City of Silence (City of Mystery)

City
of Silence

City
of Mystery, Book 3

By
Kim Wright

To
my friend and editor, Kabee Kokenes, and to my friend and publicist,

Sandy
Culver Plemmons, who each provide so much support

Prologue

June 13, 1889

The Winter Palace

St. Petersburg,
Russia

3:02 AM

The
room is dark as she enters, but this does not alarm her.  Katya Gorbunkova has
gone down this marble staircase many times, while wearing feathered masks,
great looping headscarves, costumes of every imaginable shape and size.  From
memory, she knows that the staircase leading from the performers’ level onto the
stage of the Grand Ballroom has precisely thirty-four steps.  She knows that
the walls are robin blue, and the ceiling above her is dome shaped, with the
pearlized sheen of an eggshell.  The Russians love eggs - those symbols of rebirth,
fertility, and spring.  In the city of St. Petersburg, these humble oval shapes
of the barnyard find their way into even the grandest architectural designs. 
The tsar’s private theater is no exception.

The
staircase could be notoriously difficult to navigate, even under the best of
circumstances, for this theater, just as every other room in the Winter Palace,
was designed more for the delight of the imperial family than for the
convenience of their household staff.  And each night when the curtain fell,
even a prima ballerina became no more than a servant.  Katya owed her
livelihood and her life to the continuing good will of the tsar, a man who,
despite a hulking frame which had earned him the nickname “the bear,” was in
many ways a benevolent patron of the arts.  Her life here in the palace might
not be perfect, but it was an emphatic improvement over her first eighteen
years on earth and she was not inclined to jeopardize that position. 

In
fact, the only thing which would entice her to take this present risk was the
chance to be alone with Yulian.

It
was ridiculous, really, that they should have to meet like this. She had her
room, and he had his, both in the same wing of this monstrous 900-room palace,
each tucked at the ends of halls so long that staring down then sometimes afflicted
newcomers with vertigo.  But her dance master was an unsympathetic sort,
preoccupied with rehearsals for his upcoming ballet, and unlikely to be charmed
with the news that the girl he had cast as Juliet had slipped from her room in
the middle of the night to meet the boy he had cast as Romeo. 

The
ballet would be presented in honor of Tchaikovsky himself, soon to return to
St. Petersburg after a triumphant tour of the capitals of Europe.  Did the tsar
truly admire music or dance?   It was impossible to say.  He had been caught
snoring in the middle of more than one performance.  But he was undeniably
pleased by the thought that a Russian composer had been feted in Paris and
Vienna and Rome, and so a grand ball was being planned for the occasion,
despite the fact it would fall in the wretchedly unfashionable month of June
and would thus require the nobility to delay their sojourn to their summer
homes in the countryside.  The ball would feature highlights from all of
Tchaikovsky’s major works, including a brief passage from his “Romeo and
Juliet,” played by the St. Petersburg symphony and danced, at least in part, by
Katya and Yulian. 

Of
course they had fallen in love. Of course.  At this very minute, across the
great span of the globe, in cities large and small, Juliets are busily falling
in love with Romeos.  The dance master should not have been so surprised,
should not have been caught so ludicrously unaware.  But when he’d learned the
truth he had thundered that he was running a ballet school, not a brothel, and
had ordered that Katya – still a virgin - should be kept separate from the
equally unfallen Yulian.  They were escorted from their cell-like rooms to
rehearsals in this grand theater and then escorted back.  Even to plan this
nighttime meeting had required not only daring on both their parts, but the
assistance of any number of their fellow students and the minor ranks of
teachers. 

She
was eighteen, he a year younger.  They had come from far-flung provinces where
a roasted chicken and a sack of potatoes was cause for celebration.  How could
they not lose themselves in the moment?  How could they not believe that
Shakespeare’s story had been written precisely for them?

