Authors: Barbara Hambly
‘Mr Berkhampton.’ Honoria Flasket’s heavy eyebrows pulled down sharply. ‘There are over ten thousand francs here—’
‘Will you do it?’
‘Of course. But—’
‘Go. You can’t be seen with me. Those are the trunks there, those buff ones with the brass. There are four of them, one is extremely heavy. Get them to Berlin.’ He gave her a little push in their direction, then immediately walked away.
To her credit, she strode off in the direction of the trunks, without looking back.
God loves an Englishwoman
.
Asher glanced towards the great doors that led out onto Opladenerstrasse – he knew he could get a later train to Berlin; he had left himself just enough money for that – but he saw the police, accompanied now by two railway officials and two of the artillery officers he’d seen earlier, heading towards the baggage shed as well. Just for an instant he heard Solomon Karlebach whisper in the back of his mind,
Kill him
, even as he heard the crash and roar of long-range artillery pounding Mafeking, smelled the sour mustardy stink of the yellow gas that had filled his dream . . .
Saw the bank-draft counterfoil transferring fifty thousand francs from the account of the vampire Petronilla Ehrenberg to that of Benedict Theiss,
Teutonic student of blood and folklore
. . .
He walked back along the platform, as if trying to look inconspicuous, and someone shouted, ‘That’s him.’
He ran, not fast, and they were around him. He heard the train whistle scream from the Berlin Express, and the chief plain-clothes policeman said, ‘Somebody see if he has luggage . . .’
There was nothing for it. Asher turned in the grip of the man who held him and smashed his fist into the man’s jaw with the whole of his strength.
SEVENTEEN
‘You are certain you’ll be well here?’ Prince Razumovsky leaned one powerful shoulder against the carved pillar of the veranda, a rough mosaic of green uniform and gold sun-splashes: beard, buttons, the braid of his sleeves. What was it, Lydia wondered, that drew male Russian aristocrats to wear uniforms whenever they could, even if they weren’t serving officers? A craving for brilliant plumage instead of the proper blues and grays and browns to which Western Civilization had condemned men, poor things?
‘Perfectly, thank you, Prince.’ She folded her hands on the neat piles of account books before her. ‘You’ve left me more than ample entertainment—’
‘And you truly find this perusal of dry numbers entertaining?’
Does he really think the idea of having affaires with half the Imperial Guards officers would amuse a woman? Well
, she reflected,
it certainly seems to amuse his sister
. . .
‘Oh, absolutely! It’s a puzzle, like an egg hunt at Easter – or—’ She gestured, trailing the edge of her sleeve lace through the wet ink-line on her notes. ‘Or like analyzing the results of a series of graduated filtrations. Figuring out what things mean, or what they
could
mean—’
‘I think it a great shame,’ said the Prince, stepping around the wickerwork table to take and kiss her hand, ‘that your husband will probably never permit you to work for our Third Sector.’ With startling suddenness, spring had come to St Petersburg; though the weather was still sharply chill, Lydia found the sea air sweet and the touch of the sun on her face a blessing. Beyond the veranda’s carved railing, the woods were tender with new green.
‘I will give your very best wishes to my mother,’ the Prince continued, ‘who I suspect only wants to lecture
une Anglaise
on the spiritual virtues of living in the Russian countryside – not that she herself could tell a mushroom from a birch tree – and your excuses, and will return in no more than a week. And, of course, if your egg hunt palls, by all means walk up to the house and telephone Annushka or Ninochka or Sashenka –’ he named several of the ladies whom Lydia had met through the Circle of Astral Light – ‘and make them take you to tea at Donon’s. Sashenka –’ that was a very dashing, raven-haired Baroness whom Lydia suspected of being one of her host’s mistresses – ‘at least won’t try to involve you in conversations with the dead.’
