To Kill a Tsar (27 page)

‘Look what the oaf has done,’ the injured man complained.

‘That can’t be helped,’ she replied, turning to the exit again. Two gendarmes were standing together beneath the arch, watching the traffic to and from the station. It was very unlikely that they would let workers with large trunks pass without question. She would have to distract them and hope her comrades had the sense to do what she had told them to do.

Anna scuttled towards the gendarmes: ‘That man there, that man there,’ she said breathlessly, pointing to the unfortunate civil servant. ‘He’s wanted by the police.’

The gendarmes looked at her as if she were mad or drunk or both.

‘He’s wanted by the police, I tell you!’

‘Who are you?’ the older of the two asked. ‘What’s he supposed to have done?’

‘Quick – before he gets away!’ Anna said, wringing her hands. ‘Look, he’s going, he’s leaving!’

The civil servant had obligingly chosen that moment to limp towards a platform entrance.

‘Who are you?’ the older gendarme asked again.

‘He’s got a gun! I’ve seen it. He’s a terrorist! Oh, why won’t you believe me?’ Anna began rocking back and forth, her head in her hands. ‘For goodness sake, are you going to stand here and let him get away!’

The gendarmes exchanged glances.

‘You’d better be right,’ muttered the younger man. ‘Don’t move from this spot.’

Anna watched for a few seconds as the gendarmes forced their way through the crowd, cannoning into travellers, tripping over pieces of luggage, then she slipped into the stream of people leaving the station. The workers were waiting for her at the cab rank with the trunks.

‘Quick – into a droshky,’ Anna commanded. ‘And you, Pavel – take another. Better we travel separately. 7 Spassky, off the Haymarket.’

She was a good liar. A skill, she thought, as she sat in the droshky, her heart still beating frantically, a performance learnt in childhood when fear of upsetting her father would drive her to many simple deceits.

At the Haymarket she took possession of the trunks and took another cab to the island. The door of the safe house was opened by a pale man in his twenties with languid blue eyes and a dark beard and hair that fell in a severe fringe across his forehead.

‘A delivery for a friend.’

‘Anna Kovalenko? I’m Nikolai Kibalchich.’

‘Good. Is there anyone who can help you?’

Anna paid the cab driver while Kibalchich and a comrade she did not recognise carried the trunks into the ground floor apartment.

‘Through here,’ Kibalchich shouted from the main room.

He had already lifted the trunk on to a table and was fiddling with the locks. The room was long and narrow and furnished like a laboratory, with work benches, glass beakers and flasks, coils of wire, clamps, tongs, implements she could not name
of all shapes and sizes. Kibalchich was the party’s explosives expert but she had no idea the executive committee had its own small factory.

‘It’s all here,’ he said, turning to her with a broad smile, eyes bright with excitement. ‘By my calculation we need 320 pounds, but 360 would be better. We’re at least forty pounds short at the moment.’

‘I haven’t the faintest idea what you’re talking about,’ she said.

‘The attempt on the palace, of course. Our man has 280 pounds in place but we need more.’

‘Yes, of course,’ she said with a little laugh, the colour rising to her face. No one had told her. Another attempt was to be made on the tsar’s life and no one had told her. Mikhailov had kept her in the dark.

‘But will he be able to smuggle it into the palace in time?’

Kibalchich shrugged: ‘In time for what? As long as it’s there and no one finds it, but that isn’t my concern.’

‘No. Of course not.’

The cab dropped her before the Anichkov Bridge and, after taking care no one was following her, she turned into Troitsky Lane and walked quickly along it until she reached Mikhailov’s mansion. It was a little before one o’clock when she rang the bell and was shown up to the second floor by the dvornik.

‘Did you manage the delivery?’ Mikhailov asked as the apartment door closed behind her.

‘The dynamite, you mean?’ she said tartly. ‘Yes.’

The drawing room was crowded with familiar faces – Sophia Perovskaya and Andrei Zhelyabov, the son of the house serf from the Crimea, her flatmate Nikolai Morozov and others.

‘Annushka, come and sit beside me,’ said Sophia, drawing her by the hand to the settee. ‘We’ve been speaking of you.’

‘Oh?’

‘Yes. Alexander was reminding us how easily you move unnoticed about the city.’

