Oswald Holmcroft darted a pale, anxious look at the prince and said nothing. They had reached the verandah steps.
‘Because,’ he said, ‘as I checked in your biography of Cromwell, you state in a footnote on page 117 that you yourself had satisfactorily demonstrated that you could disable a horse at thirty paces. Being a scrupulous historian, you gave the date on which you conducted the experiment and I guess – purely an informed guess, mind you – I guess it probably happened on the date the horse Frou-Frou was maimed or killed. Can you deny that?’
Oswald Holmcroft shook his head.
‘You tried to destroy the evidence of any connection by smashing the headstone, didn’t you?’
Again silence.
‘But a couple of days ago I think you were at it again. As I lay there in the shade of the very same overhanging willow I distinctly heard a gunshot at approximately the same moment as the train whistle sounded. I’m not guessing now. You were shooting, weren’t you?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I think you may have shot the wounded man over at the Court. Don’t you remember, I mentioned it at Lady Helen’s while we were having tea?’
‘Shot?’ Cromwell’s biographer went several shades paler. ‘I denied it then and I deny it now. You can’t mean it!’
‘I do mean it, Mr Holmcroft.’
‘No, prince, please, I must insist… I must insist I was not aiming at anyone. And I did not shoot anyone, that’s the truth.’ Oswald Holmcroft spoke so earnestly his voice literally shook. ‘I was shooting at rabbits!’
The prince looked straight into his hazel eyes. Shaded by the peak of his cap, they blinked back at him moist with apprehension. They were all the evidence he needed that his guesswork had done its work.
‘Who could have shot him if you didn’t?’
‘I did not,’ the other muttered. ‘Come with me.’
Of course, there was no evidence. The prince knew that Sergius, or Sergei, or Seriozha, as his mother called him, had not received a bullet wound. If the young doctor was right, then something else must have caused his injury. So all he said was: ‘But you admit, don’t you, that you did kill Frou-Frou?’
He grunted. ‘Please, not so loud. Come into my study. I will explain. There are areas of any historian’s work where rumour and conjecture impinge upon historical fact and have to be clearly identified…’
His voice, if thinned by the spaciousness of the garden, acquired a booming forthrightness the instant they entered the house. A short passageway smelling of polish led to a book-lined study considerably larger than Giles Irmingham’s. It was cluttered, as any good working study should be, with books and journals piled high on the floor and tables and windowsills and demonstrably betraying the absence, at least recently, of any tidying female hand and even of much effective dusting. But sunlight and warm air pouring in through a half-open window facing onto the area at the back of the house banished concern for dust and untidiness. The room suited Oswald Holmcroft’s own character, appearing sunny on the outside, judging by his bright hazel eyes and suntanned complexion, yet basically business-like, serious, inventive, brisk and, above all, celibate in its schoolboyish unconcern for the frivolous and any concession to such irrelevant matters as art or good taste.
‘Yes, yes, yes,’ he said, standing the musket in one corner, as if he wanted to dispose of anything to his discredit with a conjuror’s alacrity. ‘I admit that, prince. You are a highly intelligent man, sir, the first person to realise what happened, I grant you that. My only defence is that it happened before I was attracted to Tolstoyanism. Since then I have become a changed man. Cromwell and your great writer have much in common. His view of society and Cromwell’s have a remarkable similarity, you must know that… Except for one utterly essential difference, so utterly essential, you see, that I know I am fully within my rights to doubt all your insinuations about injuries to horses or shootings and so on and so forth. Accuse me as much as you like, prince, but I have one completely cast-iron defence. You look puzzled? Please do have a seat.’
A somewhat worn armchair with wooden arms seemed the obvious place to sit. As the prince sat down, he had the sudden and almost intuitive sense that he might have overplayed his hand by accusing his host of such callous – not to say murderous – behaviour. He readied himself for what he supposed would be a deserved rebuke. Oswald Holmcroft, by contrast, appeared suddenly affable and gentlemanly. ‘Some cordial, prince?’
‘Thank you, that would be very pleasant.’
