SEVENTEEN
‘You are certain you’ll be
well here?’ Prince Razumovsky leaned one powerful shoulder against
the carved pillar of the veranda, a rough mosaic of green uniform
and gold sun-splashes: beard, buttons, the braid of his sleeves.
What was it, Lydia wondered, that drew male Russian aristocrats to
wear uniforms whenever they could, even if they weren’t serving
officers? A craving for brilliant plumage instead of the proper
blues and grays and browns to which Western Civilization had
condemned men, poor things?
‘Perfectly, thank
you, Prince.’ She folded her hands on the neat piles of account
books before her. ‘You’ve left me more than ample
entertainment—’
‘And you truly find
this perusal of dry numbers entertaining?’
Does he really think the idea of having affaires with half
the Imperial Guards officers would amuse a woman? Well, she
reflected, it certainly seems to amuse his
sister . . .
‘Oh, absolutely! It’s
a puzzle, like an egg hunt at Easter – or—’ She gestured, trailing
the edge of her sleeve lace through the wet ink-line on her notes.
‘Or like analyzing the results of a series of graduated
filtrations. Figuring out what things mean, or what they
could mean—’
‘I think it a great
shame,’ said the Prince, stepping around the wickerwork table to
take and kiss her hand, ‘that your husband will probably never
permit you to work for our Third Sector.’ With startling
suddenness, spring had come to St Petersburg; though the weather
was still sharply chill, Lydia found the sea air sweet and the
touch of the sun on her face a blessing. Beyond the veranda’s
carved railing, the woods were tender with new green.
‘I will give your
very best wishes to my mother,’ the Prince continued, ‘who I
suspect only wants to lecture une
Anglaise on the spiritual virtues of living in the Russian
countryside – not that she herself could tell a mushroom from a
birch tree – and your excuses, and will return in no more than a
week. And, of course, if your egg hunt palls, by all means walk up
to the house and telephone Annushka or Ninochka or Sashenka –’ he
named several of the ladies whom Lydia had met through the Circle
of Astral Light – ‘and make them take you to tea at Donon’s.
Sashenka –’ that was a very dashing, raven-haired Baroness whom
Lydia suspected of being one of her host’s mistresses – ‘at least
won’t try to involve you in conversations with the
dead.’
‘It isn’t the seances
I mind.’ Lydia reflected that conversations with the actual dead
had been, in her experience, far more interesting than the ersatz
variety moderated by mysterious individuals with names like Oneida
and Princess Golden Eagle. ‘In fact, I found Madame Muremsky’s most
instructive, though they did become quite annoyed when I insisted
on wearing my spectacles and asked about why the lights had to be
out – unreasonably so, I thought.’ She dabbed a corner of her
blotting paper at the inky disaster on the page, then gave it up.
She hoped one of the maids up at the main house could deal with the
sleeve lace.
‘But the religion
does trouble me. It’s not that I am
religious,’ she hastened to add, reading the shift of Razumovsky’s
shoulders, the tilt of his head – for of course she had concealed
her spectacles under a pile of Deutsches Bank credit transfer
records the moment she’d glimpsed the Prince’s refulgent form
beyond the trees – and guessing that her words had touched a chord
in his own thoughts. ‘But it seems to blind them so. To render
everything into black and white, so that anything that claims to be
holy they automatically assume is all
good, straight through, and has no . . . no patches
of fallibility—’
‘Like our friend
Rasputin,’ said the Prince, a little grimly. ‘Who seems to be one
entire patch of fulminating fallibility . . . Did he
make an attempt on your virtue before he left town?’
‘Oddly enough, no. I
mean,’ she added, ‘not that it’s odd that a man wouldn’t, because
plenty of men don’t . . . but, honestly, so many of
the gentlemen in society here do! And
they seem so surprised when I’m not interested – and why would I
be? I scarcely know them!’
Razumovsky laughed.
‘Ah, Madame, in Petersburg society that doesn’t
matter.’
‘So I’ve deduced,’
said Lydia. ‘Which seems so odd to
me . . . And it does make me wonder about what
Father Gregory gets up to, if he’s considered excessive by
comparison. It must be dreadfully fatiguing. But I think he’s on
his best behavior when Madame Vyrubova is around.’
