Part 34 (1/2)

The royal cortege would turn right on to the Ekaterininsky Embankment, with the frozen ca.n.a.l on one side and the imposing wall of the Mikhailovsky Palace garden on the other. On the opposite bank, the imperial stables and the yellow and pink mansions of the more impecunious members of the n.o.bility, divided and sub-divided into apartments. The bombers would have only two minutes, three at the most, before the tsar turned to cross the ca.n.a.l for the Winter Palace.

To avoid compromising her comrades, Anna walked in the opposite direction in the hope of crossing to the other side before the royal party reached the embankment.

There were very few people on the street at that hour. She pa.s.sed a boy with a large basket of meat, and she was forced from the narrow pavement by two men carrying a couch. The service at the Kazan Cathedral had just finished and some of the wors.h.i.+ppers were making their way home along the embankment. Snow had been swept from the street into grey heaps on the frozen ca.n.a.l, and four small boys were chipping away at chunks of ice then racing them across its surface. Their laughter sharpened Anna's anxiety and she wanted to shout to them to go home. They should not witness a b.l.o.o.d.y act of violence.

She was still a long way from the bridge on the Nevsky when she heard the m.u.f.fled beat of horses' hooves on hard-packed snow. A middle-aged couple walking towards her petty bourgeois, to judge by their dress stepped into the road to peer along the embankment. And as she turned to look too, Cossack outriders six, or was it seven, of them cantered into view, followed a few seconds later by the royal coach, the sun glinting on its polished black paintwork. She grabbed the ca.n.a.l railings to steady herself, her heart racing, her shoulders lifting involuntarily in antic.i.p.ation. But the coach was rattling on at a stiff pace, a lively ride over the frozen cobbles, the two police sleighs trailing a few yards behind. Something had gone wrong. She was too far away to see the bombers or Sophia on the other side of the ca.n.a.l but the coach had pa.s.sed the first position and was gathering speed, the driver whipping his horses on towards the bridge.

'G.o.d Bless His Majesty!' she heard someone say behind her. And she could see a young woman waving from the pavement as the coach swept by. Surely the coach had pa.s.sed the second position too.

'It's over,' she said out loud, and at once nervous tension began draining from her.

'What's over?' she heard someone say.

She was on the point of turning to see who when the bomb exploded into a sheet of yellow flame.

2.20 P.M.

THE EKATERININSKY Ca.n.a.l.

Young, short, blond, a black coat, the bomb in a white package above his head. Major Vladimir Barclay knew with sickening certainty the second before he hurled it in front of the advancing coach that he was a terrorist. There was a flash and a deafening crash, and the coach was engulfed by a billowing cloud of acrid white smoke. Barclay's sleigh slewed towards the ca.n.a.l, the driver struggling to control the horses.

'Stop them, man,' he shouted. 'For G.o.d's sake, the emperor . . .'

He saw Colonel Dvorzhitsky jump from the other sleigh and run into the smoke. A moment later Barclay was running too. The imperial coach had pulled up a hundred yards further on, its back splintered by the blast. Pounding heavily in his stiff uniform towards it, a long forgotten prayer from childhood slipped into his thoughts: 'Oh G.o.d, defend us against the a.s.saults of the enemy . . . Oh G.o.d, deliver me from my trouble and misery . . .'

Out of the corner of his eye he saw a group of Cossacks forcing the bomber to his knees. The others had dismounted and were gathered about the coach and, as Barclay reached them, someone wrenched open the door.

'Help me,' and reaching for the arm offered to him, the tsar stepped from the shattered coach like Lazarus from his tomb.

'Thank G.o.d, I'm not wounded.' His voice was empty with shock. He looked round at the anxious faces, his large brown eyes wide, unblinking, then crossed himself twice, and Barclay offered his own prayer of thanks for what was surely a miracle.

'There may be others,' Barclay heard himself say, gasping still for breath.

Colonel Dvorzhitsky must have had the same thought because he stepped forward without hesitation. 'There may be more of them, Your Majesty.'

The emperor stared at him blankly for a few seconds then gazed along the embankment to where a grey pall of smoke hung over the blast site. 'I want to see,' he said, and he took a few uncertain steps towards the ca.n.a.l, grasping the heavy iron rail at its edge for support.

Barclay had seen the same distant look in his eyes on the battlefield. In such a state, even an emperor was incapable of thinking clearly. 'You must tell His Majesty, sir.'

But the colonel gave him a look as if to say: 'Who can tell a tsar?'

The emperor's cavalry boots slipped on the icy cobblestones and Barclay sprang forward to hold him by the elbow. The sound of the explosion had reverberated through a Sunday quiet city and the concerned and merely curious were scrambling across the frozen ca.n.a.l and up on to the embankment. The escort was trying to screen the emperor with its horses. One of the Cossacks had been killed outright, his mount still twitching in a pool of blood in the centre of the road. A pa.s.ser-by had collapsed in a ball at the edge of the pavement, his clothes tattered, his face covered in blood, and against the palace wall on the opposite side of the road, the broken body of a boy of ten or eleven, the raw meat he had been carrying in his basket scattered in a macabre arc around him. The bomber was standing close to the blast site in the custody of four soldiers.

