Andrew Williams - To Kill a Tsar

The battered old Gladstone was just where Hadfield had left it on a shelf above the dispensary. He picked it up and made his way back along the dim corridor towards the refectory. The door was ajar and as he approached it he could hear Goldenberg’s high-pitched voice.

‘I’ve been following him all week — to and from his office…’

On an impulse Hadfield did something he would have condemned as ungentlemanly in others: he waited and listened and watched at the door.

‘It would be foolish to attempt it from a moving cab — not after the last time,’ Goldenberg continued. The women exchanged a worried glance.

‘I don’t think we should speak of it now,’ said Anna.

‘He’s guarded, of course: four gendarmes and the driver.’ Goldenberg ignored her. ‘But it would be possible from the pavement outside Fontanka 16 or close to his home.’

‘Let’s wait until Alexander’s here,’ he heard Anna say with steel in her voice.

‘What — oh, the doctor…’ Goldenberg tailed off.

Taking this as his cue, Hadfield pushed open the door and stepped inside. For a few seconds there was an embarrassed silence in which they were careful not to make eye contact with each other. It was Anna who eventually broke it: ‘Let me take you to the church, Doctor. You can pick up a cab there.’

‘Thank you, but I can find my own way.’

Anna was insistent, rising to her feet: ‘The streets are badly lit and it would be easy to lose your way.’

Snatching her coat from the table, she made for the door, plainly anxious to guide him from the building as quickly as possible.

Walking beside her in the dark street, Hadfield was deeply troubled by what he had heard, and he knew from the charged silence that she was conscious of it.

‘Are you involved in this?’ he asked at last.

She flinched, startled by his directness: ‘What did you hear?’

‘Enough.’

They were at the corner of a street immediately opposite a small church, a cluster of golden domes, the patriarchal cross silhouetted against the faint gaslight of the city. From a lane a little further on, angry drunken voices drifted closer.

‘I’ve known Grigory a long time, Doctor,’ she said, and even in shadow he could see the furrow between her dark eyebrows. ‘He has a wild imagination. Yes, we talk of the need for action to bring about the revolution, but…’

Her words tailed away as the drunken argument spilled from the lane on to the street. They waited, looking everywhere but at each other, while three peasants, to judge from their clothes, staggered past and into a yard.

‘It’s idle talk — that’s all. Who would trust Grigory to carry out such a…’ she hesitated, ‘delicate, such a delicate task?’

‘Murder?’

‘No. No,’ and she recoiled a little, hurt by the suggestion, ‘an attack on the system of oppression.’

‘Ah. Yes.’

‘Grigory is a talker, that’s all. Please believe me. There are no plans for any sort of…’ she hesitated again, ‘political action. I will talk to Grigory, warn him he must be careful what he says.’

She took a step forward, her head at his shoulder, her white face tilted up to him, and his heart beat so fast he was sure she would hear it pounding.

‘You won’t speak of this to anyone, will you?’

‘No.’

‘Please forget it. Foolishness, that’s all.’ She paused and retreated a step, satisfied. ‘I’m glad we’re going to be friends.’

It was only five minutes more to the square in front of St Boris and St Gleb. There was not a soul to be seen and little prospect of a cab. She offered to wait with him and he wanted to accept for the pleasure of her company, but he brushed the thought aside as ungallant. ‘I know my way from here. I’ll take a cab on the embankment. But how will you get back to the school? You can’t walk alone.’

She was capable of looking after herself and knew the district well, she said, but thanked him for his concern with a summer smile that set his heart fluttering like the wings of a butterfly.

‘And will you help us again?’

‘Yes. I will help you.’

Yes, he would visit the clinic the following Sunday and perhaps the Sunday after that. But not for the poor of Peski or from the same woolly operatic urge to ‘do something’ that had led him to agree in the first place. No. It was curiosity, the shadow of her smile, the scent of her hair as she bent close over the treatment table, and the effortless grace with which she moved.

Not for a moment, for a second, was he taken in by the gossamer thin veil she had attempted to weave about Goldenberg’s words. Yes, he was vain and boastful and insecure, so much was obvious, but he was dangerous too. There was a certain self-righteous vanity in all who felt they had a right to kill in cold blood in the furtherance of their cause. Hadfield had met men and women who for all the talk of freedom were motivated by something more prosaic — self-regard or money or sexual desire, or by a simple need to belong — and they would play their part in the revolution too — if it came.

‘Ah, Anna, you’re back. And how is the good doctor? I was just telling our comrades the story of St Boris and St Gleb Church.’

Alexander Mikhailov had a soft, cultivated voice and a good-humoured if slippery smile. He was perched at the edge of a long refectory table, Goldenberg and Evgenia sitting on the bench at his feet, and a young man with bad skin and lank greasy hair — a student, to judge from his shabby uniform coat — was standing behind him.

‘The city’s bakers are paying for the church as a thanks offering for the miraculous deliverance of the tsar from the hands of the revolutionary who took a shot at him twenty years ago,’ said Mikhailov, shaking his head in a show of incredulity. ‘They would have looked pretty silly if poor Alexander Soloviev had aimed a little straighter.’

‘You should have let me do it,’ said Goldenberg, petulantly. ‘I can shoot straight.’

Mikhailov turned lazily to him, his face empty of expression: ‘Well, it’s taken the bakers ten years to get this far with the church. Perhaps someone will make a decent fist of it before they finish and disappoint them yet.’

Slipping from the bench, he smoothed the tails of his frock coat and turned to Anna: ‘We must speak.’

From the refectory, he led her down the corridor and out into the courtyard at the rear. The carriage gates were closed and looked as if they had been for years. On the other three sides, the windows of the building were roughly boarded like a derelict prison. But for a thin shaft of light spilling from the open door across the cracked and weedy flags, the yard was dark, oppressively so. Mikhailov stood at the door with the light at his back, his shadow falling theatrically across her. A showman with a love of conspiracy and the shade, but in the months Anna had worked alongside him she had learnt to recognise that he was the sharpest, the best informed and most security conscious member of their little band. Ruthless, a truly dedicated and energetic revolutionary, he was cut from Bakunin’s classic mould: everything that promoted the success of the movement was moral, everything that hindered it immoral.

‘The English doctor, can he be trusted?’

‘Vera Figner says so.’

‘And you?’

‘I think so too.’

‘Is it worth the risk?’

Anna paused to collect her thoughts, sweeping a loose strand of hair back in a single graceful movement. ‘Yes, it is worth the risk. He can be useful.’

‘But our work is more important than the patients at the clinic.’

‘Of course, yes, I know. I’m not a fool. I mean he is very well connected. His uncle is General Glen…’