Russka - Edward Rutherfurd [307]
We Rosicrucians could finish up ruling Russia, Alexander thought excitedly. How strange that, on the very day when he had reluctantly committed himself to Tatiana, and given up hope of entering Catherine’s inner circle, this new possibility should have opened up before him. He smiled to himself. Perhaps Bobrov the gambler was being saved by fate for even greater purposes.
There was just one problem. The professor was not satisfied with him.
‘I find in you a coldness, a lack of fervour,’ he had sometimes complained when Bobrov studied with him. He had been delighted when Alexander told him he was to marry. ‘Ah, that is good, my friend. It will open your heart.’ But less than a year later he wrote:
I cannot forbear to mention, dear brother,
certain news that has reached me. It is widely
known in St Petersburg, I am told, that despite
your recent marriage, you neglect your wife and
continue your affair with a certain lady.
I must inform you that your membership of our
order places burdens upon you; and this conduct
is not acceptable. Look into your heart, I beg
you, and decide what you must do.
Though Alexander dutifully burned this letter, as was the rule with all Rosicrucian correspondence, he still seemed to see it before him every day. He knew the professor was right. His conscience troubled him. Yet he could not give her up.
A message came from a visiting Mason from Moscow. ‘The professor told me to tell you he is praying for you.’ It did no good. His next letter was noticeably cool. And when Alexander met him in Moscow later that year, his mentor was very angry.
‘The members of our inner order must be men of good conscience, Brother Alexander. We expect you to follow the example of Grand Duke Paul, who is devoted to his wife, not that,’ and now his pale eyes suddenly blazed, ‘of the profligate and wicked court of his mother the empress!’ Then more gently he added: ‘Marriage is not always easy, Alexander, but all of us count on you to mend your ways.’
And Alexander, rather shaken by the professor’s vehemence, told him he would try to reform. At the time, he even meant it. Little as Tatiana knows it, the professor is her greatest friend, he thought.
There was, however, another cause of friction between Alexander and Tatiana, which the professor could certainly do nothing about. This was the issue of money.
It had come up so gradually that he could hardly say when it began. At first it had been an occasional enquiry about the estates, or the household expenses, which he took to be childish curiosity. Yet after a little while, he began to notice that there was a certain quiet persistency in her questions.
‘Do you know how many servants we have, Alexander?’ she had asked after they had been married three months. He had no idea, and no interest in finding out. Sixty? Eighty? ‘And how much do they cost?’ she had gone on.
‘Nothing,’ he replied shortly.
In a way, this was true. For though merchants and foreigners hired their servants at great expense, Russian noblemen just brought in serfs from their estates. A hundred was nothing. The women worked in the kitchens or elsewhere out of sight; the men dressed in livery like lackeys. One might see a footman who had just pulled his livery coat on over his peasant’s smock and failed to do up the buttons; none of them was really presentable; but things were the same in most of the houses he knew. Alexander did not even know where they all lived. In the basements he supposed.
‘But they eat food,’ Tatiana reminded him. ‘What does that cost?’
How the devil did he know? Food came. It was eaten. The Russka estate brought some cash payments and the rest in kind. Cartloads of provisions would arrive at the St Petersburg house – and immediately disappear. The peasants on the Riazan estate paid him in barschchina labour: his steward sold the grain and sent him the proceeds. He knew he spent it all, but had no idea