‘But of course they’ll stay here. Where else would they go?’
‘You can find room for them in your house?’ he smiled.
‘It’s a big house and Alexei’s room is free. And maybe Sarah or Richard’s if they’re married … Do you think Richard reached Sarah in time to stop her from leaving Russia?’
‘I have no idea. What I do know is that it’s been a very long day and that bed looks soft, clean, and comfortable.’ He sat on the edge, bent down, and unlaced his shoes.
Praskovia lit the lamp at the side of the bed and turned down the one her mother had left burning on the table. She unbuttoned her blouse and skirt and stepped out of them. She sensed Glyn watching her undress.
‘I’m fat and ugly.’
‘You’re becoming more beautiful every day with this little one growing inside you. He took her blouse and skirt from her and draped them over her shawl. ‘We couldn’t be more married than we are at the moment, Praskovia. I may have a wife but I never knew what love was until you came into my life.’
She reached up, kissed him, and helped him take off his coat.
‘We’ll talk again tomorrow,’ he murmured, ‘but not now.’
‘You are tired?’
‘For you, I’ll find a little energy,’ he whispered before pulling her down on to the bed beside him.
Chapter Seven
Alexei Beletsky’s cottage
September 1871
Alexei opened his eyes to darkness. He looked around in confusion. Bright light was flickering behind the curtains and they were on the wrong wall. It took him a few seconds to realise he’d moved out of Glyn’s and was in his new house. Then, when he felt the warmth of Ruth’s body lying alongside him, he remembered – and reached out and embraced her.
‘What was that?’ Ruth sat up with a jerk.
‘If you heard it too, I couldn’t have dreamed it.’ He padded naked from the bed, pulled back the curtains and looked out into the street. ‘Damn!’ He reached for his trousers.
‘What’s happening?’ she left the bed and joined him.
‘Fire up the street. Let’s hope it doesn’t reach here.’
‘Our furniture, clothes…’
‘Can be replaced. You can’t. Dress quickly and run next door with Lev and Lada. Stay there in case it does blow this way. Glyn’s house is brick, but if fire takes hold in this house it will go up like a tinderbox.’
‘If you’re going out to fight the fire I am too.’
‘You just took a sacred vow to obey me in church.’
‘I lied.’
‘Ruth, there’s no time to argue…’
‘Quite.’
‘What are you doing?’ He didn’t know why he was asking. She was already pushing her wedding dress and shoes into a bag. ‘At least dress before you pack.’
‘I can dress later.’ She threw a robe over her nightgown before emptying her wardrobe into another bag.
He buttoned his trousers and reached for his socks. ‘I saw Roman, Dmitri, Glyn, Nathan, and the soldiers and guards from the hospital fighting the fire. Please,’ He grabbed his shirt and dropped a kiss on her lips. ‘I need to know you’re safe.’ He picked up her bags and his boots and ran down the stairs, shouting for Lev. He dropped the bags, thrust his feet into his boots, and his arms into his shirt.
‘Lev’s already out there, master,’ Lada stepped out of the shadows in the hall and opened the front door for him.
‘Take Ruth next door to Praskovia. Don’t let her pack anything else that will delay you one minute.’
Alexei ran. The lumber John Hughes had stockpiled to build houses and shops, and stored in a yard in front of his warehouses, was ablaze, as were several of the wooden shops and eating and drinking houses on both sides of the street. When he looked further north it appeared as though the entire shtetl was burning.
The slim figures of Jews were silhouetted black against the yellow and orange conflagration, their cartwheel hats enormous on their heads, their dark coats flapping around their knees as they charged backwards and forwards between the buildings, hauling buckets of water and rugs to beat out the flames. The scene reminded him of the woodcut illustrations in the children’s books he’d read as a child.
Sparks arced through the air, lightening the sky and threatening the wooden buildings that weren’t yet alight, eliciting cries and screams when they landed on the firefighters. Below the shtetl, the entire population of Hughesovka seemed to have poured out of their homes.
Koshka’s clients in formal dinner suits were fighting alongside Mujiks in rags who had crawled out of their holes in the ground. Welsh colliers and ironworkers passed buckets to hotel guests in nightshirts and robes who’d lined up to form human chains.
