Blood Maidens (8 page)

She wondered why the knowledge didn’t make her hurt less.

Ellen’s heavy tread in the hall. Lydia sat up quickly, realizing with a start that it was dark, her untouched tea was stone cold, and that she had done nothing for three days about the article for
Lancet
, which was due on Thursday . . .

‘Here we are, ma’am,’ said her handmaiden proudly and held out an envelope to her, smudged and dirty and dotted with Dutch stamps. ‘I told you he’d be well.’

Rotterdam

4 April, 1911

Best Beloved,

All well so far.

J.

Lydia put on her spectacles, checked the date, then went to the globe in the corner – she never could remember where all those little countries were, between France and Germany. He must have written this in the train station (the paper certainly looked like something one would find in a public waiting-room!), before boarding the train that would take him into Germany.

She made herself beam for Ellen, but when Ellen was gone she read the note again, then took off her spectacles and sat for some time in the amber gloom.

She did not believe in a God of miracles.

It was as unreasonable to pray for one as it would have been, for instance, to feel love for a man who to her certain knowledge had personally murdered – at the lowest possible computation – well over thirty thousand men, women, and children, one at a time, presuming the abstemious rate of two per week for three hundred and fifty-six years . . .

God, please bring him home safe
 . . .

SIX

Because man does not exist in a vacuum – and because Asher guessed that the
dvornik
, or concierge, of the Imperatrice Catherine was probably being paid by someone on the staff of the German Ambassador, as well as by the local Secret Police, to note the arrivals and departures of foreign visitors at this unfashionable time of year – on the following morning he carefully re-shaved the top of his head, touched up the dye on his hair and mustache, reread the Editorials page of the copy of the
Chicago Tribune
that he had brought with him, and paid a visit to the Ministry of Police. Though the Ministry had been folded into that of the Interior some years previously, the Chief of Police still ruled St Petersburg from the ill-famed building on the Fontanka Embankment, and Asher had little trouble presenting himself as Mr Jules Plummer of Chicago, in outraged and affluent pursuit of an absconding wife.

‘I heard she’d come here, and I don’t want to make trouble,’ he announced, in a loud voice and grating Middle-Border accent that no one would have associated with the soft-spoken Lecturer in Philology of New College, Oxford. ‘But I won’t be made a fool of, either, damn it. The man she ran off with claimed he was a Russian Count, and I know he had letters from St Petersburg, so here I am. Damn all women, anyway. Bastard probably lied, but I’m here to make a start.’

Needless to say, no member of the extremely wealthy Orlov family (Asher spelled and pronounced it Orloff) had been anywhere near Chicago that the police knew about – and the movements of the near-royal Orlovs were well known. ‘Knew it,’ growled Asher, and he gave the rest of his report to the bored functionary with just enough impatience, condescension, and arrogance not to get himself arrested as well: a good defense, he had found, against recognition by those who might have last encountered him as the self-effacing Professor Leyden.

In a major capital, in a time of increasingly murderous international affairs, the Auswärtiges Amt was likely to send in its most experienced men. One couldn’t be too careful.

That done, he took a cab across the river to the Kirov Islands and inquired, of the footman in powdered wig and blue-and-burgundy livery who answered the door of a particularly splendid palace, if Prince Razumovsky was in town at this season. The footman replied in impeccable French that this was in fact the case, contracted (for two roubles) to take up M’sieu Plummer’s card and inquire if His Excellency was, in fact, at home, and left Asher in a drawing room that made the Lady Irene Eaton’s town house look like an East End tenement. Returning, the footman implied that it was a shame that his master would lower himself to speak to an American, particularly at this hour of the morning (it was one in the afternoon), but that he would. Please come this way, M’sieu.

The Prince looked up from his desk as Asher was shown in, without the faintest trace of recognition. As soon as the door shut behind the footman, Asher removed his pince-nez, relaxed from his American strut into his usual posture, and said, ‘Your Excellency?’ in his normal voice.

The golden giant’s face transformed. ‘
Jamie
?’

