The Past #2
“Get out,” she said in a scratch of a whisper to no one and everyone. She felt rather than saw them disperse. Only Lucian was left. She towered over him.
He startled. “I—it is my fault.”
“What is your fault?” Valya forced command into her voice, her eyes on his face. If she glanced down, she would see her daughter, the blood and the death…Two graves. Would the other be hers? Would her heart break, drown in blood like her daughter?
“Sveta was planning on leaving. The Grand Duke somehow found out. H-he told me to stop her. I said I wouldn’t, that I was done with his dirty work.
I…did security for him, among other things.
He came at me with his dagger, threatened me, said Svetlana was his and always would be, in life and in death.
And it wrenched from me, I couldn’t help it—that Svetlana would never be his.
Because she was mine. Mine. And that we were leaving, together, going somewhere he wouldn’t find us.
He came here, and—oh God,” sobbed Lucian. “H-he did…this.”
“How do you know it was him?” Valya had glimpsed the ugly slash across the inside of her daughter’s right wrist, the one responsible for the puddle of blood, an important vein likely nicked, still bleeding.
The wound could have been self-inflicted.
Though Svetlana was planning her and Zina’s escape, eager to start her new life…
Lucian held up the dagger with the silver bolt and sobbed harder.
The starlike ruby winked at Valya. It was the dagger that had killed Ivan Morozov, the same one she had given back to the Grand Duke.
“I didn’t mean to, I swear it! I thought she was already gone. She told me she had decided to leave earlier,” babbled Lucian.
Valya’s mind was a swirling hole of blackness, all her thoughts and emotions jumbled up, indistinguishable. She was shaking, her teeth clattering. She heard Zina’s cry again. Smelled blood on the air—her daughter’s.
Finally, Valya looked down.
Skin the white of lilies, blood the crimson of just-poured wine. The eyes that must have been sealed shut by someone. A ring on a very important finger, a simple gold band.
Valya summoned the last of her strength and forced out, “Leave, or by God, I will kill you, too.” Lucian scrambled up and away while she fell to her knees beside her dead daughter and wept.
Valya knew it was all she had. In a moment, she would need to wipe away her tears and go upstairs to tend to her granddaughter.
A police investigation was opened into her daughter’s death. In the days leading up to the funeral, in addition to her grief and caring for the suddenly orphaned baby, Valya had to endure the police sniffing around her tearoom, their endless interviews and questions.
The Grand Duke was nowhere to be found, the bastard let loose on all of Paris.
She would do what Svetlana had intended: She would leave this accursed place, and she would run.
Valya would protect her granddaughter the way she hadn’t been able to protect her daughter.
Zina would grow up happy and unburdened.
She would not know any of this. They would start over somewhere else.
Maybe on the lavender-soaked Riviera, where the sun shone most of the year. Yes, that was what they would do.
Valya had left homes behind before and survived, even thrived.
She felt the gold ring practically burn in her pocket.
She had taken it off her daughter’s finger on impulse.
Valya just needed to decide what to do about it.
She knew it was Lucian’s. He had knelt and wept so brokenly, so guiltily, over Svetlana’s body.
Said they had intended to run away together. Perhaps Zina was his.
Before she left for the funeral, Valya glanced into her coffee cup.
She stilled at what she saw—or didn’t see—at the bottom.
No dregs. A mystery.
Something hidden, impossible to divine, waiting in the shadows of the future.
The rest of the day passed in a blur as Valya went to bury her daughter.
Svetlana was interred in a new cemetery for Russians on the outskirts of Paris.
On her way back to the tearoom, the weather turned dark and ominous.
Valya adjusted her shawl over her shoulders, the fringe brushing against her bare arms. There was a sharp tinge to the air, not normal for June in Paris.
More appropriate for Russia and its northern, frozen capital.
The city felt eerie, as if holding its breath, and not in anticipation.
Something had already transpired, only waiting to be revealed. Like a tumor.
The feeling only mushroomed as Valya approached the tearoom.
