The Jewel of St Petersburg

Twenty-nine

JENS, DON’T MOVE.”

Valentina was on her knees in the snow, her hand pressed flat on his chest to stop the bleeding. Let him be alive. Let him be alive. She dragged off her scarf and rammed it against the front of his shirt under his coat. A white shirt. Scarlet now. Her teeth clenched, holding on to him in her head, not letting him go.

“Jens.” His name squeezed out between her lips. “Jens, stay with me.” She leaned close and slid a hand under his head, cradling it, lifting it out of the cold grip of the snow. His cap had fallen off and his red hair still possessed a fierce life of its own. “Jens. Please, Jens, don’t die.” Her breath curled like a white shroud onto his lips, into his nostrils, and she willed him to live.

He didn’t move. She pressed harder on his chest, feeling for his heartbeat. “Jens, damn you, don’t you dare leave me.” Her eyes didn’t shift from his face as she watched the thick fringe of his eyelashes for the faintest flicker of movement. She shouted out in a loud voice, “Doktor! Dr. Fedorin! Come quickly.”

Behind her she heard noise and dimly she was aware of raised voices, but they didn’t even come close to getting inside her head. She could feel Jens in there, cold in her mind, heavy and listless, but somewhere, very faint, there was the whisper of his breath. She bent lower and kissed each closed eyelid.

“Jens, I hear you.” She put her own warm lips on his cold ones. “I love you. You’ll take my life with you if you die. Come back to me, Jens.”

She felt rather than saw something change, a sudden sensation of warmth in the center of her palm where the back of his head lay, a fleeting pulse of life. Then it was gone. “Jens Friis,” she said sternly, “open your eyes at once.”

Nothing.

“For me. Do it, Jens.”

A narrow slit. A flash of green as one eyelid lifted, no more than a hair’s breadth, but it was enough.

“Dr. Fedorin,” she yelled again. She rested her forehead on Jens’s cheek. “Thank you,” she whispered. “Spasibo.”

Under her scarf she felt a light movement as his ribs began to lift and she murmured to him, soft private words that told him how much his life meant to her and what his death would do to her.

“Valentina! What the hell are you doing here?” It was Dr. Fedorin, his mustache coated with ice, his worried gaze already scanning his friend’s body in the snow.

“He’s alive,” she said quickly. “But bleeding badly from his chest.”

He knelt the other side of Jens, his leather bag open, and started to remove dressings. In that moment Valentina looked up for the first time, but what she saw barely imprinted itself on her thoughts. The soles of Captain Chernov’s boots iced with compacted snow, the broad backs of Hussars in a cluster around his body. Scarlet everywhere. Scarlet and crimson. Crimson and black. The uniform hiding the blood. Was that why they wore such colors?

The doctor removed her hand from the wound, and suddenly with a jolt of anger she recalled Arkin. She twisted around to look over her shoulder. He was standing on the fringe of the forest observing her, legs planted wide apart, one hand on his hip, the other on the rifle, a look of satisfaction on his face. If she had a gun now, the one she had written down on her list, she would shoot him between those cold gray eyes. Slowly she rose to her feet, leaving Jens in Dr. Fedorin’s care, and started toward the chauffeur. In her hand she clutched a scalpel snatched from the doctor’s bag.

“Arkin!” she called across the expanse of snow that divided them. Her attention was fixed on the small patch of skin between Arkin’s jaw and the frayed collar of his coat. “Arkin, if Captain Chernov dies”-the snow was deeper here, her feet were struggling-“the army will scour the backstreets of Petersburg and tear you limb from limb when they find you.”

He was higher than she was, looking down on her from the low ridge, and clearly perceived her as no threat. The rifles of his companions were trained on the Hussars, not on her, and he made no attempt to back off as she approached. She saw his pride, like treacle on his lips, thick and dark and sweet. Her fingers tightened around the metal in her hand, hidden in the folds of her coat.

“Why did you shoot them?” she hissed. “Why both?”

