by Kim Wright
The woman nodded. Her expression conveyed nothing about how she felt in the matter. She may as well have been agreeing that it was lovely weather.
“She is going to have a baby…and then, I am going to have a baby,” Ella said. “Do you understand what I am telling you?”
He did. The plan was neither original nor complex. One woman is carrying a child that, for whatever reason, she must not have. Another woman desperately needs a child that, for whatever reason, she cannot conceive. And so a friendship forms between the two, an alliance both unholy and as old as the Bible.
Tom turned toward Ella. “Your husband will accept the baby as his own?”
“Yes. More readily than you could ever know.”
His eyes moved to Tatiana. “And I assume your own husband is not aware of your pregnancy?”
Both women flinched at the word “pregnancy,” as if he had uttered a vulgarity in their presence, and Tom wondered anew at the peculiar sensitivities of women, how the two of them could calmly plot the brokering of a human life, each of them most profoundly duping her husband in the process, but still recoil from such a simple biological term.
Tatiana shook her head. “Filip has suffered many… many injuries in his service to the tsar,” she finally said, and he realized this was the first time he had ever heard her voice. It was low pitched, out of accord with her delicate appearance and thus rather thrilling. He thought back to the scar Rayley had described on Filip’s chest in the sauna and wondered if Tatiana was implying that some sort of further unseen damage had rendered her husband sterile. Tom could think of no obvious way in which a shot to the torso could create such an unwelcome complication; if Filip Orlov was unable to father children, syphilis was a more likely explanation than a wound in the line of duty.
Of course, the particulars of how it happened really didn’t matter that much to the issue at hand. If Tatiana Orlov believed her husband to be sterile and yet was currently pregnant, then her situation was dire indeed.
“My father is dark,” Ella added, “in both hair and complexion.” The remark seemed bizarrely off the subject until Tom considered the line of argument the women evidently intended to follow, the argument they were practicing on him. The child Tatiana was carrying was almost undoubtedly fathered by Konstantin Antonovich, and Tom’s mind flashed to the images of the man’s heavy dark hair and intense almond-shaped eyes, so different in every way from the fair, startled-looking Romanovs.
“Have you been ill?” Tom asked Tatiana.
“A little. In the morning, just as they say.”
“That’s a good sign. Evidence that the pregnancy is well established and will continue.”
She smiled and nodded with evident relief. So, despite it all, apparently at least part of her was happy to be carrying this baby and grateful for his assurances. The plan these two intended was madness, madness in every way, but it was not his place to tell them so. Tom looked from Tatiana back to Ella. “So what do you want from me?” he asked bluntly. “Her baby is obviously not due to be born for many months.”
“If you had a patient who was an expectant mother…” Ella said vaguely.
“If you were my patient, you mean,” Tom said. It was bad form to interrupt royalty but this was no time to stand on ceremony.
“Precisely,” said Ella. “If I were your patient would you advise me to escape the dangers of the city and spend my confinement in the country? By the sea, perhaps?”
“Yes I most certainly would,” Tom said. It was perhaps the only completely honest statement which had been uttered in the room since they entered. “Cities are full of contagion as a matter of course and I would imagine that St. Petersburg, which was built on marshland, is worse than most. Especially in the summer. When I was walking in the gardens just this morning I thought I saw a hummingbird which, on closer inspection, turned out to be a mosquito.”
Tatiana not only relaxed at this statement but looked almost amused. Ella, however, bristled at this slight to her adopted city.
“We were never meant to summer here,” she said icily. “We have remained overlong this year because of the Tchaikovsky ball.”
“I’m aware of that,” Tom said, his own tone nearly as icy. He was once again verging on the edge of rudeness to a woman of rank, but he couldn’t see Ella running to tattle to her husband or her granny about anything he said in the course of this particular conversation. He had always found it an affectation when people used the words “summer” and “winter” as verbs, and he wondered if Ella, who was accustomed to decamping to the sea with the first heat of June, had ever bothered to consider all the citizens of the city, pregnant or not, who were forced to endure the risk of cholera and malaria year round. But just as it was not his job to tell Ella that her plan was mad, nor was it his job to lecture her on her marital family’s responsibilities to their people.
