by Evelyn Weiss
“To protect Rasputin from her allegations?”
“Oh no. You saw the ledger Bukin keeps, containing details of the informers he pays. Okhrana are suspicious of Rasputin’s influence over the Tsarina. So they watch Rasputin, everywhere he goes. They say they are protecting him. But their real purpose is to gather incriminating information on him. Just like Svea Håkansson did.”
“So if neither Rasputin or Okhrana killed her, was she murdered by revolutionaries, like Mr Bukin said?”
“I don’t know. But I have a strange feeling, Miss Agnes. Although you and I have faced great challenges together, this is the hardest, and darkest, riddle that we have encountered. Somehow, the very soul of Russia seems bound up in this mystery.” He smiles. “But I am starting to sound like Mr Bukin, with his fairy stories of dragons and flying carpets. On a more practical note – I feel that getting out of St Petersburg will not be quick or easy for you and me.”
“On that subject, Professor – tonight is the last night that we have rooms paid for by Rasputin at this hotel.”
“This hotel is uncomfortable and unfriendly. It is also furiously expensive: I went down to the desk and looked at their rates.”
“So we need to find somewhere else to stay. How much money do you have, Professor?”
“King Gustaf gave me generous expenses – for a visit of a week or so. But if we are here longer, then we will run out of money.”
“Perhaps you ought to follow Mr Bukin’s suggestion, and put me to work in St Petersburg’s red-light district.”
The professor guffaws – but then, his brow furrows with worry. Neither of us have any idea what the future holds.
It’s a warm afternoon. Wispy clouds, floating high in a deep-blue sky, are reflected in the Neva River. Swallows and swifts fly low above the water, swooping under the arches of the unfinished Palace Bridge. In a few days, they’ll be flying south.
The professor is sunk in thought, so I’ve left him in his room for a few hours. I turn and walk briskly along the river embankment, overlooked by endless ranks of statues topping the Winter Palace. A single guard, looking like a toy soldier against the vast frontage of the building, waves cheerily to me. I step through an archway, and enter the palace.
Inside the door, I almost trip over a huge pile of empty stretchers. Groups of nurses come and go briskly. A white-coated doctor stands in one corner, engaged in earnest discussion with two juniors. I see a clerk sitting at a desk, below a notice “Hospital Admissions”. I get out my passport, and unfold a piece of paper that I keep in it: my certificate of service in France and Belgium with the British Red Cross. I put the certificate on the desk, and look at the clerk.
“I want to work here.”
9 Whispers of the stars
I wake in the night. Ghostly light shines upwards through huge windows, shifting and playing across the ceiling. It illuminates vast arches, rococo curves and the entwined, dancing figures of goddesses, satyrs and nymphs. The light is moonlight, reflected upwards off the wide swathes of ice that now cover most of the Neva River.
Nearly four months have passed since I started working in the Winter Palace Hospital as a nurses’ auxiliary – making beds, changing patients’ bandages, bathing and feeding them. My pay is pin-money, because my meals and accommodation are provided. I and twenty other nursing auxiliaries sleep on camp beds in one of the former imperial bedrooms.
Professor Axelson followed my example: after spending one last fruitless day arguing with Mr Bukin, he came here to the hospital and offered his services. Now he gives psychological therapy to shell-shocked soldiers. His patients are living ghosts, just like the traumatized men that I helped treat back in France. The war itself has gone from bad to worse: the German Army’s advance into Russia has stalled, but the number of injured men arriving at the hospital continues to climb.
I watch the strange cold light on the ceiling for a while, then turn in bed, pull the blankets around me, and try to sleep.
When I wake again, it’s morning. But this morning, I don’t put on my hospital uniform. Instead I pack it into a little suitcase, put on my black dress and a thick Russian travelling-coat, and walk down the steps onto the icy embankment. Half an hour later, I’m shivering as I walk across the Petrovsky Bridge, a long wooden structure leading to the quay from where a boat for Ivangorod harbor will depart. The Ivangorod hospital is desperately short of auxiliary staff, so I’m being sent there to help out.
