The Jewel of St Petersburg (27 page)

Jens judged it carefully. “Now,” he shouted.

He raised the lamp and set off. They followed meekly, up the four stone steps to the higher-level tunnel where the outflow had slowed to a knee-high slick of freezing filth. The stench was suffocating and the roof level low. Davidov crunched his head against bricks and swore, but Jens led them as fast as he dared, pulling the makeshift rope behind him. Once in this channel, it was not far to an exit.

“All well?” he shouted out.

“Da.”

“Not much farther.”

“How long?”

But Jens’s ears had caught a sound, a rumble. Above the noise of legs splashing through the water came a distant but distinct rumble.

“Faster,” he ordered.

He lengthened his stride. “Almost there,” he called out.

“What’s that noise?” Davidov yelled.

The panic swept out of nowhere. One moment they were orderly and then suddenly they were running through the filth, stumbling and sprawling, all realizing what the rumbling heralded. The rope was abandoned. The surveyor tightened his grip till he was throttling Jens, but Jens still clutched the nurse and saw that Valentina had an arm around Madam Davidova, who was having difficulty breathing. Her husband was up ahead.

“Take that opening up there on the right. You may see daylight from it,” Jens called to him.

Daylight. It was only a word.
Daylight
. Jens had saved it till now. It brought hope in its wake. They hurried, scrambling and splashing to the side recess, turned the corner into it, and immediately Jens heard shouts. He came through last, dragging Nurse Sonya with him, and immediately saw what he’d known would be there. An iron ladder, a metal trapdoor above it. Daylight seeping through the small holes, air that was clean. A cheer went up, and tears were rolling down Madam Davidova’s cheeks.

The rumble of water burst into a roar right behind them.

“Up,” Jens ordered sharply.

Davidov climbed first. He raised the metal trapdoor with his shoulders, so that it clattered open onto the roadside and white air billowed in, making those in the tunnel squint as they stared upward. Quickly Jens hoisted the surveyor off his back and onto the ladder, so that Davidov could haul him up, followed by the Duma man and his wife. The water was rising fast now, up to Jens’s waist already.

“Valentina, climb!”

But she pushed the nurse onto the lowest rung. Nurse Sonya was shivering so fiercely her plump hands could scarcely hold the metal.

“Bistro!
Quickly!” Jens shouted.

He hooked an arm around Valentina’s shoulders and lifted her onto the rung as a surge of water cascaded through the tunnel.

“Go,” he said. He gave her sodden boot a push.

He seized Madam Davidova’s wrist and placed her hand on the ladder. Saw her fingers curl around it. A dozen more steps and it would be over. But that was when the torrent hit. A great churning wall of water crashed into them, ripping the ground from under them, leaping up the ladder, tearing fingers from metal. The lamp went. The world blacked out. Jens was hurled into the water. Filth in his mouth. His head cracked against a wall. His lungs burned as he fought his way up toward the square of light, but something or somebody crashed against him, submerging him again.

He seized a flailing arm underwater and dragged it back to the surface. For a brief moment he held it and caught a glimpse of a terrified face before the roaring current ripped it away. It was Madam Davidova. Valentina was screaming at him. Her dark figure leapt over him, into the water.

“No!” he bellowed, “Valentina, no!”

He lashed out and caught her long hair; his fingers twisted into it and yanked it toward him against the rush of the current. Her body was small and slight, but Valentina was kicking at him. “Let me go,” she screamed, dragging them under. He didn’t let her go; he would drown before he let her go. A hand stretched out from the ladder, hurling a coat onto the water’s surface. He snatched at a sleeve and was hauled in toward the metal rungs by the Duma man.

“Spasibo,”
he grunted.

Valentina was quiet now, locked in the circle of his arms, staring back along the path of the water’s torrent. Madam Davidova was gone. A low moan seeped out of Valentina, an animal sound of grief, but she didn’t resist when he lifted her up the ladder. In the cold gray light of a winter’s morning, they stood in a battered huddle, wet and exhausted, in the empty road. Davidov dropped to his knees, his face in his hands. Jens was not ready yet to look at the extent of his own failure. That time would come, when he was alone, away from the eyes of the world. For now he held Valentina’s trembling body against his and stroked the filth out of her hair.

“I could have saved her,” she whispered, the words shivering on her tongue.

“No,” he said. “You couldn’t.”

In the distance he could hear cars speeding toward them. But the future he had prepared for himself was speeding away from him, as out of control as the raging flood in the tunnels below St. Petersburg.

Seventeen

V
ALENTINA LAY SUNK DEEP IN HER PILLOWS. DRIFTS OF snowflakes buffeted the window as icy patterns clung to the corners of the glass, delicate as spiders’ webs, cold and unwanted as the thoughts in her head.

Time was passing. She wasn’t sure how long. Two weeks, three weeks? More? She’d been ill, the days blurred; a fever burned inside her, drenching the bedclothes with sweat, tying her limbs in knots in the sheets. She’d welcomed it. In her more conscious moments she knew it was a lung infection from the sewer water, but in her wilder spasms she was certain it was a punishment. Madam Davidova had drowned, her body washed up against a sluice grid, while Valentina had survived because she had climbed that ladder ahead of her.

At times the woman’s gentle face came to Valentina in her dreams and said sweet words. But other times, at night when the darkness grew too hot and heavy inside her head, Madam Davidova came like a fiend out of hell. Eyes blazing fire. Mouth spitting obscenities. Then Valentina screamed. Nurse Sonya was always there, telling her, “Ssh,
malishka,
quiet now.”

