R. Morris - The Cleansing Flames

Marfa Timofyevna’s mouth was open in a wondering O. She studied Porfiry’s eyes carefully. ‘I knew what was said about him,’ she said at last. ‘The rumours.’

‘Which were?’ Porfiry asked the question a little too eagerly.

Marfa Timofyevna shook her head impatiently. ‘Oh, that he had seduced many women. That he kept three apartments, with a separate mistress in each. That he had committed crimes.’

‘Crimes?’

‘Yes. And blasphemies.’

‘You knew all this,’ stated Porfiry, his tone confirmatory.

‘I had heard all the rumours. The very worst. I heard them all from him, you see.’

‘From Konstantin Arsenevich?’

‘Yes. He often said such things against himself, as if to frighten me. But I would not be deterred. And so, he arranged for the printing of a manifesto in which he accused himself — and condemned himself — of the vilest crimes. He brought it willingly to me.’

‘How extraordinary.’

‘He told me that every word in it was true. He told me to read it carefully, and if, at the end of reading it, I still loved him, then he would be mine, mine alone, for ever.’

‘And so?’

Marfa Timofyevna gave a sudden startling sob that convulsed her whole body. ‘I was not good enough!’ she gasped.

‘You could not love him,’ said Porfiry flatly.

Marfa Timofyevna squeezed her eyelids tight.

‘May I see this document?’

‘I don’t. . have it. . anymore.’ Marfa Timofyevna’s eyes were glistening. ‘I realise now that he is gone, that I do, I can, I must love him. It is his only hope. And mine.’

‘And what of Princess Dolgorukaya? Does she know of this document? Had she read it? Is that the true reason why she cast him out?’

‘I. .’ Marfa Timofyevna’s eyes widened in recollection of the single most appalling act of her young life. ‘I took it to her.’

‘What has become of it now, do you know?’

‘She destroyed it, of course.’

Porfiry absorbed the news with a flutter of blinking. ‘Can you remember any of the charges that the Prince laid against himself?’

‘You will not hear them from me. You may torture me all you want, but I will not say a word of what was printed on that paper.’

‘My dear young lady — please! — be assured that I have no intention of torturing you!’

‘They were lies anyhow. I realise that now. Lies he had made up to test me. And I failed. Oh, how I failed!’

Porfiry laid a hand consolingly across one of hers. She looked up, startled by his touch. Her eyes implored him for some consoling word. Her face trembled with anguish and despair.

‘If you have a message for him, I will happily convey it,’ Porfiry offered.

Marfa Timofyevna breathed in deeply, drawing herself up fully, only to collapse in defeat on the exhalation. She hung her head and waited for them to go.

For a small consideration, Alexey Yegorovich escorted them across a series of courtyards, each muddier than the last. He pointed out a squalid entrance and left them to it. The door was rotten and looked as if it were about to fall off its hinges. A dark stairway led down to the basement. They were at the very rear of what was essentially the same sprawling building that housed the lavish apartments of the Dolgoruky family. It was here where one found the filthy garrets and cellars, and the dingy rooms sublet into ‘corners,’ into which multiple families and individuals were crammed.

Prince Dolgoruky had merely moved from the front of the building to the rear, and yet he might as well have crossed an entire continent. If the apartment building was a microcosm of Russia, he had been cast into its Siberia.

An old woman came through a door as they reached the bottom of the stairs. She regarded them suspiciously out of the gloom, holding herself stock-still. When Porfiry announced that they were looking for Prince Dolgoruky, her manner became highly animated and almost coquettish. She smiled an entirely toothless grin.

The old coquette led them into a large room hung with washing lines. The drying clothes served as informal partitions, dividing the space into its various living areas. Small windows set high in the walls, at ground level on the outside, let in a meagre light.

She pointed to a shabby curtain that was strung across one corner of the room. ‘You had better knock first!’ she recommended with a knowing leer.

As they approached the curtain, they could hear the sounds of laughter coming from behind it; more specifically, the laughter of two people, one as unmistakably male as the other was female. The sounds had an intimate tinge, as if the two people making them believed themselves to be utterly alone. The curtain sealed them off in the universe of their mutual abandon.

Porfiry cleared his throat loudly. ‘Prince Dolgoruky? Prince Konstantin Arsenevich Dolgoruky?’

A strained silence descended on the couple on the other side of the curtain. However, after a moment or two, a fit of giggling burst from the female.

‘Who wishes to speak to him?’ The male voice was charged with aristocratic hauteur.

‘My name is Porfiry Petrovich. I am an investigating magistrate. I wish to talk to Konstantin Arsenevich about the journalist Kozodavlev.’

‘A magistrate, you say?’

‘Yes.’

‘So, you’ve caught up with me at last!’ The quip provoked an appreciative giggle from Dolgoruky’s companion. There was the sound of a palm striking flesh, followed by a squeal of mingled pain and delight. The scents that came from the corner left little doubt as to what had very recently occurred there.

Porfiry looked around the room. The interview was drawing the attention of a number of the other residents. In particular, an audience of small and ragged children had gathered. Some of them even sat on the floor at his feet, looking up expectantly for the entertainment to continue. One or two held crusts of black bread in their grimy fingers. ‘Perhaps you would care to draw back the curtain, or come out from behind it, so that we may talk to you in a more convenient manner,’ said Porfiry.

A man somewhere in his late thirties pulled back one side of the curtain and stepped through. He was dressed in a loose shirt and tight breeches. He kept his sand-coloured hair long, swept back in waves from a brow that was higher than it once had been. The angle of his head matched the hauteur that Porfiry had earlier detected in his voice. There was an amused, self-satisfied glimmer in his eye, and a one-sided twist to his mouth. Porfiry saw no trace of the sweet-natured boy the butler Alexey Yegorovich claimed to remember.

‘Kozodavlev, you say? What’s the old fool been up to now?’

‘Are you aware that there was a fire in Mr Kozodavlev’s apartment building on Monday night, in which several people perished? It is feared that Mr Kozodavlev may have been one of them.’ Until he had asked the question, Porfiry did not know that he was going to frame it in that way. Indeed, he had not known he was going to start with the fire at all. He wondered if he had been motivated solely by a desire to wipe the smile from Prince Dolgoruky’s face.

If so, he was not fully prepared for the effect his words had. All colour drained from Dolgoruky’s complexion. The man seemed to age ten years before his eyes. ‘Kozodavlev is dead?’ His voice was a frightened whisper.

‘It is feared so. Obviously, in the case of death by fire, one cannot always be certain of the identity of the victims. But a man did perish in Mr Kozodavlev’s apartment, and he failed to attend a number of appointments on the following day, including one with me.’

Prince Dolgoruky considered this information thoughtfully but said nothing. The colour slowly returned to his cheeks and he seemed to regain his composure.