by Kim Wright
“And do you have any notion as to who that might have been?”
Vlad hesitated. “You know the members of the Queen’s private guard?”
“We all traveled over together, of course.”
“What do they think of security within the Palace?”
Now it was Davy’s turn to hesitate. But after running through several alternatives, he decided that the most appropriate response was also the most truthful. “They don’t hold it in high regard. The place is so big and spread out that it seems the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing. The tsar’s private guard is a different group entirely from the palace police and the two entities don’t share information. That sort of thing.”
“The Russians are all fools. I assume that this is what the Queen’s British bodyguards think?”
Davy was conscious that his mouth was dry and his heart seemed to be pounding its way up his throat. How on earth had he, he of all of them, been placed into this sensitive position? “I have never heard them call the Russians fools,” he finally ventured. “But they have said that they find the structure of the Palace inefficient, at least from the standpoint of security.”
“Which is precisely what Yulian reported to the Volya,” Vlad said, his tone of voice once again mild. They were walking across the expanse of a great public square and Davy was suddenly, at the sight of the giant statue of Peter the Great, oriented to where he was in the city. “When he first told us about the plans for the Tchaikovsky ball we scarcely believed him. He described a scene of such confusion, with so many people coming and going in costume, that it was almost as if the tsar had sent the Volya an invitation to attend the event.”
“The Tchaikovsky ball?”
“You know of it?”
The street before him seemed to shiver, to tremble in the golden light. Is this what if felt like to faint? He had to at least get off his feet before panic caused him to do something truly foolish, to say something which would bring down the entire political structure of Europe with a single blast.
“Do we have time for a drink?” Davy asked.
“There is always time for a drink, my friend.”
There were cafes at each corner of the square and they approached the nearest one, pulling out their chairs with a scrape. Vlad raised a finger to the bored waiter, without bothering to ask Davy what he wanted. Vodka was cheap. Plentiful. The drink of the people and thus the drink of the people’s champions. Davy steeled himself for the taste.
“We were speaking of the ball,” Vlad reminded him. “And will your Queen be in attendance?”
“I imagine so.”
“And you?”
“Of course not. Among her attendants, I’m the lowest of the low.”
“That’s good,” Vlad said, nodding to the man absent-mindedly as the drinks were placed on the table.
“Why is it good that I shan’t be there? Is something going to happen?”
“No one has tried to recruit you in London?”
God. Questions and questions from these people, with never an answer.
“I have already told you. The cause in England lags far behind your work here.” Inspiration suddenly struck Davy and he sipped the vodka slowly to stall for time. I am hardly a match for Vlad in a war of wits, Davy thought, but Mrs. Kirby was right enough in her description. He is obsessed with his own self importance. “I cannot tell you what my time in St. Petersburg has meant to me,” Davy said. “When I return to London I will begin the work myself, modeled on what I have seen within the Volya. So anything you can tell me is worth…is worth a handful of Romanov rubies.”
Vlad seemed amused. “What do you mean, begin the work yourself? There’s no need to reinvent the wheel. I’m sure a city the size of London has any number of existing groups and that they would all be delighted to take you on. Ask Cooper for a letter of introduction if you need one, although you most likely would not. Your position within the palace makes you an asset. It can take an organization years of painstaking work to get a man on the inside and you come to them with the matter already in hand.”
Davy rolled his eyes. “Please. I’m merely a messenger boy.”
“And Yulian was merely a ballet dancer. The point is that any revolutionary group needs within its ranks a spy. Someone on the inside, who can move around the palace without attracting comment.” The rim of his glass had a chip and Davy started to warn him of the fact, but something stopped him. Vlad was most likely the sort of man to prefer a glass with a chipped rim. “Do you know what I would be doing right now if Yulian had not existed?”
“Asking me to tell you everything I’ve observed about the interior of the Palace?”
Vlad gave a bark of laughter. “Precisely.”
“So I can only conclude that before his death Yulian had already provided the Volya with the layout of the building.”
“The parts that matter. Like the theater.”
“Exactly what were you planning to do on the night of the Tchaikovsky ball?”
Vlad took an inelegant slurp of his vodka, his thin lip resting on the chipped part of the rim. “What does it matter? Yulian is gone and with him, our chances.”
“And yet you asked me if I was going to be in the theater that night.”
Vlad looked at him sharply, his pale eyes cutting from a distant gaze to Davy’s face with such speed that Davy jumped. “You flatter yourself, comrade. We would not take you on so fast, not even on the recommendation of Professor Cooper. You think it is this simple? You are introduced and within days become the inside man with all our plans?”
“That isn’t what I thought at all,” Davy said with complete honestly. Even in his most anxious moments, he had never entertained the thought of what he’d say if the Volya tried to recruit him. “I assumed that you were warning me away from the theater as a friend.”
