Hadfield jumped to his feet. It occurred to him that he was about to enjoy the dubious distinction of being beaten by both sides.
The first man swung with the belt but Hadfield caught it with his left hand, yanking him forward and punching the side of his face with his right. He connected well. But the other warder had climbed on to the bed and began laying about him with the cane. Hadfield dived for his legs. His shins struck the metal bed frame but his arms closed about the warder’s knees in a perfect tackle. And he tumbled backwards heavily like a tree, turning a little in a desperate effort to break his fall with his arm. But Hadfield was left prostrate on the bed and the other warder was on top of him before he had a chance to rise.
It did not last long. They punched him in the face until he was still, his eyes swollen, his lip split, then they beat him across the back and buttocks with the cane. And when it was over Barclay came to stand above him for a moment.
‘That is in case you manage to escape responsibility.’ He spat on Hadfield. ‘Now, physician, you can heal yourself.’
43
The following day the party posted a notice in the city.
Alexander the Tyrant has been killed by us, Socialists. He did not listen to the people’s tears. A tsar should be a good shepherd but Alexander II was a ravening wolf. The party has taken the first step, and under its guidance workers should rise to claim their freedom.
But there were no barricades or demonstrations in the streets, no general rejoicing, no one heeded the call to revolution. St Petersburg was subdued, even a little fearful, the churches full of mourners and those seeking the comfort of the old order. People with a living to make went about their business as always.
At the apartment on the Voznesensky, members of the executive committee composed another manifesto, to be addressed this time to the new tsar.
What were they thinking? Anna asked herself as she listened to them argue over the party’s demands. They were careless, drunk with their own sense of importance. The first of the bombers was in police custody. It was only a matter of time before those who helped him were there too.
Her fears were well-founded: that night, just as the committee’s call for ‘freedom’ and ‘reconciliation’ was being printed, ‘the white terror’ began in earnest. In the early hours, the police broke down the doors of the apartment in Telezhnaya Street. Comrade Sablin shot himself and Comrade Gelfman was arrested. And later that morning a member of the bombing party was taken. On the 4th they raided the cheese shop. The party’s chief propagandist, Comrade Tikhomirov, began wearing black and visiting churches to pray for the soul of the tsar.
On the night of the 6th there was a knock at the door of the apartment on the Voznesensky.
‘Verochka, may I spend the night with you?’ It was Sophia Perovskaya.
‘How can you ask that?’ Vera replied reproachfully.
Sophia looked exhausted, thinner, her face a distressing pallor, with dark rings about her blue eyes. No one had seen her since the death of the tsar. She had moved through the city from friend to friend, determined not to stay more than a night in one place.
‘Sonechka, you have as much right as any of us,’ said Anna, stepping forward to give her a hug.
But Sophia held her at arm’s length: ‘I have to ask. If they find me here they will hang you both too.’
‘I will shoot if they come, whether you’re here or not,’ replied Vera, and she pointed to the revolver she kept beside her bed when she slept.
That night Anna lay close to her friend. She could sense Sophia’s grief, the dark conviction that nothing would ever be the same, the time left counted in days. At a little before dawn, Sophia turned to her.
‘Annushka, why didn’t you tell me your doctor was in prison?’
‘You have your own sorrow.’
Sophia gave a sad smile and reached down to squeeze Anna’s hand.
The following morning, Sophia Perovskaya slipped away from the apartment without saying goodbye. Four days later she was arrested on the Nevsky Prospekt. Then Nikolai Kibalchich was betrayed by his landlady and his friend, Frolenko, was captured at his apartment too.
