The Jewel of St. Petersburg

“No, I am much better, spasibo.”

  “I am extremely pleased to hear it. I was disturbed when—”

  “I am recovered now.”

  “Good.”

  He was running out of words. Maybe his head could only hold so many at a time, filled as it was with sabers and rifles and military rules. His uniform was stiff and shiny, a bright scarlet and glittering with braid and brasswork, his boots polished till they shone like mirrors. His white gloves lay like a spare pair of hands on the seat beside him and he kept touching them, twitching them, as if he could provoke them into life. He was nervous of her. His mouth under its blond mustache was hidden and gave no clues.

  Small silences. Brittle breaks in the conversation. She could almost snap them with her fingers.

  “Captain, tell me this. If there is something you want, really want, how do you set about getting it for yourself?”

  “That’s easy. I just put my mind to it and go for it the way I would ride a saber charge. No distractions. Single-minded. Go for the kill.”

  “I can imagine that.”

  He twitched at a glove. “I didn’t mean ...”

  She smiled. “I understand what you mean.”

  He flushed and looked like a schoolboy instead of a twenty-three-year-old officer in Tsar Nicholas’s great Russian army.

  “And women. Should they do the same?”

  He slapped his thigh with a laugh. “No, if a woman really wants something, she should ask a man.”

  Valentina lowered her eyes and stared at her hands.

  “Is there something,” Chernov asked with an eager voice, “that you would like me to do for you? I’d be honored to.”

  “No.” She made herself look at him. “Several weeks ago I saw the factory strikers marching up Morskaya.”

  “Troublemakers, the lot of them. We’ve received new orders for a harsher response. We’ll ride them down next time they try it. Don’t let them upset you; they’re just ignorant peasants.”

  She waited for him to finish. “Among the marchers were quite a number of women.”

  “So I’ve been told.”

  “Women who were single-minded. No distractions. Going for the kill to get what they want.” She spoke mildly and eased herself back into her chair, interested in him at last.

  “They do what their men tell them to do. Don’t you concern yourself with them. They won’t be bothering you anymore. We cannot allow anarchy to threaten the stability of our nation. How much more are these strikers going to demand? They’ve been granted their own Duma, and that should be enough for them. But instead it turns out, as my father prophesied, that the more you give these people, the more they want.”

  “Thank you for explaining that to me, Captain. So when you ride them down next time they march, will you take your saber and rifle to the women as well?”

  His face suddenly grew somber. “I don’t think this is a suitable discussion for me to be having with you. A young lady should not have to listen to talk of such things.” His fingers stopped fiddling. “A young lady should have other pleasanter occupations on her mind. I came today to invite you to supper.”

  “Captain,” she said demurely. “I am honored.”

  HE’S NOT HERE.”

  “I thought he’d wait.”

  “Why would you think that?” Katya asked.

  “Because”—Valentina looked around the music room as though Jens might be hiding under a chair—“because I wanted to explain.”

  “You should have thought of that before.”

  “Did he say anything?”

  “He gave me this letter for you.”

  Valentina tore it open, read the few lines.

  “Good news?” Katya asked.

  “Yes. It’s from a doctor friend of his.”

  “So he said.”

  “I thought it would be from Jens himself.”

  She walked over to the chair he had used and sat on it. She closed her eyes.

  TODAY VALENTINA WAS DETERMINED TO PLEASE HER feather. She sat in front of his desk, which was drowning in a tidal wave of papers and files, and wondered how on earth he could possibly keep track of it all. To one side lay a large envelope with Tsar Nicholas’s gold crest embossed on it.

  “You asked to speak to me?”

  “Yes, Papa.”

  “Be quick, please, I’m busy.” He was always busy.

  She started cautiously. “Is there anything I can do to help, Papa? I know you have your assistants and secretaries at the ministry, but maybe here at home I can help with this.” She waved her hand toward the paperwork.

  He had been scanning a sheet of figures in his hand, but now his focus shifted to her. His fingers pulled absently at the collar of his frock coat, and she felt the familiar tug of affection when she noticed yet again that his nails were like Katya’s, round and pale.

