Thirteen years later, p.21
Thirteen Years Later, page 21
But Aleksei had not used his knowledge to blackmail Yelena; he doubted she was even aware he knew. Even so, her guilt made her less willing to judge others. She was unprepared to go to Marfa and reveal Aleksei as unfaithful, not because she feared he would do the same for her, but because she feared God would.
And from that came the third reason why Valentin would do what Aleksei asked, and retreat from the very idea of discussing it with Yelena. Valentin suspected that Aleksei and his wife had at one time been lovers. Thus he both believed she would side with him now and feared that any disagreement between them would result in him being publicly branded a cuckold. It was all fantasy. There had never been any physical relationship between Yelena and Aleksei, just an intense friendship born out of their mutual love for Vadim. But for a man of Valentin’s limited imagination, such closeness could have only one explanation. A younger Aleksei would have despised him for ever allowing his wife’s lover into the house, but as he had grown to know him, Aleksei had seen something more and more noble in every one of Valentin’s actions. It was a desire to do the right thing which Aleksei knew he could never achieve and so did not even attempt. Nor did he attempt to avoid exploiting Valentin’s fears when it served his purpose.
It took only moments for all these concepts, or at least his perceptions of them, to mollify Valentin’s position. ‘I’m sorry, Aleksei,’ he said quietly, ‘but I’m afraid I can’t help you. As I say, I don’t speak English.’
‘Do you have a dictionary?’
‘I’m sure I could find you a copy of Johnson somewhere in the city, or even Webster, but I don’t see how that would help you.’
‘I meant a bilingual dictionary,’ said Aleksei.
‘Between English and Russian?’ There was greater passion in Valentin’s voice at this ridiculous suggestion than there had been in any other part of their conversation. ‘I don’t think anyone’s attempted such a thing.’ He paused for a moment in thought, tapping his lips with his pen. ‘Wait a minute though . . .’ He turned to the bookshelf behind him and brought down a sheaf of papers, clearly not a published work but some notes of his own. ‘Yes. Louis Chambaud produced a lexicon of English and French in 1805. That would do you.’
‘Absolutely,’ agreed Aleksei. ‘Do you have a copy?’
‘No, no, no. But I know a man who does.’
‘Excellent. Tell me his name and I’ll go see him.’
Valentin looked at him coldly. ‘I think not. There’s no need for you even to know the name of the gentleman. I shall ask him for it when I next see him.’ He sat down at the desk and resumed his work. Aleksei remained seated. Valentin pretended to ignore him and, much as Aleksei enjoyed the tension that his presence created, he was eager to make use of the dictionary.
‘It is rather urgent,’ he said unassumingly.
Valentin stood up swiftly and flung his pen down on his desk, or at least began to fling it, but he regained his self-control and by the time the object made contact with the desktop, its movement could be described as no more than a gentle placement.
‘Very well, I’ll go and see if I can borrow it,’ huffed Valentin. ‘Wait here.’
The wait was less than half an hour. That would have been time for Valentin to make it some way across the city and back, but Aleksei knew he would not have been able to make a brief call. He would have spent at least ten minutes in polite conversation before putting so direct a question. That put the library from where the dictionary had come very close. Aleksei could easily formulate a list of five likely candidates, with five more who were reasonable possibilities.
In the end, such calculations were unnecessary. A glance inside the front cover as soon as he had returned to the privacy of his rooms revealed an ornate Ex Libris, bearing the name of a celebrated prince and government minister whose library (so the best inside information that Aleksei could obtain had it) was more notable for its erotica than for its lexicography.
With so simple an identification of the book’s owner in mind, Aleksei turned to the mysterious volume Kyesha had given him the previous night. Had he missed something so utterly obvious? He opened it and looked at the inside. There it was – no decorative bookplate, but the simple, functional name of the author:
Richard L. Cain F.R.S.
It certainly sounded like an English name. The ‘F.R.S.’, Aleksei presumed, did not signify further initials, but some kind of qualification or decoration. He had no idea of its precise nature.
He set about translating the text. Whilst the dictionary could give him the meaning of words, their formation into sentences was a more difficult issue. He learned as he went. He was immediately reminded of what he had already heard about English – the fact that it was almost totally lacking in inflection. Aleksei knew that in such languages word order took on greater significance. By following roughly the same rules as French, he generally came up with a sensible translation. Even so, the first few sentences took him over an hour. Many others had words that were not listed in the dictionary at all, presumably scientific terms which had not been deemed necessary for general conversation – or perhaps even terms coined since the dictionary had been published. Who could tell? If Richard Cain really was at the cutting edge of science, he might be inventing new words as he went along.
‘What’s that, Papa?’
He looked up. Tamara had come in. She and Domnikiia had been out most of the day. He could hear Domnikiia’s movements in the next room.
‘It’s a book,’ he said, hoisting his daughter up on to his knee.
‘Can I read it?’
‘You can try.’ She was a keen reader already, in French more so than in Russian, though she spoke Russian better. She looked at the book lying open on the desk in front of Aleksei for some time and then frowned.
‘It’s silly,’ she said confidently.
‘It’s English,’ said Aleksei.
