‘What’s wrong?’
‘My watch – Zhirinovsky’s coachman broke it. It’s useless.’
Wojtkiewicz sighed and pulled his own fob watch out by its chain. ‘Here – take mine.’
Killigrew held it in the palm of his hand. It was gold, made by Moulinie Frères of Geneva. ‘I can’t accept this! I owe you enough money as it is.’
‘It’s a gift,’ growled Wojtkiewicz, ‘so don’t insult me by refusing it – or talking about money.’
Killigrew tucked the watch in his pocket and looped the chain through one of the buttonholes of his waistcoat. Then he embraced the Pole. ‘I don’t know how I can ever repay you for all your help.’
Wojtkiewicz grinned. ‘Just be sure that when you get to Sveaborg, you do unto the Russians as they’ve being doing unto my people since time immemorial.’ He mimed grabbing someone by the scrotum and giving it a good wrench. ‘Hit the bastards where it’ll bring tears to their eyes!’
* * *
Killigrew and Anzhelika covered two score miles before sundown that afternoon, riding through a landscape of pine forests interspersed with long, thin lakes. They did not talk much: Killigrew sensed that Anzhelika was sulking because he had not told her the truth about who he was and what he was doing in St Petersburg until he had been forced to. Well, he could hardly blame her for that; only pray that she would eventually realise he had had little choice.
They headed roughly north-west. Killigrew had no compass, but he had Wojtkiewicz’s watch, which, he guessed, kept excellent time.
When dusk came on they were still more than fifty miles from the Finnish border by his reckoning, so they stopped for the night at a barn on the outskirts of a small village, dining on the food Jedraszczyk had packed for them, curling up to sleep in the hayloft afterwards.
They were roused at dawn by the moaning of a rising wind, and after breakfast emerged from the barn to find a gale brewing up. The sky was gravid, but Killigrew insisted they pushed on regardless, determined to reach Helsingfors as soon as possible. The most recent reports in the Russian press had put the Allied fleet off Nargen, on the Estonian coast, but that had been two days ago; by now it could be anywhere in the Gulf of Finland.
The wind gusted through the forests, making the trees groan and sway, and the foliage below danced as if every bush and clump of bracken were alive. It stung their cheeks and brought tears to their eyes. Even if Anzhelika had been in a conversational mood, shouting above the howling of the wind took too much effort to be worthwhile. The sky remained overcast all day, occasionally sending down patters of fat droplets of rain without ever really summoning the enthusiasm for a full-blown shower. They skirted the Gulf of Vyborg in the afternoon, giving the port itself a wide berth, and when darkness came on they could find no shelter but were forced to huddle in a hollow in the forest.
The gale continued unabated the following day but they rode on nonetheless. Killigrew reckoned they must have crossed the border an hour or two after starting out, not that there was any marker in the forests: the landscape of pines and lakes was the same in Finland as it had been in Russia. They skirted the town of Hamina late in the afternoon, and when they stumbled across a hunting lodge an hour afterwards Killigrew decided it was time to stop for the day.
A hunting lodge – that was what Wojtkiewicz had called them, at any rate. Killigrew’s experience of hunting lodges was limited to the one on the Duke of Hartcliffe’s Scottish estate; he did not expect that anything quite so grand was provided gratis for the common folk of Finland, which was just as well otherwise he would have been severely disappointed by the small, one-room log cabin they found. From the look on Anzhelika’s face as she surveyed the Spartan interior, her own hopes had not been so modest.
‘It could be worse,’ he told her. ‘Four walls, a roof over our heads, running water…’ He gestured to the small stream that ran through the forest nearby. ‘What more can you ask for?’
‘A bed and somewhere I can my powder nose,’ she replied acerbically. ‘I think those furs are what pass for the bed…’
‘From the look of them, they are inhabited already!’
‘… And as for a necessary, you’ll just have to go around the back.’
She sighed. ‘You want me to make a fire, I suppose?’
