The Third Section (Danilov Quintet 3)

by Jasper Kent

  ‘Vasya?’ Tamara already had an inkling of who it might be.

  ‘Actual State Councillor Yudin – he’s an old family friend.’

  Tamara already knew of the connection with Dmitry, but perhaps it went further. ‘He knew Aleksei?’

  Svetlana suddenly became annoyed. ‘I’ve really no idea – and why should I tell you if I did?’

  ‘I just want to find out about Aleksei Ivanovich.’

  ‘Well, he’s Mitka’s father, not mine.’

  Tamara rose. She would get no more from Svetlana. ‘Perhaps I should call when he returns.’

  ‘You could try. I don’t imagine he’ll be leaving Sevastopol soon though.’

  Tamara offered her hand and tried to smile in a way that wouldn’t further anger Svetlana. It seemed to work. Svetlana took it and managed a brief smile in return.

  ‘I’m sorry to have been so intrusive, Svetlana Nikitichna. But the Decembrists are still important.’

  ‘Not to me – but Mitka’s father is certainly important to him. I’m sure he’ll speak to you on his return, though as I say, that may not be for a very long time.’

  Tamara left and headed back to her hotel. It had not been a hugely productive day, but she had learned one more name – Vasiliy Denisovich Makarov. And she held a much greater hope of Dmitry returning soon than his wife seemed to – but then she probably wasn’t as au fait with the military situation as Tamara. From what Tamara had heard, Sevastopol would fall within days.

  Even from the grave, Bonaparte had reached out and taken his revenge on Russia. All the pieces were in place: a French army led – however remotely – by a new Napoleon; a desperate retreat by a broken army; a rickety bridge which men, horses and civilians must cross in order to escape. Admittedly the weather was different – late summer rather than the depths of a freezing winter – but other than that it was the Berezina reborn. And there was one other difference: today it was Russia, not France, who retreated.

  Defeat, when it came, had come quickly. It was only the previous day that Dmitry had shouted orders for his men to fire on the French infantry as they advanced remorselessly towards the third bastion. They’d been lucky. The attack had been repelled. In a moment of calmness Dmitry had looked to his right, towards the fourth bastion, and seen that there too Totleben’s defences had held against the British onslaught. But then he had looked to his left. He saw no soldiers advancing, no barrage of artillery, no collapsing battlements. What he did see told him, without room for debate, that Sevastopol was defeated.

  Atop the Malakhov Tower, red, white and blue, the French tricolour fluttered in the breeze.

  He had paced back through the deserted streets of the city towards the naval barracks, where he knew other officers would be assembling, a dark anger descending upon him. For the first time in the whole war, he hated the French and hated the British and hated all of them who had come to deprive Russia of her rightful access to the Black Sea. He had suffered the war, with its disease and death, but in the end it was defeat that he could not stomach. He felt, for once, like a patriot.

  At headquarters there was no dissent over the conclusion that the loss of the Malakhov would mean the loss of the city within days – perhaps hours. The eventuality had been planned for. Work on the pontoon bridge stretching north from Fort Nikolai had begun in the summer. Everyone knew its purpose, but few dared to speak of it. The pretence of hope was a greater comfort. Details of how to phase the evacuation were carefully drawn up. No one spoke of comparisons with the Berezina.

  Dmitry felt his movement come to a halt. He opened his eyes and gazed upwards. It was dark now – he could see the stars and the looming figures of the three men who carried him, using his greatcoat as a stretcher. Although they were no longer moving, he still felt a gentle sensation of rocking from side to side, as though he were on a boat. He could only guess that they were dead centre of the bridge by now. Most of the city had already escaped across it – escaped north across the Sea Harbour to the Severnaya where they might retrench; or at least where their further retreat was not blocked by so immovable a geographical feature.

  The previous evening it had all seemed so straightforward – as if to plan was the same as to act. Dmitry remembered that no man had looked into another’s eyes as they spoke, as if it might allow them to forget what was to become of the city once they departed.

  Then someone had muttered the name of Rostopchin.