‘It isn’t the seances I mind.’ Lydia reflected that conversations with the actual dead had been, in her experience, far more interesting than the ersatz variety moderated by mysterious individuals with names like Oneida and Princess Golden Eagle. ‘In fact, I found Madame Muremsky’s most instructive, though they did become quite annoyed when I insisted on wearing my spectacles and asked about why the lights had to be out – unreasonably so, I thought.’ She dabbed a corner of her blotting paper at the inky disaster on the page, then gave it up. She hoped one of the maids up at the main house could deal with the sleeve lace.
‘But the religion does trouble me. It’s not that I
am
religious,’ she hastened to add, reading the shift of Razumovsky’s shoulders, the tilt of his head – for of course she had concealed her spectacles under a pile of Deutsches Bank credit transfer records the moment she’d glimpsed the Prince’s refulgent form beyond the trees – and guessing that her words had touched a chord in his own thoughts. ‘But it seems to blind them so. To render everything into black and white, so that anything that claims to be holy they automatically assume is
all
good, straight through, and has no . . . no patches of fallibility—’
‘Like our friend Rasputin,’ said the Prince, a little grimly. ‘Who seems to be one entire patch of fulminating fallibility . . . Did he make an attempt on your virtue before he left town?’
‘Oddly enough, no. I mean,’ she added, ‘not that it’s odd that a man wouldn’t, because plenty of men don’t . . . but, honestly, so many of the gentlemen in society here
do
! And they seem so surprised when I’m not interested – and why would I be? I scarcely know them!’
Razumovsky laughed. ‘Ah, Madame, in Petersburg society that doesn’t matter.’
‘So I’ve deduced,’ said Lydia. ‘Which seems so
odd
to me . . . And it does make me wonder about what Father Gregory gets up to, if he’s considered excessive by comparison. It must be dreadfully fatiguing. But I think he’s on his best behavior when Madame Vyrubova is around.’
The Prince grunted. ‘You’re in a small circle indeed, then, Madame. They are bored, you understand,’ he went on after a moment, and in his voice was not the impatience Lydia had often heard, when men said that of upper-class women. He propped his boot on the seat of the other chair, leaned his forearms on his thigh. ‘Bored and discontented, and indeed why should they not be? After Easter one goes to the Crimea; in the summer one visits one’s country estates; in August one goes to one’s Polish estates, for the hunting . . . In September it is either back to the Crimea, or to Monte Carlo or Nice or Paris, before the Season opens here in Petersburg. And in all of those places one sees the people one knows from Petersburg or Paris or Vienna: one dances the waltz, one goes to the Opera. If you’re a girl – like my sisters, God help them, or my poor wife –’ this was the first the startled Lydia had heard of this lady – ‘one waits out one’s time until one is old enough to put one’s hair up and be fitted for evening dresses and go dancing and gambling, in order to get married to a man who loses what interest he had in you very quickly—’
Softly, Lydia said, ‘I know. All my life, when I was a child, and in school . . . It’s as if one is being swept away by a flooding river – at least, I suppose it is, though I’ve never actually
been
swept away by a flooding river . . . But so often I felt as if I were fighting a current that was too strong for me. And, instead of trying to help me, all the people on the river bank were trying to push me back into the water. Except Jamie.’
Razumovsky was close enough that she could see, as well as sense, his smile. ‘Except Jamie,’ he said.
‘But the thing is,’ Lydia went on, ‘it doesn’t have to be that way. That’s the troubling thing about it. Not the religion – because I should imagine, in all the centuries of the human race, that God has seen so many varieties of religious sensibility that He’s past being surprised by anything – but the waste of minds and energy that could better be used at actually helping the poor, instead of . . . of trying to get in touch with the dead, or find out how many civilizations of hyper-sentient spirits rose and fell on this planet in the dark abysses of time before humankind evolved.’
