City of Silence (City of Mystery)
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City of Silence
City of Mystery, Book 3
By Kim Wright
To my friend and editor, Kabee Kokenes, and to my friend and publicist,
Sandy Culver Plemmons, who each provide so much support
Prologue
June 13, 1889
The Winter Palace
St. Petersburg, Russia
3:02 AM
The room is dark as she enters, but this does not alarm her. Katya Gorbunkova has gone down this marble staircase many times, while wearing feathered masks, great looping headscarves, costumes of every imaginable shape and size. From memory, she knows that the staircase leading from the performers’ level onto the stage of the Grand Ballroom has precisely thirty-four steps. She knows that the walls are robin blue, and the ceiling above her is dome shaped, with the pearlized sheen of an eggshell. The Russians love eggs - those symbols of rebirth, fertility, and spring. In the city of St. Petersburg, these humble oval shapes of the barnyard find their way into even the grandest architectural designs. The tsar’s private theater is no exception.
The staircase could be notoriously difficult to navigate, even under the best of circumstances, for this theater, just as every other room in the Winter Palace, was designed more for the delight of the imperial family than for the convenience of their household staff. And each night when the curtain fell, even a prima ballerina became no more than a servant. Katya owed her livelihood and her life to the continuing good will of the tsar, a man who, despite a hulking frame which had earned him the nickname “the bear,” was in many ways a benevolent patron of the arts. Her life here in the palace might not be perfect, but it was an emphatic improvement over her first eighteen years on earth and she was not inclined to jeopardize that position.
In fact, the only thing which would entice her to take this present risk was the chance to be alone with Yulian.
It was ridiculous, really, that they should have to meet like this. She had her room, and he had his, both in the same wing of this monstrous 900-room palace, each tucked at the ends of halls so long that staring down then sometimes afflicted newcomers with vertigo. But her dance master was an unsympathetic sort, preoccupied with rehearsals for his upcoming ballet, and unlikely to be charmed with the news that the girl he had cast as Juliet had slipped from her room in the middle of the night to meet the boy he had cast as Romeo.
The ballet would be presented in honor of Tchaikovsky himself, soon to return to St. Petersburg after a triumphant tour of the capitals of Europe. Did the tsar truly admire music or dance? It was impossible to say. He had been caught snoring in the middle of more than one performance. But he was undeniably pleased by the thought that a Russian composer had been feted in Paris and Vienna and Rome, and so a grand ball was being planned for the occasion, despite the fact it would fall in the wretchedly unfashionable month of June and would thus require the nobility to delay their sojourn to their summer homes in the countryside. The ball would feature highlights from all of Tchaikovsky’s major works, including a brief passage from his “Romeo and Juliet,” played by the St. Petersburg symphony and danced, at least in part, by Katya and Yulian.
Of course they had fallen in love. Of course. At this very minute, across the great span of the globe, in cities large and small, Juliets are busily falling in love with Romeos. The dance master should not have been so surprised, should not have been caught so ludicrously unaware. But when he’d learned the truth he had thundered that he was running a ballet school, not a brothel, and had ordered that Katya – still a virgin - should be kept separate from the equally unfallen Yulian. They were escorted from their cell-like rooms to rehearsals in this grand theater and then escorted back. Even to plan this nighttime meeting had required not only daring on both their parts, but the assistance of any number of their fellow students and the minor ranks of teachers.
She was eighteen, he a year younger. They had come from far-flung provinces where a roasted chicken and a sack of potatoes was cause for celebration. How could they not lose themselves in the moment? How could they not believe that Shakespeare’s story had been written precisely for them?
And such are the circumstances which have brought Katya Gorbunkov now to this marble staircase in the middle of an egg-shaped room in the grandest palace of the world, at just past three in morning. She knows the time because the bell in the tower of the tsar’s private chapel has just struck. The chimes reverberate through the night air and everyone within the palace stirs, from emperor to scullery maid.