I think of the professor, lying unconscious in the bed at that hospital last summer. My visit to Ivangorod is for two months, over the Christmas and winter period; in February I will return to the Winter Palace Hospital. But for the next few weeks I’ll miss my work here, my colleagues who have become good friends, and this city where I’ve begun to feel oddly at home.
It’s a bitter, colorless morning: my view from the bridge is of white mist across the snow and the slushy ice-floes of the river, where it flows into the open, gray Baltic. A drear wind blows in from the sea.
There are figures standing on the river bank; their hands grip ropes. They are pulling something from among the lumps of floating ice. Then I hear one of them call out to the others.
“It’s him! It’s Rasputin’s body! Looks like someone shot him and dumped him in here.”
So the river got you after all, I think.
Ivangorod is gripped by winter: there is no snow here, but it is brutally cold, and our boat carefully negotiates the river ice to reach the harbor. The hospital is just as I remember it, except now it is full to overflowing. At the Winter Palace, most patients were long-term injuries and illnesses, but Ivangorod treats new casualties from the endless fighting around Riga. Their wounds are packed on the battlefield with salt and iodine, then bandaged tight before they are sent here. Taking the bandages off a man is like torturing him. Then the compacted salt has to be dug out of the wound. I’ve been here several days now, but I can’t get used to the shrieks of agony that echo, all the time, round every ward.
Today is Christmas Day. For the last week I’ve been working eighteen-hour days; this morning, the matron woke me and said they had enough staff to allow me to take one day off. Gratefully, I accept. I’m tempted to pull the covers around me and get some more sleep, but no – I might be five thousand miles from home, but it’s still Christmas. Of course in the States, they celebrated Christmas several days ago. But today is my one free day to get out of the hospital, find a quiet place to sit for a few hours, and dream of Ma, Pa and my brother Abe. His Christmas holiday will already be over: he’ll be back at West Point by now.
Hugging my coat around me, I walk the short distance to Ivangorod town square in search of a café. There’s still been no snowfall, but the deathly cold has deepened every day since I arrived. Today, it takes my breath away.
“Coffee, Miss?” The waitress can tell I’m a foreigner.
“A tray of traditional Russian tea, please.”
“So – I seduced you after all.” A deep, strong voice is speaking. “Since you tasted it at the hospital, you realise that Russian tea is the best.”
I look across to the next table. Yuri Sirko is smiling at me.
“Yuri! How on earth?...”
“Off duty. It is Christmas, after all. But I could hardly get all the way back to my mother’s home in Astrakhan… So I came to Ivangorod, for a brief visit: tomorrow I travel back to St Petersburg, although my duties are changing.”
“Changing – in what way?”
“Mr Bukin has had enough of me. He’s releasing me from his services, and I’m returning to my regiment, who are now based in the St Petersburg Garrison. But tell me about yourself, Agnes – why on earth are you back in this town?”
I’m getting over my surprise. I look at his smiling face. Despite the cold outside, it’s warm in this café; the collar of his serge jacket is open. Silly doubts still run occasionally through my mind about Yuri, and I can’t help glancing at his neck. There’s no silver necklace. I answer him.
“I’ve been at the Winter Palace Hospital, working as a nursing auxiliary. They sent me here to cover a staff shortage. Professor Axelson works at the Winter Palace too, although every time I see him, he can talk of nothing but Mr Bukin’s injustice, keeping us in Russia against our will.”
“And have you discovered anything else about Miss Håkansson’s death?”
I tell Yuri about Rasputin, ending with what I saw from the Petrovsky Bridge. He shakes his head sadly. “You are right. Rasputin didn’t deserve to die like that. He was no killer: just a con-man with powerful friends – and a thousand enemies. Anyway… would you mind waiting here for me, for a few minutes?”
“Of course.”
He pulls on an enormous fleece-lined coat, its collar decorated with odd triangles of coloured silk; he sees me staring at it.