Anna did not reply. A tense silence fell on the room and faces turned to Mikhailov, but he seemed content to sit, his eyes half closed, hands clasped about his knee, as if enjoying the discomfort of his comrades.

‘Alexander is concerned about your friendship with this English doctor,’ Sophia said at last. ‘Can he be trusted?’

‘We’ve promised to put the party and the revolution first,’ Morozov added from the table. ‘It’s about renouncing one’s egotism for the sake of the Russian people. That is our supreme task.’

Anna looked at him with disgust. ‘I’ll take no lessons from you on sacrifices,’ she replied. ‘I don’t think you’ve given up anything.’

‘There is no need to be personal,’ said Sophia.

‘What is this if it is not personal? The committee is questioning my loyalty to the revolution.’

‘No one is questioning your loyalty, Anna,’ said Mikhailov. ‘No one could question your loyalty, only the wisdom of becoming involved with an Englishman.’

‘But we agreed he would be useful. You agreed,’ she replied angrily. This was naked jealousy and she had to bite her lip to stop herself saying so.

‘Yes, but the police have questioned him . . .’

‘And he told them nothing.’

‘They will question him again. The Third Section has a file on him.’

‘It has a file on you and on me and on you and you and you,’ Anna said, pointing to them all in turn. ‘He’ll be of service to the revolution. I know it.’

‘Are you sure your personal feelings are not getting in the way?’ said Morozov.

Anna snorted with frustration then barked a word in Ukrainian
that no one in the room understood. Her cheeks were burning, her hands shaking. None of them would meet her eye. It was the son of the serf, Andrei Zhelyabov, a handsome bear of a man, who spoke at last.

‘We must trust our comrade’s judgement. She has earned that trust.’

Anna turned to him with a grateful smile. He understood her, he was of the people too, but they must all be told. ‘You know me and you must know my loyalty is to the party,’ and her voice trembled a little with emotion. ‘I will do my duty to the people. The English doctor is my . . . my friend, and he can help us. I trust him. Vera Figner trusts him.’

Sophia Perovskaya reached for her hand and gave it a little squeeze.

‘You understand how careful we must be,’ said Mikhailov. ‘Sooner or later they will have your doctor followed.’

‘I will tell him.’

‘Is there anything else?’ Mikhailov glanced about the room at the other members of the executive committee. ‘Then Anna can go.’

‘There is something else,’ said Anna, irritated to be dismissed as if she were a flunkey. ‘I want to know why no one has told me there were plans for another attempt on the emperor’s life.’

‘The fewer people who know the better,’ Mikhailov replied, his eyes fixed upon her.

‘Well, I know now. So – what are you going to do? Have me killed and dumped in a street too?’

For a few seconds the silence was broken only by the awkward shuffling of feet and the creak of furniture.

‘What do you know?’ Mikhailov asked at last.

‘We are smuggling explosives into the palace.’

‘Careless of Nikolai,’ Mikhailov said with a shake of the head.

‘I want to tell Anna,’ said Zhelyabov, leaning forward to look Mikhailov in the eye. ‘She should know.’

Mikhailov shrugged and turned to Anna. ‘We’ve had a member of the party inside the Winter Palace since October. He’s a carpenter, and for weeks now he’s been smuggling dynamite into one of the cellars.’

Only small quantities could be taken at a time because he was obliged to hide the explosives in his boots and the lining of his coat, but the police patrols knew him and trusted him and he had managed to build up a supply of almost 300 pounds. ‘He sleeps in the cellar with the other workmen,’ said Zhelyabov, picking up the narrative. ‘He used to hide the explosives in his pillow but the fumes were too much for him so now he keeps the stuff in a box with his clothes. The cellar’s directly below the tsar’s dining room, so when we have enough . . . boom!’ and Zhelyabov flung his arms theatrically into the air.

‘Satisfied?’ asked Mikhailov.

‘I will be when it’s done,’ Anna replied.

‘No one must know,’ Mikhailov said, looking at her intently with his small brown eyes. ‘They found drawings of the palace in Kviatkovsky’s apartment. They’ve searched the cellar more than once since.’

Anna stiffened again, struggling to control her temper. Mikhailov’s pointed ‘no one’ meant ‘someone’, someone in particular.

‘Surprised?’ Zhelyabov asked, as if to draw the sting from Mikhailov’s words. She was surprised and excited and Zhelyabov must have seen it in her face. ‘To kill the tsar in his own palace will show the people that the party has a long arm,’ he added.

