To Kill a Tsar (6 page)

He did not reply. The gathering was breaking into conversational groups again. Their hostess returned with an anxious hand to her face. Anna Kovalenko had drawn Goldenberg aside and it was clear from her angry gestures they were engaged in an ill-tempered exchange. Hadfield began to make his excuses, but as he was reaching for Vera’s hand she said abruptly:

‘Lydia meant something to you, didn’t she?’ There was a steeliness in her manner, in the set of her jaw, and she held on firmly to his hand when propriety required him to withdraw it.

‘Yes, of course. Lydia was a very good friend to me,’ he said slowly. ‘Is she in St Petersburg?’

‘St Petersburg?’ Vera gave a bitter little laugh. ‘Lydia was arrested for distributing propaganda. Imprisoned. Exiled. She’s been sent to eastern Siberia.’

Hadfield turned his head away. Lydia with the soft brown eyes and teasing smile. He felt a lump the size of a fist in his throat. For a short time they had meant so much to each other. He had not seen or heard from her for three years but her last angry words troubled him still. He knew he had caused her great pain.

‘I’m sorry, Verochka.’

Vera Figner was gazing at him intently. She had not released his hand.

‘There is no freedom to protest peacefully here, Frederick. No alternative to terror. You’ll see.’

Old Penkin was a wily bird. He knew to keep his eyes open. He knew when there was a rouble or two to be earned for a little information. They had been coming and going all afternoon. He had watched them from the street and then from a chair at his gate. One of them had even asked him directions to Number 86. A young gentleman in a fine black fur-lined coat had stood gazing at the Volkonsky place only feet from him. Foreign-looking. Penkin had made a mental note of them all. He was the yard-keeper at the Kozlov house opposite, had been for fifteen years, and he knew all about Yuliya Sergeyovna Volkonsky and her friends. He had spoken to Constable Rostislov about them before.

‘Fairy tales,’ the policeman had said at first. ‘Fairy tales, old man. Bugger off. You’re not getting vodka money from me.’

That was before a madman tried to kill the tsar. Since then Constable Rostislov had been falling over himself to pay for the dvornik’s scraps. Of course, no one liked an informer. Penkin hated informers himself. But who would begrudge an old man a little extra money after fifteen years of fetching and carrying in all weathers for kopeks? On the quiet, that was the thing, just a word in the constable’s ear.

‘Hey, Tan’ka,’ he called through the kitchen door, ‘I must go out for a while.’

The maid rolled her eyes: ‘Don’t expect me to lie for you, old man. And don’t come back drunk.’

Penkin scowled at her: ‘Shut up, you trollop. I’ve got business. Important business.’

‘I know your sort of business,’ she replied with a harsh laugh.

‘Shut your mouth.’ He wanted to take his hand to her. He
offered her money instead. ‘Two kopeks for you if you tell them I’m out on house business.’

‘Five.’

‘Done.’

The local police station was only a short walk away on Gorokhovaya Street. Penkin was careful to be sure no one saw him enter. As fortune would have it, Constable Vasili Rostislov was on duty and at the station. They sat in a large office full of empty desks and bookcases stacked high with police files. Penkin could not read but he could count. He knew it was important to count.

‘They began arriving at a little before three o’clock. Her footman told me she was inviting politicals, so I knew to be looking out for them.’

‘Names?’ the constable asked.

‘No. But I can tell you what they looked like. You can ask Yuliya Sergeyovna for the names, if you want them.’

Rostislov pulled open a drawer and took out a notebook and small leather folder of photographs. He opened it and began placing pictures on the desk in front of the dvornik. ‘All right. Only the truth now. If you lie I’ll find out and you’ll regret it.’

Penkin began to move the pictures round the desktop with a dirty finger, picking them up, peering at them, scratching his nose thoughtfully, shifting on his chair. Students – men and women – nicely dressed, expensive, some in uniform and some in frock coats and ties. What did they have to worry about? Nothing. There were two he was sure he recognised, and he handed them back to the policeman. Rostislov stared at him: ‘Have you been drinking?’

‘No,’ said the dvornik sulkily.

‘Are you sure about these two?’

‘Yes.’

‘This one?’

Penkin nodded.