  “Spasibo. Thank you for the thought, but no. So what is it you want to discuss?”

  “I thought you might like to know that Captain Chernov has invited me to supper.”

  His dark eyes widened with pleasure, and he gave her a broad smile. “Otlichno! Excellent!” He let the paper float down to the desk and pressed his hands together in a gesture of prayer. “Thank God,” he muttered, then suddenly grew tense and leaned forward. “You accepted, I hope?”

  “I did.”

  “Well done. He is an important young man and his father is a powerful influence at court, so don’t make a mess of this, Valentina. I need you to handle it carefully.”

  She smiled sweetly and shook her head to set her hair dancing. Use your weapons, Davidov had told her. Her reward was to see the crease between her father’s eyes relax, and she knew she had made him happy, if only for a brief moment.

  “I won’t disturb you any longer, Papa.” She rose to her feet and started to walk to the door, but halfway there she stopped and looked over her shoulder as though she had just recalled something. “One other thing, Papa.”

  He had picked up his pen, his large head already bent over another sheet of paper. “What is it?”

  “I am applying for nurse training at St. Isabella’s Hospital.”

  The words were out.

  “No!” His fist slammed down on the desk so that papers slid from their piles and his pen clattered to the floor. “You will do no such thing.”

  “Papa, listen to me. Please. Pozhalusta. I want to do this because—”

  “Valentina, I’ve already told you, I need you to forget this foolish idea.” There were beads of sweat on his brow.

  “I thought,” she said mildly, “that we might come to an arrangement.”

  “What kind of arrangement?”

  Tread carefully.

  “I need your signature on a form because I am under twenty. Please, Papa, sign it for me. In exchange I will dance with your charming and important Captain Chernov. I will smile and laugh for him and flutter my eyelashes along with my fan like an empty-headed ninny. I will do exactly what you want.” In the pause that followed she presented her father with a soft compliant smile. “If you sign.”

  “I will do no such thing.”

  “Papa, imagine it. By day I will be quiet and unseen, an unknown nurse in an unknown hospital. But by night I will become the darling of Petersburg society for you, with all the champagne and caviar and dancing you could desire.” She swayed her hips as though swept up in a waltz. “Your name, Minister General Nicholai Ivanov, will be spoken at court, your position envied. That’s what you want, isn’t it? That’s what I want for you, too.” She smiled at him. “It would suit us both. Agreed, Papa?”

  He extracted a large white handkerchief from his pocket and dabbed at his face. There was a pause. “Agreed.”

  “Thank you, Papa.”

  She left before he could change his mind. As soon as she reached her bedroom, she removed the key from her pocket and unlocked the drawer. Lifting out the sheet of ivory paper, she read it through carefully before placing a line through the last point: Number 11
. The arrangement with Papa was made.

  She knew her father would not like her for it, any more than she liked herself for it, but it was the only way she would be allowed to set foot in a hospital. Slowly she unfastened the pearl buttons on her sleeve, peeling back the material to look at her pale skin and to imagine Jens’s fingers on it.

  Please, Jens, please understand that I have to see Chernov.

  She tried a smile for him, but it faltered on her lips. I want this job as a nurse. I need it. Please, don’t take it from me, Jens.

  DID YOU EVER POLISH SHOES LIKE THAT?”

  Arkin was surprised by the question. He was driving Elizaveta Ivanova alongside St. Isaac’s Cathedral, and its glorious golden dome immediately brought to mind Father Morozov. Such a bright well-read man, yet condemned to live in a damp shack and to wear homemade boots with holes in them.

  “Did you, Arkin?” Elizaveta Ivanova asked again.

  “No, madam.” They had just passed a row of four shoeshine boys in the square, busy with their brushes and impudent smiles, hungry for kopecks. “I was brought up on a farm.”

  Behind him he heard a small sigh of approval, as though life on a farm were something to be desired.

  “What made you leave?” she asked.

