The Killing of Anna Karenina

by Richard Freeborn

  There was fishing of a kind in the question, however direct and confident it might seem. It implied that something might have been overlooked, some clue inadvertently left behind. The prince did not take the bait. He merely muddied the water a little by asking: ‘Revenge perhaps?’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Your name, you see.’

  ‘What about my name?’

  ‘It puzzled me.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Oswald Holmcroft first used it. Crow. Then I learned your name was Carew and I assumed I had misheard. But I hadn’t, had I?’

  ‘So?’

  ‘A simple rule of philology applied to that name, collapsing the two open syllables into one, would produce another name, wouldn’t it? Perhaps your real name or the name of a lady from St Petersburg who died at the age of fifty-four. Someone you call your mother. That would produce a motive.’

  The other’s eyes blinked. Otherwise there was no reaction. The prince had expected instant denial, even some defiance, and was disconcerted. It was clear that he was expected to go on speaking until he either faltered or said too much.

  ‘Yes, well,’ he asserted, ‘I recognise I must be held responsible to some extent. I see I was very likely a cause, a catalyst. You must have known that I had been invited to stay at Stadleigh Court for a purpose, and that purpose was, as it turned out, to identify the lady in the tower. Am I wrong?’

  No, the prince thought, he’s not going to answer until I get something wrong. He continued: ‘So long, of course, as she was an imposter, or so you thought, there was no need for you to take her seriously. But if she were to be real, if she were entitled in law to inherit her husband’s money, you could no longer pretend she did not exist. So I think you decided to scare me off. I think you waited and watched. A couple of days ago I think you probably glimpsed me coming out of the tower and followed me down to the river. You guessed I’d seen her. Then, in the burning stubble, you saw your chance. If you’d turned your head just a fraction to your left you’d have seen me lying in the ditch. But you didn’t. You first saw me after returning here and making great play with a weakness in your legs that obliged you to walk with a stick. That was a pretence, wasn’t it?’

  Again silence.

  ‘The most puzzling thing to me was why. Why should you want to kill Anna Karenina? Then I remembered something you’d said. You’d said she’d destroyed a noble, decent man. I assumed you were referring to her husband, but I soon realised you didn’t mean him, you meant Count Vronskii. Here I ought to add that I knew Count Vronskii very briefly during the Turkish campaign. He was, as you say, a noble, decent man. He had been crushed by her suicide.’

  This led his listener to spring to his feet. The name had obviously struck a chord. Muttering something under his breath, he fished in his trouser pocket for a handkerchief, wiped his face and clumsily, in obvious agitation, thrust the handkerchief back before reaching up to the top of the piano for the faded photograph in the gilded frame. He held it up as if it were a priceless religious relic and then pressed the glass front of the photograph to his chest.

  ‘That name!’ he shrieked. ‘You have no idea what it means, no idea at all!’

  For several moments he stared up at the ceiling and the circling flies before slowly shaking his head.

  ‘You accuse me of murder and in the same breath you mention the name of Count Vronskii! His life was taken from him! He sacrificed everything for that wretched woman! He was the one who really killed himself! She… she lived on!’

  Holding the photograph at arms’ length, he breathed deeply while gazing at it with admiring eyes. He had spoken in a series of breathy, high-pitched exclamations resembling hysterical shrieks and now tried to speak more calmly.

  ‘I was his half-brother. My mother was a peasant girl. She died shortly after I was born. I was brought up by someone I always thought was my mother. She was a cousin of the Count, also a Vronskii. You know how it is. Many of our Russian noble families have other families. They are not talked about. They disappear. I disappeared into my English name.’

  He paused, pursed his lips and gazed out of the window.

