Kate Furnivall - The Jewel of St Petersburg

Elizaveta, still parading in her silks and furs, was an easy target for any red armband seeking revenge, yet still she walked out into the streets, head held high. He had warned her. He had even begged her. But she had smiled her quiet smile and kissed his mouth to stop his words.

“I am me. And you are you,” she had murmured. “Let us leave it like that.”

So he had left it like that. He could not bring himself to ask Elizaveta about the child, but he never saw the little girl with them. Valentina kept her hidden away.

VALENTINA SAT WITH LYDIA AT HER SIDE ON THE CHAISE longue in her parents’ drawing room and pleaded with them to leave Petrograd while they still could.

“Valentina,” her father said sternly, “this is our home. This is our country. I will not leave.”

“Papa, please, it is not safe.”

He scowled, but not at her, at the carpet, his skin settling into the downward lines that were now permanent on his face. He had lost weight in recent months like everyone else. Valentina could see that things were missing from the room. The pair of gold candelabra was gone, and an antique mother-of-pearl fire screen. Was he secreting them somewhere, hoarding them for better times? Or had they been sold or used as bribes? Maybe even stolen by roving bands of Red Army soldiers pushing their luck.

“They do not frighten me, these Bolsheviks,” he said.

“They should.” It was her mother who had spoken. She didn’t look frightened. She didn’t even look annoyed at the mention of their name. She was quietly dressed in somber silk, no pearls or jewelry of any kind, Valentina noticed. So she was also being careful in her own way. “We should all be frightened, not at what they have done but of what they have yet to do.”

Ivanov looked at her, surprised. “How do you know what they intend to do?”

“I read the newspapers, I hear talk. They are hunting us down one by one. Taking over our houses. It’s only a matter of time.”

“Mama, don’t you hate them?”

“No. They are fighting for what they believe in, just like we live in the way we believe in.”

Her husband snorted with annoyance, and Valentina went over to his chair.

“Stay at home, Papa. Keep safe.” She touched his hand and he wrapped his fingers around hers. She bent and kissed his cheek. It felt softer, as if an outer layer had been removed. “Look after yourself and Mama.”

“Is that what you’re doing? In those ridiculous clothes? I never thought a daughter of mine would wear such rags.”

“Grandpapa,” Lydia said with her father’s smile, “you should wear a work shirt and cloth cap. You’d look funny.”

They laughed, all of them together. Later, Valentina remembered that last laugh.

THINGS BECAME WORSE AS THE WEATHER GREW COLD again and Valentina started work on preparing her house. She summoned a furniture dealer and had most of their possessions removed in exchange for a fat pile of paper roubles. Immediately she exchanged it for gold coins and diamonds because the paper rouble would soon be worth next to nothing. Both the dealer and the jeweler robbed her blind, but she was in no position to argue.

She sacked all the servants, filled the house with worthless beds and chairs and cupboards, and locked all her and Lydia’s belongings in two rooms upstairs. She kept Jens’s engineering drawings, a few of his clothes, none of his books, a stout pair of shoes. Everything else she let go. Lydia clung tight to her toy train and her wooden bricks as she sat on her mother’s lap and listened solemnly.

“We have to become one of them,” Valentina explained. “We mustn’t let them throw us out of our house, or how will your Papa know where to find us when he comes back?”

“Will he come back soon?”

“Yes, my angel. Soon.”

The tawny eyes blinked hard. “I am five now, Mama.”

“I know.”

“That is almost grown up.”

Valentina smiled. “Indeed it is.”

“So you must tell me the truth, Mama.”

“Of course.”

“When will Papa come back?”

“Soon.”

WORST WAS THE ERARD GRAND PIANO. LETTING IT GO was like chopping off a limb. She polished it till it gleamed and sat on the stool one last time with Lydia on the floor, her back propped against Valentina’s leg. She played the Chopin and Lydia cried.

“It’s Papa’s favorite.”

“Maybe he heard it.”

Lydia shook her head, biting her lip. Then the piano was taken away in a cart.

People moved into the house. People who walked mud onto the polished floors and who did not know what a light switch was for or how to use a flush lavatory. Valentina shut herself away in her two rooms, curled on her bed wrapped up in Jens’s cotton shirt that now smelled of herself instead of him. She’d lost his house, she’d lost his beloved books, and now she’d lost his scent. She turned her face into his pillow, dry-eyed, and a sound came from her lips, a low formless moan from deep within her.

On the top step of the stairs Lydia sat hugging her knees and watching two barefoot boys play football in the hall with her father’s globe of the world.

DON’T HURT HER, VIKTOR.”

“Elizaveta, I will never hurt your daughter, I have promised you that. Her husband is still alive only because of you.”

“Don’t let them hurt her, the ones in gray that call themselves an army. Or the ones that roam in packs like wolves, administering their version of justice. Don’t let them hurt her.”

“I can only do so much. When you remove a dam from the river, you cannot tell it not to flow. But”-he lifted his head from the pillow and kissed her slender throat above him on the bed-“I will do what I can. To protect you.”

She moved her hips in rhythm to his as she lay astride him, her breasts soft as satin as they brushed over his chest, and a low sigh punctuated her words. “I don’t need protection.” She pressed her lips hard on his mouth, and her tongue sought his as if she would starve without it.

ASOUND LIKE THE HAMMER OF THOR POUNDED THROUGH the city of Petrograd and rattled the windows like bones in a grave. It startled Valentina from her book and woke Lydia, who scurried in her nightdress into her mother’s bed with wide excited eyes. Valentina could feel her daughter’s heart fluttering as she held her close. She looked at the clock. It was nine forty-five in the evening of October 24, 1917.

“Is it thunder, Mama?”

“No, my love. It sounds like a gun.”

Lydia’s eyes grew large as plates. “A big one.”

“Yes, a very big one. I think it’s a ship’s gun.”

“Which ship?”

“I don’t know.” But her blood froze in her veins. She was certain what it was: a signal for the revolution to start.

Arkin could have told her. It was the Aurora .

IT WAS FOUR O’CLOCK IN THE MORNING AND VALENTINA stood under the freezing night sky, watching her world burn. There were no stars, no comets, nothing spectacular to mark the event. But somewhere in the distance above the roofs of the city, a fire was burning a hole in the darkness and its glow stripped away any last shred of hope in her heart that Russia could pull itself back from the brink.