‘Wait here. Don’t touch anything.’ The policeman pushed his chair away from the desk and crossed the office to a door in the opposite corner. He opened it and Penkin caught a glimpse of a brightly lit room with clerks bent over desks before it swung to behind him. The time slipped by and the dvornik began to grow impatient. He had been away from the Kozlov house for almost half an hour. The maid could not be trusted to make a decent job of lying for him – not for five kopeks. At last the door opened again.

‘You’re coming with me,’ Constable Rostislov said, lifting his uniform coat from a peg.

‘But I have to be back. They’ll miss me.’

The policeman laughed. He was clearly in great good humour.

‘Too bad. We’re going to Fontanka 16.’

T
he earnest faces and desperate talk left a dull grey impression on Frederick Hadfield’s mind for days and he resolved to be busy if another invitation was delivered to his door. He thought of Lydia Figner often and found himself consumed by feelings of guilt about the careless way he had ended their affair. As the days passed and he heard nothing more from her sisters, he began to wonder if they had just dismissed him as a hopeless case, beyond redemption, another fuzzy liberal without the vision or courage necessary for their great socialist project. For the most part, he was happy to be considered so, even if it was impossible to entirely ignore the truth of Vera’s parting shot: there is no freedom in Russia. With a stroke of his pen the tsar had made the army master of life and liberty in his empire. Men and women suspected of ‘subversive tendencies’ could be brought before a court martial and either imprisoned or banished without any recourse to an appeal.

From time to time he would cross the Neva by the pontoon bridge at the eastern tip of Vasilievsky and stare across the water at the grim stone face of the St Peter and St Paul Fortress. The enemies the state simply wished to forget were held in the cellars of the Alexeevsky Ravelin until cold and hunger carried them away. Would the Figners die in this Russian Bastille? And he would imagine Vera shivering in the darkness, her white face still defiant, an unspoken ‘Didn’t I say so’ in the damp air between them.

But Hadfield was too busy on the wards of the Nikolaevsky and with a growing list of private patients to brood for long on
the fate of the Figners or the country’s future. With the help of his aunt, he began to establish his reputation as a physician in embankment society, in particular with Anglo-Russian women of mature years, of whom there were a goodly number. So much nicer than those German doctors was the general view, and so well qualified. Some remembered his father with affection, and one old lady had ‘the honour’ to have been examined by his great-uncle, Sir James; ‘You are so like him, dear,’ she had said, with a tear of memory in her eye. And it had been suggested to him more than once that the emperor would one day favour the great-nephew of such a loyal servant of the House of Romanov with a royal appointment. Hadfield was grateful but a little embarrassed by the attention and looked forward to his afternoons at the Nikolaevsky with those who could not afford to pay for his services and would never dream of inviting him to dinner.

On the last Sunday in April, the dvornik huffed and puffed up the stairs to his apartment with a note from the British embassy. It was from one of the consuls, an old friend of his father’s: the ambassador’s wife had taken to her bed with a fever and he would be grateful if Dr Hadfield could spare the time to attend upon her. A victoria was waiting at the door for an answer, the surly coachman tapping his whip impatiently against its iron frame.

The embassy and its residence were at the seat of imperial power on the embankment before the Field of Mars where the emperor reviewed the royal regiments, within hailing distance of his palace. A fine eighteenth-century mansion, it had belonged to the first Alexander’s tutor and councillor, and the tsarconqueror had often danced in its famous White Ballroom. With less ceremony, Hadfield was shown up the bright marble staircase, through the embassy’s formal rooms and into the private quarters in the east wing.

The Countess of Dufferin was suffering from no more than
a severe head cold and an acute attack of anxiety. But Hadfield was charming and concerned and left her with just the sort of large brown bottle she was expecting and would have been disappointed not to receive. A generous dose of honey and lemon to be taken on a silver spoon. By the following day she was much improved and fulsome in her praise for ‘my doctor’ and his ‘miracle’ cure.

Hadfield visited her twice more and, as her spirits improved, he found her to be engaging, with a keen interest in her new home. Lady Dufferin was not handsome: she had an angular face with a heavy brow, small dark eyes and loose curled hair, difficult to tame, judging by the number of pins and bands used to hold it in place. But the impression was of a lively woman with a wry, self-deprecating sense of humour. A little guarded – no doubt in keeping with her position – she had none of the aristocratic hauteur he had encountered in some of his patients in London. She questioned Hadfield closely about his work and expressed an interest in visiting the Nikolaevsky. The ambassador would accompany her, she said, the Earl of Dufferin wished to be familiar with all aspects of Russian life.

