City of Silence (City of Mystery)

by Kim Wright

  “But how am I to pass a university student?” Davy protested. “I barely made it through my primaries.”

  “I assure you that is not a problem,” Mrs. Kirby said. “Cooper reports that his Russian students speak English quite well, but certainly not well enough to notice any nuances or errors in grammar that might betray your class.”

  It was a slap, but Davy took it without flinching. “Nonetheless,” he said with dignity, “it seems that Tom would be better suited for this assignment.”

  The same thought had occurred to Tom. “We had no idea we were expected to infiltrate a revolutionary group,” he said to Mrs. Kirby, with the sort of smile which generally won him ground with women of any age or temperament back in London. “It seems a lot to put solely onto Davy’s shoulders. Perhaps your spy, this Cooper chap, could claim to know two students –“

  “Elliott Cooper most certainly is not a spy,” Mrs. Kirby snapped. “The word implies an ongoing conflict between two nations and Russia and Great Britain are of course friends and allies. Cooper is…an observer. He listens and takes notes and reports to the Crown what he learns.” She frowned and replaced her glasses. “’Spy’ is a crude word, and one that no proud Englishman is willing to claim. And as for your duties,” she added, with a swift look to Tom, “you are the medical student posturing yourself as a doctor, are you not?”

  “I suppose I am,” Tom said coolly.

  “Then I have a quite different sort of challenge for you,” she said. “One involving such a personal and delicate matter that I trust you all will forgive me for not sharing it with the rest of the group. Shall you and I meet privately tomorrow to discuss the particulars?”

  “I most eagerly anticipate the event,” Tom said, turning to consider the clock on the mantle and trying to figure the difference in time between St. Petersburg and London. It was not yet a civilized hour to pour a cocktail in either city, but surely under the circumstances he could be forgiven for requesting something more bracing than tea.

  “Emma Kelly,” Mrs. Kirby continued briskly, for she was evidently immune to sarcasm and as deaf to conversational nuance as the Russian students she had mocked. “I take it your turf in this particular battle is the grand ballroom?”

  “Yes. I am to be instructed in the waltz by a man named Konstantin Antonovich.”

  “Something is up with that one,” Mrs. Kirby said. “Keep your eyes sharp. And learn what you can about another of his students, this petite little doll of a woman named Tatiana Orlov. She was there when they found the bodies of the ballet dancers and for some reason she felt compelled to disturb the tranquility of the Grand Duchess with the theory they had been murdered.”

  “But they had been murdered, had they not?” Trevor asked.

  “Almost certainly, but how would she know this? And why would she care? There was no reason for her to have been present at the investigation and even less reason for her to have engaged the Grand Duchess in conversation. I don’t like the Orlov woman. I don’t trust her. Oh, and her husband is a member of the tsar’s private guard.” Here Mrs. Kirby broke off and her face twisted with regret as she turned to Trevor and Rayley. “The private guard is the one area of the palace in which we have made no particular progress in our efforts to gather information. But perhaps now that the two of you are here and posing as Scotland Yard, we can rectify that oversight.”

  “We aren’t posing as Scotland Yard,” Rayley said sharply. In her systematic efforts to insult them all equally, Mrs. Kirby appeared to be a bit of a communist herself. “We are Scotland Yard.”

  “And now we have a question for you,” Trevor said quickly, before his friends could all rise as a group to maul the woman. She was inordinately tactless, but then again so was Ella. Did Russia coarsen women, he wondered, or was it that only the boldest of them ventured into this vast and incomprehensible land in the first place? If it were the latter, then the meek little Alix was in trouble. He could scarcely imagine the young girl he had met on the yacht functioning in this world which seemed, even in the first hours, one of the most confounding places he had ever seen.

  “I shall enlighten you if I can,” Mrs. Kirby replied, her tone clearly indicating she preferred asking questions to answering them.

  “Is the Grand Duchess Ella in danger?”

  The question, while being both the simplest and the most obvious one he could have asked, seemed to catch the woman off her guard. She sat for a moment staring down into her own lap.

