Part 13 (1/2)

But Hadfield's thoughts were with the little Jew called Silver and his dynamite. Silver or Gold? How many Jews from Kiev were there in the revolutionary movement? Poor Anna. He could remember the warmth as well as the exasperation in her voice when she spoke of him. Would she be safe? Perhaps she was in custody too? And would Goldenberg mention to his captors the English doctor who had once had the temerity to question the wisdom of killing a tsar?

'. . . Doctor?'

'I'm sorry, your Ladys.h.i.+p.'

'Please explain to them I want the McCulloch of the Highlands in the dining room . . .'

To Major Vladimir Barclay's mind the Jew looked anything but a desperate terrorist in his torn and dirty great coat. They had spoken only briefly; Goldenberg to spout a well rehea.r.s.ed justification of the attack on 'the tyrant'. Barclay had ordered him to hold his tongue or he would teach him some manners.

Rising from his seat, he stepped over to the window the station concourse was crowded with people then back to the stove. The train was late, there was a gale blowing through the detention room, and Barclay's patience was wearing very thin.

'Fetch me some tea,' he barked at the corporal standing at the door.

He had been waiting at the Nikolayevsky for nearly three hours. Goldenberg was wedged between gendarmes on the seats opposite, and there were a dozen more outside. They were going to take no chances. Not only had he fought like a tiger at Elizavetgrad it had taken six of the local gendarmes to subdue him but he was the only one of the conspirators they were holding in custody.

Barclay had arrived in Moscow two days after the explosion and had seen the cottage and the remains of the tunnel the terrorists had dug to the railway embankment for himself. On his third day in the city, he had helped the local gendarmes arrest a well known radical at the university. After a little direct pressure, the student had admitted sheltering a revolutionary called Hartmann and his female companions in the hours after the explosion. One of the women was certainly Sophia Perovskaya. His description of the other small, silent, a little sullen with strikingly blue eyes had brought to Barclay's mind a mental picture of Anna Romanko. The student had accompanied the three of them to the Belorussky Station where Hartmann had purchased a ticket for Berlin. He was not certain, but he thought the women had taken a train to St Petersburg.

The corporal returned with some tea and the news that word was spreading through the station that one of the terrorists who had tried to kill the tsar was being held in the detention room. A hostile crowd was gathering at the foot of the stairs.

'Can I have some tea too?' It was Goldenberg.

Barclay glanced over the top of his gla.s.s at him contemptuously.

'Well?'

'If you don't shut up, you'll get more than tea. I'll hand you over to the mob.'

Goldenberg wrinkled his face disdainfully. 'You're not going to do that, Major. Not yet. I'm far too valuable.'

d.a.m.n the fellow, Barclay thought, he was right.

17.

23 NOVEMBER 1879.

124/5 NEVSKY PROSPEKT.

They spoke of it often, and always with deep sadness and a sense of injustice. To have prepared so thoroughly and to have come so close it was a blow to the morale of all. One evening after their return to St Petersburg, Anna was preparing supper in a safe house on Nevsky. Conscious of a particularly long silence, she looked up to find Sophia Perovskaya standing at the sink, her hands in icy water, eyes fixed blankly on the wall.

'Sonechka,' Anna said, rising from the table, a knife still in her hand.

'It wasn't my fault, was it?'

'How could it be your fault?' Anna stepped over to the sink and put her arms about Sophia's waist, pressing herself against her small body. 'We only managed to get as far as we did because of you.'

'I'm sorry,' she said, turning in Anna's arms to face her. 'I'm fine, really. I know I must be strong.'

Anna reached for her hands, still rough and chapped from the work at the cottage, and very cold. 'You are the strongest among us.'

It was a little shocking. No one had seen Sophia falter. But weeks of nervous exhaustion, hard labour, the scheming, the lying and the fear of the gendarmes at the door had taken their toll on all of them. They sat side by side at the table and finished preparing supper for the most part in silence until they were joined by other comrades, Kviatokovsky, Morozov and Olga Liubatovich. No one spoke again of past failure that evening or of the plans for the future, but when they had eaten they laughed and joked and drank and sang together until late in the evening. Sophia Perovskaya's apartment was a cab journey away and she left at ten o'clock with Kviatkovsky, who lived close by. Anna was to spend the night in the little flat on Nevsky with the other two and return to her schoolhouse at Alexandrovskaya in the morning. She was anxious about her safety and would have preferred the life of an 'illegal' with her comrades in the city, but the executive committee had decided she should resume her teaching post in the village. 'The party needs people who can move freely, without fear of arrest,' Alexander Mikhailov had told her. The Director had a.s.sured him the Third Section was a long way from identifying her and she was 'clean'. Of course, there would be questions after so many months away, but Mikhailov had made her write regular bulletins on her mother's health to the local priest and had arranged for them to be sent from Kharkov.

