FOURTEEN
The woman kept repeating something that Lydia knew could only be, ‘Will he be all right? Will he be all right?’ but since she was speaking Russian it actually could have been anything. It didn’t matter. The tears of anxiety running down her face, the way her stooped thin body trembled in the awkward circle of Lydia’s arm, made translation supererogatory. Annushka Vyrubova, on the woman’s other side, murmured softly in Russian, comforting words, while at the battered table of the clinic’s curtained-in consulting-room, Dr Benedict Theiss unwrapped the gory wad of torn pillowcases from around the young man’s hand and examined the fingers that were left.
Lydia whispered in French, ‘What happened?’
‘An accident in the factory,’ Madame Vyrubova whispered back. ‘They’ve stepped up the production quotas because of the new battleships, and the poor boy had been working since eight last night. No wonder he didn’t get his hand out of the press quickly enough . . .’
Despite the morphia – the first thing Theiss had administered when the young man had been half-carried into the clinic by his mother and brothers – the patient screamed, and on the bench between Lydia and Madame Vyrubova the mother cried out in anguish, like an echo. The bleached canvas curtains of the consulting ‘room,’ only slightly higher than a man’s head, hung partly open, and past them the clinic – which had the appearance, in the thin clear sunlight of the first springlike day, of having begun life as a small factory itself – was filled with a commingled reek of blood, carbolic soap, and unwashed clothing and bodies, a combination of stinks that, despite herself, Lydia hated.
In her years as a medical student she had worked at hospitals, sustained through clinic duty only by her stepmother’s smirking assurances that, ‘You’ll hate it, dear, you know . . .’
Well, of course someone has to see to the poor things, but I don’t see why it has to be you . . . That had been her Aunt Faith. And, Darling, I know it’s bien à la mode to take an interest in the poor, but surely one day a month at a settlement house – Andromache Brightwell knows a PERFECTLY clean and decent one – would do . . .
After which, of course, Lydia had been completely unable to protest that she, too, disliked the stinks and the wastefulness and the sense of speechless futility that filled her in the face of poverty. It had been impossible to admit that she did not share the usual womanly motives of her stepmother’s friends who went in for nursing the ‘less fortunate’, as they were politely called . . .
She couldn’t tell them – the aunts who had raised her, the exquisite slender woman that her father had married the year Lydia was sent away to school – that what she sought was knowledge of the human body, of those squeamish fascinating details that women weren’t supposed to know about or want to know about. A thing of miracles, Benedict Theiss had called the human body . . . Tubes and nodules, nooks and crannies, nerves and bones and the secrets hidden in the marrow . . . Blood and spit and semen, why and how. Working in the clinics was a stepping stone to the end that she sought, which was research for its own sake – knowledge for its own sake – the pursuit of goals far beyond the tying up of a drunkard’s bruises or the Sisyphean labor of primary care for the poor.
The big clinic room had recently been painted a dreary shade of beige, and there were about two dozen people on the benches at one end, men and women – several with children clustered around them and babies slung in shawls at their bosoms – in the faded, mended, ill-fitting and unwashed garments that people make do with when every available penny is being spent on rent and fuel and food if it could be afforded. They were thin, in the way that even the poorest of the London denizens of settlement houses and clinics were not: thin and wary, like animals that have been frightfully abused. Lydia recalled the streets she and Madame Vyrubova had been driven through, to come to this dingy yellow-brick building on the Samsonievsky Prospect. Even through the comforting blur of myopia, it was clear to her that these slums were worse than anything she’d ever seen in London, grown up like oozing sores around the factories.
‘Please forgive us for interrupting you,’ said Lydia, when Dr Theiss had finished his task and washed his hands – he was reaching for his frock coat, hung on its peg, as if to get himself ready to welcome his visitors. She held up her hand. ‘Don’t. I shouldn’t have asked to come.’ Though it had been, in fact, Madame Vyrubova who’d suggested it. Of course dear Dr Theiss will be delighted to receive us. He always is . . .
He probably always was for this dumpy little woman who was said to be the best friend of the Empress and almost a member of the imperial family.
‘I see now you have many more important matters to attend to.’
Madame Vyrubova looked surprised at her words – it had probably been a long time since anyone had professed matters more important than her warm-hearted desire to make the world a better place – but the physician’s hazel eyes thanked Lydia’s understanding. ‘It’s kind of you to think of me, Dr Asher. Yet I know you spoke, when last we met, of my research, and one could not be other than delighted to take a moment’s rest when our Annushka has come all this way to visit.’ He took Madame Vyrubova’s hand and bowed deeply.
‘Texel—’ At the lifting of Theiss’s voice, the man Jamie had identified as an agent of German Intelligence came through the door of the wooden partition that divided the great whitewashed brick room. ‘Is there tea? Thank you. Would you please let my friends know –’ his gesture took in the men and women waiting on the benches – ‘that I must perform the offices of society for ten short minutes, and then I will return?’
‘Bien sûr, doctor.’