“They are enemies of the people.”

She took two more paces. “You’re wrong. Jens Friis is helping you and your workers by bringing water to them.”

His eyes suddenly narrowed, sensing danger as her hand started its swing. He ducked just as a shot rang out, but he was knocked back on his heels, blood trickling from a straight scarlet line on his forehead that tracked up into his hairline where a bullet had scored his skin. Valentina didn’t hesitate. In that half-second of shock in which he realized what had happened, she swept her hand to his side. The short blade sank through cloth and into flesh. He uttered a groan but staggered back from her, yanked out her scalpel, and hurled it at her feet.

“You don’t know what you’re doing,” he growled through clenched teeth, and before she could even begin to question what he meant, he was gone. Into the trees, lost in the gloom. His men vanished with him.

She swung around and looked across to the far side of the clearing. The burly figure of Liev Popkov was standing in the snow with her father’s rifle at his shoulder, grinning at her.

THEY TOOK REFUGE IN THE DOCTOR’S HOUSE. THE BULLET looked too small an object to inflict such damage. It sat in the jaws of the forceps, slimy with blood, before it rattled into the enamel dish beneath it.

“Well done, Nurse Ivanova. A good job.”

Dr. Fedorin dipped his hands in a bowl of hot water as Valentina flushed the wound with an antiseptic solution of boric acid and dusted it with iodine powder. She watched carefully as he worked. As the needle threaded through the ragged edges of Jens’s flesh, she assisted calmly and methodically, the way she had been taught at the hospital. Swabbing blood, passing instruments, keeping a close watch on Jens’s thready pulse, ensuring that his tongue didn’t roll back to suffocate him. He was only lightly sedated and released small pained growls at intervals, like a bitch giving birth. At one point when she raised one of his eyelids to check his pupil dilation, he looked straight back at her and, despite having a bullet in his chest with a pair of forceps rooting around under his smashed ribs, lifted the corners of his lips in a faint smile.

“I’ll sit with him,” she said, and took the chair by the bed when the doctor had finished stitching and the wound was dressed.

What she meant was Leave us. Please. I need to be alone with him.

Dr. Fedorin opened his mouth to speak, looked at her face, and shut it again. He rested a scrubbed hand on her shoulder for only a brief moment, tossed a towel over his arm, and walked out of the room with his tray of medical instruments in his hands. He would sterilize them in his kitchen. As soon as the door closed, Valentina rested her head on the pillow next to the shock of red hair. She touched it gently. Like a horse’s mane, thick and wiry. His chest was naked except for the heavy bandage, and she studied the fineness of his skin and the gingery hairs that curled up toward his collarbones, the sunburst of freckles at his throat.

“Jens,” she murmured into his ear, “if you ever try to fight a duel again, I swear I will shoot you myself.”

The corner of his mouth moved. That smile again. She draped an arm carefully across his waist and curled herself around him on the bed, molding her body to the shape of his bones. She listened to his breathing, to the catches in the back of his throat when the pain was bad, to the ticking of the French marble clock on the mantelpiece, to the sounds of the city outside launching itself into the stride of its nightlife. She held him close. Only when she was certain that his pulse had settled into a steady though shallow rhythm did she start to hum to him, her breath brushing his cheek. Chopin’s Nocturne in E Flat.

MAMA, MAY I SPEAK WITH YOU?”

It was the middle of the night but her mother was downstairs in the blue salon, dimly lit by only a small reading lamp at her shoulder. She was wearing an exquisite Oriental kimono that Valentina had never seen before and was playing cards, a game of solitaire on a card table by the fire. Her hair lay loose on her shoulders, and when she looked up at her daughter her eyes were alert and observant.

“What hour is this for you to return home?”

The words were a milder rebuke than Valentina had expected. “I was nursing someone.”

She slid off her coat and stood in front of the fire. She couldn’t imagine ever being warm again. Dried blood marked the front of her dress where she had held Jens in the snow, and they both looked at the stains in silence.

