Russka - Edward Rutherfurd [286]
It was straightforward enough. He had avoided her for three weeks, Tatiana pointed out. Her father had other candidates in mind. And it ended firmly:
I shall ask my father tomorrow night
whether he has heard from you. If
not, then I shall not wish to hear
from you again.
By the standards of the day, the letter was utterly astounding. For a young girl to write like that, in person, to a man: it was a breach of every rule of etiquette. He could scarcely believe that she had done such a thing. He hardly knew whether he was shocked or secretly impressed by this daring. But of one thing he felt certain: she meant what she said.
He leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. What if he gave up? Would it be so terrible? With Tatiana’s money he could keep his fine house in St Petersburg and the estates. He’d be rich, secure, respected. People would say he’d done very well. ‘It’s time to leave the gaming table while I’m still ahead,’ he muttered.
Why then should he hesitate? Why not seize the life-line fate had thrown him? He opened his eyes and stared at the window, and at the winter darkness outside. There was just that one, last chance: a final, dangerous, throw of the dice. The old woman.
He sighed. It was horribly risky. Even if he got what he wanted, she could still change her mind. Then he would probably lose everything – money, reputation, even the chance of recovery. I’d be a beggar, he realized. And yet …
For several minutes more, Alexander Bobrov the gambler sat at the big desk pondering the chances. Then at last he sat upright, with a faint, grim smile on his face. He had decided on his play.
I’ll go and ask the old woman tonight, he decided.
For Bobrov the gambler was playing a secret game, with higher stakes than even young Tatiana’s fortune.
He was playing for St Petersburg itself.
St Petersburg: truly it was a miracle. At a latitude parallel with Greenland or Alaska, twelve hundred miles further north than the city of Boston, and nearer the Arctic Circle than to London or Berlin, the Russian capital was a second Venice. How lovely, how simple it was: built around the broad basin where the Neva, nearing its estuary, was divided into two forks by the big triangle of Vasilevsky Island whose apex gently pointed inland and whose broad base out in the estuary protected the city from the sullen rages of the sea.
Bobrov knew no greater joy than to approach by ship from the west, along that long, wide inlet of the Baltic known as the Gulf of Finland, to come through the markers, up the narrow channel round the island, and out into the basin of the river which lay before him like a huge, placid lagoon.
Was there any more beautiful sight in northern Europe? Nearby, in midstream, the tip of the island, the Strelka, with its houses and warehouses like so many little classical temples. Away to the left, in the middle of the north shore, and forming a little island itself, the old Peter and Paul Fortress. It contained a fine cathedral now, built by Trezzini, embellished by Rastrelli, whose needle-like golden spire, softly gleaming, soared a thin four hundred feet and linked the low lines of the city by the water with the huge open sky above.
Off to the right, on the southern shore, lay Peter’s Admiralty buildings, and the baroque and classical façades of the Winter Palace and the Hermitage. How calm and serene it was: the distant stucco façades mostly painted yellow, pink or brown in those days, blended so softly with the wide, grey waters.
‘Perfect city,’ Bobrov would sigh, ‘that can be both masculine and feminine.’
City of Peter: he had laid it out. As if to remind the place perpetually of its military and naval origin, the three huge avenues – of which the famous Nevsky Prospekt was the greatest – which