‘But there is a simple solution,’ Caroline pointed out. ‘If I told Uncle Viktor and Grigori that Sacha was a changeling, and that Michael is not an Antonov at all but the grandson of Anna Barovska.’
‘And do you think they would believe you?’ Katya countered. ‘Indeed, Caroline, even I cannot believe this wild tale that Alexander is not the true Count Antonov. No one who knows about the white streak in his hair, passed down to him by his Antonov forebear, could possibly believe it. By telling his family that story you will merely reveal the fact that you suspect them of wanting to harm the child. No, you must get the boy out of the house with as little fuss and attention as possible. I suggest that you take him out tomorrow morning for his usual walk, and then slip into my house afterwards instead of going home.’
‘And after that?’ Caroline demanded. ‘We could hardly stay with you. Uncle Viktor or Grigori would discover in no time where we were, and I would have no justification for keeping Michael from them. As the head of the family, Uncle Viktor is now Michael’s guardian, and he would force me to return the child.’
‘He will be unable to do that, for by the time he discovers that the boy is missing you will have left St Petersburg with him.’
Caroline stared at her. ‘Have you forgotten the curfews, the restrictions on moving from place to place, the fact that one needs permits to go anywhere these days?’
‘No, I have not forgotten,’ Katya said quietly. ‘I have a plan. Just trust me.’
And Caroline found that she did trust Katya. There was a confidence and strength about the girl which was very reassuring in a situation which was not in the least reassuring.
That night, Caroline shed all the tears for Sacha which she intended to shed. Afterwards she meant to dedicate herself to seeing that Michael grew up safely and reasonably happily. It would be her memorial to Sacha.
In the morning, after breakfast, the child set off with her for their usual walk. But this time, instead of walking in one of the parks, or by the banks of the Neva, Caroline took him to Katya’s house.
‘Why have we come here, Marisha?’ Michael asked in a puzzled voice.
‘Because we are to have an adventure, Michael. But in a way, it’s a very serious adventure too, and it has to do with your being Count Antonov now. So you must be as good and as brave as your—as your Papasha would have wanted.’
The little boy nodded solemnly, and curled his hand inside Caroline’s as they mounted the stairs to the front door.
Katya had been waiting for them. She whisked them into one of the bedrooms, and indicated a pile of clothing lying on the bed. For Caroline there was a shabby woollen gown and flannel petticoats, a knitted shawl and clumsy boots. For Michael there was similar peasant’s clothing, but intended for a small girl.
He hung back when he realised that he was to be dressed as a girl. But Katya said, ‘It is important, Michael. Very, very important. You must pretend to be a girl for a while. You see, you and—Marisha—are going away, and people will be searching for you. But they will be looking for a young lady and a boy, so that is the reason why you must be a girl for a few days.’
‘We’re having a running-away adventure!’ he exclaimed, his eyes shining.
‘That’s right.’ Katya turned to Caroline. ‘I have obtained permits for you and Michael to join the dobrovolni leaving St Petersburg. There is no place as good for hiding a tree as in the woods.’
‘Dobrovolni?’ Caroline echoed. ‘What is that?’
‘It is the name given to the army of prisoners’ wives and children who go into voluntary exile to be with their husbands and fathers. Later this morning, such a procession of prisoners and exiles and dobrovolni will be leaving St Petersburg to begin the march to Siberia. You and Michael will mingle with the dobrovolni.’
‘And if we are challenged?’
‘You will show your permits, which describe you as the wife and daughter of a prisoner named Sergei Orlov. There is such a man among the prisoners, and he will confirm your story if asked.’
Caroline stared at her in awe. ‘You have certainly planned this most thoroughly. What do we do once we have left St Petersburg with the dobrovolni?’
‘You will continue with them for a small part of the way until you reach a pre-arranged spot. From there you will be taken to safety by friends.’
‘But how will I recognise this pre-arranged spot?’ Caroline questioned.
