by Jasper Kent
One day, if Zmyeevich got his way, there would be a tsar who, although buried, would awaken in the crypt of the cathedral and would ascend to take his place beside his master to rule Russia for eternity. Would that tsar be Aleksandr II? Yudin did not know. He did not understand what he had seen in his microscope, but that fragment of tissue in his pocket would explain things. He was eager to examine it.
He left the way he had come.
CHAPTER VI
‘WHY DON’T YOU have a mirror?’
Tamara had been into Raisa’s room – as she had all the girls’ rooms – more than once over the weeks since she’d arrived, but the absence of that otherwise universal item of furnishing had not previously occurred to her. She was seated on the bed, watching Raisa from behind as she brushed her long, blonde tresses. In front of her was a dressing table, much the same as in any of the other rooms – except that it had no mirror.
‘Vanity,’ said Raisa simply.
‘Vanity?’ Tamara would not deny that Raisa was vain – any woman who was so consistently well turned out would always be suspected of that – but it didn’t explain the lack of a mirror. ‘If you were vain, surely you’d have more mirrors.’
‘Like Irina Karlovna?’ Raisa briefly nodded towards the door that connected her room with that of her colleague, though Tamara doubted either of them had ever used it – Raisa and Irina were not friends.
Tamara laughed. ‘Exactly!’ The walls of Irina’s room were covered with mirrors. She’d even asked to have one fixed to the ceiling, but Tamara had still to find an opportunity to discover whether Yudin would stump up the money.
‘And whose benefit do you think those mirrors are really there for? Irina’s?’
‘For her clients’, obviously.’ Otherwise Tamara wouldn’t have agreed to paying for any of them.
‘And what do you suppose those gentlemen are looking at in the mirrors?’
‘Irina?’ suggested Tamara, though she knew already where Raisa was leading.
‘They don’t need a mirror for that. What those men are gazing at, through the entire process, is themselves. They find it so hard to believe that Irina has coaxed them into achieving something that they haven’t managed with their wives for years, that they need to keep looking over her shoulder and checking.’
Tamara laughed.
‘I’d rather have them looking at me,’ continued Raisa. ‘Hence no mirrors. Pure vanity.’
It was a good story, if not a good explanation. ‘But what about doing your make-up?’ asked Tamara.
Raisa swivelled round on her stool. In her hand she had a dainty pot of rouge – Rallye and Company’s finest. She picked up a brush and dabbed it in the pot, then began to apply it to her lips. Her hand never wavered, and within seconds her lips were a perfect cherry red, the line between pale, powdered skin and rouged lip as precise as the boundary between two nations, drawn on a field marshal’s map. She picked up another pot and with another brush applied pale blue shading to her eyelids, enhancing the natural sapphire of her eyes. Again she made not one slip.
‘Practice,’ she said when she had finished.
‘I’d like to see you do that on the train,’ said Tamara.
Before Raisa could reply there was a knock at the door. It was Nadia Vitalyevna. She was a curious thing. She had no qualms about the nature of the work that most of the girls in the brothel were called upon to perform, and yet despite her youthful charm, there was some quality about her that made her quite unappealing to the majority of the clientele. Those men who did show an interest, Tamara distrusted profoundly, and so Nadia had fallen into the necessary role of a simple housemaid. Perhaps she would grow into a more suitable creature for the work to which she aspired.
‘Lieutenant General Yelagin here for you,’ she said.
Raisa rolled her eyes, but Tamara knew that Yelagin was no ordinary customer. ‘He’s on Yudin’s list,’ she said. There were certain officers that Yudin insisted should be allowed every indulgence. It wasn’t because he liked them. She stood and walked over to the door as Nadia departed to fetch Raisa’s guest.
‘Anything for the motherland,’ said Raisa, giving a mock salute.
Tamara glanced at her and grinned, then left her to her work.
It was Nikolai’s body.
