Web of Discord

by Norman Russell

  The porter walked slowly away, leaving Box to his own devices. He sat down gingerly on a tall stool near one of the benches. The room exuded a chilly, almost clinical atmosphere, an impression enhanced, no doubt, by the fact that there was nobody in it. It was here, Box knew, that the officials of the Goldsmiths’ Company assayed and hallmarked a never-ending panoply of valuable objects, both useful and ornamental. If they passed muster, then they received the coveted leopard’s head mark. But everyone had gone home, and the treasures were locked away securely from prying eyes and light fingers.

  There was a noise of footsteps from the passage, and Colonel Kershaw came into the deserted room. He was wearing evening dress, and the collar, sash and star of the Most Honourable Order of the Bath. His face was flushed, but it still carried that almost apologetic air that he reserved for Arnold Box. He perched himself on another of the office stools.

  ‘I knew you were here, Mr Box,’ he said, ‘and I just had to come out and find you. Have you ever been in the Goldsmiths’ banqueting room? It’s an awesome place, eighty feet long, I’m told, and forty feet broad. We’re sitting at a huge horseshoe of tables, groaning with gold and silver plate, and lit by candelabra, and there are massive chandeliers, burning hundreds of candles – if one of them fell, a dozen people would be crushed to death.’

  Box felt a sudden surge of excitement and pride. How many other ordinary men like him would be sought out at such a time by such an eminent man?

  ‘It sounds very impressive, sir,’ he said. ‘Are they feeding you properly?’

  ‘They are. It’s all in French, but it boils down to very good food when you get it. And very good wines to match. But it’s hot in there, Box, with all those candles! Still, when the wine flows, the tongues wag more mellifluously. Sir Charles Napier’s just made the most insincere and glutinously sickening speech I’ve ever heard. It was all about the enduring trust between the peoples of Europe, a trust that had triumphed over feud and faction. Everybody cheered, and thumped the tables.’

  ‘How are the Russians taking it, sir? Prince Orloff and his suite.’

  ‘He’s rather like Mr Pickwick tonight, twinkling, you know. He’s arm-in-arm with the German ambassador, who’s due to entertain us next. Mercifully, no one dare ask me to say anything. I’m billed merely as Extra Equerry to Her Majesty – ah! Here he comes, at last.’

  The door opened to admit a liveried footman, who was carrying a silver tray containing an ice bucket, in which reposed a dusty and venerable bottle. Two tall fluted wine glasses stood beside it. The footman placed the tray on the bench, bowed to Kershaw, and left the room.

  ‘Box,’ said Colonel Kershaw, ‘I’ve had this very decent champagne brought here because I think it’s time that you and I drank a special toast, which I’ll propose just as soon as I’ve poured us out a glass each. This dinner will go on for another hour or two, and when “the captains and the kings depart”, people like you will be left behind, still on duty, and their deeds unsung. Although not officially one of my folk, you were – are – a bona fide member of our gang in Secret Intelligence, and so this toast is really to you—’

  ‘Sir—’

  ‘But as you can’t very well toast yourself, we’ll drink to “Ourselves”. There you are, Box – to Ourselves.’

  ‘To Ourselves.’

  The two men followed the mutual tribute with another glass or two of champagne. ‘I’ve received intelligence from Count von und zu Thalberg, Box, to the effect that the Eidgenossenschaft is now completely destroyed. The headquarters of the Brandenburg Consortium in Hesse-Darmstadt were raided, and the company’s records and assets seized. That was all done very effectively by the security police in Berlin. I’m afraid that a goodly number of heads will roll.’

  ‘Didn’t you say that the Lermontov was owned by a Norwegian company, sir?’

  ‘Yes, that’s right. The Olafsson Steamship Company was merely an outlet of the Brandenburg Consortium. The Norwegian Government has obligingly frozen its assets until it can be formally liquidated.’

  Kershaw got to his feet.

  ‘I must get back to the banquet, Mr Box,’ he said. ‘Congratulations, by the way, on securing the arrest of Bleibner, and thank you for agreeing to my request to let him be charged and tried in Cornwall, away from the limelight. I promised Napier that something like that could be arranged. I knew that you’d agree to my request. We have very different minds, you and I, but we work together very well indeed. Goodbye, Box.’

  ‘Goodbye, sir. Perhaps we’ll work together again, some time.’

  ‘Perhaps. We’ll have to wait and see how the world wags. Goodbye.’

  The two men shook hands, and Colonel Sir Adrian Kershaw KB walked thoughtfully out of the Goldsmiths’ assay office.

  A pale sunlight, more silver than gold, bathed the gilded domes of St Isaac’s Monastery a mile or two outside Odessa, bringing with it a firm promise of warmth in the unfolding Russian spring. In his ornate study, sitting at a desk placed below a great icon of the Holy Trinity, Archimandrite Seraphim gravely listened to his visitor.