Water was being pumped by Praskovia’s slow-witted brother Pyotr from the well in Glyn’s yard and passed from hand to hand to Glyn who’d stationed himself perilously close to the fire in the lumber yard. Alexei studied the line and realised that the buckets would move faster if there weren’t so many men handling them.
He raced towards the wooden shed where the building materials were kept, shouting to Lev, Vlad, Maxim, and half a dozen others to follow.
‘The doors are locked, master,’ Lev said when Alexei tried and failed to wrench them open.
‘What are you after?’
Alexei turned to see Nathan at his shoulder.
‘Tarpaulins. If we smothered the fire on the fringes…’
He didn’t have to say any more, Nathan shouted to Maxim to bring an axe.
Vlad was directing the workmen who’d joined them to pull as much of the undamaged timber from the back of the pile as they could safely reach. Maxim returned with an axe. Alexei knocked the padlock from the door and yanked it open.
He stared at a mound of sand heaped inside the door.
‘Quick, bring buckets,’ Nathan ordered no one in particular.
Alexei grabbed a tarpaulin, dragged it out and ran to Glyn. The centre of the pile of timber was blazing, but they managed to smother one edge with the oilcloth. At the far side of the fire, Vlad and the Cossack soldiers who’d ridden in with Colonel Zonov succeeded in pulling most of the undamaged planking out of reach of the flames.
Nathan heaved up a second tarpaulin. Alexei threw one corner to Glyn. Between the three of them they managed to cover even more of the fire. Maxim handed the first bucket of sand to Alexei who passed it to Glyn.
Alexei stepped back and studied the street. He saw Praskovia and Yelena working alongside Pyotr at the well in Glyn’s garden and to his dismay Ruth – still in her nightclothes – working alongside Lada at the well in his garden.
Glyn shouted for another tarpaulin. Alexei ran to fetch it and pulled it behind him.
Nathan was standing motionless next to Glyn, staring at the shtetl. ‘Fire is moving in from both sides of the Jewish quarter.’
Glyn and Alexei turned to see Rabbi Goldberg marshalling the Jews. They were attacking the untouched shops in the centre of the shtetl, axing the wooden frames and walls so they would fall in on themselves and starve the fires that burned at both ends of the settlement.
‘He’s making a firebreak,’ Nathan said.
‘Let’s hope the destruction isn’t in vain and it prevents the flames from spreading,’ Glyn breathed in a lungful of smoke and began coughing.
‘Here comes the relief force,’ Alexei shouted when John Hughes arrived in the foremost one of a convoy of Catherine’s carriages. All were packed with workers from the Ignatova estate. Sonya leapt out with John. She ran directly to the hospital where Anna, Yulia, Naomi, and Miriam were examining the injured in the grounds.
‘Sonya, thank you, we can do with all the help we can get,’ Anna shouted to make herself heard above the cries, screamed commands, and crackle of flames. ‘Can you sort the wounded? Those with breathing problems over there,’ Anna pointed to an area at the side of the building. ‘We’re dressing minor burns and cuts in the porch. Any serious injuries, send for D
r Kharber.’ Sonya nodded and ran to the people who were waiting to be seen.
‘Every second man, follow me, the rest of you to Mr Edwards,’ John Hughes headed straight for the conflagration that was destroying the Jewish quarter.
‘Do you think he’ll save the shtetl?’ Nathan asked Alexei when they heaved the last tarpaulin out of the warehouse.
Alexei wiped his blackened forehead with the back of his hand. ‘Not a chance. I only hope the Jews don’t start spreading the rumour that God brought this down on them for allowing Ruth to marry a Christian.’
Glyn Edwards’s house
September 1871
A thin, grey, smoke-filled dawn broke over Hughesovka at six o’clock to reveal smouldering ruins. The exhausted men, women and children who’d spent the night firefighting were raking over the embers that had cooled enough to fork and scatter. John Hughes stood in Glyn’s front garden and studied the North Eastern sector of his town that had housed the shops. The only buildings that hadn’t been destroyed were the two built of brick.
