The Amber Rooms

Chapter One

Approaching St Petersburg: Early September, 1907

A late evening train moved north through the empty miles towards the City Upon Bones. The electric lights of the train reflected in the water dripping from the trees and the animal eyes only one passenger, Saskia Brandt, could see. She sat in the dining carriage. Her right hand held The Travels of Marco Polo open at an illustration of Kublai Khan, but Saskia was not reading the book. Her eyes searched for the occluded horizon. She had been thinking of that first meeting with Draganov in Sukham, when he had used her real name and unlocked the puzzle box of her memory.

Pink spray carnations leaned in pity over her uneaten lemon sorbet. Saskia had no appetite. She was more scared than she could remember, and she could remember everything. Fear was her partner and had been since April of 1904. Some days she led; some days the fear took her through every step and turn.

She looked once more to the horizon. The Tsar’s Village was close. She needed to reach it within twenty-four hours or her hope would be lost. She could, if necessary, leave the train before St Petersburg and head to the Tsar’s Village directly, but there was little chance of entering the Summer Palace undetected. She would need the help of revolutionaries, and they were to be found in St Petersburg.

Her right hand closed The Travels of Marco Polo and joined her left wrist within a bearskin warmer that she wore around her waist.

She thought of one hour before, when her travelling companion, who happened to be a psychotic and a murderer, had fallen from the train. Fear rocked the balance of her mind and she imagined this man having clung to the carriage.

Was that Kamo’s bloodied face in the window of the connecting door? No. It was the guard of the dining carriage. She had exchanged pleasantries with him earlier in the journey. His long coat was silvered with rain. He ignored Saskia and moved past her to the curving partition behind which the maître d’ was making preparations for the second service.

Saskia inventoried the occupants of the carriage once more. She worried that her daydreaming had distracted her from the entrance of a passenger she could not trust. Since its inception, the Moscow-St Petersburg railway had unsettled those authorities who did not wish to see the Russian people move quickly between the two cities. The train was intended for passengers above a certain class threshold. Passport control was strict. The train would carry any number of Tsarist agents. Saskia wondered whether a third person had been assigned to watch both her and Kamo and, perhaps, assume responsibility for the completion of their task should they fail.

There were three other people in the carriage. Each was travelling alone. The first was an elderly Hussar who was occupied with the anatomy of his strudel. The second, shaking straight his newspaper at irregular intervals to the annoyance of the first, appeared to be a civil servant. The third was a minor royal of some description, and he was sleeping with an open mouth. Next to him, a stove flickered redly. Saskia looked at the upright carriage clock near the door to the first class sleeping carriage. She alone heard it tick.

Yes, Kamo had failed. He was lying somewhere along a cold curve of rail, miles to the rear, maybe near a rural train station, maybe not.

Two minutes passed. Each second was crowded with ideas, notion upon notion. She thought about the item in the luggage carriage addressed to the Twelve Collegia. At the close of that second minute, Saskia resolved that she would complete her business on the train and jump clear before its arrival in St Petersburg.

The wheels struck an irregularity in the rail. Saskia rocked. The minor royal snorted awake. The civil servant looked at Saskia and smiled in the manner that said: he was a man, she was a lady, and in his opinion everything would be quite all right.

Saskia inclined her head towards him and left the carriage by its rear door. Outside, on the open platform, the wind pressed against her hat, which was securely pinned to her hair. She could see the connective tissue of the train beneath her feet; sleepers flickering by; the knots of time passing. The fear was there, too, leading her.

She tried to relish the air from the Gulf of Finland but her nerves hummed like ramshackle electrics. It was likely her mascara still carried the dust of the Caucasus. She thought about Kamo as the sky in the west lost its blueness for black.

When the train guard came, Saskia was ready. She smiled and touched her hand to his sleeve. He was buttoning his double-breasted coat. Its thick collar reached his ears. His hat was wide and heavy.

‘Madam,’ he said, pinching some soup from his moustache, ‘you would be more comfortable in your compartment. You are not dressed for these conditions. May I lead you there?’

Saskia was wearing the clothes that had been given to her: a vermillion dress with a fishtail skirt, a short pearl-white jacket, and a pillbox hat. It would not have been her first choice, but the revolutionary who had expropriated it from a public bath in Baku had, at least, selected a costume of the correct size.

‘No, thank you,’ she said. ‘But you are very good.’

She looked at the pinned flap of coat that neatly dressed his arm, which had been amputated at the elbow. The guard noticed her attention.

‘An old injury,’ he said.

Saskia shook her head. ‘I did not mean to offend you.’

‘You could not offend me.’

The guard had not finished his sentence with “madam”. Saskia took it as a sign that he was willing to forego the strict propriety that would typically characterise a conversation between a noblewoman and a train guard. His age helps, she thought. He must be fifty or sixty. He wants to daughter me.

Saskia removed her left wrist from the hand warmer. The guard looked at the scarf that covered her stump. His expression had not changed. The thick skin of his eyelids did not move.

‘There was an accident. It happened in the Ukraine, during the summer when I went down to the peasants.’

The guard put his hand in one of the deep pockets of his coat. For a moment, Saskia feared that he would draw a gun and denounce her as an anarchist. But then she remembered him taking his official timepiece from that pocket in response to the minor royal’s query about the accuracy of the clock in the dining carriage, not two hours before.

‘I have no weapon,’ she said.

‘Then you have placed yourself in some danger.’

Saskia wanted to ask his name, but she thought that his hesitation might set her back. There was no question that she needed his help. There was a piece of furniture in the luggage compartment that Saskia and her fallen companion had been instructed to escort, regardless of cost to life, to sympathisers in St Petersburg.

Saskia would not let that happen. She needed to press the guard.

‘Are you a friend?’ she asked. ‘Tell me now or go about your business.’

His beard twitched. ‘Are you an agent of the Third Section?’

Saskia smiled. The Tsar’s Third Section had not existed officially for years, but its name still held a chill.

‘My friend,’ she said, touching the arm that had held the timepiece, ‘there is a crated item in the luggage compartment addressed to the University’s Twelve Collegia.’

‘Do you want me to change the address?’

‘You’re a good man, comrade. Here it is.’ She passed him an envelope. ‘Inside are new luggage labels. It will be safer if you do not read them.’

The guarded nodded and put the envelope in an outer pocket.

‘Take these, too,’ she said, pulling a clip of roubles from her sleeve.

‘I will not.’

Saskia sighed. ‘I need the train to be slowed. Can you do that?’

‘You need to be careful.’

The guard had used the informal “you”.

‘Comrade, will you let the train be slowed?’

The guard sighed and took his hand from his pocket. Where Saskia expected the pocket watch, she saw a revolver.

With an apologetic shrug, the guard said, ‘We’re given these.’

Saskia felt a wave of relaxation down the muscles on her right side. She was ready to slap the gun aside and overpower him.

The train whistled.

The guard said, ‘You should have it. What am I meant to do with it? I’m an old man.’

‘Thank you, but keep it.’

‘I will slow the train for you and redirect the crate. Should I tell you my name?’

Saskia put her hand to his cheek. She did not want to give him her assumed name, which would be to meet honesty with deceit.

‘There is a tunnel,’ the guard said, ‘and at its entrance, if you go north, there is a track. That will take you quietly into the city.’

When he left, Saskia slowed her vision to watch the sleepers drift by. She thought about the revolver, how the cylinder would turn with quiet clicks.

I will lead my fear, she thought.