  ‘I have come, you see, as arranged, despite the griefs and sorrows that have burdened me in recent months. I have buried my good husband, and listened to the plaudits of the thousands who revered him. Let him rest in peace, and rise in glory! I have buried my English years with him in his tomb. I come now, Father, to reclaim the past.’

  She still speaks Russian fluently, thought Archimandrite Seraphim, but she speaks it with a decidedly foreign accent. Those English years of hers will not remain buried for long. She spoke to me earlier of her love for Odessa. Well, time will tell whether an unacknowledged love for London will ultimately prove stronger.

  ‘You have known great sorrows, Lady Courteline,’ he said aloud, ‘and they cannot be quickly assuaged. You must accept them as part of your personal heritage. Remember, too, Maria Alexeievna, that my monastery is not a place that holds, as though preserved by miracle, the images of youth. He is much changed.’

  Lady Courteline caught the note of compassion in the Orthodox prelate’s voice, and turned pale. She suddenly recalled the chilling description of Charles Dickens’s Dr Manette in A Tale of Two Cities, a creature reduced from vibrant humanity to a vacant mind imprisoned in a withered, parchment-like body, and preserved in torn rags. She shuddered. Seraphim, reading her thoughts, stood up.

  ‘Come,’ he said, ‘I will take you to him.’

  They walked along one side of a white cloister, and into a quiet passageway containing a number of rooms. Seraphim opened the door of one of them, and motioned Lady Courteline to enter.

  The man she had come to see sat in a tall chair beside an open window, a bent and aged figure with gnarled hands like the exposed roots of dead trees. His thin face was almost completely hidden by a long and fulsome white beard. She saw that his right eye was blind, and that the left could focus only with difficulty. She crossed the room, and placed her fingers on one of the gnarled, unmoving hands.

  ‘Nikolai Ivanovich Karenin,’ said Fr Seraphim, ‘you have a visitor today. I will leave you together.’ Turning to Lady Courteline, he added in a low voice, ‘He is frail, and older than his years, but his health is quite sound. Come to see me before you return to Odessa.’

  ‘I thought, you see, that you had avenged yourself on John by shooting him. I have never in my life experienced such desolation and despair when I saw your calling-card beside my husband’s hand.’

  Dr Karenin permitted himself a slight smile. He moved in the tall chair, and looked at the woman who had been talking to him for the last half-hour. It had been twenty-five years since he had seen her, but it seemed more like a century. He was glad of the visit, moved, even; but Maria Alexeievna was as one with the many faded daguerreotypes of his long-dead family that the good fathers had shown him when they had begun their task of dragging him, body and soul, from the living death of the Imperial Russian prison system.

  ‘No, I would not have done such a wicke
d thing. My quarrel was with a dying social system, not with poor fellow-victims and their foreign friends. That quarrel is over for me, though others, no doubt, will continue it. Look at me, Maria: could such a human wreck have embarked on a venture of that nature? You say that my simulacrum, this second Dr Karenin, hired a professional assassin to do the deed. How would a man, imprisoned in the labour colonies of Siberia for a quarter of a century, know how to do that? When we are finally expelled from those places, Maria, we are like the dead.’

  ‘But you hated him, I expect?’

  ‘No! That is your woman’s vanity speaking. After my arrest, I was as good as dead. John Courteline was alive, a man with great prospects. You did right to marry him.’

  Dr Karenin stopped speaking, and his eyelids began to close. A table stood beside him, on which reposed a great open Russian Bible, and an anthology of prayers. Lady Courteline glanced round the room. It was not a monk’s cell, but a well-furnished guest room. Nikolai Ivanovich belonged here.

  She looked at him, old before his years, his revolutionary zeal silenced, and suddenly felt great pity and anger for his situation. And with that pity came a realization that her consuming love for this man had in reality perished in the ’60s, leaving only a romantic illusion behind. It was with John Courteline that her true life had been lived out.

  ‘Nikolai,’ she said, laying a hand once more on his sleeve, and watching his tired eyes open and focus once more, ‘there is something that I must know about those vanished times. It has been said that John Courteline betrayed you to the authorities so that he could marry me. Was that true?’

  ‘No! I have heard of that false calumny. Courteline did nothing of the sort. I was betrayed by my “faithful” friend and fellow dissident, Zinoviev, who was in the pay of the secret police. It was they who circulated that rumour in order to protect their informer. They made a point of telling me so, soon after I was taken to the Peter-Paul Fortress! It is all folly, and all past. My life will be lived out here, at the Monastery of the Holy Trinity, in the tender care of the holy Archimandrite Seraphim and his brethren.’

  ‘I will say goodbye, then, Nikolai Ivanovich. By seeing you, some of the ghosts of my troubled past have been laid.’

  ‘Goodbye, Maria Alexeievna,’ said Dr Karenin. ‘Remember, that I am a guest here, not a monk. You can visit when you will, and I will enjoy talking to you about the olden times.’