Asher put a finger to his lips. Prince Razumovsky had a voice like an operatic basso.

‘Good God, man!’ The Prince came around the desk, grabbed Asher by the shoulders, and kissed him on both cheeks. ‘Where is it that you’ve sprung from, eh? I thought you had—’

‘I have,’ said Asher, holding up a warning finger. ‘I’m in Petersburg on a private matter, Your Highness. Not even my own Department knows I’m here.’

‘And your beautiful lady—’

‘Is at home.’

‘Just as well.’ Razumovsky shook his head. ‘Lent in St Petersburg . . .’ He shuddered theatrically. ‘I couldn’t interest you in coming to the Theosophical Society’s charity ball at the Winter Palace tonight, could I? The two Princesses of Montenegro are trying to catch the final contributions before everyone makes their escape for the Crimea . . . It will be a horrific crush – every charlatan in the city, and everyone in the city who wishes to be on the good side of their Highnesses.’ The Prince stroked his splendid mustache. By
everyone
, Asher knew he meant the two or three thousand (out of a population of a million and a half) who were fashionable in their professions, or in the highest levels of the government bureaucracy.

‘I should be honored, Your Excellency.’ Asher inclined his head, glad that he had thought to pack evening clothes. He had first encountered Razumovsky not in Petersburg, but in Berlin, when the Prince had been in charge of collecting the day-to-day information of the Foreign Bureau agents there: the clerks in the defense ministry who had blotted their copybooks; the officer on the Kaiser’s staff who was living beyond his means and wasn’t averse to having his gambling debts paid, no questions asked. The tiny details of which nine-tenths of good intelligence work consisted. While he would never have expected the aristocratic diplomat to assist him in anything against the interests of the Russian Empire, he knew he could trust the man as a friend.

There were few in his own Department in Petersburg that he knew to that extent.

‘Excellent!
Wunderbar
!’ The Prince waved him to a chair beside the stove – a monument of colored tiles and gold – and rang the bell. ‘One can only endure so many platitudes about the Serbian situation or communications with the dead – both of which topics seem to suffer severely from lack of hard information. You’ll have tea with me, Jamie—?’

‘Mr Plummer. And perhaps it’s best that I don’t. There isn’t anyone in town from Berlin, is there? Or who was, for instance, in South Africa—?’

‘Or China? Or Vienna? Or Bosnia? Or Mesopotamia—?’

‘Who told you about Mesopotamia?’ returned Asher with a grin, and Razumovsky shook a finger at him.

‘Nobody can remember all the faces, Jamie. Not you – and not them. So far as I know, all the good folk over at the German Embassy are the ones who’ve been there since Tsar Alexander was on the throne – or Catherine the Great, for that matter. Now tell me how I can help you in this “private matter” that’s brought you eighteen hundred miles from your beautiful Madame Asher at a time when Germany is boiling to conquer Morocco and revolution is threatening to sweep the world—’

‘Not my business,’ said Asher firmly, and he accepted the tea – in a silver-mounted glass, with a lump of sugar, and stronger than most coffee in England – that the liveried footman deigned to offer him on a tray.

The Prince waited until the servant was gone before he asked, more quietly, ‘And what is your business, Jamie? It is a long way to come at this season, and that is the truth.’

‘I don’t know what is the truth,’ replied Asher, just as softly. ‘And the information I’m looking for is going to sound insane to you.’ He was silent for a moment, debating how much he might ask without triggering a Russian investigation – and how much would be in the report he’d asked Lydia to compile and send to him, which should arrive, he hoped, within days . . .

The very word ‘German’ – especially coupled with ‘scientist’ – was likely to start the Third Section asking questions . . . and might lead to his own deportation. Instead, he asked, ‘Can you speak to the police – or perhaps to the Okhrana – and find out if there have been cases here in Petersburg of what has been called spontaneous human combustion?’

Razumovsky’s eyebrows mounted halfway up to his hairline. ‘Like in Dickens?’

