‘I need to pace myself,’ he said, rising to his feet. ‘Lady Dufferin has returned to Petersburg and she’s invited me to join an embassy party at the Yusupov tomorrow.’
‘You’re such a favourite with the ladies, old boy, especially those of – shall we say – maturer years . . .’ replied Dobson with a mischievous smile.
‘Dobson, are you jealous?’
‘I haven’t squeezed the hand of a pretty girl in months.’
‘If it’s any comfort, nor have I.’
‘No comfort. You could have if you’d wanted to.’
Perhaps I could, yes, Hadfield thought as he let himself out of the building and on to the snowy street. There had been two or three pretty young ladies who had caught his eye at parties, but he had felt no inclination to be more than amiable. His aunt teased him that when the ladies retreated after dinner he was often spoken of and always in favourable terms. One of the most eligible young men in Petersburg, she said. Well, at least on the English Embankment. And it was quite true that his reputation was growing with his practice and his credit at the bank.
The wind had dropped a little but it was snowing harder than ever, large soft flakes falling thickly, an unhealthy yellow in the light of the street lamps. It was only a short walk to the Nevsky Prospekt, his boots crunching on the virgin snow, and the freezing air roused him from the torpor he had been in danger of sinking into in front of Dobson’s fire. There was something magical about the city in the first hours of a heavy snowfall, before the cabs cut rough ridges of ice in the streets and the gutters and pavements were awash with filthy meltwater. Clean and strangely peaceful, but for the Sunday chiming of old Russia. On an impulse, he decided to visit the Kotomin House for a glass of Glühwein, and climbing to the second floor was shown to a table with a view of the frozen Moika. It had once been a favourite with the literati, and rich students, academics and cultivated professionals chose to patronise the restaurant for that very reason, but on this evening it was almost empty. He sat at the table sipping his wine and staring out of the window at the passers-by trudging heavy-footed along the embankment. There had been talk at the clinic of the attempt on the tsar’s life, and some of the students whom he had recruited to help him there were impressed and openly expressed sympathy for The People’s Will – rather too vociferously so. Hadfield kept his counsel. He was in no doubt that Anna, the Figners, Goldenberg and their friends were involved, but he had seen and heard nothing of them for months. He missed their camaraderie, their idealism, their sense of mission – precisely those things Dobson liked to dismiss as ‘romantic tosh’ – and sometimes he was conscious of feeling inexpressibly restless and disgusted with the bourgeois complacency of his life. But he took comfort and pride in his work, in the real and practical difference he made day after day to the lives of his patients. He had pushed Anna to the back of his mind, but when someone spoke of politics a memory of her – always frowning – would force its way to the front and make him smile. Sitting in the restaurant, staring out to the snow falling in a luminous carpet below, he felt a sudden, an annoying, an irrational longing to see her. After a few minutes, he ordered the bill and paid without finishing his glass of wine. The cold air would bring him to his senses.
But the same puzzling ache was with him through the evening: as he watched the maid light the fire and sipped the broth she had brought him from the kitchen below, and he was conscious of it still as he read a letter from his mother and sat at his bureau with his medical journal. It was as if the doubts he felt about his life and his purpose were crystallising about Anna like ice on metal. Too much introspection was unhealthy. Since childhood he had struggled to prevent his thoughts taking him to dark places.
The following morning, he walked to his surgery with a lighter heart. It was a cold clear day, the snow blinding in the yellow winter sunlight. Workers were clearing the pavements on either side of Line 7, shovelling the snow into dirty heaps in the gutter. The traders at the market hall had set out their stalls and were hawking their wares to women bundled in coats and scarves and valenki boots, shapeless and ageless but for their eyes. Hadfield had rented rooms for his practice from the German pharmacy at the corner of Line 7, opposite the pretty pink and white Cathedral of St Andrew. He was on excellent terms with the cathedral priests because he visited the parish orphanage free of charge, and they more than repaid this small service by praising his skill as a physician and his Christian generosity to their wealthier parishioners. He spent the morning dispensing advice and reassurance, pills and potions to a procession of women in furs who were for the most part in rude health, and to an elderly lawyer suffering from severe and persistent overindulgence. At a little before one o’clock, a messenger delivered a note from Lady Dufferin asking him to call at the embassy to examine one of her children and inviting him to stay for afternoon tea. The Dufferins had just returned from a long visit to England and their estates in the north of Ireland. The ambassador had left almost at once for Berlin, where he was representing the government’s case on the Ottoman question to Prince Bismarck. But the Countess of Dufferin was busy placing the new furniture she had brought from home and preparing for the first official reception to be held at the embassy since her husband’s appointment to the imperial court.
