Boris Akunin - The Coronation

‘What will they think of next?’ said the lieutenant, squinting wistfully at the grey window. ‘Well, now they’ve stopped their clattering, I can hear the gurgling in my belly.’

I remarked guardedly: ‘Yes, indeed. I feel really hungry. Are we really going to die of hunger?’

‘Oh, come on, Ziukin,’ my fellow prisoner protested. ‘We won’t die of hunger; we’ll die of thirst. A man can live two or even three weeks without food. Without water we won’t even last three days.’

Mythroatwas indeed feeling dry, and meanwhile itwas getting rather stuffy in our little cell. Endlung had taken off his woman’s dress a long time ago, leaving himself in nothing but his drawers and a close-fitting undershirt with blue and white stripes – what is known as a singlet. Now he even took off his singlet, and I saw a tattoo on his powerful shoulder – an entirely natural representation of a man’s privates with varicoloured dragonfly wings.

‘They drew that for me in a Singapore brothel,’ the lieutenant explained when he noticed my embarrassed glance. ‘I was still a warrant officer at the time. I did it for a bet, to show off. Now I can never marry a respectable woman. It looks as though I’m going to die a bachelor.’

This last sentence, however, was spoken without the slightest trace of regret.

I spent the entire second half of the day walking around the cell, with the torments of hunger, thirst and inactivity becoming worse and worse all the time. From time to time I tried shouting out of the window or banging on the door, but with no result.

In his gratitude for my description of the coronation, Endlung entertained me with endless stories of shipwrecks and uninhabited islands where sailors of various nationalities had died slow deaths without food or water. It had been dark for a long timewhen he started a heart-rending story about a French officer who was forced to eat his companion in misfortune, the ship’s quarter-master.

‘And what do you think?’ the half-naked gentleman of the bedchamber said brightly. ‘Afterwards Lieutenant Du Bellet testified in court that the quartermaster’s meat was wonderfully tender, with a fine layer of fat, and tasted like young pork. The court acquitted the lieutenant, of course, taking into account the extreme circumstances and also the fact that Du Bellet was the only son of an aged mother.’

At that point the instructive tale was broken off because the door of the cell suddenly opened without a sound, and we both blinked in the bright light of a torch. The blurred shadow that appeared in the doorway spoke in the voice of Foma Anikeevich: ‘I beg your pardon, Afanasii Stepanovich. Yesterday, of course, I recognised you under the ginger beard, but it never even entered my head that things could end so badly. Just nowat the reception in the Faceted Chamber I happened to hear two habitués of this establishment whispering to each other and laughing as they recalled the lesson they had given to two “Guardians”, and I wondered if they could be talking about you.’ He came into the dungeon and asked solicitously: ‘How have you managed here, gentlemen, with no water, food or light?’

‘Badly, very badly!’ Endlung exclaimed and threw himself on our rescuer’s neck. I suspect that such impetuousness demonstrated by a sweaty gentleman wearing nothing but his drawers can hardly have beenmuch to Foma Anikeevich’s liking.

‘This is our court’s gentleman of the bedchamber, Filipp Nikolaevich Endlung,’ I said. ‘And this is Foma Anikeevich Savostianov, butler to His Highness the governor general of Moscow.’ Then, with the necessary formalities concluded, I quickly asked about the most important thing: ‘What has happened to Mikhail Georgievich? Has he been freed?’

Foma Anikeevich shrugged. ‘I know nothing about that. We have our own misfortune. Prince Glinsky has shot himself. A terrible disaster.’

‘How do you mean, shot himself?’ I asked, astonished. ‘Did he not fight a duel with Lord Banville?’

‘As I said, he shot himself. He was found in the Petrovsko-Razumovsky Park with a gunshot wound in the heart.’

‘So the little cornet was unlucky,’ said Endlung, starting to pull on his dress. ‘The Englishman didn’t miss. He was a grand lad, even if he was a queer.’

‘. . . and also the assistant pantry man broke the dish for game from the Sèvres service. I have already ordered him to be fined half a month’s pay; anything further is at your discretion. And then there is Her Highness’s maid Petrishcheva. The footman Kriuchkov reported that she had been seen in the bushes with Mr Fandorin’s valet in a quite unambiguous position. I did not take any measures, since I do not know how you usually deal with behaviour of that sort . . .’

‘The first time, a reprimand,’ I said, looking up from the plate to explain to Somov. ‘The second time, out on her ear. If she has served the time, severance pay. We’re very strict with that sort of thing.’

It was just getting light outside, and the lamp was lit in the kitchen. I ate some reheated soup with great gusto and then applied myself to some cutlets. More than twenty-four hours without a single bite to eat is certainly no joke.

After Foma Anikeevich released Endlung and me from our incarceration, the lieutenant’s path and mine had parted. He went to the Variety Theatre to change his clothes. He had invited me too, saying that the girls slept in rooms at the theatre. They would give us food and drink, and show us a bit of affection.

But I had more important business to deal with.

And, moreover, this business did not include household concerns, so I listened to my assistant rather inattentively.

‘How did the coronation go?’ I asked, trying to work out if Somov might know something about the previous day’s operation. He ought not to, but he was far from stupid; in fact he seemed quite shrewd to me. But in any case he did not ask a single question about the reasons for my absence. Perhaps I could simply ask casuallywhether Mikhail Georgievich had been brought back from Ilyinsk?

‘Absolutely magnificent. But –’ Somov lowered his voice ‘– some of our people are saying there were bad omens . . .’

That put me on my guard. Bad omens on such a day, that is no trivial matter. A coronation is an exceptional event, every minor detail is significant. Among the court servants there are fortune-tellers who will lay out cards for the entire course of the ceremonies, hour by hour, in order to determine how the reign will proceed and when during its course convulsions can be expected. This we can call superstition, but there are other signs that cannot simply be dismissed. For instance, during the coronation of Alexander the Liberator a bottle of champagne suddenly burst for no reason at all on a table at the evening reception – it was like a bomb exploding. At that time, 1856, bombers had still not been heard of, and so no one knew how to interpret the incident. Its significance only became clear much later, after a quarter of a century. And at the last coronation the sovereign placed the crown on his head before he was supposed to, and our people whispered that his reign would not be a long one. And it was not.

‘First of all,’ Somov began, with a glance at the door, ‘when the hairdresser was arranging Her Majesty’s crown on her coiffure, he was so excited that he pushed too hard on one hairpin, and the empress cried out. He pricked her so badly that there was blood. And then, when the procession had already begun, the chain of His Majesty’s Order of St Andrew broke, and it fell on the ground! Only our people know about the hairpin, but many people noticed the incident with the order.’

Yes, that is not good, I thought. However, it could have been worse. The main thing was that the crowning of the tsar had taken place, and Doctor Lind had not disrupted this supremely solemn festivity after all.