  “Her husband,” she finally said, “is not affectionate.”

  Well, that was certainly an interesting tidbit of information, but Trevor failed to see how it applied to the matter at hand.

  “You mean he doesn’t value her?” Rayley ventured. For if Serge saw Ella as a mere trophy or as some sort of necessary diplomatic compromise, this could be good news. Victoria’s granddaughter might be more willing to flee her marriage than she appeared on the surface.

  “As I have written to the Queen, he is rumored to be a man of curious tastes,” Mrs. Kirby went on, actually blushing, which caused Rayley and Trevor to exchange yet another pointed look. Good God, they both seemed to be thinking, are we back in Paris again?

  “And you believe that the Queen understood what you meant by that phrase?” Rayley asked. Victoria may well have thought that the term “curious tastes” referred to the man’s butterfly collection or a passion for harpsichord music.

  “I cannot say.”

  “So the marriage is possibly in danger,” Trevor said slowly. “Which could be pertinent in the long run. But what I am asking you now is if you have any reason, any reason at all, to believe that Ella’s life may likewise be in danger.”

  “Of course not,” Mrs. Kirby said staunchly, once again rising to her feet, this time to indicate that their extraordinary briefing session was finally at its end. “The Russians will always be an eternal mystery to the British mind - prone to violence and hostage to the sort of emotions which leave us mercifully untouched. But they would never harm an Englishwoman, and certainly not the Queen’s granddaughter. Even they would stop short of that.”

  Chapter Nine

  The Streets of St. Petersburg

  June 19, 1889

  10:40 AM

  “Where are we going?” Alix asked Nicky. The rumblings of the carriage were so loud that she was forced to all but shout the words, which was unfortunate. She wished to appear feminine, dignified, and remote, not like a child shrieking questions.

  She had journeyed six days and more than a thousand miles to see him, but it had taken nearly as much effort to arrange this brief bit of time alone. Or at least relatively alone, for Emma and a stern-looking guard were wedged on the bench at the back of the carriage, staring straight ahead, while Alix and Nicky sat facing each other on the red velvet seats at the front. With a chaperone and a guard in attendance, and a noise level more suitable to a bull fight than a courtship, it was not the most perfect setting for romance, but a girl must seize her chances in whatever form they are offered.

  “I am taking you to the place where my grandfather was killed,” Nicky shouted back, with what appeared to be a reassuring nod. Or perhaps he was merely being jostled by the movement of the carriage.

  Emma could not help but overhear this exchange, and Nicky’s planned destination struck her as a most improbable choice. She peered out the window at the passing scenery, which was a jumble of people, animals, vehicles from various centuries, and shops, the chaotic nature of the city evident as once. There were all manner of citizens standing in the street, quite heedless of traffic, as well as others who were sitting squat on the sidewalks, smoking, drinking, and conversing. The carriage had slowed in acknowledgement of an inconveniently placed cart and the rattling inside diminished to the degree that she could more easily hear the rest of the conversation between Nicky and Alix.

  “My grandfather was a good man,” Nicky was saying. “I want to be a good man.”

  “But you are a good man,�
�� Alix said.

  The remark must have pleased him, for he flushed, but evidently Nicky had more to get off his slender chest. “The last time we had a ball at the palace,” he said, “it was the birthday of one of the girls who had been invited. Everyone wanted to dance with her. All the men, I mean. Of course it was the men who wanted to dance with her.”

  Alix nodded politely, as if this were a perfectly logical sequence of thought, to move from stories of ancestral murder to recollections of the latest grand ball.

  “And so I lined up with the others to take my turn,” Nicky said, “and later my father berated me.”

  Alix notably swallowed and Emma became abruptly aware that she was gaping at the two young lovers and turned her gaze back to the street. It was terribly wrong that they could not even have this brief exchange – nonsensical as it seemed to be – without witnesses, but then again she supposed that royalty never has true privacy and neither Alix nor Nicky seemed embarrassed by the presence of outsiders. To his credit, the guard wasn’t eavesdropping at all, but was rather focused on the action outside his own window, where the potato cart had now overturned and the vendor was waving at the carriage to wait while he scooped up his wares from the cobblestone street.