She gave a look of concentration and then spoke. ‘The king of England is King George IV.’
‘Very good.’
‘The king of France is King Charles X.’
‘Excellent,’ he smiled. ‘Any more?’
‘America does not have a king. It is a republic.’ It seemed her long-dead Uncle Maks was having an influence on her. ‘A republic is an affront against God,’ Tamara added. That sounded less like Maks – or perhaps not; Maks was quite fond of affronting God.
‘Who told you that?’ he asked.
‘Uncle Valentin.’
‘And do you believe everything Uncle Valentin tells you?’
Before she could answer, Domnikiia shouted from the other room. ‘Toma!’ The little girl ran out, leaving Aleksei with a sudden understanding of the Latin phrase on the front of the book. Nullius in Verba. On the words of no one. Take nobody’s word for it. Certainly not Uncle Valentin’s, nor that of any adult. The phrase should be written above the gates of every school in the country.
‘Let your father work,’ said Domnikiia from outside. A moment later, Aleksei felt her arms around his neck and her chin on his shoulder.
‘So this is what it was all for?’ she asked. He had told her about the book that morning.
‘Seems so. A step along the way, at least.’
‘Why couldn’t he have just given it to you the first time you met?’
‘Or just delivered it to my house in Petersburg,’ suggested Aleksei. ‘Perhaps he’s in league with someone who wants to bring me to Moscow and keep me here. Now who could that be?’
He felt a tight little punch to his shoulderblade. ‘Can you decipher it?’ she asked.
‘I haven’t yet. If only Toma would stop pestering me.’
‘But she’s . . . Oh, I see.’ She kissed him on the cheek and he felt her arms uncoil from around him. He heard the door close.
In truth he had made some headway, but he had found nothing that could explain why Kyesha should have wanted him to read the document. It was, as he had suspected, some sort of scientific journal, listing a series of ongoing experiments, many of which were related, to use a term repeated frequently in the text, to ‘biology’. It was not a word listed in the dictionary, but Aleksei knew enough Greek to guess its meaning. Many of the experiments were conducted on animals, of a species that was not made clear. Individuals were referred to simply by a number. The image that formed in Aleksei’s mind was of rats, but there was nothing concrete to suggest that. Other experiments were of a more chemical nature, many referring to a substance called lapis lunaris, which Aleksei this time had to resort to Latin to translate, unenlighteningly, as ‘moonstone’.
It was clear that this was simply the latest volume in an ongoing work. The text began abruptly on 9 December the previous year, with a reference to work from the day before. It would be a slow process to translate page by page, though ultimately necessary, but for now it seemed there was a better chance of gaining some clue as to what was really going on by flicking through the book and diving in at random. In doing so, Aleksei stumbled on one further fact. One entry referred to the day of the week. The section was pondering, as well as Aleksei could make out, whether any of the animals changed their behaviour on a weekly cycle. Seemingly they did not, but the text made the comment ‘today being Sunday’ and therefore placed that entry’s date, 8 March 1825, as a Sunday.
Aleksei searched his desk and found an almanac. 8 March was the feast day of Saint Theophylaktos, but more importantly, it was indeed a Sunday. That meant that the book’s author was definitely using the Old Style calendar, and probably working in Russia, or at least in the east of Europe.
Aleksei raised his head and rubbed his face with his hands, pushing his spectacles up on to his forehead. It was dark outside. He glanced at the clock. It was half past eight. He’d been sitting there for hours, and he was in danger of missing his appointment – if indeed he had one.
As he passed Tamara’s room, he glanced inside. She was in bed. Her mother was singing gently to her. Aleksei could not make out the words. He paused to watch and to listen. It was another twenty minutes before he left the house.
Aleksei had run across the city. As he went, he questioned what he was doing. Kyesha had killed a man the previous night, and had to be well aware that Aleksei had planned the action against him. And yet Aleksei felt no fear. Kyesha had made no move to attack him all week. His ultimate goal had been to deliver the book, and now that was achieved, it seemed even more pointless to do anything to harm Aleksei until he had actually managed to read it.
The greater worry was that Kyesha wouldn’t be there. It seemed more than likely – he had said himself on Friday that there would only be one more meeting in Moscow. On the other hand, they hadn’t actually met at the theatre the previous night. Aleksei might be taking things too literally, but there was no benefit in ignoring the possibility.
He was only a few minutes late when he arrived at the church. He glanced inside, and inside Menshikov’s Tower, but there was no sign of Kyesha. It was raining, and Aleksei didn’t feel inclined to wait outside. He returned to the tavern where he had taken Kyesha a week before. There was still no sign of him, but Aleksei ordered vodka and sat down to wait. He was at the same table where they had sat before, where Kyesha had first brought out the bones Aleksei now knew to be his own.
Knew? That was a stretch of faith. Kyesha was, in many ways, like Iuda. Iuda would lie and toy with Aleksei, mixing truth and falsehood, leaving him to doubt any certainty he’d had over either. Even today, Iuda’s legacy continued. Aleksei still did not know the truth of what he had seen at Domnikiia’s window, all those years before. His joke earlier that evening about her plotting with Kyesha to keep him in Moscow had started as just that, but he had never felt that depth of certainty with Domnikiia that he did with Marfa. He knew it was one of the things that made their relationship so exciting.
