The Coronation: The Further Adventures Of Erast Fandorin (Erast Fandorin 7)

by Boris Akunin

  A genuine butler knows that his service is not a duty but away of life. It is not a matter of being a butler from morning until evening and then going home and simply being Afanasii Ziukin. A butler is like a nobleman, they both serve at court, only we are a lot stricter with ourselves than the nobility. That is what makes us worth so much.

  Many people would like to lure away a genuine butler from the court of the tsar or a grand duke and they have been known to offer huge amounts of money. Any rich man is flattered to have his own home ordered in the same manner as the imperial palaces. My own brother Frol could not resist the temptation: he felt flattered by a handsome offer . . . Now he serves as a butler – no, they call it a major domo – for a Moscow millionaire, the banker Litvinov, a Jew. Frol was given five thousand for making themove and three thousand a year, all found, with an apartment and gratuities. There was a butler once, but no more.

  I severed all relations with my brother. And he does not bother me either – he understands the sin he has committed. And never mind millionaires, I would not even go to Prince Borontsov, although he offered me everything you could possibly imagine. One can only serve someone with whom one will not compare oneself. Distance is required. Because on one side there is the human, and on the other side the divine. Distance will always help to maintain respect. Even when one discovers Georgii Alexandrovich in the black chef Manefa’s little room or when Pavel Georgievich, unconscious and covered in vomit, is delivered home by cab in the middle of the night. But who is Prince Borontsov – merely a noble, and what is so special about that? Even we Ziukins were nobles once, although not for long.

  This is an unusual story concerning one of our ancestors, my great-grandfather Emelyan Ziukin. I think it is probably worth telling – it is highly edifying, since it demonstrates once again that the foundation of the world is the established order, and God forbid that one should disrupt this order – no good will ever come of it in any case.

  The Ziukins have their origins among the serfs of the Zvenigorod district of the province of Moscow. My ancestor, Emelyan Silantievich – at that time simply Emelka – was taken as a child to serve the master and his family, and his quick wit and efficiency made him well-liked, so that after a while they began treating him specially: they dressed him in clean clothes, kept him away from dirty work and taught him to read and write. He was attached to the young master as a kind of play friend. He read a lot of books, picked up some manners and even learned a certain amount of French, but the worst thing was that he started to feel ashamed of being a serf. And I believe that is why he started looking at the young lady of the house, the landowner’s daughter, not as one looks at a grand princess, with reverential devotion, but with the most audacious of intentions: he was determined to marry the object of his interest. You might think, who has ever heard of a peasant boy marrying a noblewoman? Anyone else would have dreamed for a while and then given up, but Emelyanwas a stubborn character – he thought a lot and planned a long way ahead and, as they would say nowadays, he believed in his star.

  He did not tell a single living soul about his dream (although one could call it a plan, not a dream), especially not the young lady, but when recruits were being enlisted – they were fighting the French at the time – he suddenly asked to go for a soldier instead of the miller’s son, whose name had been drawn in the lottery. Emelyan was not yet old enough, but he was a fine strapping lad, and he added a year or two to his age. He was willingly let go, because by that time he had become insolent and disobedient – the master and his family no longer knewwhat to do with him.

  So my great-grandfather put on a soldier’s uniform and took a payment in compensation from the miller, the richest man in the village, of seven hundred roubles in paper money, which he didn’t give to his father but put in the bank in his own name. That was in order to carry out his plan.

  Emelyan was sent straight to the war, to fight in the Austrian campaign, and he fought for seven or eight years without a break – against the French and the Persians and the Swedes and the Turks and then the French again. He found his way into the very hottest spots and always volunteered for every desperate adventure. He was wounded many times and awarded medals, won a corporal’s stripes, and still that was not enough for him. And in the campaign of 1812, at the battle of Smolensk, when all the commanders in his company were killed, Emelyan won his cherished reward: General Bagration himself kissed him and promoted him to officer’s rank, something that almost never happened in those times.

