Yet he had worked for his success too. My God, he had tried! He might so easily have been a nonentity, like any other provincial noble of his day. As a child on one of the family estates near Tula, his education had consisted of little more than reading from the Orthodox Psalter and learning fairy tales and Russian songs from the serfs. And so he might have continued, but for one stroke of luck. For when he was ten, a friend of his father’s, apparently on a whim, had taken a fancy to him and invited him to live in Moscow and share tutors with his children. That had been his break – and it was all he had needed.
‘From then on,’ he recalled proudly, ‘I did everything myself.’ He had worked like a demon, amazing his teachers. Though only a boy, he had recommended himself to people at Moscow University and others with influence. Somehow he had been chosen for the elite corps of pages at the St Petersburg court; and while most of those young men gambled, drank and made love, he had studied as hard as ever until – the greatest triumph of all – he had been one of a handful of youths chosen to be sent to the great German University of Leipzig. What some thought of as effortless superiority was nothing of the kind. I paid with my youth, he would reflect.
And what drove him forward? Ambition: he owed all his success to ambition, but it was a cruel master. It drove you forward, but if you faltered, if you met an obstacle that stopped you, it leapt like a huge fiend on to your back, first screaming abuse, and then weighing down on you like a mountain, crushing the life out of you. Yet strangely, it also gave Alexander Bobrov a kind of purity. Whatever he did, however deviously he played his cards, it was all in the service of this single, secret idea that drove him on.
Yet what exactly was it that he wanted? Like most ambitious men, Bobrov did not really know. It had no name. The whole world, perhaps; or heaven; or both, more likely. He even wanted to be a benefactor of mankind, one day.
But that December evening, there was a more urgent question on his mind as he looked again at the sheet of paper covered with figures and shook his head. He had known he was in trouble for a long time, but he had tried to put off the reckoning. Now it had come.
For Alexander Bobrov was completely ruined.
He had been luckier than many, he was the first to admit it. Despite subdivisions over the generations, his father had still left him three estates: the one near Tula; another on the rich land south of the Oka, in the province of Riazan; and one at Russka, south of Vladimir. There were also part shares in two others. In all, Alexander owned five hundred souls – as the adult male serfs were termed. Not a great fortune nowadays, for the population had been growing that century, but still a good inheritance. It was not enough, though.
‘Half the men I know are in debt,’ he used to say cheerfully. It was quite true – rich and poor noble alike. The authorities were very understanding: they had even set up a special bank to lend – to the gentry only, of course – on easy terms. And since a noble’s wealth was reckoned by the number of serfs he owned, the collateral for these loans was expressed not in terms of roubles, but in souls. Thank God, that very year, the credit limit had been raised from twenty to forty roubles per soul. That had kept him afloat for the last few months. But the fact was, the Tula estate where he grew up had had to be sold, all his remaining three hundred souls were mortgaged, and God knew what he owed to merchants.
The final blow had come that morning, when his major domo had asked for money to buy provisions in the market and Bobrov had discovered he had none. He had told the fellow to use his own, then paid a visit to his bank. To his astonishment, they had refused to advance him any more cash. It was iniquitous! On reaching his office he had forced himself to do his accounts and discovered to his horror that the interest he owed was far greater than his income! There was no question: he was bankrupt. The game was up. ‘It’s no good,’ he sighed, ‘I can’t play this hand any more.’
And now he turned again to the letter. The way to safety: marriage to the German girl. How the devil could he get out of it?
He had been married once before, long ago. His bride had died in childbirth after only a year and he had been heartbroken. But that was far in the past and he had not married again. Instead, he had a charming mistress. In fact, the German girl had been only one of several desultory courtships he had begun in recent years, as a kind of insurance policy. Her family belonged to the Baltic nobility – descendants of the ancient Teutonic Knights – some of whom had taken service in Russia after Peter the Great had annexed their hereditary Baltic lands. She was fifteen; and the trouble was, she had fallen desperately in love with him – for which he should have been grateful since she was an heiress. Her name was Tatiana.
All that year, the innocent girl had been putting pressure on her father to conclude the matter. As weeks and months had passed, and Bobrov himself had become increasingly uncertain of his finances, he had been forced to become further and further committed. For if things don’t go as I plan, he calculated, I can’t afford to lose the girl. Indeed, he had been getting increasingly afraid that her father would find out the truth about his debts and call the whole thing off. Then I’ll have nothing, he sighed. Day by day he had played for time: and now, on this day of all days, had come her extraordinary letter.
It was straightforward enough. He had avoided her for three weeks, Tatiana pointed out. Her father had other candidates in mind. And it ended firmly:
I shall ask my father tomorrow night whether he has heard from you. If not, then I shall not wish to hear from you again.
By the standards of the day, the letter was utterly astounding. For a young girl to write like that, in person, to a man: it was a breach of every rule of etiquette. He could scarcely believe that she had done such a thing. He hardly knew whether he was shocked or secretly impressed by this daring. But of one thing he felt certain: she meant what she said.
He leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. What if he gave up? Would it be so terrible? With Tatiana’s money he could keep his fine house in St Petersburg and the estates. He’d be rich, secure, respected. People would say he’d done very well. ‘It’s time to leave the gaming table while I’m still ahead,’ he muttered.
Why then should he hesitate? Why not seize the life-line fate had thrown him? He opened his eyes and stared at the window, and at the winter darkness outside. There was just that one, last chance: a final, dangerous, throw of the dice. The old woman.
He sighed. It was horribly risky. Even if he got what he wanted, she could still change her mind. Then he would probably lose everything – money, reputation, even the chance of recovery. I’d be a beggar, he realized. And yet…
For several minutes more, Alexander Bobrov the gambler sat at the big desk pondering the chances. Then at last he sat upright, with a faint, grim smile on his face. He had decided on his play.
I’ll go and ask the old woman tonight, he decided.
For Bobrov the gambler was playing a secret game, with higher stakes than even young Tatiana’s fortune.
He was playing for St Petersburg itself.
St Petersburg: truly it was a miracle. At a latitude parallel with Greenland or Alaska, twelve hundred miles further north than the city of Boston, and nearer the Arctic Circle than to London or Berlin, the Russian capital was a second Venice. How lovely, how simple it was: built around the broad basin where the Neva, nearing its estuary, was divided into two forks by the big triangle of Vasilevsky Island whose apex gently pointed inland and whose broad base out in the estuary protected the city from the sullen rages of the sea.
Bobrov knew no greater joy than to approach by ship from the west, along that long, wide inlet of the Baltic known as the Gulf of Finland, to come through the markers, up the narrow channel round the island, and out into the basin of the river which lay before him like a huge, placid lagoon.