“I believe,” he said in a more conciliatory tone, “the question before us is whether or not a doctor would advise an expectant mother to go to the country rather than remain in the city, and the answer is yes. The purity of ocean air is most palliative, especially when temperatures climb.”
“And you would say this to my grandmother? As general advice, that is?”
“Of course. But I will not lie to my monarch. I will not tell your grandmother I have found you pregnant when I have not.”
“You do not have to lie,” Ella said, with an impatient shake of her head. “I will tell her about the baby myself. And we shall all leave soon. Just after the ball. Due to the untimely death of my former lady in waiting, I have asked my sister-in-law if she can spare Tatiana from her own court to enter my service and she has most kindly agreed. And so we are an expectant imperial mother and her loyal attendant traveling to a safe place for the duration of her confinement. No one shall find anything odd in it at all.”
“Who is this ‘we’ who will leave soon?” Tom asked. Dear God, she didn’t expect him to travel with them, did she?
“Tatiana and I to the coast…” Ella said.
“And Konstantin to Paris,” Tatiana said simply.
And with that Tom saw the whole of the situation. In giving Ella her child, Tatiana had bought the safe passage of her lover. Once he was ensconced in France, Konstantin would be far beyond the reach of Filip Orlov, or anyone else inclined to frame him for a triple murder.
“Konstantin Antonovich is a lucky man,” Tom said. “He seems to enjoy the most intense loyalty of all the women in his life. You are certain that you’re prepared to do this?”
“He must never know,” Ella interrupted. “He doesn’t like for women to lead him. Just ask your red-haired friend what he’s like.” She crossed her arms across her chest and gave a slight, definitive shudder. “Russian men are proud, Siberian men even more so. He leaves us no choice but to dissemble, for he would never accept the risks that two women are undertaking to guarantee his safety.”
Tatiana had resumed packing. It was impossible to see her face.
“I need a baby,” Ella said defiantly, as if Tom had uttered some word of protest. “Tatiana needs to not have a baby. Konstantin needs to leave Russia. But all three of these problems are easy to rectify if we work together. We can be, in a sense, each other’s saviors. Why do you hesitate?” she added, when Tom did not answer, but rather continued to watch Tatiana struggling to push an armful of dresses into the small valise. “Surely you can see that this child will be given every privilege in life, will have every sort of comfort.”
“Are you quite certain you want to stay in Russia?” Tom asked, a question that was directed toward Ella even though his eyes never left Tatiana.
The question seemed to pull Ella up short. “This is where my destiny lies,” she finally said.
“Well, you certainly sound Russian.”
“Fatalism is the true national contagion,” Ella said with a slight laugh. “And I fear I have caught it. This baby will be the salvation of Serge as well, as you have undoubtedly noticed, doc
tor. Your eyes are very sharp. He and I shall have our child and Konstantin will have his new life in Paris. He is innocent, we all know this, but once a man has been singled out by the private guard, the truth does not seem to matter. Tatiana will concur with this opinion, I believe, and realize that I do not mean it as a criticism of her husband, but simply as a pragmatic analysis of the situation.”
She is so like her grandmother, Tom thought. Moving people about to suit her aims. Manipulating the world and calling it fate.
Tatiana had now closed the trunk and was buckling the strap. “And if Konstantin gets his freedom and Ella and Serge get a child, what do you gain from this bargain?” Tom asked her. “You seem the forgotten soul in this grand plan.”
“I gain redemption,” she said quietly. “My sins have been numerous, Dr. Bainbridge.”
“Somehow, my dear Mrs. Orlov, I doubt that your sins have been any more numerous or more damning than those of anyone else.”
