He raised an eyebrow. She loved the way he always did that, just a bit, when he was about to make a request. ‘I thought I might dine out with my dear old boy from the City Duma, tonight, since you won’t be there? I know you find him dull…’
Sitting up straighter herself, Inna wrapped the pretty lace peignoir he’d given her on her birthday about herself and reached for the teacup. ‘Of course, darling,’ she said with a smile (using the English word for ‘darling’, which she knew made him laugh). ‘You’ll have a lovely time talking politics together. Much better without me.’
Monsieur Shreider, the white-bearded mayor of Petrograd – and Horace’s client, who, like all of them, must be wined and dined every now and then – was a decent man, she knew: full of solid, good-hearted, bourgeois virtues, and a mine of information. But she did find him dull: not just because of his clunking gallantry (all those toasts to ‘the ladies, God bless ’em!’) but also because of his wartime talk about turning more factories over to make munitions, and the corruption of the big tycoon class, and the rest of it. And she couldn’t abide the restaurant they went to either. These days Sadko’s was all profiteers and red plush and beefsteaks and too much dark wine and brandy. It was characteristically sensitive of her husband to spare her. She wrapped her hands round the delicate china of the cup and breathed in the steam, scented with heady Assam leaves (she’d developed very English tea-drinking habits, too, since marrying Horace).
‘I particularly want to see him…’ Horace was saying as he leaned over to kiss the top of her head: an affectionate, low-key gesture. She felt his lips on her hair. ‘… because there were such extraordinary new rumours at the club last night. Shreider’s my most political client, and I would like to find out if there’s any truth in any of it.’
Inna sipped. She was aware of his slight tension but not especially worried, because there were always rumours. Of course there were. Russia had been at war with Germany and Austria for more than two years. The generals were hopeless, and the Germans were advancing. The Great Retreat last year, as the foe moved forward, meant the city was now packed with hundreds of thousands of extra angry, hungry people: deserters from the army (the men who’d refused to go into battle without boots or guns), the limbless (the ones who hadn’t refused), and the landless (the peasants whose villages were now in German hands). They joined the jobless (the former workers of all the factories not making munitions) massing in the streets. With so many people in town, starving so near the plutocrats and wartime profiteers, and with the papers censored so hard that they conveyed none of the reality, rumours were only to be expected.
If it wasn’t rumours, it was singing: while the destitute marched angrily through the streets, the poor who still had something left to lose complained through song. All the doormen at the Youssoupoff palace, all the salesmen on Nevsky and all the urchins in the gutter were, this week, singing the same sarcastic song, putting words in the mouths of the spoiled city rich, who were getting richer while they starved:
‘We do not take defeat amiss,
And victory gives us no delight;
The source of all our cares is this:
Can we get vodka for tonight?’
There’d be a different snide, hateful song next week, Inna thought, because the government was as hopeless as the generals. Beyond patriotically changing the German-sounding city name of St. Petersburg to the more Russian-sounding Petrograd, back when hostilities started (the German embassy had been ransacked, too, and German Christmas trees burned), and beyond silencing criticism in the newspapers, what had any ministers achieved? It had been left to good-hearted individuals to set up a bit of a hospital here, or organize some charity supplies to the soldiers there, because no one official was doing anything. Not that it was all the ministers’ fault, either, since, while the Emperor was off at military headquarters, making a mess of running the war, the Empress had been here in the city, making a mess of running the country. She’d been dissolving parliaments – they’d had three Dumas in just a few years; a fourth one was sitting now – and banning papers and people, and changing ministers every few days or weeks, till no one knew who was in charge of what, or why, and everyone just whispered, all the time, trying to make sense of things.
Sometimes people said the Empress was interfering so destructively in government on purpose, to weaken Russia, because she was German, and, to her, the Kaiser was Cousin Willy. Because, secretly, she wanted the Germans to win.
How confusing everything was. Inna put her cup down, rubbed her eyes and stretched, letting her descending arm sweep down Horace’s head and back. Horace called her his Sleeping Beauty on these late Friday mornings. She’d sleep again when he’d gone, as she’d need to be fresh for the hospital tonight; because it was only then that she was confronted with the disturbing misery of outside.
Inna often felt pleased she didn’t have to look too hard into the swirling darkness outside any more, or try too hard to understand what was going on, or plan several anxious moves ahead, now that she had the dusty calm of this rented flat to retreat into, and the safety of her husband’s foreign name. And, of course, there was kind, knowledgeable, unflappable Horace, who would always keep them both out of trouble, and who thought every problem through so intelligently that they could live without fear, or as close to it as anyone could hope for nowadays. Horace had held her close in the night, last night as so often, tenderly attentive to her body’s needs; and she’d felt the protective softness she always did when she heard his groan of pleasure at the end, when his breath eased as he held her and whispered about love. Horace knew everything, from how to deal with the authorities to when not to make love to avoid having a baby. This was marriage: shelter from the storm; a warm cushioned nest; this great, shared kindness. Horace would look after her, however frightening the world beyond their door. Horace would keep her safe.
‘There are always rumours,’ she said now, picking up the toast and nibbling at the nearest edge.