‘It will be pointed out to you. Before the procession leaves St Petersburg it will be joined by a monk—a friend of mine—who is leaving the capital to join his Order on the steppes. He is known as Brother Andrei, and he will indicate to you when the time comes for you to leave the dobrovolni. He will not speak to you, by the way, for he belongs to an Order who have taken a strict vow of silence.’
Katya turned to Michael. ‘When you have dressed up in your disguise, you must come and meet Brother Andrei, but you must not stare at him because of the way he looks, or giggle because he does not talk.’
Michael nodded solemnly. Katya left the room, and after Caroline had helped the small boy into his new wardrobe she changed her own clothes. With her hair hidden by a black scarf and with the shawl draped over her shoulders, she looked as anonymous as any peasant girl.
Taking Michael by the hand, she went in search of Katya. The latter was in her drawing-room, in company with a man dressed in a monastic habit.
‘Allow me to introduce Brother Andrei,’ Katya said.
Michael hung back in sudden shyness at being seen in girls’ clothes, and Caroline held out her hand to the monk.
His cowl had slipped from his head, revealing a smooth, clean-shaven skull which somehow emphasised his high cheekbones and slanting Tartar eyes. His expression was almost mystical in its impassiveness, but no force on earth, no degree of self-discipline, could have obliterated the human emotion in his eyes.
In that shaven, monk’s face Sacha’s green-and-yellow eyes looked at Caroline with gladness and a mixture of desire and despair.
CHAPTER
TEN
With a supreme effort, Caroline bit off the exclamation of joy which had sprung to her lips. She fully understood the reason for Katya’s elaborate charade, and also the reason for ‘Brother Andrei’s’ supposed vow of silence. Michael had to accept that his father was dead, and that this mute man with his shaven skull and sombre monk’s habit was Brother Andrei. The child was too young to be able to adopt an effective act if he realised the truth.
Caroline forced herself to murmur politely, ‘How do you do, Brother Andrei,’ and then glanced anxiously at Michael.
There was no recognition on the boy’s face. And after all, why should there have been? His father was associated in his mind with a handsome, hirsute officer in peacock uniforms. Besides, adults had assured him that his father was dead, and at four years old Michael did not question the superior knowledge and integrity of adults.
He clicked his small heels together, and then remembered, and bobbed a self-conscious and clumsy curtsy. ‘How do you do, Brother Andrei.’
Katya laughed. ‘Oh dear, Michael! I shall have to show you how to curtsy properly, and then you must practise it by yourself. Come with me.’
She took the boy by the hand and led him from the room. As the door closed behind them Caroline moved towards Sacha and grabbed his hands in hers, bringing them to her face.
‘Oh, Sacha,’ was all she could say.
‘Caroline.’ Gently but inexorably he withdrew his hands and buried them inside the capacious sleeves of his habit. ‘My dear sister...’
‘No!’ She shook her head in blind denial.
Katya returned to the room alone, then, and said, ‘I am so sorry, Caroline, that I had to let you suffer unnecessarily. But I dared not tell you that Alexander was safe. Your reaction to the news of his “death” had to be utterly authentic.’
Caroline had conquered her emotions, and was able to say, ‘Your reaction was brilliantly contrived. You had shed real tears
at Vassili Sosnovsky’s news, I recall.’
Katya answered quietly, with dignity. ‘It was easy enough for me to weep. I had only to remind myself that Alexander would soon leave St Petersburg and Russia for good, and that I would never see him again.’ Caroline looked at her with compassion. In a sense they were rivals, and it was ironical that both of them were fated to lose.
‘Please tell me what happened,’ she said.
It was Sacha who answered. ‘Friends sheltered me after I fled, and we waited for an opportunity to present itself to make my escape possible. The opportunity came when several men were killed in the bombing attempt.’
‘But how could you be certain, beforehand, that Sosnovsky would mistake one of the dead men for you?’ Caroline asked with a frown.
