The Coronation Read Online Free

rich. You must have heard about her, Mr Ziukin. Some say that Pushkin based his Queen of Spades on her, and not the old Princess Golytsina at all.’
    I do not like it when servants flaunt their erudition, and so I said nothing, but merely nodded.
    Somov obviously did not understand the reason for my displeasure, for he continued in even more flamboyant style.
    ‘The legend has it that during the reign of Alexander I, when everyone in society was playing the newfangled game of lotto, the countess played a game with the Devil himself and staked her own soul. The servants say that sometimes on moonless nights a white figure in a nightcap wanders down the corridor, rattling the counters for lotto in a little cloth bag.’
    Somov giggled again, as if to make it clear that he, as an enlightened man, did not believe in such nonsense. But I took this news quite seriously, because every servant, especially if, like me, he happens to be a member of an old court dynasty, knows that ghosts and phantoms really do exist, and joking with them or about them is a foolish and irresponsible pastime. I asked if the ghost of the old countess did anything wicked apart from rattling the counters. Somov said no, that in almost a hundred years she had never been known to play any other tricks, and I was reassured. Very well, let her wander, that was not frightening. In our Fontanny Palace we have the ghost of Gentleman of the Bedchamber Zhikharev, a handsome Adonis and prospective favourite of Catherine the Great, who was poisoned by Prince Zubov. What is an old woman in a mob cap compared with him? Our otherworldly lodger behaves in the most indecent fashion: in the darkness he pinches the ladies and the servants, and he becomes especially rowdy on the eve of the feast of St John the Baptist. It is true, however, that he does not dare to touch the ladies of the royal family – after all he is a gentleman of the bedchamber. And then in the Anichkov Palace there is the ghost of a female student from the Smolny Institute who was supposedly seduced by Tsar Nikolai Pavlovich and afterwards took her own life. At night she oozes through the walls and drops cold tears on the faces of people who are asleep. It can hardly be pleasant to be woken by cold tears and confronted by a horror like that.
    Anyway, Somov did not frighten me with his ghost. It was far worse that the house really did prove to be very cramped and lacking in many conveniences. That was hardly surprising – nothing in the property had been renovated since the Court Department bought it from the Counts Chesmensky half a century earlier.
    I walked round the floors, calculating what needed to be done first. I must admit that Somov had coped rather well with the basic preparations: the covers had been removed from the furniture, everything was brilliantly clean, there were fresh flowers in the bedrooms and the grand piano in the large drawing room was correctly tuned.
    The lighting was a great disappointment – there was not even gas, only antediluvian oil lamps. Ah, if only I had had just one week – I would have installed a small electric generator in the basement, laid the wires, and the palace would have looked quite different. Why did we need to skulk in the oil-lit twilight? It had been like that in the Fontanny Palace thirty years earlier. Now I would need a lamplighter to keep the lamps full of oil – they were English-made, with a twenty-four-hour clock mechanism.
    On the subject of clocks, I counted nineteen table and wall clocks in the house, and they all told different times. I decided that I would wind the clocks myself – it is a job that requires punctuality and precision. One can always tell a good house kept in ideal order from the way that the clocks in different rooms all tell the same time. Any experienced butler will tell you that.
    I discovered only one telephone apparatus, in the hallway, and immediately ordered another two lines to be laid: one to Georgii