White Ice

by Celia Brayfield

  ‘Myself. My peers. We are at the end of the chain of command, we must be responsible. Peasants are truly like beasts, but noble beasts. Like horses, they can sense the limit of their understanding, and they know that it is you who rule their world. Your responsibility is to care for them. And we failed.’

  ‘But what has become of the deserters? Surely they just bolt back home?’ The Englishman’s eyes were a little bloodshot; he had drunk well of the champagne and the fine wines, and was now finishing with brandy. Orlov imagined his own words, filtered through alcohol, in tomorrow’s dispatch to London.

  ‘You can see scores of them here in Petrograd, they’re the ones who’re even thinner than our own folk. They’ve come to be in on the real action. The rest of them – they’re thousands of miles from their homes, and some of them have nothing to return to in any case. They’re swilling around the country like flotsam, stirred up by Bolsheviks, maddened with hunger …’ His voice died away. He was boring the party, an unforgivable crime. Better to keep his gloomy opinions to himself.

  ‘Tata, my dear, I would not alarm you for the world, but there may be worse hazards in Kiev than deserters turned bandits. When will you travel?’

  ‘Early in February.’

  ‘Before the thaw – well, that’s on your side. But I believe that Russia herself may be breaking up. The reports we have at the Ministry tell us that every province in this nation is restive – the Finns, the Poles, the Cossacks, the Ukrainians, Siberia, the Caucasus – in every region nationalists are stirring up the people. The Ukraine has even sent their own peace delegation to the enemy. In a few weeks you may need your passport to go to Kiev – I’m serious, it can happen.’

  ‘So I’m right,’ Bruce persisted, ‘she should refuse to go?’

  ‘But who is asking our Tata to go, and could they be a good friend in the future?’ Their host left his dark, disappointing windows and came to join them, picking a grape from the arrangement of fruit in the table centre as he went. ‘You may be glad of the permit to travel in the future. And – you may soon be in more danger here. I hear there is now a government committee on the evacuation of Petrograd. There are enough people here who think that if the Germans took the city it would be a blessing, because the Soviets would be destroyed and so would the Baltic fleet, the worst red cell in all the forces.’

  ‘Oh, dear! Why is life so impossible! Please, Niki, give me some proper advice.’

  ‘My proper advice would be that if you believe that there will be no revolution before the end of the war, then go to Kiev, because I know that peace cannot be concluded before the end of the year.’

  ‘I can’t bear it! “If I die you will lose your son and your throne in six months!” That was what he said, wasn’t it, Rasputin? We can’t let that ghastly man’s words come true.’

  ‘Speaking personally, I’m quite certain there will be no revolution before peace.’ Paleologue thought that when women started repeating Rasputin’s curses it was only chivalrous to reassure them. All the diplomats in Petrograd kept their doubts to themselves in Russian company. Nevertheless, the Frenchman gave Orlov a keen look, suddenly anxious to sound his opinion more deeply.

  Orlov felt that there was nothing to be lost by candour. ‘There speaks a Western mind. This is Russia, we don’t obey the same rules – anything can happen here. Everything I know of our past, everything I have studied in the past of ancient civilizations, has taught me that a state can reach a critical point of instability beyond which it won’t be able to recover. I believe that Russia is close to that point.’

  ‘There you are.’ Bruce took his wife’s hand. ‘Now will you be sensible?’

  ‘But darling, I know how much it would mean to the people for me to go. And after all, I am an artist, it’s what I have to do. I’ve been coddled all my life’ – with an exquisitely expressive sweep of her arm she included the magnificent room – ‘so that I can perform. And it may be just bread and circuses, but it’s my duty and I can’t think of my safety any more than a soldier can.’ Karsavina was at the height of her powers and the pinnacle of acclaim. In the old days, Orlov would simply have called up a company of men to escort this national treasure through any local trouble, but throughout the winter there had been riots in the city; the best regiments were already at the front, and he could not pledge his help for the future with any certainty.

  The optimists, a dwindling class, had predicted that the winter would freeze the rebellion to death, but it was many-headed like a hydra, and every head crushed grew back as two. There was no Hercules to kill it.