“The engineer’s blood?” Elizaveta asked quietly.

“You know?”

“Yes.” She didn’t look up. “I know about the duel.”

Valentina didn’t ask how. “Mama, Captain Chernov survived the attack, though he is gravely ill. But I want you to understand that I am finished with him.”

The words were out, like spitting stones from her mouth. “I refuse to keep up the charade of an engagement to that man for even one more second of my life.” The image of Jens with a hole in his chest made her hand clench around the blood on her dress. “Chernov was the cause of this.”

Elizaveta turned back to her cards. She gathered them up and shuffled them, but her hands were not as steady as she would wish. “Your father will be ill-pleased when he hears.”

“I want to tell him myself.”

“Not now.”

“Is he at home? In bed?”

Elizaveta gave a sad smile. “No, he is not.”

Valentina crouched in front of the fire, stretching her hands to its flames, and for once her mother did not chide her. “I want you both to understand, Mama, that I can’t do it anymore. I don’t mean to hurt you or Papa, really I don’t. But this is…” She wanted to say, This is killing me. Killing Jens, but instead she changed it to, “This is wrong. There must be some other way to sort out Papa’s finances.”

“I understand.” Elizaveta proceeded to lay out the cards once more.

For a while nothing more was said, and the fire sent shadows darting up the walls as they both lived with their thoughts. After a while Valentina removed a velvet case from her coat pocket and placed it on the floor as far away from herself as she could reach.

“I will give Papa this,” she said.

Elizaveta flicked a glance at the blue box containing the diamond necklace, but Valentina did not choose to open it.

“It’s from Chernov. The banks will advance credit to Papa on the strength of it.”

Her mother sighed softly. “Thank you, Valentina. I am grateful.”

“You would like it, Mama. It’s very beautiful.”

“Is that what you think of me? That I am so easily tempted by beautiful objects?” Her eyes remained on the cards.

“Why did you marry him, Mama? Why Papa?”

One of her mother’s hands gave a little jump. She dealt the cards in a faster rhythm, but she spoke slowly. “When I was a little older than you, I loved a man whom my parents deemed unsuitable. They paid him money to leave Petersburg.”

“They bought him off?”

“Yes. He went without saying good-bye. After that I didn’t much care whom I married. They chose your father. It was a good match.”

Valentina remained on the floor by the fire, staring intently at her mother until Elizaveta finally lifted her eyes from the cards and met her gaze.

“I’m so sorry, Mama,” Valentina murmured. “Sorry for everything.”

Her mother shrugged and concentrated on the cards. Valentina rose to her feet, moved over to a mahogany cabinet that contained an array of bottles on its shelves, and poured out two vodkas. She walked back, placed one glass on her mother’s card table, and sat on the floor in front of the fire with her own. She gazed into the shifting flames and sipped her drink.

“Why tell me now, Mama?”

“I have my reasons.”

“What reasons?”

“Firstly because I want you to know that men are rarely what you think they are. Don’t ever forget that. Secondly”-she paused and played three cards in quick succession as if trying to bridge the gap between her thoughts and her tongue-“because tonight you have gone.”

“Gone?”

“You have gone from us. I can see it in your eyes, in the way your feet touch the floor as if they know exactly where they are heading. I hear it in your voice. Tonight you have grown up and gone.”

“I’m still here, Mama.”

Her mother nodded. She drank her vodka in one quick movement and asked, “I assume he’s alive, your engineer?”

“Yes.” Valentina said it quickly, the single word tumbling off her tongue. For even the possibility that he might not be alive was too dangerous a thought to allow. Like her mother, she drank down the clear liquid, emptying her glass. She had dosed Jens on morphine, enough to knock out an ox, but in Dr. Fedorin’s guest room his hand had clamped around her wrist, unwilling to let her go even as he slept. She had kissed his fingers. Trust me, Jens. And I will trust you. Because Mama is wrong. You are the man I think you are; you have proved it to me.

“You’re smiling,” Elizaveta commented.