  “The lure of the big city.”

  “Petersburg is very beautiful, I admit. Did it live up to your expectations?”

  “Yes,” he lied. But her ears were sharp and she laughed.

  “I hope you’re happy here,” she said after a moment’s thought. “And happy working for my husband.”

  “Of course. I couldn’t ask for better.”

  “I hope that’s true, Arkin, and that you’re not just saying it to please me.”

  “It is true.”

  He half-turned his head, one eye still on the road, and caught a glimpse of her in her black fur coat, sleek as a panther’s pelt. She was smiling. Oddly, it pleased him to see it.

  “I have a favor to ask of you.”

  The way she said it, he knew immediately it had nothing to do with chauffeuring.

  “Madam, I am always at your service.”

  “Stop the car a moment.”

  He pulled into the curb and it happened to be opposite a fish stall so that the smell of dead fish on the slabs drifted into the car. He swiveled around in his seat and noticed the tiny lace handkerchief in her hand. She dabbed at her nose.

  “How can I help you, madam?”

  Her eyes considered him for a moment, and he saw uncertainty in them. She was wondering how far could she trust him.

  “It is ... a delicate matter,” she said, and her cheeks colored. She glanced away, and the black feathers on her hat bobbed as she moved. “I don’t know who else to ask.”

  “I am discreet,” he said quietly.

  He thought of the times he had collected any of Minister Ivanov’s young mistresses in the car or even driven his employer to his favorite brothel down by the Golden Apple nightclub where the French gypsy girl, Mimi, awaited the minister’s favors. Oh yes, Arkin had learned to keep his mouth shut.

  “I will help you if I can,” he offered.

  Her gaze studied his gloved hand where it lay on the back of the seat as if it held an answer for her. She swallowed awkwardly. “I want you to find out whether my elder daughter is seeing . . . someone.”

  Arkin almost laughed. She wanted to turn him into an Okhrana spy. It was ironic.

  “Who is this person?” he asked, genuinely interested.

  “The Danish engineer she was trapped with in the tunnel. His name is Jens Friis.”

  So that was it. He suddenly felt sorry for this proud woman, reduced to such snooping on her daughter.

  “I’ll find out what I can,” he agreed, and immediately her eyes lifted from his hand to his face.

  “We understand each other?” she asked.

  “Perfectly.”

  She smiled at him, but he reminded himself who she was and what she stood for. He didn’t want to like her.

  “Shall I drive on now, madam?” he asked, suddenly formal.

  “Yes.” But as he turned to the snow-covered road ahead once more, she added in a low voice, “I’m grateful, Arkin. For this . . . and for the other day when I was . . .”

  “You are welcome, madam,” he interrupted.

  He preferred not to think about it. It did not help the cause to feel sorrow for your class enemy. It was dangerous. Yet he couldn’t help it.

  THE MORNING WAS BRIGHT AS POLISHED GLASS. NO HINT of fog today, just an endless arc of sky and the smell of the sea in the air. It made Arkin restless. He was waiting beside the car outside the front steps for Valentina to emerge, with the Turicum gleaming as gaudy as a kingfisher in the sunshine.

  “Good morning, Arkin.”

  “Dobroye utro, Miss Valentina, good morning,” he said as she crossed the gravel. She looked thin and pale. She was dressed in a plain coat and headscarf, yet there was a nervous energy in her step as though she were in a hurry.

  “Miss Valentina, I’m glad to see you have recovered and are looking so well.”

  The comment took her by surprise. “Thank you, Arkin.”

  “I hope Miss Katya passed on my good wishes to you when you were ill.”

  “Yes, thank you.”

  Still he stood there, forgetting about the car. She moved to climb the step into its interior, but he raised a hand that, even without touching her, made her stop.

  “What is it, Arkin?”

  “The men who caused the explosion in the tunnel would not have wanted to harm you in any way. Those people are fixed on a goal. You were in their path, that’s all.” He wanted her to know.

  “So tell me, Arkin, what is their goal?”

