The Jewel of St Petersburg (25 page)

“We’ve all got bangs and bruises, I know, but”—they weren’t going to like this—“if there’s nothing else major, I’m going to leave you.”

“No. Don’t.”

It was Valentina. He noticed a graze on her neck.

“You’re going back there, aren’t you?” she said.

“I have to.”

“Because there might be others who are wounded.”

Wounded. Crushed. Pinned under rocks. Bleeding and dying. Maybe already dead. Everyone saw images in their heads.

Valentina said quickly, “It’s too dangerous to go alone. Take someone with you.”

Take me with you.
That was what she meant.

He glanced across the chamber. “You.” He pointed to the Duma man, the frailest of them. “You come with me.”

Valentina made a soft noise in her throat. This close he could see the dirt caked on her eyelashes. But he couldn’t take her. He didn’t know what mangled limbs they might have to tread on down there. He relit the candle and took hold of the Duma man’s elbow, steering him back toward the mouth of the tunnel. He could feel the man’s arm trembling.

“Wait!” Valentina stopped him. “Take the lamp, you’ll need it more than we will. Leave us the candle.” She removed the lamp from beside the wounded man and carried it to Jens. She held it out. “Take it.”

“Thank you,” he said.
“Spasibo.”

“Take care.”

He nodded. “Minister Davidov,” he called out, “watch out for the women.”

“Jens,” Valentina said in a low voice, “don’t you know that it is the women who watch out for you men?”

“So I should be taking you with me?”

“You should.”

“I can’t.”

“I know. No stars to look at this time.”

He couldn’t help a smile. Then he was gone, swallowed by the black tunnel so effortlessly that for a bleak moment he doubted his existence.

T
HE LIGHT, WHICH NOW HAD DWINDLED TO A MISERABLE candle flicker, made people more anxious, nervy as cats in a wolf cage. But for Valentina, the loss of
him
, that strong center of him, was the worst. Without Jens the chamber felt much emptier, the air fouler, the people smaller. The rescue that only minutes ago had seemed likely, abruptly became unlikely. She was frightened he wouldn’t come back.

She’d seen how he moved in the darkness as if he owned these tunnels, as if they were his, not the city’s. The way you own a house. And for the first time it hit her forcibly what this collapse of his beloved tunnels must mean to him. A groan came from the young surveyor, and she switched her thoughts. She had done all she could to make Kroskin comfortable after Nurse Sonya had finished binding his leg, but it wasn’t much. She had placed a scarf under his head and her fur coat over him, tucking it around him, trying to keep out the pain. His groans were muffled by the arm he had draped across his face and though she held his other hand between hers, he didn’t speak.

“Is your family here in Petersburg?” she asked.

He nodded, nothing more.

“I have a sister,” she told him softly. “Her name is Katya.”
Katya, I’m not dead. Don’t believe them if they tell you I’m dead. And don’t be frightened for me. I’ll come back, I won’t abandon you, I promise.
“She’s blond like you and loves to play cards. Do you have a sister?”

A nod again.

“What’s her name, your sister?”

Nothing. His shivers grew worse.

“They have safety systems,” she told him. “Rescue procedures. They’ll get us out of here, don’t worry.”

His arm fell from his face. “Is that true?”

“Of course it is.”

“She’s lying.” Davidov stood beside her, his sharp-angled shadow resting on her. “Just like she lied about hearing an explosion.”

“Why would I lie?” she demanded.

“To protect Friis. He’ll be hauled up for incompetence if we get out of here alive.”

She looked around at the others. “Did anyone else hear an explosion?”

Nurse Sonya shook her head. Madam Davidova was standing motionless, close to the candle on the floor as though nervous of leaving it. Its flame sent her shadow scuttling up the walls. She stared at her husband with a bemused expression. Only the Duma man’s wife, who had sunk down on her heels, nodded vehemently.

“I heard it,” she stated. “My ears still hurt from the blast. Don’t yours?”

“Yes,” Valentina said, and looked at Madam Davidova.

Slowly the minister’s wife nodded her head.

“An explosion,” Valentina repeated. She knew the sound. It had been blasted into her brain at Tesovo. “A bomb.”

The word splintered the fragile shell they had been sheltering under.

“Why would anyone attack the sewers?” Nurse Sonya whispered. Tears were running down her cheeks.

“It’s not the sewers,” Davidov snapped. “Are you too foolish to see the target?”

“The tsar,” Valentina stated bluntly. “They meant to kill the tsar.”

