Midnight in St. Petersburg by Vanora Bennett

Author:Vanora Bennett
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781466892163
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

PART TWO

1916–17

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

It was a beautiful December morning, cold in the startling and brilliant way of real winter. There’d been the first proper snowfall earlier in the week. Today’s blue sky was spotted with pink clouds.

‘Friday, so it’s your night away at the hospital…’ Horace said as he opened the pale-gold curtains. Inna sat up, stretching. She nodded sleepily.

On Fridays, nowadays, she took a day off from her job at the Lemans’. Like many other good-hearted city wives, she’d taken to doing a little voluntary work nursing the poor soldiers wounded in the war. Like many city aristocrats, Prince Youssoupoff had turned one wing of his palace into a hospital (though, unlike most, he hadn’t actually gone off to fight), and, like many craftsmen, Horace had wanted to cement his ties with his wealthiest patron. So he’d suggested that his wife become one of the Youssoupoff palace’s lady volunteers, and now Inna did whatever she could for the soldiers lying in cots crammed into a former ballroom, for one evening and night every week, and made up the time to the Lemans by going on there on Saturday morning, and working till evening.

‘And you’ll be going straight on to the Lemans’ in the morning,’ Horace sounded absent-minded, but then they both knew their timetables too well to need reminding of them. He must be working round to something else, Inna thought.

Horace was dressed already in the austerely tailored dark clothes he wore to Fabergé’s. In the hand not occupied with tweaking back the curtains, he was carrying a cup of tea on a tray for Inna, with a sliver of toast and marmalade (she liked the exotic Englishness of that sharp orange taste; it made her feel genuinely foreign to breakfast off it). He put the tray down on the bed beside her and sat down behind it on the oyster satin quilt. Inna looked up at Horace, and beyond him to the austerely high ceilings, dark wallpapers, stiff curtains and curlicued dark furniture of their rented apartment. Along from their bedroom, the drawing room was her husband’s territory, full of the scribbles and scratches of the avant-garde art Horace was interested in at the moment. But she’d done what she could to make the rest of their apartment a home for them by covering everything ugly with quilts and lace and cushions in soft warm colours, which she’d piled up like snowfalls on the bed and sofa and armchairs till Horace started indulgently calling the place ‘Inna’s nest’.

He raised an eyebrow. She loved the way he always did that, just a bit, when he was about to make a request. ‘I thought I might dine out with my dear old boy from the City Duma, tonight, since you won’t be there? I know you find him dull…’

Sitting up straighter herself, Inna wrapped the pretty lace peignoir he’d given her on her birthday about herself and reached for the teacup. ‘Of course, darling,’ she said with a smile (using the English word for ‘darling’, which she knew made him laugh).

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