Heart of Iron (12 page)

I rushed into my apartment, to see Anastasia setting the table for supper and Aunt Eugenia reading the newspaper by the table.

“Aunt Genia,” I exhaled. “Aunt Genia! There’s going to be a war soon.”

I am firmly convinced that if my aunt could be persuaded to take on the problems of the world, we would be living in utopia. However, she preferred to concentrate on the domestic, and instead busied herself with making me raspberry tea and a slew of other old-fashioned remedies meant to lift my spirits and strengthen my obviously shaken constitution. Anastasia was sent out for valerian tincture and chamomile, and Eugenia made sure to loosen the laces of my corset to let me breathe better.

“I am all right,” I assured her. “I swear.”

“Just drink your tea,” she said. Her presence made my small living room more inviting somehow, more like home — she had adjusted the wick of the lamp so light fell only on the table and chairs around it; the rest of the room remained swathed in pleasant velvety shadows. She wrapped a plaid throw around me and made me comfortable in the best chair, situated on the border of light and dark. She brought my tea and pulled up a straight-backed chair to sit next to me. “Oh, Sasha. I forget how strenuous it is for you — you’ve never even been away from home before, and now you’re on your own, and your studies are difficult.”

“It’s not that,” I protested weakly, even though I did enjoy her attention. “The British are worried, their spies are everywhere. They are using the Chinese as a diversion.”

Eugenia stopped mopping at my brow with a cold towel and gave me a long, critical look. “I would think that you speak nonsense, Sasha,” she answered after a while, “but today I’m not willing to dismiss anything as nonsense. Something very strange is afoot, and I am a bit dismayed the emperor has decided to abandon those who have been loyal to him.”

I sat up straighter. “I told you they dragged me to Gorokhovaya as if I were a common criminal. I needed an Englishman to intervene.”

Eugenia nodded. “I spent all day sitting in waiting rooms, and no one would receive me. The entire government is either away or in meetings, the emperor has stopped giving audiences, and all the clerks are snooty upstarts who act as if they have never heard of our family.”

“That might be my fault,” I said, timidly. “I’m sorry.”

“You’ve done nothing wrong. If you didn’t stand up for your friends, I would have been disappointed. And if Constantine wishes to forget who
his
friends are… well then!” She huffed and rose to pace across the living room in her habitually large, unfeminine steps — two steps forward, two back. “I’m afraid you are right though — things are about to get much worse.”

“What can we do to make them better?” I asked.

Eugenia shrugged. “What can anyone do? I would tell the emperor he is not looking at the real danger, but will he listen?”

“To you, maybe,” I said. “I also think China would be a good ally against the British.”

Eugenia paused. “Perhaps. Only how would that be achieved?”

“Perhaps I can help,” I said. “The man who is, I think, in prison — Wong Jun — is of the ruling dynasty. And the others… they are from families of wealth and influence or they would not have been studying here.”

“You’ll have to speak to your imprisoned friend,” Eugenia said. “And as God is my witness, I won’t leave this city until I help you with that. Then we will see what we can do to convince the emperor that China is his friend, not the British Empire.”

It would be a lie to say I didn’t feel intimidated by the enormousness of these events. Two women, sitting in a tiny apartment disentangling a complicated standoff between three empires — four, if you counted the Ottomans, and Eugenia assured me that if Russia were to show any weakness, the Turks would surely make a grab for Crimea and the Russian shores of the Black Sea. They may already have made an alliance with the British, making it even more urgent that Russia and China stand shoulder to shoulder — no one would dare to defy such a show of power.

I tried to force my mind to think on such a scale and it recoiled. My thoughts were like lumbering boulders, impossible to shift by mere human will, and I felt defeated by the very act of contemplation.

I would have gone mad if not for Eugenia’s presence. She spoke of politics until Anastasia, who had returned from the shops, walked smack into the middle of our plotting. She fell asleep at the kitchen table, a cheek resting on round freckled arms still folded around the bag of fragrant roots and potions she’d fetched.

