The Serpent and the Scorpion

by Langley-Hawthorne, Clare

  “Careful,” Christopher Dobbs whispered. “You don’t want to set tongues wagging again, now do you?” He had managed to steal up on her unawares.

  “And you think that somehow I care?”

  “Oh, I know he cares. How could he not? Respected member of the House of Lords. Famous barrister and King’s Counsel. ‘Friend’ of the Foreign Office. Reputation’s all he’s got.”

  “Well, then, he need not worry about me.” Ursula replied.

  “Oh, I think we both know that’s a lie. Why, Miss Marlow, you are like a firecracker. Who knows when you might explode in his face? Of course, that’s not to say you aren’t a decoration that’s worth having around. But we all know that educated girls like yourself don’t make suitable society wives.”

  “If you have a point, please come to it quickly.”

  Christopher Dobbs smiled. “I just want you to be realistic, that’s all. Mrs. Pomfrey-Smith may still fuss around you, but once your fortune’s gone, well . . .”

  Ursula raised one eyebrow. “If you’re trying to scare or intimidate me into accepting your offer, it’s not going to work.”

  Christopher Dobbs raised his whiskey glass to his lips with a smile.

  “How’s your friend Alexei Prosnitz?” he asked with maddening calm. “I’m sure the society pages would be very interested in him . . . more grist for the Marlow rumor mill.”

  Ursula watched Dobbs closely. “How’s your friend Whittaker?” she asked coldly, testing the waters. “You and he been arranging the deaths of any more young women?”

  Christopher Dobbs’s face went white.

  Ursula extricated herself from the ball as soon as she was able. Once seated in Bertie, she chastised herself for being so reckless and impulsive. Though Dobbs’s reaction was enough to convince her of his involvement in Katya’s death, she was afraid she had been too hasty, too premature in alerting him to her suspicions.

  “Home?” Samuels asked.

  “Not yet,” Ursula replied.

  “Brook Street?” Samuels responded after a momentary hesitation.

  “Hmmm?” Ursula looked up. “No . . . no . . . Freddie’s place. Woburn Square.”

  Ursula looked at her pocket watch. It was nearly midnight. She knew Winifred refused to celebrate Empire Day on principle, but would it be too much to expect her to be home at this hour on a Friday night? She decided it was worth trying.

  Samuels stopped at the front of Winifred’s house, and Ursula instructed him to wait while she got out and hurried up the stairs, still clad in her ball gown and cloak. She banged on the knocker frantically, praying that Winifred was home. The lights were on in the front parlor; the curtains opened, Winifred peered out, and a minute later the door opened. Winifred was wearing a pair of gray flannel breeches, a striped shirt, and a long brown cardigan, and was holding her pipe in her hands.

  “Sully, what’s the matter? Is everything all right?”

  “I’m not disturbing you, am I?”

  “No, you needn’t worry. No ex-lover inside—well, no ex-lover of mine, at least.” Winifred stuck the pipe in her mouth and grinned. “Actually,” she said, “I was just finishing a lecture I’m giving on Tuesday. Come on in.”

  Ursula waved to Samuels, signaling him to leave.

  “Is Alexei downstairs?”

  “Yes, of course . . . why, what is it?” Winifred replied as Ursula hurried in.

  “I think it’s time we had a little chat with him.”

  Winifred rubbed her nose. “I was wondering when that was going to happen,” she said with a grim look of satisfaction.

  Ursula took off her cloak and hung it up on the coat stand.

  “Nice dress,” Winifred commented.

  “Not now, Freddie. . . .”

  “Is that real chinchilla?” Winifred asked as they made their way down the stairs.

  Alexei was sitting beside the stove with his feet propped up on the kitchen table, to all appearances engrossed in Winifred’s copy of the final volume of Havelock Ellis’s Studies in the Psychology of Sex.

  “I heard you,” he said, placing the book down on the table. “What is it that you want to chat about?”

  “Let’s start with the part where you lied to me about why you were in England.”

  Alexei studied her face. “It wasn’t a lie. I just didn’t want to burden you with everything else.”