“My own coat – much better than standard Russian Army issue! This is my most prized possession. It comes all the way from the Aral Sea; I bought it from a caravan of Uzbek traders in Astrakhan. So I will be warm enough for a little adventure outdoors. But will you?”
“I’ll be absolutely fine.”
In five minutes he’s back, his military haversack over his shoulder. “I have a suggestion, Agnes, as to how you and I might usefully spend Christmas Day. I came to Ivangorod in order to go on a little adventure, alone. But it would be much more pleasant to go together. So – would you like to see Tri Tsarevny again?”
Although there is no snow, white frost glistens on every surface. A rimed, rutted road winds its way out of the town into the countryside. It may be Christmas, but Russians are still working. An old woman walks along, bent under a bundle of firewood, and a man carries over his shoulder the bundle of dead rabbits he’s trapped. The scene looks like a painting by Pieter Bruegel: I feel I’ve travelled back in time to the Middle Ages.
On one side the road is bounded by a high brick wall, clad in icicles and extending as far as the eye can see. Yuri points to a low arched doorway in the wall.
“We are now on the far side of the Tri Tsarevny estate from the main Dacha. That door is the servants’ entrance to the estate.”
“It will be locked, won’t it?”
“And I have a key. Bukin gave me one last summer, so he could send me on errands into Ivangorod.”
We step through the doorway in the wall into a silent world. The oak and ash trees that surround us, and the carpet of long-fallen leaves, sparkle with glittering ice crystals. There are no footprints anywhere on the frosty ground, but the line of the servants’ path is clear; it’s the only open space in these woods.
“Why has no-one been along the path, Yuri?”
“Because Tri Tsarevny is completely deserted. Petrov, who hires out horses in Ivangorod, told me that all his horses were requisitioned in September, to help transport stuff out of the place. Every item of value was taken, so as to deter thieves from coming here. Petrov also told me that now the winter has come, the man they pay to patrol the estate doesn’t bother to do his duties; he prefers to sit by a warm fire. No-one at all has been here, for a month or more.”
“So what might we find?” My voice sounds oddly muffled, as if the crystallized trees around us absorb all sound.
“Nothing, I expect. Miss Håkansson’s murder will probably remain an unsolved mystery. But at least you and I can tell ourselves that we tried.”
The path through the trees opens out. We’re standing on the frost-crusted shore of a frozen lake. Satin-smooth ice, gleaming in the pale sunshine, stretches maybe half a mile across to the line of little islands. I can even see the tiny coloured domes of the three Princesses. Beyond them, a dumpy hill is crowned by the many-gabled Dacha, jutting into the turquoise winter sky.
“If you prefer, we can walk around the shore of the lake; it’s about two miles. But I was planning to get there another way, Agnes.”
Yuri opens his haversack, and takes out four battered ice-skates. “I hired a pair in the town. Then when I bumped into you at the café, I went back and hired an extra pair for you. I hope? –”
“Yes. I love skating.”
“Then let’s go.”
I push off, one foot then another, then the momentum carries me forward. The glassy ice glides under my feet. Yuri sails along beside me: our breath fills the air in little puffs, like steam trains. He laughs.
“You’re not much of a detective, Agnes! Not like that famous Mr Sherlock Holmes. I have read some of those stories.”
“I’m not like Sherlock Holmes in any way! But why do you say that?”
“Because you should be interrogating me! After all, I’m a murder witness. The first duty of a detective is to interview witnesses. But you’ve not even asked me what I was doing on the day of Svea Håkansson’s death – that is, before I found the body.”
“All right. What were you doing that day?”
“Just after lunch, I’d gone over to the Third Princess; Rasputin had called for me. He told me he was worried about security.”
“In what way, worried?”
“I think he had a fevered imagination. But he told me that at night he liked to commune with God, by walking along the jetty in the dark.”
“Walking past the Second Princess island, by any chance?” I think of what Rasputin said about Svea. Ahead, the Princess islands are approaching us fast across the ice; I can now make out the low gray line of the causeway, on the far side of the islands.
