The Jewel of St Petersburg

Thirty-six

VALENTINA WALKED BEHIND JENS AS HE CARRIED KATYA into the house and up the stairs. Dimly she was aware of her mother crying, of Nurse Sonya fretting, of servants rushing to open doors. Words rebounded off the walls and off her skin. Sounds entered her ears but didn’t reach her brain. All she saw was the long line of his back. His cape was wrapped around Katya, so that his jacket was what she saw and the way the blades of his shoulders shifted under the material. She noticed how his white collar nudged at his hairline, the width of his strong neck, the length of his limbs, the loose-jointed way of moving as he strode up the stairs.

She needed to draw all these things inside her again. As if she had lost them. Her eyes devoured them all. As soon as Katya was in her bed with people crowding around it, Valentina led Jens downstairs to the music room. He closed the door and took her in his arms. Held her fast against him. Neither spoke.

She rubbed her cheek against his cheek, her hair against his throat, even her legs twined around his legs like a cat, imprinting her scent on him and taking his scent on her. They stood together in the room, her body slowly molding to the shape of his bones once more, ousting the dents and hollows where someone else’s weight had left its mark on her. When he kissed her mouth hard and she tasted him once more, she started to feel clean.

SHE WATCHED FROM ABOVE AS DR. BELOI SHOOK HANDS with her father in the marble-floored hall below, took his top hat, and left. He must have made a joke of some sort because they both chuckled. A good sign. She hurried down the stairs.

“What did he say, Papa?”

Her father looked older. These few days seemed to have sucked the last strands of his youth from him, so that his shoulders slumped, but there was something softer in the lines around his mouth when he spoke to her.

“Katya’s going to be all right. Dr. Beloi has given her something to make her sleep. A few days’ bed rest and extra medication should bring her back to her usual self, that’s what he says.”

He smiled, surprising her. She smiled back. A tentative connection once more.

“I’m so relieved,” she said, and started up the stairs again, but she stopped halfway and turned. “Papa, thank you.”

“For what?”

“For trying to raise the money for our release. It must have been…” She sought for a word. Humiliating? Degrading? Belittling? In the end she just said, “It must have been difficult.”

He nodded but brusquely, unwilling to discuss it. He looked up at her and fingered his side whiskers in a self-conscious gesture. “And you? I hope you are all right after your ordeal?”

“Yes, Papa. I’m all right.”

“Nothing bad happened, except for Katya falling out of the cart?”

“No, nothing bad happened.”

“Good. You did well to find her.”

He walked back into his study and shut the door. It made no difference to her that he was the one who had sent Katya into his study at Tesovo, though he’d never voiced it. She knew that if she had taken Katya with her for that dawn ride to the forest, her sister would not have been at her father’s beck and call. They’d have eaten breakfast and rushed straight down to the creek to swim. He may be as guilty as she was, but it altered nothing.

THE FEVER STARTED THAT NIGHT, THE SICKNESS BY THE next evening. Katya’s skin burned at first with a fierce dry heat that gave her cheeks a flush and made her eyes bright. But when the vomiting began, her eyes dulled to the color of the Neva Bay, and the hand that held a handkerchief to her mouth shook.

It was cholera. Dr. Beloi announced it and ordered Elizaveta Ivanova to take precautions. The house was quarantined, closed to all visitors, and Katya was moved to a room away from the family bedrooms. The servants were ordered to avoid that end of the house. Everything was scrubbed again and again, as Nurse Sonya ordered her assault on the illness with all the vigor of a military campaign. It was the stagnant water in the marshland channels, the doctor said, the infection lying in wait in the foul water like a spider in its web. She had swallowed it. And now it was swallowing her.

WEAR THIS MASK, VALENTINA.” “Will it help?”

Jens cupped his hand over her nose and mouth as though he could guard them. “It’s a surgical mask. Dr. Fedorin gave it. It is essential that you don’t breathe her air.”

She nodded, her eyes huge above his fingers, and he wanted to pluck her out of that house of sickness. They were by the stables, the sound of hooves on cobbles echoing around them.

“You promise me? You will wear it always?”

She nodded.

“Don’t kiss her,” he said.

Her eyes flinched, but she nodded and he released his hold over her face. She touched a finger to his cheek.

“I will protect our child,” she promised.

“Protect yourself.”