  “Like the fact you’re here to set up some armed revolutionary group, or maybe you just left out some of the minor details, like the fact that you and Arina were lovers?”

  Alexei swung his feet off the table and leaned forward in the chair.

  “That was a long time ago. Before I met you, lapushka. . . .”

  “I need to know why you’re really in England.” Ursula continued, ignoring his reply.

  “Sounds to me like someone has already been talking to you.”

  Ursula knew she had to tread carefully. “Yes, well, I don’t like being sent anonymous notes,” she lied.

  “What did this note say?” Alexei asked carefully.

  Winifred looked baffled.

  “It was a warning. It said that you were arranging an armament shipment for your comrades and stirring up trouble with the English unions,” Ursula continued with the charade.

  “And who was this note from?” Alexei asked, his eyes never leaving hers.

  “I told you, it was anonymous. But then at tonight’s ball I received a thinly disguised threat to reveal to reporters that I am helping harbor you in England.”

  “And I suppose you won’t tell me who made this threat?”

  “What would be the point?” Ursula retorted. “I need to be able to trust you before I tell you anything more.”

  Alexei ran his fingers through his curly dark hair and sighed.

  “What do you want me to say?”

  “I want you to start by telling me what really happened that night at the Oldham factory.”

  Alexei took off his spectacles and rubbed his eyes. “There’s really not much more to tell. So I failed to tell you that Arina was there when I arrived at her house—it makes little difference. I spoke to her when she returned from work, and I told her about Kolya. She was obviously upset, but she also didn’t want me around. She asked me to leave. She was angry. So I left. Everything else is just as I told you.”

  Ursula regarded him skeptically.

  “That’s the truth,” he countered.

  “Do you know where Arina’s roommate, Natasha, is?”

  Alexei hesitated for a moment and then replied with a shrug, “Perhaps . . .”

  Ursula crossed her arms.

  “I can take you to a place. There are no guarantees, but she might be there tonight.”

  “Sully . . .” Winifred placed a warning hand on her arm.

  “Natasha really doesn’t know anything,” Alexei protested. “She had nothing to do with Arina’s death.”

  “I’d like to talk to her all the same.”

  Alexei looked Ursula up and down. “You might want to consider changing, unless you want to be mistaken for a tsarina.”

  “Why don’t you go upstairs?” Winifred suggested. “Help yourself to whatever you can find to fit. I can stay and watch Alexei.”

  “Don’t worry,” Alexei said. “I still need somewhere safe to stay, so I’m hardly likely to leave. Besides, I cannot risk Okhrana finding out where I am. Whatever you may suspect about me, you know I am telling the truth when I say I cannot allow them to find me.”

  Ursula and Winifred exchanged glances.

  “I am still the same man that I was,” Alexei said, looking at Ursula. “You know I am loyal to the party and to my comrades. If I am in England, it is to serve them. You once believed in what we stood for. You believed in me. I am not the one who has changed, lapushka.”

  Ursula’s eyelids flickered. She wanted to believe him. It was hard not to feel the pull of the past, of what she had once felt so deeply.

  Winifred tugged her sleeve. “Come on,
we’d best get upstairs. It’s late—if we’re going, we’d better go soon.”

  Alexei picked up his book and, pushing his glasses back, started to read once more.

  Winifred and Ursula climbed the stairs to the bedroom. In Winifred’s previous house, the bedroom had been a richly furnished, bohemian boudoir, full of vermilion-and-black oriental cushions and heavy gold brocade bedclothes. Winifred’s taste’s had become subdued and muted since Laura Radcliffe’s death. Aside from the dark curvaceous wardrobe and chest of drawers in the corner, there was only a simple marble-topped washstand with a basin and ewer, a single wrought-iron bed, and an armchair beneath the window. There was no central chandelier, just two brass wall sconces that emitted a soft glow of light when Winifred flicked the light switch next to the door.

  Winifred opened the wardrobe and pulled out a simple brown serge wool skirt and mannish striped shirt.

  “I don’t have much that will fit you. But this might do. Here, let me help unhook you.”

  Ursula stood in the center of the room, struggling with both her dress and her tears.

