Russka - Edward Rutherfurd [495]
The more frightening occurrence took place as Rasputin was leaving.
For some reason, after watching him for a while, Karpenko had suddenly decided he did not want to meet Rasputin. When it looked as if Mrs Suvorin was about to summon him, he had slipped away to a far corner of the room. And as the visitor finally rose to take his leave, Karpenko watched discreetly from behind the cover of two elderly ladies.
And Rasputin was halfway to the door when he abruptly stopped, wheeled, and came straight towards him.
The two ladies blushed and parted. Rasputin came nearer, then paused about ten feet in front of the young man. The hypnotic eyes stared at him, as Karpenko, stripped of his protection, seemed to quail before them. For a full quarter minute Rasputin looked at Karpenko. And then he smiled. ‘Well, well,’ he said softly. ‘I have known others like you, in Siberia and St Petersburg.’ And to Mrs Suvorin: ‘What a clever young Cossack to have in your house.’
What on earth did he mean? Mrs Suvorin seemed to understand him, but she only looked a little awkward, and escorted Rasputin to the door.
But the effect upon Karpenko was devastating. By the time Rasputin had gone and Dimitri had gone over to him, he was white as a ghost, and shaking. When Dimitri put his arm around him and asked him what was the matter he could only whisper: ‘He saw through me. He saw everything. He is the devil himself.’ And when Dimitri gave him a look of blank incomprehension, he just grimaced, shot an awkward glance at Mrs Suvorin, and muttered: ‘You don’t understand. You know nothing.’
And for several weeks afterwards, the young Cossack was moody and withdrawn, and Dimitri could not discover why.
1911, September
For some reason, Rosa noticed, her breasts felt cold. Why should that be? The chill damp air smelt faintly of smoke as she walked down the street. Darkness had fallen an hour ago. Here and there, lamps glowed.
At the corner she stopped and looked back. The bedroom she and Peter shared was the only room in the apartment that looked on to the street and for some reason – she herself did not know why – she had lit a candle and placed it in the window there. She could just see it now, a small, guttering flame set in the dark frame of the building, a strange, intimate little sentinel. A message perhaps, of love and of hope. Except for a note to say she had gone for a walk, she was leaving no other.
She walked round the corner. Her footsteps, oddly, felt light.
No one would know: that was the point. That was, in truth, her gift of love to them, that they should never know. Only Vladimir would know, and he was with his son in Paris now, not due back for a month. She had not written to him: there was no message; but he would know, and keep her secret.
A party of Cossacks clattered by on their horses on their way back to barracks, capes pulled tightly round them against the autumn chill.
When had it all begun? At the very start, perhaps: she had married Peter Suvorin when she was still depressed. That was her fault. Yet she had loved him passionately. No, she thought, she could pinpoint the real beginning. It was in 1900, when little Dimitri was five and the letter had come from America.
Since her marriage, Rosa had had little contact with her family in Vilnius. Four years afterwards, her mother had unexpectedly died, and then her elder brother and his family had emigrated to America. Then, in 1899, her other brother had