Vlad shrugged with a suspiciously high level of nonchalance, and put down his glass. “There is nothing to warn you away from. Just another night of champagne and waltzing and jewels and idiocy. The incessant feeding of the imperial family and their friends upon the very flesh of Mother Russia. You do well to shun such a place. Absence from their corruption will save your soul, if not your flesh.”
Davy sensed that this was far from the total truth, but he was not sure what to do about it. Vlad now he looked at his pocketwatch and winced. Time for the meeting of the Volya, evidently. A meeting to which Davy was not invited and there was no telling when the two of them would meet again.
But the Russians liked toasts, didn’t they? They always seemed to be toasting someone or something. There was but a swallow of vodka left in his glass. Davy raised it. “Peace to your country.”
Vlad left his own glass on the table. “You insult me, my friend,” he said. “True Russians do not want peace. We want justice.”
Chapter Seventeen
The Winter Palace – The Grand Ballroom
June 22, 1889
4:50 PM
They had been dancing for nearly an hour when Konstantin took a break. There was a carafe of water on a tray atop the piano and he led her to it, poured a careful glass for her and then himself. Emma took it with pleasure. She had been thirsty for some time, but the fact that he was as well was a type of confirmation that her dancing indeed was getting better. They had spent the last fifty minutes working hard, covering larger sections of the floor. It was the first time a pianist had joined them in their lessons and practicing with music had inspired her. Her small solo within the long and complex imperial waltz lasted no more than twenty seconds, but they had gone over the steps numerous times and there was a faint sheen of perspiration on Konstantin’s broad brow. It showed her what she suspected that he would never say – that they were truly dancing now.
“You are not married?” he asked.
The question surprised her. They had never spoken of anything remotely personal. She shook her head and took another sip of water.
“So the man you were with whe
n you opened the door…he was…” He paused, glanced at the pianist. “Who was the man you were with that day?”
She supposed it was natural that he would want to know.
“Thomas Bainbridge,” she said. “The Queen’s physician.”
“And he is your lover?”
“Good heavens,” she said. “Certainly not.”
He sipped his water too, regarding her flustered response with confusion. “If there is no husband and no lover,” he said, “then who protects you?”
Trevor protects me, she thought automatically and the speed with which the name came to her was surprising. Not that she could tell Konstantin this, of course.
“I protect myself,” she said. “I live on my salary as Alix’s governess and being in service to the royal family puts a very adequate roof of my head, as I’m sure you can well imagine.” His surprise irritated her, although she couldn’t have said why. The majority of Englishmen undoubtedly felt the same way, that it was impossible for a woman to function without male protection. “I am what we call a modern woman,” she added, and for some reason felt ridiculous almost the minute the words were out of her mouth.
“A modern woman,” he said slowly and thoughtfully, rolling the syllables around on his tongue like a pit from a cherry. It seemed as if the combination of the two words confused him, as if they had stretched his knowledge of English – or even his knowledge of women, which she knew to be far greater – to its breaking point. But she could think of no way to explain to him why Geraldine and her friends were marching for the vote - not here and now, to this man, who lived in a country where even men did not vote. Besides, even if she could have made him understand, that was far from the whole of it. Suffrage was a very small part of what Emma Kelly expected out of life.
“Modern women,” she said tentatively, “or perhaps, now that I think of it, modern men as well, do not look to a church or a government or even their ancestral family to assign them their position in life or instruct them on their fate. They expect to be self-sufficient and have the chance to determine their own destiny.”
He looked at her utterly without comprehension. She tried again.
“To be modern is to look at things objectively,” she said, “thus trying to see them as they really are. Modern women value science more than faith. They value the future more than the past and friendship more than romance.”
“Oh no,” he said, with mock seriousness. He thrust his hand to his chest and pretended to stagger about. “But this is terrible. Does it hurt much, to be this modern woman?”
“Sometimes,” she admitted.
“That is because in the heart all woman expect to be a princess,” he said, in a tone that implied the subject was closed. “They want the man to come and rescue them from the lives they have as children. Like in the folk stories of the ballet, where the duck becomes the swan. This is what we dance, you know. We dance the dreams of little girls.”
A few months earlier, Emma might privately have agreed with him, at least with the part about all women wanting to be a princess. But now that she had met Ella and Alix, she wasn’t so sure. She thought of Alix, so weighted down in her borrowed silver dress that she could hardly lift her fork, and Ella, far from home and married to a man who ignored her. Their royal births did not seem to have guaranteed them any particular happiness. In fact, you could argue that in many ways these real-life princesses enjoyed fewer freedoms and pleasures than Emma herself.
Konstantin put down his water glass and held out his arm. Practice was evidently resuming and as they walked back to the center of the dance floor it suddenly occurred to Emma why he had really asked if she and Tom were lovers.
“You needn’t worry about what Tom and I saw,” she said quietly. The pianist did not appear to be interested in their conversation, but one could never tell. “He may not have a mistress himself but I assure you he will keep your secret. I have never met anyone who cares so little for conventional morality.”
