Midnight in St. Petersburg (50 page)

Horace's eyes were shut. If he'd recognized Yasha, heaving him into the cart with Selifan before they left the hotel, he hadn't acknowledged him. But his temperature was down, and when the old man had finally allowed Inna to the bedside to look at his foot and bandage it for the road, she'd seen to her astonishment that it had been much cleaner, with the hot hard anger gone out of the flesh and the edges of the wound a hopeful, uninfected pink. It was almost miraculous. ‘How did you do that?' Inna had asked.

The old man had only lifted his shoulders awkwardly. ‘I've tended a lot of soldiers in my time, miss,' was all he'd say. ‘I know how easy it is to lose a good man once you let the badness in.' And then he'd got quietly up and taken away the basin, covered with cloths so Inna couldn't see the water inside. But he'd drawn Yasha aside before they'd all set off and given him a paper-wrapped parcel, and whispered to him. Yasha's eyes had widened for a moment as the old man talked, and he'd glanced down at the package and then at Inna, but after he'd heard the old man out he'd just nodded and put the parcel in his bag.

‘What was that about?' Inna had asked as the cart had set off.

‘Towels for bandages,' Yasha had said briefly. ‘And some poultice.' And then, turning away, he'd walked back, away from the lumbering cart, and slipped the old man some money. Inna, suddenly remembering how he'd done the same kind thing, long ago, in the poorhouse, hadn't been able to bring herself to speak for some time afterwards.

Now Yasha was loping along in front, by himself. His bag was swinging jauntily off one shoulder, and the violin he'd made was in the box under his arm. She could see herself in that long body, the dark intentness of it.

Sometimes he turned round and looked at her, expressionlessly. She could see herself in his eyes and his cheekbones.

She couldn't help staring at him. He was right in her line of vision.

There was so much holding them together, even now. Especially now.

She touched her free hand to her belly. She couldn't help thinking, If I get on that ship I'll never see him again.

She couldn't help the tightening of panic at the thought.

The road twisted into a new bay and, down in the distance, the embarkation near the horizon came into view. There were two English ships flying flags with red, white and blue crosses: a smallish dark-grey destroyer and a much bigger carrier vessel. Near a toy-like jetty, stretching out into the blue, were hundreds of tiny forms, rushing to and fro among steamer trunks. ‘They're not leaving empty-handed, the aristos, then,' Yasha remarked drily.

Their footsteps rose and fell. The sun got hotter. The ships got bigger.

Inna held Horace's hand, and watched Yasha.

The ships seemed much bigger by the time Yasha dropped back and started walking next to her.

His face was studiedly neutral. But she could feel the hope in him, just as she was aware of Horace lying trustingly in the cart on her other side, with his hand holding on to hers.

The road went on, all the way up the coast. But, any minute now, they'd reach the place where their cart would need to turn off to get to the water's edge. She could get on the ship with Horace, or she could carry on up the coast with Yasha. She'd have to decide soon. Now it was coming so close, it felt to Inna as though her whole life had been leading her here, to this moment, to this crossroads, to the choice she'd have to make once they got to the mêlée ahead. And she still didn't know what to do.

She saw Yasha glance down at her hand in Horace's.

The pressure of both men's expectations felt as crushing as a physical burden. When her ears caught a new sound mixing with the breeze and the rustle of leaves: the faint hubbub of the crowd ahead, she felt sick.

Letting go of Horace, she grasped the side of the cart with both hands and clung on, dizzy and grateful for the rough wooden support.

‘Is there any water?' she asked Selifan faintly. They'd drained his flask during the morning, but he jerked a thumb at the wooded hillside just behind them. ‘There's a spring up there,' he said, ‘under that big rock, see?' He handed the bottle to Yasha who put down the violin box he was carrying on the open back of the cart, by Horace's feet, and scrambled away through the bushes to refill it.

The horse ambled on. Inna tried to concentrate on nothing more than the sunlight on her back and the sound of hoof and wheel. After a few minutes her nausea began to pass. She straightened up and felt for Horace's hand again.