And
such are the circumstances which have brought Katya Gorbunkov now to this
marble staircase in the middle of an egg-shaped room in the grandest palace of
the world, at just past three in morning.   She knows the time because the bell
in the tower of the tsar’s private chapel has just struck.  The chimes
reverberate through the night air and everyone within the palace stirs, from
emperor to scullery maid. 

Katya’s
foot, delicate and highly arched, leaves the thirty-third step and dangles for
a moment above the thirty-fourth.  The room, she has realized in the course of
her descent, is not as absolutely unlit as she first assumed.  Her eyes have
now started to adjust, her pupils expanding to take in a nebulous sort of
light.  The capital of St. Petersburg is high.  It sits on the Baltic Sea, more
Scandinavian that Russian, and in the summer there is a persistent soft glow, a
sense of a sun that never sets, a sky that never fully darkens.  Even at this
hour, a faint rose-gray floats through the windows, and as the light grows, she
sees him.  Her lover, her Yulian and her Romeo. 

He
is lying on the floor.  He has taken up the pose of the final scene.

For
in their choreographed death, the lovers are to sink into the shape of a
heart.  Their feet come together in the bottommost point, their bodies arch out
to form the curves, their hands strain down towards each other to make the
final indention at the top.  The perfect symmetry of the shape is not visible
to anyone watching from the level of the floor.  Only those in the balcony,
looking down, can catch the full effect of the pose.  Much of dance is like
that, Katya thinks, pausing as she at last reaches the bottom of the staircase,
waiting there to allow her eyes a few more moments to adapt.  Even the waltzes
require bizarre and tortured shapes from the women – leaning away from their
partners, arching their backs and raising their chins.  The very unnaturalness
of the position is designed so that they might show their faces to the royalty
sitting above them on the balconies.   It is not enough to be pretty.  One must
be pretty when one is looked down upon, when one is under the consideration of
her superiors, those gazing upon her from an exalted height.  The idea of the
lovers dying in the shape of a heart is contrived, overly sentimental, but
Katya’s dance master claims that the Romanovs like such things.  They do not
require realism. In fact, they disdain it. They are not in the least troubled
by the fact that even the most devoted lovers do not customarily die in the
shape of a heart.

And
it is here, on the last step of the grand staircase, that Katya sees the man. 

Not
her lover. Yulian lies before her, curved on the floor.  He is but a boy, after
all, and his youth is clearest when he is immobile, his chin unshaven and his
ribs as insubstantial as those of a pheasant on a plate.

No,
she sees the other man. The bad one, the dark one, the man that all girls know
somewhere exists.

As
the truth of the situation sinks into her, a British girl might scream, or a
French one, an American or German, even a princess of the far east. They might
struggle, bite, or kick, but Ekaterina Gorbunkoya, known as Katya to her family
and friends, possesses a fatalism so profound that it does not occur to her to
fight.  She looks around her and considers her limited options.  This theater,
she knows, has been designed to contain sound, not release it.  They are in the
performance wing of the palace, which is deserted at night.  There is likely no
one with a hundred rooms of this place.  An egg is much like a coffin, she reflects,
a container that can transport one between life and death and back again.  There
is nothing surprising in any of this.  A forbidden affair has come to a
predictable end.  Yulian has only briefly preceded her to the place where we
all must someday go. 

And
without Yulian in it, the world suddenly seems much easier to leave.  

The
man who is coming towards her, his hands gloved, his face swathed in cloth, has
placed Yulian at the exact point on the broad stage where the lovers are
supposed to die.  He knows the show, Katya realizes.  He is part of the company
and she twists in his arms to see his face.  It is not a desire to outrun death
that prompts her to turn against him like this, but more a curiosity.  A
reflexive and futile effort in these final moments to know her assailant.

He
has a knife.  Of course.  The weapon of peasants, the weapon of kings.  It
comes fast.  And then she is on the floor too, placed carefully, her blood
smearing the black and white tile as she is dragged into position.  There is a
sense of something burning in her chest but, beyond that, surprisingly little
pain. Just a great numbness, the impression that one is dissolving, fading
mist-like into the beginning of a summer morning.  She stretches her hand. 
Touches Yulian’s cool fingertip with her own. 