‘Another of my little Tolstoyan fads.’ He handed across a glass of pink liquid. ‘My mother helped make it. Local fruits. On a hot day it is a most refreshing drink. Tell me why you’re puzzled, prince.’
The drink was sipped and tasted mostly of raspberries. The prince crossed his legs quite contentedly. ‘What puzzles me is why? Why you aimed your musket in the first place, why you shot?’ There was no immediate reply, so he added: ‘Why do you hate Stadleigh Court? I think that’s the question. And I think you may have already given me the answer.’
‘Ah, yes, I think that is the question.’ Oswald Holcroft took a seat in a similar armchair beside him, his suntanned face turned towards the prince with a faint smile of gentlemanly triumph. ‘You’re right on both counts, I think – question and answer. You have been good at guessing, prince. Very good.’ He took a sip of his own drink. ‘Yes, that is the real question. In my case, because the Irminghams are usurpers. Under the Protectorate we, the Holmcrofts, were the true masters here.’
‘I guessed that was it.’
‘But the main reason, prince - my personal reason, a reason of my very own as a historian…’ his face leaned very close as he spoke ‘…is because Lord Irmingham’s a charlatan, an out-and-out charlatan! He’s an idea-monger! He’s a poseur! He pretends to be a follower of your great writer, but he is really doing a terrible disservice by giving sanctuary and succour to the lady you referred to as the lady in the tower who is at best an imposter and at worst an out-and-out fiction!’
‘Ah,’ the prince sighed, ‘I see!’ He countered the other’s fiercely contentious statement with a world-weary heave of the shoulders and a dismissive, ‘I heard the same thing this morning.’
A suspicious look was darted at him. ‘You did! Who from?’
‘He is called Carew Kingston.’
‘Well, he is a compatriot of yours, he should know!’ The claim was made almost joyously. ‘And of course he’s right! There has to be respect for the truth! That is paramount!’
‘So what is the truth?’
Responding with a little chuckle, Oswald Holmcroft rose, opened a desk drawer and handed across a sheet of paper, urging him to take a careful look.
‘There are only two copies,’ he pointed out. ‘Irmingham’s got the other. But it states our case. And we’ve all put our initials and signed it because Irmingham himself won’t countenance the truth.’
What the prince held in his hand was a brief, handwritten statement, headed TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN in bold capitals, which announced ‘categorically and without fear of contradiction’ that Anna Karenina committed suicide in 1877 by throwing herself under a train.
‘Any attempt,’ the statement concluded, ‘to claim that the said person survived that event and is alive and resident at Stadleigh Court in the county of Herefordshire must be regarded as totally false and insupportable in the light of all the known evidence.’
Four initials and four names were appended at the bottom of the statement – B.P. (Bernard Pares), O.H. (Oswald Holmcroft), C.K. (Carew Kingston), I.I. (Isobel Irmingham).
‘Well, well.’
The presence of Oswald Holmcroft’s name and Carew Kingston’s was no surprise. Lady Isobel’s caused a shock at first glance, but a moment’s reflection made it seem less remarkable.
‘Bernard Pares? Who is he?’
‘A young English historian of great probity and promise,’ came the answer, followed by a somewhat regretful acknowledgement t
hat hardly anyone in England had a proper knowledge of Russian literature and culture, let alone the kind of scholarly ability required to sift fact from fiction in dealing with Russian history. ‘Yet young Bernard Pares has. I was glad he was so forthright. Whoever claims to be the lady concerned is an imposter. As a fiction, of course, she cannot exist, in any case. All the documentation has been passed to Lord Irmingham.’ Oswald Holmcroft retook his seat at this point, his tone one of disdain mingled with a certain scorn. ‘How could I or anyone else shoot at a fiction? The idea is absurd! And so how could I possibly wound her horse?’ He complacently licked his lips. ‘Nothing in the world will persuade me that that person, whoever she is, is Anna Karenina! If she exists, she’s an imposter! And as for that headstone, it was a nonsense, erected for the same silly reason that his father built that pretentious place, Stadleigh Court! Just for show! To show off! That’s why I smashed it.’