But what would have been easier for Kyesha? To sneak back, as he had described, and retrieve Aleksei’s fingers, to keep them for a decade and a half, and finally reveal them to their original owner? Or simply to steal a few bones from a peasant’s grave and pass them off as Aleksei’s own? How could Aleksei tell the difference? Perhaps they were even Kyesha’s fingers – he seemed happy enough to harvest them as he thought necessary. Could he have cut them off some months before and waited until, just as the flesh grew back on his own hand, it decayed from those severed fingers and they became no more than dry bones?
Aleksei reached into his pocket. Inside, Kyesha’s two fingers still lay where Aleksei had put them. He made sure no one else in the room saw as he drew them out and placed them on the table. They looked and felt just as they had done before, still in that strange state that was both unliving and undead. That was remarkable in itself. It had been three days since Aleksei saw with his own eyes that ragged piece of metal separate those fingers from the body that sustained them. And yet there was not a hint of decay. He raised one to his face, cupping it inside his hand so no one would see, and sniffed it. There was no noticeable odour. It was conceivable that it was still too early, but Aleksei had other ideas.
He had observed putrefaction in the body of more than one vampire in his time. Usually it came on very quickly after death – if the body had not been destroyed anyway, by sunlight or fire. But when he had killed a vampire using a wooden blade to the heart, or by decapitation, the collapse of its bodily integrity had been almost immediate. There had been one exception: a young soldier who had become a vampire only weeks before he met his final end. His decay had been slower and less pronounced. Indeed, as far as Aleksei had been able to tell, the body had decayed, but only to the extent that it would have done if nature had taken her usual course from the point of the soldier’s actual death – the moment at which he became a voordalak. Ultimately, what Aleksei had seen in front of him had been exactly what he would expect to see in a corpse that had lain in the open, unattended to, for several weeks.
Thus his conclusion was that the state of being a vampire somehow suspended the normal process of decomposition expected in a dead body. In reality, that was all that Kyesha and any of his kin were: lifeless cadavers given the semblance of existence by some foul spirit. That same force which animated the limbs fended off the processes of decay. When it had lost control of the body, nature rapidly reasserted herself.
Those fingers would not decay until Kyesha himself was dead.
Aleksei slammed his fist down on to the table, crushing the little finger beneath it. He smiled to himself, wondering if Kyesha, wherever he might be, could still feel pain in that detached part of his body. The sound of the impact made a few heads turn, but none could see what Aleksei was doing. He ignored them and took a gulp of vodka.
Once again, he placed his hand on the table so that the two fingers lay precisely where his own fingers should have. The skin that had grown over the tops of his shattered knuckles had little feeling in it, but he could see that it was just touching the still-raw ends of Kyesha’s fingers. There was no blood in them now, and no healing had taken place, so blood vessels, bones and other structures, of whose nature Aleksei knew little, were clearly visible. It was an anatomist’s dream; a body-part that could be studied slowly and over a long period, without ever worrying about losing the sample through decay.
Those two fingers answered another question which Aleksei had asked himself years ago. The Oprichnik Andrei had suffered a similar but far more serious injury than Kyesha. In that case, Andrei had lost an entire arm, severed by a blow from Maks’ sword during a desperate fight for self-preservation. Aleksei had seen Andrei not long after with the arm fully restored. The question that had briefly crossed his mind was, if a voordalak could grow back a severed arm, could not the arm grow back the body of a voordalak? Would such an intersection result in two copies of the original?
It seemed not. There was no sign of a new Kyesha, growing out of his own fingers. Perhaps though, even if they could not grow a body anew, they might be able to reattach themselves to an existing body if the chance arose. For a second time, Aleksei pulled his hand away in revulsion. He had almost felt the sensation of new tendrils growing out of those moribund cylinders of flesh and feeling their way towards his own hand, which lacked what they could so readily provide, making him whole once again – part human, part monster. It was all in his mind, but the thought sickened him. He rammed the fingers back into his pocket and downed more vodka.
He looked up at the clock. It was past eleven. Kyesha would not come tonight.
CHAPTER XII
‘I THINK I KNOW HOW TO HANDLE THE TSAR.’
Aleksandr smiled to himself as he heard the words in his head, spoken in Clemens von Metternich’s refined Austrian accent. It had not been his own ears that had heard Metternich speak, but he knew what had been said. He knew much of what people said.
He gazed out of his study window, across the garden and out to the sea. It was peaceful here in Taganrog, and that gave him the chance to contemplate; not merely to think – though he had done enough quick-thinking in his time – but to look back on how things were, and how they might have been.
They had all presumed to understand him: Metternich, Castlereagh, Bonaparte. The last two were dead, and Bonaparte’s fall could be attributed almost entirely to Russia. And Russia was the tsar. That’s what Aleksandr’s babushka had always told him. She, of course, had said ‘tsaritsa’, but he had chosen to take the more general interpretation of her words – the role, not the individual.
