The Frost And The Flame

by Drusilla Campbell

  Katia was sprawled near their feet, dazed, confused. With the toe of his boot, Oleg prodded her thigh as he watched from the corner of his eye for Alexei’s reaction. His cousin’s wince of pain gave him pleasure, and he grew in confidence. “If you don’t want to take her with you, perhaps you would like to have her now. I’m sure Katia would enjoy the experience. Wouldn’t you, my dear?”

  Oleg held out his hand to her. She rose and embraced him hungrily as her hands caressed him, moving aside the folds of his heavy brocade gown. Oleg pushed her away, turned her around and held her to him, facing Alexei.

  “Well, Cousin, what do you think of your convent angel now?”

  At first, Katia saw only Alexei’s eyes. They were like hard unshining bits of coal. They were eyes without humanity or love or hope in them. Abruptly, her own eyes filled with tears. But the Hummingbird’s honeyed drunkeness was still in her, and she did not know why she cried.

  “Your weeping does not impress me as it once did,” said Alexei, his voice quiet and flat, deadened by the loathing that filled him when he looked at her. “I believed you when you said he forced you to be his lover. And I believed you when you said you felt nothing for him. Now I know you lied and you are dead to me, Katia.”

  What was Alexei talking about? She could concentrate on nothing but the hungry need within her.

  Distracted, she fondled herself; her hand stroked between her legs, and she barely heard what Alexei was saying.

  “I wouldn’t have her for all the gold in Russia.”

  He was leaving! She understood that now. ’Then I must be leaving too,’ she thought. ‘I’ll need my cloak, and where is little Mary?’ Katia’s mind spun as she tried to understand what was happening to her.

  She was cold and the most peculiar sensation of numbness had begun in her arms and legs. She seemed to be growing lighter and lighter. As if she were a bubble about to burst. The feeling frightened her and her body shook convulsively as her mind reached toward consciousness. She touched herself and was surprised to feel naked skin.

  “Alexei Stephanovich…to Katia her own voice sounded faint and strained…pray do not go without me. I shall be ready when…” she waved her hand confusedly and began to weep once more. The Hummingbird stirred faintly in her system, and she forgot everything. She swayed toward Alexei, draping her arms about his rigid shoulders, unmindful of his cold response. She pressed her body into his and implored, “Your kisses, Alexei, my love. Let me feel your lips, your sweet tongue…”

  But Alexei pushed her away and spat at the floor near her feet. “You disgust me, Katia. Go peddle yourself to my cousin. But leave me alone. I want no part of you.”

  Katia’s mind still reeled from the residual rush of the Hummingbird. She craved release from the agony of longing that captivated her. Alexei and Black Jake turned and strode from the bedroom; and she didn’t even try to call her beloved back. Instead, she turned to Oleg, her arms out to him, her eyes half-closed in delirium.

  She embraced him eagerly, and he was about to push her away just as Alexei had. Then he thought better of it. He let Katia stroke and caress him, but he realized that her beauty did not tempt him as it had moments before. Her wantonness disgusted him and he no longer desired her. He had used her to be rid of his cousin, and now she was nothing to him. He knew he would find new pleasures elsewhere. He thought of Mary and of how Katia had led him a merry chase these many months. He would rejoice to be rid of her.

  “Come lie with me,” she begged, half sobbing.

  Oleg laughed shortly. “You need a man? Even you, little angel? Then here…” he pushed her at Leo’s lifeless body “…try this one. Had he lived, you would have belonged to him, so it seems only fair that you now thank him for laying down his life for your love.”

  The sordid picture excited Oleg anew. He was going to get some pleasure from this evening after all! He positioned himself astride her from behind. His body stabbed her roughly. She cried out in pain and struggled as he probed her tiniest budlike opening. She cried against the outrage; and her body found new strength, her mind new clarity. She turned and twisted suddenly. There was a shirring sound. Oleg saw a flash of light, of movement, just before the wooden footstool slammed into his skull.