Asher nodded. ‘As in Dickens.’

‘Why—?’

Asher lifted his hand, shook his head. ‘For the moment, it’s what I need to know,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t have to be proved, only reported. I’m looking for one within the past two months.’
If you can’t start at one end, start at the other . . . at least until Lydia’s report arrives
.

The Russian was silent for a moment, blue eyes narrowing. Asher wondered if he – or anyone – had heard or read reports of what had been found in the old palace in the ancient section of Constantinople, from which he and Lydia had emerged on a winter morning in 1909: four or five charred bodies, consumed almost totally with no evidence of pyre or combustibles. The Turkish government had hushed the matter up, and it had been lost in accounts of the larger rioting that had swept the ancient city that night.

But as his friend – and as an agent of the Tsar – Razumovsky would certainly have looked up the reports.

But the Prince said only, ‘Well, if it is spontaneous human combustion you seek, my friend, the Theosophical Society ball tonight is the place to hear all about it. And about poltergeists, levitation, falls of live fishes, and frogs found alive in impenetrable hollows of rock. The Montenegrin sisters cannot get enough of this sort of fare. Every scientist who makes his living attempting to develop teleportation or to explain mysterious monsters in Scottish lakes shall be there—’

‘And I will be urging them on to unfold themselves to their utmost.’
And perhaps asking them whether they specialize in diseases of the blood as well.

‘Then you will doubtless be the most popular man at the event. Most of these “scientists” won’t even listen to one another.’

‘But I would also like to hear,’ said Asher, ‘what the Okhrana has to say about it.’

‘You can ask them tonight yourself.’ Razumovsky grinned again. ‘They, too, will be there in force.’

With a further assurance from Prince Razumovsky that any unspecified ‘trouble’ Asher might happen to find himself in during his stay in St Petersburg could be referred to the Prince’s department in the Ministry of the Interior, Asher took a cab back along the Kamenno Ostrovsky Prospect to the city again. The day was freezing cold but clear, and in the fading light the Islands still retained the fairy-tale air of a place and time long separated from the nascent Twentieth Century; the woods and birch groves of aristocratic private estates, the little wooden
izbas
that mimicked peasant simplicity, all seemed like something glimpsed through a magic mirror. A glimmering quality of Once Upon a Time.

The world that children grew up in? Asher leaned his head back against the dirty squabs of the cab, remembering the cottage his aunts had had in the Kentish countryside, the sweetness of the woods beyond their garden. The world where something new and beautiful is waiting beyond the next turn of the path, under the next mushroom?
Is that why it fascinates us so? Do we chase folk tales and fairy gold, when what we really want is our childhoods back, when we were safe and loved?

When the world was a safe place to live in, because we knew no better?

Back when we hadn’t learned about things like poison gas and bombs?

Through the leafless trees the Gulf seemed to glitter, a hard green-black flecked with white. Behind the mossed-over gargoyles and granite lions of porters’ lodges, Italianate palaces of yellow, pink, and green showed up as bright as the flowers. They would be glorious inside, Asher knew, with polished stone of a hundred colors, with ebony and gilt, and with French marquetry and Chinese silks: every rouble of it contributed against their will by peasants in a thousand dreary hinterlands villages, and by workers who were shivering themselves to death in those dreary miles of tenements and factories within walking distance of this magical place.

The cab dropped him off at the gardens of the Tauride Palace. He walked to the house where the Lady Irene Eaton had lived. Though the days were lengthening, the light was fading fast. Over breakfast, and during his various cab-rides, Asher had read steadily through all the more recent missives in the packets Ysidro had given him: so far, Golenischev seemed to have been accurate in his statement that she had no living acquaintance whose communication went beyond the superficial. Yet Ysidro had been searching for something. He walked around to the mews behind the row of town houses, scaled the back gate and passed through the bare garden – simple hedges that a jobbing day-gardener could tend, and a good deal of pavement – and found that the lock of the kitchen door, like that of the front, was a modern Yale model, a good fifty years newer than the house.