It was the first night Anna had spent in the Nevsky flat and she was a little shocked to discover she was to sleep on a pallet in the kitchen while her comrades shared the only bed. Morozov and Liubatovich were dedicated revolutionaries with long police histories, but they had chosen to ignore the party's strictures against intimate relations.h.i.+ps and had become lovers. She wondered at their audacity. It was Nikolai Morozov who had written the manifesto with its emphasis on personal sacrifice. Would he leave Olga if the executive committee required it of him? The opportunity to express deeper feelings, s.e.xual love; she could not help but feel envious. She was alone on a hard mattress, the mice scratching at the skirting boards close to her head. It was more than two years since she had last seen her husband, Stepan the marriage was over and she was glad of it. But after weeks of frantic activity preparing for the attack, the fear and the loneliness, the role of revolutionary ascetic seemed harder to play than it had before. Life might end tomorrow before she heard a man say, 'I love you,' and mean it. Shaken along endless miles of track, in daydreams and through restless nights, one man had whispered love to her and she had imagined what it would be to share a bed with him and feel his body pressed to hers. But this man was beyond her reach. Clever and different in many ways that frightened her, how could they love when he was not of the same mind? 'No. Not one of us,' she thought, 'not one of us.' Olga and Nikolai were fortunate to have found each other. But the comfort of others was no comfort to her and the longing for affection and closeness was still with her when she woke cold and stiff in the morning.

Anna had resolved to leave for the village straight after breakfast and had packed her few possessions before the others began to stir. Olga was the first to rise, a man's padded smoking jacket over her nightgown. She was a peculiarly masculine-looking woman with a full mouth, weak chin and heavy eyebrows that met above a Roman nose. Not at all handsome but formidably clever, and her comrades admired her independence of thought and strength of purpose. She was only twenty-five but after years of prison and internal exile, she had the air of someone older and more worldly wise.

Nodding to Anna, she reached for the cigarette case she had left on the kitchen table the night before and lit one with obvious pleasure. Only when she had drawn deeply upon it two or three times was she ready for conversation. Olga's appet.i.te was already legendary, and once the small range was lit she set about frying eggs, the cigarette hanging loosely from her mouth. She was on the point of serving them when they were surprised by a quiet but urgent rapping at the door.

'Don't open it!' It was Morozov from the bedroom next door. Seconds later he joined them, blinking myopically, his long hair tousled, spindly legs beneath his greatcoat.

'The revolver!' he hissed at Olga.

But before she could open the table drawer the knocking began again and this time they heard Sophia Perovskaya's high pitched voice. 'It's me. I need to speak to you.'

Anna opened the door at once and Sophia almost fell into the room. 'It's Kviatkovsky! The police are going to raid his apartment.' She had run up the stairs and was still gasping for breath, her eyes wide with alarm.

'How do you know?' asked Morozov.

'A note from Mikhailov . . . we must warn him! There are papers . . . but it may be too late. I can't go Alexander can't go . . .'

'Here.' Anna pulled her towards a chair. 'I'll go now.'

'No,' said Morozov. 'It's too dangerous. I will ask Maria Oshanina to go. She's clean. The gendarmes have nothing on her.'

'I'm clean,' said Anna crossly. 'There's no time to waste.'

'Too much of a risk. You're a friend of Goldenberg's. And you know too much.'

'Anna's right. Someone must go now.' Olga was already moving towards the bedroom.

'But not you or Sophia. It's too dangerous,' said Morozov with alarm.

'No. It has to be Anna,' she shouted through the half open door. 'But I'm going to wait in the lane in case . . .' She did not need to finish the sentence. They knew what she meant.

A little after eight o'clock in the morning, Nevsky was bustling with traffic workers on the way to the Admiralty yards and the factories on Vasilievsky, civil servants to the great ministries and it was a while before they were able to hail a droshky. There was a biting wind from the north-east carrying with it a flurry of snow, and Olga put her arm about Anna to share the warmth of her body, pressing her close.

'If the police stop you tell them you are delivering a message from me to the dressmaker at Number 8,' she whispered. 'Nikolai and I have cover papers in the name of Khartsov.'

The driver dropped them at last at the corner of Zagorodny and Leshtukov Lane. It was a respectable part of town, popular with junior army officers and their families and doctors at the nearby hospital. Kviatkovsky was another of the gentleman revolutionaries and one of the most influential. The apartment he shared with Evgenia Figner was in a handsome yellow and white four-storey mansion in the middle of the lane. Anna knew the block well.

They hurried along Leshtukov in silence, arm in arm, their faces almost covered by their scarves. Mittened and m.u.f.fled children were throwing s...o...b..a.l.l.s at each other as they made their way to school. A dvornik was sc.r.a.ping snow from his yard into the street and an old lady, a black bundle in coat and shawl and hat, was inching unsteadily along the frozen pavement towards them with a shopping basket. There was no sign of gendarmes or the city police. A short distance from the mansion, Olga pulled Anna into an open yard: 'I'll wait here.' She leant forward and kissed her on the lips. 'Be careful, comrade.'

Kviatkovsky's grand apartment was on the third floor, with a fine gallery window over the street. Nothing appeared out of place. Anna turned under the carriage arch into the yard and walked with purpose towards the back entrance and the servant's staircase. Gazing up at the back of the block, she could see no sign of a parasol, the signal that was to be posted in a window when it was safe to visit. One foot lightly in front of the other, she began climbing the stairs, pausing after a few seconds to listen for voices or boots or the clatter of a rifle b.u.t.t. At the door to the third-floor landing, she stopped and listened, but could hear only the faint trundle of a pa.s.sing carriage in the street and the ferocious beating of her heart. It was no time for timidity; a deep breath, her small gloved hand firmly on the door k.n.o.b, and she turned it quickly and stepped on to the landing. There was no one there. Kviatkovsky's door was closed and there was nothing out of the ordinary muddy footprints on the tiled floor, scratches on the varnished door, a splintered frame nothing to suggest there had been a struggle. Perhaps there was still time. With another deep breath she stepped forward and rang the bell. At once, the door jerked open to reveal a portly middle-aged man in the black uniform coat of the city police.