Saskia was wearing the clothes that had been given to her: a vermillion dress with a fishtail skirt, a short pearl-white jacket, and a pillbox hat. It would not have been her first choice, but the revolutionary who had expropriated it from a public bath in Baku had, at least, selected a costume of the correct size.
‘No, thank you,’ she said. ‘But you are very good.’
She looked at the pinned flap of coat that neatly dressed his arm, which had been amputated at the elbow. The guard noticed her attention.
‘An old injury,’ he said.
Saskia shook her head. ‘I did not mean to offend you.’
‘You could not offend me.’
The guard had not finished his sentence with “madam”. Saskia took it as a sign that he was willing to forego the strict propriety that would typically characterise a conversation between a noblewoman and a train guard. His age helps, she thought. He must be fifty or sixty. He wants to daughter me.
Saskia removed her left wrist from the hand warmer. The guard looked at the scarf that covered her stump. His expression had not changed. The thick skin of his eyelids did not move.
‘There was an accident. It happened in the Ukraine, during the summer when I went down to the peasants.’
The guard put his hand in one of the deep pockets of his coat. For a moment, Saskia feared that he would draw a gun and denounce her as an anarchist. But then she remembered him taking his official timepiece from that pocket in response to the minor royal’s query about the accuracy of the clock in the dining carriage, not two hours before.
‘I have no weapon,’ she said.
‘Then you have placed yourself in some danger.’
Saskia wanted to ask his name, but she thought that his hesitation might set her back. There was no question that she needed his help. There was a piece of furniture in the luggage compartment that Saskia and her fallen companion had been instructed to escort, regardless of cost to life, to sympathisers in St Petersburg.
Saskia would not let that happen. She needed to press the guard.
‘Are you a friend?’ she asked. ‘Tell me now or go about your business.’
His beard twitched. ‘Are you an agent of the Third Section?’
Saskia smiled. The Tsar’s Third Section had not existed officially for years, but its name still held a chill.
‘My friend,’ she said, touching the arm that had held the timepiece, ‘there is a crated item in the luggage compartment addressed to the University’s Twelve Collegia.’
‘Do you want me to change the address?’
‘You’re a good man, comrade. Here it is.’ She passed him an envelope. ‘Inside are new luggage labels. It will be safer if you do not read them.’
The guarded nodded and put the envelope in an outer pocket.
‘Take these, too,’ she said, pulling a clip of roubles from her sleeve.
‘I will not.’
Saskia sighed. ‘I need the train to be slowed. Can you do that?’
‘You need to be careful.’
The guard had used the informal “you”.
‘Comrade, will you let the train be slowed?’
The guard sighed and took his hand from his pocket. Where Saskia expected the pocket watch, she saw a revolver.
With an apologetic shrug, the guard said, ‘We’re given these.’
Saskia felt a wave of relaxation down the muscles on her right side. She was ready to slap the gun aside and overpower him.
The train whistled.
The guard said, ‘You should have it. What am I meant to do with it? I’m an old man.’
‘Thank you, but keep it.’
‘I will slow the train for you and redirect the crate. Should I tell you my name?’
Saskia put her hand to his cheek. She did not want to give him her assumed name, which would be to meet honesty with deceit.
‘There is a tunnel,’ the guard said, ‘and at its entrance, if you go north, there is a track. That will take you quietly into the city.’
When he left, Saskia slowed her vision to watch the sleepers drift by. She thought about the revolver, how the cylinder would turn with quiet clicks.
I will lead my fear, she thought.
Chapter Two
In the first sleeping carriage, the steward was sitting in his chair. He rose as Saskia passed. She smiled, expressed her desire to remain undisturbed in her compartment, and continued along the narrow, carpeted passage until she reached the last door.
She knocked once and went inside. There was nobody hiding beneath the fold-out seats or in the en suite bathroom. She locked the door. The steward had left her smoked salmon and vodka in an ice bucket. On one seat was a printed note from the train manager. It described the weather and the wildlife one might see coming into St Petersburg. The note from the previous day, which had appeared following their departure from Moscow, had said much the same.
Saskia popped some salmon into her mouth and withdrew a small travelling bag from the cupboard beneath the sink in the bathroom. It had a tumbler lock. She turned the dials, opened the bag, and withdrew her papers. There were several. Each testified to the state’s anxiety. Saskia set them alight using the oil lamp and brushed the debris into the sink. She turned the tap and watched the blackened flakes swill away. Then she opened the window and threw out Kamo’s second hat, his pipe and tobacco pouch, and his wash bag.
She looked at herself in the mirror.
Home, she thought. We’re going home.
There was no time to consider what she meant by ‘we’. Did she feel some responsibility for Ute Schlesinger, the woman who had been born in this body? Saskia knew her own mind to be a digital ghost. Indeed, perhaps her thoughts were only a crude facsimile, a simulation.
Mirror, mirror.
As always, the imperfections stood out. Her eyes were wrinkling at the edges. The dimples either side of her mouth were deeper now. This is age. This is time. The days were long passed since she had shaved her legs or shaped the edges of her eyebrows. Saskia had been told that she gave the impression of a sadly lost beauty, a woman whose twin turned beneath chandeliers. The compliment did not please her. The physical attractiveness distinguished her as surely as her missing left hand. Both were attributes she wanted to hide.
So neat: those petals of skin that a butcher had gathered, folded and stitched during the winter of 1905. It was a curious thing that the absence of her hand should embarrass her when she was alone. Curious too that the hand had been lost in the crash of a heavier-than-air flying machine. What secrets she carried.
It is time for us to go home, she thought.
Am I thinking in Russian?
‘It is time,’ she said in German, watching her mouth in the mirror, ‘to go home.’
The face—Ute’s face, Saskia’s face—smiled.
She took her long coat from the hook on the bathroom door and swung it around her shoulders. She fastened the buckles with a practised movement and folded back the material on her left sleeve. Pinned it. As she held the bearskin warmer between her teeth, she changed her hat for a thick cap, and undid the laces on her boots. They had high heels and would not do.
In Kamo’s trunk beneath the window, she found the expensive fur boots that he had bought in Baku, on the Caspian. She stuffed the toes with newspaper and put them on.
Before she could pack her satchel, there was a knock at the door. It was sturdy but the upper panel, hidden by a green blind, was glass. A strong man would be able to break it open. She watched the brass handle turn. Its lock held.