‘But when?’

‘Soon. Very soon. We’re almost there. The new year will be a new dawn for the Russian people.’

T
wo Christmas days had passed and one new year before Frederick Hadfield received word from her again. For a time he could not enjoy an idle moment without being tormented by the tune from Mozart’s aria
Amore un ladroncello
, and he would hum it as he dressed, in the droshky to the hospital and even on the wards. Love, the thief of time and of liberty that chains the soul, and he would hold his head and curse under his breath for an incurable romantic. He had celebrated a Protestant Christmas at his uncle’s gloomy table, then thirteen days later an Orthodox one. The festive season had not been without cheer. There had been a succession of extravagant parties and balls and he had escorted his cousin to a glittering affair at the Nobles’ Club, where the heir to the throne was the principal guest of honour. And he was to welcome the Russian New Year with the Glen family at the mansion of their neighbour, the immensely wealthy banker, Baron von Stieglitz. The general was insisting on a carriage to collect his nephew at nine o’clock. He was not to be late.

Frederick was dressing for the Stieglitz Ball when the dvornik knocked at his door. Anna’s note – as peremptory as before – proposed a meeting at precisely the same time. It was the height of bad manners, of course, and he risked causing the sort of offence that could damage his position in embankment society irreparably, but he felt only joy at the prospect of seeing her. In the end he wrote simply that he was suffering from a fever. It did indeed feel
close to the truth – and who was going to argue with his diagnosis?

By nine o’clock he was waiting before the west front of St Boris and St Gleb. It was snowing hard and he was grateful for his old student coat and hat. New Year’s Eve, it was below freezing, and instead of sipping champagne in the baron’s opulent drawing room he was stamping his feet in an empty square in one of the poorest parts of town.

‘What is so funny?’

‘Where did you spring from?’ Walking quickly towards her, he held her tightly before slipping the scarf down from her nose and mouth to give her a long, tender kiss, her lips soft and warm. Then he took off his gloves and held her face in his hands. ‘It seems so long.’

‘Three weeks.’

‘So you’ve been counting too?’

She smiled weakly, pushing him gently away. ‘Come on – this is no place to celebrate the new year. We’re going to a party.’

She led him through the streets by the arm. From time to time they could hear the sound of happy and drunken voices through the thin glass of the poorer houses, and rough carousing from the basement taverns. They said very little to each other, he was content holding her little hand tightly, turning sometimes to catch her eye, a prickle of excitement just walking at her side. He was disappointed when they stopped at the corner of a street and she announced they were almost there. Lifting her chin, her eyes searching his face, she asked in a quiet voice: ‘Do you love me, Frederick?’

‘Yes,’ he said, and he bent to kiss her once more.

She put her hands against his chest and held him at bay. ‘So I can trust you?’

‘Of course you can.’

‘Then you must be careful what you say to my . . .’ she
hesitated for a moment ‘. . . to my friends. They must know they can trust you too.’

Her ‘friends’. He felt a flutter of alarm.

‘Well?’ she asked sharply, her brows knotted together in that peculiar frown of hers.

‘They can trust me.’

‘Good.’

But he felt ill at ease as he followed her down the street and into the yard of a mansion block. The servants’ entrance was unlocked and she led him quickly up the back stairs. On the third landing she turned before a door to give him a reassuring smile, then knocked sharply twice. After a few seconds it was opened by a broad, handsome man with a full beard, unruly hair and warm brown eyes.

‘So this is your doctor,’ he said to Anna with a robust chuckle. ‘My name is Zhelyabov, Andrei Ivanovich at your service.’

‘He is not my doctor!’ said Anna, blushing hotly.

Zhelyabov chuckled again and placed an affectionate arm about her shoulders: ‘Come in and let me take your coats.’

The living room was heaving with people, flushed with alcohol and good humour, draped over the furniture and sitting on cushions. In the centre was a round table and upon it a large tureen. A group of men and women were busy preparing some sort of punch with rum and wine and sugar and spices. No one seemed surprised to see Hadfield.

‘The punch is ready,’ an earnest-looking man in his twenties shouted from the table. ‘Out with the candles.’ A hush fell on the room and everyone crowded round the punch bowl. Anna touched Hadfield’s arm: ‘Come on.’