The Jewel of St. Petersburg Read online

  She pulled her knees to her chest. Sank her chin on them and in return received a prod in the spine from the rifle, but behind her heels she’d dragged a stone to within reach. She wrapped her arms around her shins and shivered in the breeze that was thinning the mist. Not that it was cold, but she was frightened. Frightened for her parents and for her sister, Katya, who would be rising from their beds about now, totally unaware of the black hoods that stalked Tesovo. Katya was only thirteen, a blond bubble of energy who would come bounding into Valentina’s room to entreat her for a swim in the creek after breakfast on their first morning at Tesovo. Mama liked to keep to her room first thing in the morning, but Papa was a stickler for punctuality at breakfast. He would be ruffling his whiskers and glaring at his pocket watch because his elder daughter was late.

  Papa, be careful.

  “Are you Bolsheviks?” she asked suddenly, tensing herself for the blow.

  It came. On the neck. She heard something crunch.

  “Are you?” she asked again. She wished she could turn and look into his hooded face.

  “Shut your mouth.”

  The second blow was harder, but at least he had spoken. It was the first time she’d heard his voice since he’d ordered her to sit. She wasn’t certain how far behind her he was crouched, silent as a spider, except that it was obviously less than a rifle length away. She’d been submissive so long, he must have dropped his guard by now, surely. If she was wrong... She didn’t care to think about that. She needed to lure him within reach.

  “You know who my father is?”

  The rifle slammed into the side of her jaw, jerking her head almost off her neck. “Of course I bloody know. You think we’re stupid peasants or something?”

  “He is General Nicholai Ivanov, a trusted minister in Tsar Nicholas’s government. He could help you and your friends to—”

  This time he thrust the tip of his rifle against the back of her head, forcing it forward till her forehead was jammed against her knees.

  “Your kind is finished,” he hissed at her, and she could feel his breath hot on the bruised skin of her neck. “We’ll trample you bastards into the earth that you stole from us. We’re sick of being kicked and starved while you stuff your greedy faces with caviar. Your father is a fucking tyrant and he’s going to pay for—”

  Her hand closed on the stone hidden under her skirt. With a violent twist she spun around and slammed it into the front of the hood. Something broke. He screamed. High-pitched, the way a fox screams. But she was too quick, gone before he could pull the trigger. Racing, ducking, dodging under branches and plunging into the darkest shadows while his cry fluttered behind her. She could hear him charging through the foliage and two shots rang out, but both whistled past harmlessly, raking the leaves and snapping off twigs as she stretched the distance between them.

  She slid down a slope on her heels, desperate to find the river. It was her route out of the forest. She swerved and switched direction till she was certain she had lost her pursuer, and then she stopped and listened. At first she could hear nothing except her pulse in her ears, but gradually another sound trickled through: the faint but unmistakable ripple of water over rocks. Relief hit her and to her dismay she felt her knees buckle under her. She was stunned to find herself sitting upright on the damp earth, fretful and weak as a kitten. She forced herself shakily back onto her feet. She had to warn her father.

  After that she moved at a steadier pace. It didn’t take long to locate the river and set off along the narrow track that ran along its bank. Disjointed thoughts crashed around inside her head. If these hooded men were revolutionaries, what plans did they have? Were they just hiding out in Tesovo’s forest, or had they come here for a specific purpose? Who was their target? That last one wasn’t hard. It had to be Papa.

  She clamped her lips together until they were bloodless in an effort to silence the shout of rage that roared inside her, and her feet speeded up again, weaving a jerky path through the overhanging branches.

  A sound jolted her and she recognized it at once: the noise of a horse’s hooves splashing through water. Someone was coming upriver. It was shallow here, a silvery burble over a bed of stones, the morning sunlight flouncing off the eddies and swirling back up into the trees. She crouched, curled in a ball behind a bush, the skin stretched tight across her cheeks as if it had somehow shrunk in the last few hours.