The tsar approached him unsteadily, dragging his left leg, and with a trembling hand pointed to the dying boy. 'You see, I'm all right, thank G.o.d, but look, look at your handiwork . . .'

'Do not thank G.o.d yet,' the terrorist replied defiantly.

'This is madness,' Barclay muttered, and he touched the colonel's arm: 'For G.o.d's sake speak to His Majesty, sir.' Then he addressed the emperor himself.

'Your Majesty, there is a sleigh close by. Please, Your Majesty, it isn't safe.'

The tsar turned slowly to look at him, and Barclay was struck by the sadness and bewilderment in his eyes. 'First, I want to go a little closer.'

A squadron of cavalry had turned on to the embankment from the manege and began to take up positions about the emperor. But mounted, the guards could play no part. Their horses were s.h.i.+fting restlessly at the edge of a large circle while the crowd of onlookers gathered on the pavement near the emperor with no one to hold them in check.

Barclay could barely contain his anger. But what could he do? There were senior officers there, it was their duty to reason with His Majesty.

'I want to see the site of the explosion,' the emperor insisted, and he began walking towards the small crater in the middle of the road. He had taken no more than a few steps when a young man at the ca.n.a.l fence swung round to face him and, lifting his arms above his head, hurled a bomb at his feet. A scorching rush of air and Barclay was knocked to the ground, his face stinging, blinded for a second and completely deaf. And there were others on the cobblestones beside him. Through the dense smoke he could see an officer with white epaulets was it Dvorzhitsky? rising unsteadily. His ears were ringing but after a few seconds the sound of someone screaming reached him as if from far away, then a plaintive cry for help. With a supreme effort he picked himself up and stumbled forward through the smoke. Dvorzhitsky was kneeling over the tsar. His back was against the granite base of the ca.n.a.l fence, he was bare-headed, his coat in tatters like a beggar's, his face covered in blood. One of his eyes was closed, the other empty of expression. His legs had been shattered by the blast, the right one hanging by strips of flesh, and blood was pumping from his severed arteries. And as the smoke cleared Barclay could see a score of dead and wounded about him, some crawling, some standing, the snow stained with plumes of blood. Among the fragments of clothing, the hats and swords, were severed limbs and pieces of torn flesh. Close to the tsar, his face unrecognisable, lay the man responsible for the carnage. If not yet dead, he was very close to it.

'I'm cold, Dvorzhitsky, cold,' the emperor said, his voice weak and flat. The colonel was swaying over his sovereign, close to collapse and in no fit state to issue orders. And to Barclay's dismay, a crowd of onlookers and guards was stepping through the wounded to gather about the tsar, their hats in their hands.

Couldn't they see their emperor was dying? Struggling to control the grief and guilt welling inside him, Barclay shouted: 'Get back! Get out of the way! You a blanket for His Majesty. We're going to carry him to the sleigh.'

But before they could lift him, the Grand Duke Mikhail Nikolayevich appeared as if from nowhere, his guards forcing their way through the crowd. He fell to his knees and reached out gently with a white gloved hand to touch his brother's face. And the tsar whispered something Barclay did not catch, but a moment later the order was given to lift him into a sleigh and drive with all speed for the palace.

'The hospital we must stop the bleeding!' But no one was listening to Barclay. 'Your Highness, the hospital . . .'

One of the Grand Duke's officers pulled at his sleeve: 'It's the emperor's wish.'

No one was going to question the word of the Autocrat of All the Russias.

Barclay watched in a daze as the sleigh sped along the embankment towards the Konyushenny Bridge and pa.s.sed from his view. There were no more miracles. They had killed the tsar. And standing there in the street, surrounded by the wounded and the dead, tattered pieces of uniform, a broken sword, he shed silent helpless tears for his emperor and for Russia and for himself.

3.30 P.M.

THE NEVSKY PROSPEKT SADOVAYA VOZNESENSKY

At half past three in the afternoon the double-headed eagle of the House of Romanov was lowered at the Winter Palace. As word spread through the city, people began to gather in the streets to listen to the rumours and to weep or pray. There was talk of a palace coup, a royalist plot, and of Russia's foreign enemies, but most were sure the 'nihilists' were to blame.

'Do you know what they've done to our tsar?' an old lady asked Anna, wiping her eyes with her mittens. 'They say he was helping the wounded from the first bomb when they killed him.'

'He was the liberator,' said a merchant in a fine fur-lined coat. 'Why would they kill the tsar who gave the serfs their freedom?'