  Orlov was tired. It was the unnatural fatigue of living in falsehood. His daily business consisted of dealing in monstrous half truths. The table before him was covered with real lace, swagged with silk ribbons and decorated with posies of forget-me-nots forced in the hot-house. It was laid with silver-gilt cutlery copied from Catherine the Great’s service preserved in the Hermitage museum, and set with Limoges porcelain. They had eaten foie gras, quenelles de brochet and wild duck. Later, he was bidden by Countess Witte, the wife of a former prime minister, to a charity gala in aid of the Disabled Soldiers’Workshop, where Fokine and Kchessinskaya were to dance in the first act of Don Quixote.

  From the beginning of the war his army – for he thought of it as his although the army, under General Kornilov, now thought of the whole of Russia as its own property – his army had stood against the Germans without arms and without rations. The railways, instead of providing swift, reliable transport for men and supplies, had all but broken down. The men had been heroic, they had been defeated, many had been killed and the survivors reviled by their allies, especially the French, for their lack of victories. When he saw his careful plans sabotaged by rivals and botched by fools, Orlov had despaired.

  He left the gay party as early as he dared, dismissed his driver and walked, slipping and even falling on the snow and thin ice. It was around five o’clock, the time at which thousands of men left the vast, barrack-like offices of the government to make their way home. They were for the most part middle-aged or more, stooped from a lifetime at their desks, subdued by the interminable waiting for dead men’s shoes, but each according to his rank wearing the splendid uniform prescribed by Tsar Peter the Great, with the imperial eagle on every button.

  The small roads were quiet; people were afraid of deserted corners and preferred the safety of crowded avenues. Voices from the distant streets, muffled and distorted, echoed through the cold air and across the watery spaces of the city. A young woman was screaming ‘Pavlusha! Where are you? Come out, it’s not a game!’ He heard the thin young calls of ‘Down with the government!’ answered with ‘Power to the Soviets!’ Lowing like cattle, the resonant voices of working men chanted, ‘Cabbage, porridge – our life is hopeless.’

  As he approached the bridge over the little Moika river he saw a gang of gaunt and ragged men burst suddenly from a side street on the far bank. As he passed below a street light the first was clearly hiding something under his coat as he fled. After them came two young boys, then older men, and finally women, a small and infuriated crowd, with four men of the city police in an automobile behind them, but too late to prevent the marauders scattering with their prize.

  ‘Looters! Why don’t the police shoot them?’

  ‘Is that all? I thought they were German spies.’ Gasping for breath, the pursuers gathered on a street corner.

  ‘What did they get?’ Orlov demanded of the boy who had led the chase, a child with a shrivelled, monkey face who, when he spoke, seemed much older than his size suggested.

  ‘Our boots, Sir.’ Two tears fell from his eyes. He smeared them aside with a grimy hand. ‘All we had in the shop. They just came in and took them. My mother will kill me. She only left us for a minute.’

  ‘Only a Jewish shop.’ People drifted away, feeling the cold after their exertion.

  ‘God save the Tsar! Beat the Jews!’

  ‘Right! God save the Tsar!’

&nb
sp; He gave the snivelling child a coin and continued on his way. A few hundred yards further on, near to Rimsky-Korsakov Street, the deep silence of wealth prevailed. He had formed the habit of visiting his son here every evening, not only because he craved as Tata did the reassurance of a foreign presence in the governess, but also, in those dangerous days, because his only offspring had become acutely dear to him. When he was alone and thought he could feel death breathing on the back of his neck, Orlov craved company and the sight of his child.

  ‘Papa,’ his son greeted him, ‘you must tell Charlotte not to cheat when she plays Lotto with me. I have thought about it a lot today. I know Mamasha cheated but I don’t think it’s right that a governess should cheat, do you?’

  The nurserymaid took Orlov’s coat with its high sable collar and brought slippers which bore his family arms in petit point. ‘But this is a grave allegation, Kolya. May I ask how you know Charlotte is cheating?’

  ‘She always wins, Papa, she must be cheating.’

  A suppressed smile hovered at the corners of the governess’s small mouth as she resumed her seat at the opposite side of the hearth. The little family had taken to living in the morning room, a pleasant chamber at the rear of the ground floor, the chairs protected by slipcovers of fresh blue and green cotton.