The
man with the knife is one of us, she thinks.  He knows the story.  Juliet dies
last.

Chapter
One

London - The Lawns
of Windsor Palace

June 13, 1889

2:29 PM

The
Queen was not pleased. 

Her
Most Royal Highness Victoria of the House of Hanover, monarch of the United
Kingdom and Empress of India, might have been regent to the largest, richest,
and most powerful empire of the civilized world – but she was also a grandmother. 
The impulse to protect beat strong in her chest, especially when it came to
Alix, who, of the Queen’s thirty-four grandchildren, had always been her
favorite. 

And
it seemed that Alix was determined to go to Russia. 

The
problem was that Alix’s request appeared so reasonable on the surface.  Her
older sister Ella had lived in Russia ever since she married the Grand Duke
Serge four years earlier. In her letters Ella claimed that life in St.
Petersburg was quite delightful - full of balls, hunts, and a continual
enjoyment of the fine arts. She was even making noises about converting to
Russian Orthodoxy, a threat that the Queen could only assume to be some sort of
bizarre joke. 

But
Ella was the sort who would always pretend that everything was fine, no matter
what the actual truth of a situation might be.  A whistler in the dark,
adaptable and confident, a girl who knew how to muddle through even in the
midst of the most appalling cultural barriers.  Alix was only sixteen and
different in every way from her sister.  Besides, even if she were not,
Victoria would have opposed Ella’s plan to bring Alix to St. Petersburg for the
summer. 

The
real problem, of course, was Nicky.  

Ella
might say she was merely inviting her little sister to enjoy a grand ball at
the Winter Palace, some celebration in honor of a Russian composer, a man with
one of those long, ridiculously unpronounceable Russian names.  Ella might say that
she only wanted to play hostess in her lavish suite of rooms, to enchant Alix
with the endless light of St. Petersburg in June.  But the Queen was no fool. 
She saw behind the charmingly-stated request of Ella’s effusive letter, which
had begun with “Darling Granny” and ended with “Your Most Devoted Ella,” each
phrase written in Ella’s large swooping handwriting, a penmanship so
distinctive that the Queen had known the author of the missive before she had
broken the seal on the envelope.   No, it was quite clear that Ella did not merely
want to show off a Russian composer or the vastness of the Winter Palace – this
visit was all part of her plan to bring Alix into the intricately webbed world
of the Romanov royal family, to align the girl with Nicholas II, the young tsesarevich,
a man who would someday rule a kingdom far larger than Victoria’s.

Even
if that kingdom did exist almost exclusively of frozen tundra, vodka, and
illiterate peasants.

An
alliance between the Romanovs and the Hanovers was not without precedent.  Alix
and Nicky had, after all, first met at the very wedding of Ella and Serge, her
sister and his uncle.  At the time he had been sixteen and she, merely twelve.  Why
a boy of his age would have noticed a girl of hers was beyond the Queen’s
capacity to imagine, but notice her he most certainly had, and the two children
had since engaged in an unlikely but apparently quite persistent
correspondence.   Alix had confided to her grandmother that she felt warmly for
Nicky; for a girl of Alix’s calm and careful temperament this was the
equivalent of someone like Ella leading a parade. 

The
Queen’s first impulse had been to recoil at the news.  She had already lost one
granddaughter to those barbarous lands of the east and did not intend to offer
up another.  One can only, after all, throw so many pearls before swine, can
only watch so many English roses be trampled under Cossack boots.  But another
part of Victoria, the part who answered to “darling Granny,” had been more alarmed
than angered by Alix’s shy declaration of love. 