Eugenia filled in more of my lacking understanding of foreign politics and made more tea, raspberry and chamomile. She made me drink the valerian root seeped in hot water. It made me warm and drowsy.

It was almost morning when I had been calmed enough — with Eugenia’s talk and no small amount of valerian tea — to go to bed. My aunt did the same.

I did not ask for this, I whispered to myself as I fell asleep. I did not need this, not on top of my classes and the constantly smirking Professor Ipatiev, not with friends in jail or missing, or a suitor who robbed people and leapt from one building to the next. It all seemed excessive for one person, and I would never have dreamed of taking on additional burdens if my aunt had not been with me. But since she was, efficient and severe as always in her black dress, sleeping in the bedroom next to mine, it didn’t seem all that impossible.

Really, it was mostly because of my aunt that I rose in the morning, determined and ready. As Anastasia snored peacefully in her little room and I made tea, I made the decision that was to alter the course of my life forever: I had decided that if there was a war brewing, it was my job to stop it. My first step was to convince Jack Bartram to come to my side.

Thwarting the impending war turned out to be more complicated than I imagined. While Eugenia was getting nowhere with her petitions and being irritably sent from one waiting room to another and then back again, I suffered under the uncompromising instruction of Professors Ipatiev, Zhmurkin, and several of their assorted colleagues. Physics caught up with me rather unexpectedly, and I realized that to pass the exams I would have to study more than previously. And of course I was not going to abandon my studies, so the entirety of my campaign would have to be confined to my winter recess. Or so I thought.

Jack presented another problem — after his passionate confession, he seemed to consider the matter closed, and we returned to our amiable walks after philosophy class, with an occasional outing to a concert of chamber music, of which Jack was inordinately fond, or an engineering exhibit. I felt uneasy about those, even when they featured something as innocuous as the piano-playing automaton. I could never forget he was there to observe closely and report.

He too seemed to be aware of the awkwardness — at least, he never made any further incursions into romantic territory, to both my small relief and greater disappointment. A man in love was easier to manipulate, and I was prepared to feel only a modicum of guilt about it.

Because of him, I had also gained access to the Northern Star — the English favored it, and I discovered that even though the smoking room adjacent to the main hall was off limits to everyone female, the library on the second floor was available for my use. Jack spent much of his time there, and I started to occasionally join him, while procrastinating or simply looking for a quiet place to study.

My natural curiosity had driven me to explore the heavy oak shelves and bookcases in the library. The selection of novels was decent but not breathtaking, featuring some old books and some newer ones, such as George Henry Borrow (I flipped through one that looked like a gypsy romance, and decided to save it for later). What interested me most however were thick sheaves of newspapers—
The Times of London,
going decades back, all stitched together and bound into massive tomes.

I was able to read them only when there was no one else in the library — I did not want to attract attention to the fact that I selected newspapers between last year and five years previous, and combed through them looking for reports of arrests. Jack might have shown me himself if asked, only it did not seem right to inquire. Besides, I rather enjoyed the sense of secrecy, the feeling it was I who spied on him. It somehow fulfilled my sense of justice.

Because of this situation, I only learned of Jack’s past in brief snatches, in short but illuminating glimpses between the creaking of floorboards and consequent slamming shut of heavy volumes. Garnered in this constant atmosphere of vertiginous trespass, his tale seemed all the more marvelous. I tried to reconstruct the chronology, from the first brief report of a robbery and two drunk eyewitnesses swearing they saw the robber leap onto a nearby roof of a three-storied townhouse and sprint away, jumping from rooftop to rooftop, to much more detailed accounts, dozens of witnesses — a growing and calamitous impossibility of denial.

One of the more recent stories struck me as especially telling: it spoke of a hansom cab hired to transport a jeweler and two men he employed to protect his person and the diamonds and gold he had with him. The valuables were in a heavy chest held together by three iron strips that ran the circumference of the chest. The chest was locked, and the key was hidden under the jeweler’s jacket, cravat, and shirt, hanging from a plain velvet cord. The newspaper was especially insistent in listing all these details.