“So he is this modern man.”
“I suppose he is,” she said. “I suppose they all are.” She realized she had almost slipped with the word “all,” so she hastily continued. “Those of us who travel with the Queen, that is. Her bodyguards and messengers and private physicians.”
He took a moment to absorb this information, but did not ask why the famously traditional Queen Victoria might have chosen to surround herself with such a pack of godless wolves. “And it makes you happy, to depend on no one or nothing and to always think for yourselves?”
“Trevor and I are the ones who suffer the most with it,” Emma said. “We want the whole world to change, or at least we say we do, but I suspect there will always be something in us that will mourn the death of the old order.”
Talking with Konstantin always seemed to have this effect on her. She found herself blurting out things she had never consciously thought about, but the minute the words left her mouth she knew that they were true. Tom rushed toward the novel, embracing scientific advancement with every fiber of his being, and in his own way Davy displayed equal aplomb, playing the cards he’d been dealt with the posture of a man who knows he has little to lose. Rayley of course had his characteristic reserve, his constant sense of standing back from a situation and watching it unfold as if all were a play staged for his benefit. This detachment, Emma knew, was the sort of mental state that true modernity required. She and Trevor were the ones in trouble. They could not help reacting to the people and events around them. As many times as they declared themselves to be creatures of logic, they probably fooled no one. In the heat of the moment, they made their decisions based on impulse and emotion.
“If the two of you suffer the same,” Konstantin said, holding out his arms, “then this Trevor must be a great friend.”
“He is.”
“So he is the one who is your lover.”
“He most certainly is not,” she said impatiently, moving into his frame. “I have no lover. Trevor and I are friends, and that is all.”
“Good,” he said. He was moving slowly in the shape of a box, as if this were their first lesson. “For people who are similar in character should not be lovers. Your lover should be someone who stands across from you, who sees the world from a different place.”
She wondered if he were speaking of his own affair with Tatiana. “We have a phrase for that in English,” she said. “We say that opposites attract.”
“Opposites attract,” he repeated, expanding the scope of their waltz very slightly, beginning only the gentlest of a turn. “As in science, you mean? The, how do you say this, magnum?”
“We say ‘magnet,’” she said. “And yes, that is the basic idea. But I have always wondered. Opposites attract…and then what? Does the attraction remain or, after a while, do these dissimilar lovers fall apart?”
He did not answer, at least not with words. He turned his face from hers, stretched his frame and began to dance with more energy, pushing off from flexed knees, covering a greater distance across the floor with each stride, carrying her along like a sail carries a mast. Or perhaps she was the sail and he was the mast – it was hard to say, really. She closed her eyes, more out of habit than anything else, and let herself relax into the repetitive motions of the dance.
At moments like this, when her guard was dropped and her mind was free to wander, Emma would sometimes drift back in time and speculate about how her life might have been different. If her mother had not nursed the town during the cholera epidemic…if her parents had not sickened and died and her brother Adam not gone to America and if she and Mary had never been cast into the dark streets of London…if none of that had ever happened, then who might she be? She probably would have stayed forever in the town of her birth. Been the schoolmaster’s daughter who married the cobbler’s son. Most likely would have had children of her own by now, as would Mary and Adam. She never would have met Gerry, then Tom, and then all the others. Never would have traveled great distances, baited the R
ipper, swam the Seine, waltzed with a Siberian. She would most certainly not have been a modern woman, but would she have been happier? More at peace? For seeing the world in all its cruel glory was changing her, each day after the next, and there were times when she was no longer sure of anything.
“You can do the waltz correctly now,” Konstantin said. “And this is good. Soon you will do it big.”
She opened her eyes and looked at him questioningly.
“You have learned fast,” he said. “Faster than any. Five lessons and you do not make any mistakes. Very good. But there is more to dance than not making a mistake.”
Her mouth curved up. “Are you suggesting that I have learned faster than any student you’ve ever taught?”
“You are the intelligent one, Emma Kelly.”
He said her name strangely, all the emphasis on the last syllables of the word. Em-mah Kel-lee. He had already told her how to make the dance bigger, at one of the previous lessons. Apparently this was the only part of the affair that was her decision. In the first motion of the waltz, when the woman steps back on her right foot, that simple gesture tells the man how big the dance will be. Her backward step creates the empty space he will step into and he cannot go farther than she allows. The man determines the steps, the rotation, the direction, the timing, the couple’s position on the floor. But the woman alone decides how big their dance will be.
He had shown her how to do this. How to bend the knee of her standing leg and push the other one back with confidence, stretching her legs apart like a hurdler, creating a world for him to move into, giving him a large canvas upon which to paint the colors of the waltz. She understood it all intellectually and had even been getting used to the required movements, although it was not an easy thing to step backwards with confidence, to commit so absolutely to a future one could not see. Something was keeping her small and tight, and she knew this, but she could not name this particular fear.