  ‘The Russian name was always there, of course. My mother made a joke of it. She used to call me Crow as a boy. You must understand something – she loved him, my real father, I mean, the old Count, Vronskii’s father. She married my father simply to escape from all the scandal. Here they are on their wedding day, Mr and Mrs Kingston. But for her, of course, and for me it was exile…’

  He fixed his eyes on the photograph and seemed for several moments to lapse into a trance of recollection. Oblivious of the prince or the need to justify himself, he appeared consciously to seek out that very umbilical cord of memory, as if the past could produce a kind of rebirth for him. The prince respected this private moment by saying nothing, knowing that the mechanism of justice and retribution would shortly be at work to challenge him. Although Carew Kingston’s raised head and jutting beard suggested a somewhat theatrical readiness to defy whatever the future might bring, he looked sad and what he said next, as if here were talking to himself, expressed the essence of that sadness.

  ‘Exile is a living death. You must know that as well as I do. For a true Russian, for someone with Russia in his bones, exile is always a kind of death in life.’

  Shrewd, slightly enlarged irises of light-blue eyes glanced downwards at the prince through round lenses as the words were spoken. His lined, drawn, still perspiring face had become a rigid mask. He again pressed the photograph frame to his chest.

  ‘My mother came here because she was in exile. She insisted. I didn’t know why at the time. It was long after my real father had died, long after my stepfather, her English husband, had died – oh, twenty years ago! On her deathbed…’ he tapped the glass front of the photograph ‘…on her deathbed she made me swear. She knew, you see, that Anna Arkadyevna Karenina was there, in the tower at Stadleigh Court. She knew she lived! And she made me swear on my honour as my father’s son, as a Vronskii, as a descendant, that I should avenge my half-brother’s death! Can you understand that, my dear prince?’

  The prince said he couldn’t. What was there to avenge, after all?

  ‘My whole purpose in living.’ Carew Kingston treated the question as completely irrelevant. ‘Obvious, surely? But at first I really couldn’t believe that the recluse over at the Court was real. Not, as you say, until you arrived. Then I knew the time had come. I knew I had to keep my promise.’

  He had his head still raised, looking out of the window on to the so-called main street of Irmingham where, in the midday heat, nothing seemed to move at all and even the children had grown quiet. Try as he might to be dispassionate, the prince could only feel that here was one of those sad, entangled stories of seigneurial rights and illegitimacy which he knew only too well from the lives of relatives and acquaintances, and in their unraveling what always emerged was more sadness, more tragedy. In this case, a promise frozen into a deep permafrost of memory had been revived and acted on only through his chance arrival as the result of a bicycle accident. Its unraveling had led to death.

  ‘I did it. Yes, it had to be done. It is why I have lived in exile so long.’

  ‘The fulfillment of a promise can hardly justify murder.’ As soon as the prince said this he knew it sounded priggish. He spoke shakily, without the assurance of genuine certainty. A quick lick of the lips and he started again. ‘The pretext, if I may put it this way, your “Russian Rhapsody”, it gave you the kind of access to Stadleigh Court that must presuppose… well, must have meant at least some… some planning in advance.’

  ‘An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth! The Bible says it! That’s what matters!’

  It was too much. Struggling to his feet in the face of this arrogance, the prince felt the righteousness of a judge rise like phlegm in his throat.

  ‘I speak …’ It took an effort to moisten his lips again ‘… I speak as Tolstoy would speak, I’m sure. He teac
hes non-opposition to evil by violence. That is the cornerstone. You committed a violent act. You killed her. She was a frightened woman and you killed her. It was murder. Premeditated murder. But, like Tolstoy, I will not judge you. You will have to be your own judge.’

  For once the shell of the other’s arrogant self-absorption seemed to crack. He turned his gaze on the prince. The mask-like, inexpressive features slowly became unmistakably hostile. The eyes glinted angrily. He curled his lips in an ironic grin.

  ‘She died in her bed, my dear prince, didn’t you say so? I will judge as I see fit. You may accuse me, but I will admit nothing in public. There will be no evidence against me.’

  ‘I have guessed your real name.’

  The prince’s remark provoked a smile of superiority. ‘My true name, yes. I am proud of that name. But what is an exile’s real name? A true exile is half-dead already, as soon as his exile starts. No, my real name – there will be no connection! None! Absolutely none!’

