Heart of Iron

Read Heart of Iron Online

Authors: Ekaterina Sedia

Tags: #sf_history

BOOK: Heart of Iron
12.56Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
Annotation
In a Russia where the Decembrists' rebellion was successful and the Trans-Siberian railroad was completed before 1854, Sasha Trubetskaya wants nothing more than to have a decent debut ball in St. Petersburg. But her aunt's feud with the emperor lands Sasha at university, where she becomes one of its first female students — an experiment, she suspects, designed more to prove female unsuitability for such pursuits than offer them education. The pressure intensifies when Sasha's only friends — Chinese students — start disappearing, and she begins to realize that her new British companion, Jack, has bigger secrets than she can imagine! Sasha and Jack find themselves trying to stop a war brewing between the three empires. The only place they can turn to for help is the Heavenly Kingdom of Great Peace, newly founded by the Taiping rebels. Pursued by the terrifying Dame Florence Nightingale of the British Secret Service, Sasha and Jack escape across Siberia via train to China. Sasha discovers that Jack is not quite the person she thought he was…but then again, neither is she.
Ekaterina Sedia
HEART OF IRON

 

To Chris, with all my love.

 

Chapter 1

 

I have been blessed by several good fortunes, and I have no doubt that it is this constellation of luck and circumstance — at least, in part — that allows me to write these words. But foremost among my various and undeserved gifts I count my aunt Eugenia (Countess Menshova to most), for if it were not for her sardonic manner and low tolerance for insincerity, my debut at the St. Petersburg season — and my life thereafter — would have been very different.
Aunt Eugenia had taken care of my mother and me since my Papa had passed on to the mysterious afterlife I had only vague notions of at the tender age of eight. Unfortunately, Papa’s passing was not sudden. He had started to succumb to increasingly frequent coughing and fainting spells when I was just an infant. His failing health ensured that I had no memory of his face since he spent most of his time in Switzerland, in successively more expensive and desperate treatments. Time was not the only thing of which the disease robbed our family — the cost of the treatments was such that after my father’s passing at some Swiss resort, our fortune was nil, and entered the realm of negative numbers once his body was transported home and interred in the family crypt, just three hundred miles from St. Petersburg in the village of Trubetskoye.
My mother and I were destitute — save for the family manor house, which would have had to be sold at auction, were it not for my mother’s trusting love for her sister Eugenia, and Eugenia’s clear-eyed practicality. Aunt Eugenia had inherited most of the money on my mother’s side of the family. (Their father, an unsentimental man, decided that since my mother was married and Aunt Eugenia was not, that it was Eugenia who would benefit from being named heiress to the title and its monetary accompaniment.) She and my mother decided to pool their resources and save the manor from such indignity. Aunt Eugenia moved to Trubetskoye and set about buying back and administering the estate, hiring help, fixing the manor house, and leasing the land, all the while pouring her own not inconsiderable resources into the enterprise. In a sense, she took over Papa’s role in my young heart as well, and provided as admirable a model of masculine virtue as one could hope. The fact she wore a corset and a severe black dress was entirely coincidental.
After Papa’s death, my mother had faded both spiritually and physically, acquiring an inspired look one usually imagined in angels or ancient Christians, and while she was never much involved in the daily life of the estate to begin with, she withdrew even further away from mundanity, drifting through the brightly lit spacious rooms of the Trubetskoye Manor, pale fingertips of her left hand trailing along the light-colored paneling of the walls, while her right hand tortured either a lacy handkerchief or a string of rosary beads, a relic from some distant and Polish relative. She only took interest in the news of the St. Petersburg season. This, I think, is what kept her alive — her desire to see me at the Winter Palace, and gossip. She delighted in any news from Emperor Constantine’s court, as she delighted in all of his reforms — for he had never forgotten the Decembrists and their families, the ones to whom he owed his throne. He always sent us cards for Christmas and Easter, even after my Papa had passed on.
Ever since I was very young, I had known about reforms — everything changed so fast. Even Aunt Eugenia, interested in the news from the court only if it concerned her directly, used to say that the Emperor’s name was ill-fitted to his feverish rush to change change change the ancient injustices that plagued the land.
I was born seven years after the serfs were freed, but ten years later the adults were still talking about the families who had lost their fortunes. The serfs of the Trubetskoye estate were freed with the rest, but quite a few had remained as renters; the rest of the estate was worked by hired labor and, as Aunt Eugenia used to say, the raising of the downtrodden necessitated some sacrifice. Both she and my papa, when he was still alive, had foresight enough to send a few especially bright newly liberated young men to a vocational school. As a result the Trubetskoye now enjoyed its own engineering staff, enough to modify the machinery to do something Aunt Eugenia tried to explain to me on many occasions, but my mind invariably started to drift the moment she mentioned the dreaded word “efficiency.”
My education was also Aunt Eugenia’s concern — at least she was the one to interview the applicants for the enviable position of my governess, and she dealt with a long procession of French, German, and English noble-but-destitute maidens with her habitual ruthlessness. The winner who emerged from what I imagined as a gladiatorial pit was a long-nosed Englishwoman with closely set eyes who reminded me of a herring. Her name was Miss Chartwell, and from the day I was eight to the day I was eighteen she taught me English, cursive writing, natural history, and calculus.