  “Why did he berate you?” Alix asked.

  The guard is worried, Emma thought, sensing the tension which moved throughout the man’s body. The overturned cart could be a ruse, some way to disrupt the progress of a carriage with the Romanov eagle painted so conspicuously on its side.

  “For standing in line with the others,” Nicky said. “Papa told me that the future tsar of Russia does not wait for anything. That if I am going to rule a great land that I must learn to take what I want. He said I should have walked directly up to the girl and claimed her, pulled her from the other men and led her to the dance floor.”

  The carriage began to move. Slowly, and swaying unevenly as it crushed the heaps of potatoes still in the street. Emma watched the infuriated face of the vendor slide from view as they passed.

  “Why do you tell me this?” asked Alix.

  Yes, thought Emma, shifting slightly as the guard settled back in the seat, why do you tell her this?

  “Not to make you jealous, my love,” Nicky said quickly, leaning towards Alix, bringing his head closer to hers. “It was a special day for the girl and I was simply trying to show her courtesy. I don’t even recall her name. I tell you this story only so you understand that I wish to be a tsar in the manner of my grandfather, and not my father. I wish to bring back something of the Winter Palace I remember as a boy, a place of elegance and compassion.”

  Elegance and compassion, Emma thought. Two unlikely qualities to mention in the same breath and it seemed, when one thought of it, that when elegance and compassion came together it added up to nothing more than basic good manners. How extraordinary that Nicky would so willingly confess that his father’s court lacked them.

  “And what I most need is a partner in this quest,” Nicky added, his body straining toward that of Alix. “I have prayed daily to God to bring me such a woman.”

  All in all it was a strange appeal for a young man to deliver to the girl he loved, Emma thought. No declaration of affection, no flattery or persuasion, and certainly not an attempt at an embrace. Sitting across from each other on the red cushions, it looked as if Nicky and Alix were playing chess, and they were, in a way. It was her move now.

  Alix might have found this to be a rather passionless sort of proposal, but, on the other hand, Emma supposed Nicky’s words might just as easily have warmed her heart. They were if nothing else a bold declaration that Nicky was taking her seriously as a potential consort, and Alix was by nature so solemn and bound to duty that she might actually be charmed by a rendezvous which began with a visit to the scene of an assassination. Certainly no one could accuse Nicholas Romanov of trying to misrepresent the challenges of his situation. It would be Alix’s situation too if she opted to be his wife, although Emma was still not entirely sure what form that Nicky’s elegant and compassionate empire would take. He could be speaking of bringing back the sort of reforms his martyred grandfather had sought for the serfs, or he might have been merely planning to reconfigure the dance protocol for royal balls. Either way, his words had made one thing quite clear: Nicky resented and feared his father as much as the rest of Russia.

  Alix had not yet answered.

  “This is it,” Nicky said abruptly as they rolled toward a bridge. “The very place where my grandfather was struck down.”

  “And are we to pause at the spot?” Emma quietly asked the guard. “To allow the tsesarevich and the princess to pay their respects?”

  He did not turn away from the window to look at her as he answered, his shoulder so twisted that she could barely see past it to the pale gray world beyond.

  “This carriage makes no stops,” he said.

  The Streets of St. Petersburg

  10:53 AM

  Had Emma crooked her neck a little further she might have noticed, at a cafe sidewalk on the far side of the infamous bridge, Davy Mabrey sitting with his cap pulled low over his forehead, deep in conversation with the man named Elliott Cooper, the professorial assistant with ties to the Volya.

  “This is a significant place in the city,” Cooper was saying, gesturing toward the bridge. “I’ve always found it odd that the lads would choose to meet so close to the spot where Alexander II was killed, but they’re strangely sentimental for a group of revolutionaries. Or strangely superstitious is perhaps more like it.”

