The Killing of Anna Karenina
Page 25
The encounter had its dangers. There was so much that could not be broached, just as he had to quell the immediate impulse to acknowledge her commanding beauty by smiling too much or being too obviously appreciative. A still greater danger was the sort of embarrassing constraint that could stiffen and perhaps in the end curtail any fondness between them.
‘I had so hoped,’ he said, ‘I might have heard something from your father about, well…though, no news is good news, I suppose…’
‘My dear prince,’ she announced in the hostess manner she had used when they first met, ‘I haven’t much time. There’s a cab waiting outside. I have something for you, you see, but first of all I must apologise on my father’s behalf.’
He was grateful for her forthright way of dealing with his unease. Her urgency spared him any more politeness.
‘I will be brief. We owe you explanations and apologies, I know, but, you see, my father simply did not receive your Christmas greetings, I’m afraid. Isobel simply did not trouble to have anything sent across. They’re no longer on speaking terms, which is all very sad. She insists on staying in the Court and my father prefers to live in what was my cottage. Oh, you can’t imagine what difficulties there’ve been! It was only last week, you see, I learned your London address because it was only then I discovered your card. And then of course there was the difficulty over her will – you know who I mean – and no money was forthcoming due to a court challenge and, of course, the deaths of both beneficiaries, so the financial situation was very – well, very unsatisfactory.’
She spoke it all with the sort of concentrated urgency due not only to a waiting cab but also because it had been learned by heart and he readily imagined that she might have rehearsed it all beforehand. His immediate reaction was to leave all the ‘difficulties’ to one side. As if aware of this, she patted the bag she was holding in her lap.
‘Yes, well,’ she said, drawing in a breath, ‘I won’t trouble you with an account of our worries. They will, I hope, remain quite private.’
‘Of course.’
She paused as if verifying his meaning. A logjam of uncertainties was slowly allowed to free itself, it seemed. She raised her chin stiffly. Things had obviously changed since he had last seen her. She had changed, he thought. Her beautiful eyes no longer scrutinised him with the intensity he remembered. They were much softer, more understanding and, strange to say, more sensitive and private in expressing the shadings of distress and disappointment of which she had just been speaking.
‘You must have thought it so rude, terribly rude of us,’ she began saying. ‘No response, nothing…’
‘I assumed your father might have been too preoccupied.’
She took in a deep breath. ‘Yes, that’s been the trouble. So much has been lost, you see. When it happened, things just got lost.’
‘Lost?’
‘Yes, lost. You didn’t know, I suppose?’
‘No.’
‘It was my stepmother Lady Isobel who started it. She decided on fumigation.’
‘Excuse me?’
‘She decided to fumigate.’
His mouth dropped open in surprise. ‘That means? Pardon me, I…’
‘I don’t really know how it began, but she apparently found someone who said that the tower had to be fumigated and in doing the fumigating the whole tower caught fire. Everything was burnt. Of course, it was dusty, smelly, full of old stuff…’
‘You mean the servants were burned?’
‘No, no, they’d been sent back to Russia. It happened after they’d gone. And the fire didn’t just destroy the tower, it went right along that whole wing. Father’s study was burnt as well. Local firemen managed to save the stairs and the hall and about half of the Court, but there isn’t a lot left. My stepmother’s still there. She insists on being Lady Isobel and having charge of what’s left. And my father’s in the cottage, as I said. He has the bedroom you slept in. You see, I’m not living there any more.’
‘You’re not living there.’ He found himself repeating the words, quite neutrally, without any note of query or surprise.
‘No, I’m not living there. I couldn’t stand being there after what happened. My father’s now in charge of the little commune. I got married, you see.’
The news had a shockwave impact. In a way it was more shocking than the news of the fire or the news of her parents’ separation. He could understand what a tinderbox the tower might have been and how marital conflict might cause its own conflagration, but Lady Helen being married implied that an earthquake had occurred in her life.
‘Congratulations,’ he stammered. ‘I didn’t know. When did you…’
‘Just before Christmas. Oswald’s mother died last autumn. He couldn’t think of marriage so long as his mother was alive.’
‘Ah!’
‘Yes, I’m a married lady. I’m Mrs Helen Holmcroft.’ She gave a contented little laugh. ‘And we’re very happy. Oswald’s up here for a conference on Cromwell. It’s a happy coincidence we could come up to London together.’
He nodded. It was as if what she had just said so distanced her that she was literally carried from him like someone disappearing away into the distance on a train, obliterated now by a smoke far more dense than the smoke from the burning tower of Stadleigh Court. Yet there she was, sitting in front of him; and he nodded at his own silliness in not recognising that all along it had been Oswald Holmcroft. He also recognised she had very likely been as much an ‘enemy’ of the lady in the tower as Oswald himself and the others named in the document she had herself written.
Or had she? He knew it would be wrong to ask. So much had happened, as she had just told him, that to mention the name ‘Karenina’ might be dangerously upsetting. Suddenly she interrupted his thinking.