  He made a face. It seemed a waste of time to be angry with this man. Truth and fiction had become so intertwined it no longer mattered which prevailed. The prince knew for a fact what he knew for a fact. He took the Oswald Holmcroft document out of his jacket pocket and held it open for the other to see.

  ‘I know she existed,’ he said. ‘I saw the black boat. It was no “gap in nature”.’

  ‘What?’ The other looked deeply suspicious. ‘What? What black boat?’

  The question was waved aside. ‘Look at this, it contains your real name.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘It’s evidence. You know who wrote this?’

  Carew Kingston pretended not to have seen it before.

  ‘Lady Helen? Did she copy this out? It’s her handwriting…’

  The sudden change in his voice confirmed the prince’s suspicion. There came a quick intake of breath and Carew Kingston looked away in an effort to hide his feelings.

  ‘You love her, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes, yes, I’m very fond of her. She’s like a daughter to me, the daughter I never had.’ Suddenly, with a spurt of anger at having confessed so much, he declared: ‘It’s no business of yours! I consider you’ve disrupted our lives here, Prince Rostov! As for this document, Lady Helen copied it, did she?’

  ‘Yes.’ It would not take him long, the prince thought, to discover the betrayal implicit in it. The order of the initials would tell him. And what would he do then? Mutual hostility might become a lover’s jealousy. ‘She loves her father,’ the prince said rather cruelly, ‘more than anyone in the world. You must accept that, Mr Kingston.’

  ‘I don’t accept anything of the kind,’ he sneered angrily, snatching at the document. ‘Her father’s an idealist, a fool! And you’re a parasite, Prince Rostov! My mother’s blood runs in my veins, you know, the blood of a Russian peasant, and we’ve always despised and hated lords and princes! As for the imposter, the lady in the tower, she didn’t deserve to live! And don’t tell me what I must accept or what I must do! I’m not frightened of death, I’ve lived it every day of my exile!’

  The prince would have snatched the document back except that he knew the need to warn Lady Helen was more pressing.

  ‘You’re guilty and you know it!’ were the words he shouted.

  This caused an ironic, caustic, bitter laugh, which ended with Carew Kingston swaying a little, giving a sniff and then breaking into a smile. He raised his eyes to the ceiling again. There was a momentary pause.

  ‘Clever of you,’ he admitted, still looking at the ceiling, still smiling, still ready to laugh, ‘clever of you – the lines from the English poet, the lines from Mr Wordsworth! You had me there! I hadn’t thought of that! But then of course she died in her bed, didn’t she?’

  ***

  The prince slammed the door. The sound of the other’s guffaws followed him down the stairs.

  He was so upset he could not be sure what to do. It was only when he realised he was still carrying the Wordsworth volume and was on the point of returning it to its place on Lady Helen’s bookshelf that he knew he had an absolute priority to warn her. The sitting room was empty. The busy, delicate ticking of the clock on the mantelpiece stitched its way through the silence and competed with hushed voices beyond the consulting-room door. Not wanting to disturb the doctor again, he decided to take it upon himself to see if she was still in the garden and crossed the Indian carpet to the open French windows.

  It was baking hot outside. All damp from the rain had vanished from the lawn as he crossed it, glancing from side to side in the hope of seeing a gardener but fairly sure the heat had driven people indoors. He crunched along a cinder path running between a large greenhouse and an extensive kitchen garden but saw no one. He called out her name. No answer. Lady Helen had hidden herself away in the heat, it seemed, and the farther he went and the more he called, the less sure he was of finding her. All around, though, was abundant evidence of her success in ensuring a self-sufficiency of natural produce for the so-called commune.