The Prince grunted.
‘You’re in a small circle indeed, then, Madame. They are bored, you
understand,’ he went on after a moment, and in his voice was not
the impatience Lydia had often heard, when men said that of
upper-class women. He propped his boot on the seat of the other
chair, leaned his forearms on his thigh. ‘Bored and discontented,
and indeed why should they not be? After Easter one goes to the
Crimea; in the summer one visits one’s country estates; in August
one goes to one’s Polish estates, for the
hunting . . . In September it is either back to the
Crimea, or to Monte Carlo or Nice or Paris, before the Season opens
here in Petersburg. And in all of those places one sees the people
one knows from Petersburg or Paris or Vienna: one dances the waltz,
one goes to the Opera. If you’re a girl – like my sisters, God help
them, or my poor wife –’ this was the first the startled Lydia had
heard of this lady – ‘one waits out one’s time until one is old
enough to put one’s hair up and be fitted for evening dresses and
go dancing and gambling, in order to get married to a man who loses
what interest he had in you very quickly—’
Softly, Lydia said,
‘I know. All my life, when I was a child, and in
school . . . It’s as if one is being swept away by a
flooding river – at least, I suppose it is, though I’ve never
actually been swept away by a flooding
river . . . But so often I felt as if I were
fighting a current that was too strong for me. And, instead of
trying to help me, all the people on the river bank were trying to
push me back into the water. Except Jamie.’
Razumovsky was close
enough that she could see, as well as sense, his smile. ‘Except
Jamie,’ he said.
‘But the thing is,’
Lydia went on, ‘it doesn’t have to be that way. That’s the
troubling thing about it. Not the religion – because I should
imagine, in all the centuries of the human race, that God has seen
so many varieties of religious sensibility that He’s past being
surprised by anything – but the waste of minds and energy that
could better be used at actually helping the poor, instead
of . . . of trying to get in touch with the dead, or
find out how many civilizations of hyper-sentient spirits rose and
fell on this planet in the dark abysses of time before humankind
evolved.’
The Prince’s smile
widened to a grin at this description of some of the articles of
faith among the devotees of Astral Light, and of dozens of other
occult societies in the city. Then he sighed and shook his head.
‘But religion is a thing that they can master without education,
you see,’ he explained. ‘To which, God knows, few girls of my class
have access, for all the expense of Swiss boarding-schools and
Madame Dupage’s Exclusive Establishment for Young Females, Rue St
Honoré . . . And, as you say, while the current of
dress fittings and dances and beaux sweeps them away, their parents
and friends and everyone whom they speak to is standing lined up on
the riverbank pushing them back in. So those without a Jamie to
pull them out when they were— How old were you, when you met
him?’
‘Thirteen,’ said
Lydia. ‘Sixteen, when he helped me swot for my exams to get into
Somerville, but he’d been helping me find tutors and things for a
year before that. I always knew I wanted to be a doctor, you
see.’
‘Thirteen,’ said
Razumovsky, and his handsome face was sad. ‘And now those young
ladies are twenty-seven, twenty-eight, and they have not had
educations and can not marshal either the mental discipline or the
informational knowledge to take pleasure in— What did you call it?
Analyzing results? Their souls are ravenous, and they do not know
for what. And, here in Russia, religion is not like religion in
England . . . or anywhere else in the world, I
think. Here in Russia, fairies and devils are as real as angels –
and angels are as real as one’s village priest. Here in Russia –
perhaps because of the long winters, or the vastness of the land –
one feels the Other World is very close. Have you not sensed it,
when you sit on the veranda here in the twilight? Have you not felt
that if you walked a little way down the path –’ he nodded towards
the graveled way that led back into the woods, towards the birch
groves and the river – ‘that you might meet bathhouse spirits, or
swan maidens, or a kobold carrying a load of magical sticks? Russia
has not been civilized for very long,’ he added gently. ‘For good
or for ill, these things still lie very close to the skin. And now
I am late!’
