The Past
Valya
Saint Petersburg, Imperial Russia
“Come to my place on the Moika, dear one,” said the first lady, with starlike diamonds in her hair, before slipping Valya her perfumed calling card.
Other ladies handed Valya their calling cards then.
The second lady with the fat gold Cartier bracelet.
The third lady with the diamond diadem. Even the fourth lady, though she was more understated.
She wore all black and had a pearl-gray veil, so Valya couldn’t see her face.
All she could see was her ruby necklace.
The bloodred stone glinted through the gauze, its heavy silver weighing down the swanlike neck, dangerously close to snapping it.
Valya instantly knew there was something different about this lady, and the family she belonged to.
The ruby in the necklace reminded Valya of the ruby on the blade that had plunged into Ivan Morozov’s heart.
She decided to first call on the other ladies, who gave her gems, coins, and banknotes for her coffee readings.
She moved herself and Svetlana into more comfortable lodgings, closer to the center of town.
Closer also to the embankment near the Winter Palace and the other palaces of the nobility she was ravenous to meet, to know, to read fortunes for.
But Valya did not forget the veiled lady with the ruby necklace at her throat.
After she had had regular clients for a time, forgot the streets and the poverty, moved to still better lodgings, still closer to the embankment, and left her daughter with a passable nanny, Valya decided it was time to pay the lady with the ruby necklace a visit.
When she arrived at the address on the calling card, she stared up at the building in wonder.
It was the famous Marble Palace, built by Catherine the Great for her lover, Grigory Orlov.
But Valya would not be wowed by palaces or riches.
She assumed an unimpressed air as she was led by the lady with the ruby necklace to a brilliant receiving room within, all marble and gold, mirror and light, and perfumed with lilac.
Valya knew then that the woman with the ruby necklace was not her client.
It was the lady who sat at the little lacquer table in the middle of the room.
She was somewhere in her early forties, formidable and handsome, though with a hawklike appearance.
She had squinting dark eyes and the same somber attire as her lady-in-waiting.
Valya, upon finding herself in the audience of a real grand duchess—her husband was the brother of the current emperor, his father having been the previous emperor—for once, words failed her. Had she truly reached so high?
“Thank you for coming.” The grand duchess’s deep, surging voice was every bit as formidable as her appearance. “May I ask, why now? My lady-in-waiting gave you my calling card months ago.”
Valya considered the grand duchess. “Because I knew you would be an important acquaintance, and I wanted to be worthy of you.” She could tell the grand duchess was pleased, and she continued in her fortune-telling voice. “What kind of reading do you wish, and what would you like to know?”
“I wish to know of my fate. I do not care how.”
It was the worst question one could ask a fortune teller, for it was the most changeable and, therefore, the most unreliable. “Go on,” Valya said anyway.
“My husband has, of late”—the grand duchess paused, reflected—“drifted away from me. I wish to know what my future is here in Russia, whether I should return to my homeland in Germany. Or whether I should hope he may yet return to me. To stay or to leave? To believe in him or to give up? All that speaks of fate, does it not?”
Valya’s fortune-telling sense told her the grand duchess’s fate was about as grim as her funereal attire, which did not necessarily mean death. “Do you have coffee beans?”
The grand duchess rang a little gold bell beside her. The young woman reappeared; the coffee beans were requested. After she departed on her errand, the grand duchess said, “She is the latest. He gave her that necklace. I suppose I should be thrilled.”
“Why is that?”
“It is but silver and tarnishes easily.” Suddenly, the grand duchess gave a terrible laugh, a burst of violence that vanished on the air like a dead man’s last breath.
The young woman with the ruby necklace returned holding a gleaming silver tray on which were placed two Sèvres porcelain cups, silverware, and other tea things.
Valya had never read coffee grounds from a tea service this fine.
She got over it as soon as she began sorting and grinding the coffee beans. They smelled rich and rare. She gave her instructions as the grand duchess drank the coffee—after it was made in some distant kitchen.
Valya instantly saw the black cloud of coffee grounds hovering over the remnants of the liquid. They hadn’t settled. Death—not the grand duchess’s but her husband’s.
Her instinct was proven correct when another symbol formed in the dregs.
A blade, a dagger, with a jagged silver bolt on the handle ending with a scarlet-red ruby that winked at her like a star. Her mind had added in the colors, the ones she knew belonged to the real dagger that had glinted over Ivan Morozov’s unmoving, dead chest.
It took Valya a few more visits to verify that the dagger from the coffee grounds was the same one owned by the grand duchess’s husband and identical to the one used the night of Ivan Morozov’s murder.
In the palace’s shadows, more than once, Valya glimpsed the man who had done the deed.
Likely, one of the husband’s manservants.
She trudged back to her and Svetlana’s lodgings after the latest visit, at which she had ascertained from the grand duchess that her husband’s family had significant ownership in Moscow’s publishing houses.
Below the bridge, the Neva churned black with shards of ice. Valya suddenly had the overwhelming urge to plunge a shard deep into the husband’s chest.
This was the first time she had ever thought about killing someone.
No, she told herself, wiping her tears before they had a chance to freeze.
You will not be weak or stupid. She vowed to seek vengeance instead.
But not with a shard of ice to the chest. That would be too easy, too merciful.
She would do it with patience and trust. With time.
A slow, agonizing death, one no one would see coming.
She would force this house to rot from the inside out.
The grand duchess’s son, the future Grand Duke—Le Grand-Duc, as he would come to be called in Paris—was but twelve years old. He never saw Valya. But she saw him. She marked him. And once she was done with his parents, Valya would come for him, too.