He leaned forward to kiss her, but she turned her head away. “Don’t kiss me. Don’t risk yourself.”

He pulled her to him and pressed his lips to hers.

VALENTINA WAITED OUTSIDE ST. ISABELLA’S HOSPITAL, impatient as she watched the nurses descend the wide steps at a leisurely pace at the end of their day shift. There was a smell in the air of something burning, but she took no notice. It happened regularly now. A shop burned down, a warehouse torched, to teach bosses not to shut down unions or enforce punishing work methods.

“Darya!” she called at the sight of the figure with the spiky black hair.

“Valentina! What are you doing here? Can’t keep away even though-”

“Darya, listen. You know the empress’s monk who sometimes comes to the hospital wards.”

“Grigori Rasputin?”

“Yes. How do I contact him?”

Darya rolled her eyes and laughed. “Durochka! You idiot! Stay away from that mad-”

“How? How do I find him?”

“They say he has an apartment on Gorokhovaya near the Fontanka River and that the highest ranks of society flock to him there, when he’s not twisting his filthy mind around the Empress’s…” But she didn’t finish. Valentina had gone.

THE ATMOSPHERE WAS CLAUSTROPHOBIC. THE BIG UNTIDY man who swaggered into the room was wearing an expensive black satin tunic and high black boots, but Valentina recognized him at once.

“I remember you,” he declared. “The little nurse who slapped my face.”

Father Grigori Rasputin pointed his finger at her, his strange blue eyes fixed on Valentina as he strode toward her. She leapt to her feet. She intended to seize him before he could be distracted by anyone else. The room was large but stifling, as dust floated in bars of sunlight that bleached the carpet and softened the sweets and biscuits spread out on the oak table. Damask chairs lined the walls, jammed together to accommodate as many petitioners as possible, their faces tense and suspicious of each other, stealing sideways glances. They had stood in line hour after hour on the stairs outside the apartment and now waited nervously for their turn.

Except it seemed to Valentina that there was no certainty, no order in which they were invited to rise and enter the inner study, no way of knowing if their turn was next or in two hours’ time. Or not at all.

“Father Grigori, I need to speak to you.”

He gazed greedily around his room, examining the upturned faces, and smiled at a woman in a low-cut dress and ruby earrings that blazed in the sunlight. “All need to speak to me,” he murmured, “because I am the path to the Holy Khristos.”

“This is urgent.”

“Come with me, my child of Christ.”

He wrapped an arm around her waist and led her away to the coveted door of the inner sanctum. She heard the desperate sighs behind her. His study was long and thin with a striking icon of the Virgin of Kazan in one corner lit by a red lamp. An old desk, a battered leather sofa, not much else in the room except a large Bible open on a low table in the center. The place was musty, like Rasputin himself, unwashed and in some way uncivilized, though she couldn’t quite work out why.

Rasputin sank to his knees immediately in front of the gilded image of the Virgin and bowed his head. His black hair was long and lank, his lips large and red. Valentina remembered those lips, remembered the sour taste of them on her own. She shivered, impatient to be away from this place, but had no idea whether he would be minutes or hours on his knees.

“Father Grigori, my sister is dying.”

He responded in a way she didn’t expect. He laughed and lumbered to his feet. “My child, we are all dying.”

“Father, I have not come for such words. I heard that you can heal people. Please… heal my-”

“Child,” he said in a slow sonorous voice, “you are in far too much of a hurry. You are trying to rush through life, but what you must take time to consider are your sins.”

The way his strange eyes stared at her. She felt her thoughts loosen a notch. Felt her cheeks flush red.

“Sin,” he said, his voice penetrating her mind, “is our path to Almighty God. We sin and we ask forgiveness, that is how we enter into his arms.” He moved closer, and it was a wrench to make herself look away.

“I’m not here to talk of sin. Healing is what I need.”

“We all need to be healed.” He laid a heavy hand on her shoulder.

“Can you help me, Father?”

“Yes. Da.” He leaned down to kiss her forehead, but she was ready for it this time and stepped back. “Ah”-he smiled at her, his mouth a dark red cavern-“a nervous fawn.” The smile widened. “I like those best.”

She looked at the door. She could leave. “Father Grigori, they say you work miracles on the tsarevitch for his mother and father, the tsarina and tsar.”