At least, it was the body of a Romanov and of Nikolai’s generation – and that left little room for other possibilities. Back in Moscow, in his office beneath the Kremlin, Yudin had examined the small fragment of fatty skin that he had taken from the body in the cathedral. The body had been buried now, and the remainder of the family had bid their tearful farewells, and Yudin was as sure as they that it was truly Nikolai.
He had ground the sample to a pulp with a pestle and mortar, then mixed it with oil to form a liquid from which he could make a slide for his microscope. Then he’d added a few drops of Zmyeevich’s blood and watched. Each time now that he used any part, however small, of that precious blood supply, he became nervous. It would not last for ever. He had eked it out over thirty years, expecting that it would be ultimately useful at the time of Nikolai’s death; and useful it was proving, but not in any ultimate sense. Each discovery that Yudin made only led him on to further questions.
The current observation was a dull one – but informative. Nothing happened. With normal human flesh, as with normal human blood, the blood of a vampire should wreak immediate destruction, causing the human cells to wither and die. Here, there was no reaction. Vampire and human cells coexisted. They did not merge, as he had previously observed with Aleksandr’s cells, because they were not blood, but the lack of immediate decay was enough.
He went over to his notebooks and checked again. He had brought them all here from his house in Zamoskvorechye now – all the secrets he had discovered from years of experimenting on the creatures. Some of the books were in a sorry state, battered and dog-eared not only from his regular use of them, but from being stored underground, hidden away at times when mobility had been his only means of survival. There were benefits to the settled life he had here in Moscow.
Two of the books though – including the one he was now consulting – had withstood the years remarkably well. They were covered in a light, flexible and phenomenally durable material. All the books had been bound in such a way to begin with – bound in the skin of a living vampire. He’d begun it more for amusement than because he thought it particularly practical, but it had turned out that there were only two ways that the skin could be damaged: it could be exposed to sunlight – which Yudin was incapable of causing without risk to himself – or the vampire from which the skin had originally come could perish. There had been three that he had used for the purpose. Two of them were dead – one killed by Yudin’s own hand, and to save the life of Aleksei, of all people.
The third creature, whose skin still covered those last two volumes, remained where Yudin had left him – entombed beneath the cave city of Chufut Kalye, which Yudin had been precipitately forced to leave. He had used explosives to seal all the tunnels that led down there, and the voordalaki on whom he had been experimenting were thereby entombed. They would starve, but they would not die. Instead they would simply become dormant, unconscious of the world around them until such time as they could once again taste human blood on their lips and be given strength enough to revive. It was an unlikely scenario, despite the war so nearby. Far more probable was that some explorer would one day dig his way back into those caves and, in doing so, expose those emaciated bodies he found to the light of the sun, destroying them for ever. But Yudin’s notebooks were still neatly bound, and so he knew that deep within those caves his former captive was still, in some sense, alive.
He checked the entry he was looking for. It was dated April 1824. It described exactly what he had just observed. The human flesh had not been Romanov and the vampire blood had not been Zmyeevich’s, but that did not matter. Neither that family nor its nemesis was in any way special in terms of their biology – only in t
heir status. He read through the details and could find no difference between what he had done then and what he was doing now. He tried to think back, but could find no memory whatsoever of actually carrying out the experiment he could now see described in his own handwriting – one of dozens he had conducted at the time. He silently complimented himself on his own assiduity in taking notes, not then knowing for sure how long he would live, or how poor his memory would become.
But there was always the possibility that he had made an error back then. He couldn’t see how, but he was not fool enough to think himself infallible. It would be easy enough to reproduce, to confirm that his notes were correct. For vampire blood he could use his own, or that of Raisa or one of the several other samples he had collected over the years. As for human blood, he had an ample supply of it – how else did he live?