‘How did you do that?’
‘By standing up in my trap. It was the only way I could reach it.’
‘I thought as much.’
He gave the prince another look, this time of mild approval for good guesswork. ‘Yes, I struck the thing with the butt of my rifle.’ The admission was conjured out of sight with great swiftness. ‘But I make no apologies about the horse. If it really was real, of course.’
‘You mean, it would be hard to prove it was real?’
‘Precisely.’
‘I see. Once your experiment was over, the horse didn’t matter, was that it?’
They exchanged quite candid looks. The prince had to acknowledge that the historian of Cromwell had made a reasonable case.
‘I only regret…’ The round hazel eyes glittered with what might have seemed sympathy and a readiness to make amends, except for a schoolboyish suggestion of malicious glee in their sideways glance ‘…you had that accident. I’m sorry about that.’
‘So you were to blame! You were the indirect cause of my accident and the Good Samaritan who came to my rescue! I am very grateful to you. More important, I am in your debt in another sense.’
The irony was inescapable. ‘You are?’
‘Yes, I would never have met Anna Karenina otherwise.’
Oswald Holcroft now raised his chin slightly and licked his lips, evidently wondering whether to believe the last remark or not. Finally he permitted himself a smile. ‘A joke, prince, is that it?’
The prince did not answer directly. Instead he swallowed what remained of the cordial in his glass and asked politely: ‘Would you permit me to have that document?’
‘Why, of course, prince. It is cast-iron, you must agree. The Anna Karenina you mentioned is a fiction – and dead, of course. She is not the lady in the tower.’
***
Cheerily he swung a leg over the saddle of the Rudge Explorer, waved his hand and pedaled away up the long straight drive. Again, no one was about and everything seemed silent and deserted.
No “gap in nature”, then, he had to conclude. On the face of it, nothing more remarkable than a sentimental woman’s desire to celebrate the death of a favourite horse, a dangerous, schoolboyish experiment by someone who should have known better and a malicious, if understandable, act of vandalism in smashing a headstone in a disused lane. But beneath it all was something much less innocent, much more complex – deep-seated resentment, for example, of the Irminghams by the Holmcrofts, a modern historian’s obsession with experiment in the name of truth, and, worst of all, a conspiracy, so far as could be judged, by Anna Karenina’s enemies to deny her existence or, quite probably, render her non-existent if they could.
The wind blew in the prince’s face once more as he cycled down a pleasant gradient, making the rim of his Panama hat flap slightly without blowing it off, just as it did not blow away his thoughts. It concentrated them.
What had happened to Sergius? Why was he sick with lockjaw? How could he suffer from the disease of wounding if there had been no wound? If he had not been shot, how could he have been wounded?
Oswald Holmcroft was denying what the prince knew to be true. He was denying that Sergius existed, let alone that he was a victim of lockjaw. He was denying Anna Karenina was alive and well and living in Stadleigh Court. All his denials simply meant that, for him, everything was permitted, not to say justified, even the shooting of Anna Karenina’s son or her horse. According to his document, then, he had a cast-iron defence, which would very likely stand up to scrutiny in a court of law. The prince knew he had to challenge that. Was it any wonder, in that case, that Anna Karenina was so obsessed with “enemies”?
In some twenty minutes of rapid pedaling he found himself once again free-wheeling down the steep lane towards the river. It rose up towards him in its placid, blue-green brilliance, enticing with its coolness and offer of something pristine and magical. Naturally he took care to brake before reaching the smashed headstone and the sharp squeaking caused a shrill, frightened flapping of wings as a disturbed moorhen rose off the water and flashed across to the far bank. He drew to a stop, climbed off the bike conscious of the slight nagging from his ribcage and took a long look at the water. The level had dropped noticeably since he had last been there. More reeds were exposed on the bank and even a modest area of pebbly beach had appeared at the water’s edge. It was possible to see fairly clearly where the old ford had been, since shallows had formed above a kind of raised causeway near the riverbank.