  LIEV POPKOV!”

  The big man on the ugly flat-footed horse swung round at the sound of her voice. “Miss Valentina!” He was leading her horse, Dasha, behind.

  The expression on his face under his black corkscrew curls surprised her. It was one of shock. Did she look that bad? Normally Liev Popkov was a young man of few words and even fewer expressions of emotion. He was several years older than herself, the son of her father’s Cossack stable master, and he seemed to have time and interest only for four-footed companions. He leapt out of the saddle and stomped in his long boots through the shallows. He towered over her as he seized her arm. It surprised her that he would touch her. He was only an outdoor servant, but she was far too grateful to him for bringing her a horse to object.

  “I heard shots,” he growled.

  “There are men in the forest with rifles.” Her words came out in gasps. “Quickly, we have to warn my father.”

  He didn’t ask questions. He wasn’t that kind of person. His gaze scoured the forest, and when satisfied, he swept her up onto the back of her horse.

  “What made you come up here?” she asked as he untied Dasha’s reins.

  His massive shoulders shrugged, muscles stretching the greasy leather tunic. “Miss Katya came looking for you. I saw your horse was gone”—he rolled a hand fondly over the animal’s rump—“so I rode up. Found her tethered.” As he handed her the reins, his black eyes fixed on hers. “You well enough to ride?”

  “Of course.”

  “You don’t look good.”

  She touched her cheek, felt blood and saw scarlet slither down her fingers. “I can ride.”

  “Go slow. Your feet look bad.”

  She gathered the reins in her hands and twitched Dasha’s head around. “Thank you, Liev. Spasibo.” With a brisk touch of her heels she set the horse into a canter, and together they raced off down the river, water scything like a rainbow around her.

  She rode hard through the forest, with Liev Popkov and his big-boned animal tight on her trail. At one point a tree was down across their path, but she wasted no time finding a way around it. She heard an annoyed shout behind her but she didn’t stop, just put Dasha to it and lifted her into the jump. The horse soared over it, pleased with herself, and swerved to avoid the roots that writhed up from the black earth to trip the unwary.

  They burst out of the forest fringe into the open, into the quiet sunlit somnolence of the landscape, a quilt of greens and golds, of fields, orchards, and pastureland that was spread out lazily before her. It made her want to cry with relief. Nothing had changed. Everything was safe. At the top of the slope she reined in her horse to give her a moment to breathe. She’d tumbled out of the forest nightmare back into the real world where the air was scented with ripening apples and the Ivanov mansion sat half a mile away at the heart of the estate, fat and contented as a honey-colored cat in front of a stove. It quickened something inside her and, like Dasha, she breathed more freely. She shortened the reins, eager to ride on.

  “That jump was dangerous. You take risks.”

  She glanced to her right. The young Cossack and his horse were silhouetted against the sun, solid as a rock.

  “It was the quickest way,” she pointed out.

  “You’re already hurt.”

  “I managed.”

  He shook his head. “Have you ever been whipped?” he demanded.

  “What?”

  “That jump was difficult. If you had fallen off, your father would have had me whipped with the knout.”

  Valentina’s mouth dropped open. A knout was a rawh
ide whip, often with metal barbs attached, and although its use had been abolished in Russia, it still prevailed to enforce discipline. One hung coiled like a sleeping snake on the wall of her father’s workroom. For a moment they stared at each other, and the sunlight suddenly seemed lost to her. What must it be like to live each day in fear of a whip? Liev’s features were heavy and solemn, already set in grooves despite his young age, as if there had been little in his life to smile about. She felt ashamed and embarrassed.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  He grunted.

  She was the first to look away. She stroked Dasha’s feathery ears, then clicked her tongue to set her off at a gallop down the grassy slope. The air buffeted Valentina’s lungs and dragged at long strands of her hair, and one stirrup threatened to snap loose from her bare foot. She leaned forward, flat along Dasha’s back, urging her to a faster pace.