He collected a few items from his desk and then took out a key and went across the room to the heavy wooden door that stood opposite the covered mirror. He unlocked it, revealing the stone steps that descended to that deeper, older level of the building. He carried out one last check on the equipment he had picked up: a porcelain bowl, a scalpel and a thin glass rod, hollow on the inside, like a reed. It was all that he needed.
He descended the steps.
It was April now – two months since the late tsar’s death – and spring was clearly on its way. There were only a few mounds of snow left waiting to melt, regularly located at street corners where they’d been piled up as the roads and pavements were cleared. Even though it was dark, it was still warm enough for Raisa and Tamara to walk through the Moscow streets without heavy overcoats or gloves.
But it was spring in another sense too, in the sense of hope and optimism that seemed to be shared among so many in the city. It was not unusual at this time of year, but now it was a feeling of expectation for not just a new season but a new era. Tamara did not share the belief herself. She preferred the certainty that Nikolai had brought with him. Aleksandr wanted change – just like his uncle and namesake had. There was even talk of freeing the serfs. So many of Tamara’s generation dreamed of it, but during Nikolai’s reign had not spoken, knowing he had spies on every corner. None suspected that she might be one of them, so they did talk to her, but she didn’t report them; not over matters like that.
What none of them seemed to consider was that freedom was the freedom to starve. Certainly plenty of the more able emancipated serfs would prosper and rise in society, but who would pay for it? It wouldn’t be their former owners; the rich would always take care of themselves. Those they left behind – those they stepped over – alongside whom they had toiled for decades, would be the ones for whom life would be intolerably worse. Tamara preferred order. The tsar was there to protect them, all of them, serf and noble alike. How would he do that in the chaos that emancipation would bring? Aleksandr I had been persuaded to leave things be, against his own instincts. Perhaps the same could be achieved with Aleksandr II.
‘It’s getting late,’ said Raisa.
‘Are you expecting someone?’ Tamara asked.
‘No, but …’ Raisa could find no ‘but’.
‘They’ll manage,’ said Tamara.
Even so, she increased her pace. She had already been hurrying when she had seen Raisa on the other side of Tverskaya Street and hailed her. They had been walking together now for only a few minutes. Tamara took a step out into the road to make room for a family who walked past, heading down Tverskaya Street towards Red Square. The adults were around Tamara’s age. The little boy, clutching a parent’s hand in each of his and scarcely needing to bear his own weight on his legs, must have been about nine. Tamara let her head turn to follow them as she passed.
‘You like children, don’t you?’ said Raisa.
Tamara nodded. ‘I had three in Petersburg.’ She had said it before even thinking. It was her business and she longed to keep it so. On the other hand, there were times when she equally yearned to speak of it. The Lavrovs knew, of course, but how could she talk to them of her children when she had rejected them as parents?
Raisa stole a glance at her. The wind had strengthened and it was easier to walk with their heads down. It suited Tamara. She needed to talk, but it would help her to remain detached if she could not see any reaction in the person to whom she spoke. Raisa could be dispassionate at the best of times, but this would be even less uncomfortable.
‘You left them there?’ asked Raisa.
‘Left them? I suppose I did. It took me six years to get away.’
‘You only lived there for six years?’
‘No, I lived there for fourteen years,’ Tamara explained. ‘I wanted to leave for the last six.’
‘What happened?’
‘1848.’
‘The year of revolutions?’
Tamara gave a brief laugh. ‘What did that matter to us?’ She paused, but knew that she would tell Raisa everything. Almost everything. ‘In 1848 we were living in a house on Vasilevskiy Island, overlooking the river. My husband, Vitaliy, was a doctor and we had three children, Milena, Stanislav and Luka. Luka was just two.’
‘Sounds idyllic.’
‘It was.’ It was true, though there was little in Tamara’s voice to convey it. She had moved on from Larionov by then, and seen his downfall, and was sleeping with whoever Dubyelt said she should – not so many in number. But whenever she could forget that, whenever she was with Vitya or the children, she had been happy.