  ‘I am not cheating, Kolya, I told you before. I’ve just stopped letting you win, that’s all. You’re seven years old now, you could beat me if you tried.’

  The child glowered at her. Kolya was a fine boy, fleshy, sturdy, round-faced, with curly hair and a mouth like a Cupid’s bow. His eyelids curved decisively, so the upper edge of the iris of each eye was always obscured, giving him a baleful look. ‘You made my armour wrong,’ he accused her in a sulky voice.

  ‘I know you don’t like your armour, but the poem says “damascened gold armour wrought by a cunning Saracen”, and that’s what I made you.’

  Discarded in the corner lay a breastplate and greaves of card, painted yellow and elaborately decorated with black ink cross-hatching to look like Moorish filigree. ‘Why, it’s magnificent armour, Kolya. Don’t you like it?’ Orlov found the helmet under a chair and held it up to admire the work. ‘Saladin himself would have been grateful to have such a skilled armourer.’ He noticed Charlotte blush.

  ‘It isn’t like the picture in the book.’ Kolya was fascinated by one of Pushkin’s fables. ‘The Son of Wise Oleg’. It was a morbid story, concerning a warrior prince who banished his beloved horse after a wizard prophesied that the animal would be his death. ‘Look, Papa, in the picture Oleg has chain mail.’

  ‘That’s quite likely, chain mail was a Saracen invention. But damascened decoration is inlaid, and that can’t be done on mail. So here I think the illustrator is at fault, not your governess. And why do you suppose we call it damascened?’

  The child’s keen eyes searched his face for clues. ‘Oh, I know! From Damascus. Read, Papa, read it again, please!’

  ‘Won’t you read it to me tonight?’

  Reluctantly, the boy reached for the book, but Charlotte said, ‘Our little prince is worn out this evening. In the park today he was unhorsed in his pursuit of the ruthless hordes and wounded in both knees.’

  ‘I hope his wounds were borne bravely.’

  ‘I did not shed one tear, Papa. Don’t listen to Charlotte, she always lies.’

  ‘You must speak of your governess with respect, Kolya. If you want me to read to you, you must apologize to her first.’

  The house had acquired a new atmosphere under the hand of the English governess. Without Lydia’s careless extravagance to disorder things, with the most ostentatious rooms closed, and the war forcing a new way of life on the city, the whole household had an air of bourgeois industry which amused Orlov immensely because his mistress would have scorned it.

  The dacha which he had settled on Lydia had become a convalescent home for servicemen, and almost all the staff had been sent to tend the patients. All but two of the horses had also been placed at the service of the wounded heroes, but in exchange Charlotte had surprised him by asking for a cow, a milkmaid and some chickens. He had laughed, thinking of her as a bluestocking, not knowing that her anxious mother in London had written to advise such measures, and not foreseeing that her practical request would prove so wise.

  The animals now lived in luxury in the stables and gave the household enough milk and eggs to spare. In the hot house the orchids had been packed into a dim corner, and melons, tomatoes, cucumbers and marrows grew in large pots. The remaining servants, to whom such prudence was almost witchcraft, looked upon the governess with superstitious respect.

  While he was reading, Charlotte heard a tap at the door and stepped into the corridor, where the kitchenmaid stood in frightened defiance, twisting her apron in her reddened fists.

  ‘Ma’am, I can’t go again, please don’t ask me to. I’m not shirking, honest I’m not, just don’t ask me to go again.’

  ‘Go where, you silly girl?’

  ‘For sugar, Ma’am. Cook says I must go and my boots won’t stand up to it, I swear they won’t. Those hours of waiting in the snow and rain. They’re splitting as it is, Ma’am …’

  ‘But Lena, we must have sugar. How will we make tea without it?’

  ‘Oh …’ The girl’s dull eyes were vexed with the effort of thought. ‘I don’t know, Ma’am, it didn’t come to my mind to ask.’

  ‘Go again tomorrow, Lena, and when you come back we will send your boots to be mended. How’s that?’

  ‘But Ma’am…’

  ‘I can’t send Mischa with you again. He’s too old, it will surely kill him.’

