The Killing of Anna Karenina

by Richard Freeborn

  ‘Oh, very nice, very nice indeed,’ the prince murmured, aware that in a practical sense this bathroom was not architecturally part of the tower. His practical attitude did not stop her from saying in a prattling way: ‘Oh, I do love it. And I don’t show it to anyone. It’s my secret. I do so enjoy my baths, you see. It’s been such a pleasure having a bathroom all to myself.’

  In further demonstration of the bathroom’s delights, she leaned forward and opened a casement window slightly. It immediately admitted a fresh flow of air and the warmth of morning sunshine. Along with it, a little to their surprise, came a sound of voices. He glanced out and saw several of Giles Irmingham’s guests gathered along the balustrade almost immediately below. The difference between the tower’s seclusion and the guests’ free-and-easy life was most striking.

  ‘Anna Arkadyevna, don’t you ever feel cut off? I mean when all the windows are closed…’

  ‘No!’ The hooded head gave an emphatic shake. ‘This window into my lovely bathroom is the only one I open. Oh, I have friends here, too, you know. And now that my dear Seriozha has come, why should I leave?’

  ‘I can understand that, of course. As for myself, well, I don’t know that I would choose to spend much time here.’

  ‘You speak as if you won’t be staying long, prince. Am I right?’

  It was an awkward moment. He had never anticipated he would have found himself in any way emotionally drawn to this black-clad, nun-like Anna Karenina. Yet her clear preference for the dolls-house world of Stadleigh Court seemed suddenly very touching. He could see she needed the protection offered by the place. She had about her the vulnerability of a very gifted, easily hurt child. Perhaps this was what had made Giles Irmingham’s father and then Giles himself go to such lengths to ensure her security and anonymity for so long.

  That and something else. In a totally unexpected way, while he looked at her, there came a sound from far away on the other side of the river. He did not recognise the sound clearly at first. Like a fingernail drawn scratchily across glass, it identified itself after a while as the shrill, clear note of a locomotive whistle. In a further instant came its fainter echo and the distant rumble of wheels.

  As if it had been a gunshot, she pressed herself against him and held him so tight he could hardly breathe.

  ‘Protect me! Protect me! Protect me!’ she whispered.

  ‘From whom?’

  ‘From my enemies! They are all around me! They think I should not exist!’

  9

  ‘She is imagining things.’

  It was the prince’s verdict once he had returned to the study, but he knew he was not imagining his own feelings. The force of his emotional attachment to the Anna Karenina who had hugged him at their first meeting now overwhelmed him. He was in love as deeply as a boy first consumed by love. Older, of course, vulnerable, willful in a childlike, self-absorbed way and yet charming despite the rather pitiable charade of her veil, she still had the power to set his heart racing. It was a guilty love, naturally, that challenged fidelity to Princess Alisa, not to mention the way Lady Helen’s beauty had suborned him, but in Anna’s case he knew how Gerald Kempson would feel as her lover. He felt a similar need to offer a loving protection, to enfold her, keep her safe and ward off all her fears.

  ‘Oh, I know, I know. Enemies! She is imagining she has enemies!’

  This was Giles’s emphatic response to the prince’s verdict. It suddenly awakened a momentary suspicion. Perhaps the prince’s imagination had played tricks on him. Just as her insistence on having been pushed to her death seemed unlikely, he wondered whether he had been wrong to suppose that, only a moment previously, once he had left the tower and the door had again been locked behind him, he had seen someone watching him from the end of the corridor. Had there been someone there? Had it been one of her enemies? Maybe he blinked. He looked again. No one was there. So he had made his way quickly along the corridor to the study.

  ‘That’s been the trouble recently,’ Giles went on a little irritably. ‘They’re imaginary, these enemies, I feel sure. And why she imagines she hears threats in her bathroom beats me. We only had it put it in about a year ago and she never complained about anything then. As I’ve assured her, just as Hannah has and, er, my son Gerald…’ Giles caught his breath at this point ‘…there’s really no reason for her to be frightened.’ In his solemnly sonorous way he then announced that they were all trying to observe the precepts of Count Leo Tolstoy, so it was very unlikely anyone would use violence against Anna Karenina. ‘But you are sure about her identity? You would swear to it in a court of law?’