Something cold on her brow, a sip of liquid on her lips. Sometimes the bitter taste of laudanum.

The door opened quietly and there was the whisper of wheels on carpet. “Are you awake?”

“Yes. Good morning, Katya. You’re looking well.”

It was true, Katya did look well. Her skin had color, her hair was freshly washed, and she was sitting more upright in her chair.

“I’ve brought you some pineapple. Look.”

She placed a dish on Valentina’s side table. Inside a bowl lay two slices of canary-yellow pineapple, their fragrance drifting around the wintry room and turning it into summertime.

“How are you feeling?” Katya asked.

“Better.”

“Good. Will you come downstairs today?”

Valentina closed her eyes. “No. I have a thumping headache.”

“Nurse can give you something for it. You could get up and—”

“No. Not today, Katya.”

There was a long silence. The window danced and rattled in its frame. Valentina felt her hand lifted by Katya’s fingers.

“Valentina, you can’t go on like this.”

More silence. Thicker this time, harder to breathe.

“Nurse tells me,” Katya said gently, “that your fever is cured. That you are better.”

“But I feel weak.” Eyes still closed.

“Too weak to walk downstairs?”

Valentina nodded.

The small fingers soothed her own with soft feathery strokes. “I hear you, my sweet Valentina, I hear you every night.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“Of course you do. I hear you creep past my room every night when you think the whole house is asleep. You go downstairs and you play the piano. Sometimes for hours, even for most of the night.”

“No.”

“Yes. You creep back just before the servants start to stir. Admit it.” Katya squeezed her hand hard, jerking Valentina’s eyes open. “So,” Katya said, “now you will look at me?”

Valentina looked. This wasn’t her Katya, this was someone who had slid under her sister’s skin. The blue eyes were cold and pale as moonstones. This person was masquerading as Katya, getting it all wrong.

“Valentina, what is the matter with you? What is it that has paralyzed you as totally as the bomb paralyzed me? You’re not hurt. You’re not ill. Yet you’re hiding away up here. You didn’t even bother with your birthday. Where has all your spirit gone?”

“It was washed away in the sewers.”

“You’re alive. You weren’t crushed and you didn’t drown, nor did you lose part of your leg like the surveyor did.”

“The surveyor? Lost his leg?”

“Below the knee. Amputated.”

Valentina recalled his young face. Sweat-covered. Frightened. His arms around Jens’s neck, tight as tentacles.

“He’ll be able to walk with a crutch,” Katya said.

“Madam Davidova will never walk again.”

“No.”

“I saw her die, Katya. I watched this good woman drown.”

Katya’s hand slackened its grip, and her tone grew gentler. “Grieve for her. Yes, that’s your right, but don’t stop living because of her.”

Valentina slumped against her pillows. “Katya, it should have been me. She should have been on that ladder, not me.”

“But she wasn’t. She died; you didn’t. So get on with your life.”

“Jens put me on the ladder.”

“Thank God for Jens Friis. Though he shouldn’t have invited you down there in the first place.”

“Shut up, Katya. It’s not his fault that bloody revolutionaries meant to murder us.”

“Good.” Katya was smiling. “A spark at last. You owe it to Jens to come back to life.”

But Valentina yanked the quilt over her face. “Go away, Katya.”

The quilt was wrenched from her grasp. “Look at you!” Katya shouted.

Valentina looked down at herself. A grubby nightdress, her hair lank and knotted. She started to close her eyes, to shut it out, when she felt a quick sharp slap on her cheek.

“Get up!” Katya yelled. “Get out of that bed.”

“Don’t!”

“Are you just going to stay in your pit and rot?”

“Yes. Leave me alone.”

“Look at yourself. You have everything. Everything. You have no reason to hate the world. None.”

Valentina said nothing, in case she said too much.

“Poor Madam Davidova would give anything to be you right now,” Katya cried out. She sat back in the wheelchair, holding her hand to her throat as if holding something in. “Valentina,” she said in a harsh whisper, “
I
would give my eternal soul to be you.”

A swirl of wheels and she was gone from the room. Valentina gave a long moan and turned her face to the wall.

S
HE FELT SOMETHING MOVING INSIDE HER HEAD. SOMETHING slithering like a snake around her thoughts until it was throttling them as efficiently as a rope around a pickpocket’s neck.

Guilt was crushing her. Breaking her back. Pressing her face down in the dirt. Katya. Her mother. Her father. Madam Davidova. The amputated leg of the surveyor. Even her beautiful discarded horse, Dasha, still unridden since the day of the explosion.

And a thought kept intruding, like a voice murmuring in her ear, so low she could barely hear it. If it hadn’t been for her, would Jens have arranged the visit to the new sewers at all? If he hadn’t wanted to steal her away from Captain Chernov, would all those others still be alive? Was it all her fault?

Staring blank-eyed at the wall, she slowly took herself apart.

Piece by piece she attempted to put herself back together. It took a long time to make what was left fit together.

It was the pineapple that finally drove her out of bed. With each breath she inhaled of its fragrance, something of Jens imprinted inside her. She could feel it seeping through her lungs and into her bloodstream, pumping along the twisting paths of her veins. Because only Jens would have brought her a pineapple. He must have been here. Called at the house. He wasn’t curled up in bed like a wounded animal. She threw off the quilt and swung her feet to the floor.

Pulling off the nightdress, she picked up a segment of pineapple and slid it onto her tongue. A burst of sunshine in her mouth. She walked over to her writing table, unlocked the drawer, and took out the list. Pen in hand, she started to write.

11. Come to an arrangement with Papa.