The flames, coupled with Rabbi Goldberg’s firebreak that had managed to curtail and concentrate the blaze, had decimated the Jewish quarter, houses as well as shops. The seared posts of the buildings’ frameworks stood, blackened skeletons in a sea of smouldering debris. Three of the largest dormitories for the Welsh, French, and Russian colliers, two drinking shops, and two eating-houses that had been erected on the eastern fringes of the shtetl were blackened smears on the scorched earth. The thatched roofs of the Mujik “hole” houses in that section of town had also been devoured by the flames, but philosophical and pragmatic by nature, accustomed to setbacks they invariably attributed to “God’s just punishment for sins” the peasants were already weaving replacements.
The brick foundations for permanent buildings that had been recently laid were blackened but appeared structurally undamaged. To the south of the settlement, the hotel, Madam Koshka’s, and Glyn’s house, all brick-built, were unscathed, as was Alexei’s wooden house and the New Russia Company’s wooden warehouses and headquarters in the South West quarter. But most important of all in John’s eyes, the furnaces and buildings of the ironworks that waited to be commissioned had escaped the conflagration.
Exhausted and dispirited after the night’s work, the senior managers of the New Russia Company gathered around him.
‘It could have been worse.’ Glyn looked back at his garden. As the sky faded from dark to light grey and light rose from the ground, he saw groups of shadowy, weary figures slumped in every corner of his plot.
Alf nudged Vlad in the ribs. They started laughing.
‘What’s funny?’ Glyn wondered if fatigue had edged them into hysteria.
‘Us, all of us,’ Alf said when he could finally talk. ‘We’re blacker than colliers at the end of a shift. You can’t tell Cossack soldier from civilian, Jew from Welshman or Russian, and we’re all too whacked to fight each other or even trade insults.’
‘Perhaps we should cover ourselves in ash every day,’ Vlad added in his heavily accented English.
‘Might stop people mouthing a few of the stupider comments I heard some of the Russian colliers make about the influx of Welsh colliers and ironworkers yesterday,’ Glyn agreed.
John Hughes ran his hands through his hair. ‘Everyone is sleeping on their feet. I can’t see us doing much work today, so you may as well tell the colliers they’ve been given a day off, Alf.’
‘Yes, sir.’
John parried Alf’s questioning glance. ‘All the men – and women – who turned out last night will be paid for the shift they put in firefighting. Without their efforts even more of the town would have gone up in smoke and the flames might have reached the works.’ He glanced at Glyn. ‘The ironworkers can have the day off to catch up on sleep, but I’m calling a senior managers’ meeting. Headquarters in one hour. That should give us enough time to breakfast and clean ourselves up.
‘I’ll be there, sir.’ Alexei smiled at Ruth who had brought a tray of tea glasses out from Glyn’s kitchen.
‘Thank you, Mrs Beletskaya’, John took a glass. ‘Alexei, I’m grateful for what you and your wife did last night. Without your assistance we wouldn’t have saved as much timber as we did, but the company gave you two weeks’ leave for your honeymoon. Take it. That’s an order.’
‘We can honeymoon later, sir,’ Alexei demurred.
‘I admire your enthusiasm and loyalty, but I can’t allow you to make the sacrifice.’ John eyed Alexei and Ruth thoughtfully. ‘However, if you can spare a couple of hours this morning there is one job you’re perfectly suited to. Both of you. Could you go to the shtetl and talk to Rabbi Goldberg, the merchants, and anyone else who lost property last night, sales goods and livestock as well as buildings. I’ll send a couple of clerks with you to make notes. Ask everyone affected to list what they need to rebuild their homes and shops. Tell them you have my complete authority and the New Russia Company will underwrite their losses. In the meantime they can take the notes, which the clerks will write out and you’ll countersign, to the company warehouses and draw whatever materials they require to begin rebuilding. If it’s not in stock or we run short, inform them I’ll have everything that’s listed brought into the town as soon as the bullock carts allow.’
‘That’s very generous of you, sir,’ Ruth commented.
‘Not that generous, Mrs Beletskaya, most of the losses will be covered by the company’s insurers. My main concern is to keep Hughesovka’s commerce and building programme on track.’