  In fact, the garden was a thriving smallholding, quite unlike the traditional cottage garden at the front. It turned into a wide area of lawn beyond the vegetables. Here huge trees rose like silhouetted giants and seemed to bear down on him with watchful eyes formed by shafts of bright sunlight. He felt their eyes flicker at him as he approached across the grass. Cupping his hand against his forehead in an effort to shade his eyes, he tried to discern anything even faintly visible in the deep shadows of the trees. He stared and stared. With the sun full on him he knew he must be conspicuous out in the open. He could see nothing. The trees formed what looked like an impenetrable wall. He spoke her name one last time more in desperation than hope.

  ‘Lady Helen!’

  The sound of his voice seemed to be deadened by the trees and the background noises of summer. For a few moments he felt sure there would be no reply. As he turned to go back to the house, he heard a movement quite close by. There was a distinct sound of a yawn. He was astonished to find he had stopped only a short distance away from some particularly deep shade just to his right.

  ‘Prince! Prince!’

  A woman’s resonant voice filled the air round him. Dazzled though he was, the singing note in the calling voice made him feel he had entered some Calypso’s isle.

  ‘In here, prince! Come in here out of the sun! How nice of you to come!’

  Why there had been no sign of the summerhouse earlier he simply did not know. It was there, a three-sided structure with a slatted roof, and he realised it was laid on sand and could probably be moved. Its interior seemed black as night for the first few moments before his eyes became accustomed to the shade. Lady Helen was reclining in a canvas deck chair.

  ‘I must have fallen asleep! It’s the heat of course. Oh, what’s happened to your coat?’ He had forgotten about the tear to the pocket of his jacket and at once showed her what had happened to the volume of Wordsworth’s poems.

  ‘It saved my life,’ was his explanation after having apologised for taking it. ‘I wanted it as evidence.’

  ‘Evidence?’

  He told her what had happened in the churchyard and added: ‘You remember yesterday at the soiree – Monty Coulsham talking about symbiosis and Miss Julie the Unruly reading from Wordsworth. Mr Kingston should have heard all that, shouldn’t he?’

  She patted her mouth against a second yawn, swept back her luxurious hair and sat up abruptly. Because she was only half visible in the deeper shade of the summerhouse, it took him a moment to distinguish the dark-blue of her cotton dress from the highlights of her matching eyes and their expression of anxiety. She sat upright with her bare arms raised behind her head to hold back her hair.

  ‘You don’t mean he…’

  It was less of a question than a half-formed thought. Her hands fell back into her lap as she spoke and the luxurious copper hair created a proscenium arch either side of her face. He had a distinct sense that she understood exactly what he meant.


  ‘May I?’ He indicated a deck chair folded in a corner of the summerhouse.

  ‘Oh, please do. Jane brought some lemonade. Do pour yourself a glass.’ On the table next to her was a cut-glass crystal jug covered in a muslin cloth with a beaded fringe. Two glasses stood on a cloth-covered tray beside it, one of which was half-full of lemonade and had attracted a couple of wasps. She waved the wasps away. ‘I had one brought for Carew but he hasn’t come. You mean he… What are you saying, prince?’

  ‘I must warn you, my dear Lady Helen. He is a very dangerous, depressed man. Very dangerous. I think he killed Anna Karenina.’

  ‘How on earth can you say that?’

  The air in the summerhouse had a hot woody smell. Thin stripes of fierce bright sunlight penetrated through the slits in the roof and one bright hairline crack fell directly across her face. Leaning forward, he picked up a parasol lying on the floor and used the steel tip to draw letters in the sand outside the summerhouse.

  B and P appeared followed by O and H, C and K and I and I: BPOHCKII.

  The name VRONSKII lay there as if carved out of granite in the brightness of the sun. He opened the deck chair and sat down.

  ‘You did it deliberately, didn’t you, Lady Helen?’

  She saw what he had done, raised her eyebrows and looked at him anxiously. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Did you suspect?’

  Her hands made vaguely explanatory movements. ‘I thought it was funny how the initials – you know – made up that name. I mean she tried to commit suicide – you know – for love of him. I didn’t know it could mean…’

  ‘He’s related!’

  ‘He is?’

  What the prince had just learned from Carew Kingston was briefly told. ‘And I suspect he killed her!’