Katya’s foot, delicate and highly arched, leaves the thirty-third step and dangles for a moment above the thirty-fourth. The room, she has realized in the course of her descent, is not as absolutely unlit as she first assumed. Her eyes have now started to adjust, her pupils expanding to take in a nebulous sort of light. The capital of St. Petersburg is high. It sits on the Baltic Sea, more Scandinavian that Russian, and in the summer there is a persistent soft glow, a sense of a sun that never sets, a sky that never fully darkens. Even at this hour, a faint rose-gray floats through the windows, and as the light grows, she sees him. Her lover, her Yulian and her Romeo.
He is lying on the floor. He has taken up the pose of the final scene.
For in their choreographed death, the lovers are to sink into the shape of a heart. Their feet come together in the bottommost point, their bodies arch out to form the curves, their hands strain down towards each other to make the final indention at the top. The perfect symmetry of the shape is not visible to anyone watching from the level of the floor. Only those in the balcony, looking down, can catch the full effect of the pose. Much of dance is like that, Katya thinks, pausing as she at last reaches the bottom of the staircase, waiting there to allow her eyes a few more moments to adapt. Even the waltzes require bizarre and tortured shapes from the women – leaning away from their partners, arching their backs and raising their chins. The very unnaturalness of the position is designed so that they might show their faces to the royalty sitting above them on the balconies. It is not enough to be pretty. One must be pretty when one is looked down upon, when one is under the consideration of her superiors, those gazing upon her from an exalted height. The idea of the lovers dying in the shape of a heart is contrived, overly sentimental, but Katya’s dance master claims that the Romanovs like such things. They do not require realism. In fact, they disdain it. They are not in the least troubled by the fact that even the most devoted lovers do not customarily die in the shape of a heart.
And it is here, on the last step of the grand staircase, that Katya sees the man.
Not her lover. Yulian lies before her, curved on the floor. He is but a boy, after all, and his youth is clearest when he is immobile, his chin unshaven and his ribs as insubstantial as those of a pheasant on a plate.
No, she sees the other man. The bad one, the dark one, the man that all girls know somewhere exists.
As the truth of the situation sinks into her, a British girl might scream, or a French one, an American or German, even a princess of the far east. They might struggle, bite, or kick, but Ekaterina Gorbunkoya, known as Katya to her family and friends, possesses a fatalism so profound that it does not occur to her to fight. She looks around her and considers her limited options. This theater, she knows, has been designed to contain sound, not release it. They are in the performance wing of the palace, which is deserted at night. There is likely no one with a hundred rooms of this place. An egg is much like a coffin, she reflects, a container that can transport one between life and death and back again. There is nothing surprising in any of this. A forbidden affair has come to a predictable end. Yulian has only briefly preceded her to the place where we all must someday go.
The man who is coming towards her, his hands gloved, his face swathed in cloth, has placed Yulian at the exact point on the broad stage where the lovers are supposed to die. He knows the show, Katya realizes. He is part of the company and she twists in his arms to see his face. It is not a desire to outrun death that prompts her to turn against him like this, but more a curiosity. A reflexive and futile effort in these final moments to know her assailant.
He has a knife. Of course. The weapon of peasants, the weapon of kings. It comes fast. And then she is on the floor too, placed carefully, her blood smearing the black and white tile as she is dragged into position. There is a sense of something burning in her chest but, beyond that, surprisingly little pain. Just a great numbness, the impression that one is dissolving, fading mist-like into the beginning of a summer morning. She stretches her hand. Touches Yulian’s cool fingertip with her own.
The man with the knife is one of us, she thinks. He knows the story. Juliet dies last.
Chapter One
London - The Lawns of Windsor Palace
June 13, 1889
2:29 PM
The Queen was not pleased.