  The roar of an explosion shattered the silence when they were only halfway down the slope. One end of the house shuddered and seemed to leap up into the air, before it disintegrated inside a gray cloud of smoke. Valentina screamed.

  Two

  NYET! NO! THE WORD FILLED VALENTINA’S MIND, ECHOING inside it till there was no room for other words. Nyet! No room for words like blood and pain. No room for death.

  Their horses skidded to a halt on the gravel in front of the house and Valentina threw herself out of the saddle. There was noise everywhere. People frantic, servants running, shouting, crying. Panic leaping from face to face; the air was thick and heavy with it. There was the stink of smoke, shattered glass underfoot. Riderless horses hurtled into view from the stables, skittering in terror. She heard the word bomb repeated again and again.

  “Papa!” she screamed.

  Her father’s study was at that end where the smoke was pouring out, swallowing the house in greedy gulps. Each morning when at Tesovo, her father would go into his study to write his ministerial letters immediately after finishing his newspaper over breakfast. Her heart lurched as she started to fly toward the crumpled wing of the building, but after only two steps she was jerked to a stop. A fist like an anchor chain had seized her wrist.

  “Liev,” she screamed, “let go of me!”

  “Nyet.”

  “I have to see if Papa is—”

  “Nyet. It’s not safe.”

  His filthy fingernails dug deep into her white skin while in his other hand lay the reins of the two horses. Dasha was prancing wildly, nostrils flared, but the ugly one just stood flat-footed, its curious brown eyes fixed on Popkov.

  She stopped struggling and drew herself up to her full height. “I order you to release me, Liev Popkov.”

  He looked down at her imperious figure. “Or what? You’ll have me whipped?”

  At that moment Valentina caught sight of her father’s back—she recognized his navy frock coat—stumbling into the dense pall of rubble dust.

  “Papa!” she yelled again.

  But before she could make Popkov release her, the blackened form of a man emerged from the smoke, choking for air. In his arms lay what looked like a broken figure. He was cradling it, his head bent over the boneless body, its sooty legs dangling limp and unheeding. The man was bellowing something, but for some reason Valentina’s ears weren’t working. She couldn’t make out what he was saying. The man drew closer and with a shock she realized it was her father, but her father with a cocoon of black dust encasing his skin, his whiskers, his clothes.

  “Papa!” she screamed.

  This time the Cossack let her go. As she scrabbled to her father’s side, her eyes took in one of the figure’s feet. It was wearing a single red shoe, one she herself had helped her sister choose in the shop on Nevsky. The rest was blackened like Papa: her legs, her dress, her face, even her hair, except for one stray strand on the side of her head that was still blond. But streaked with scarlet.

  “Katya ...”

  Valentina tried to shout the name, to make her sister open her blue eyes, to sit up and laugh at the game she was playing. But the word had no life. It died on her lips.

  “Katya ...”

  Her father was bellowing at the servants. “Ride for the doctor! For God’s sake, bring him here at once. I don’t care what he’s...”

  His voice thickened and seemed to splinter. Valentina stood at his side, her face frozen, but when she reached out to touch the broken doll, her father swung his arms away.

  “Don’t touch her.”

  “But I—”

  “Don’t touch her. You did this to her.”

  “No, Papa, I rode up to—”

  “You should have taken her with you. She was looking for you, waiting for you. It’s because of you she’s hurt. You—”

  “No,” Valentina whispered.

  “Yes. I was still in the breakfast room, but she was fretting because you’d gone off riding without her. She must have wandered into my study where...” His mouth collapsed into a low cry. “I’ll have the murdering savages shot, I swear to God I will.”

  “Katya ...”

  The blond-black head moved. The red shoe started to judder and shake, and a strange unearthly sound rose in a thin thread from the lacerated throat. Grasping his child tighter to his chest, crooning her name, her father hurried to the wide steps up to the front door, Valentina at his heels. As he stepped over the threshold he snapped his head around to look at her. What she saw in his eyes made her halt.

