‘Cotton, my dear fellow, tell me why? Why am I being taken to see Lord Irmingham?’
Cotton could only say those were his instructions. The prince accepted the inevitable. ‘To the future!’ he cried as he stepped into the carriage. He was doing this, he told himself, chiefly because of the beautiful Lady Helen’s unexpected kiss. So they drove away from her cottage and down the route towards the river.
‘Would you care, sir,’ Cotton asked politely, ‘to give me an account of what happened? I have a morbid interest in the details of accidents.’
The prince was reluctant to say more than that he had been on his bicycling holiday, enjoying the English countryside and stopping at inns for the night. On the third day he had got as far as Herefordshire. ‘I was travelling down a lane of some kind. It was rather steep. I had my thoughts fixed on the “sylvan Wye” of your English poet William Wordsworth. You see, I have always wondered what Mr Wordsworth’s words were really worth.’
It was an open carriage with the leather roof folded down and gave a clear view of the coachman’s back. The man appeared to shrug his shoulders, whether derisively or due to the reins being flicked, it was hard to say. What both his passengers could see clearly was that the back of his velvet-trimmed jacket was so shiny with wear it gave an inkling of the state of the Irmingham finances.
Cotton persisted. ‘About the accident, sir. The details?’
‘Yes, well…’
As many details as could be remembered were given – the black boat, the sunlit water, the man hopping about as if shot, the red rose. It was all said in a low voice because it sounded less and less significant once it was recounted. Throughout Cotton’s expression remained quite inscrutable, if attentive.
‘And your bicycle, sir?’
He said he hoped it could be repaired.
‘Well, sir, if I may say so, sir, I hope you will also be repaired soon as well.’
‘Thank you, Cotton, I hope so.’
They were crossing a stone bridge at that moment. The brisk clip-clop of horses’ hooves matched the sparkling sunlight on the stretch of water below the bridge as the river flowed away hurriedly into the shade of trees. The prince’s attention was directed to the looping telegraph wires and the red-tiled roof of what Cotton told him was Stadleigh Halt.
‘So we could catch a train, if we wished? Is the Court far from here?’
‘No, sir, not far at all.’
This was true. In a reasonably short time they were passing through gates and down a long tree-lined driveway. At the end of it they confronted tall Gothic windows and tall pitched roofs of blue slate set between even taller, redbrick towers and battlements in a mixture of styles combining English baronial, Prussian military and Tudor domestic. This, then, was Stadleigh Court. Its wide front door and entrance steps faced on to a large courtyard. Their carriage swept up to these steps in proprietorial fashion with a loud grinding of shingle under hooves and wheels.
At the front door a tall, bearded man dressed like a priest in a kind of light-blue cassock was welcoming two other new arrivals. He waved to the newly arrived carriage, but continued speaking to a well-dressed lady and a young man. Liveried staff were simultaneously engaged in unloading luggage.
Immediately on arrival Cotton jumped down and announced in a loud voice, to the prince’s evident annoyance: ‘Your lordship, I have the honour to present His Excellency Prince Dmitry Nikolaevich Rostov, sir, of the Province of Tula, loyal subject, sir, of His Highness Emperor Nicholas II, Tsar of all the Russias. Lord Irmingham – His Excellency Prince Dmitry!’
‘My dear fellow,’ said Lord Irmingham, coming down the steps at once, ‘how good of you to come! My daughter, Lady Helen, came over last evening and mentioned you had been in an accident. Are you, er…?’
The prince momentarily looked daggers at Cotton. The latter raised one eyebrow and bowed a trifle unctuously without apparently noticing the disapproval, allowing the prince to respond warmly to the greeting.
‘Your daughter, Lord Irmingham, your doctor and a night’s rest have helped to restore me a good deal.’
‘Ah, but you must be fully restored here! I insist. In any case, we are having a soiree and you will be most welcome.’ Further discussion was curtailed by the introduction of the other new arrivals. They were a Mrs Emerald Stephenson and her son by her first marriage, Montgomery or Monty Coulsham. ‘Just arrived from Massachusetts. Via Southampton.’
