The Jewel of St Petersburg (64 page)

R
ASPUTIN WAS RIGHT. VALENTINA COULD ADMIT IT NOW and laugh. It was a coincidence, nothing more, she told herself. After a winter that was milder than usual and a spring of relative peace in the factories, she gave birth to a daughter. Not just any daughter. As she held the little bundle of snuffles and tiny clutching fingers, she knew that this was the most perfect being ever created. How could she not be? Look at her father.

Valentina could not stop smiling. Or crying. She touched each eyelid, each wrinkled ear. She gazed at the plump little lips and the tiny heart-shaped chin. She loved the way Jens didn’t wait for Dr. Fedorin to open the bedroom door to him but entered with eager strides that stopped dead when he saw her and the child. She could see that however much he had prepared himself, he had no idea it would be like this. Like an earthquake inside him. And then the grin on his face, so wide she thought it would crack his cheeks. With the gentlest of movements, he sat on the bed.

“Valentina, are you—”

“I’m sore and battered,” she interrupted, “not a bit like shedding kittens.” She held his daughter out to him, and his arms enfolded the small bundle in a possessive embrace.

For a long time he held her, his head bent over, staring down at his daughter, at her flame-colored curls still damp on her head. Only when the tiny mouth popped open in a silent yawn did he laugh and look up at Valentina. The love in his eyes was naked and it felt as if they’d stepped out of this world.

“I hadn’t realized,” he said tenderly, “how my life was not complete before. Not without this child in it.” His voice was shaking. “She’s beautiful.”

Valentina smiled. “Let’s call her Lydia.”

Thirty-nine

ST. PETERSBURG, RUSSIA FEBRUARY 1917

S
TOP THE CAR!”

Valentina shouted the words to Jens as he steered the motorcar through the crush of traffic in St. Isaac’s Square. Rain was sheeting down, bounding off umbrellas and off the car’s roof, splashing in the gutters. Whenever it rained, Valentina noticed—even after more than five years of marriage—the way Jens’s quick eyes checked each drain they passed to ensure that it was clearing the water flow efficiently.

“Stop the car,” she said again. “Please.”

“What is it?”

They were driving back across the city, returning from a visit with Lydia to Valentina’s mother, but Jens had insisted they leave early because he did not want his wife and child on the roads after dark. She didn’t blame him. In February the daylight hours were short, and the mood of the city had grown ugly. It was bitterly cold, and nearly three years of war against Germany had brought terrible defeats and humiliation for Russia, with wounded soldiers pouring back home, unfed and uncared for, begging in the gutters. Public fury at the tsar had erupted not just in strikes this time but in barricades in the streets. Shops were destroyed, bricks were hurled through windows, and firebombs reduced businesses to rubble.

“Death to Capitalists”
was the shout that echoed through the city.

Rationing was severe. There was a shortage of bread, no
khleb
to fill the empty bellies of the workers, no flour, no milk, no butter, no sugar. Queues formed outside bakeries and butcher shops from dawn to dusk in the bitter cold.

Valentina could feel the hatred in the air. Taste it like acid on her tongue. Eight million Russian soldiers killed, wounded or taken prisoner in the trenches, Tsarina Alexandra labeled a treacherous German whore by the masses, and Tsar Nicholas so out of touch that at this critical time he had left Petrograd to go to army headquarters.
Petrograd
. Even after three years, the new name for St. Petersburg still did not fit easily into Valentina’s mouth. It had been changed to avoid any contamination from the German-sounding word. Since the start of the war in 1914, anything and everything German was to be despised—including the tsar’s wife.

As soon as Jens stopped the car, Valentina jumped out and raced across the square, her coat plastered against her legs by the driving rain. She ran to the
placati,
the notice boards with newspapers and posters displayed for people to read. In this foul weather there was not the usual crowd huddled in front of them. That was why she’d seen it.

The flash of red. The scrap of scarf that Varenka had promised as a warning so long ago.

She had prepared herself for this moment—
not yet, don’t let it be yet.
Her hand reached out and she saw the rain spattering her glove, the wind snatching at torn posters that screamed POWER TO THE PEOPLE, and four crows hunched like black heathens on the cathedral dome behind. The strip of red material was nailed to the notice board, sodden and ragged, but it was there. Waiting for her to see it. She wrenched it off the board.

M
AMA, YOU’RE ALL WET.”

As Valentina slid back into the car, Lydia’s small hands patted at her cheeks, wiping away the raindrops.

“What was that about?” Jens asked.

“It’s Varenka’s.” She held up the red piece of cloth. It dripped onto her lap.

Jens slowly shook his head. “After five years of nothing from her.”