‘Was Vitaliy successful?’
‘Very – he was a good doctor.’
‘So what happened?’
‘Cholera.’ Tamara whispered the word.
‘I see.’
‘It was everywhere. Every street had its deaths – every house in some areas.’
‘Couldn’t you have gone out of the city?’
‘Vitya begged me to. He had to stay – it was his job. He saved lives, I know he did.’
‘But you didn’t go?’ asked Raisa.
‘I wanted to be with him, but eventually he won out. It was when the riots started, in June. I saw them all, crowding together in the Haymarket. Vitya said that would make it worse – all those people gathered together. Tsar Nikolai himself spoke to them – tried to calm them down, but by then we were already packing.
‘Vitya was so confident – he made it difficult to believe that anything would go wrong if we did what he said. I remember him holding me, telling me that he’d be all right, that doctors rarely caught the disease. He was lying – but he was right.’
‘So you left him?’ said Raisa.
Tamara nodded. ‘We went to Pavlovsk, but we hadn’t been on the train long when Stasik started showing symptoms.’ She remembered the foul stench of his diarrhoea inside the hot stuffy coach as she’d hugged him close to her, hoping that the conductor wouldn’t notice and throw them off for fear of catching the disease himself. She’d forced him to drink water, as Vitya had recommended, and made sure the other children did as well. But it did no good.
‘He was dead before we got there.’ She had climbed down from the carriage, holding him in her arms, shouting for a doctor, but no one would even approach her. At last someone came and looked at him and told her he was dead. She laid his body down on the platform where she stood and kissed his forehead in the way her father – and for a moment she had almost been able to recall his face – used to kiss hers. She wept, feeling a pain within her belly where Stasik had grown, as though he had been ripped out of her. But eventually, when she did stop crying and found they had taken his body away, the pain inside her didn’t stop. It kept growing and growing – a knife digging into her guts – even as they put her to bed.
‘I went down with it too,’ she told Raisa, glad again that she could not see her friend’s eyes. ‘I don’t remember much for two days except for the pain, and the smell. And the shame – that’s the worst of it – lying in your own filth like an old woman. When they could see I’d recover, they told me how lucky I’d been.’
‘You were,’ said Raisa.
‘Then they told me Milenochka had died. She’d been taken ill the same time as me, and I never even noticed. I wanted Vitya to come out for the funeral, but they said it had to be done quickly. They’d already buried Stasik – I never found out where. I searched and searched. At least I know where Milenochka is.’ She knew, but she also knew that Milena was not alone. It had been a mass grave. Not a pauper’s grave – it wasn’t a question of money. She was always keen to point that out when she spoke of it, as though boasting of which school her children went to. It was simply that with such great numbers of dead, things had to be done quickly. Perhaps Stasik’s body was at the bottom of that same grave pit – it was a strange thing to hope for.
‘So it was just you and Luka?’
‘For a while. In the autumn, Vitya wrote to say it was safe now. He tried to hide it, but even in his writing I could tell that he’d changed. It wasn’t just Milenochka and Stasik – he must have seen so much death in the city.’
‘So you went back to Petersburg?’
Tamara nodded. ‘As fast as we could.’
‘And how was Vitya?’
‘He was dead.’ For the first time in the conversation, Tamara allowed emotion to seep into her voice and her words sounded to her like a lament. She breathed deeply to regain control of herself. ‘Not the cholera – not directly. Murder plain and simple. One of his patients – a peasant he was treating free of charge – thought Vitya must have money. Stabbed him a few days before we got back.’ Freedom was the freedom to kill.
‘Did they catch him?’
‘God did. He was a genuine patient – died to prove it. Vitya might have saved him.’
‘You had Luka,’ said Raisa. There was nothing consoling in her voice.
‘No, Luka died too.’ It was a lie, pure and simple, but nobody ever questioned it. Sometimes Tamara almost believed it herself, or wished she could.