  All understood the implication. Again it went back to 1812, but this time not to Napoleon’s retreat but, just months earlier, to his occupation of Moscow. Dmitry had heard the story countless times from his father. Moscow’s governor, Fyodor Vasilievich Rostopchin, had given orders, before his departure, that fires should be set throughout the city. The inferno had raged for five days, razing two thirds of the buildings. Some now doubted whether it had actually been Rostopchin who gave the order, but it made no difference to the outcome. Moscow had become untenable; Napoleon had been forced to retreat, and therein had lain his downfall. Whoever had issued the command, they had shown the truest love for the city – preferring to see it destroyed over falling into the hands of another.

  Dmitry did not know how deeply he loved Sevastopol, but he had been one of the first to volunteer to lead a party of fire-starters. As the multitude had moved north, towards Fort Nikolai and the bridge that would lead them to safety, Dmitry and teams like his had spread out through the city. They set the first fires in the south, in areas that had already been evacuated. Even there they found some who continued to hope; to believe that the city could be saved. They were sailors mostly, for whom Sevastopol had been the only home they had ever really known; the only home that didn’t rock from side to side with the motion of the sea. A blow from the stock of a musket or a poke from its bayonet moved them on and Dmitry hoped they would have the sense to leave with the rest of the evacuees – or at least not to come back here.

  Each time he thrust a flaming torch into the piles of tinder and paraffin that he and his men had laid he almost laughed at the futility of it. Enemy cannon had already flattened more than half of the city’s buildings – and there had been no let-up in the shelling even today. Who could it benefit to see the other half reduced to ashes? And yet Dmitry was beyond rationality. The sense of purposelessness that had held him when he arrived in Sevastopol was now doubled. Briefly he had thought that Tyeplov had given him a reason to carry on, but Tyeplov had betrayed him. Now, all Dmitry had to fulfil him was his duty. And if duty meant to destroy what the French wanted to take, then that was all the better.

  ‘Time to go, sir,’ his sergeant had shouted as dusk began to fall. Dmitry, the sergeant and three ryadovye had been out there for hours. They’d started a dozen conflagrations, but had not stayed to see the outcome of any. Already they’d heard the shouts of advancing troops, just streets away from them.

  ‘Just one more,’ Dmitry replied, looking up at the edifice in front of him. They were in the east of the city, on the other side of the Sea Harbour from the naval barracks. Dmitry knew the house well enough. It was to there that he had followed Ignatyev and Tyeplov and their unwitting victim, so many weeks before; there that he had seen Ignatyev feeding; there that he had seen Tyeplov gazing into a mirror – and understood what he truly was. It would make a fitting farewell to the city, and to his memories of it.

  They set the fire quickly. The sergeant had pointed out that the back of the house was bombed out anyway, but by then they’d done most of the work. Dmitry stood and watched as the flames took hold – despite his men’s pleas that they should get away. It was an ending for him. Tyeplov might be anywhere, but for Dmitry he was nothing any more. Dmitry truly believed it.

  Then the gunfire had begun. The redcoats were on them in seconds – ten of them; more likely a reconnaissance party than an occupying force. One of the ryadovye dropped to the ground in the first volley, but Dmitry knew their only hope was to counterattack before the British could reload. They raced down the str
eet, sabres raised. Dmitry heard a yell form in his throat that was taken up by his comrades. Almost as they fell upon the enemy, Dmitry dispatched two of them with swift strokes of his blade. His pistol dealt with another. Then the butt of a gun caught him under the chin and he fell backwards. Around him he could see his comrades continue to fight, but they were outnumbered. The Englishman who had knocked him down stood over him, his shtutser reloaded with the same speed that Tyeplov had displayed months before. Dmitry could see straight down the length of the rifled barrel, and beneath it a finger coiling around the trigger. He tried to raise himself up, but his head still swam from the blow. He began a prayer that he knew he would not have time to complete.

