The Jewel of St Petersburg

Thirty-eight

JENS SAW A CHANGE IN VALENTINA AFTER THAT DAY IN THE courtyard. Some of the shadows left her eyes, and her limbs regained the fluid grace that they had lost since the death of her sister. They didn’t talk about what had happened. Neither wished to mention Arkin’s name. To do so would be to invite him back. But there was a new tenderness in their lovemaking and a deeper passion in her music that made him ache for her when they were apart.

Unknown to her he continued to search for Arkin. He dredged through the slums of St. Petersburg once more but found no trace of him, not even a whisper. The man had left the city, Jens was convinced of it. He even sent Liev Popkov to drink the backstreet bars dry, but still no word. Neechevo. Nothing. If there were any justice in the world, he’d be dead and buried from gangrene of the leg, but that was too much to hope for. Jens didn’t believe in natural justice. You had to make your own.

Though the official period of mourning for Katya was not over in the Ivanov household, he spoke to Valentina’s parents in private about the wedding, and the ceremony was arranged with a certain amount of speed. Jens was not a man for Russian weddings. They were too long and too solemn for his taste, the ritual too precise. But on the day of his marriage, he was mesmerized by the sight of Valentina in her long white dress, holding her lighted candle, her dark hair twined up at the back of her head, clustered under a white veil with a scattering of pearls that could not begin to compare with the creamy texture of her skin.

As the priest in his epitrachelion robe performed the traditional liturgy, bound their joined hands with his stole, and led them three times around the analogion lectern, circling the Gospel Book, her eyes flashed at him with such a challenge and such desire that he considered scooping her up in his arms right there and then. He couldn’t bear to share her a minute longer. When the golden wedding crowns were held over their heads and the priest in his finest robes chanted the ektenia, he saw the way her glance moved against her will to the church door, as though expecting someone else to slide in. A small crease of concern on her high forehead, a tense touch of her hand when they exchanged rings. The faintest sliver of fear behind the shimmer of her veil.

Not for the first time Jens cursed himself for not raising the barrel of his rifle that day in the hospital courtyard and blowing a hole the size of her crown in Arkin’s chest. Like for like. A bullet for a bullet. But the revolutionary had been wearing body armor that day; Jens had seen the bulk of it clearly under his shirt, and that was why he could be so bold. Whatever lair the bastard had slunk off to now, that knee of his would take a long time to heal. Arkin would not be returning to St. Petersburg in a hurry.

When the ceremony and the elaborate celebrations were finally at an end, Jens whisked Valentina away and drove her at speed in a decorated carriage to their new home. It lay in a quiet avenue near Dr. Fedorin’s house.

“It will be useful to have a doctor on our doorstep when the baby comes,” Jens had pointed out, but she had laughed at him, calling him a worrisome bear, and promised to produce the child as effortlessly as a she-cat sheds kittens. He had chosen the house for her with care. The view of the river, with its surface looking as solid as steel, was for when she needed to sit and be quiet, and the height of the ceilings would form a perfect chamber for her music. The pale polished floors reminded Jens of the dense pine forests of Denmark, and he had brought his reindeer rug to lay in front of the fire. He intended to put it to good use.

He took delight in peeling her wedding finery from her body, while she stood smiling at him and proffering each tempting arm and each slender leg to be denuded. When she was naked and her hair was spread in a rippling fan of satin over her bare back, he led her to the new Erard grand piano in the drawing room and she played for him. Just for him. The lilting notes of Chopin’s Nocturne in E Flat.

As her hands glided over the keys, his eyes traced each delicate notch of her spine. Every line of her was smooth and supple, the curve of her buttocks on the piano stool, the angle of her shoulder, the tip of her elbow. And the exquisite hollow above her hips that was slowly filling as the swell of her belly grew larger.

This woman, his wife, carrying their child. As essential a part of him as the lungs in his chest and the blood in his veins. He moved over to her and kissed the warm top of her head, then each rib on her back and the dainty bone at the base of her spine. All the time her hands kept playing but he heard her sighs of pleasure, and when his arms encircled her, cradling the child inside her, she let her weight lean back against him, as if it belonged there.

“I love you, Madam Friis,” he whispered into her ear, and swept her up off the stool into his arms. “Time for bed.”

She twined her arms around his neck, her eyes bright and laughing at him, swinging her bare feet, her fingers tight in his hair.

“We have forever,” she promised.

CANDLES STILL BURNED AROUND THE BEDROOM. THEIR soft flickering light soothed Valentina’s thoughts and turned Jens’s skin golden on the sheets. She kept a hand on his head where it lay next to the curve of her stomach, and she smiled contentedly. Both were asleep-one beside her and one inside her-and she let her mind stretch into the future that was waiting for them. She filled it with new engineering projects for Jens and St. Petersburg’s Conservatoire of Music for herself.

There would be no more St. Isabella’s Hospital, not now, not without Katya to care for. No list to cross off one by one. She had different aims now. Instead she pictured concerts and walks in the park, a small hand tucked in hers, and the world’s biggest mouse palace constantly being redesigned and expanded. Always the sound of laughter. Always the warmth of Jens’s body next to hers at night and that look in his eyes when he lifted his gaze from his book or from his papers and caught sight of her. That moment. As though they were bound under one skin.

She stroked his hair. There would be problems; of course there would. The social order in St. Petersburg was unstable, but she had faith in the power of men like her father to bring it under control, of men like Captain Chernov to hold the line against the strikers. But above all she had faith in men like Jens to build a better world for the workers to live in. Arkin and his ferocious revolution would never succeed; it would just fade away to nothing, leaving the banners and the slogans to be pecked by the gulls that swept in silvery flocks low over the city.

She rested her hand on her stomach and imagined a delicate head with a mass of fine curls living inside her. To be a mother. The thought took her breath away. But it made a sensation that was warm and real beat inside her blood, a feeling that in a strange way she was now larger than herself. Not just physically, but in her love. She smiled, thinking of her own mother.

Elizaveta Ivanova had recently taken to traveling by train to Moscow to stay with an old school friend of hers. Sometimes for only one or two days, sometimes longer. She said she needed to escape from the city where her daughter had died, and certainly she always returned without the lines of tension on her forehead and without the dull sorrow in her eyes. Papa barely seemed to notice her mother’s absences, he was so involved in deals with Minister Davidov, but he had embraced Valentina warmly at her wedding and kissed her cheek with his blessing. The gesture meant much to her. Only her sister wasn’t there to share her joy.

Valentina turned on her side and curled herself around Jens’s sleeping form, entwining her limbs with his and inhaling the scent of his skin. “My husband,” she murmured.

Katya would have been happy for her.

RASPUTIN 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.”