‘Thanks, but the last time I asked a woman to get a fire going, I almost burned to death.’ That had been Araminta, trying to make a pot of coffee in the galley of Hartcliffe’s yacht at Cowes Regatta the day he first met her. He felt a pang at the memory: they had been able to laugh about it afterwards, and remembering that he would never laugh about anything with her again filled him with pain.
‘What’s wrong?’ asked Anzhelika.
‘Nothing. I just thought of something, that’s all.’
‘What?’
He put on a smile to reassure her. ‘Nothing for you to worry about.’
They dined on sausage, cheese, bread and apples and afterwards Anzhelika arranged the furs into two piles… on opposite sides of the cabin. Well, that speaks for itself, Killigrew thought ruefully. He wrapped himself up in his share of the furs and snuggled down to sleep, listening to the ululating threnody of the wind as it gusted around the eaves of the cabin. He must have fallen asleep almost at once, for the next thing he knew the fire had burned down to its embers, and he awoke to find Anzhelika snuggling against him.
He turned to face her. ‘I thought you were sulking?’ he whispered.
‘I was.’
‘Then why the sudden change of heart?’
‘I thought, why punish myself?’
She kissed him, and he drew her closer to him, the two of them making gentle yet passionate love in front of the fire.
In spite of his nocturnal exertions, he woke early the following morning, roused by the sound of the birds twittering in the trees. It took Killigrew a moment to realise that the gale must have finally blown itself out. Leaving Anzhelika to sleep a little longer, he rebuilt the fire so he could brew some fresh coffee, and stepped outside to relieve himself against the back of the cabin before fetching some water from the stream. A fine mist hung amidst the boughs of the trees, but there was a fresh, earthy scent in the air.
He went back inside and brewed the coffee over the fire. When she smelled it, she opened her eyes and smiled across at him.
‘Time to go,’ he told her.
‘Must we?’ she mumbled sleepily. ‘Could we not stay and live here for all time?’
‘“Come live with me and be my love”,’ he quoted. ‘It’s a tempting proposition. But I’ve got a job to do.’
‘And if you had to choose between me and your job, which would it be?’
‘If you love me as much as you expect me to love you, that’s a question you won’t press me for an answer to,’ he replied. ‘If the Russians succeed in sinking the Duke of Wellington and the Allied fleet withdraws – which it almost certainly will, with an old woman like Dundas in charge – then the war will just be dragged out a few more months. It’s not just the men on the Duke I’ve got to worry about; it’s the thousands more who will die if this war can’t be brought to a swift conclusion.’
‘What makes you sure the Sea Devil will be used to attack the Duke of Wellington?’
‘I’m not. But it’s the logical thing to do. It’s the most powerful ship in the Allied fleet – in the world, for that matter – and it’s the British flagship. She’s the pride of the Royal Navy, and the Royal Navy is the pride of Britain. Sink her and the damage to morale both in the navy and at home will be incalculable.’
After a swift breakfast of bread and cheese, they went outside and were about to mount up when they heard hoof beats. Hundreds of hoof beats, the jingle of harness, booted feet marching more or less in time, and the rumble of wheels over a rutted track.
Killigrew and Anzhelika exchanged glances. Even as they listened, the sound grew louder.
‘They’re coming for us!’ she whispered.
‘If they are
, they’ve sent a whole army after us. Wait here a moment.’
‘Where are you going?’
‘Not far.’
He moved quickly through the bracken, his eyes straining to see through the mist and the trees for the source of the sound. The Russian soldiers materialised out of the mist so suddenly he almost ran into them. He ducked down behind a clump of ferns to watch as they marched past on the road below. There were hundreds of them: a squadron of hussars leading the way, followed by a whole regiment of fusiliers, horse-artillery, a ponderous baggage train of ox carts and another squadron of hussars bringing up the rear. Killigrew reached for his revolver, not that it would be much use to him against an entire army.
Once the soldiers had all marched past, he retreated to where Anzhelika waited. She looked relieved to see him.
‘Russian soldiers,’ he told her curtly, helping her into the saddle. ‘Marching west, towards Helsingfors.’