Little Freddie Blackwood was suffering from nothing more than a head cold and a severe attack of boredom. A precocious four year old, he was bubbling over with curiosity to see the tsar and his Cossack guards and ride in a troika, but his anxious mother was refusing to release him from the embassy. Hadfield had taken his part: ‘Perhaps a little air and a little excitement would do him no harm.’ Since his visit to her bedside six months before – a journey Her Ladyship now recalled as an heroic life-saving dash across the city – his word as a physician went unquestioned at the embassy. The same could not be said for his judgement of pictures.
‘Do you like this one?’ she asked, as they were taking tea in the small drawing room. Two of the servants – one rather short, the other a little too doddery for the task – were holding a large landscape to the wall.
‘French?’ he asked uncertainly.
‘After Poussin,’ she replied, waving her hand at the servants. ‘A little to the right please. Yes, that’s perfect there.’
The picture hangers looked unsure what was expected of them.
‘Oh, would you, Doctor?’ said Lady Dufferin, exasperated.
Hadfield explained in Russian that Her Ladyship would like them to hang the picture precisely where they were holding it now.
‘The Countess von Plehve and Madame von Pahlen were very taken with the painting. Quite as good as some of the pictures in the Hermitage, they said. And I showed them the French furniture we have brought here for the dining room,’ she continued. ‘Madame Pahlen says it is finer than the furniture at the French embassy and that the Grand Duke Vladimir has just purchased something very like it.’
Hadfield smiled and nodded politely. He had no particular views on Louis Quinze cabinets and chairs or on the French Rococo style in general. But to an accompaniment of banging step ladders and hammering, Lady Dufferin slipped seamlessly from furniture to politics. Hadfield wondered if that was why conversation was commonly described as a drawing-room art rather than a science.
‘. . . and the Countess von Plehve said the imperial family was still shaken by the attack on the train. The police have been ordered to round up anyone suspected of sheltering or supporting these nihilists.’
‘I thought they had already done that, Your Ladyship,’ Hadfield replied.
‘No, not there, to the right!’ she shouted, rising from the sofa. ‘Oh, will you tell them, Doctor?’
The picture hangers climbed down their ladders and reassembled them closer to the mantelpiece.
‘. . . yes, well, it appears not,’ Lady Dufferin said, picking up the thread of their conversation. ‘But the ladies say one of the plotters is in custody, a Jew from Kiev called Silver. The most extraordinary thing: he was d
ragging a bag of dynamite along a station platform. Anyway, the police hope he will give them the names of the other conspirators.’
She paused again. ‘That’s it, that’s it. There.’ Then, settling her dress around her on to the sofa, the conversation moved just as seamlessly from politics to the sledging hills at the yacht club and the evening’s expedition to the Yusupov.
But Hadfield’s thoughts were with the little Jew called Silver and his dynamite. Silver or Gold? How many Jews from Kiev were there in the revolutionary movement? Poor Anna. He could remember the warmth as well as the exasperation in her voice when she spoke of him. Would she be safe? Perhaps she was in custody too? And would Goldenberg mention to his captors the English doctor who had once had the temerity to question the wisdom of killing a tsar?
‘. . . Doctor?’
‘I’m sorry, your Ladyship.’
‘Please explain to them I want the McCulloch of the Highlands in the dining room . . .’