On the 19th they transferred the body of Alexander II to the Cathedral of St Peter and St Paul, the fortress’s minute gun echoing along the Neva. The river was lined with tens of thousands of onlookers, many from the country, some to mourn, some only to enjoy the spectacle. And as the long cortège of soldiers and civil representatives left the palace the city’s bells began to toll, their solemn note reaching into every home and even into the subterranean cells of the Secret House. For the first time in days Anna left the apartment seeking the anonymity of the crowded streets. She dressed in her old brown woollen coat, a little tight now, with Mikhailov’s burgundy scarf pulled up over her face. To feel the sharp air in her chest, the crunch of snow underfoot, to find relief in exercise, the stiffness leaving her body, and put the gloom of the last days, the staleness of the apartment behind her. Perhaps it was the freedom she allowed herself in the fresh air to think again of a time when she might be with Frederick that caused her to lower her guard for once. Was it in the Haymarket or on the Nevsky Prospekt? She was never quite sure. But at some point she was seen and followed by a ‘pea-green coat’, as the party liked to call the police department’s spies. He waited until she turned on to the Fontanka Embankment, then grabbed her roughly from behind. ‘Thief, thief!’ she screamed and managed to break free. She ran into a yard and to the back door of a mansion, but the dvornik had been roused by the commotion and met her on the stairs, driving her from the building. It was only a matter of seconds before they were upon her.
They drove her to Fontanka 16 and then to the studio of Alexandrovsky and Taube on the Nevsky for a police photograph. By the time she returned to the Third Section its corridors were crammed with agents and officials from the justice ministry loitering in the hope of catching a glimpse of another of the regicides. She was taken to the basement and locked in a cell with a guard to watch her at all times. The sergeant in charge of the prisoners refused to listen to her appeal for some privacy to go to the toilet. For an hour or so she sat at the edge of the bench with a dull pain in her chest, resigned to what she had long believed to be inevitable. She tried not to think of her baby. In the early evening a doctor – an elderly sober-suited German – came to examine her. Again the sergeant refused to remove the guard. She said nothing to the doctor of her pregnancy but after examining her for a few minutes, he placed his stethoscope on her belly. Then he lifted his round brown eyes to her face and gave her a knowing look.
He left without saying anything more than that she was in good health. A short time later the collegiate councillor called Dobrshinsky, whom she knew to be the special investigator, came to inform her that some dignitaries were waiting in his office to see her. He escorted her under guard up the broad marble stairs to the second floor. Then, with more graciousness than she expected, he introduced the two men who were sitting at his desk as the chief prosecutor, Count von Plehve, and General Sereda of the Gendarme Corps. A chair had been set for her in the middle of the room.
‘Is it the jealousy of the peasant, Madame Romanko?’ von Plehve asked contemptuously, as soon as she had settled. He was fidgeting restlessly with a pen, a high colour in his cheeks. ‘Is that why you became a nihilist?’
She stared at him unmoved.
The count was needled by her refusal to reply. ‘We have a witness that places you on the embankment – he spoke to you only minutes before His Majesty was murdered. It will hang you.’
Again Anna refused to be drawn.
‘Your only hope of escaping the gallows is if you help us,’ he barked, his elbows on the desk, hands clasped together in a large fist.
Anna noticed the suggestion of a frown on Dobrshinsky’s face as if he disapproved of the count’s bullying manner. Frederick had spoken of the special investigator with grudging admiration, describing him as a ‘subtle Pole’.
But
it was General Sereda who spoke next. ‘You seem so small. So unassuming.’ He was quiet and considerate in his address, like an avuncular old priest.
‘Were you expecting someone with two heads?’ she asked with a wry smile.
‘Precious little brain for one,’ said von Plehve, breaking in belligerently, ‘but a great deal of unruly passion.’
The general ignored him. ‘What did you hope to achieve? Do you know the tsar signed a draft law to introduce reforms only hours before he died?’
‘There is nothing I want to say before my trial,’ Anna said, determined not to be drawn into a political discussion.
‘Why didn’t you have children, Madame Romanko?’
‘My name is Anna Kovalenko.’
‘If you had had children this would never have happened to you,’ the general said with a little shake of the head.
Anna could not help smiling at this strange observation. She sensed that, although the general was hopelessly misguided and old-fashioned, he meant well.