“Jens, it’s a warning. She promised it as a sign of when the revolution was close. Remember?”

“Yes, I remember.” He stared grimly ahead through the windshield at the blurred figures scurrying through the rain. “Dear God, now the bloodletting will begin.”

W
HAT ARE YOU DOING?” JENS ASKED.

Valentina looked up from her sewing and smiled. He was on his knees on the floor, building a railway station out of wooden blocks with Lydia. At four years old her young face would crease with concentration as she balanced one on top of another, careful to imitate her father’s technique. She was wearing a navy velvet dress with lace collar and cuffs, but she had pushed up the cuffs and tucked her skirt into her underwear to stop it from getting in her way as she worked. Valentina sighed indulgently. Her flame-haired daughter wasn’t turning out quite as she expected. Tawny eyes that missed nothing and a determined preference for playing with model trains with her father instead of the magnificent dollhouse Valentina had bought for her last birthday.

“Valentina”—Jens sat back on his haunches and studied her with a lift of one eyebrow—“the maid does our sewing. What are you doing?”

Her needle froze midstitch. She lowered her voice. “Getting ready.”

She slid a golden rouble from her pocket and pressed it into the section of hemline that she had opened up in the plain brown dress that was sprawled over her knees.

His eyes lifted from the stitching to her face. She saw his throat swallow. “My dearest Valentina, have we really come to that?”

“Yes. I believe we have.”

Lydia laughed, crowing with delight as she abandoned her bricks. “Can I play too, Mama?”

L
ENIN WAS COMING BACK. THE GLORIOUS VLADIMIR ILYICH Lenin was at last returning from his enforced exile in Switzerland. Arkin recognized the moment for what it was: the end of the Romanovs.

After five hundred years of tyranny, they were finished. Now that the people would have a figurehead to rally behind, nothing and nobody would stop them. Not the tsar. Not his troops. Not his pathetic attempts at silencing the outcry of the proletariat by dismissing the Duma. The air spat fury. The streets of Petrograd were on fire. Not just the shops and the capitalist businesses, but the ground beneath the feet of Russians. It was burning. Scorching away the old ways, ridding Russia of injustice and fear.

Arkin lit a cigarette, inhaled as he flexed and unflexed his damaged knee, and looked around his office. It was small, but it was all he required. Posters on the walls: WORKERS UNITE! and VICTORY TO THE PEOPLE! A huge image of a clenched fist and of a peasant stamping on the Romanovs’ double-headed eagle. A desk, a telephone, a cabinet, a typewriter. And stacks of rectangular white cards. Hundreds of them. He kept names on cards, names and details.

On top of the pile in front of him was one name: JENS FRIIS—DANISH ENGINEER. He picked it up between two fingers and struck a match on the leg of his desk. The flame flared. He held it under the card and watched it eat it up as the card curled and crackled and died. He dropped it into the metal bin at his feet.

Very soon. He allowed himself a smile as the flames consumed the final remnants of the card. Very soon. Jens Friis would not exist.

I
N THE STABLE JENS WAS BRUSHING DOWN HIS HORSE, HERO, with quick angry movements. He’d just heard that General Krymov had arrived back from the front in the war against Germany. He’d brought tales of thousands dead and a woefully underequipped Russian army. Soldiers were perishing of cold and starvation, and those still alive were marching in boots held together with string, feet rotting in the trenches. Insufficient ammunition. Toxic gases blinding their eyes. No food. No blankets. With no faith in their commanders, despair and misery were making men desert in the thousands.

“Who can blame them?” he muttered, and just then heard a carriage draw up outside his house.

“Your countess for you,” Liev Popkov called out with a grin on his face.

“She’s not
my
countess, ox-brain.”

The big Cossack liked to turn up in the stables sometimes and took acute pleasure whenever he could in goading Jens into losing his temper. The day Valentina moved out of the Ivanov household and became Jens’s wife, Popkov had departed as well. No one knew quite where he lived now, or how, but in the last few years he’d grown a dense black beard and seemed to relish his newfound freedom. When Valentina was busy in the evening practicing a new piano piece for one of her concerts, she liked to be alone to concentrate, so Jens would wander out to check on Hero and smoke a cigarette under the stars. More often than not Popkov would be out there with a pack of cards and a bottle of vodka.

Only once did they come to blows, and that was over Valentina. It happened late last year just before Christmas, the night that Rasputin was murdered and thrown into the river. Popkov had wanted to tell her that he’d heard that Viktor Arkin had turned up again in Petrograd. Jens had told him no. On no account must he tell her. They’d argued. In the end Jens had used the only language that seemed to register in Popkov’s stubborn brain and knocked him to the ground. Fists had flown.