Victoria
was propped in her padded chair on the rolling lawns of Windsor with her large,
deep eyes focused on Alix, who sat some distance away, reading a book whose
title the Queen could not quite decipher. This was no surprise. Alix was always
reading.  At first, appropriate books of the Queen’s own choosing, but as of
lately, who could tell?  Alix was fluent in four languages, as were most of the
royal grandchildren, but there were times when Victoria regretted that she had
been quite so rigorous in her instructions regarding their education,
especially the girls.  This modern necessity of speaking multiple tongues may
have been exaggerated; upon deeper reflection it had occurred to the Queen that
any words which could not be said in English were perhaps best not spoken at
all. The Queen’s own French was spotty, her German half-forgotten, her Russian
non-existent.  Therefore, she could never be quite sure what any of the
children were reading in her presence.  She might possibly have bred a nest of
vipers within her own family.

Ella
and Alix had been among the seven children born to Victoria’s daughter Alice,
who had been married to the Grand Duke of Hesse, a tranquil but admittedly rural
and somewhat backward section of Germany.  From the start, Alice’s family had
seemed marked for tragedy.  When Alix, the fifth in line, was merely a year
old, her older brother Frittie had tumbled from a window onto the stone patio
below.  He appeared to come through miraculously well, with only the predictable
lumps and scratches, but shortly afterward had died from internal bleeding, a
relentless seepage of his life force that the German doctors had been helpless
to stem. It was a profoundly unfortunate event which had given rise to even
more profoundly unfortunate speculation: That the royal family of England might
carry the dreaded disease of hemophilia, a curse most often passed from mother
to son, with the women being carriers but rarely victims.

So
poor little Frittie had bled to death, slowly and in agony, and Alice had never
been the same.  Although she had gone on to bear another child, a daughter
named May, the loss of her son left Alice anxious and diminished.  When a wave
of cholera swept through her family five years later, carrying away little May
with it, Alice had no fight left in her. She eventually succumbed to the
disease as well, leaving her grief-stricken husband and royal mother in charge
of her five surviving children. 

Victoria
took a vigorous interest in the lives of all of her grandchildren, but had
always had a special soft spot for Alice’s motherless brood. Ella, Alix, their
sisters Irene and Vickie and brother Ernest had spent all their summers at
Windsor with the Queen and she had grown exceptionally fond of Alix, whose nickname
of ”Sunny” was deeply ironic.  For ever since her mother’s death, Alix had been
a somber, serious child, lost in her books.  Unlikely to be talked into or out
of anything.

The
Queen was of split mind about what to do next, an unusual state for her and one
she found unpleasant.  On one hand, a correspondence between two youngsters,
even one which had endured over four years of separation, was hardly the basis
of a royal engagement.  Most likely they were more in love with the idea of each
other than anything else.  But on the other hand, the Queen knew her
granddaughter’s temperament –gentle on the surface but with a ribbon of steel
underneath.  To simply forbid the girl to continue to write the boy would only
turn him into an even more highly desired prize.  Darling Granny would have to
be far more cunning than that.  She would have to devise some way that would
make it seem as if the severance of the bond was the girl’s idea.  Or perhaps the
boy’s.  Certainly not the result of squabbling between their two families. The
Queen most emphatically did not wish to cast Alix and Nicky into an imperial
version of Romeo and Juliet.  No matter where or how it was staged, that story
never seemed to end well. 

A
servant offered her tea, but Victoria turned her chin away in refusal.  Her
ladies in waiting were doing just that, waiting in various pleasant situations
about the lush green lawn, some of them reading or holding needlework, others
sipping tea, a few more on their feet and wandering about, presumably in search
of flowers to press into volumes.  Victoria had been queen for the entirety of
her adult life, since she was barely older than Alix, and one of the distinct
but rarely mentioned advantages of her position was that a queen was never
required to look busy.  She need not poke needles with bright threads through
cloth or pretend to read books that did not interest her or make a great fuss
of drinking tea that she does not crave.  The utter absence of distraction, the
endless opportunity to bob within the pool of her own thoughts, had throughout
the years turned Victoria into a bit of a mystic.   