‘I don’t want to appear,’ said Mrs Emerald Stephenson, a tall lady of middle age with a high soprano American twang, slightly altering the hang of her dress at the shoulders and in doing so making the feathers in her wide-brimmed hat perform a brief pas de deux, ‘too provincial, but to be introduced to a lordship and a prince within two minutes of arrival sure impresses us folks used to nuthin’ more socially excitin’ than a common-or-garden New Haven clambake! What’ll we tell our friends back home, Monty dear?’
Monty, wearing a green velvet jacket with a pink silk handkerchief hanging limply from a breast pocket, nodded and made a noise which sounded like ‘privet’ to which he added the title ‘prince’ a second later. The prince took a moment to realise what he meant.
‘Pree-VET!’ he responded, not so much correcting the pronunciation by emphasising the final syllable as grateful for the attempt to greet him in his own language. ‘Ochen’ priatno!’
‘My son,’ said Mrs Stephenson, ignoring the exchange, ‘is a poet. He believes in a universal language. You may not have heard of Symbioticism but he is surely the very first Symbiotic poet in the entire world!’
This was too much for Monty. ‘Mother, please desist,’ he said with a sigh. ‘This is neither the time nor the place.’ He explained that out of respect for the ideas of Count Leo Tolstoy he had learned a couple of words of Russian.
Lord Irmingham congratulated him and admitted he had never been able to master much of the language himself, though he instantly apologised to the prince for such inadequacy. ‘Well, you are all most welcome as my guests. Do please excuse me.’
With a magnanimous wave of the hand he invited them to find their rooms. The Americans’ luggage led the way. It amounted to three large travelling trunks and half-a-dozen hat boxes requiring three men to carry them through the spacious hallway and up the main staircase, whereas the prince’s, consisting of no more than a small suitcase and a larger case Cotton had brought from London, seemed pitifully un-princely by comparison.
He appeared, though, to be favoured as an honoured guest by being offered a room near the head of the stairs while the others were led away down a long corridor, waving their goodbyes as they went. The room had all the necessary appointments of a bedroom and the additional amenity of a bathroom. Cotton was delighted to find it contained what was known as an ‘Irmingham Rapido’, a design of water closet with a special siphon action. Although a German invention had recently superseded it, the fact of such a modern amenity was a clear advance on the absence of any such arrangement when they had visited the prince’s Tula estate earlier that summer.
‘I am afraid,’ the prince felt bound to admit, ‘we Russians are not in the forefront of water closet inventiveness. Tolstoyanism can clearly not compete in that area.’
‘Pardon, sir. Tolst-what, sir?’
‘Tolstoyanism is what it is called in England. The reason we are here, I suspect.’
A brief explanation followed, with a possibly unduly cursory acknowledgement that, apart from non-opposition to evil by violence and self-sufficiency, etc., Tolstoyanism involved vegetarianism.
‘I didn’t realise,’ remarked a suddenly anxious Cotton, ‘I would not be allowed to eat meat while here, sir.’
‘I do apologise,’ said the prince. ‘It is all to do with the need to live in peace, you know, and avoid killing.’
‘Oh, you are peace-loving, sir, I am sure of that. Well, sir, I am also peace-loving, no one can accuse me of not being peace-loving, but to be denied bacon for breakfast or beef on Sundays can be
an intolerable deprivation to someone like myself. Quite intolerable, sir.’
Cotton became rather subdued by the threat of vegetarianism. In silence he set about arranging the prince’s clothes and performing all the normal duties of a valet while the prince himself took a seat in a large upright armchair facing the window. The journey from Lady Helen’s cottage had restarted the aching in his ribs and made his left arm feel sore again. He stared at the view, pursing his lips in frustration and annoyance. Although the view was attractive, it did not attract him to explore it immediately – a wide terrace with a balustrade, steps leading down to lower terraces and lawns fringed by yew hedges, with pine trees beyond. Presumably the gardens stretched down to the river, although there seemed to be a declivity or valley beyond offering a horizon of ruins, possibly of a castle, looking incongruously like a row of broken teeth.