S
HE WATCHED THE CANDLE, THE WAY THE HOT WAX pooled. Watched time burn. Still he didn’t return. She wanted to go after him. Instead she listened to the ever-present swirl and rush of water. She tried to assess the damage to the five faces huddled around the flame. It kept her mind off Jens’s absence.

Nurse Sonya was steady. She had seen death and damage before. Yes, there were tears, but her hands were steady as she tended her patient on the floor. The surveyor was crumbling. Sweating. Pain and fear too much for him. But Madam Davidova was harder to judge because she was schooled in self-control. Just a small crease between her eyebrows, pulled tight the way Mama did when she had a headache.

Mama? Don’t worry about me.

The Duma man’s wife was different. She couldn’t keep still. She sat, she stood, she paced, fingers fretting at her clothes, at her hair, at her throat. She was a thin woman. In the darkness she looked more like a shadow than a person. “The men have been gone a long time,” she said.

“Searching for others,” Valentina assured her. “It takes time.”

“But more rocks could fall.”

“We’d hear if they did. And, don’t worry, the men would shout to us.”

Davidov stepped between them. “We should not be too alarmed because we have among us someone who is the guarantee of our rescue.”

“Who?” the woman demanded.

Davidov directed his gaze at Valentina.

“Me?”

“Yes, you.”

“Why me?”

“Because you are about to become the jewel of St. Petersburg.”

“What do you mean, Andrei?” his wife asked.

He paid her no heed. “Is that not so, young lady?”

“No.”

“Valentina Ivanova is about to marry,” he announced. “Into one of the finest families in the city.”

“No.” Valentina wiped her hands on her filthy skirts. “It’s a lie.”

“Your father himself informed me of the match. Congratulations, my dear. And because of you, the Chernov family will move heaven and earth—and rocks—to get you out of here. They’ll send the army in if necessary.”

Valentina felt the air around her change. Hope fluttered faintly. Eyes brightened and hearts beat faster.

“Do you have matches, Minister?” Valentina asked coolly.

He frowned. “Yes, I do.”

“The candle is disappearing fast. We should save it.”

“What?”

“We must blow it out.”

T
HE DARKNESS WAS TOTAL. SHE LIKED IT THAT WAY. SHE could hide in it. She couldn’t believe she had ever been frightened of Jens’s tunnels.

Jens.
Come back to us.

All six of them were seated on the cold ground in a circle, feet touching, so that all were anchored to each other. No one would feel that he or she had been cut adrift in the blackness, alone with the scurrying sound of rats slinking from tunnel to tunnel.

Valentina felt, rather than saw, the minister on her right lean close. “You are a bright and lovely creature, my dear,” he said under his breath, “far too intelligent to bow to the will of others when you so clearly have one of your own. Take this advice from an old campaigner. Use your weapons.”

“Weapons?”

“The greatest of all, my dear. Your beauty.”

“Do you know what the strongest weapon is?” she asked him in the pitch darkness. “One I will never possess.”

“What’s that?”

“Being born a man.”

He chuckled, low in his throat. She sensed him nodding acknowledgment that she was right.

W
AS SHE DEAD? ARKIN WONDERED. He had asked himself that question a thousand times.

He didn’t want her dead. Or hurt. Or frightened. It shocked him how much he wanted her to be alive. Before this he had killed only strangers and always to further the cause, but this time it was different.

He glanced up at the window of her room, but she wasn’t there. He was waiting in the cold beside the Turicum outside the front door. Waiting. Half his damn life was spent waiting. When finally Minister Ivanov and his wife descended the steps, both wrapped in heavy furs, both stiff and silent with each other, they seated themselves on the blue leather and didn’t speak. They stared out at opposite sides of the street. It was a familiar routine, but it saddened Arkin that at a time like this, with their daughter missing, they couldn’t find something to hold them together. Was there so little left to their marriage?

As he drove, his mind replayed his conversation with Sergeyev.

“Tsar Nicholas is paying a visit to the new sewerage tunnels,” Arkin had told his friend. “This is our chance, Sergeyev.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes. The nurse in our household can’t stop jabbering about it. She’s been invited along as chaperone to the older Ivanov daughter. It’s the perfect place for a trap.”

Sergeyev groaned. “Fuck this arm of mine. It means I’m no use to you. I’m not working underground again yet.”

Arkin had slapped him affectionately on his good shoulder. “No, my comrade, I know that. But your brother is.”

Together they started to distribute rifles, and for the first time in many months Arkin allowed himself to get drunk that night. Tension was a creature with claws and fangs, living in his guts, eating him alive.