‘The same way we’re headed,’ she said.
He nodded, and swung himself up on to his own horse. ‘They’re not moving fast. We’ll leave them behind us soon enough if we skirt around to the north.’
The mist faded, but the sky became gravid until finally the heavens opened an hour and a half before noon, slashing through the boughs overhead to drip on Killigrew and Anzhelika as they continued on their journey, drenching them. The rain continued on and off until two o’clock, when the sun broke out and chased away the clouds. It soon grew warm enough for Killigrew and Anzhelika to ride with their coats rolled on the backs of their saddles, and even beneath the forest canopy the sun soon dried them out. Thousands of birds sang in the boughs overhead, and occasionally they caught a glimpse of an elk through the trees. The only people they saw were a woodsman cutting logs and a party of huntsmen. They waved to both from a distance and received waves in return. In spite of the soldiers they had seen that morning, it was easy to forget there was a war on and they were fugitives in enemy territory.
They chatted as they rode. Killigrew did not like talking about himself, but he was content to listen to her prattle on about her childhood: growing up as the child of servants in the household of a Russian count, her subsequent training at the Imperial School of Ballet, and anecdotes from the time she had spent touring Europe and the eastern seaboard of America with the Mariinsky Ballet.
As the afternoon wore on they found another hunting lodge, so identical to the last one that for a moment Killigrew wondered if they were going around in circles. By his reckoning they could not be more than thirty miles from Helsingfors and would reach it the following afternoon. They dined on the last of the sausage, bread and apples, washed down with a cup of water from a nearby stream, and afterwards they sat on the porch, Killigrew keeping the mosquitoes at bay with a cheroot while the two of them watched the sky turn from pink to purple via orange and crimson. That night their lovemaking was more frenzied than usual, as if they both knew they were running out of time in more ways than one.
As they rode on the next day, it became increasingly difficult to avoid the roads converging on Helsingfors, until finally they gave it up altogether and followed the main road. The first people they passed were a well-to-do family in a coach and four rattling along the dusty track as if all the demons in hell were on their tail. Killigrew thought little of it until they passed several more such carriages, all heading away from Helsingfors. Then they saw the horse-drawn wagon, piled high with household goods: chairs, tables, paintings, even a grandfather clock that clanked and bonged with every rut in the road.
‘Looks like someone’s moving house,’ Killigrew remarked.
More carriages passed them, and more furniture-laden wagons, and then he knew something was amiss. Within half a mile the traffic had become a steady stream of humanity: long-faced men, frightened-looking women and bawling children accompanying wagons and dog-carts piled high with all the valuables they could carry. A plump housewife chided a freckle-faced little girl for clutching a kitten instead of helping her father and brothers push a wagon.
Killigrew reined in his horse to address one of the refugees in Swedish. ‘What’s going on?’
‘Haven’t you heard? The enemy fleet’s anchored off Helsingfors!’
Chapter 17
Geology
‘How long has it been there?’ Killigrew asked the refugee urgently.
‘Since yesterday afternoon.’
‘Has it started bombarding?’ As soon as Killigrew asked it, he realised it was a stupid question: they were close enough to the city to have heard if a bombardment had commenced.
‘No, but it’s only a matter of time!’
There were a dozen more questions Killigrew wanted to ask, but he knew they would only be answered when they reached the city. He rode back to where Anzhelika waited and told her what he had learned.
‘What now?’ she asked.
‘We go on as before. And pray we’re not too late.’
‘But what if the Allies bombard the city?’
‘They won’t do that,’ Killigrew told her. He was fairly sure that was true. ‘Why bombard civilians when they’ve got Sveaborg to fire on?’