‘Enough of this nonsense!’ von Plehve blustered. ‘Madame Romanko, you will go on trial alongside your comrades in the next few days. The outcome is a foregone conclusion unless you help us.’
Anna frowned but said nothing. What was the point?
‘And what of your lover?’ he continued, a mean little smile in his eyes. ‘Your English doctor. Do you think of him? What a strange hold you have on his imagination. You can help him.’
She flushed a little but did not reply.
‘It might be possible for him to go free.’
After a pause, she said: ‘Frederick Hadfield has done nothing. He knows nothing.’
But the count was not satisfied and fired questions and threats at her for another ten minutes, working himself into a mighty rage. Finally, he gave up, issuing orders to the guard to take her back to her cell. She assumed that would be the last she would see of her interrogators until the morning. But two hours later she was woken from a light sleep and escorted back to the office to face the special investigator alone. He offered her something to eat and she accepted some tea.
‘But you should eat to keep up your strength,’ he said gently. ‘Prison food is very insubstantial.’
But she was only interested in the tea. Dobrshinsky summoned a clerk from his outer office and gave him instructions, and a few minutes later he returned with a pot and glasses and also a little vodka.
‘I hope you’ll forgive the chief prosecutor’s intemperate display, Anna Petrovna,’ said Dobrshinsky, pouring her a glass and pushing it across his desk towards her. ‘He does not understand that you and your comrades love Russia and her people as much as we do.’
So reasonable, so plausible, Anna thought; he is as wily as a fox.
‘Ah, you smile,’ he said. ‘But I know your political programme as well as you, and there is much that you ask for that I would support – an elected assembly, freedom of speech and press – I share these aspirations too.’ He leant across his desk, his small dark eyes not flickering from her face.
‘The tsar is dead but where is your revolution? That is not the will of the people at all. They want change, yes, but not violence. Grigory Goldenberg understood this,’ he added, ‘that is why he was prepared to help me.’
‘Poor Grigory was tricked by smooth words and he knew it, and that’s why he took his own life,’ she said curtly. ‘I won’t make the same mistake.’
‘It’s over. The People’s Will is finished. It died on the embankment with the tsar. Who of importance is left? Only Vera Figner.’ He paused, his eyes scrutinising her face for any sign of weakness or emotion. ‘And I am sorry to say Count von Plehve is right – your closest comrades will be executed – even Sophia Perovskaya.’ He noticed her body tense.
‘You thought she’d escape because she’s a woman and an aristocrat?’ Again he paused, staring at her intently for a few seconds more. Then he said: ‘But you will not be executed. You will be saved by your baby. Yes, of course I know. Your unborn child is deemed by the law an innocent. But I know, too, what happens in such cases. Your baby will be taken from you when it’s born and placed in an orphanage. It will grow up knowing nothing of its mother and father. A Class 14 clerk will give your baby a name and an institution will be responsible for its wellbeing. Have you visited a city orphanage? Can you imagine your child in such a place?’
Anna felt a sharp, breathless pain as if his white hands were squeezing her heart. She had presumed her baby would have followed her into exile.
‘I think it’s barbaric,’ he added, ‘but what I think counts for nothing. I want you to understand the choice you must make is not just for yourself but for your unborn child. What life can your child look forward to in an orphanage?’
She did not answer, her face rigid and white.
‘It is a painful choice. Whatever happens, you will go to prison for life. It is possible, if you help me, that I may be able to arrange for your child to be given to your family, or even Dr Hadfield’s. Then it would know of its mother and father and know love . . .’
It was as if he was talking to her from a great distance, the subtle sibilant hiss of the snake in the garden. What was she prepared to risk for her child? How could they threaten to separate a child from its mother? She wanted to release the pain, to scream, to throw her tea glass against the wall.
‘. . . you must have time to think . . .’ He was still speaking to her. ‘It is a choice you make for your child. What is most important to you?’