  ‘No, my friend,’ said Lady Courteline. ‘It is all folly, and all past. If I call – when I call – we will talk about the present, and about the many steps that must be taken on the road to your complete restoration. In the meantime, I will return to London, and throw my energies into continuing the many saving works instituted by my late husband. My work shall be his memorial.’

  She gently kissed the ruined man on the brow, and saw his pleased but passionless smile of contentment.

  Arnold Box stood on the sandy beach at Porthcurno, looking out to sea. A few hundred yards offshore a ship lay at anchor, smoke drifting lazily from its single funnel. A crowd of men had assembled at the sea’s edge to help as a new imperial cable was floated into Porthcurno Bay on a long line of bobbing buoys.

  ‘It’s an amazing business, Bob,’ said Box, shading his eyes against the bright sunlight of the May afternoon. ‘That ship out there – it makes me think of the Lermontov, lying in wait for us off the Rundstedt Channel.’

  Bob Jones laughed, and removed his pipe from his mouth.

  ‘That’s the old Venturer, Mr Box. No hidden shells in her. She’s a good old British cable-layer. Come on, let’s leave them to it.’

  He turned away from the beach, and Box followed him up the steep path that would take them both back to Porthcurno Cable Station. The way was bright with early summer flowers, and a warm breeze blew.

  ‘Porthcurno’s an amazing place altogether, Mr Box,’ said Bob Jones, ‘but it’s only the tip of the iceberg where the Eastern Telegraph Company’s concerned. We’ve got twenty-three thousand miles of submarine cable altogether, and sixty-four cable stations. You’ll find us in France and Spain, in Portugal and Egypt, in— But there, you didn’t come down to Cornwall to hear me advertising the company.’

  They came at last to the impressive cable station, and stopped on the grass bordering the tennis court. The company’s flag blew proudly in the breeze.

  ‘So it’s all over, Mr Box?’ asked Bob Jones.

  ‘It is. Captain Adams was as good as his word, trailing Bleibner back here to Cornwall, and then alerting Scotland Yard to the fact. We arranged a trap for him, and he walked right in to it. I’ve spent the morning with my colleague Inspector Tregennis, assembling our evidence, including the signed deposition of Caleb Strange, who witnessed the murder of your friend William Pascoe. Hans Bleibner will pay the ultimate price for the murder of that young man.’

  ‘He was a clever lad, you know,’ said Jones, ‘and a brave one, too. He’s sadly and sorely missed down here at Porthcurno. He was a native Cornishman, and very friendly with Squire Trevannion. I wonder what’ll happen to him?’

  ‘In my book, Bob, he was an accessory after the fact, but the powers-that-be think otherwise. They’ve got the doctors to say that he wasn’t responsible for his actions when he harboured Bleibner in his house. I think he’ll be back at St Columb’s Manor, miraculously restored to sanity, before the month’s out.

  ‘But we got our surly friend Sedden, landlord of The Cormorant at Spanish Beach. There’s no way that he’ll be able to wriggle out of a long spell in gaol. Quite a revelation, he was – a one-man immigration business. They’ll be sweeping out a cell for him at Dartmoor before long.’

  ‘Does Captain Adams work for Colonel Kershaw?’ asked Bob Jones. ‘I feel entitled to ask, seeing that Kershaw, you, and I, were all “stormed at with shot and shell” together in Prussia.’

  ‘Captain Adams was working with Colonel Kershaw, Bob, but he’s actually employed by Admiral Sir James Holland, of Naval Intelligence – the man who saved the day last January up in Caithness. In the end the whole lot of us work for the same person. I’m referring, of course, to the Widow Lady who lives in a castle at Windsor.’

  Bob Jones laughed good-humouredly, and shook hands with Box.

  ‘You’ll find a pony and trap waiting in the stable yard, Mr Box, to take you back to Inspector Tregennis at Truro. I wish you well. Maybe we’ll meet again. It’s a small world.’

  The two men parted, and Bob Jones, recently promoted to chief cipher clerk in place of his dead friend, returned to the main office of the cable station. He was greeted by the busy clicking and clattering of the telegraph engines receiving cables from the farther reaches of the Empire, and transmitting messages in diverse languages to the four corners of the earth.

  By the Same Author

  The Dried-Up Man

  The Dark Kingdom

  The Devereaux Inheritance

  The Haunted Governess

  The Advocate’s Wife

  The Hansa Protocol

  The Ancaster Demons

  Copyright

  © Norman Russell 2004

  First published in Great Britain 2004

  This edition 2012

  ISBN 978 0 7090 9674 0 (epub)

  ISBN 978 0 7090 9675 7 (mobi)

  ISBN 978 0 7090 9676 4 (pdf)

  ISBN 978 0 7090 7732 9 (print)

  Robert Hale Limited

  Clerkenwell House

  Clerkenwell Green

  London EC1R 0HT

  www.halebooks.com

  The right of Norman Russell to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

 

 

 
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