He straightened as
the blue-and-burgundy form of a servant – by his walk and bearing,
Lydia identified Jov the butler long before the man came close
enough for her to make out his long, wrinkled face – appeared on
the pathway. Razumovsky flung out his arms. ‘I come, I come! See
how I hasten—’
‘It is my duty to
preserve your Excellency from a beating at your mother’s hands,’
returned Jov with a grin. Like most of the Prince’s upper servants,
he spoke excellent French. ‘And to save myself one, for not
hastening your Excellency to his train. Madame Asher would not be
persuaded to visit the Dowager Princess at Byerza? Madame,’ he
added, turning to address her – a dapper, elderly man with enormous
grizzled side-whiskers that reminded Lydia of James’s current
disguise. ‘Be assured that I speak for all of us when I say, do not
hesitate to issue the smallest of commands.’
‘Thank you.’ Lydia
got to her feet, extended her hands to the Prince. ‘And thank you,
Prince—’
‘Andrei,’ he
corrected her. ‘If Madame will be so kind. Until Monday next,
then.’ He kissed her hand again and was gone, disappearing among
the bare silvery trees.
Lydia returned to her
wickerwork chair and drew her shawl around her again, but for a
long time she did not return to her systematic examination of
Deutsches Bank property transactions over the past five years.
Instead she sat, turning over in her mind what the Prince had said
about the ladies of her acquaintance. From informants about
possible partners and patrons of Benedict Theiss, they had become
friends, some of them . . . On the previous Friday
she had accompanied Natalia, and the Baroness Sashenka, and several
others of their circle, to the night-long services of the Orthodox
Good Friday; and had gone with them again the following night,
praying and standing and praying and standing and singing and
inhaling incense, and had seen the ecstasy of Easter on the faces
all around her . . .
And had been
propositioned four times at the Pascha breakfast after the Easter
morning services, once by the Baroness’s husband. She didn’t doubt
the sincerity of their beliefs, and yet – how easy it was to
believe one was engaged in some vital quest for knowledge, when all
one was doing was chasing phantoms in a
dream . . .
If one could only figure out, she reflected,
retrieving her spectacles from beneath the pile of her notes,
which was the phantom, and which the
reality.
Else why was she
trying to trace money sent from a dead man’s bank account in some
unknown city, to purchase property in a place where even the Undead
were unable to walk for two months of the year? Which makes a good deal less sense, she sighed,
than attempting to have a straightforward
conversation with one’s deceased Uncle Harold, something which at
least has the virtue of repeated anecdotal
evidence.
She dunked her pen in
the inkwell, found her place again, and continued with her
notes.
‘I want to see the
American consul.’
‘Not the British
consul?’ The interrogator was an elderly man, almost a caricature
of a Prussian Junker: tall, fair, and with the contempt of one who
has grown up knowing himself to be the ruler of every human being
around him, outside his own family.
‘I tell you I don’t
know who the hell this Professor Leyden is that you keep saying I
am. My name is Plummer, and I’m from Chicago—’
‘Then why did you
assault the officers sent to apprehend you at the
Bahnhof?’
Because I knew damn well my story wouldn’t hold up for ten
minutes. ‘I told you, I thought he was this rat-bastard
German named Speigel who’s been followin’ me ever since I come to
Köln, swearin’ I’m the man who meddled with his sister, the ugly
cow—’
‘And how long has
that been?’
‘Two
days.’
‘And you did not
report this to the police?’
‘Mister –’Asher poked
his finger at the officer in his best imitation of an American
engineer he’d known in Tsingtao – ‘you know goddamn little about
Americans if you think we run snivelin’ to the cops every time a
man leans on us for one thing or another. We take care of our own
problems.’
Behind thick
pince-nez, the interrogator’s blue eyes narrowed. ‘Evidently. Yet
none of this explains why you then assaulted the police officers a
second time on the platform, when it was amply clear to anyone but
an imbecile that they were the police and not civilian
attackers.’
‘Well, maybe by that
time you put my dander up.’
And thank God everyone from Land’s End to Yokohama knows
Americans think elevated dander a perfectly appropriate reason for
taking on six policemen and two officers of the
artillery.
