EXCERPT

Dirty in the nightgown, dirty from the floor outside the police chief’s office; dirty from all the years complicit in Alexei’s games. Katerina had crossed the border from her ordinary life and the world was made differently here. Darkness held her in a new way, tighter. Everything merged. Rooftops with sky, smells into fear; busy street sounds into blood and bone dance. She moved more lightly along the street than she otherwise should, her feet on the dark made liquid, borne on a tide not yet at its reach. There were two currents at play in the waters of Odesa: one coming, one going. Always the push and the pull.
Katerina was on her way home to the palais when she remembered it was no longer hers. The police had moved in. By now they would be examining her intimate garments and laughing at how a woman in her forties clung to such illusions.
‘We’ll find what we’ll find,’ the chief of police had said, as his men with flapping hands tried to steer her from the house without being folded into the spectral waltz of her nightgown. The palais was ablaze with lamps by then, in full giddying splendour, celebrating its liberation.
‘Of course you will.’ She gestured to the men carrying crates up the marble steps. ‘But why bother with the charade of taking it in to bring it back out?’
‘Those boxes are to take away the governor-general’s papers for examination.’
‘On what authority have you taken him away?’ she asked.
‘He’s quite in one piece, I assure you.’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘The boxes are only for papers.’
‘I know that,’ she'd said. 'But why would you stress it?’
Never before had she been on the streets in the dark, alone. This was the city she saw only from the window of her carriage: street life reeled by as if on a painted backdrop, streaming out of sight where it… What? She’d always thought of people and places vanishing from existence the moment they left the frame, but of course they didn’t. She was one of those people now – on the street, in the dark, with the frame entirely gone.
Was it only yesterday that everything had collapsed? How dizzying, how freeing, to find yourself so completely wrong. 
She stopped by the statue of Catherine the Great presiding over her city named for Odysseus. Wanderers had built this city and were building it still, but now they were suspect. Even the ones who’d been here before the city itself, when it had been nothing but the lonely Ottoman fort of Khadjibey. From the clifftop garrison, authorities commanded the mouths of the three most navigable rivers in eastern Europe, with an ice-free harbour for most of the winter. Limestone buildings had replaced the Tatar huts of fifty years ago. Tatars in pink pelisses, Turkish traders in fezzes, and Persian sailors in loose trousers still mingled freely with Russians and Europeans.
Would everyone know what had happened to her and Alexei? What had happened exactly? Who would she be from now on?
As the governor-general’s wife she could enter the Hôtel St Petersburg and have services lavished upon her without charge. As a woman with her hair wild, wearing a man’s overcoat and nothing but her nightwear underneath, she might be mistaken for the wrong sort of woman. The right sort of woman would throw herself upon a friend’s charity immediately, regardless of the unfashionable moment, write the usual letters of petition throughout the night, and start the journey to Petersburg tomorrow. But she might be in the capital for months without securing an audience with the minister, and in the meantime Alexei would be tried in secret. He could be transported to Siberia long before she discovered he was no longer in a Petersburg fortress.
Dust rose from hooves and heels and carriage wheels. It was the time of evening when society strolled to restaurants, bars and the theatre.
No, not the theatre. That was closed, and she was the one who’d done it. Was this the cause of Alexei’s arrest? It couldn’t be that alone. 
‘Be careful with this play,’ Alexei had said. ‘There will be people who understand it.’
‘Good,’ she’d replied. ‘I want to know who they are. Don’t you?’
‘I know already.’
‘Your friends, yes, of course, but I’m not talking about them or officers in the garrison, or any of the other rumours. Who here thinks as we do, who in the south will help us push for change?’
‘Just tread lightly,’ said Alexei. ‘I don’t want to have to fabricate more insincere apologies on your behalf.’
‘Then don’t. We’ve begun something. Hold your line, Alyosha.’
‘Don’t talk to me as if you’re the general, your dress betrays you. Or protects you. Watch yourself, that’s what I’m saying. By all means, dazzle with your gowns and gems that my fortune provide. Without them you’re vulnerable.’ 
And what of being seen on the street, dressed as the police chief’s mannequin in the overcoat and purple valenki embroidered in gold? Not even Alexei’s arrest could excuse this derangement. How could she go to anyone for help, how could she ask, when she was the one who bestowed help and favours, the one who had always looked after herself? 
She’d left the police station in a panic. Should she return? Perhaps Alexei’s arrest was one of those temporary detainments, though you didn’t know it would pass until it was over; and you lived forever with the consequences. She tried to believe this. But Russia didn’t arrest the governor-general of its fourth city to give him a scare. In these times, mercy was weakness; changing your mind was weakness. When you ruled conquered peoples from fifteen degrees longitude to two hundred and ten, from the wastes of Siberia to the warm southern waters, you couldn’t allow anyone to chance their luck with your authority. And if you made a mistake no one must ever know. Imprisoned, exiled or shot. Was it too hasty, too fatalistic, to believe these were the cards dealt to Alexei? At the very least she had to consider the possibility. 
Once she began to consider eventualities they became vivid pictures with lives of their own, with each new scene unfurling from the bud of the very worst moment. She tried to reverse the drama in her mind and stop the sequence unfolding before she saw the extreme end and felt compelled to rush there.