“She will live in the closest proximity to the child,” Ella said, her voice conveying no particular understanding that such proximity might well be a torment and not a relief. “And not just this year, when Tatiana and I must remain inseparable, even after the men have returned to the city in the fall. She will always attend me, and thus my family. Her husband will become guard to mine. It happens all the time you know, this swapping back and forth of servants. And I assure you, Doctor Bainbridge, that Tatiana and Filip shall be rewarded for their loyalty, both of them.”
“Yes,” said Tatiana. “And besides, life is long, is it not, Dr. Bainbridge?”
“For some of us it is far longer than it is for others,” he said. The most painful part of the affair was not the woman’s sacrifice, but the faint flash of hope which remained in her eyes. She was clinging to the idea that she might someday yet join her lover in Paris, a dream Tom deemed unlikely. Once the child was born Tatiana would undoubtedly find it impossible to leave, knowing that she would never again see her son or daughter. She would trade away any chance for her own future happiness and remain forever in the thankless role of Ella’s new lady in waiting, and thus servant to her own flesh and blood.
“I shall write my grandmother this afternoon,” Ella said. “And all you must do, when she asks, is confirm that you did indeed tell me that St. Petersburg is a dangerous place for a woman in such a delicate condition. She will readily believe you. She hates this city and has always claimed that the entire Winter Palace was built on a web of pestilence, ready to split and sink back into the Neva at the slightest provocation.”
“You don’t wish to tell the Queen your happy news in person?” Tom asked. It seemed Ella was far more concerned with what her grandmother might say or do than she was with the reaction of her husband. The men in their lives cannot possibly be so gullible as these women are betting, Tom thought. If the rumors are true, then Serge will certainly know Ella cannot be with child and even if Tatiana managed to conceal her own condition from Filip throughout the summer, it was unlikely she would be able to avoid all intimacies throughout the autumn and winter, up until time for the child to be born. Some luckless doctor on the coast would have to be taken into their plan, bribed or threatened to attend Ella and then deliver Tatiana. Tom observed the two women in the reflection of the mirror which hung on the far wall. They were in many ways different – Ella tall and russet haired, Tatiana with a bird-like frame and mass of blond curls – but they both were beautiful and he supposed that this singular fact might be the key to their ultimate ability to sell this extraordinarily unlikely story, to somehow keep the illusion afloat. Men believe what they want to believe when it comes to women, especially when it comes to female fecundity, truly the greatest magic trick of them all.
Ella tossed her head. “No, I shall write Granny a note to be delivered only when it is time for her to depart. We have quarreled once already, which is quite enough. Did you know? But of course you do. Everyone in the Winter Palace knows the business of everyone else. Some claim it to be the largest residence in the world but when it comes to privacy, we may as well be a gaggle of peasants living in a one-room hut. But it doesn’t matter. By this time next summer Serge and I shall be visiting England with a baby in our arms. And the birth of a child has a way of making everything new and right, does it not? Old discords are forgotten and the future seems suddenly hopeful.”
“I hope you are right,” Tom said. “For your sake and the sake of everyone involved, especially the child.”
“Granny will forgive me when she sees the baby,” Ella continued, speaking more to herself than to the others. “The child will come with the new year, which is a good sign. They say the earlier in the year a child is born, the more auspicious its future, do they not?”
“I’ve never heard that particular theory,” Tom said. His own birthday was in late November.
“Tell me doctor, have you ever seen a Fabrege egg?”
Another of her jarring changes of subject, but by now Tom was growing use to them. “I have certainly heard of Fabrege. He is the royal jeweler, is he not?”
Although the room was Tatiana’s, Ella confidently went to a bureau drawer and opened it. “I want you to see something,” she said. “I had it commissioned weeks ago, on some impulse I could not have explained, and now Tatiana has agreed to hide it for me until the proper time.” She unwrapped a cloth of blue velvet and revealed a golden egg, about the size of her hand, the top of it crusted in rubies and emeralds.
“It is the only one of its kind,” she said, her voice sinking to a whisper. “They are all individual, you know, created by the master to mark a particular occasion or celebration.”