He took a while to decide. Then he removed his shoes and stockings, rolled up his trousers and waded in. It had struck him that if a lead bullet could be found of the kind fired by a musket, that at least would be some sort of proof. There was of course very little likelihood of this. What he was about to do could be dismissed as eccentric, not to say plain silly, yet as soon as he felt the cool, caressive flow of the water round his ankles and calves he was delighted by the pleasure of it on such a hot day. The water, moreover, was clear. He could see exactly where he was going and waded on. In a short while he found himself nearly halfway across.
It seemed likely that the crossing might be made on foot, which was very surprising, and he was on the point of turning back to fetch his Rudge Explorer when suddenly he slipped. The water at once came up to his neck and he thrashed about wildly. The shock literally took his breath away. He could swim, of course, but the sensation of succumbing to the immersion, glimpsing the sun above him like a white porcelain plate fragmenting before his very eyes, caused him to thrash more frantically than ever. He could find no foothold. A strong current dragged at his feet and sucked him down. Instinct and good fortune, he thought afterwards, saved him. For several moments he struck out blindly in a desperate dog-paddle, going under more than once but managing to raise his head back above water sufficiently to gasp in some air. As soon as that much buoyancy had been achieved, he began a breaststroke and saved himself. He was at the mercy of the river’s flow for a short while and then managed to swim into calmer water until his hands touched stones. By that time he realised he was back again on the causeway of the ford.
The once smart bicycling suit clung to him with a sodden, dragging tenacity as he managed to stand upright, shivering, his teeth chattering. The water reached only to his knees but the very pressure of the wet clothing seemed to prolong the sensation of drowning. He spent a while inhaling deep breaths. It was ignominious, of course, standing there drenched. No Russian prince should allow himself to be seen in such a state.
Bozhe moi, kak eto unizitel’no!
Luckily he saw no one around him. Nothing but tree-shade and a few cows. He crossed himself and thanked God.
Cautiously, one short step at a time, he made his way towards the bank on the Stadleigh Court side.
Suddenly something glinted.
He stopped, one foot poised.
He drew his foot back.
He balanced.
He bent forward to look more closely.
It was there!
It shone among the stones!
He stooped
down, picked it out of the water and studied it.
It was the proof! All the proof he needed!
12
‘You are, sir,’ said Cotton, ‘in need of some addition to your wardrobe, if I may say so.’
The prince had to admit that, having been through fire and water, he was temporarily reduced to the silk, monogrammed dressing-gown that Cotton now held up for him. Studying himself in the mirror once he had put his arms through the sleeves, he came to the conclusion that a cycling accident, a bruised ribcage, “the burnin’”, indiscriminate gunshots, a blow from a heavy wooden plume and immersion in Wordsworth’s “sylvan Wye” had left him dressed more suitably for the Promenade des Anglais than for Stadleigh Court.
‘As a boy or scarcely a man, Cotton, I endured enemy fire,’ he said philosophically.
‘Yes, sir.’
‘And the Bashi-Bazouks. And being wounded. But today, Cotton, I have been under fire here in rural Herefordshire and I am not at all sure I like it. To be shot at like a rabbit for no good reason is undignified. What is more I have left my bicycle on the other side of the river.’
Cotton said he would fetch it.
The prince thanked him. ‘My one consolation,’ he added, ‘is our great poet Alexander Pushkin.’
‘Your great poet, sir?’
‘I will try to offer you his words in English, Cotton. “Vsyo, vsyo, chto gibel’iu grozeet…” Something like: “All that threatens peril…” “Dlya serdtsa smertnego” “For the heart of mortal man…Yes, all that threatens peril for the heart of mortal man, er, “tayeet” – “conceals, yes, conceals…” “Neiz’iasnimy naslazhden’ia – Bessmert’ia, mozhet byt’, zalog!” “conceals inexplicable joys, the guarantee perhaps of immortality!” These lines, Cotton, now make me feel a lot better qualified for everlasting life.’
The Killing of Anna Karenina Page 14