  BOOK THREE

  Chapter Thirty

  The Gathering of Souls was one of the old beliefs of the renegade Khlysty priesthood and dated from a more primitive Russian Orthodox Church. Every patriarch since the time of Ivan had condemned it as pagan. Wandering healer priests and other charismatics like the Little Father were despised by the higher order of the Church because they encouraged participation in such old and passionate rituals as the Gathering.

  Near dawn, in the shabby apartments of the Little Father, the air was syrupy, a rich stew of sound and odor. The men and women in the room—a half-dozen, no more—moved with care, like swimmers in a strange sea. As they paced and turned the room, their white robes brushed the dusty floor with soft whooshes and stirred the dust into the candlelight. Their prayers were cries and whispers like the life and death of moths.

  They seemed pitiful to the Little Father. But brave as well, for every penitent gathered that night knowingly risked excommunication by coming to his apartments. Yet fear of reprisals and shame couldn’t keep them away because the Little Father had, in truth, the power and gift for healing tired, broken, minds and bodies. Unlike most of the wandering healers who came to Petersburg in hope of making their fortunes, he was not a fraud. His powers were real; and for the cleansing calm he offered, even the most devoutly orthodox Christian might disobey the church fathers to attend a Gathering of Souls.

  ‘If the Patriarch only knew of my powers,’ thought the Little Father with some bitterness. He wanted no more than his wonderful gift honestly deserved; and it galled him that he had yet to attract a patron either guilty or wealthy and independent enough to be persuaded to override the sanctions of the Church. He needed someone to present him officially, to make him fashionable with the idle ladies and gentlemen of the nobility. Then, he told himself, he would live as he deserved.

  The Little Father’s name was affectionately ironic for he was a giant of a man with a great moon-shaped, pleasant-featured face encircled by bushy black hair and a dark beard that covered his body to midchest. Though he towered over the penitents in the gornitza, in his simple white muslin cassock, he became the humble shepherd of their errant souls who passed among them praying and chanting.

  It was the tenth hour of the Gathering, and the penitents’ passionate faith was growing more and more intense. The atmosphere at this peak time was like a heat that slowly warmed his blood and made him feel powerfully alive. For a while, the Little Father forgot the unfairness of life without a patron to assist him, and was consumed instead by the growing sensation of power in himself. All his life, it had been this way. The power seemed to know in advance when it would be needed, and now it tingled in him like a warning and a promise all in one.

  He passed among the swaying bodies, hearing their cries and confessions, touching them gently from time to time as they exhausted themselves in an orgy of guilt and repentance. Some, like Natasha Kalino across the room, carried tambourines; and the rhythms of their shaking were hypnotic. There had been hours of this dancing and praying, chanting and swaying; and the gornitza was charged with the dynamism of faith.

  ‘Anything might happen now,’ thought the Little Father with a touch of excitement.

  Beside him, a woman with matted hair and a face flushed by her exertions, fell to her knees. She tugged at the hem of his gown.

  “I tried to stop myself,” she moaned, sobbing as she covered the Little Father’s huge hand with kisses. “I honestly tried.”

  He did not follow her confession closely. The transgressions of this woman—whose name he could not recall—did not interest him. The sins that drove normal men and women to the edge of madness were usually petty, inconsequential infractions he had found. Certainly there was nothing in her sto
ry that could help him curry favor with the aristocracy. When she turned his hand upwards and began to kiss his palm, he checked the irritation he felt. He had to remind himself that she was suffering genuinely and deserved the blessing he had to give. She begged to be scourged by him, and he took the broom of briarthorn from its place against the wall. She moaned as he brought the bedaggered branches down across her back and shoulders, shredding the muslin cloth of her robe. She clung to his hand all the while, her sobs rising to a crescendo as she licked and bit between the Little Father’s fingers.

  He shuddered and pulled away from her, dropping the broom. Her ravaged face stared up at him, the skin across her cheeks pulled taut as in death. He enclosed her head between his hands, his fingertips pressing hard into her temples. His eyes took her gaze and held it, peering into the spinning confusion of her pain. The flesh beneath his fingers felt angry to the touch. He pressed harder until—at last!—he seemed to feel her pain himself. He felt it leave her and enter into him where it quickly lost its malignancy.