Her Most Royal Highness Victoria of the House of Hanover, monarch of the United Kingdom and Empress of India, might have been regent to the largest, richest, and most powerful empire of the civilized world – but she was also a grandmother. The impulse to protect beat strong in her chest, especially when it came to Alix, who, of the Queen’s thirty-four grandchildren, had always been her favorite.
And it seemed that Alix was determined to go to Russia.
The problem was that Alix’s request appeared so reasonable on the surface. Her older sister Ella had lived in Russia ever since she married the Grand Duke Serge four years earlier. In her letters Ella claimed that life in St. Petersburg was quite delightful - full of balls, hunts, and a continual enjoyment of the fine arts. She was even making noises about converting to Russian Orthodoxy, a threat that the Queen could only assume to be some sort of bizarre joke.
But Ella was the sort who would always pretend that everything was fine, no matter what the actual truth of a situation might be. A whistler in the dark, adaptable and confident, a girl who knew how to muddle through even in the midst of the most appalling cultural barriers. Alix was only sixteen and different in every way from her sister. Besides, even if she were not, Victoria would have opposed Ella’s plan to bring Alix to St. Petersburg for the summer.
The real problem, of course, was Nicky.
Ella might say she was merely inviting her little sister to enjoy a grand ball at the Winter Palace, some celebration in honor of a Russian composer, a man with one of those long, ridiculously unpronounceable Russian names. Ella might say that she only wanted to play hostess in her lavish suite of rooms, to enchant Alix with the endless light of St. Petersburg in June. But the Queen was no fool. She saw behind the charmingly-stated request of Ella’s effusive letter, which had begun with “Darling Granny” and ended with “Your Most Devoted Ella,” each phrase written in Ella’s large swooping handwriting, a penmanship so distinctive that the Queen had known the author of the missive before she had broken the seal on the envelope. No, it was quite clear that Ella did not merely want to show off a Russian composer or the vastness of the Winter Palace – this visit was all part of her plan to bring Alix into the intricately webbed world of the Romanov royal family, to align the girl with Nicholas II, the young tsesarevich, a man who would someday rule a kingdom far larger than Victoria’s.
Even if that kingdom did exist almost exclusively of frozen tundra, vodka, and illiterate peasants.
An alliance between the Romanovs and the Hanovers was not without precedent. Alix and Nicky had, after all, first met at the very wedding of Ella and Serge, her sister and his uncle. At the time he had been sixteen and she, merely twelve. Why a boy of his age would have noticed a girl of hers was beyond the Queen’s capacity to imagine, but notice her he most certainly had, and the two children had since engaged in an unlikely but apparently quite persistent correspondence. Alix had confided to her grandmother that she felt warmly for Nicky; for a girl of Alix’s calm and careful temperament this was the equivalent of someone like Ella leading a parade.
The Queen’s first impulse had been to recoil at the news. She had already lost one granddaughter to those barbarous lands of the east and did not intend to offer up another. One can only, after all, throw so many pearls before swine, can only watch so many English roses be trampled under Cossack boots. But another part of Victoria, the part who answered to “darling Granny,” had been more alarmed than angered by Alix’s shy declaration of love.
Victoria was propped in her padded chair on the rolling lawns of Windsor with her large, deep eyes focused on Alix, who sat some distance away, reading a book whose title the Queen could not quite decipher. This was no surprise. Alix was always reading. At first, appropriate books of the Queen’s own choosing, but as of lately, who could tell? Alix was fluent in four languages, as were most of the royal grandchildren, but there were times when Victoria regretted that she had been quite so rigorous in her instructions regarding their education, especially the girls. This modern necessity of speaking multiple tongues may have been exaggerated; upon deeper reflection it had occurred to the Queen that any words which could not be said in English were perhaps best not spoken at all. The Queen’s own French was spotty, her German half-forgotten, her Russian non-existent. Therefore, she could never be quite sure what any of the children were reading in her presence. She might possibly have bred a nest of vipers within her own family.