‘But this one was about people we know. They’re saying Felix Youssoupoff is planning to assassinate Rasputin.’
Inna didn’t stop eating, although she felt uncomfortable even hearing that name. The Rasputin who was written about so scandalously in the papers all the time in 1916 seemed nothing like the commonsensical Father Grigory she’d known long ago. But, she thought – letting her mind slide away from wondering how Father Grigory had become so different, because the man he was now had no place in her comfortable life with Horace – people do change. She certainly had: she’d become sleek and loved and well cared for.
Their paths had diverged, but she’d heard a lot about Rasputin over the years. People claimed that the Empress was flailing about in the dangerous way she was because she was so under his influence. They said he knew secret country ways of easing the inherited blood sickness her little boy suffered from: gessenskaya bolezn’, the Hessen disease; her German family’s curse on Russia. So the Empress couldn’t say no to Rasputin. And perhaps it was Rasputin, more than the Empress, who wanted the constant change, the leapfrog of ministers, because he was evil, and corrupt, and hell-bent on the utter destruction of everything.
Not all of what Inna had read and heard was bad. Inna had privately rather liked the argument that had made Rasputin so unpopular with the aristocracy back on the eve of the war: that he was opposed to fighting over the Balkans. He’d apparently told the Empress for years that it would never be worth shedding a single Russian peasant’s blood to protect other, lesser Slavs living under Austrian rule. But he hadn’t been around to dissuade the Emperor from rushing to war with all the patriots of Europe in the summer of 1914 after that assassination in the Balkans.
Rasputin hadn’t been around because he’d been in hospital in Siberia, fighting for his life.
That was the moment Inna had stopped being able to understand Rasputin’s strange and frightening story, beyond knowing that it was not for the person she was becoming.
Rasputin had bee
n in hospital in Siberia, fighting for his life, because he’d been stabbed in the gut by a religious maniac. The maniac was a syphilitic woman with no nose, a follower of his religious enemy, Iliodor, who’d run after him with a bread knife. Afterwards she was locked up (though Iliodor somehow got papers and left Russia for America; people said the secret police had helped him go).
Rasputin had told people the war might never have happened if he had been well enough to talk to the Emperor, in person. But he was too late. By the time he came back to Petrograd, months later, bitter, ghost-white, with black-ringed eyes, the war was already raging. That was when he seemed to have changed. He’d taken up women, they said: street women, society women, gypsies, orgies … And drink, because, as he took to growling in the restaurants he spent his nights in, ‘Why not? I am a man like any other.’
Perhaps he was drinking to suppress his fear – fear of the murder plots that the police only ever seemed to foil at the eleventh hour, the bombs, the poisoners and the cars poised to crash into him. But he was a nasty drunk, who got into fights in restaurants. And he was always drunk.
Inna didn’t believe all the things the papers said, even now, from inside the silken cocoon she inhabited. She wasn’t sure, for instance, that she really believed that this new, bribe-taking, malicious, whoring, Madeira-swilling Rasputin dined so regularly with a Jewish banker known to spy for Germany. But still, as people were always saying, there’s no smoke without fire.
And now the latest rumour going around Horace’s club was that Prince Felix Youssoupoff had gone to the Duma building and told the parliament’s chairman that he and a group of friends were secretly planning to do away with Rasputin, thereby rescuing the Empress’s reputation and saving Russia from the revolution of discontent that her catastrophic friendship with Rasputin was threatening to bring about.
‘Felix actually asked the chairman to help, can you believe?’ Horace said. ‘And that absurd MP, the Jew-hating one, Purishkevich: he’s been in the Duma press room, too, sounding off about it. He’s been saying he’s going to help, and intoning, ‘Remember the date, brothers: the sixteenth of December.’ That’s next week! And: ‘We’re going to kill him like a dog.’ So not much of a secret! It was all anyone was talking about last night.
‘Of course the chairman said no, but apparently Felix has got a whole team of other helpers as well as Purishkevich. His friend’ – here Horace wiggled his eyebrows, to indicate the athletic grand duke who was Youssoupoff’s closest ally, Dmitry Pavlovich – ‘and some other officers, and, I heard, the English secret service team who live at the Astoria. Oh, and even his wife. The princess.’
Here Horace had the grace to look ashamed, and laugh in slight embarrassment. Inna smiled too. It sounded so absurd: Felix Youssoupoff’s wife?
‘All right, that part I’m not so sure about,’ he admitted. He let out a long sigh. ‘Well, it’s probably all just hot air.’
‘People say your Felix is scared of blood,’ Inna said cautiously. She didn’t want to belittle her husband’s worry, but how could he be taking such lurid talk seriously? She hoped that by recalling another popular rumour – that the prince, as a boy, had been so appalled by the blood that came out of the first and only rabbit he’d ever killed that he’d never touched a gun again – she could put Horace’s fears to rest.
Horace nodded. But the worry lines were still there, between his brows.