She handed it to Tom, who cautiously turned it over in his palm. There were not only the large jewels at the top, but the egg was covered with a profusion of carefully wrought vines, each one coming to bud in the form of a perfectly-shaped seed pearl. The value of such an item was inestimable.
“You will take it, yes?” Ella said quietly. “To remember your time here in Russia?”
This is a land, Tom thought, in which anything can be bought. A woman’s child. A doctor’s silence. The passage of a suspected murderer across a national border.
“The grandness of the gift overwhelms me,” Tom said. “But I fear I cannot accept. It is my duty and my honor to serve your Royal Highness in any capacity.”
“Your Imperial Highness,” she corrected.
“It is my honor to serve your Imperial Highness,” Tom amended, wondering once again what sort of subtle psychological nightmares awaited Tatiana Orlov during her long dark autumn by the sea with this woman.
“And have you seen this part? It is exceptionally clever,” Ella went blithely on, changing mood so rapidly that Tom wondered if she was not merely spoiled and self-centered, but somehow mentally unsound. Ella pressed a panel in the center of the egg and a small golden hen popped out of the top.
“Many of them are like this,” she said. “Designed with some sort of surprise inside, whether it is a small portrait of the person giving the gift or perhaps some symbolic message. As in this case, do you see? The hen represents fertility and is thus a subtle way for a woman to tell a man that she is carrying his child.”
“Then perhaps this particular egg should be given to the baby’s father,” Tom said.
“Ah, yes” said Ella. “Yes, perhaps you are right. But see here, this part is clever. You press the panel on the other side and, just like this, our golden hen is gone.”
“So it is a trick,” Tom said.
“I suppose a trick is precisely what it is,” Ella said with a shrug, as she carelessly rolled the egg back into the blue velvet cloth and replaced it in Tatiana’s bureau drawer. “But it is a pleasing one, is it not?
The Streets of St. Petersburg
3:54 PM
“You seem to work rather lenient hours.”
Davy looked at Vlad out of the corner of his eye. Was this a challenge? Were they onto him somehow? “The Queen does most of her pape
rwork in the morning,” he said. “Any correspondence she sends is likely gone by early afternoon.”
“Lucky for you, I’d say.”
“Are you about to tell me that the work of a revolutionary is never done?”
To Davy’s relief, and somewhat to his surprise, Vlad laughed. He was such a serious sort that Davy found it hard to tell when he would accept a joke on face value and when it might prickle his sensibilities. The two young men were walking in a rather indirect fashion toward the Volya meeting, a stroll which Davy was enjoying, since it gave him the opportunity to see more of the city. The streets of St. Petersburg were broad and beautiful, with space between the buildings and a more modern sense than one found in London. This openness is what you get when you build a city from scratch rather than letting it evolve over centuries, Davy thought, trying to remember all that Emma had told them on their lectures at sea. She had unleashed a torrent of facts on their heads in a matter of days and Davy doubted that a fraction of it had truly sunk in to any of them. He wondered if Emma would be willing to tutor him on history when they returned to London, but at a more civilized pace, perhaps one evening a week in Geraldine’s parlor. It would be embarrassing to ask her, an admission of how limited his past education had been, but he suspected she would say yes.
“What is the meeting about today?” he further ventured, since Vlad appeared to be in good humor.
“A licking of wounds,” Vlad said. “We had a great plan which fell through when one of our comrades was killed.”
“The ballet dancer.”
Vlad sighed. “What are they saying of the matter inside the palace?”
“That it was a double suicide.”
“They would call it that, wouldn’t they?”
“I take it you don’t agree.”
“Of course not. Yulian Krupin was not the sort to kill himself. In fact, he was disgustingly happy.”
Davy raised an eyebrow.
“Oh you know, happy,” Vlad elaborated, flapping his hands about like wounded birds. “He had a girl in his bed, food in his belly, a ticket to Paris in his pocket. Besides, even if his life hadn’t been such a plum, Yulian didn’t have the bollocks to do himself in, especially not with a knife to the throat. My guess is that someone within the palace did the deed for him. Someone who had figured out who and what he was.”