To Major Vladimir Barclay’s mind the Jew looked anything but a desperate terrorist in his torn and dirty great coat. They had spoken only briefly; Goldenberg to spout a well rehearsed justification of the attack on ‘the tyrant’. Barclay had ordered him to hold his tongue or he would teach him some manners.
Rising from his seat, he stepped over to the window – the station concourse was crowded with people – then back to the stove. The train was late, there was a gale blowing through the detention room, and Barclay’s patience was wearing very thin.
‘Fetch me some tea,’ he barked at the corporal standing at the door.
He had been waiting at the Nikolayevsky for nearly three hours. Goldenberg was wedged between gendarmes on the seats opposite, and there were a dozen more outside. They were going to take no chances. Not only had he fought like a tiger at Elizavetgrad – it had taken six of the local gendarmes to subdue him – but he was the only one of the conspirators they were holding in custody.
Barclay had arrived in Moscow two days after the explosion and had seen the cottage and the remains of the tunnel the terrorists had dug to the railway embankment for himself. On his third day in the city, he had helped the local gendarmes arrest a well known radical at the university. After a little direct pressure, the student had admitted sheltering a revolutionary called Hartmann and his female companions in the hours after the explosion. One of the women was certainly Sophia Perovskaya. His description of the other – small, silent, a little sullen with strikingly blue eyes – had brought to Barclay’s mind a mental picture of Anna Romanko. The student had accompanied the three of them to the Belorussky Station where Hartmann had purchased a ticket for Berlin. He was not certain, but he thought the women had taken a train to St Petersburg.
The corporal returned with some tea and the news that word was spreading through the station that one of the terrorists who had tried to kill the tsar was being held in the detention room. A hostile crowd was gathering at the foot of the stairs.
‘Can I have some tea too?’ It was Goldenberg.
Barclay glanced over the top of his glass at him contemptuously.
‘Well?’
‘If you don’t shut up, you’ll get more than tea. I’ll hand you over to the mob.’
Goldenberg wrinkled his face disdainfully. ‘You’re not going to do that, Major. Not yet. I’m far too valuable.’
Damn the fellow, Barclay thought, he was right.
17
23 NOVEMBER 1879
124/5 NEVSKY PROSPEKT
They spoke of it often, and always with deep sadness and a sense of injustice. To have prepared so thoroughly and to have come so close – it was a blow to the morale of all. One evening after their return to St Petersburg, Anna was preparing supper in a safe house on Nevsky. Conscious of a particularly long silence, she looked up to find Sophia Perovskaya standing at the sink, her hands in icy water, eyes fixed blankly on the wall.
‘Sonechka,’ Anna said, rising from the table, a knife still in her hand.
‘It wasn’t my fault, was it?’
‘How could it be your fault?’ Anna stepped over to the sink and put her arms about Sophia’s waist, pressing herself against her small body. ‘We only managed to get as far as we did because of you.’
‘I’m sorry,’ she said, turning in Anna’s arms to face her. ‘I’m fine, really. I know I must be strong.’
Anna reached for her hands, still rough and chapped from the work at the cottage, and very cold. ‘You are the strongest among us.’
It was a little shocking. No one had seen Sophia falter. But weeks of nervous exhaustion, hard labour, the scheming, the lying and the fear of the gendarmes at the door had taken their toll on all of them. They sat side by side at the table and finished preparing supper – for the most part in silence – until they were joined by other comrades, Kviatokovsky, Morozov and Olga Liubatovich. No one spoke again of past failure that evening or of the plans for the future, but when they had eaten they laughed and joked and drank and sang together until late in the evening. Sophia Perovskaya’s apartment was a cab journey away and she left at ten o’clock with Kviatkovsky, who lived close by. Anna was to spend the night in the little flat on Nevsky with the other two and return to her schoolhouse at Alexandrovskaya in the morning. She was anxious about her safety and would have preferred the life of an ‘illegal’ with her comrades in the city, but the executive committee had decided she should resume her teaching post in the village. ‘The party needs people who can move freely, without fear of arrest,’ Alexander Mikhailov had told her. The Director had assured him the Third Section was a long way from identifying her and she was ‘clean’. Of course, there would be questions after so many months away, but Mikhailov had made her write regular bulletins on her mother’s health to the local priest and had arranged for them to be sent from Kharkov.