Inna put out a hand and laid it on his. She knew he was short of good commissions – the gangsters making fortunes from the war didn’t want miniature scenes from English life when they went to Fabergé, they wanted gold lumps and diamonds like hen’s eggs and pearls the size of fists, made into giant ropes of glitter to hang on their molls. And she’d seen how delighted he’d been when Felix Youssoupoff, who’d been away a lot with his wife since getting married, had placed a new order this autumn. Felix was recently back from his estates in the south, while his wife and their new baby daughter enjoyed the last of the Crimean warmth. He wanted to give them both a lavish Christmas gift of toiletry boxes decorated with flowing pre-Raphaelite nymphs in the manner of Rossetti and Millais. Inna remembered how encouraged Horace had been, and Fabergé had been pleased, too. Horace needed his prince.
‘You mustn’t worry,’ she said.
‘He’s still a wild boy, you know,’ Horace muttered. ‘Marriage hasn’t changed him.’
Inna could privately agree with that. She’d spotted Felix Youssoupoff herself, every now and then, on her Friday nursing trips to the hospital corner of his palace this autumn. He was still tall and elegant and disdainful: the last smart young man left in Petrograd not to be in some sort of uniform, fighting for the Motherland – which didn’t seem to embarrass him in the least. She disliked him, because, oh, he was vain. You could see that from the swashbuckling photograph of himself in Tatar fancy dress, fur-trimmed turban, daggers, jewels, the works, that he’d had hung at the entrance to the ballroom-cum-hospital for the nurses and doctors and dying men to contemplate.
Morality didn’t bother Felix Youssoupoff much, Inna thought now. He had graceful manners, and a lisping, clever way with words, and he always bowed politely to her, and exchanged a few pleasantries; but you knew straight away, from the shameless mockery in his eyes, that he was still the vicious child who’d played cruel jokes on servants. He hadn’t changed with marriage. He’d always been only interested in his own pleasures; he always would be. But you couldn’t imagine him ever actually doing anything.
Inna lifted her husband’s hand and kissed it. ‘Why are you worrying so?’ she asked curiously.
He made a small, uncomfortable sound: half laugh, half sigh. ‘Well, because of the silliest detail. Because of what I heard about how he was saying he’d do the murder.’
He paused, gathering words. She waited.
‘Do you remember that novel we all read a while back? The Silver Dove? The murder story with the evil peasant mystic?’
Inna nodded.
‘Well, in the book, you remember, the peasant offers his woman to the young gentleman, saying that the three of them will form a Holy Trinity and give birth to a Christ child who will save Russia. But then the peasant gets jealous, and gets his followers to murder the young gent instead?’
She nodded again, feeling suddenly uneasy too. ‘Well, a man at my club had it that Felix has got it into his head to borrow the plot of that book – but, of course, turn it upside down, so that it’s the peasant who gets murdered, not the gent. The idea being to lure Rasputin to his home by pretending to offer him his wife – and telling him they must form a sectarian Holy Trinity, and that Rasputin must father on the princess a Christ child, who will save Russia…’
‘He’d be excited … He’s vain enough to say yes,’ Inna said, almost to herself.
‘And then, once he’s in – well, we both know what happens next.’
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
When Inna left the hospital the next morning, her head was still full of the frightened boy she’d sat with for half the night, who hadn’t had the lucky escape he’d hoped for from the gangrene that had set in while the generals failed to get their wounded out. She was remembering the clutch of his hand, and the sobbing; the smell, which had only really turned her stomach after he’d gone; and the quiet answering anger in the eyes of the doormen, out in the hut at the courtyard gate, when she’d gone to say they’d need to move another body.
But as she came out on to the pretty embankment road by the ice-clagged Moika River, past the yellow-and-green palazzo façades, under a sky thick and low with unfallen snow, the rumour Horace had been talking about was also still with her.
So she wasn’t altogether surprised to realize that the man getting out of a motorcar on the otherwise empty road just up ahead was Father Grigory himself. It was just part of the unreality.
He was clearly still lost in the night before, just as she was. But his night had surely been different. He was holding unsteadily on to the door.
He was Rasputin in her mind, by now, more than Father Grigory. She recognized him from the pictures so often published with all the scandalous stories, rather than from her memories. What she saw, above the silver fox fur, was hair that was long, black and greasy, a matted, shaggy beard, and eyes that were deep-set and (as they were always described) piercingly, sinisterly blue. He was scowling and swaying.
He was drunk.
So this is what it looks like to have lost your innocence, Inna thought, staring with horrified fascination.
The virtuous wife she’d become should walk anonymously by. But now he was actually here, so near, she couldn’t resist the chance of one more conversation.
She started walking towards him.
He should have taken my advice and got away long ago, she was thinking, taking in the shaking hands, the pitted, blotched skin. Just look at him, and what he’s become.
‘Oho,’ he slurred, after a first startled glance at Inna. His tone, though vague, became jocular. ‘Whom do I see here?’
He had teeth missing, Inna noticed. She could smell the Madeira (so that part was true). She stopped just out of touching range, and bobbed her head.
‘Been a long time,’ he said, still holding on to the car door, but making an effort not to sway too much. ‘Many summers, many winters.’
She couldn’t help compassion creeping into her heart. The eyes in that ruined face, now gazing into hers, were still human.
Midnight in St. Petersburg Page 21