  ‘I would.’

  The prince surprised himself by his very certainty. Apart from his own feelings, so many things had been convincing. Her voice, for one thing, the elegance of her gestures for another, but it was the subject of her conversation, so spontaneous and so intelligent, that left no doubt.

  ‘She spoke exactly as I remember from our meeting, oh, what, two decades ago? I remember it like yesterday!’

  Giles said he perfectly understood. He shook the prince’s hand and broke into effusive thanks. Then he suddenly snapped his fingers.

  ‘Your bicycle, my dear chap! It slipped my mind. I heard from the other side, from Irmingham, that it’s been repaired.’

  ‘From where?’

  ‘Ah, yes, Irmingham! That’s what the place is called on the other side of the river. If you’re going there, do give my daughter my love. Naturally I hope to see her tomorrow at the soiree. And, my dear Dmitry, what you’ve said about the lady in the tower will be of the utmost importance. But do keep it secret, I beg of you. My lawyers will be here tomorrow and I would ask you to be prepared to sign written testimony, if you have no objection.’

  He said he had none.

  ‘Then can I arrange a carriage for you if you’re going across to Irmingham?’

  The prince said he would prefer to go on foot because he felt in need of exercise. Giles responded with a series of sonorously issued instructions as to how to get there and a renewal of his heartfelt thanks. With these ringing in his ears and relief at freeing himself from the reclusive, hot, airless atmosphere of the tower as well as his host’s irritability, the prince returned to his bedroom.

  Stimulated by the meeting with Anna Karenina, he found himself on reflection just as much puzzled and dismayed by it. He felt sure he could not be wrong about her identity. Her fear that had led to the concealment offered by the heavy black veil could not of course hide her natural vitality even if it might hide her injuries. It certainly did not conceal her obsessive, possibly unreal, concern for “enemies”. Could it perhaps conceal her true identity? Was he wrong in being so certain that she was Anna Arkadyevna Karenina? He swept the doubt from his mind. No, he would refresh himself by walking to ‘the other side’, as Giles enigmatically referred to the village named after him on the other side of the river.

  He had hoped on returning to his bedroom to find Cotton. There was no sign of him. Instead he found the newly cleaned and mended white linen cycling clothes neatly laid ready. Whether or not it was fitting dress for a stroll in the country before lunch, he could not say, but he fancied he would look rather up-to-date in a sporty English way. A glance in the mirror confirmed the impression. Canvas-topped shoes and a Panama hat completed the outfit.

  Having been told to go through the rose garden, he did so. On the way he chose a tight-budded red rose for his buttonhole in celebration of the pleasure of the fresh air after the stuffiness of the tower. Although he felt a liberation of sorts, he could not throw off a feeling of anxiety and sadness. Just as the bruised ribs and wounded arm were reminders of the cycling accident, retrieval of his Rudge Explorer promised further freedom, he thought, yet doubts as to his own motives grew more marked and oddly more palpable as he made his way slowly down the sunlit stone steps and the terraces, waving the Panama hat languidly from side to side in front of his face to fend off flies.

  He met no one. The
English were clearly not going out in the midday sun. The neatly manicured garden, the terraces of lawn, the lines of yew hedges, the curving paths and stone steps – all seemed so normal in the heat. So why on earth did he have a feeling of being covertly watched? Why did he sense hostility in such normal surroundings?

  Giles had told him to take the steep path down to the riverbank through the trees. The glistening surface of Wordsworth’s “sylvan Wye” soon became visible through the darkly shuttering shapes of the tree trunks, although when he reached the bottom of the slope he faced not water but the planking of a footbridge and his weight caused a distinct sharp creaking that skittered across the quiet surroundings like a stone across water.