The eyes drooped, half-closed, and it was a relief. She flicked a tongue across her lips.

“God has granted me the honor of being the channel of his power and his love to that child, the next emperor of Russia.” He turned abruptly and sat down on the sofa. “Come here.”

“Will you help me? I have money, it’s not much, but…” She placed a small pouch of gold roubles on the table.

“Kneel here.” Rasputin’s voice was powerful in the narrow room.

“I’d rather stand.”

“Then you are no good to me because you are too proud.”

“Katya. My sister’s name is Katya Ivanova. She has cholera. Please”-she moved closer and sank to her knees on the bare boards in front of him-“please, help her.” The weight inside her chest was crushing her. “Please, help Katya.”

He placed his hand on the top of her head, heavy and possessive, and she felt a heat in her mind, churning her thoughts until she almost lost track of why she was here.

“No,” she whispered and swayed back on her heels, so that his hand fell to his side.

“You are strong.”

He made a sound, an odd growl in the back of his throat. Uncivilized. Lecherous. Unclean. A semiliterate peasant. He was all these things, but she could feel his power and touched his knee with her fingers.

“Help me, Father Grigori.”

He stared at her for a long time, his lips moving in silent prayer, her fingers the only connection between them. His eyes grew rounder, became a more vivid blue, but then seemed to glaze over, and for the first time since becoming pregnant Valentina felt violently sick. He reached forward, took her face in his hands, dirty fingernails scratching at her skin, and his mood seemed to change.

“You would have been sweet and tender,” he said with a sad smile. “You would have been luscious and fragrant, my tempting little fawn.”

“I am not your little anything. But I need you to help my sister.”

“She is beyond my help.”

“No! Please!”

His face came so close to hers she could see the purple pockmarks on his nose and smell the brandy on his breath.

“The Lord God Almighty heals through my hands,” he said, “and sends me visions to help lead sinners to the salvation of their souls. I see your sister. She is soon to be cleansed of all tribulations of this flesh.”

“No! You’re lying.”

“But you.” He slid out his tongue and touched her lips. “You have a girl growing inside you who will one day drag her father from the jaws of a fiery hell.”

No. How could he know? It was impossible.

“A girl?” she breathed.

“Yes.” He laughed. Loud and boisterous, shaking his wild hair, and he dropped his hands from her face. “And she’ll be a good little liar, so you’ll have to watch her carefully.”

Blood pumped through her veins, scalding her skin. Her hands touched the spot where the child lay, and she prayed that it was a boy. Because if it was a boy, Rasputin was wrong. Let him be wrong. Wrong about Katya. She jumped to her feet. Enough of his lies. Enough of his games with her mind and his hands on her body. She picked up the pouch of gold and walked out of the room.

KATYA DIED THAT NIGHT. VALENTINA HEARD THE SOFT rustle in her throat and saw the fractured moment of relief when her frail body gave up the fight. Valentina didn’t utter a sound but continued to sit, knees jammed against her sister’s bed, holding Katya’s small hand wrapped in hers, denying it the ability to grow cold.

Her mother laid her head on the pillow and wept, harsh grueling sobs, while her father stood stiffly at the end of the bed and demanded of God what they had done to deserve such wrath. All through the day while priests came and went, while candles were lit and incense burned, and all through the next night while Sonya again washed Katya’s body and clothed her in fresh garments, Valentina held her sister’s hand.

Only when dawn fingered the black curtains on the third day did she lay the bone-white hand on the quilt and quietly leave the room. She never entered it again. She walked into her own room, unlocked the drawer, and tore up her list.

THE MUSIC WAS HARSH. NOTES THAT GRATED ON JENS’S ears. Chords clashed as Valentina’s hands flew over the keys, darting and falling like broken wings. Sound filled every corner of the music room, stirring the air with rising crescendos and tender aching passages that broke his heart.

He sat there, hour after hour. Watching each vibration of her body and listening to the cries she didn’t make. She played as if a tidal wave of music could flood every corner of her, crowding her veins, her bones, her mind, leaving no room, no space, no air left for grief or pain to breathe. And when he rose from his seat, walked over to the piano and wrapped his arms around her from behind, he pinned her against him so that her hands couldn’t play. They fluttered in desperate empty movements. Her whole body shook until something snapped inside her. She spun around within the circle of his arms and clung to him.