David Dickinson - Death on the Nevskii Prospekt

St Petersburg, October 1904

Ever since she had read Anna Karenina two years before, Natasha Bobrinsky thought of Tolstoy’s heroine every time she was in a railway station. This particular engine driver seemed intent on raising so much steam that any putative suicides would have been completely invisible. She peered, fascinated, at those enormous wheels and wondered what it would be like to be crushed to death beneath them. She shuddered slightly, for Natasha had no intention of dying just yet. The Bobrinskys had come to St Petersburg with Peter the Great and had been rewarded for their loyalty and devotion to his new capital with grants of thousands of acres. Successive Bobrinskys, in their turn, had served their Tsars and been rewarded with yet more grants of land. Natasha’s father had once tried to show her on a map where the family estates were, many of them thousands and thousands of miles away. In the end her parents too had moved thousands of miles away for most of the year, not to the badlands of Siberia, but to the sunnier climes of Paris and the French Riviera. Natasha wasn’t particularly interested in her father’s estates. Surely girls of eighteen couldn’t be expected to be interested in places that far away from civilization, which stopped, as everyone who was anyone in St Petersburg knew, at the end of the Nevskii Prospekt.

Even Natasha’s four elder brothers, who had teased and tormented their only sister from earliest times, would have said she was pretty. She was taller than average, without being liable to stand out in a crowd, slim, with very dark eyes and thick brown hair. For her trip to the station Natasha was clad from head to foot in fur and reminded more than one of the passengers on the platform of Tolstoy’s eponymous heroine. She had come to see a young man off on a journey of adventure. Natasha had known Mikhail Shaporov since she was a child. Just when she thought their friendship might turn into something different, something altogether more exciting, he had to leave Russia to go and live in the fogs of London. And where was he? she thought, looking up at the clock and seeing that the train would leave in nine minutes’ time. If you were a Shaporov, she reflected with a smile, you probably wouldn’t mind missing a train. You could probably buy yourself another one on the spot. For the Shaporovs had not been content with the great estates they had received on government service. They had branched out into banking and insurance and all kinds of other things to do with money that Natasha didn’t understand. People said they were now much richer than the Romanovs.

Then she saw him, running at full speed towards her, his eyes filled with happiness.

‘Natasha!’ he panted. ‘I’m at the other end of the train! This way!’

With that he grabbed her hand and pulled her at breakneck speed down the platform, dodging a considerable amount of luggage and annoying a great many other travellers who had to get out of their way.

‘Here we are,’ he said, still out of breath. ‘This compartment is mine.’

Natasha saw that he had a sleeping compartment and a well-furnished living room at his disposal. Shaporovs didn’t travel third class.

‘Do you think you’ll have enough room in there, Mikhail? You don’t think you should have ordered a dining suite and a chef for yourself as well?’

The young man laughed. ‘I didn’t book it, Natasha. I’d have been perfectly happy with first class. My father booked it for me.’

Natasha still remembered the first time she had met Mikhail’s father at a children’s party. He had given rides on his back to every single small guest, some of them up the marble staircase accompanied by wolf noises. Now the man was booking luxury train suites for his children.

‘You’ve been to London a lot, haven’t you?’ asked Natasha, anxious perhaps lest her young man, or one who might become her young man, be going to an alien world.

‘I have been there a lot. They sent me to school there, you may remember, for two years before I went to Oxford. London’s splendid. It’s not as beautiful as St Petersburg and the English are more reserved than we are, but it’s a fine city. And,’ he went on, noticing that Natasha was looking sad all of a sudden, ‘my father says I can come home after three months if I do well.’

Natasha wondered where he might be sent then, New York, or Siberia perhaps. Maybe she should find herself a more stationary sort of young man.

‘I haven’t told you,’ she said, ‘I’ve been offered a job as a lady-in-waiting.’

‘Waiting for whom or for what?’ said Mikhail gravely.

‘The Empress and her children out at Tsarskoe Selo,’ said Natasha proudly. ‘They want to have a sensible young girl to talk to the daughters and so forth. The only thing they checked about me was whether I was fluent in French or not. I am, as you know. So I got the position.’

Mikhail looked at her carefully. Sensible? Would he have called Natasha sensible? It wasn’t the first word that would have come to mind. Beautiful, certainly. Attractive, yes. Desirable, undoubtedly. Maybe Natasha was sensible too. It seemed such a mundane, a prosaic adjective to describe such a gorgeous creature.

‘Congratulations, Natasha! What an honour to be picked for that post!’

‘I may not like it, Mikhail,’ she said. ‘My mother says they’re all mad out at the Alexander Palace and my father says to keep an eye out for the bombs and the terrorists.’

‘Not sure it’s bombs you need to keep an eye out for. Beware faith healers, ouija boards, necromancers, fakes and phoneys of the spiritual world. One of these fiends convinced the Empress she was pregnant a couple of years back.’

There was a sudden burst of whistles from the front of the train. Natasha thought she saw something like a flag waving. Mikhail hopped on to the step at the door of his compartment. He thought he would still be able to kiss her from there if the opportunity presented itself.

‘You be careful in London, Mikhail Shaporov,’ said Natasha firmly. ‘There are all kinds of bounty hunters and wicked people over there. I read about them in a book by Henry James.’

‘Not females, surely, Natasha? Not members of your own sex, trying to trap a man for his money? Impossible, surely.’ The young man laughed.

The train began to move very slowly. The engine was giving out great gasps as if it were in labour. The white-grey smoke billowed back down the platform. Natasha began walking alongside Mikhail’s carriage. Very suddenly he reached down and pulled her up on to the same step. He kissed her firmly and then returned her to the platform.

‘Take care, Natasha,’ he said, ‘take great care out there in your palace.’

Natasha’s head was spinning. Why did this have to happen now when he was going away? Was that the kiss of a friend or a lover? Lover, she thought, every memory on her lips said lover. She was nearly running now.

‘Take care in your wicked city, Mikhail! Come back safely! Will you write to me?’

There was an enormous roar, almost an explosion, as the train gathered speed and began to move clear of the station.

‘Of course I’ll write,’ Natasha thought she heard him say. The train was disappearing now. Natasha made her way home slowly. She was not going to tell anybody about the kiss. It would be a secret between them. Natasha rather liked secrets. And London? Well, she remembered a governess in her youth who had tried in vain to teach them about distances. London, she thought, was only about two thousand, one hundred and fifty miles away. Not really that far when you considered how far it was to Siberia.