Lydia struggled with the impulse to slip her spectacles from her beaded handbag and sneak a better look at the man, who at that distance was little more than an impression of stooping height, arms that seemed slightly too long, skimpy mutton chops hanging on his jaws like socks on a clothesline, and thin fairish hair slicked unappetizingly to a dolichocephalic skull. Even his voice was thin, with a nasal quality to it and – though Lydia’s ear for accents was not nearly as good as her husband’s, especially not when everyone was speaking French – an inflection that differed from Theiss’s. As Theiss led them through the doorway into a laboratory – and thence to a chamber beyond it, barely wider than its window, which served as a sitting room – she inquired, ‘Mr Texel also a physician, I think you said?’
‘A medical student.’ And, with a humorous half-smile: ‘And one, I suspect, who blotted his copybook a little with the Kaiser’s police. He’s an Alsatian, from Strasbourg; he came to me at first only because he needed the work. Yet he has found – as I have – the profound ease of heart that comes from working towards the good of one’s fellow man.’
Or he says he has. Anyone else might have doubted James Asher’s ability to remember the face of a man he’d seen on three brief occasions seventeen years previously, but Lydia knew her husband’s memory for faces and details was as extraordinary as his ear for accents and did not doubt for a moment that it was the same man. For Dr Theiss, with his dislike of the new German Reich, a detail about ‘blotting one’s copybook with the Kaiser’s police’ – if worked artfully into the conversation – would be an infallible Open Sesame to trust . . . Was Alsace one of those places that Germany had taken away from France? Lydia recalled her friend Josetta had mentioned something about it, and she tried to remember what.
‘I beg you will excuse me for intruding on your work,’ said Lydia, as the scientist poured out tea for the three of them, where the window’s sunlight made small lace patterns on tablecloth and dishes. ‘It truly is unforgivable of me. But I read your article on serums in the blood, and I’m afraid I allowed my own enthusiasms get away with me. How on earth do you manage to continue your researches, with the volume of work you do here?’
And who is giving you the money to do it?
‘There was a time when it was impossible.’ Theiss smiled at her. ‘But now, thanks to Madame –’ he nodded at Madame Vyrubova and saluted her with his cup – ‘who put me in contact with some most generous patrons . . . That was how it was that I was able to hire my good Texel in the first place; and, of course the donation of this building – and of another excellent laboratory facility not far from here – was of inestimable assistance. And I must admit,’ he added ruefully, ‘that my soul is so insufficiently evolved that I did grudge not being able to pursue my own researches, for so many years . . .’
‘Oh, Professor—’ simpered Madame Vyrubova.
‘It was the profession’s loss,’ said Lydia. ‘Yet this most recent article of yours . . . I thought it showed signs of a completely new direction in your researches . . .’
It was a shot in the dark, because Lydia had barely skimmed Theiss’s latest work – published eighteen months previously in the Journal des Medicins – but Theiss beamed like an author whose more subtle themes had been applauded. Lydia put on her spectacles, and with Madame Vyrubova tagging politely on their heels, was taken on a tour of the laboratory next door, which was obviously – to her trained eyes – set up for experiments involving the meticulous testing, filtering, distillation and chemical analysis of the various components of blood.
‘Oh, I covet your microscope,’ she cried jestingly, and Theiss responded with a gallant little bow, hand over heart, as if he, like she, found relief in being able to talk with someone else who understood the quest for knowledge for its own sake. It was a relief, Lydia reflected, only to talk with another physician. Much as she enjoyed the stylish social rounds she’d been taken on by Razumovsky’s sister (‘Call me Natalia Illyanova, darling, Madame Korova sounds so formal . . .’) in her quest for information about people who were never seen by daylight, she found the constant attempts of the young Army officers and members of the Court to get her into bed wearing in the extreme. The upper social circle of St Petersburg was just as gossipy as that of her London relations, but far more heated: everyone – with the exception of Madame Vyrubova, who seemed to be oblivious to it all – appeared to be engaged in adultery with everyone else.
And as Jamie had said, NONE of them seemed to go to bed before dawn or to rise before dusk. If it weren’t for their bank accounts she would suspect them all of sleeping in coffins.
By contrast, like herself, Benedict Theiss was a researcher in his heart. Perhaps, reflected Lydia, it was why she found the man so enormously sympathetic – had it not been for the presence of Texel in his household, and the monk Rasputin’s disconcerting reaction to the lady in the red touring-car, she would have concluded that there was nothing to investigate. When Theiss spoke of working far into the nights, of the limitations of working with very small sample-groups (how small? Lydia wondered), of the difficulties in obtaining the absolutely most up-to-date journals – which were censored, like everything else in Russia – she found herself in danger of forgetting all that Jamie had told her about the scheme to ally a vampire with the German Reich.
Even now she found herself wondering, Was Jamie wrong?
‘Ach—’ Theiss looked at his watch. ‘Please, please excuse me, dear ladies . . . It is just that my unfortunates out there, they wait so long and so patiently, and there are so few to succor them . . . Texel!’ He raised his voice only slightly, but the younger man appeared at once in the doorway. ‘Texel, would you please continue to give Dr Asher a tour of my experiments, and explain to her whatever she wishes to know? Texel has been of invaluable help . . . Thank you, Texel . . .’
He clasped his assistant’s hand as he hurried out to his patients once more.