  Davy studied the bridge, which looked precisely like the seven others they had crossed on their journey from the university to this workaday part of the city and took a cautious sip of his coffee. Turkish, Cooper had called it, and it was black and bitter on his tongue. “But that was better than eight years ago, wasn’t it, Sir?”

  “True, but they still look upon it as their finest hour.” While Davy had been taking in impressions of his surroundings, Cooper had been taking impressions of Davy and he added, “You shall pass well enough as a former student from my time teaching in a British boarding school.”

  “Good to hear that you think so. Mrs. Kirby said my class was evident and then went on to say not to worry, that the Russian lads wouldn’t be able to tell the difference.”

  “Our dear Mrs. Kirby,” Cooper said, blowing on his coffee. “She is quite the charmer, is she not? But, as usual, her statements are correct. To the Russians, all British seem alike.”

  Cooper was a strange man, Davy thought, while taking peripheral note that an elaborate carriage was bumping past them, with squashed bits of produce caught in its wheels and a huge gold eagle embellished on the door. Although the day was temperate and on its way to genuine warmth, Cooper was not only bundled in a scarf and jacket but had insisted on stopping for a coffee. With his chubby cheeks bearing the slight remains of a pockmarked youth, he did not look at all like Davy’s notion of a university professor or indeed like any sort of authority figure at all. If the members of the Volya would not talk to him, why was everyone so sure they would confess their intentions to Davy?

  “Don’t worry,” Cooper went on, slurping the syrupy coffee with a slight shudder and misinterpreting Davy’s frown. “If I introduce you, they will accept you. The Russians believe that their suspicion of all outside influence is what keeps them safe, but they fail to see the dangers that lie on the other side of the street. For if a boy has been taught from childhood to fear strangers, the inverse of that prejudice often makes him too quick to trust the people he thinks he knows. Membership in the Volya is less about understanding the principles of communism and more about being a friend of a friend of a friend. You look like one of the little brothers and Vlad, I suspect, will be especially quick to take you under his wing.”

  “The little brothers?”

  “Just as it sounds,” Cooper said, distractedly digging out a few coins to leave on the table. “The younger members, sponsored into the group by a
relative or an older friend. Vlad is a little brother and Yulian was one too.”

  “Yulian Krupin, the dead boy?”

  “One of them. The Volya can claim several dead boys.”

  “And you haven’t heard anyone venture a theory on why Krupin and the girl were murdered?”

  Cooper gave him a sharp look as he pushed against the table to stand. “Don’t give yourself away by being too analytical,” he said. “Or too Scotland Yard. In London, people die for a reason. Here, they just die.”

  The Winter Palace – The Private Room of the Orlovs

  11:22 AM

  The realization that she was pregnant had come upon Tatiana Orlov all at once, in a single wave of nausea.

  She had tried, with a fair amount of success, to ignore the possibility for weeks, a self-deception made easier by the fact that she had never fully stopped bleeding. For the last two cycles, her courses had been far lighter than usual, but she had passed it off to the grief she felt about the impending summer and her enforced separation from Konstantin.

  Speaking of Konstantin, he must not know. They had used precautions. Ineffective ones, as it turned out, but who was to say how he would react to this news? He might be driven to do something drastic, to assert some sort of claim on her, especially if he knew the child she carried was definitely his and not Filip’s.

  And speaking of Filip, he absolutely without question must not know. Two years ago, as they had traveled from their small village of Sugry to St. Petersburg, grains of rice from their hasty marriage still sticking to her hair, he had looked at her and said, “If there are no children from our union, you will understand this?”

  “I will celebrate it,” she had told him. “I don’t like children.”

  And he had thrown his head back and roared with laughter, saying “We shall suit each other well, little bird.”

  Precisely what he had meant with the remark about the children, at the time she did not know. Perhaps his manhood had been compromised by the injuries he had suffered in his service to the tsar. This too she might have welcomed - Filip and Tatiana were scarcely a love match - but their overnight stop at an inn on the outskirts of town had repeatedly and emphatically proven that such was not the case. Filip still had his virility, but evidently not his potency, for, just has he had predicted, two years of marriage had produced no pregnancy.