  The river had its customary majestic calm flow. He paused at the centre of the bridge and looked downstream. Two figures could be seen some hundred metres away. To his amazement, one of them appeared to be wearing a bowler hat. It could only be Cotton standing there! And with water up to his knees!

  What on earth was Cotton doing down by the river? The prince crossed the rest of the footbridge and walked down the overgrown path along the river’s edge, remembering vaguely that this was the way he must have come in Oswald Holmcroft’s trap. Willows and alders and reeds, though, provided an effective shield from the two figures he had glimpsed, but after a short walk Cotton’s voice became distinctly audible and speaking with a great deal more enthusiasm than usual.

  ‘A very nice one, young Charles, sir! That’s right! Well done!’

  A large willow hid him until, as if a door had opened, there he was. His black trousers folded halfway up his white thighs, he was standing some distance out from the bank and making gestures that looked as if they might be appropriate for cricket, but since the prince knew it was not a game usually played in mid-river he soon realised Cotton was giving directions about how to use a fishing rod. In his black bowler hat, looking a bit like a policeman, though still wearing a tie, coat and waistcoat, he was showing the long-legged Charles Kempson how to cast.

  ‘Now again, young sir! Farther out, this time! Swing it right up!’

  The boy, naked save for corduroy shorts and a floppy-brimmed straw hat, was standing a short way downstream with the fishing rod raised in the air.

  ‘Caught anything yet?’ the prince asked.

  ‘Sir!’ Cotton swung round in astonishment and almost toppled into the water.

  The boy turned and pointed negligently to a wicker basket on the bank containing a large fish. The brightness of the sunlight on the water’s surface and the faint pallor of shadow from the straw hat lit up his young face in a most striking way. He had the same Monna Vanna beauty of his aunt and his father but much fresher in the sun’s brightness than it had been the previous evening at dinner or in the rose garden earlier. He looked at the newcomer, absorbed the prince’s image, as it were, gave a faint smile of recognition and turned back again to the business of casting.

  ‘I hope you have no objection, sir,’ said Cotton. ‘Young Master Charles wanted someone to come fishing with him. I had some time to spare and I took the liberty…’

  ‘I never knew you were a fisherman, Cotton.’

  ‘Oh, yes, sir. My father taught me.’

  ‘That was very sensible of him. I thought I saw you down here and wanted to make sure. Can we expect fish for lunch?’

  Cotton said he did not know. He was preparing to make his way back to the bank, but the prince urged him to stay where he was and explained that he was off to Irmingham to retrieve his bicycle. As he waved his hat at a fly buzzing close to his face he saw something else.

  A small grey cloud, like a faint fog bank, had appeared farther downstream. On the calm, glittering, sunny reaches of water it looked more like a swarm of insects than drifting smoke. He asked Cotton what it was and received no more than a shrug in reply. The boy heard and pipingly his young voice rang back: ‘Stubble-burning. In the Irmingham fields. If you’re going to see Auntie Helen, don’t go through the smoke, go up the other way by the old ford.’

  The other way by the old ford the prince repeated to himself, both in order to conceal his ignorance of what ‘stubble-burning’ was and out of gratitude for being warned about the smoke, which had suddenly grown much thicker. He merely said, ‘I see,’ gave a grateful wave, wished them both luck and turned back the way he had come.

  ‘Stubble’, of course, referred to a man’s beard. But ‘stubble’ as an agricultural term meant nothing. Certainly something was burning. Whiffs of a smell like bonfire smoke momentarily filled the air round him. They lessened and then vanished once he re-entered the shade of the trees.

  He walked quickly upstream, noticing as he went how the river widened and presumably grew shallower. Everything began to marshal itself into the correct relationship of shape and colour he remembered from the site of his accident. Even the cows still stood dutifully in shallow water in the shade of trees near the far bank and were no doubt ready to disperse should the black boat appear. In no time the willow against which he had propped himself came into view. There also was the narrow lane down which he had cycled. Its high banks topped by hedges on either side made a sunlit oasis for butterflies filling the air like thrown confetti. He stopped and looked around him and understood at once why it was known as the old ford.