  He dropped his voice. “Their aim is to build a new and fairer society. They want to bring down the tsar. Not to endanger young women.”

  “Is that what you believe in too, Arkin? In bringing down our tsar?”

  “No, Miss Valentina.”

  “Good. If you believed in that, you would be arrested.”

  She stepped past him into the car and sat on the sleek blue leather, staring straight ahead. He started the engine with the crank handle and jumped up in front of her. Neither of them spoke.

  VALENTINA WAS THANKFUL TO CLIMB OUT OF THE CAR half a mile from the hospital and send it back home for her mother’s use. She enjoyed the short walk and tried to fix her mind on what she was to say, rather than on all that had been said last time. She entered St. Isabella’s Hospital and went through the same procedure as before, the name checking at the window hatch and following the green trail of worn linoleum down the corridor to the door marked GORDANSKAYA. She knocked.

  “Vkhodite. Come in.”

  Whatever she had been expecting, it was not what she found. The large figure of Medsestra Gordanskaya seemed to have ballooned further inside her white uniform since their last meeting, and she was leaning against a row of filing cabinets with a pair of long-handled tweezers clenched between her fingers. Her attention shifted to Valentina for no more than a second.

  “Ah, yes, the little aristocrat who thinks she has the makings of a nurse.” She grinned into the mirror propped up on the cabinet, but it had nothing to do with humor. Valentina realized she was inspecting a side tooth that was black and broken.

  “Good morning, Medsestra Gordanskaya.”

  “Know anything about teeth?”

  “No, Medsestra.”

  “Not much use to me then, are you?”

  “I’m good with tweezers.”

  “Here.” The woman thrust the instrument at Valentina.

  Valentina took it and wondered whether the medsestra initiated all her would-be nurses with this exercise. But then she wouldn’t have a tooth left in her head.

  “Friends in high places, I gather,” Gordanskaya said, but without rancor, as though it were a fact of life. “But of course you would have. Look at you.” She laughed a deep laugh that wobbled her cheeks. “You ca
n’t hide behind a headscarf and a servant’s mended gloves. I know what you are.”

  “I’m not hiding.”

  “Aren’t you?”

  “I want to be a nurse. To do something more with my life than arrange flowers and drink tea. I promise you I know how to work hard, and I am already familiar with Dupierre’s book on human anatomy. I’ve nursed my younger sister and practiced bandaging.”

  “You talk too much. You educated ones always do. Learn to keep quiet.”

  Valentina nodded. “Yes, Medsestra.”

  “If you were applying to be a soldier, I’d call you cannon fodder, but instead I call you—and all the other chits like you—bedpan fodder. That’s what you’ll be dealing with most of the time, and that’s what will finish you off in the end. Bedpan fodder, the lot of you. Dear Mother of Christ, why don’t they send me some young women able to work? Not just these whey-faced milksops.”

  Valentina didn’t make a sound.

  Gordanskaya snatched up one of Valentina’s hands, turned it over to inspect the palm, and prodded its pale pads with her thumb. Valentina felt like a farm animal in the marketplace.

  “Skin as white as a piglet’s tits.” The medsestra shook her head. “But there’s muscle in there. What is it you do with them?”

  “I play the piano.”

  Gordanskaya burst out laughing. “Dear God, give me strength.” Abruptly she opened her mouth wide and pointed to a black tooth that was hanging half loose. “Pull it.”

  One quick jerk with the tweezers and the black stump slid out like a nail from rotten wood. A tail of blood followed it and a whiff of pus. A flicker of relief passed over the nurse’s broad face, and she pointed to the chair in front of her desk. Valentina sat down and she placed the tweezers, still clutching the tooth, within Gordanskaya’s reach.

  “You’ve been recommended to me for training by Dr. Fedorin,” Gordanskaya said briskly. “I will need your parents’ consent as you are under twenty. Now read this form and get them to sign it,” she ordered before adding with a sly lopsided smile, “I take it you can read and write?”

  “Medsestra Gordanskaya,” Valentina said, “I can do whatever it takes.”