Ella and Alix had been among the seven children born to Victoria’s daughter Alice, who had been married to the Grand Duke of Hesse, a tranquil but admittedly rural and somewhat backward section of Germany. From the start, Alice’s family had seemed marked for tragedy. When Alix, the fifth in line, was merely a year old, her older brother Frittie had tumbled from a window onto the stone patio below. He appeared to come through miraculously well, with only the predictable lumps and scratches, but shortly afterward had died from internal bleeding, a relentless seepage of his life force that the German doctors had been helpless to stem. It was a profoundly unfortunate event which had given rise to even more profoundly unfortunate speculation: That the royal family of England might carry the dreaded disease of hemophilia, a curse most often passed from mother to son, with the women being carriers but rarely victims.
So poor little Frittie had bled to death, slowly and in agony, and Alice had never been the same. Although she had gone on to bear another child, a daughter named May, the loss of her son left Alice anxious and diminished. When a wave of cholera swept through her family five years later, carrying away little May with it, Alice had no fight left in her. She eventually succumbed to the disease as well, leaving her grief-stricken husband and royal mother in charge of her five surviving children.
Victoria took a vigorous interest in the lives of all of her grandchildren, but had always had a special soft spot for Alice’s motherless brood. Ella, Alix, their sisters Irene and Vickie and brother Ernest had spent all their summers at Windsor with the Queen and she had grown exceptionally fond of Alix, whose nickname of ”Sunny” was deeply ironic. For ever since her mother’s death, Alix had been a somber, serious child, lost in her books. Unlikely to be talked into or out of anything.
The Queen was of split mind about what to do next, an unusual state for her and one she found unpleasant. On one hand, a correspondence between two youngsters, even one which had endured over four years of separation, was hardly the basis of a royal engagement. Most likely they were more in love with the idea of each other than anything else. But on the other hand, the Queen knew her granddaughter’s temperament –gentle on the surface but with a ribbon of steel underneath. To simply forbid the girl to continue to write the boy would only turn him into an even more highly desired prize. Darling Granny would
have to be far more cunning than that. She would have to devise some way that would make it seem as if the severance of the bond was the girl’s idea. Or perhaps the boy’s. Certainly not the result of squabbling between their two families. The Queen most emphatically did not wish to cast Alix and Nicky into an imperial version of Romeo and Juliet. No matter where or how it was staged, that story never seemed to end well.
A servant offered her tea, but Victoria turned her chin away in refusal. Her ladies in waiting were doing just that, waiting in various pleasant situations about the lush green lawn, some of them reading or holding needlework, others sipping tea, a few more on their feet and wandering about, presumably in search of flowers to press into volumes. Victoria had been queen for the entirety of her adult life, since she was barely older than Alix, and one of the distinct but rarely mentioned advantages of her position was that a queen was never required to look busy. She need not poke needles with bright threads through cloth or pretend to read books that did not interest her or make a great fuss of drinking tea that she does not crave. The utter absence of distraction, the endless opportunity to bob within the pool of her own thoughts, had throughout the years turned Victoria into a bit of a mystic.
For if one was granted the privilege and the patience to simply sit for hour after hour, interesting images begin to arise. The Queen’s gaze moved down the bright lawn and settled again on the still form of Alix, perched in the grass beneath a tree and possibly the only one of all the ladies present who was actually reading the book she held in her hands. The Queen felt a discomfort inside, a slight lurching of the heart, at the sight of the child’s sweet face. The continuing stability of her monarchy – indeed all of Europe – demanded that Victoria give up her daughters and granddaughters into marriage with foreign husbands, but these were decisions she always made reluctantly. Sacrificial lambs, the girls were, brokered into unions that were rarely of their own choosing, packed off and shipped about the continent as if they were bolts of cloth. Although they wore diamonds around their necks and slept in high soft beds, it seemed to Victoria that the women of royal families were little more in control of their destinies than the serfs of Russia.