  It was then that his memories became vague. At the same moment that he heard the report of the gun and saw the flash of powder in the lock, one of his men had charged into the redcoat, knocking him and his rifle off target. Dmitry had felt a searing pain as the bullet shattered his right ankle. He’d attempted to lift himself up again, but the pain was unendurable. He passed out.

  His next memory was of lying on his back, moving through the city at tremendous pace, and yet without the constant jolting and bumping that he would have felt on a wagon. Around him he could hear the sound of tired, laboured breathing, and beyond that, the ever-present noise of cannon fire.

  ‘Don’t worry, sir,’ he heard his sergeant say. ‘We’ll get you out.’ He was lucky not to have been abandoned. He tried to speak, but didn’t have the strength. He’d swum between consciousness and oblivion several times, and wondered why God had chosen to save him when he’d had so little desire to save himself, but he could find no answer.

  And now they were on the pontoon bridge, and at a standstill – so close to safety and yet still prone to the shellfire that could so easily be heaped upon them. The pain shot upwards through his leg in regular pulses. He dared not look at the wound, but he doubted he would walk again. He turned his head to the right and saw the crowds surrounding him. Beyond, the harbour opened into the Black Sea itself, where the British and French fleets waited. His hand dropped off the side of the makeshift stretcher, and he felt water. He looked and saw that the men around him were in it up to their thighs. He could feel it soaking his back, despite his bearers’ efforts to raise him out of it. The pontoons were sinking under the weight of the men crossing them, but still they managed to bear the load. Dmitry remembered his father describing how, at the Berezina, one of the two French bridges had collapsed completely, sending men, horses and carts into the icy waters. Here the water was not so cold as to kill, but Dmitry doubted he would be able to swim very far.

  The face of his sergeant – he had never bothered to ask the man’s name – peered over him. ‘We’ll be moving again in a moment, sir. Just getting a bit clogged up ahead.’

  Dmitry tried to speak, but he had nothing to say. He laid his head back and gazed at the low clouds as their folds and billows flashed with the light of shells exploding in the city below them. It was as though they were being illuminated by the lightning of some great storm that raged within, though the splashes of water that fell upon his face were not rain but from the foaming harbour.

  And then all turned to chaos. Dmitry heard the whistling of a shell, followed by a splash somewhere close by on the left. He felt the rumble of an explosion beneath the water, but noticed that the whistling did not stop. The second impact was closer still, and the third, immediately following, felt as though it had detonated beneath the bridge itself. It was not enough to cause much damage directly, but from the little that Dmitry could see, it looked like over two dozen men instinctively threw themselves away from the explosion and into the water. His stretcher bearers stood firm, but while they might be able to resist their urges to panic, the forces of nature were a different matter.

  With so much weight released, the pontoons beneath them erupted from the water, sending a wave of disruption along the bridge in both directions. The two ryadovye on Dmitry’s left lost their grip and were flung into the water. It would have been better if, on the other side, the sergeant had done the same. Instead he clung on, spilling Dmitry out to the left as surely as if he had pushed him. Dmitry hit the wooden struts of the bridge first and felt bolts of pain through his leg, but he could do nothing to help himself.

  A moment later all was silent, as the cool water of the harbour embraced him.

  CHAPTER XII

  THE DOOR CLOSED behind Tamara and she heard a key turn in the lock. She looked back at it. It was an unassuming door, like any of those that punctuated the walls of the Marble Palace. When wandering past the building in times gone by she, like many, would have glanced at those doors and wondered just what it was that lay behind. Did such a door open into some dark corridor, guarded by one of the empire’s most trusted men, or into a kitchen, providing easy access for grocery deliveries? Or did the door perhaps open on to one of the imperial family’s personal apartments? Was it merely a few inches of solid wood that separated the humble passer-by from the greatest and most powerful men in Russia?

  Now Tamara knew. For her it was now a surprise to be returned to the familiar reality of Saint Petersburg, after the wonders of the palace in which she had spent the evening. She quickly glanced around her and regained her bearings. She was on the embankment, overlooking the Neva. Behind her was the Marble Palace and ahead, across the river, the Peter and Paul Fortress. She turned left and began to walk.