The Prince’s smile widened to a grin at this description of some of the articles of faith among the devotees of Astral Light, and of dozens of other occult societies in the city. Then he sighed and shook his head. ‘But religion is a thing that they can master without education, you see,’ he explained. ‘To which, God knows, few girls of my class have access, for all the expense of Swiss boarding-schools and Madame Dupage’s Exclusive Establishment for Young Females, Rue St Honoré . . . And, as you say, while the current of dress fittings and dances and beaux sweeps them away, their parents and friends and everyone whom they speak to is standing lined up on the riverbank pushing them back in. So those without a Jamie to pull them out when they were— How old were you, when you met him?’
‘Thirteen,’ said Lydia. ‘Sixteen, when he helped me swot for my exams to get into Somerville, but he’d been helping me find tutors and things for a year before that. I always knew I wanted to be a doctor, you see.’
‘Thirteen,’ said Razumovsky, and his handsome face was sad. ‘And now those young ladies are twenty-seven, twenty-eight, and they have not had educations and can not marshal either the mental discipline or the informational knowledge to take pleasure in— What did you call it? Analyzing results? Their souls are ravenous, and they do not know for what. And, here in Russia, religion is not like religion in England . . . or anywhere else in the world, I think. Here in Russia, fairies and devils are as real as angels – and angels are as real as one’s village priest. Here in Russia – perhaps because of the long winters, or the vastness of the land – one feels the Other World is very close. Have you not sensed it, when you sit on the veranda here in the twilight? Have you not felt that if you walked a little way down the path –’ he nodded towards the graveled way that led back into the woods, towards the birch groves and the river – ‘that you might meet bathhouse spirits, or swan maidens, or a kobold carrying a load of magical sticks? Russia has not been civilized for very long,’ he added gently. ‘For good or for ill, these things still lie very close to the skin. And now I am late!’
He straightened as the blue-and-burgundy form of a servant – by his walk and bearing, Lydia identified Jov the butler long before the man came close enough for her to make out his long, wrinkled face – appeared on the pathway. Razumovsky flung out his arms. ‘I come, I come! See how I hasten—’
‘It is my duty to preserve your Excellency from a beating at your mother’s hands,’ returned Jov with a grin. Like most of the Prince’s upper servants, he spoke excellent French. ‘And to save myself one, for not hastening your Excellency to his train. Madame Asher would not be persuaded to visit the Dowager Princess at Byerza? Madame,’ he added, turning to address her – a dapper, elderly man with enormous grizzled side-whiskers that reminded Lydia of James’s current disguise. ‘Be assured that I speak for all of us when I say, do not hesitate to issue the smallest of commands.’
‘Thank you.’ Lydia got to her feet, extended her hands to the Prince. ‘And thank you, Prince—’
‘Andrei,’ he corrected her. ‘If Madame will be so kind. Until Monday next, then.’ He kissed her hand again and was gone, disappearing among the bare silvery trees.
Lydia returned to her wickerwork chair and drew her shawl around her again, but for a long time she did not return to her systematic examination of Deutsches Bank property transactions over the past five years. Instead she sat, turning over in her mind what the Prince had said about the ladies of her acquaintance. From informants about possible partners and patrons of Benedict Theiss, they had become friends, some of them . . . On the previous Friday she had accompanied Natalia, and the Baroness Sashenka, and several others of their circle, to the night-long services of the Orthodox Good Friday; and had gone with them again the following night, praying and standing and praying and standing and singing and inhaling incense, and had seen the ecstasy of Easter on the faces all around her . . .
And had been propositioned four times at the Pascha breakfast after the Easter morning services, once by the Baroness’s husband. She didn’t doubt the sincerity of their beliefs, and yet – how easy it was to believe one was engaged in some vital quest for knowledge, when all one was doing was chasing phantoms in a dream . . .
If one could only figure out
, she reflected, retrieving her spectacles from beneath the pile of her notes,
which was the phantom, and which the reality
.
Else why was she trying to trace money sent from a dead man’s bank account in some unknown city, to purchase property in a place where even the Undead were unable to walk for two months of the year?
Which makes a good deal less sense
, she sighed,
than attempting to have a straightforward conversation with one’s deceased Uncle Harold, something which at least has the virtue of repeated anecdotal evidence.