‘We’ll do our best to ensure that, sir,’ Vlad asserted.
‘Tell the clerks to make copies of the notes they hand out and file them in the office, Alexei. Warn everyone that the company will only pay out on notes that either you or Mrs Beletskaya have countersigned.’
‘We will, sir.’ Alexei winked at Ruth. ‘Mrs Beletskaya. Did you hear that?’ Alexei took the heavy tray from Ruth and handed it to Pyotr.
‘Something else for all of you to think about is the urgent formation of a trained fire brigade,’ John lowered his voice, ‘that can fight fires and also crime. Several people reported that they saw someone flitting around before the fires took hold last night. The fact that the flames flared simultaneously in so many places suggests the blazes were down to the work of more than one arsonist.’
‘If the brigade is to have any credibility we need to recruit men from every race, Cossacks, Jews, Welsh and Mujiks,’ Alexei warned. ‘Are you sure you don’t want me to come to the managers meeting, sir?’
‘You’re not indispensable yet, boy. Just do as I asked, and while you’re talking to Rabbi Goldberg remind him that I sent him the architect’s rough sketches for the new synagogue a month ago and I’m still waiting for him to come and discuss them with me.’
‘I will, sir.’ Alexei saw Anna walking through the gate. He called down to her. ‘Was anyone hurt last night?’
Anna joined them. ‘Dr Kharber sent me to tell you that there are no serious injuries among the men who fought the fire in this section of the town, Mr Hughes, but he’s still waiting to hear from the shtetl.’
‘Let’s hope the people in the shtetl got off as lightly as us,’ John said. ‘We couldn’t have managed without you and the other nurses, young lady. I saw how hard you all worked last night.’
‘All the beds in the hospital are taken and we’ve treated over fifty people for burns and minor injuries, mainly cuts and bruises, but all the nurses are hoping that there won’t be any major catastrophes today.’
‘It’s not just the nurses who are hoping for a quiet day, young lady.’ John eyed his senior staff. ‘We can’t let this setback affect the timetable for commissioning the furnaces. No matter what, this January we have to go into full production.’
None of the men around John dared point out that the height of winter was almost upon them, bringing with it snow, below freezing temperatures, and, possibly, even worse disasters than fire.
Ruth returned t
o the kitchen and helped Yelena, Praskovia, and the maids to load another tray that Pyotr carried out to the men in the garden. She looked for Alexei and found him with Vlad and Alf by their well. All three had washed their faces, but the water had only served to plaster the black and grey smuts that covered them in layers over their skin and hair.
‘You look as though you’ve all grown scales like lizards,’ she observed.
‘If that means we can lie on a rock and sleep for the rest of the day, I’ll be happy.’ Alf wiped his face with his hands, smearing the grime even more.
Ruth shook her head at Alexei. ‘Your wedding trousers are ruined. They’re blackened and peppered with burn holes.’
‘As I’ve no intention of getting married again, Mrs Beletskaya, I won’t need them.’ He slipped his arm around her waist.
‘And when we’re invited to other weddings?’
‘I’ll buy wedding guest trousers.’
‘You won’t be able to wear them with that linen shirt. It’s singed beyond repair and your shoes are in ribbons. I’m not much better.’ Ruth examined the torn and blackened overall and apron she’d borrowed from Yelena to throw over her nightgown and dressing gown. ‘We need to go home and wash and change before we visit the shtetl.’
‘No,’ Alexei countered. ‘The rabbi and the merchants need to see us exactly as we are. That way they’ll know we fought the fire as well.’
‘I’m not going to the shtetl in my nightclothes,’ Ruth protested. ‘Rabbi Goldberg would die of shock.’
‘Change if you must, but put the overall and apron back on over it, and don’t wash the soot from your face and hands.’ Alexei felt a tap on his shoulder and turned around.
‘Mr Beletsky, sir,’ Vasily was standing behind him together with a younger company clerk. Both were carrying notepads stamped with the heading of the Company. ‘Mr Hughes said you’d be needing clerks.’
‘We will, thank you for coming. We’ll be leaving for the shtetl in a few minutes. If there’s any tea left go and get yourselves a glass.’
Princes and Peasants Page 7