It wasn't much of a noise, what came next, barely enough to make the horse put its ears back. But Selifan looked up when a scatter of pebbles fell on the road ahead. Following the direction of his eyes, so did Inna. For, unless he'd gone a very circuitous route through the trees above, the pebbles were coming from the wrong place for Yasha to be returning.

Inna saw three men emerging from behind the rocky outcrop ahead. They came shambling out together from a patch of shade. One had a rifle.

Inna was aware of Selifan swearing under his breath; her own breathing seemed to stop. The cart kept moving forward through the honeyed air towards the men. There was nowhere else for it to go.

Inna could see the red armband on the one with the apology for a coat – the officer, she supposed, if these Reddish irregulars had officers in the normal sense of the word. They looked more like bandits. They were also close enough, by now, for her to see the twitch in the cheek of the one standing next to him, with the gun, and the dragging leg of the fat one at the side.

The cart's wheels crunched in the scree. Selifan kept walking, though more slowly, as if he were hoping to go past them without a word. But his forehead was wet.

‘
Stoi
,' the man in the armband told him, not loudly. ‘Stop.' And the man with the twitch in his cheek raised the gun.

Selifan reined the horse in, and it dropped its head and put its nose peacefully to the nearest grass. Inna saw that Selifan's clammy cheeks were pale and his eyes cast down in an attitude of utter dejection.

‘Are you lot headed for that lot?' the man with the armband asked Selifan. He nodded his head towards the crowd of gentry in the distance.

‘Just driving along the coast,' Selifan answered cagily. ‘That's all I know.'

‘You.' The man turned to Inna. He beckoned.

How unreal it felt to be summoned forward, in the dappled light, with the sea sparkling at her side. She was dully aware of the irony of being stopped at the very last minute, when they'd got so close. But all she could really focus on, as she let go of Horace's hand and stepped towards the man, was the fact that all the buttons were missing off his torn coat, which was far too heavy anyway for this hot day.

‘Going for a boat ride?' the man asked her in turn. The mockery in his voice got the other two men snickering. ‘Your excellency?'

Inna lifted her head higher, hearing in her head a voice from long ago, Aunty Lyuba's, saying, ‘Walk tall … stare them down, like a princess.'

She came eyeball to eyeball with the man. She was on the point of telling him, with dignity, that her husband was sick and they were out searching for a doctor when suddenly her mind started working again and she realized that it would do her no good at all to be seen by these desperadoes as a woman with no male protector.

‘No,' she said, emphatically, and the act of speaking this one word out loud, and knowing it to be a lie, because she did, overwhelmingly, want to get on that ship with Horace, brought her back to life.

She could see the man didn't believe her.

‘Requisition!' he bawled, right in her ear, making her jump, and his two grinning mates immediately leaped forward and rushed round the side of the cart to start scrabbling for stuff from the open back.

There was too much at stake for Inna just to let them do whatever they wanted. Instead she rushed after them, feeling that if she once let fear root her to the ground and her eyes drop, as Selifan had, she'd never get back the will to resist. ‘Stop, stop. There's a sick man in there—'

And then there was another scattering of pebbles, and Yasha was jumping down from the bushes above the road, between the men and the cart. Her heart leaped. The men all stopped dead.

‘What's going on?' Yasha yelled. Then, without stopping, he grabbed Inna and pushed her down to sit on the back of the cart, so hard that she only just managed to avoid Horace's bandaged foot. She saw Yasha's mouth move quickly, and a bright, encouraging flash of eyes, though it was a moment or two before she disentangled the words his lips had formed and realized that he'd said, ‘I love you.' It was too late to respond. By the time she'd understood, he'd already picked up the violin case that was lying next to where she was now sitting, at the back of the cart, and turned towards the men.

‘Look here,' he was saying, striding straight past the sidekicks towards the man with the armband: the boss. ‘Look at this. Never mind what those poor bastards have got in their luggage, brothers, because it won't be anything much, any idiot can see that; they're in rags. But just you take a look at what I've got here. They won't have anything like
this
, I can tell you. And you won't, either.'

