Volkonsky had died two years before. He had continued writing – and sending money – to the last, but it was through his brother-in-law that they had heard the news. He had been seventy-six – just five years older than Aleksei, and the news had been for him a memento mori. It was sad, but in terms of the practicalities of lessening the misery of their exile, he had already done his duty. There was no need for more money. Dmitry was a major, last thing they had heard. They knew nothing of Tamara – they had specifically instructed Volkonsky not to tell them; it would have been too painful – but she would be thirty-three by now, happily married, and no doubt with children of her own.
Domnikiia and Aleksei had themselves saved much of what Pyetr Mihailovich had sent them. They owned this house, never mind that it was made of wood and not stone. And they owned land, which Aleksei farmed. ‘We must cultivate our garden,’ Lyosha always said to her, and then told her she should read Voltaire – but she never did. What mattered was that they were contented, even if it was a life that neither had envisaged. True, it was horribly cold here in the winter, but that only reminded them they were in Russia. In the summer, it was usually pleasant – rarely too hot. Now it was somewhere between summer and autumn, and still comfortable to sit out in front of the house and gaze down to the river, even after sunset. Today it was particularly important that she could sit outside, because Aleksei had a visitor.
The old starets – a few years older than Aleksei, she would guess – had arrived on horseback. He looked in some strange way familiar to Domnikiia, but she could not place him. He had given her his name and she had, with ridiculous but somehow appropriate formality, gone to announce him to Lyosha. The old man had followed her into the house and Aleksei had seen and recognized him. He had rushed over – as best he could – and hugged the old man like a long-lost brother before she had been able even to repeat the name she had been given – Fyodor Kuzmich.
She had sensed that Aleksei and the old man – the other old man – had things to discuss and had left them alone, despite both their protestations. Now they had been together for almost half an hour, and she was tempted to go back in. She peeked through the window and Aleksei saw her. He beckoned her in enthusiastically, and she complied.
Aleksei was sat in his favourite chair, a rug over his knee despite the warmth. He was seventy-three now – to her sixty-one – and showed many of the superficial indications of aging that one might expect. The hair of his head and beard was white. His skin was thin and pale, but not excessively wrinkled. His body was wizened, but not weak – the years of forced labour in the mines had helped with that. His hearing was poor, as was his eyesight, but he had a pair of eyeglasses that he used whenever he wanted to read.
The man who sat opposite him – Fyodor Kuzmich – seemed wiser, but less contented. Age had affected him similarly, except that the top of his head was completely bald. Aleksei still possessed a full head of hair, but for a tiny gap on the crown that Domnikiia had only recently noticed.
‘And Cain never knew?’ Kuzmich asked just as Domnikiia entered. She shuddered silently at the name.
‘No – much as I was tempted to tell him.’
‘You think he still lives?’
‘I’d be a fool to make any other assumption,’ said Aleksei.
‘So our deception – your deception – remains a victory; a suitable reimbursement for the times he deceived you.’
‘He never deceived me,’ said Aleksei. ‘He just persuaded me to deceive myself.’ His eyes flicked up and looked straight into hers. ‘But I’ve understood the truth for a long time. Some things don’t need faith – some things you just know.’
Domnikiia had no idea what he was talking about, but she saw the look of love in his eyes, the same look she had seen every day since she had climbed out of that troika after a journey of thousands of versts and their eyes had met for the first time in two years. She did not care to listen to their conversation any more; she did not need to.
She went back outside and walked slowly, with a little pain in her knees, back to her chair. She sat down and gazed up above her. There was no moon tonight, but the sky glittered. It was strange, but she sat out there most nights – when it was neither cold nor cloudy – and gazed at the constellations, most of which Aleksei had taught her. He was smart enough to know that the patterns were just random, not icons set into the sky by the gods, and she was smart enough to believe him, but it wasn’t for that that she gazed at them.
Her reasoning was simple. It wouldn’t be every night, it probably wasn’t tonight – it might only be one in a hundred or even a thousand nights – but just occasionally, Domnikiia was sure, as she looked up at Pegasus or Orion or Cassiopeia, that somewhere, across half a continent, her daughter would be walking along a street, or sitting in a chair, or lying in a bed with the man she loved, and lifting her eyes skyward to gaze, like her long-forgotten mother, upon those same stars.
Historical Note
The official record tells us that Tsar Alexander I entered immortality in Taganrog on 19 November 1825, attended by his wife and his closest advisors. But almost immediately, rumours began to circulate that he had not died but had faked his own death, in order to abdicate a crown with which he had never felt comfortable. The tale was that he lived out the remainder of his long life in the guise of an impoverished holy man, by the name of Fyodor Kuzmich, dying finally in Tomsk in 1864. If Alexander and Kuzmich were one and the same, then he would have been eighty-six years old. While many historians regard these stories as worth little more than a footnote, within the Romanov family itself they were widely held to be true. As recently as 1958, the Grand Duchess Olga Alexandrovna, sister of the last tsar, Nicholas II, is quoted as saying, ‘I am old and not long for this world; you are young and apparently have understanding of these things. You should know that we have no doubt that Fyodor Kuzmich was the emperor.’
Jasper Kent
Born in Worcestershire in 1968, Jasper Kent read natural sciences at Cambridge before embarking on a career as a software consultant. He also pursues alternative vocations as a composer and musician and now novelist.
The inspiration for Jasper’s bestselling début, Twelve (and indeed the subsequent novels in The Danilov Quintet), came out of a love of nineteenth-century Russian literature and darkly fantastical, groundbreaking novels such as Frankenstein and Dracula. His researches have taken him across Europe and to Saint Petersburg, Moscow and the Crimea, including three days on a train from Cologne to the Russian capital, following in the footsteps of Napoleon himself.
Jasper lives in Brighton, where he shares a flat with his girlfriend and several affectionate examples of the species rattus norvegicus.