Any strange place can be unsettling and the prince was unsettled. The bedroom was clean if unaired, smelled of mothballs and was furnished in a style popular, in his estimation, some thirty years before. If he were to stay here long, he would have to find some outdoor activity to distract him. But he hoped he would enjoy Lord Irmingham’s hospitality no longer than was required to attend the soiree, after which he was bound to feel better and could either resume his bicycling holiday or go home to his house in Portland Place. There he would await the return of Princess Alisa from her visit to Russia. His London club, business affairs, one or two invitations to country house weekends and perhaps a little more bicycling would fill in the time.
He must have slept. He was conscious of a hissing sound. Peering round, thinking it must be Cotton, he was surprised to see Lord Irmingham’s pale-blue cassock-like garment approach rapidly across the carpet towards his chair. Cotton danced attendance in an unsuccessful effort to keep the sound of footsteps and fabric to a minimum. Lord Irmingham brushed aside the attempt to calm his arrival. Instead, without warning, he confronted the prince face to face, a pair of very bright blue eyes scrutinising him with the same intensity as Lady Helen’s had studied him the previous day.
‘Do please excuse me. I know I am intruding. But I must ask you something, my dear prince, because I would be most grateful for your help.’
Help? The prince could never resist appeals for help. He began to rise from his chair. Lord Irmingham at once urged him not to.
‘No, no, please. I would like to speak to you alone, if I may.’
Cotton gracefully took his leave and Lord Irmingham immediately lowered himself onto the cushioned window seat. Drawing up the skirt of his ankle-length garment and crossing his legs, he clasped both hands together across his chest, a gesture suggesting intensity of feeling rather than piety. Bright sunlight set up a modest corona at the fringes of his beard and accentuated the lean muscularity of his figure.
The prince could not avoid studying his face, even though it was backlit. Broad, a little pallid, with tiny veins apparent in the upper cheeks and eyebrows white like his beard, both neatly trimmed, it had the strong features of someone who obviously wished to look venerable and yet was a little unsure of himself. His eyes, for all their brilliance, were the secret. When he spoke they appeared partly hidden by a nervous semaphore of blinking. His lips were well shaped but seemed to make a movement as if tasting what he said and uttering the words in an oversweet sonorous voice.
‘You must forgive me for interrupting your rest.’ He asked how the prince was feeling, whether this was an appropriate time to have a private talk and assured him it would not take up much time. ‘I owe you an explanation, I know. You are probably wondering why you are here.’
‘I must agree with that, Lord Irmingham.’
‘Well, you see, as I mentioned, you can be of very great help to me.’ The blue eyes blinked more rapidly than ever. ‘Prince, let us dispense with titles. May I call you Dmitry?’
‘You may.’
‘I am Giles. Giles Irmingham.’ The sound of voices from below them, audible through the half-open window, distracted him. He looked down. ‘Ah, some of my guests are enjoying the sunshine. As you probably know, since my daughter Helen must have told you, I like to entertain visitors here and encourage them to become better informed about the ideas of your famous compatriot Count Leo Tolstoy. She tells me that you know him.’
The prince acknowledged that he was kindred.
‘Then it is most fortunate that you are here.’ The speaker lowered his voice. ‘Can I ask you if you were in Moscow or St Petersburg in the seventies?’
The question came as something of a shock. ‘I was in my teens then.’
‘But you were there?’
‘Yes, I was in St Petersburg.’
‘Did you ever meet or know of or have any dealings with…’ the voice was lowered now to the point of being little more than a breathy whisper ‘…any of… anyone by the name of…’ It was as if the name was too hard to pronounce and suddenly the subject was changed. ‘In your teens, you say. So you were hardly likely to be in high society, in the beau monde, as they call it?’
‘On the fringes. It was before I went off as a volunteer to fight against the Turks. In those days in particular, if you were young and a volunteer, you were quite feted in high society. In any case, my title…’
‘Ah, yes, of course. So you might perhaps have known the, er, the Karenins?’