‘And your uncle, General Glen . . . Of course, he has made us very welcome, but I fear I may have offended him. I understand the general goes to church every day during Passion Week. Do you go to church that often, Doctor?’

‘Not as often as I should and not as often as my uncle would like,’ Hadfield said with a little shake of the head.

He had grown a thick diplomatic skin – the loss of his father, the strange ‘Russian boy’ at an English boarding school, the studied patience of medical practice – these had shaped a personality naturally inclined to please, but had also taught him a comfortable degree of detachment. An admirer of Darwin and Huxley, he was an agnostic, a firm believer in natural selection and the descent of man, but he was careful not to express these views in what his mother liked to describe as ‘polite
company’. For her sake he had accompanied the Glen family to the English church on Easter Sunday.

‘Your uncle is a man of forthright opinions. He was concerned that Dufferin and I had only been to the English church once at Easter.’

Hadfield’s face must have betrayed the irritation he felt, for Lady Dufferin lifted her eyes to his and her patient smile became a conspiratorial one: ‘Well, the general recommended you. In practitioners, at least, his judgement is not to be faulted.’

The following day the embassy coachman delivered a warm note from the ambassador requesting the pleasure of Dr Hadfield’s company at the opera.

His father’s diamond studs, top hat, tails and black leather shoes from Jermyn Street – later he would smile at the rich irony of meeting her at the theatre in the company of a countess.

The Dufferin party was seated in the grand tier to the right of the imperial suite in a box designated suitable for grand dukes and ambassadors. The Mikhailovsky was glittering silver in the brilliant light cast by the new electric sconces the management had installed at great expense.

Her Ladyship had invited what she called a ‘select band of six’; Hadfield, the first and second secretaries at the embassy, and
The Times
’s man in St Petersburg, Mr George Dobson. It was a lively group, and the ambassador clearly believed he was among friends, presuming on a doctor’s discretion and the self-interest of a newspaper correspondent. He regaled them with a humorous anecdote told to him by the prime minister, Lord Beaconsfield, then there was talk of the war between Russia and Turkey and the seeds of discontent sown throughout the empire by the incompetent handling of the campaign.

‘Do you know, Doctor,’ said Lady Dufferin, turning to Hadfield, ‘a terrorist tried to kill the chief of the secret police—’

‘The Third Section—’ her husband corrected her from the seat beside her.

‘. . . just around the corner from our house? Two shots were fired into his carriage. They missed, but now they’re threatening to murder his daughter. And Mr Dobson says a girl walked into a party in Moscow last week and shot a man. That’s correct, isn’t it, Mr Dobson?’ Lady Dufferin leant back to catch the eye of the correspondent.

‘Yes, Your Ladyship. They say the victim was ordered to shoot the emperor but fled from Petersburg to avoid doing so and that the girl was sent to punish him.’

‘Well, what do you think of that?’ Lady Dufferin asked in a voice that left no doubt as to her own strong opinion on the matter.

Hadfield was relieved when the conversation turned to the ambassador’s first official visit to the Winter Palace. Leaning forward a little, he could see the only empty seats in the house were in the imperial suite. That Meyerbeer’s
The Prophet
was not to royal taste was hardly surprising, for it had been a great favourite in revolutionary circles in Switzerland where it was held to be a salutory tale of tyranny and religious hypocrisy.

‘. . . I don’t like it at all,’ said Lady Dufferin. ‘The electricity spoils the effect of the chandeliers. The balcony’s in darkness. And here,’ with a graceful flourish of her gloved hand she indicated the boxes on the opposite side of the grand tier, ‘the lamps are too bright. Look, the lights flicker and change colour. It just isn’t as gay as gas. But what an extraordinary modern age we live in.’

Yes, yes, what a modern age. Hadfield nodded as if hanging on her every word, but his attention was fixed on the gloom near the back of the stalls. Later, he would wonder what had drawn him to her of the many hundreds seated below: Anna Kovalenko, his persecutor at the political salon, Anna with the
strikingly beautiful blue eyes. Perhaps it was because even at such a distance he could sense she was restless and ill at ease. Evgenia Figner and Madame Volkonsky were sitting to her right; to her left, the vociferous and blood-thirsty Goldenberg. The imperial suite with its huge orange velvet and gold fringed drapes was almost directly above them. Fortunate then that the chairs inside it were empty, Hadfield thought with a wry smile, or the evening might have been spoilt.