  After that Emelyan Ziukin fought for another two years and went as far as Paris with the army, but as soon as the armistice came, he asked for extended leave, although he was regarded most highly by his superiors and could have hoped for further advancement in the army. But my great-grandfather wanted something else – his impossibly bold plan was finally coming close to fulfilment.

  Emelyan returned to his native parts not simply as a nobleman and a lieutenant in the grenadiers, he also had his own small capital, because in all those years he had not spent his pay, and when he was discharged he received bonuses and medical payments, and his initial seven hundred roubles had also almost doubled owing to accrued interest.

  And in his home village everything could not have gone better. The estate had been burned by the French, so that the master and his familywere absolutely ruined and nowlived in the priest’s house. The young master, Emelyan’s former playmate, had been killed at Borodino, and the maiden who had inspired my great-grandfather to play his desperate game with fate had been left without a bridegroom, for he had laid down his life at Leipzig. All in all, Emelyan appeared to the object of his dreams almost in the guise of an angel sent to rescue her.

  He presented himself at the priest’s log-built village but in his dress uniform, wearing his medals. The young lady came out in an old patched dress, and the trials she had suffered had spoiled her looks, so that he did not recognise her immediately. But that did not matter to him, because itwas not the young lady he loved but his own impossible dream.

  Only nothing came of it. The young lady greeted him affectionately enough at first – she was delighted to see an old acquaintance – but she replied to the offer of his hand and his heart with an insulting amazement, and said she would rather live under sufferance with her relatives than ever become ‘Mrs Ziukin’.

  These words clouded Emelyan’s reason. He had never drunk intoxicating liquor before in his life, but now he launched into a wild binge, and it ended very badly. In his drunken state he tore off his epaulettes and medals in public and trampled them into the ground, all the while bawling out an incoherent stream of words. He was tried for bringing disgrace on the uniform, stripped of his officer’s rank and expelled from the nobility. He would have been completely destroyed by drink but, by a fortunate chance, he was spotted by his former regimental commander, Prince Drubetskoi, who took pity on the down-and-out and for the sake of his former meritorious services found him a place as a manservant at Tsarskoe Selo.

  And so the fate of our family line was decided.

  When an individual of loworigins cherishes inadmissible dreams regarding a person of higher standing, this is deplorable and even perhaps outrageous, but not really so very dangerous for, as they say, a wicked cow has short horns. But an infatuation that runs in the opposite direction, not up from below but down from above, is fraught with far-reaching consequences. The case of Grand Duke Dmitrii Nikolaevich is still fresh in everyone’s memory. He defied the tsar’s will and married a divorced lady, for which he was banished from the empire. And we court servants also know that when the present tsar was still the tsarevich, he begged his august father with tears in his eyes to release him from succeeding to the throne and allowa marriage beneath his station to the ballerina Snezhnevskaya. That had everybody trembling, but any damage was prevented by the grace of the Lord and the abrupt temperament of the late tsar.

  Therefore, the sense of alarm that came over me following that infamous game of tennis is en
tirely understandable, especially since Xenia Georgievna already had a fiancé in the shape of a Scandinavian prince with good prospects of becoming king (everybody knew that his elder brother, the heir to the throne, had consumption).

  I needed urgently to consult someone who understood the workings of a young girl’s emotions, for I myself, as must be clear from what has already been said, can not consider myself an authority in such matters. After long hesitation, I decided to take Mademoiselle Declique into my confidence and I informed her of my apprehensions in the most general and delicate of terms. Mademoiselle nonetheless understood me perfectly well and – to my dismay – was not at all surprised, indeed she took what I said in a spirit of quite incredible frivolity.

  ‘Yes, yes,’ she said, nodding absent-mindedly. ‘I noticed that too. He is a handsome man, and she is at that age. It is all right. Let Xenia know a little love before they put her in a glass case.’

  ‘How can you say such a thing!’ I exclaimed in horror. ‘Her Highness is already engaged!’

  ‘Ah, Monsieur Ziukin, I saw her fiancé Prince Olaf, in Vienna,’ Mademoiselle said, wrinkling up her nose. ‘What was that folk saying you taught me . . . one of God’s own fools, yes?’