Was she? She hadn’t realized.

“You’re smiling because you are thinking of him.”

“Don’t you still smile when you think of the man you love?”

Her mother’s blue eyes widened. “Yes, I do.” She opened her mouth to say more but closed it abruptly and swept all of the cards into her hand, squeezing them tight. Tears slid down her cheeks.

“Mama.” Valentina hurried to her mother’s side.

“Valentina,” Elizaveta whispered, “I am so jealous of you.”

Valentina wrapped her arms around her mother’s stiff figure and rocked her gently by the light of the flames.

VALENTINA STOOD AT HER BEDROOM WINDOW, IMPATIENT for morning to arrive. The moment that lights started to appear and the servants roused themselves to the new day’s activity, she wrapped herself in her coat and slipped out into the dark. The air bit into her lungs. The stable was swarming with grooms raking straw and rubbing down the horses, whistling snatches of tunes and breaking the ice on water buckets. The air smelled of oats and the sweet scent of hay, and she noticed that the sturdy little mare she had driven yesterday was safely back in her stall. One of the grooms rolled his eyes at her when she headed straight for the narrow stairs that led up to the sleeping cubicles, but she ignored him.

“Liev,” she called, jolting open his door, “you are a rotten shot.”

Popkov was lying flat on his back on the floor, clothed in the same filthy tunic as yesterday, and didn’t make any effort to stand. His eyes were dull and filmy but regarded her with interest.

“The bastard ducked,” he growled.

“You creased Arkin’s skull, that’s all.”

“It was meant for his brain.”

“What was he up to?”

“Revenge, most probably.”

“Revenge can work both ways.”

The Cossack bared his teeth and it was impossible to tell whether it was a grin or a snarl. Valentina sat down on his narrow cot and studied his muscular frame. “The rifle?” she asked. “Back in the study?”

“Of course.”

“Spasibo.”

“Your engineer alive?”

She nodded. “Do you need morphine?”

“Nyet.”

She drew from under her coat the vodka bottle from the blue salon. Instantly his eyes lost their dull haze and gleamed black as sin. She handed it over.

“Try to make it last, will you? At least until after breakfast,” she urged.

He laughed, a booming sound that shook the flimsy walls, and started to open the bottle.

VALENTINA REALIZED IMMEDIATELY THAT CAPTAIN STEPAN Chernov was drugged up to his eyeballs. His pupils were tiny pinpricks at the center of misty irises and his mouth had lost its firm line. It was loose and pliant as though it belonged to someone else. Clearly his doctor believed in pain control for his patients as much as she did.

She sat quietly by his bedside and listened to his mother cry. Countess Chernova, a delicate woman wearing too many ropes of pearls, was seated in a gilt chair on the opposite side of the bed, sobbing into a tiny lace handkerchief that struck Valentina as inadequate for the job. She could find no sympathy in her heart for the mother of the man who had sworn to kill Jens. She had come here for the sake of her own parents, and it was the last time she would play the role of fiancée. She refused to touch him. His right hand lay on the quilt, but she would rather chop it off than pick it up. This was the offending hand that had gripped the dueling pistol with such relish. His parents had announced their intention of whisking him away as soon as he was strong enough to travel to their dacha on the Black Sea, where the weather was warmer and the healing would be faster.

“Valentina,” Stepan Chernov whispered, “come with me.”

He tried to smile but it was beyond the strength of his drugged muscles. He had lost a large amount of blood from a stomach wound and had hung all night on the edge of survival, but this morning he had rallied and was making improvement. That was what his father, Count Chernov, had told her. Rallied. Improvement. She had shut her ears.

“I can’t come with you.” She spoke clearly, so that there would be no mistake in his foggy brain. “My sister is ill, so I can’t leave Petersburg.” She offered one crumb of comfort to the ghost-white face on the pillows. “When you return, we will talk again,” she said, and rose to her feet. “I might even play the piano for you.” She couldn’t quite hide the faint trace of a smile.