Heart of Iron - Ekaterina Sedia [55]
“If you come with me right now,” I said, “we can act as if you were in the compartment the whole time. There is no one else awake in this carriage, and the train is too loud for people to have heard the glass breaking.”
He followed me, his satchel clasped so tightly in his hand that—when I finally managed to pry his fingers open—I saw his nails had cut semicircles into his palm.
Jack seemed in a state of shock, and I wondered if that was common in cases of extreme exertion. I had not noticed it before, but then again, I never witnessed him chasing a train for miles. His first instinct seemed to be to retreat into himself, and I let him. I even went as far as to ask the conductor, when he finally came by, for two glasses of hot tea.
“Yes sir,” he said, and adjusted his billed cap, the red stripe going around it the only color on his entire person. He was dressed in a gray overcoat and even his hollow face looked gray in this light. “It is very cold in here, sir. Perhaps you would like to change cars? Some hoodlums seem to have broken the door.”
I nodded. “Yes, we felt a draft. Perhaps we will move later. My companion is feeling somewhat ill, so for now, my good man, just the tea.”
“I’ll see about some blankets then,” he said.
The conductor brought us tea and two woolen blankets. Jack drank his tea and soon resumed his customary demeanor, although he kept looking at me and my uniform.
“Unbelievable,” he said. “Who would’ve thought that the best disguise would be so . . . colorful?”
I shrugged my new masculine shoulders. “As long as it’s a change, it doesn’t matter what one changes into.”
We occupied a couchette carriage. Jack and I each claimed a seat, opposite of each other, and attempted to sleep the rest of the night. At first, I thought I would never fall asleep with the chugging of the train, its whistling, and the desperate cries of crows overhead. But before I knew it, I was in another train, in my proper clothes, and talking to Chiang Tse who drank his tea in a seat next to me. I dreamt of his knee accidentally brushing against mine, and woke with a start.
The sun was well up and the locomotive sped along the gleaming tracks, a black line singing through the expanse of white snow walled in by naked black trees. It was vertiginous, to think of my gigantic, flat, frozen country, crisscrossed with the black lines that connected Moscow to St. Petersburg to Sochi to Minsk, every single city in the empire. I imagined a multitude of metallic spiders weaving this web, ensnaring smaller and smaller towns, until no white snow was left.
“Sasha?” I looked up to see Jack, stretching and yawning on his bench. He sat up—or rather unrolled his long spine into a sitting position. “Did you sleep well?”
“Yes,” I said. “And you . . . you are better?”
He nodded, still eyeing me cautiously. It seemed that with my disguise I had become a new person to him, and we had to get reacquainted. “I obtained everything we need last night,” he said. “Do you wish to see?”
Of course I did. He handed me a sheaf of papers from his satchel, and I leafed through copies of submarine diagrams and long letters detailing boring but apparently important diplomatic details. Much of it revolved around Nightingale’s instruction to her spies, and Herbert’s hopeful letters to Her Majesty back in England.
Some of the letters were private correspondence—these were tied together with an ice-blue satin ribbon that reminded me strongly of Dame Nightingale. Without even looking at the signature, I recognized the meticulous, precise handwriting as hers. Interspersed with her letters were offers written with loopy, generous, words running off the page—surely Mr. Herbert’s. As revolted as I felt about reading private correspondence, I peeked with one eye, and blushed. The letters were passionate—an emotion I could see in her, boiling and bubbling like