It was the first night Anna had spent in the Nevsky flat and she was a little shocked to discover she was to sleep on a pallet in the kitchen while her comrades shared the only bed. Morozov and Liubatovich were dedicated revolutionaries with long police histories, but they had chosen to ignore the party’s strictures against intimate relationships and had become lovers. She wondered at their audacity. It was Nikolai Morozov who had written the manifesto with its emphasis on personal sacrifice. Would he leave Olga if the executive committee required it of him? The opportunity to express deeper feelings, sexual love; she could not help but feel envious. She was alone on a hard mattress, the mice scratching at the skirting boards close to her head. It was more than two years since she had last seen her husband, Stepan – the marriage was over and she was glad of it. But after weeks of frantic activity preparing for the attack, the fear and the loneliness, the role of revolutionary ascetic seemed harder to play than it had before. Life might end tomorrow before she heard a man say, ‘I love you,’ and mean it. Shaken along endless miles of track, in daydreams and through restless nights, one man had whispered love to her and she had imagined what it would be to share a bed with him and feel his body pressed to hers. But this man was beyond her reach. Clever and different in many ways that frightened her, how could they love when he was not of the same mind? ‘No. Not one of us,’ she thought, ‘not one of us.’ Olga and Nikolai were fortunate to have found each other. But the comfort of others was no comfort to her and the longing for affection and closeness was still with her when she woke cold and stiff in the morning.
Anna had resolved to leave for the village straight after breakfast and had packed her few possessions before the others began to stir. Olga was the first to rise, a man’s padded smoking jacket over her nightgown. She was a peculiarly masculine-looking woman with a full mouth, weak chin and heavy eyebrows that met above a Roman nose. Not at all handsome but formidably clever, and her comrades admired her independence of thought and strength of purpose. She was only twenty-five but after years of prison and internal exile, she had the air of someone older and more worldly wise.
Nodding to Anna, she reached for the cigarette case sh
e had left on the kitchen table the night before and lit one with obvious pleasure. Only when she had drawn deeply upon it two or three times was she ready for conversation. Olga’s appetite was already legendary, and once the small range was lit she set about frying eggs, the cigarette hanging loosely from her mouth. She was on the point of serving them when they were surprised by a quiet but urgent rapping at the door.
‘Don’t open it!’ It was Morozov from the bedroom next door. Seconds later he joined them, blinking myopically, his long hair tousled, spindly legs beneath his greatcoat.
‘The revolver!’ he hissed at Olga.
But before she could open the table drawer the knocking began again and this time they heard Sophia Perovskaya’s high pitched voice. ‘It’s me. I need to speak to you.’
Anna opened the door at once and Sophia almost fell into the room. ‘It’s Kviatkovsky! The police are going to raid his apartment.’ She had run up the stairs and was still gasping for breath, her eyes wide with alarm.
‘How do you know?’ asked Morozov.
‘A note from Mikhailov . . . we must warn him! There are papers . . . but it may be too late. I can’t go – Alexander can’t go . . .’
‘Here.’ Anna pulled her towards a chair. ‘I’ll go now.’
‘No,’ said Morozov. ‘It’s too dangerous. I will ask Maria Oshanina to go. She’s clean. The gendarmes have nothing on her.’
‘I’m clean,’ said Anna crossly. ‘There’s no time to waste.’
‘Too much of a risk. You’re a friend of Goldenberg’s. And you know too much.’
‘Anna’s right. Someone must go now.’ Olga was already moving towards the bedroom.
‘But not you or Sophia. It’s too dangerous,’ said Morozov with alarm.
‘No. It has to be Anna,’ she shouted through the half open door. ‘But I’m going to wait in the lane in case . . .’ She did not need to finish the sentence. They knew what she meant.
To Kill a Tsar Page 16