, they still used it to potter about on the loch close to the shore and it wasn’t very likely that Natasha would want to risk hiding a will somewhere it could get soaking wet. Come to think of it, it wasn’t terribly likely she would choose the boat shed as a hiding place. But he carried on anyway. His search, if he was to pursue it at all, would have to be thorough.
Alex searched the shed minutely but found nothing. He returned to the house.
‘We must try a different tack,’ said Duncan. ‘Let’s think about other white birds.’
‘Doves,’ said Alex. ‘They’re white. But we don’t have any.’ The house over the hill had a ‘doocot’. A dovecot. But Natasha wouldn’t have gone over there.
‘So then we have the word muskets,’ mused Duncan. ‘What does that suggest?’
‘War.’
‘And doves are a symbol of peace!’ Duncan sat up straight. ‘You’ll find me there. Natasha!’ he said excitedly. ‘Natasha is the heroine in the famous Russian novel War and Peace by Tolstoy!’
SIX
ST PETERSBURG, FEBRUARY 1917 THE REVOLUTION COMES
Natasha was sewing. She had to do something. She couldn’t concentrate to read. Everyone in the house was on edge. Trouble hung in the air like a bad smell. She hadn’t been out since the night of her accident. Law and order had broken down completely in the streets. Even inside the closed-up building, with its sealed windows and bolted doors, they could hear the rioters. They were like prisoners in their own house, peering out of the long windows at the crowds gathered on the frozen river waving red banners.
Most of their servants had disappeared. The house-maids and the kitchen maids, the laundry maids and the porters and the little men called ‘moujiks’, who wore brightly coloured shirts and high boots, and swept the carpets,
stoked the furnaces, washed dishes and slid on cloths over the floors to polish them. Natasha had never known exactly how many servants they had had, but at least two dozen.
‘Where have they gone?’ she asked Lena.
‘Back to their villages in the country. They don’t want to get caught up in the trouble.’ Lena went out on forays into the streets and brought back news. ‘Or else they’ve joined the rioters.’
‘The moujiks?’ Natasha couldn’t imagine the little men rioting. They’d been friendly and had often sung as they’d gone about their duties.
In former times, the house had been full of bustle and noise. The doorbell had rung constantly. Her mother and grandmother had entertained in the salon, serving tea, in small decorated teapots, made with hot water from the pot-bellied copper samovar that steamed gently in a corner for most of the day. With it, they had offered cakes: gooey meringues, crisp little honey and almond cakes, chocolate profiteroles, coffee and walnut cake.
Now there were no cakes in the house. The shop on the Nevsky Boulevard was closed. The doorbell didn’t ring. It was quiet and still in the hall and corridors. People spoke in lowered voices in case an enemy might be listening. For it seemed that there were thousands out there baying for their blood. The sound of their cries was terrifying.
The weather had continued to be severe, with temperatures dropping to as low as thirty degrees below zero. Schools were shut down due to shortage of fuel. Mostly everything in the city was closed: shops, factories. There was no public transport, no newspapers. Snow was piled up on the railway tracks; trains were stuck. Food was scarce. Lena said the peasants were refusing to bring produce into the city. It was thought bread would be rationed. People were becoming hungrier and angrier by the day. Police stations had been set alight and troops had opened fire. Some people had been killed.
‘Why do they hate us so much, Lena?’ asked Natasha.
The maid shrugged. ‘When people are cold and hungry, Miss Natasha, they get angry.’