  “I told you to be careful,” Winifred said gently. “You and Alexei were always such a volatile combination.”

  Winifred finished unhooking Ursula’s dress and let it slide to the floor. Ursula stepped out, picked up the dress, and laid it on the armchair.

  “And what of me and—” She left the sentence unfinished. She grabbed the shirt and skirt and got dressed quickly.

  Winifred helped button the back of the shirt and draw in the skirt.

  “Now, that’s a volatility of quite a different kind.”

  Ursula turned and faced her, and together they struggled to hitch up the skirt and readjust the waist with a belt, for Winifred was a good deal taller than Ursula and had little in the way of her curves.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You and Alexei are both idealists, impetuous and reckless. Together you just consume and destroy each other. Whereas you and Lord Wrotham, well, that’s quite a different matter.”

  “Because we’re so different?”

  Winifred also removed Ursula’s delicate hairband and tied a gray scarf to hide the Parisian styling of Ursula’s hair.

  “Is that what you think?” Winifred probed.

  Ursula regarded her quizzically.

  “Let’s put it this way,” Winifred said with a smile as she stepped back and regarded her handiwork. “You could be in a room full of Labour Party supporters—from social reformers to revolutionaries, men dedicated to the female suffrage cause, even passionate radicals like Alexei—and there’d still be just one man in the room as far as you’re concerned, and that would be Lord Wrotham.”

  Ursula sat on the bed and pulled on a pair on Winifred’s boots.

  “Freddie, don’t be daft. . . .”

  “Here, let me help you. It’ll be a miracle if you can walk in these—mind you, I can’t see you getting very far in those fine satin slippers of yours, either.”

  When they were done, Ursula regarded herself in the wardrobe mirror.

  “What do you think?”

  “You’ll do. Not that you’ll ever look exactly poor, m’dear. What do you want me to do with your earrings?” Ursula’s necklace was hidden under her shirt.

  “Best leave them here.”

  Winifred placed them carefully in the small trinket tray on the chest of drawers.

  “And the ring?” Winifred pointed to Ursula’s right hand.

  Ursula took off the filigree moonstone ring and placed it beside the earrings.

  They made their way out of the bedroom and down the stairs.

  “Well, here goes,” Winifred said as she opened the door that led to the kitchen stairs from the main hallway. “Let’s see how many more of Alexei’s little secrets we uncover.”

  Winifred, Alexei, and Ursula left by the servant’s entrance and hurried to the Euston Street tube station to catch the last underground train on the Metropolitan line to the Farringdon station. From there, they walked to the Rose and Anchor public house, well known for its associations with Lenin and the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. Although the pub officially closed at eleven o’clock, and from all outward appearances was dark and empty, down in the basement there was a crowd of people, all standing, smoking, and shouting out in various languages. There were Russian revolutionaries standing next to Italian anarchists, Irish nationalists and French syndicalists all arguing loudly, while laborers and intellectuals sat along the low wooden benches drinking their pints.

  The publican, a huge, barrel-chested man with a long dark beard, greeted Alexei with a roaring torrent of Russian and a bearlike hug. Alexei leaned over and shouted in his ear. The publican nodded, and Alexei returned to Winifred and Ursula, who were still standing in the doorway.

  “He’s going to check, but he thinks Natasha was here earlier. She may be in one of the back rooms.”

  Alexei led Ursula and Winifred through the front room and found them a place to sit, squeezed in alongside a group of Italian men engaged in deep conversation. The men didn’t even pause or look up as Winifred and Ursula sat down.

  Alexei leaned over and whispered in Ursula’s ear, “Takes you back, doesn’t it?”

  Ursula was indeed reminded of one of the first meetings Alexei had taken her to. It was May 1907, and Alexei had brought her to a RSDLP meeting to meet his friends. Unfortunately, as the entire meeting was conducted in Russian, Ursula had hardly found it edifying, but she still remembered vividly how exciting it felt to be sitting among people filled with such passion.

  Alexei’s hand ran lightly down Ursula’s back, and she flinched slightly.

  “I’ll go and see what I can find out. Wait here,” Alexei said and disappeared into the crowd.