He was taken back to
his cell. There were two other men in it with him, one a laborer
from Saxony on the Neuehrenfeld gun emplacements, the other an
elderly Frenchman who persisted in shoving, cursing at, and
haranguing the Saxon about Alsace-Lorraine and the foul attempts by
the Germans to spy out the secrets of the French Army and then
corrupt the populace with lies about the efficacy of that Army to
defend La Patrie. Asher, whose whole
body ached from the fracas at the Bahnhof, wished he could
unobtrusively kill them both.
Grated windows gave
onto a minuscule areaway about two feet below the level with the
Rathaus courtyard. When the endless day ended and darkness finally
fell, Asher wondered if Ysidro had emerged from his coffin before
the train stopped in Berlin, and if Mrs Flasket had gotten herself
away safely. How soon would the vampire become aware that he,
Asher, was not in the city with him? And what would he do
then?
A jail officer
brought food: bean porridge in cheap tin bowls, water, and bread.
Men talked in other cells, desultory abuse in five separate
varieties of Rhineland German. The gray-haired Frenchman – for the
dozenth time – ranted at the Saxon about l’Affair Dreyfus, despite the fact that the Saxon
knew not a single word of what was being said to him. As silence
gradually settled on the cells, Asher unobtrusively flipped open
his box of ‘snuff’ and rubbed some of it on his gums.
It might be morning
before Ysidro realized that, in the parlance of the Department,
plans had come unstuck. But growing in the back of his mind was the
uneasy vision of Petronilla Ehrenberg’s handsome town house in
Neuehrenfeld . . . and the recollection of the fact
that, because of the shortness of time before the departure of the
train, he had not searched it from top to bottom. If she slept
there, she would have kept her coffin in a crypt or sub cellar,
like the one beneath Ysidro’s rented nest in Prague or the one in
Lady Eaton’s shallow cellar in Petersburg.
And he had no
assurance that some other vampire had not been sleeping in that
crypt, aware of him – as he knew vampires were sometimes aware – in
its sleep.
Towards dawn he
slept, and save for those intervals when his two cell-mates so
infuriated one another as to attempt to settle European politics
between them with fists, he dozed on and off through most of the
day. When he asked the guard if the American consul had been
contacted, the man said he didn’t know, and in truth Asher knew
this was a hazardous ploy at best. America, greedily snapping up
every territory it could lay hands on in the Pacific and the
Orient, had little use for Europe. Its Presidents tended to appoint
as consuls personal friends whom they considered deserving of four
years’ paid holiday in Europe, or useful political supporters,
ditto. Considering the strategic position of Köln on German’s
defensive line, the Americans were more than likely to wash their
hands of him with Pilate-like
speed . . .
And, of course, for
the same reason, the Department – if he were willing to condemn
himself in advance by asking for the British Consul – would do
likewise.
He dreamed that night
of Lydia, as he’d dreamed of her in China and later in Africa, in
the years between his despairing realization that he loved that
budding girl as a man loves a woman, and his return from Africa to
find her disinherited and able – for all her family cared – to
marry a poor man after all.
Lydia in white gauze
and a wide-brimmed hat, with her red hair down her
back . . .
Lydia glancing
sidelong at him beneath those long dark lashes and saying,
You really ARE a spy, aren’t
you?
Lydia . . .
He jerked awake with
a gasp, but the cell was empty save for his snoring comrades. Under
the dim flicker of the gas beyond the bars, the corridor lay
shadowed but still.
On the second day –
Tuesday – the American Consul visited him, and it quickly became
clear that this square-jawed, disapproving banker with an insanely
spreading beard wanted nothing to do with wild Midwesterners who
got into brawls with the German police on railway platforms. ‘You
understand my position, I hope, Mr Palmer,’ said Mr McGuffey, in
his dry New England accent, and folded plump clerkly hands. ‘I
will, of course, cable Chicago at once to confirm your bona fides,
but if you are as you say you are, I’m sure all these matters can
be straightened out.’
The following morning
Asher was taken from his cell to the office, where the same
interrogator as before informed him – with a telling glance at the
brown stubble that was ghosting visibly back into existence on the
shaved top of his head – that a telegram had been sent to the
Auswärtiges Amt in Berlin, and that he – Professor Ignatius Leyden
aka Jules Plummer of Chicago – was facing a military court and a
charge of espionage.