The prince let his mouth fall open. ‘Your daughter, Lady Helen…’
Giles Irmingham raised his eyebrows expectantly. ‘She said you knew them, isn’t that right? I think she said you did?’
The prince inhaled deeply and looked down at his fingernails. ‘I was introduced to her – Madame Karenina, Anna Arkadyevna. My grandmother knew her.’
‘Your grandmother… well, well! So you actually met her – Anna, I mean?’
‘I met her. Twice, as a matter of fact.’
Giles Irmingham gazed for several moments in wonderment and query at his guest. The gaze was returned with genuine puzzlement.
‘She died very tragically,’ the prince muttered.
‘Yes, yes…’ Giles Irmingham licked his lips.
‘I mean, she killed herself. She threw herself under a train. It was a tragedy.’
‘Oh, of course, of course. Yes, yes, I wasn’t meaning…’ The white beard was stroked anxiously. ‘I wasn’t meaning to give the impression she didn’t, my dear Dmitry. No, no, of course not. We know her death was called a tragedy. It was just a question of identifying…’ The eyes blinked with greater rapidity as Giles Irmingham clasped and unclasped his hands. He turned his face towards the window in an apparent effort to avoid the other’s puzzled gaze. ‘A question of identification, that’s all. I have to make sure I have not been misled about a particular identity. It is rather important. May I talk to you again tomorrow? Then perhaps I can explain things more fully.’
The prince nodded. He was grateful for the promise of an explanation even if in the meantime his curiosity and puzzlement were not allayed one iota. He resisted the temptation to ask further questions about it. Instead he raised the question of vegetarianism. Well, no, it was not for everyone, Giles Irmingham admitted. It was practised upstairs, true, in the spirit of Count Tolstoy’s teaching, but downstairs it was voluntary. That would be very gratifying to his manservant Cotton, the prince said. His host then mentioned that dinner that evening would be early since they were celebrating the birthday of their grandson, Master Charles Irmingham. He hoped the prince would join them and was delighted to learn that he would. A further snake-like hissing of his cassock then accompanied his hurried departure, though not before he implored the prince, in the politest way, not to breathe a word, not a word, about – in a whisper – the Karenins.
5
Dinner that evening was served in the main hall. Designed originally in the Gothic manner to house a collection of medieval armour and serve as an impressive reception room, it had recently been stripped of its exhibits and was now in semi-darkness, with its tall windows tightly curtained aga
inst the early evening light.
Descending the wide staircase, the prince was surprised to hear organ music. He soon discovered it was coming from an organ gallery in the hall. Wave after wave of frankly rather banal chords filled the air at the moment he entered, suggesting a finale. Then there was silence. He saw what looked like a narrow enclosed staircase linking the gallery to the hall and could have expected to see the organist. No one appeared. Instead Giles Irmingham came forward to greet him with a whispered explanation.
‘My dear Dmitry, so glad you could come. We are all assembled ready for the evening meal.’
The prince was about to apologise for being late, though he had assumed he was on time, when his host forestalled him by changing the subject.
‘It is the gentleman from the other side. His music.’
‘I am so sorry, I hadn’t…Other side?’
‘He’s from the other side of the river. He resides with my daughter. Mr Kingston is practising his composition for the soiree.’
This piece of news was almost as obscure to him as the candlelit faces of the assembled guests. The prince found himself being introduced immediately to a gaunt-faced prelate, the Reverend Ellis Chalmers of Belfast, a distinguished interpreter of Tolstoy’s teaching, so he was told. His companion was Raymond Vernoncourt, described as a journalist, a much younger man with a boyish face and slicked down black hair. Also present was Julie Mayhew-Summers, a pretty young woman in her twenties with a rather sing-song voice who professed an earnest devotion to Tolstoy but was in fact more devoted to her companion, a widower and retired businessman, Rodney Palmer. He was rich, corpulent, loud-voiced, balding and wickedly ‘naughty’, as he liked to call himself, with the kind of intelligence and dislike of etiquette easily justified by having sufficient wealth to fend off all manner of criticism. The only other guests were Mrs Emerald Stephenson and her son Monty.
The Killing of Anna Karenina Page 4