‘That’s not really why I came, prince. No, I brought something.’ She rummaged in the bag in her lap. ‘I’ve brought something for you, something I think you should have. You see, the fire in the tower destroyed practically everything. All the wooden flooring, all the beams, everything was burned to a cinder and when all the debris was searched through about the only surviving thing was an old samovar – and this thing which father felt you should have, because I think you found it, didn’t you?’
She finished her rummaging by drawing out of the bag a brightly gleaming piece of metal. She held it up much as if it was a weapon or a not very pretty object she hoped to sell at auction. He saw it was the steel horseshoe he had found on the river bottom by the old ford. The nails had gone, but the impressed mark was as clear as ever. It was the ‘proof’ he had shown to Giles Irmingham. He had given it to the lady in the tower.
‘Akh, slava bogu! Of course! Thank you!’
It was supposedly the only tangible ‘proof’ of the disputed existence of the lady in the tower, though he knew better than anyone how little it could actually prove.
‘I hope you don’t mind. Father said it could be a memento.’ She handed it to him and quickly snapped shut the catch on the bags in her lap. ‘Now I think I ought to be going.’
He detained her a moment. The feel of the metal in his hand was like a heavy coinage, if worthless, but he weighed it briefly.
‘The initials of her “enemies” in that document you wrote were just as much proof, weren’t they? They were a warning to Mr Kingston that you knew his real name and his real intention, didn’t you? Did you also want her dead?’
‘Really, prince, I don’t think…’
She naturally enough waved aside the implication of the question as if it were quite beyond the bounds of probability or reason, not to say propriety, only for the gesture to be accompanied by a sudden tapping on the study door. Cotton appeared followed almost instantly by Princess Alisa. The prince rose quickly to his feet.
‘My dear, I must introduce Lady… No, forgive me, Mrs Helen Holmcroft, daughter of Lord Irmingham. You remember how I told you they kindly looked after me when I had that accident with my bicycle last summer. Mrs
Holmcroft, let me introduce my wife Princess Alisa.’
‘Delighted to meet you, princess.’
‘Yes, Mrs, er… you can stay to dinner, can’t you?’ Princess Alisa said. ‘We would be so pleased.’
Mrs Helen Holmcroft rose slowly when addressed, assuming at once the dignified, if rather commanding manner of a Lady Helen, and smilingly extended a gloved hand.
‘It is so kind of you but, you see, I have taken up far too much of your husband’s valuable time already. In any case, I have a cab waiting for me outside.’
‘You met my husband on his holiday last year, didn’t you?’
‘Yes, princess, I did. We were talking about one or two matters relating to it.’
The vaguely formal ring of this remark immediately intrigued the princess. Her expression became one of slightly amazed curiosity.
‘Was this thing one of the matters?’
She had noticed the horseshoe in the prince’s hand. The prince, though, knew this was a pretext. Her bright eyes were already shrewdly surveying and weighing up the other woman’s attractiveness.
‘An old horseshoe, princess. A memento.’
The words were uttered very lightly through smiling, parted lips, giving the impression that any further question would be extremely impolite. Their meaning was enhanced by a seemingly deliberate intensification of the steady blue gaze with which she clearly urged caution. It was a theatrical instant. Candlelight made her copper-red hair flare beacon-like and graced her features with a magic brilliance as if Rossetti’s Monna Vanna had suddenly sprung to life.
‘Forgive me, I really must be going.’ She turned to the prince. ‘It was so nice meeting you again.’
A gloved hand was extended. The prince transferred the horseshoe to his left hand and gave a courteous handshake with the other, bowing a little as he did in honour of the unmistakable spell cast by her beauty. Princess Alisa followed suite, although for her the handshake was more dutiful than admiring. Mrs Holmcroft dispensed polite smiles and nods to each in turn, except that she added in a kind of hasty and embarrassed afterthought: ‘It does prove, you see, that she did exist, doesn’t it? Just a memento, then. Goodbye.’
She swept out of the study followed by Cotton. Princess Alisa looked questioningly at the prince who was still holding the memento. He placed it gingerly on the desk.
‘A memento of what, Mitya dear?’
‘It’s quite a long story really. Really quite long. I’ll have to give you the gist of it over dinner.’
Also by Richard Freeborn
Novels:
Two Ways of Life
The Emigration of Sergey Ivanovich
Russian Roulette
The Russian Crucifix
American Alice
Translations:
Ivan Turgenev, Sketches from a Hunter’s Album, Rudin, Home of the Gentry, First Love and other stories, A Month in the Country, Fathers and Sons
F. M Dostoevsky, An Accidental Family
Academic Studies:
Turgenev: The Novelist’s Novelist
A Short History of Modern Russia
The Rise of the Russian novel
The Russian Revolutionary Novel: Turgenev to Pasternak Dostoevsky
Furious Vissarion: Belinskii’s Struggle for Literature, Love and Ideas
Copyright
Dynasty Press Ltd
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First published in the UK by Arcadia Books 2004
Copyright © Lady Colin Campbell 2004
Lady Colin Campbell has asserted her moral right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the written permission of the publishers.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978–1–909807–49–5
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