There was too much traffic coming out of Helsingfors for them to make any headway on the road, so they skirted the adjoining fields until they were on the heights overlooking the city, where they were brought up short by the sight of an entire army on parade: cuirassiers in gleaming breastplates; hussars wearing fat busbies; plumed lancers; dragoons with crested brass helmets; tall, moustachioed grenadiers; fusiliers, jägers, and artillerymen; all neatly arrayed in serried ranks upon the heights. Squadrons of horsemen galloped back and forth, teams of horses thundered past, drawing field guns and limbers, bugles blared, drums rattled, non-commissioned officers barked crisp commands, palms slapped against musket-stocks, bands played and regimental colours fluttered in the breeze. By Killigrew’s reckoning there had to be at least ten thousand men there.
One of the officers reviewing his company glanced curiously at Killigrew and Anzhelika as they rode past less than a hundred yards away, but all he saw was a couple of civilians approaching Helsingfors.
‘Just keep riding,’ Killigrew murmured to Anzhelika.
From the heights they had a fair view of the rooftops of the city below, standing on a peninsula jutting out into the Gulf of Finland with two bays enclosed by islands on either side. Four miles off – less than three miles from the southern tip of the peninsula – Killigrew could just make out the ships of the Allied fleet, anchored on the glittering waters of the gulf. The ships were too far out for him to be able to see if the Duke of Wellington still floated.
‘Do they mean to land soldiers?’ asked Anzhelika.
Killigrew shook his head. ‘No troopships with the Allied fleet this year.’ He knew that between them, the ships of the British contingent could muster a force of some six thousand marines, and he did not doubt they were a match for the Russian troops parading on the heights; but such a victory would be won at a high cost in terms of human life, and to no advantage. Even if the British fleet could capture Helsingfors, it could not hold it. Besides, even if Dundas had been fool enough to attempt a landing – which a younger Napier might have done – the sight of all those troops would have discouraged him, which was doubtless why the Russians had paraded their garrison there.
The fleet could have come for one purpose and one purpose only: the bombardment of Sveaborg.
Leaving the Russian army behind them, Killigrew and Anzhelika rode down towards the city and found a livery stable on the outskirts. A bearded old man leaning against the door watched them approach.
‘Give you two hundred marks for the pair,’ he said before either of them could dismount.
Killigrew blinked at him. ‘Two hundred marks?’
‘All right, make it three. But that’s my final offer.’
‘Three hundred seems a little steep to me for a couple of old screws.’
‘I can make it less, if you want. But I can sell
them on for five.’
Killigrew smiled. ‘If you can sell them on for five, what’s to stop me from doing likewise?’
‘A man’s got to make a profit, hasn’t he? Besides, you don’t know the people I know. I’ll make it four hundred… but that’s my final offer.’
‘Done.’
The two of them shook on it and the man scurried inside and emerged within a minute carrying a wad of notes. Killigrew handed him the bridles and counted the cash. ‘Why the high price of horseflesh?’
‘Everyone wants draught animals so they can get their property out of town. Draught horses, oxen, dogs, screws – folk are desperate enough to take whatever I can give them.’
Killigrew tucked the money in various pockets about his person and he and Anzhelika continued into the city. Laid out on an orderly grid pattern, Helsingfors was small and relatively young as cities went. There were fine town houses and neoclassical buildings painted in pastel shades of pink, brown, blue and yellow, with white pilasters and window frames. The high green dome of the Lutheran cathedral dominated the city skyline, with four smaller domes at each corner of the building.
As Killigrew and Anzhelika walked to the centre of town, it soon became clear that the owner of the livery stables had been exaggerating: not everyone in the city was convinced the Allies would bombard it, if the numbers of shops that had disdained to put up shutters and close until further notice was anything to go by, even if the streets did seem to be sparsely populated for a Tuesday lunchtime.
It was nearly two years since Killigrew had last visited Helsingfors. He led the way to the South Harbour, where the fish market bustled in front of the Imperial Palace, the residence of the governor-general of the duchy. They made their way along the promenade on the side of the harbour until they emerged from the south side of the city on the downs at the tip of the peninsula, where the government observatory and optical telegraph station stood on a hill. From there it was less than half a mile to West Svarto, the nearest of the islands that made up the Sveaborg cluster.
Killigrew and the Sea Devil Page 33