44
For many days Hadfield saw only the warders and a doctor who stubbornly refused to say more than he deemed professionally necessary. The beating had left him with superficial injuries, but fearful the bruises would precipitate a scandal, the governor of the Preliminary had placed him under close medical supervision.
For half an hour each day, he shuffled in silence round the edge of the frozen exercise yard with the other inmates. He listened to messages painstakingly tapped on the pipes and memorised the names of ‘politicals’ from every corner of the empire and the distinctive chinking rhythm of their spoons. It was from one of these he learnt of Sophia Perovskaya’s arrest.
‘Is there word of Anna Kovalenko?’ he tapped slowly on his own pipe. No one had news of her. But after that he asked the question every day.
It was the powerlessness he found most oppressive. His fate in the hands of others, and even the smallest details of his life determined without reference to him. Finally, in his third week of captivity, he received a visitor.
His Excellency General Glen was standing by the mantelpiece in the governor’s office, resplendent in the Finance Ministry uniform, the gold and silver stars on his coat twinkling in the light of a lively fire. The governor was at his side but withdrew with a respectful nod of the head.
Hadfield stood in the middle of the rug, conscious of the sorry figure he cut in his prison greys, his hand clutching the top of his trousers. General Glen did not move from the fire, pity and contempt written in the lines of his face. Only when the door closed quietly behind the governor did he speak.
‘What have they done to you?’
‘This?’ asked Hadfield, touching the yellow bruises on his cheek and about his eyes. ‘It’s not as bad as it appears.’
‘Pity. Damn it, you deserve it.’
They stood gazing at each other in awkward silence. Hadfield wanted to say he was sorry but he was sure it would be like lighting a blue touchpaper.
But an apology was what the general was waiting to hear. ‘What do you say for yourself, sir?’
‘That I deeply regret the pain and the embarrassment I have caused you and my aunt after all the kindness you have shown me.’
‘But why, sir? Why?’ The muscles in the general’s face were twitching as he fought to hold his anger in check. ‘You’ve disappointed everyone. The ambassador, the British government . . . Lord Dufferin was obliged to assure the emperor that no one at the embassy had the slightest inkling you were in
volved with these people, this woman . . . and I have had to apologise to His Majesty. Lady Dufferin feels you betrayed her trust. We all do. Explain yourself, sir.’
Hadfield took a deep breath, as if collecting his thoughts, but there was nothing he wished to say. He could not speak of his feelings. There was no need. A ferocious diatribe burst from his uncle like warm champagne from a bottle: the disgrace his nephew had brought upon him, his aunt’s pain and the disappointment of his cousin Alexandra. ‘And your mother. Did you think of her? How could you allow yourself to be deceived by this Romanko woman?’
‘Do you know if she is still—’
‘Your mistress is not my concern.’
‘Don’t call her that.’
General Glen looked away for a few seconds, his face puce, hands balled, as if struggling to contain an urge to punch his nephew. ‘My only concern is that we avoid a public trial,’ he said at last. ‘We’re going to have to dress this up as an unfortunate affair of the heart, of course, a dangerous infatuation.’
‘Of course.’
General Glen took a menacing step closer: ‘Damn fool. I’m only doing this for your mother and your aunt’s sake.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘You have your aunt and cousin to thank for my presence here today.’
Hadfield nodded. ‘Please give them my—’
‘There is no reason to be optimistic,’ said the general, cutting across him impatiently. ‘The Ministry of Justice is pressing for trial and an exemplary sentence. You are fortunate Lord Dufferin is still willing to speak on your behalf as a British subject.’
‘Yes. Thank you.’
‘I don’t want your thanks, sir. I want to see the back of you.’ He stared at Hadfield for a moment, then walked over to the governor’s desk and sat down. ‘Who was responsible for those?’ he asked, pointing at Hadfield’s face.
‘An officer of the Gendarme Corps.’
To Kill a Tsar Page 36