Russka - Edward Rutherfurd [284]
‘Yet surely,’ he murmured again, ‘there must be a way out.’
At this moment, he could think of only one.
With a sigh he pushed the papers away from him and then called to the ante-room beyond. Immediately, a respectful young man appeared, dressed in a light blue coat with yellow buttons and white knee-breeches – the uniform of the St Petersburg government.
‘Tell the lackey to find my coachman. I’m leaving.’
‘At once, Your Highly Born.’ The young man disappeared.
Your Highly Born. This honorific referred not to Bobrov’s ancestry, noble though it was, but to the fact that he had already, though only in his early thirties, reached the dizzy height of fifth rank in the fourteen service ranks established by Peter the Great. Nobility could be achieved by service. Lower ranks were only addressed as Well Born; then Highly Well Born; then Highly Born. If Bobrov continued his brilliant career, he might hope to reach the final and most coveted appellation of all: Your Highest Excellency.
Alexander Prokofievich Bobrov was a good-looking man of above average height. He had a rather round, cleanshaven face with a broad forehead, slightly hooded brown eyes and a thin mouth which, when it moved, might have looked sensual if he did not disguise it with a faint, ironic twist. His hair, in the fashion of that decade, was powdered and arranged like a wig, with a single curl over each ear produced with heated tongs every morning. His frock coat was of plain cloth: tight-fitting, knee-length and of an English cut. His waistcoat was embroidered, his breeches white with a blue stripe. In short, he was dressed in the best European fashion of the day.
It was hard to guess this character from this carefully controlled exterior. Seen in profile, his face assumed a slightly Turkish look and the long, hooked nose was noticeable: was there, in this refined face, a hint of cruelty? But then, in company, seeing him unconsciously making that gentle caressing motion with his arm towards some person he was talking to, it was impossible to believe he could be harsh.
In the golden era of Catherine the Great, in the gracious city of St Petersburg, there was no more accomplished gambler than Alexander Prokofievich Bobrov. He did not gamble for money. Though he would often be seen at the card tables in the best houses, he only played for pin money. ‘Only fools or rogues try to make their fortunes at cards,’ he would observe; and he was neither. Bobrov the gambler was interested in a greater and more secret game: he was gambling for power. Or perhaps something even more. ‘Alexander,’ a shrewd acquaintance once remarked, ‘is playing at cards with God.’ Up to now he had been winning.
Yet he had worked for his success too. My God, he had tried! He might so easily have been a nonentity, like any other provincial noble of his day. As a child on one of the family estates near Tula, his education had consisted of little more than reading from the Orthodox Psalter and learning fairy tales and Russian songs from the serfs. And so he might have continued, but for one stroke of luck. For when he was ten, a friend of his father’s, apparently on a whim, had taken a fancy to him and invited him to live in Moscow and share tutors with his children. That had been his break – and it was all he had needed.
‘From then on,’ he recalled proudly, ‘I did everything myself.’ He had worked like a demon, amazing his teachers. Though only a boy, he had recommended himself to people at Moscow University and others with influence. Somehow he had been chosen for the elite corps of pages at the St Petersburg court; and while most of those young men gambled, drank and made love, he had studied as hard as ever until – the greatest triumph of all – he had been one of a handful of youths chosen to be sent to the great German University of Leipzig. What some thought of as effortless superiority was nothing of