Eyewitnesses reported that a man fell out of the sky, landing on both feet with such force that his knee had to touch the ground to absorb the impact, and that the cobblestones on which he had landed splintered with the shock of his arrival (I did a quick calculation in my mind, trying to figure out the force of a falling human body, and decided that — by itself — it was not enough to split stone, but the newspaper was quite adamant about the fact. The image of Jack splintering stone consequently haunted my dreams.) The horses spooked and reared, upsetting the cab and rendering the jeweler and his bodyguards ineffectual. As they struggled to free themselves from the cab and avoid the horses, the man who fell out of the sky grabbed the chest and heaved it over his head — which was a feat in itself, as the chest was quite heavy. He then brought it down with such force the strips of metal holding it together broke as easily as violin strings, and the wood burst into a shower of long splinters. Gold and jewels showered the street, and the man shoved a few handfuls of the treasure into the pockets of his long overcoat, leaving the rest for gawking onlookers and the street urchins, who fell on the bounty like scavenging magpies. No one saw what happened to the robber, although most felt that he probably jumped onto a nearby roof and was gone in his usual manner, taking one roof after another with his gigantic, inhuman strides.

I felt exhilarated just reading the story, but did not understand why. I supposed that it was the sheer fact of Jack’s existence, the very impossibility of there being a man such as he — impossible, I whispered, impossible. A man who could jump atop buildings now studied philosophy in the same class as I.

The London newspaper dubbed him “Spring Heeled Jack,” and the nickname made me laugh at its levity and simultaneous accuracy.

I heard footsteps, and quickly slammed the volume shut. I shoved it into its nest on the shelf, while grabbing for something else to read. By the time Dame Nightingale peered over my shoulder, I appeared to be quite absorbed in my reading and gave a little start when she said, “Ah,
Pride and Prejudice
—a fine work indeed, and offers much for a young lady such as yourself to learn.”

“Quite,” I agreed. I expected Dame Nightingale to point out how everyone in the book married, as if it somehow bore relevance to my life, but instead she sighed and rested her long, well-shaped hand on the crease of my white sleeve.

“You see, Alexandra,” she said in a tone of soulful intimacy, as if we were best friends sharing secrets, “it is good for a girl your age to understand that not all people are suitable for your friendship. There are rough beasts masquerading as gentlemen; I wish I could tell you that the reverse is also true. However, those who seem as beasts are bestial, and so are some of those who seem as gentlemen. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” I said. I did understand her words, although the reason behind her saying them escaped me — unless she meant to intimate that Jack Bartram (which was not his real name, as I had surmised) was a beast; but then again, I already knew as much.

“Very good,” Dame Nightingale said, and nodded at me as if dismissing a class. I reacted as if it were exactly that, and left the library, book still clutched in my hands, even though nothing could be further from my intentions than reading.

I found Jack in the hallway — an open corridor that ran along the front wall of the building, its wide windows offering a view of the Nevsky Prospect and the moody dark river. I stood for a bit, as I always did, captivated by the wide expanse of water. More than ever-present, the River Neva did not merely run through the city, the city arranged itself along it — every palace, every cathedral had a connection to it, or to one of the smaller rivers such as the Moyka and Fontanka.

Jack finished his conversation with Mr. Herbert and some other gentleman I had not previously met, and smiled at me, his hat in his hand, ready to depart. Always willing to walk me home or to the club or to the embankment, wherever I wanted to go, he was right there next to me, my gangly criminal shadow.

“Such a nice view,” I said to him.

He nodded. “I almost feel bad,” he said. “I mean, that we English have taken this club over. We really do not deserve that view.”

And there it was, that elusive quality in him I could never understand — on one hand, he was considerate of others to an enormous degree; yet, if newspapers and his own words could be believed, he had no trouble robbing people and scaring the daylights out of them. I avoided thinking of the darker tales, where the victims claimed Spring Heeled Jack beat them or committed some other violence. Perhaps I was foolish, but I was not afraid of him.