The three men could see by now that Yasha was unarmed. They could easily have rushed him. But his decisiveness, speed and flow of talk seemed to have disoriented them, and they were just staring at him in uneasy fascination, and following him as he stepped away from the cart. Perhaps they'd been too confused to even notice that he'd only picked up the violin box when he'd pushed her down? Perhaps they hadn't realized that the box had been in their cart all along?

Inna couldn't tell. All she could be sure of, as she hunched fearfully down in the cart, not knowing what to expect, was that Yasha sounded so confident that the bandits had let themselves be taken right off the road, into a patch of shade under a tree several paces behind the cart.

Out of the corner of her eye, she became aware of Selifan, also hunched up, sitting very quietly on his driver's bench up in front. He hadn't quite given up hope after all, she could see; he had pulled up the horse's head, and had the reins taut in his left hand and his whip ready in his right.

‘Now, let me just get these clasps open, and then you'll see,' Yasha was saying, retreating under the tree, step by step, until the bandits, craning forward like children eager for a fairy story before bed, found they had to stoop to avoid the low branches and look down to avoid the knotty roots. When the gun started bashing awkwardly against the tree, the man who'd been carrying it leaned it against a branch and took another step forward. ‘This is a priceless thing I've got here, brothers, I'm telling you, something that's going to set me and my lot up for life.' Yasha was sweet-talking the men on. ‘When you've had a good long look at it, I'll tell you how I came by it. Because that's a tale in itself.'

Then, grinning around at them, he went on, ‘Ah, to Hell with these stiff locks, I'll take my knife to them; here, hold this for a moment,' and, unexpectedly, Inna saw him shove the violin box towards the man who'd had the gun.

Quite what happened next Inna was never certain. But suddenly the shadowy space under the tree was all grunts and blows and movement and the splintering of wood, and Selifan was looking around and swishing the whip in his right hand, ready to use it as soon as the moment was right. Then someone rushed out from the fight under the tree with the rifle in his hands, yelling, and it was only when he got into the sunlight that Inna saw that it was Yasha, and that he was shouting something at her, or Selifan, and it was only much, much later that she made out the words he was shouting: ‘Go! Go! Get the Hell out! Get her away!'

And by then – and certainly by the time she screamed – the cart was creaking into life and rolling down the road away from him, with Selifan standing up at the front of the cart, yelling like a madman too and whipping on his panicking horse until it bolted in earnest.

Only Inna saw the shadow emerge out of the branches behind Yasha. As Yasha, heeding her warning, began to turn round, the fat man at his back tripped over a root, falling heavily against Yasha and knocking him to his knees. Only Inna saw a thinner, harder shadow, with a flash of red at the arm, run out too, and grab the gun. Only Inna saw this man whack the rifle butt down on Yasha's shoulder and knock him flat, then, twirling the heavy weapon round with the speed of adrenalin and rage, point it down towards the prone body below.

But everyone heard the shot.

As the man with the gun raised its barrel away from the bloodied ground, and began swaying round towards the road, as Inna began screaming in earnest, Selifan, still shouting too, and fighting the foaming, rearing horse, forced it on, out of the sunlight, round the bend.

They fell quiet as soon as they'd got into the shade, though with the cart still rolling and jerking dangerously underneath them. They fell quiet enough to start hearing Horace's stifled groans as his injured foot was banged from side to side. But they went just as fast: a blur of breath and snapping leather and terrifying jolts, with the cart feeling as though it would topple any moment or come apart altogether. For what felt a long time, Inna could hear running behind them. And then, finally, the footsteps stopped.

‘Nasty, that,' muttered Selifan, slowing to a walk again round the next kink in the road, wiping the sweat from his brow and fixing his eyes on the green and gold dance of the waves at their side. His voice was trembling.

The once formless crowd ahead was close enough by now to have separated into people, Inna saw: arms, legs, heads, parasols, valises, fob-watches, voices, arguments. A whole new life was beckoning her forward, a future that felt remote and dream-like now but which she knew she should, and would, come to value in time, because Yasha had given up his life so she could live it.