Andrew Williams - To Kill a Tsar

‘A fine thing, I’m sure, to have your police escort travelling behind you,’ muttered Dobrshinsky.

‘Well, take a little comfort,’ the chief prosecutor observed tartly, his gaze fixed on the coach as it trundled through the echoing arch into the street. ‘His Majesty has just instructed his coachman to take him over the Pevchesky Bridge.’

‘Yes, there is comfort in that,’ Dobrshinsky replied. So he had listened to that much advice. The tsar would follow the route along the Ekaterininsky Canal to the parade. ‘Perhaps it will be enough to keep him alive.’

Anna did not obey the executive committee but waited near the manège for the crump of the mine. She felt sick with anxiety and a little faint and had to turn away to find support against a wall. Perhaps it was the baby, too. Then, at a little after one o’clock, the crowd began to twitter with excitement and she heard horses at a fast trot and the rumble of a coach. She caught only a glimpse of him at the window, his large eyes turned towards her, a soft expression, whiskers and moustache greyer than in the paintings that hung in every public building. People about her were cheering and crossing themselves like pilgrims at the tomb of a saint. I could have tossed the bomb beneath his coach, she thought. And yet, although she wanted him to die she knew she no longer had the strength or will to be his executioner. She could picture her comrade Frolenko in the cheese shop clasping the wires in his workman’s hands, poised to make the connection that would not only kill the tsar but bring part of the building down on top of himself.

‘Hurrah!’

Through the tall windows of the manège, she could hear the cheers of the Life Guards as they welcomed the sovereign, and then a military band struck up a quick march as the battalions trooped their colours. A mounted gendarme was pressing the spectators back quite unnecessarily and an old woman cried out in pain as his horse stepped on her foot. Some of the men began to remonstrate with him but the gendarme was too drunk with self-regard to care. Anna was suddenly conscious that she was shivering with apprehension and the cold. Why was she waiting? There was nothing she could do. Without a task, she risked recognition and arrest for nothing.

She turned her back on the manège and the insistent rattle of the Life Guards’ drums with half a mind to do what she had been instructed to do. A contingent of mounted gendarmes passed at a slow canter on to the gates of the Mikhailovsky Palace. The city police were already clearing the public from the pavement close by and, peering through the huge wrought-iron railings, she could see the grand duchess’s flunkies scraping ice from the carriageway that swept up to the palace entrance. As she watched them bent double over their spades, she cursed herself for a dull-witted simpleton. They were preparing for the emperor, and if it was his intention to visit his cousin at the Mikhailovsky he would return to his own palace along the canal embankment. The mine in the Malaya Sadovaya was quite useless. Would Sophia guess?

Without wasting another second deliberating, she set off across Mikhailovsky Square in the direction of the cheese shop. But before she had gone more than a hundred yards she saw one of the bombers struggling through the crowd towards her. He had a shock of blond hair and an earnest clean-shaven face, and in his arms he was carrying a white paper bag the size of a large box of chocolates. If someone jogged his elbow a dozen or more passers-by would be blown to pieces. He noticed her only as their paths crossed, and gave her an anxious little smile. Sophia must have given her signal, because he was walking purposefully towards the canal. After a few seconds, Anna turned to follow him.

The royal cortège would turn right on to the Ekaterininsky Embankment, with the frozen canal 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 nobility, divided and sub-divided into apartments. The bombers would have only two minutes, three at the most, before the tsar turned to cross the canal 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 passed 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 worshippers were making their way home along the embankment. Snow had been swept from the street into grey heaps on the frozen canal, 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 bloody act of violence.

She was still a long way from the bridge on the Nevsky when she heard the muffled 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 canal railings to steady herself, her heart racing, her shoulders lifting involuntarily in anticipation. 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 canal but the coach had passed the first position and was gathering speed, the driver whipping his horses on towards the bridge.

‘God 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 passed 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.

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 canal, the driver struggling to control the horses.

‘Stop them, man,’ he shouted. ‘For God’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 God, defend us against the assaults of the enemy… Oh God, 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.