The Romanov Conspiracy (61 page)

93

Andrev came awake with a kind of convulsion, a cry on his lips.

“Are you all right?” Lydia lay beside him, her head in the crook of his neck.

“Just a bad dream, that’s all.” He rubbed his eyes and checked his pocket watch in his jacket by the bed. Almost four hours had passed. He’d been exhausted. It was bright outside, shafts of sunlight filtering through the shutters.

She asked sleepily, “Did I make a terrible fool of myself?”

“If you did, that makes two of us.” He touched her face gently with his hand. “How are you feeling?”

She sat up and smoothed her skirt, her face suddenly flushed. “I’m not sure. What … what happened between us, it’s made me think.”

“About what?”

“How would it have been if we met before now?”

Andrev looked into her eyes. “Before we did? I think we should go mad thinking about that.”

Lydia changed the subject. “Do you think Yakov might have some tea for that samovar of his?”

“Let me look.” He climbed out of bed and immediately sensed something was wrong, but he couldn’t quite work out what it was.

Lydia said, alarmed, “What’s the matter?”

And then Andrev realized: almost imperceptibly, the train’s speed was decreasing.

“The engine’s slowing. Get your clothes on quickly. There might be trouble.” He dragged on his clothes and grabbed his revolver.

Lydia dressed, and he moved to the door leading to the engine. “No, wait, I’m coming with you.”

He clambered over the coal wagon, Lydia following.

Thick forest lay all around, as far as the eye could see, the Urals towering above them, snowcapped in places. Behind them he thought he glimpsed wooden buildings, the outline of a scattered village.

They reached the engine. The driver and his son were gone.

He slapped his hand against the cabin wall in frustration. “Just what we need. The fools must have slowed and jumped ship.” He examined the steam indicator. “The pressure’s running low. Who knows how long we’ve been abandoned? If this keeps up we’ll come to a grinding halt.”

He grabbed the driver’s thick leather gauntlet left discarded on the floor, slipped it on, and yanked open the furnace door. A wave of heat blasted out, the furnace a sea of yellow and bloodred coals.

“It’s down to sheer, brutal donkey work, I’m afraid.” He grabbed a pair of shovels from a rack behind him, handed one to Lydia, and dug the other into a coal pan behind them. “Start shoveling as fast as you can.”

Sweat dripped from Andrev’s face as he adjusted the valves, and the engine speed began to pick up. He wiped a patina of sweat from his brow. After thirty solid minutes of shoveling the steam pressure was constant.

Lydia felt fatigued. “Have you any idea where we are?”

“Absolutely none.” He peered out at the snowcapped Urals, then studied the route map he took from his pocket. “I’ll make a guess we’re at least three or four hours from Ekaterinburg.”

An hour later they chugged past a small town, a few gaunt-looking peasants lining the tracks, scrawny children waving at them from an abandoned station hut. Andrev checked the station name on the route map.

“We’re making better time than I thought. If this keeps up, we ought to be nearing Ekaterinburg in another couple of hours.”

“Then what? We can’t just arrive in the city station. It’ll be crawling with Reds.”

“According to the map there should be a siding about five miles from Ekaterinburg. We’ll shunt the train there and make our way in on
foot.” He put the map away. “We better take turns cleaning ourselves up. You first, I’ll keep the furnace stoked. And try and gather any food and spare clothes you can find in the carriage. We may need them.”

Two hours later the train entered a broad valley. In the far distance, they could make out a dramatic collection of domes and spires, mingled with the tall brick chimneys of factories and smelting works, the telltale signs of Ekaterinburg, in the shadow of the snow-topped Urals.

Andrev reduced their speed and when they approached the siding, he slowed to a snail’s pace before stopping. He jumped down, taking with him the point-change bar, and when they shunted the train onto the siding, he went back and repositioned the points, then climbed aboard again, joining Lydia.

They drove the train for a quarter mile along the siding, coming to a halt in a cloud of steam. Andrev shoveled more coal into the furnace.

“We’ve stopped—why more fuel?”

“In case Yakov has a welcoming committee waiting for us in Ekaterinburg and we have to beat a hasty retreat.”

When he finished shoveling they gathered their belongings and climbed down from the engine.

Andrev stared back at the vast Ural forests they’d left behind them, a shadow crossing his face.

“You don’t look happy.” Lydia touched his arm.

“That bad dream I had. It gave me this awful feeling something terrible happened to Nina and Sergey.”

“You know you Russians. You’re always quick to make a drama out of nothing.”

“I hope that’s all it is.”

94

“It’s done, Leonid. We felled a dozen trees and blockaded the rail line.”

Yakov checked his pocket watch—2 a.m.—then snapped it shut. “And the guards?”

Zoba said, “They’re stationed on the main track at five hundred paces. If a train appears, they’ll wave it down with lanterns. The blockade will make sure it halts.”

“It better, or we’ll both be facing a firing squad.” Yakov looked dismal as he peered out the open window, the Siberian night air balmy, fragrant with pine. His men were huddled in groups along the tracks, fires lit, brewing tea and eating their rations—hard biscuits and the tins of corned beef. “What about the scouts?”

“Half a dozen men are on their way along each end of the track. We’ll try to reach the nearest town and find a telegraph. How is she?”

“Desolate. The medic’s going to give her a little ether to sedate her. I had the child’s body moved to the next compartment. We had to pry it from her embrace. She clung to the boy as if her life depended on it.”

“You’re going to talk to her?”

Yakov looked sober as he opened the door. “For what it’s worth. But I have a feeling I’m the last person in the world she wants to talk with.”

Yakov let himself into the compartment, where a guard patrolled the passageway.

The child’s body lay on the bottom bunk, covered with a worn cotton sheet. Yakov knelt and grimly lifted the sheet.

Sergey’s eyes were closed, the lids almost translucent.

He so often witnessed death in the trenches that he was almost
immune to it. But the loss of a child still wrenched his heart. His stomach churned, as he imagined Katerina lying there.

A heavy sigh passed his lips as he replaced the sheet. Then he stood and left the compartment, silently closing the door.

He knocked before he went in.

Her eyes looked scalded from crying. She was seated by the window, a handkerchief held over her mouth, and she was weeping, deep, uncontrollable sobs that shook her body.

A lamp was lit, and in its sulfur-yellow glow Nina looked inconsolable. She didn’t speak when he stepped in, just stared out at the darkness beyond the glass.

Yakov cleared his throat. “Nina … I don’t know what to say.”

“Get out of my sight.”

He touched her arm. “No, please, hear me out—”

“Leave me.” She stood, her tears welling. “I don’t want you here. I don’t want you near me.”

Yakov sighed and went to sit on the lower bunk, his hands clasped together. “Nina, you must listen to what I say. It’s important.”

“Nothing’s important. Nothing, not anymore. I want you to go.” She spoke with such ferocity, her eyes blazing, and then she turned away, putting her handkerchief to her mouth.

Yakov closed his eyes tightly, opened them again, touched his clasped fingers to his lips. “I promise I will. Once I say what must.”

She didn’t turn back, or speak.

Yakov said quietly, “First, you have to understand something. It’s not just about Stanislas. The reason I have to hunt Uri down—it’s him or me. His life or mine, and Katerina’s. That’s what I’m faced with.”

She turned and looked at him through wet eyes.

Yakov said, “It’s that bleak. Do you understand? I can’t allow him to succeed. Those above me won’t allow me to fail.”