  ‘But if the elder brother should die – and everyone knows that he is consumptive – Prince Olaf will be first in line to inherit the throne. Which means that Xenia Georgievna could be a queen!’

  Of course, the governess’s remark that I found so jarring should be attributed to her state of dejection. I had noticed that Mademoiselle was absent that morning and believed I had guessed why. No doubt, with her active and energetic temperament, she had been unable simply to do nothing and had attempted to undertake some searches of her own. But what could she do in a foreign country and an unfamiliar city when even the police felt helpless?

  Mademoiselle had returned looking so tired and miserable that it pained me to look at her. And it was partly because of this that I began the conversation about the subject of my concern – in a desire to distract her from her thoughts about the little grand duke. In order to calm her a little, I told her the direction that things had taken and mentioned the responsible mission that had fallen to my lot – naturally without any undue inflation of my own role in matters.

  I had expected Mademoiselle to be delighted by the news that now there was a glimmer of hope, but after hearing me out she looked at me with a strange, frightened expression and suddenly said: ‘But that is very dangerous.’ And turning her eyes away, she added: ‘I know you are brave . . . but don’t be too brave, all right?’

  I was quite nonplussed by that, and there was a rather uncomfortable pause.

  ‘Ah, what bad luck,’ I eventually said to recover the situation. ‘It has started raining again. And the combined choir serenade for Their Imperial Majesties is set for this evening. The rain could spoil everything.’

  ‘You’d better think of yourself. You have to ride in an open carriage,’ Mademoiselle said in a quiet voice, pronouncing the final phrase almost perfectly. ‘It’s very easy to catch cold.’

  When I drove out through the gate in the gig with the top back, the rain was already lashing down in earnest and I was soaked through before I even reached Kaluga Square. That was bad enough, but in the stream of carriages rolling along Korovii Val Street, I was the only person behaving in this intrepid manner, whichmust have appeared strange to any onlookers. Whywould a respectable-looking man with a large moustache and whiskers not wish to put up the leather hood on his carriage? The water was streaming off the sides of my bowler hat, and my face was inundated too, while my fine tweed suit clung to me like a wet sack. But how else would Doctor Lind’s people have been able to recognise me?

  Standing at my feetwas a heavy suitcase stuffed full of twenty-five-rouble notes. Colonel Karnovich’s agents were driving in front of me and behind me, maintaining a cautious distance. I was in a strangely calm state of mind and did not feel any fear or excitement – my nerves had probably been numbed by the long wait and the damp.

  I did not dare to look round, for my instructions had strictly forbidden it, but I did glance to the sides every now and then, examining the occasional pedestrian passers-by. Half an hour before I left, Foma Anikeevich had telephoned me and said: ‘Mr Lasovsky has decided to take measures of his own. I heard him reporting to His Highness. He has positioned his sleuths from Kaluga Square all the way down to the Moscow River, spaced fifty paces apart, and told them to stay alert and arrest anyone who comes close to your carriage. I am afraid this might put Mikhail Georgievich in danger.’

  I had no difficulty in spotting the sleuths – who, apart from them, would be out strolling with such an air of boredom in a downpour like this? Except for these gentlemen with identical black umbrellas there was almost no one on the pavements. There were just carriages driving in both directions, crowded close together, almostwheel-to-wheel. After Zatsepsky Val Street (I read the name on the street sign) a priest came up beside me in an old rattletrap of a carriage with its tarpaulin cover up. He was in a ferocious mood, in a hurry to get somewhere, and he kept shouting at the driver in front: ‘Come on, get a move on, servant of God!’ But how can anyone get a move on when he’s stuck behind a solid line of carriages, wagons, charabancs and omnibuses?

  We crossed a little river or canal, then a river that was a bit wider. The chain of sleuths had ended long ago, and still no one had hailed me. I was already quite convinced that Lind had spotted the police agents and decided to call the meeting off. The flow of traffic halted at a wide crossroads, with a constable in a long oilskin raincoat whistling frantically as he gave right of way to traffic from the street crossing ours. The newspaper boys took advantage of the hold-up and darted in between the carriages, screeching: ‘One-Kopeck News!’, ‘Moscow Gazette!’, ‘RussianWord!’