Her tears spent, she had been dry-eyed all day.
But upon seeing that darkened place where tragedy had so swiftly stolen in and stolen her little girl, she felt the tears gather, the pressure build, and she hoped she wouldn’t weep in the street.
Even with what had happened, it would be unseemly for her clients and patrons to see it.
They needed her. Her granddaughter needed her. So she kept it in.
Valya went to unlock the door, but it swung open.
Strange. She thought she had locked it.
She did not turn on the lights. She couldn’t bear to see her tearoom without her daughter.
Traces of Svetlana were everywhere: pouring coffee at that table, laughing by the mirror, gliding up the stairs.
And Valya thought she heard her voice, saying something, humming a tune.
She would make a cup of tea and retire. Then, tomorrow, she would collect baby Zina from her client’s, and she would decide where they would go next.
Suddenly, her foot slipped on something wet. Valya glanced down, the darkness disorienting her. She should have switched on the electric lights. Or lit a candle.
She slipped again, this time crashing to the floor. She landed awkwardly, painfully, on her elbow. She swore furiously. She could almost hear Svetlana’s laugh.
You really are a silly old woman.
I am not, she retorted to the Svetlana in her head.
Valya tried to get up, but she realized the wetness was sticky and dark.
No, it couldn’t be. Somebody had cleaned up all that blood, hadn’t they?
She brought her hand to her eyes, peering at her fingers.
Her hand started to shake. It was blood.
She looked past it and saw a dark mass lying against the wall.
Valya swallowed, hating how her throat closed up in fear.
She struggled to her knees and shuffled to the mass, despite her insides screaming for her to run, the lack of dregs in her cup rushing back.
The mystery. The hidden thing. The shadowed future.
Valya couldn’t smother the ugly cry that tore from her throat.
It was a body. That of the Grand Duke.
She pressed down her nausea and forced herself to examine the corpse.
There was a nasty wound to the head; the blood still flowed. But it wouldn’t have been enough to kill him. It was likely the result of a fall—she noticed the broken shelves, the tea tins strewn all over the floor.
Valya scanned the rest of the body but didn’t see any other wounds or injuries.
She glanced at the blood on the floor, by her feet, noticing it was mixed with sick.
A tea tin lay near his hand. She reached for it, ignoring the blood, her own rising sickness.
She lifted the lid, peered inside, saw dried berries black as night mixed with the tea leaves.
She gave the tin a sniff. The nausea reached into her throat.
Valya dropped the tin, and it bounced off the floorboards.
The sound echoed in her ears long after it had stopped.
Rotting flesh. Potent. Powerful.
There was only one thing it could be: deadly nightshade. Belladonna. Poison.
He was poisoned in her tearoom, where she grew belladonna. Somebody had done this to frame her.
Valya rose, standing very still. The tears for her daughter had dried, only to be replaced by a cold, hard knot of fear. What to do, what to do.
There was only one course of action left to her: to bury the body.
She could not call the police, not with all the evidence stacked against her in such an exquisitely damning way. Whoever did this made sure of it, the fiend!
Once more, Valya pressed down her nausea and placed her hands on the dead man’s shoulders—cold as ice. Then she pulled, dragging the corpse away from the tearoom with its many windows, into the bowels of Samovar, and the kitchen.
It took time, as corpses were heavy things. And they were quiet things.
To distract herself, Valya formulated a plan. Her tearoom would remain closed, a period of mourning appropriate given the circumstances. And, at daybreak, she would run to the butcher’s to telephone Lucian. He would help her with the body. It was the least he could do after everything.
Valya scrubbed and polished the floors until they shone as she waited.
When Lucian arrived, as she knew he would, she let him into the tearoom. But not before glancing about the street—empty, save for the rain pounding the pavement. He shuffled in place, awkward, guilty. “You said you wanted to talk about Svetlana.”
Valya watched Lucian for a moment. He was in his nice inspector suit again, and with his cropped blond hair and mustache, she acknowledged he was handsome.