  Somewhat later, the Little Father noticed Nikki Kalino. She had begun to shake her tambourine more wildly. As the Little Father watched, she turned in elliptic circles around the room. She moved crazily, like one possessed by dervish demons, until she stopped at last, within inches of him. He saw her eyes were hollows of exhaustion in a face made gaunt by pain and guilt. She looked up at him as if to speak. She reached for the Little Father’s garments, and her hands shook as though a palsy gripped her.

  “Father, why has God sent this pain to me?” she implored.

  “Our Father in Heaven knows you are not yet truly penitent of worldly ways, Lady Natasha. You are holding back even now, and Our Father knows this.”

  It was only a guess, an instinct; but a second sense had told him months earlier that Natasha Filippovna might be valuable to him with her Romanov connections and her inescapable burden of unexplained guilt. In recent weeks, he had become convinced that the woman held within her a great secret, information of priceless worth. Now as she knelt before him, in her eyes he saw the touching faith of an innocent. She was childlike; and for a moment, the Little Father pitied her because she believed he could heal in an instant the ruination of a lifetime of excess and greed. She was dying now. To a man such as he, an observer and interpreter of life who had stood beside Death a thousand times, the signs were apparent in her. And he knew that even his own miraculous powers could not reverse the painful erosion of her strength. He could only make the end more comfortable for her and, perhaps, lure away her tightly kept secret at the same time.

  “God calls upon you to put away wordly things now, Sister,” the Little Father said in a tone of gentle reprimand. “He wishes you to prepare for the life that is to come. Our Father knows you are unhappy. He feels all the pain you do. Give all your pain to him. He will carry it, Natasha Filippovna.” He touched her chin and she raised her haunted eyes to his. “God says, give me your pain.” Their gazes met and were bound like iron in a forge. She tried to turn away, but he caught her hands. A long instant passed before she breathed easily. “Your Father loves you, Natasha Filippovna,” he said. “Why do you refuse him?”

  An island of silence seemed to isolate Nikki and the priest from all the others in the room. The Little Father felt the power in him as if his veins were on fire, and he knew the Kalino woman would not have the will to keep her secret from him. He seemed to glow before her eyes; and she could not turn aside or break from his touch that seemed to reach right through her skin and lost itself in the muscle, bone and blood within her.

  A moment later, with no warning or preparatory consideration, she heard herself speaking the truth she had sworn never to utter. The confession came haltingly at first; her voice had an abrupt staccato quality like a child’s unwilling recitation. But almost immediately, she began to feel her desperation lessening. She spoke more quickly, eager now to be emptied of her burdensome secret. “Katiana Danova is not my niece. She is the love child of Princess Anna Romanov and a Scotsman. She is the half-sister of Prince Oleg though she does not know it.” She told the Little Father everything. And when she had confessed to being greedy for the emeralds, when she had uttered the fearful word incest aloud for the first time, she was rewarded for her honesty by a slow-growing sense of inner serenity unlike any emotion she had ever felt before. She moved away from the Little Father at last. Like a child who has slept in the carriage coming home from a late evening, she was unsure of where she was or what was happening. And, like such a child, she was too tired and contented to care.

  An hour later, the Little Father was able to slip away from the gornitza. After many hours spent in near darkness, he was half-blinded by the light in the hall. Passing the partially open door to the anteroom, he rubbed his stinging eyes and almost did not see the richly dressed young woman and the child she held close beside her on the long wooden bench beside the fire.

  He was smiling as he went into his tiny sitting room. Without being told, he knew who his visitors were; and he thanked Divine Providence for bringing them to his apartments now when he knew their story. Katiana Danova was beautiful indeed. It was not remarkable that she had blinded a man like Oleg Romanov with her innocent allure. But as vivid as her beauty was, the Little Father had seen something else as well when he looked at her. She was suffering and no power on earth but his could still her pain. He sat at the place set for him at a small table and patted his fingertips together in thoughtful silence for a few moments. His eyes bore a distant expression.

