“You mean Okhrana killed her? And then they tried to kill us, when we investigated?”
“Okhrana have no scruples about killing inconvenient people – even foreign citizens. So, what you suggest would be the obvious explanation. But there is something else in this matter… a deeper, hidden pattern we can’t yet see. A question keeps nagging me, and won’t go away. That question is: if Okhrana killed Svea, what was their motive for murder?”
“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.”