  Behind the door from which she had just emerged there was indeed a corridor, but there had been no guard when she entered or when she left. The corridor had been accessed by a short flight of steps, which in turn she had reached through a small door halfway up one of the grander staircases in the northern wing of the palace. The contrast between the two flights of stairs – one of stone, the other of wood – had been striking. Clearly the former was intended to be used by the residents and their guests, the latter by the staff. Tamara evidently fell somewhere between the two categories. She had come down that greater staircase, escorted by a silent footman, after crossing a huge, marble-floored landing which she had walked out on to through the most beautiful pair of doors that had ever been opened for her.

  In the room behind those doors, the grandest room in which she had ever sat down, she had spent three hours of the evening eating the most delectable food she had ever tasted. Her dinner companion had been of some note as well – he was the Grand Duke Konstantin Nikolayevich Romanov, second son of the late Tsar Nikolai and brother to Tsar Aleksandr II. More than that, he was the new tsar’s closest confidant.

  It had begun in her hotel when, the previous evening, she had returned from her visit to Svetlana Nikitichna. There was a note waiting for her. It had been brief.

  My dear Tamara Valentinovna,

  I was so pleased to make your acquaintance today. I’m afraid that, as you might guess, a visit to the theatre will prove difficult to arrange. Instead, may I suggest dinner tomorrow at seven? I will send a carriage for you.

  K.N.R.

  Having seen him board the imperial train at Bologoye it had taken only a little thought on her part to realize who the man must be. She had never seen a portrait of him, but for a Romanov he was marked out by his short stature and the need to wear spectacles – or perhaps a sufficient lack of vanity to wear them when he did need them. The initials on the card served only to confirm what she had guessed, but the fact that their encounter on the platform had been, on his part, more than a passing flirtation astounded her.

  She was not a woman so blinded by the stature of the tsar and his family as to be unaware of the stories of their almost insatiable sexual appetites, and though she did not believe all she heard, it would be foolish not to credit some of it. If a man had the power to take to his bed any woman he chose, then he would be inhuman not to exploit that power to some degree. But if he had that power then why, Tamara wondered, choose her? The old generals and chinovniki who paid for her services at Degtyarny Lane might, from their own perspective, see her a
s young and voluptuous. They might even have acquired the wisdom to understand that a twenty-year-old did not know all of the secrets of how to make a man happy. But Konstantin was only twenty-seven. To him Tamara’s thirty-four years must make her seem ancient. And yet he had sent her the note.

  But even if it seemed the stuff of fairy tales, she knew that it was her duty to comply with his request. It was the duty of every Russian to obey the tsar’s will, of course, and it seemed not unreasonable to extend that fealty to his brother. But Tamara had a duty to her job as well. As Yudin had explained to her, this new generation of Romanovs had come into contact with ideas that might ultimately prove dangerous to their dynasty. It was the task of the Third Section to protect that dynasty, even from itself. When the carriage arrived, she found it hard to believe that the horses had not once been mice and the coachman a rat, but still she had happily climbed aboard.

  It had taken her to that same side door in the Marble Palace by which she had just now departed and she had been escorted, by a footman who might well have led a previous life as a lizard, up to where her host awaited her. Konstantin introduced himself formally and apologized for leaving her so abruptly at the railway station. He also apologized for entertaining her here, not at his more usual home in Strelna, but explained that he felt it would be far more convenient for her to come here, since she was staying in the city. Convenient also, she thought, to avoid encounters with his wife and children.

  Konstantin talked more than Tamara, which suited them both. They began where they had left off, discussing theatre. Tamara had been out early and purchased a couple of plays by Gogol, so was able to keep up with the conversation to some degree. But then Konstantin turned to his true love – music. Here Tamara was on even less steady ground, but the grand duke was more than happy to talk. He was something of a namedropper, mentioning musical evenings when he had been personally entertained by Johann Strauss and Hector Berlioz, but the effect would have been greater if the names had meant anything like as much to her as they did to him.