“Yes – Rasputin said that was exactly where he’d been standing, the previous night. He told me that, when he was standing there, he had seen what looked like a human figure, going along the causeway in the dark. Rasputin said that the figure came from the garden below the main Dacha, and it went onto that little island with the storeroom on it. ‘You must take a look in that old store, Captain Sirko’ he said. ‘No-one ever goes in there. An intruder could have a hideout inside it, and never be spotted.’ Then he looked at me with those eyes… and at that exact moment, we heard a shot.
Rasputin and I were inside his house, near the porch. He was very alarmed, and said ‘Go and see what’s happening. I’m not coming out: someone might try to shoot at me.’ I went out onto the porch and looked around. I shouted to him that I could see nothing. After a few minutes he joined me on the porch, still looking terrified. He was staring anxiously here and there, but neither of us could see anything out of the ordinary. So I told him to stay inside, then I ran out of Rasputin’s house, along the causeway to the next island – and found the body.”
We’re skating fast; getting close to the Three Princesses. The birch trees that grow on the little islands look like clumps of white feathers, shining with frost. The only colour is the domes – gold, silver and copper – reflected on the lake-ice. We slow to a halt, and Yuri smiles at me.
“If the legends are true, we have accomplished a great feat, Agnes. We have skated over the top of a bottomless chasm.”
“Well it’s obviously not bottomless!” The ice under our skates is a foot thick, but crystal clear. Below it we can see the bottom of the lake, like looking through glass into an aquarium. Perhaps twenty feet below us is a carpet of even, brown gravel, as if on a carriage-drive. Torpid fish rest on the bottom. Nothing moves: I gaze at a hidden world in suspended animation.
“What’s that?”
I point down between my feet. The shape I can see lying among the gravel is a familiar one, yet utterly unexpected. Perhaps six inches long, black, and almost the shape of a letter L. Yuri looks at it, then at me. He gives a low whistle.
“No-one could ever see that, when the lake is not frozen. That gun might have lain there a hundred years without being discovered.”
“The murder weapon.”
“A lawyer might say: have you got proof of that? But fortunately neither you nor I are lawyers. We both know we are looking at the gun used to kill Svea Håkansson. Someone shot her – then they threw the gun into the lake.”
“We must get it.”
“Seeing the gun down
there under the ice is one thing, Agnes; pulling it up off the lake bottom is another. We need some equipment to get down to it. But nearby is the storeroom that Rasputin was so concerned about. Let’s take a look in there. We might find something useful.”
We go to the door of the storeroom. It’s not locked, but it’s jammed with frost. As Yuri pulls it, not just the door but part of the frame comes away: the wood is soft and rotten. “This place is practically falling down” he grins, as we step into the dark interior.
It’s a junk room. Pots of paint, brushes and ladders are stacked in disarray. The oars of a boat lean against a wall, and I nearly trip over a table-umbrella for shading summer picnics. There’s even a pile of rusty ice-skates. But Yuri picks up an object leaning against a wall, just inside the door. It’s a long stick of bamboo, with a metal ring and a net on the end; he holds it out, and I look at it.
“A child’s fishing-net!”
“A summer toy for the Tsar’s children. Ideal for lifting the gun, Agnes – but the handle is far too short. Now, if we can find a long stick to lash it to…” He lifts something else from the floor; a wooden boating pole. Moments later he has found some string and is lashing the fishing-net to the pole, while muttering to himself. “What we need now is – ah, here’s one! An ice-saw.”
I look around the dark interior of the store room. One tiny area of floor is clear of the piled junk, as if someone has used it as a place to stand. I step over to it, and notice a small drape, drawn as if covering a window. Did someone stand here, looking out of the hut? I draw back the drape.
There’s no window behind it; just the wooden wall of the hut and a shelf. On the shelf is a large metal box with dials, levers and a wire aerial. Yuri stares at it.
“That’s a Russian Army field wireless.”
“Why would it be here, Yuri?”
“I have no idea. It’s the strangest thing yet…” He steps over, turns a dial. “Dead, of course. The battery has been sitting here in sub-zero temperatures for ages.”