‘He did not mistake him for me. Vassili Sosnovsky is a member of our movement and one of the friends who helped to shelter me. He contrived to be given the task of examining the bodies, and as we had hoped there was one among them who could not be positively identified, and so Vassili furtively slipped my signet ring on the finger of the corpse, and claimed it to be my remains.
‘Once I became officially dead,’ Sacha went on, ‘matters were simpler. Now that the authorities are no longer searching for me, no one will remark on any slight resemblance between Alexander Nikolaievich and “Brother Andrei”. The vow of silence helps too, for it means that there would be no danger of anyone recognising my voice.’
‘Yes, I understand,’ Caroline nodded. ‘And of course you wished that Michael should join you in exile, and so Katya invented the story that his life was in danger ’
‘It was no invention,’ Sacha said grimly. ‘If my son would have been safe with my relatives, do you think I would have exposed him to all the dangers of fleeing into exile?’
‘Aunt Natalia’s fears convinced me that Michael had to be removed with all speed,’ Katya put in. ‘It meant that we had to re-arrange our plans. And speaking of those same plans, Caroline, it will be necessary for you to write a note to Uncle Viktor, as the head of the family.’
She unlocked a small, ornate escritoire and set out notepaper and pens. Caroline obediently sat down at the writing desk.
‘What shall I tell him?’ she asked Katya.
‘It is important that there should be no question of your disappearance being in any way linked with Alexander. So inform Uncle Viktor that you are homesick and that you have decided to try to reach Odessa and there take ship for England. But since Alexander had made you promise that you would look after Michael, you have had to take the child with you.’
Caroline wrote as she had been directed, and afterwards Katya took possession of the note. ‘I shall hand this over tonight, and explain that it had apparently been left here by you during the day, while I was absent. And now, Caroline, it is time that you and Michael should leave and join the dobrovolni gathering in the square by the Winter Palace.’
Katya rang a bell, and one of her servants entered with Michael, while another brought a wicker basket packed with food.
‘I’m afraid it is crude fare,’ Katya said, ‘but anything else would have seemed suspicious. Goodbye, Caroline, and good luck.’
Caroline hesitated, and then embraced Katya warmly. ‘Goodbye. I shall never forget you.’
She left Katya to say her own farewell to Sacha in private, and took Michael to the servants’ entrance of the house. From there they made their way to the square in which a crowd of women and children were already assembled.
While they waited, Caroline looked at the heavily guarded Winter Palace, remembering the social occasions she had attended there. It seemed almost unbelievable to recall that only a few short weeks ago the Czar had been giving one of his Bals des Palmiers, when a hundred palm trees, specially grown at Tsarskoe Selo, were brought to the Winter Palace in huge horse-drawn boxes to decorate the ballroom. How carefree life in St Petersburg had seemed then, for those of rank and privilege. And yesterday—yesterday someone had tried to annihilate the Imperial family with a bomb—
A ripple of sound moved through the assembled crowd of women and children. Soldiers with bayonets were herding prisoners along the street which adjoined the square. Some of the prisoners wore heavy iron fetters on their legs; all of them had their heads grotesquely half-shaven to make identification of their prisoner-status easy, and some had even been branded across their faces.
The assembled women and children began to form a straggling procession in the wake of the prisoners and guards. One by one their permits were examined by officials, and they were allowed to join the procession. Caroline proffered her own and Michaels permits with a heart beating rapidly with fear, but the official only accorded it a cursory glance. Katya had been right when she’d said that this was the safest means of leaving St Petersburg.
Perhaps because in these violent times there was some safety in numbers, various unconnected individuals chose to travel out of St Petersburg in the company of this sad and suffering exodus of exiles and voluntary exiles. There were several priests and itinerant merchants and beggars. Caroline searched the crowd for Sacha. He walked alone, his cowl pulled forward so that his face was shadowed, and carried an ikon in his hands.