  In that instant the quiet of the scene was faintly interrupted by the odd creaking sound of someone crossing the footbridge downstream. Why it should have sent a sharp twinge of panic up his spine he did not know. He quickened his pace, knowing how conspicuous he might look in his white linen bicycling clothes, and began climbing the lane, telling himself that if this was the way to Irmingham, as Master Charles had seemed to indicate, then he was doing the right thing.

  Butterflies fluttered in delicately tinted kaleidoscopic patterns against the dark green of the steep sides and the hedgerows, obliging him to keep his eyes down. It was this that drew his attention to something in the thick grass. At first glance it looked like a lump of stone. On closer inspection it turned out to be a heap of stone fragments. The growth of grass over several seasons had virtually hidden them, so that what he saw was little more than a grass-covered mound.

  ‘Ia natknulsia na… Vot!’

  It seemed he had stumbled on the cause of his accident. Coming fast down the slope towards the river his front wheel must have struck the fragments, concealed as they were in the grass, and he had been thrown forward. His ribs ached now in recollection.

  Simultaneously he was reminded that something had caught his eye and it prompted him to look round. As he did so a butterfly alighted on what looked like a short length of bare wood set high up in the hedge. He peered up at it only to see what looked at first like bare bone, curved, whitish, but obviously part of a small tombstone. Faintly visible were the words In memoriam already green with lichen and below them, again discoloured, the barely discernible shape of a horse’s head, or so he supposed, because the stone in which the words and the horse’s head were carved had been cracked diagonally right across. The only certainty was that this fragment glittered whitely in sunshine against the dark jade of the hedge. This was what he must have glimpsed as he sped downwards.

  The rest of the inscription presumably lay in the mound at his feet. Why, though, had this memorial or whatever it was been placed here, atop the steep side of this lane and in the shade of the hedge?

  ‘Kto zhe postavil byi… esli ne ona?’

  Who would have put a memorial to a horse, if that’s what it was, there, precisely there? Who? He felt sure it was connected with Anna Karenina, connected with the ceremony he had witnessed, connected with ‘A little outing for me…’ Hadn’t she said something like that? ‘Every year I have a little ceremony,’ she had said. He fingered the tight red rosebud in his buttonhole as he remembered the red rose floating on the water.

  What if this broken headstone commemorated the place and the date of the death of her favourite horse? What if this was the site of her accident? What if she hadn’t
been performing some strange obsequies in memory of her late husband, as Giles imagined, but simply been remembering her dead horse and her own injury? Of course she was a sentimentalist after her fashion! The idea of decking out the boat in black would have a macabre appeal for her, much in the way that her own black garments and black veil, no matter what they might hide, confirmed the macabre notion that she was already dead.

  So why had it been smashed to pieces? Was this the work of her enemies? And was it all related to some special date?

  He would go to Irmingham at once. Lady Helen would be able to shed some light on it, he felt sure. It took him therefore very little time to climb the lane, which he soon found rutted with parallel cart tracks that had very likely been created by the traffic of heavy horse-drawn vehicles long ago. It rose less sharply towards the top and the steep sides gave way to overgrown hedges that framed the beautiful vista of river and trees he saw as he glanced behind him.

  Looking to his right, he was quite taken by surprise at the glimpse of another vista. Visible through the thickness of the hedgerow was the silvery glimmer of steel rails. They were some distance away and vanished in a curve from his line of sight. So he must be standing above a short tunnel! The locomotive would whistle no doubt as it emerged from the tunnel and the tunnel exit would act as a megaphone for the rumble of wheels.

  Well, well, another little mystery solved! By now, though, he had reached the crest of the ascent and there, to his relief, he found a signpost shaped like a thick-fingered hand that announced the way to ‘Irm ..gham’ in faint, weather-beaten letters. Somewhat strangely it directed him to nothing more obvious than a stile in an overgrown hedge.