  ‘Oh but I’m so feared to go by myself, Ma’am.’ Stolid as her nature was, the girl was working herself into hysterics. ‘Must I go? Can’t it be Ilze’s turn again …’

  ‘That wouldn’t be fair, now would it? Perhaps, though, you and Ilze could both go. It will mean more suffering in one way, but you will be able to keep your courage up better if you are together. Send Ilze to me and I’ll explain. And suggest to Cook that she sends to inquire of our neighbours – maybe a man will be going from their houses – you’d feel safer then, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘Oh, Ma’am, bless you …’ The girl darted forward and kissed Charlotte’s hand. ‘You’re so wise and good, Ma’am. I don’t know where we would all be without you.’

  ‘What was that about?’ Orlov appeared in the doorway. Wan and careworn as his face had become in the past months, she still considered him a fine-looking man, especially in his dress uniform. He looked amused, which he seldom did now. She knew that he thought her ridiculous for talking reasonably to the servants when to be shouted at was what they needed.

  ‘Run along, Lena.’ The girl, who had been gawping fearfully at their master, curtsied and waddled away, her square hips shimmying in agitation. ‘The younger maids take it in turns to queue. Lena is going for sugar for us in the morning and she didn’t want to go, that’s all.’

  ‘Did I hear something about boots?’

  ‘You did, but that’s not the real reason. The queue for sugar forms earlier and earlier, there are people there before dawn, and she’s afraid to go out in the dark. And when the post boy called this morning, he stirred them all up downstairs with stories of another bread riot last night.’ Charlotte did not consider it proper to elaborate. On her way to the last sugar queue, the nurserymaid had been set upon and raped by a group of rioters and Lena feared the same fate.

  ‘Tell her not to be afraid, I’ll send someone over.’ Orlov indicated the slumped figure of his son in the corner of a chair. ‘You were right, he’s exhausted. Shall I carry him up?’

  ‘Why certainly. How good you are to us.’ Apart from Mischa the groom, who was elderly and half crippled from a knee kicked to fragments in his youth, the household was entirely female, and Kolya was not a light child.

  The nurserymaid dressed the sleepy boy in his nightshirt and put him to bed. Orlov kissed his forehead, and returned to the
morning room to sit with Charlotte by the stove. She would not light the fire, since fuel was scarce, supplies sent from the Orlov estates were often stolen by bandits, and the fire’s heat was negligible beside the warmth of the stove.

  ‘The boy brought us a letter from Madame this morning, although the postmark is September in France.’ She passed him the single page, covered in an angular scrawl, barely decipherable. ‘You’ll see she says she is still in bed. I fear for her so much. From her letters, she has hardly had a week of good health in the past year.’

  ‘She is well cared for, Charlotte, and in a healthy climate. We can’t do anything to help her here in Petersburg. You worry too much.’

  ‘I’m sure she is suffering because you and Kolya are apart from her …’

  Orlov smiled, thinking that the Englishwoman, all gentleness and fidelity herself, was imputing her own high motives to Lydia. To him, the letter was nothing but hysterical self-pity. He imagined Lydia reclining on her terrace above the Mediterranean, eating candy and sipping lemonade in the sunshine, quite oblivious to the fate of her friends in Russia who were in real danger of freezing or starving to death.

  Orlov thought of how Lydia would scoff to see him gossiping in common comfort with a governess, contemplating with satisfaction the slippers she had embroidered for him. She was now working a cover for a footstool, and he would often stay with her for several hours, half reading a book. The two of them might for all the world be some minor provincial bureaucrat and his wife.

  Curiosity about an underling, especially a female, was alien to the Prince’s way of life. His own household was administered by a steward and he did not expect to hear anything of his servants’ personal affairs. The governess was different. Her status was that of an independent employee rather than a serf, but what had stimulated his interest in her was the difference in his son and in their home once Charlotte had control of them.

  Lydia had squabbled with her staff; dismissals and departures were frequent, screaming tirades a daily occurrence. Items were often lost, so there had been many accusations of theft. Things were damaged, repairs never done properly. Fires went out, palms withered, the horses went lame.