Though not tall, he had a presence. But it was his eyes that ultimately drew one in.
They were honey brown and flecked with green—sharp, intelligent, knowing.
An ambitious man. And the man who had caused her daughter’s death.
Valya caught the gleam of gold on his hand.
A ring, identical to the one she had found on Svetlana’s finger.
“We cannot find him, madame,” he was saying. “We are scouring all of Paris.”
Valya tilted her head. “You were not at the funeral.”
Lucian avoided her eyes. “I felt I had done enough.”
“That you have. It is good you did not show your face. And after tonight, after what you will do for me tonight, you never will again. Not in my tearoom, not on rue Daru, not anywhere else. You will stay far away from me—and from my granddaughter.”
His eyes cut to hers.
“I assume she is yours.”
“Y-yes,” he stammered, a lost little boy caught out.
He covered the ring with his other hand and lifted his gaze to hers.
In it, she saw wrenching, bottomless pain.
He would not need to be punished. He was broken already.
“We married, just before Zina was born. She intended to tell you, move in with me, be my wife not only in name.”
“And what happened?”
“She kept delaying. She didn’t want the Grand Duke or anyone to find out.
She believed he would come back for her.
When he did, she wanted to leave, kept delaying that, too, until she finally made up her mind.
You know the rest.” Lucian dropped his gaze.
“She had asked me to stop by the tearoom to tell everybody she had already left. Except she hadn’t.
And I found her…Oh God. I cannot believe she is—”
“Dead,” Valya supplied flatly. “How are you so sure Zina is yours?”
“Svetlana was many things, but she was no liar. She told me she wasn’t seeing anybody else.”
“What about the Grand Duke?”
“She had slept with him only once, at Chateau de Rêve. The child, well, was conceived after that. It wasn’t until after that we…” Lucian trailed off.
Her daughter had kept so much from her. Valya supposed that was her fault. And the tragic thing was now she would need to keep a lot from Zina, too. She reached into her pocket and rooted around in it, producing the ring. “You should keep it.”
Lucian’s eyes shone with tears, the green in them muted, like damp leaves after a rainfall. He accepted the ring, picking it up reverently.
Valya pushed down her own tears and forced herself to focus on the task at hand. “Now, you will atone for the role you played in my daughter’s death. Come with me,” she said to Lucian, who pocketed Svetlana’s ring and nodded obediently, as he should.
Valya led him through the tearoom, the hallway leading to the kitchen, to the kitchen itself, and to the dead Grand Duke, whose body was starting to smell. She pressed a handkerchief to her face, ignoring Lucian’s sharp intake of breath, the flurry of questions.
She put up a hand. “I found him like this. Somebody is framing me for his murder.” She spoke calmly, trying not to breathe in the stench as she revealed the next part of her plan, one she had thought of as she cleaned the bastard’s mess from her tearoom floor.
“You will help me bury him. But not here. In my daughter’s place at the Russian cemetery.
My daughter we will rebury in my garden.
” Valya had hated the idea of Svetlana being buried so far from her, making the possibility of communing with her less likely.
This was her opportunity to change that.
“But how—?”
“That does not concern me. You will open an investigation into the Grand Duke’s disappearance, and everyone will believe he escaped after murdering my daughter.
Oh, he had hidden a wall full of treasure in my tearoom.
Jewels, gold, banknotes, coin. We will bury it all with him.
His gifts to my daughter we will keep for a rainy day.
And you will make sure this tearoom remains mine.
You will do all this, then you will stay away, protecting me and your daughter from afar, making certain no one dares touch us again. ”
And Valya would never leave the tearoom. It would be her daughter’s burial place, the scene of tragedy and suffering, yet hers, and Zina’s. She would raise her granddaughter in the tearoom with her. And she would never tell her about these events.
Not unless something went terribly wrong.
The storm outside kept blustering, they and the tearoom so silent, Valya nearly imagined the dead man reviving. A twitch, a blink of an eye. His rasping, dead breath. Him, rising from the grave, alive and walking among them.