  “Get out, Valentina. Get out of here. As horses mean so much more to you than your sister, go and help catch them.”

  His eyes almost closed and for a moment he swayed unsteadily. With his foot he kicked the door shut in her face.

  VALENTINA STOOD THERE AND ROCKED BACK ON HER HEELS, staring at the door. At the iron studs in it, at the place where she and Katya had nicked its surface with a stone to show how deep the snow had risen last Christmas.

  “Katya,” she moaned.

  Where was Mama? Gathering hot water and bandages?

  An earsplitting squeal behind her made her swing around. Horses were charging about the drive in panic, tossing their heads, kicking their heels. Who had let them out? Flecks of foam littered their mouths and flanks. What had happened in the stables? Had the revolutionaries been there too? The grooms and stable boys were pursuing the frightened animals, coaxing and calling, but there was no sign of the stable master, Simeon Popkov, a powerful man who knew how to take control and steady nerves. He was nowhere to be seen.

  Where was he? And where was Liev?

  She abandoned the steps and flew around the side of the house toward the stables. Had he already caught the men who had done this terrible thing to Katya? Surely Papa would forgive her selfishness if she brought him one of the revolutionaries responsible.

  “Simeon!” she shouted as she raced into the stable yard.

  Abruptly she stopped, lungs pumping. The yard was quiet and oddly empty. Only Dasha and the ugly mount that was Liev’s were tethered to an iron ring in the wall. They were jumpy, edging in circles, bumping into each other. At the far end of the yard beyond the stalls stood the shack that was the stable master’s office, its door hanging open. In the dim interior she could make out a broad male figure, his back toward her. He was kneeling on the ground, his black head bowed.

  “Simeon,” she called out. She could hear the fear in her voice.

  But even as the word left her mouth she realized her mistake. It wasn’t the stable master; it was his son, Liev, huddled over something on the floor. She burst into the shack.

  “Liev, where is ... ?”

  His father, Simeon Popkov, was there in front of her. The stable master was lying stretched out on his back on the ground, limbs askew, black eyes open. His throat had been cut to the bone. She’d never have believed there could be so much blood. Crimson seemed to flood her world. It had taken over his tunic, soaked his hair, laid claim to the floor. Specks of scarlet floated in the air, and the smell of it made her choke.

  Her mind grew hazy.
She blinked, as if her eyelids could sweep away what lay before her, blinked again and this time focused on the Cossack’s son. Tears were coursing down his cheeks and his hand was holding his father’s, wrapping the strong fingers in a grip that would cheat death if it could. She put a hand on the young man’s back, feeling the tremors under his shirt.

  “Liev,” she whispered gently. She touched his hair, the black wiry curls, wanting to draw out the splinters of pain but not knowing how. “I’m so sorry. He was a good man. Why would they harm him as well?”

  Liev raised his head and gazed bleakly at the splashes of crimson on the wooden walls. Words roared out of him. “My father was nothing to them. Nothing! They did it just to prove they could, to show their power. And to give warning to those who work for other families of your class.”

  She stood there for a long moment, her chest too tight to breathe, seeing in her head the broken figure ofKatya, reliving the expression in her father’s eyes. Listening to the pain in the guttural moans that shuddered out of the Cossack’s throat. Her hand lay on his shoulder in an attempt to offer comfort, though she knew that comfort was the last thing either of them wanted. A thrashing tide of anger was rising within her.

  “Liev,” she declared, “they will pay for this.”

  He lifted his dark eyes to hers. “I’ll not rest,” he growled, “and I’ll not forget. Not till they’re dead.”

  Her gaze slid to the dead body of Simeon, who had been the first to lift her up onto a horse’s back when she was scarcely three years old and the first to pick her up from the dirt each time she fell off. He would dust her down, tease her with his huge laugh, and throw her straight back on again.

  “I’ll not forget,” she echoed. “Nor forgive.”