The Third Section (29 page)

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.

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 as 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.

He asked her nothing about herself, and while she was thankful not to have to reveal to him any more than was necessary, it struck her that most would regard it as rude not to make a few enquiries into the life and interests of the woman he had chosen to treat to such an elegant evening and whom he planned, as the finale of that evening, to bed. The answer came as they drank coffee and stood beside the tall windows, looking out over the Neva.

‘I must confess, Tamara Valentinovna,’ he had said, deliberately avoiding her eye, ‘that I have made enquiries about you. I know the nature of your profession.’

She stiffened and looked at him, feeling her face flush. It was an odd reaction. She could hardly object to the fact that a potential customer – and that was all that Konstantin was – knew perfectly well that it was all he was. But she realized she had succumbed, if only slightly, to the illusion that she had professionally been trying to instil into him – that this evening had been about a man and a woman getting to know each other.

‘If you know my profession, then why waste all of that time and effort over dinner?’ she said icily.

He turned and looked at her, uncomprehending. ‘I was told that you work for General Dubyelt at the Third Section,’ he said. Then the implication of what he had learned of her and what they both had said dawned on him. He blushed a deeper shade of crimson than Tamara suspected showed in her own face, and his mouth began to open and close like a fish’s. Tamara scarcely managed to suppress her amusement.

Konstantin beamed and then burst into a laugh. He went over to the table, where he poured two glasses of brandy and proffered one to her. She joined him and took it.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said.

‘Think nothing of it.’ He smiled. ‘Though I’m glad you appreciate the dinner.’ He caught her eye as he spoke, and she laughed again. Now though, his reasons for bringing her here were even more puzzling.

‘Would it be wise for you to consort with someone who spies for your own brother?’

‘“For”? I would have thought that “on” would be a more apposite preposition.’

‘I’ve never even met His Majesty.’

‘I didn’t mean you personally. You, I’m sure, are a loyal subject of the tsar.’ They looked at each other for a moment, and then Konstantin threw himself back in his chair. ‘I’m sorry, Tamara Valentinovna, I meant that genuinely – about you – but say it of half your colleagues and the irony would not be misplaced.’

Tamara said nothing. She understood the distinction Konstantin was making, but she had never heard it from the point of view of one so close to the seat of power.

‘Things are changing.’ He leaned forward as he spoke and clasped his hands together on the table. ‘My brother belongs to a new generation. That’s not happened in half a century. We’re going to make a difference.’

‘Didn’t Aleksandr I say that?’

‘He did! He did! He wanted to free the serfs too.’

‘Really?’

‘He wanted it. But he never achieved it. The war saw an end to that.’

‘We’re at war now,’ Tamara pointed out.

Konstantin shook his head. ‘Not for long. That was our father’s war. There’ll be peace by the New Year. And then we can begin. Sasha – His Majesty – has appointed me head of a secret committee to put an end to serfdom.’

‘Secret?’

‘Absolutely.’

‘And you’re telling me?’

‘And you’ll tell your masters within the Third Section – I know. And they’ll think that they’ve got their eye on us.’

‘Because they will have.’

‘To the extent that you tell them what you know. And you’ll tell us how they react.’