For
if one was granted the privilege and the patience to simply sit for hour after
hour, interesting images begin to arise. The Queen’s gaze moved down the bright
lawn and settled again on the still form of Alix, perched in the grass beneath
a tree and possibly the only one of all the ladies present who was actually
reading the book she held in her hands.  The Queen felt a discomfort inside, a
slight lurching of the heart, at the sight of the child’s sweet face.  The
continuing stability of her monarchy – indeed all of Europe – demanded that
Victoria give up her daughters and granddaughters into marriage with foreign
husbands, but these were decisions she always made reluctantly.  Sacrificial
lambs, the girls were, brokered into unions that were rarely of their own
choosing, packed off and shipped about the continent as if they were bolts of
cloth.  Although they wore diamonds around their necks and slept in high soft
beds, it seemed to Victoria that the women of royal families were little more
in control of their destinies than the serfs of Russia.

The
depth of the Queen’s skepticism toward marriage would have shocked the vast
majority of her subjects, for her own union with Prince Albert had been a
resoundingly successful one.   But Victoria knew that she had been lucky, perhaps
singularly so; love matches between royals were rare and happy families even
rarer.  Marriage was a lottery, a gamble that rarely paid off for either
gender, but while a bad match could damage a man, it would destroy a woman
altogether.   The Queen had never attended a wedding without a pit of dread in
her stomach, the sense that the spinning wheel of fate could come to rest on
disaster just as easily as providence.

Alix
had now leaned back against the trunk of the tree which shaded her, had turned
a page of her book, and was frowning intently at its successor.  How abstracted
she is, the Queen thought.  She not only reads, she reads too much.  She has
the character of a nun, if indeed Lutherans had nuns, and it would be
especially intolerable to see this delicate girl cast willy-nilly into the dark
pit of marriage, most specifically marriage to a Russian, potentially the
deepest pit of all.  Ella’s letters were contrived to be amusing, but the Queen
had seen the truth behind her droll descriptions of life at court.  The
imperial family did not fully accept her.  Serge was proving cool and distant,
not as careful to steer his wife socially through these strange new
surroundings as he should have been.  The Russians were self-impressed.  The
very word ”tsar” was derived from ”Caesar” and they considered themselves
descendents of gods, placing their crowns on their own heads at their coronations,
since they claimed to accept no human authority over their reigns, not even
that of a priest or a bishop. 

Arrogant
they were -  arrogant and barbarous, a bad combination in a race of people.  If
they had cherished Ella, that would have been one thing, but she had written
that the tsar had greeted her as “a minor princess from a minor German
principality,” a phrase that made Victoria’s skin prickle.  If Alexander III
did not deem Ella a fit consort for his brother, it was highly doubtful he
would consider Alix good enough for his son.  Victoria’s head reeled at the
thought that there was somewhere on earth a man presumptuous enough to mock the
lineage of the British throne, a man who honestly believed his boys were too
fine to marry her girls, a country where even the highest English princess
would be expected to curtsy to the lowest Russian empress.

Of
course Ella wanted her sister at her side, an ally and a friend.  And it was
easy enough to understand Alix’s attachment to Nicky.  Any sixteen year old boy
could manage to dazzle any twelve year old girl, and besides, even the Queen
had to admit that Nicky was a remarkably handsome young man.  Everyone agreed
that he was furthermore kind and gentle, with the Princess of Wales, his
maternal aunt, going so far as to confide to the Queen that the young tsesarevich
was “sweet.”

Sweet. 
A strange term for a man who would shortly rule one-sixth of the globe. 

So
the boy was handsome and sweet and wealthy beyond imaging and he and Alix had
now indulged their special friendship for nearly a quarter of their lives. This
would not be an easy courtship to disrupt.  But the Queen knew she had a
powerful ally, for the tsar did not want this match any more than she did.  And
while the nickname “Sunny” no longer suited Alix, the tsar’s nickname of “the
bear” most certainly captured the essence of Alexander III.  The man was a
clumsy beast, but Victoria was certain that if the Queen of England and the
Tsar of Russia aligned forces they could manage to thwart a half-imagined
romance between two over-sheltered children.  Someone had to save Alix and
Nicky from themselves.