  One of them, with a flaxen forelock stuck to his forehead and a plush shirt turned dark by the rain hanging outside his trousers, suddenly grabbed hold of my carriage shaft with one hand and adroitly plumped himself down beside me on the seat. He was so small and so nimble that probably no one in the carriages behind had noticed him through the curtain of rain.

  ‘Turn right, Mister,’ the little lad said, nudging me in the side with his elbow. ‘And orders are not to turn your head.’

  I wanted very much to look back to see if the police agents had missed this unexpected messenger, but I did not dare. They would see me take the turn anyway.

  I pulled the reins to the right, cracked the whip, and the horse turned into a slanting side street that looked most respectable, with fine stone houses.

  ‘Move on, Mister, move on!’ the boy cried, looking back. ‘Come on now!’

  He grabbed the whip from me, gave a wild whistle, lashed the chestnut horse, and it started clopping its hooves over the cobblestones for all it was worth.

  ‘Turn in there!’ said my guide, jabbing one finger to the left.

  We went flying into a street that was a bit smaller and less grand, hurtled past one block of buildings and took another turn. Then another, and another.

  ‘Go that way, into the gateway,’ the newspaper boy ordered.

  I pulled back slightly on the reins, and we drove into a dark narrow archway.

  Less than half a minute later two carriages carrying police agents went rumbling and clattering past, and then all was quiet except for the splashing of the rain as it lashed even harder against the surface of the road.

  ‘And what now?’ I asked, taking a cautious look at the messenger.

  ‘Wait,’ he said grandly, blowing on his chilly hands.

  It was clear that I could not expect any help from the court police and I would have to fend for myself. But I was not afraid, for I could deal with an opponent like this on my own. A small boywas no problem. Grab him by his skinny shoulders, give him a good shaking and he would tell me who had sent him. Then I could follow the trail.

  Then I took a better look at the little fellow, noting the swollen mouth
not at all like a child’s and the screwed-up eyes. A wild wolf cub, a real wolf cub. One could never shake the truth out of a boy like that.

  Suddenly I heard the sound of another carriage approaching in the distance. I craned my neck to look, and the boy immediately took his chance. I heard a rustling sound and when I looked back I saw there was no longer anyone beside me – there was nothing but a blurred smear on the wet seat.

  The rumbling was very close now. I jumped down off the coach box, ran out of the archway to the pavement and saw a foursome of sturdy blacks pulling a carriage with all the curtains tightly closed at a spanking pace. The driver had a hood lowered over his face and he was cracking a long whip loudly over the gleaming backs of the horses. When the carriage drew abreast of the archway, the curtains suddenly parted and there in front of me I saw His Highness’s pale little face framed in golden curls and that familiar sailor’s hat with the red pompom.

  Mikhail Georgievich also saw me and started shouting loudly: ‘Afon! Afon!’

  That was what he had always called me.

  I tried to shout too and I opened my mouth, but only sobbed.

  Lord, what was I to do?

  The tricky procedure of backing the gig out of the gateway would take me too long. Not even realising what I was doing in my agitation, I dashed after the carriage as fast as I could run. I did not even notice when the wet bowler hat went flying off my head.

  ‘Stop!’ I shouted. ‘Stop!’

  I could see the driver’s round hat above the roof of the carriage, and his flailing whip.

  I had never run like that before in all my life, not even during my time as a court outrunner.

  Of course, there was no way I could have caught a team of four horses if the street had not suddenly taken a tight bend. The carriage slowed down, heeling over slightly to one side. I took several huge bounds to reduce the distance, jumped and clung onto the luggage rack with both hands. I pulled myself up and was just on the point of climbing onto the monkey board, but the driver, without even looking round, lashed his whip back over the roof, stinging my temple, and I fell off. I landed face down in a puddle and then rolled across it, sending up a fountain of spray. When I lifted myself up on my hands the carriage was already turning a corner.