Perhaps it is worth mentioning that my youth was not just a jumble of family strife and nation-wide reformism — there were also long summers spent playing in the fields, fishing, and befriending the children of the renters, and reading James Fenimore Cooper; there were equally long winters when frost painted the windows with fantastical white flowers while the coal fire blazed in the copper stove, and my mother and her sister sat amiably side by side: one knitting, the other checking over the accounts. They still live like this in my mind’s eye, the two aspects of contented domesticity — caring and wisdom, twin guardians of my childhood happiness.
I remember the second winter after Aunt Eugenia took over the household’s reins. I played with my mother’s cat Murka in front of the roaring fireplace. My mother looked up from her knitting, her dark-hooded eyes smiling at me, the skin around them folding into unfamiliar happy creases. “You’re getting so big,” she said, wistful. “Soon, I’ll be escorting you to the balls in St. Petersburg.”
I smiled, happy to see her thinking and talking of me instead of my dead papa. “Am I pretty, Mama?” I asked, coquettish.
She smiled still, but remained silent, and I could see that her eyes were troubled. She stopped rocking in her rocking chair.
Aunt Eugenia interfered with her usual bluntness. “There are better things to be than pretty, Sasha,” she told me. “Don’t you let anyone tell you otherwise.”
“What is better than beauty?” I asked, breathing deeply to stave off the impending heartbreak.
“Not being a fool,” Aunt Eugenia said. She was not a great beauty, with her long narrow chin and small beady eyes, her thin hair slicked into a paltry bun. But when she said it, I could see that she would have felt the same way if she were a golden-haired full-lipped nymph. “And if I were you, I would start paying attention to your lessons.”
“I am paying attention,” I said, indignant as only a ten-year-old child can be in the face of a just accusation.
Aunt Eugenia smiled then, her chin growing even pointier, and turned to my mother. “What do you think, Irina?”
My mother resumed her knitting and rocking; it was difficult to believe that this dark-haired, fragile beauty was related to Eugenia. “I think women in our family are late bloomers,” she said. “You watch and see — the girls who are pretty now will be sows in a few years, and my little frogling will become a pretty young lady. Remember the story of the Ugly Duckling?”
Aunt Eugenia and I nodded in unison. Eugenia smiled impishly and said, “Then again, some ugly ducklings grow up to be ugly ducks — not to be helped, that. But having a brain and a heart… well, that’s the sort of thing a young lady doesn’t have to wait for.”
Is it any wonder that I took her words more deeply to heart than my mother’s?
When I turned eighteen, I was judged to be ready for my debut — even Eugenia nodded and conceded there was nothing to be gained by delaying it further. I was not so much excited about the balls and the season as I was about getting to visit St. Petersburg again — even though we had an apartment there, we spent all of our time in Trubetskoye, and visited only rarely. I missed the leaden Neva and the spire of the Admiralty piercing the fat low winter clouds, and I could not wait to walk those broad and impossibly straight streets, blown through by the cold autumn winds.
Despite my mother’s predictions, I had not achieved beauty. Rather, my appearance had become stuck between my aunt’s sharp features and my mother’s dainty ones — neither an ugly duck nor a swan, I could only claim awkwardness as one feature that belonged to me and no one else.
Then there was the matter of a dress; my mother fully intended to fret about it until Eugenia rolled her eyes and hired a village seamstress. “Here,” she told the large, red-handed and rough-knuckled woman as she gave her the money. “Make something not embarrassing.” The woman nodded while I secretly doubted the effectiveness of such low-aiming instruction. But to my surprise, the dress turned out to be foam green, simple, and beautiful in a manner of Grecian shifts (if Grecians were to wear corsets and crinolines under theirs.) Thus accoutered, I was ready for anything fine society was prepared to throw at me.
I confess to some anxiety as Eugenia’s carriage left the familiar backwater of Trubetskoye and clanked along the too-wide ruts toward the capital. Squeezed between my mother’s warm soft shawl and my aunt’s sharp elbow, I had all the time in the world to think and fret, even as Miss Chartwell’s fish eyes watched me from the seat opposite ours where she was losing a silent and undignified battle with hat boxes and suitcases that had not fit on the carriage roof.
I felt an impostor, somehow — as if my papa’s sacrifice and service had expired the day he had died, and now my mother and I were nothing, just poor relations leeching off of my aunt’s kindness; as if my family’s past did not entitle me to a place at the emperor’s season; as if I did not stand to inherit two titles. All of that was no more than dust to me, and the closer we got to the icy, stony beauty of St. Petersburg, the more perturbed I felt.
Fortunately, my mother and Eugenia’s exclamations brought me out of the tar pit of excessive self-reflection.
“It changes every time I come by,” Eugenia said. “Every time.”
“Indeed,” my mother said peering through the window on her side of the carriage. “I guess it is a good thing that the emperor is taking care of the roads.” She smiled at me and leaned back into the cushions to allow me a view out of the window.
The road I remembered as being insubstantial and barely passable in the spring floods was being widened — a crew of freedmen labored next to the road, shattering stone with heavy hammers; another crew collected the resulting gravel and loaded it into long, open carts. I surmised the carts would then be sent to pave the road — it was still dirt at our present location, but noises ahead signaled it was paved not too far from there.
Roads and highways and railroads were the emperor’s latest obsession. Eugenia had shrewdly observed he had to do something with all the freedmen, now that the fields were modernized and required fewer workers than before. My mother approved of the emperor’s actions as she approved of everything he did — he was her connection to my dead papa, his protégé of sorts, even though such an imaginary inversion of power was ridiculous.

Other books

Aquatic Attraction by Charlie Richards
Unfold Me by Talia Ellison
Night of the Howling Dogs by Graham Salisbury
The Dead Season by Donna Ball
Firespill by Ian Slater
Channel Sk1n by Noon, Jeff
The Art of Dreaming by Carlos Castaneda
The Blessing by Nancy Mitford
Destiny of Coins by Aiden James