  “Typical,” Winifred said. “Didn’t even buy us a drink. Shall I go?”

  Ursula shrugged—she was too anxious to speak with Arina’s roommate.

  Winifred got up, stuck her pipe in her mouth, and walked over to the makeshift bar that was set up in the corner of the front room. A young barwoman was standing there, wiping a glass dry on her apron. Winifred ordered four vodkas and returned, balancing them in both hands. She sat down and handed a glass to Ursula.

  Alexei appeared beside them, accompanied by a frail-looking young woman with wide dark eyes and wispy blond hair. He was carrying a pint of beer in his hand.

  “This is Arina’s roommate, Natasha.”

  “Please sit down,” Ursula said, moving along the bench to make room. Natasha slunk into the seat next to her.

  “Why is she so frightened?” Ursula asked Alexei under her breath as he also squeezed in alongside her.

  “She isn’t sure whether to trust you or not. She thinks Arina’s death was the work of Okhrana, and she’s convinced their spies will come after her next.”

  “It’s all right,” Ursula told Natasha. “I only want to know what happened to Arina that night. Can you tell me?”

  Natasha looked nervous.

  Alexei spoke to her in Russian, hoping to reassure her.

  Natasha remained wary but began to speak. “Arina told me that morning she was planning to go to the Garden Suburb after work, so I was surprised to see her when I got home. But she was distracted and upset, so I didn’t ask her any more about it. Alexei was already there when I arrived, and he had told her about Kolya.”

  “And she was very upset about his death?” Ursula prompted. She had to shout to be heard over the din.

  “Yes,” Natasha nodded. “And she insisted that Alexei and I leave her alone. Alexei told me he would return to the hotel, and I, I had to go to the colliery. I work two shifts on a Tuesday. When I returned early the next morning, I heard about the fire. . . . Alexei arrived, and then the police came. . . .” Natasha’s voice broke.

  Ursula clasped her hand. “It’s all right,” she said. “You’re safe here. We just want to try and work out what happened to Arina, that’s all.”

  Natasha turned to
Alexei and asked him something in a stream of Russian.

  Alexei shook his head.

  “She was asking me whether the coroner’s inquest had determined who killed Arina.”

  “Natasha,” Ursula said leaning in close so she could hear her. “Why would Arina go to Garden Suburb? Was there someone she used to visit there?”

  Natasha shook her head. “No, but there was a walk she told me about. Along Green Lane and through Green Wood. She liked to do it when things got . . . got . . . hard for her. She said it was peaceful, and it reminded her of the village she grew up in.”

  “Oh, I see . . . but Arina was home, so she hadn’t gone to Garden Suburb. Do you know if she was planning to meet anyone that night? Had she ever spoken of a man called Christopher Dobbs, or Ambrose Whittaker?”

  Natasha shook her head. Out of the corner of her eye, Ursula saw a tall, thin man watching them from beneath his bowler hat. Ursula was about to speak when she saw Alexei’s reaction to the man’s entry. He whispered urgently in Natasha’s ear, and she blanched. Alexei then leaned in and said to Ursula and Winifred, “Don’t look, but I am sure the man who just came in is an Okhrana agent. I think it’s time we were going.” Alexei tipped the contents of the vodka glass into his mouth and placed the glass back down with a bang.

  “But I still have questions,” Ursula protested. Winifred hastily downed her glass and pulled Ursula to her feet.

  “Then they will have to wait,” Alexei responded sharply.

  Winifred, Ursula, and Alexei walked along Clerkenwell Road toward Bloomsbury. It was now close to two o’clock in the morning, and there were few taxicabs to be found in the area at this hour. The Empire Day concerts and plays were over, and they were far from the elaborate balls of Mayfair and Belgravia. A soft rain had started to fall, misting over the streetlamps and forming a fine, damp film across Ursula’s face. As they turned down Southampton Row a motorcar skidded past, sending mud flying. The driver and his passenger shouted “Hooroo!” as they drove away, waving gaily.

  Ursula shook out her skirt, viewing with horror her muddy hem and boots.