  He sensed the power of God around him and was in awe of it. For the thousandth time, he considered who he was—a simple peasant from the distant Urals—and wondered why he had been selected to bear so great and holy a gift for healing. Whenever he thought this way, the Little Father felt heavy with the responsibility of so wondrous a power. Katiana Danova was in the anteroom awaiting him. The Lord had sent her to him. She had been entrusted to his care.

  He rose from the table and went to the icon corner of the room and knelt. “Help me. Heavenly Father,” he prayed, “to right the evil done to this poor girl. Show me the way to power and glory.”

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Katia did not know or even wonder how long she had been sitting on that hard bench in the Little Father’s anteroom. The hours had passed; time did not stand still because Oleg Romanov was dead. That fact alone seemed miracle enough to her. She felt like a member of an ancient race; unspeakably old, she had come through Time and been numbed by the experience. One thought alone filled her mind. She had murdered Oleg Romanov.

  She had reached for the heavy old fashioned footstool; and with a strength she had not known she possessed, she jerked her body around as her arm arched over and brought the stool crashing into his skull. She knew he was dead because afterwards she had stood over his body watching, waiting for the slightest sign of life. Had he shown any, she would have picked up the stool and struck him again. It was Oleg who had taught her to hate, and it was he who suffered the consequences of that foul engendering.

  For a long time she did not fully appreciate all that had happened to her. Then memories of the night cut into her numbed mind, bringing with them a terrible anguish as she thought how close she had been to her heart’s desire. Prince Alexei was coming to the palace to take her away with him to England and a new life, a fresh chance. She recalled that much with total clarity, But what came afterwards was clouded. Oleg had given her something to drink, a thick oily liquid. What had happened next? She could not remember no matter how she tried. That part of her memory had frozen.

  When she knew that Oleg was dead her first thought was for escape though she had no idea of where she could go or who would assist her. It crossed her mind to beg asylum at the Troitza Mother House, but the idea of returning to the convent repelled her almost as much as remaining in the Romanov Palace. They would make her a prisoner; and then, in all their holy sanctimony, they would give her over to the authorities for punishment. But if not Troi
tza, where? She remembered then that her aunt was with the Little Father. Aunt Nikki knew and must be forced to tell her the truth about her parents. Though Katia hated her mother for abandoning her long ago, she had some small hope that the woman might help her now. It was her only hope, and so she fled to it.

  She dressed quickly, roused Mary from a deep sleep and, cautioning her to silence, dressed her warmly. Taking the sleepy child’s hand, she urged her to follow quietly after her down the many stairways and halls and finally into freedom. Outside the night was dark with a mist so thick that it obscured everything. At the canal’s edge she stopped a moment and fumbled in her reticule for the few gold pieces Aunt Nikki had cautioned her to keep there at all times. There were five of them. More than enough to hire a carriage that would take them through the sleeping Petersburg streets in safety. But the street outside the Romanov Palace was quiet as if even the night must mourn the death of a Russian prince. There was nothing to do but walk until they found some busier boulevard; but the way was slow for Katia had little idea of direction. She thought she recalled from one of her carriage rides with Prince Oleg that Nevsky Prospect lay somewhere to the right, away from the river and the canals that laced the city. But the sameness of the cobbled streets disoriented her; and hand-in-hand with Mary, she had wandered until almost dawn growing increasingly confused and more and more fearful of what the day would hold. At last, however, they came out onto a broad street. The fog had lifted somewhat with the gradual lightening of the sky, and she could see some distance in all directions. The street was abandoned, silent.

  All at once a carriage, heralded by the clopping of the horses’ hooves, turned into the Prospect and came towards where she stood with Mary. It was full of noisy soldiers who had obviously been carousing all the night. The sound of their drunken laughter filled Katia with fear, and she pulled Mary roughly into the shadows of a shop. But it was too late. One of the soldiers had spied them and called to the yantchik to reign in his team. The carriage door opened and before Katia and Mary could run they were surrounded by the men.