Those of the women and children who were not following their menfolk into exile were left behind in the square, the sounds of their hopeless grief following the procession. Caroline’s sympathy for them was tempered by the thought that, in their position, she would not have hesitated in her choice, but would have followed the man she loved to the ends of the earth.
However, as the procession plodded through St Petersburg, frequently jeered by the citizens, and Caroline fell into conversation with some of the other women she began to perceive that there was an agonising choice to make.
‘We shall not see our homes or our relations again,’ one of the women told her. ‘Once we have crossed the Irtysh river there can be no turning back until our men have served their Siberian sentences. For those of us whose husbands have been exiled for life, that means never.’
‘And our children will lose their names and their titles,’ someone else explained. ‘Siberia children have no patronymics, no right to their own ancestry. And neither do they have the right to attend schools.’
Caroline’s respect for the women who had chosen to follow their men increased when she learnt something of the suffering which faced them in the two years which they could expect their march to Siberia to last. They could look forward to horrifying climatic conditions, to hunger, disease and marauding wolves. And all the while they could watch, impotently, the degradation of their men at the hands of the guards.
The men in chains set the pace of the march. Two miles an hour they covered, twenty miles in one day. And to the sound of their clanking irons they began to sing, a kind of funeral chant of despair.
The women and the children soon learnt the tune and the words of the song and took it up in a mechanical way. It was a traditional exile’s song, and Caroline thought she had never heard any sound more filled with doom and terrible hopelessness.
She rationed the black bread, pickles and cheese which Katya had packed for them, for she had no way of knowing how long it would have to last. Michael, footsore, hungry and cold, became fretful.
‘I don’t like the running-away adventure any more, Marisha,’ he complained. ‘I want to go back to St Petersburg.’
‘Oh darling, please be patient.’ Her eyes scanned the crowd for Sacha. They had left St Petersburg three days ago, and their route now lay through a forest of birches. She, like Michael, was becoming dispirited by the hardships of the march, by the hopelessness of its participants, and by the all-pervading melancholy of the exile’s song. Surely it was time they left the procession?
Her heart drummed fearfully when she realised that Sacha was not among the crowd. How and when had he disappeared? Had someone recognised him and challenged him, so that he had been forced to return to St Petersburg under guard? The trouble was that there was a
lways some drama or other taking place in the straggling procession, so that one became inured to them and scarcely paid any attention to them.
There had been some disturbance during the night, she remembered; she had assumed that one of the unfettered prisoners had succeeded in joining his wife and children for a brief reunion and had been discovered. But could that have been when Sacha was, all unknown to her, being unmasked?
Her anxiety grew as they plodded along through the forest, and she tried to conceal it from Michael. Darkness fell, intensified by the overhanging trees. But the guards, anxious to clear the forest as quickly as possible, would not call a halt. Caroline was forced to carry the weeping Michael, who had stumbled in the dark and hurt his knee.
Presently he fell asleep in her arms. He was a dead weight, holding her back as she struggled to keep up with the rest of the women and children.
A hand shot out suddenly in the darkness, and touched her arm. ‘The time has come,’ Sacha’s voice whispered close to her cheek.
‘Oh, thank God!’ she breathed. ‘I thought—I scarcely knew what to think ’
‘Hush.’ He pulled her into the shelter of a tree, and took Michael from her arms. He was no more than a dark shape to her, but she sensed somehow that he had changed his clothes and was no longer wearing the monk’s habit.
They stood motionless and waited until the procession had trudged its weary way out of earshot. Then Sacha moved briskly.
‘Come. I have a troika waiting at the edge of the forest.’
Within half an hour they were in the troika and speeding along hard-packed snow. Sacha explained that he had slipped away in the early hours of the morning to meet an accomplice who had arranged to deliver the troika to him. Since then Sacha had furtively been pacing the procession, and waiting for a safe moment during which to spirit Caroline and Michael away.
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