Duncan Kyle - The King's Commisar

'You haven't heard?'

'We hear nothing.'

So I told Kobylinsky briefly of the incarceration of Nicholas and Alexandra and their daughter.

'Can anything be done?'

'I'm trying. The situation is very difficult.'

'Are you taking the others?' Kobylinsky then asked me worriedly. 'They very much want to go to their parents, of course. But I don't like the prospect of Ekaterinburg ... I don't like that at all.'

'No. There's no question of taking them, but I'll talk to the youngsters.'

He nodded. 'Try not to worry them.'

So I made my face as cheerful as possible and adopted a matching tone, but it was a melancholy experience to face the three Grand Duchesses and young Alexei and to tell them the news. That they blamed me was clear in their eyes, but they were all of them too well-mannered to say an accusing word; they simply sat in a little semi-circle round me, listening with great concentration and absorbing every movement of my eyes and lips and facial muscles.

When I had finished, the questions came, and they were heartbreakingly polite and formal: How is Papa? How is Mama? Is Marie well? I told them what I could, but such explanation as I could make satisfied them as little as it satisfied me.

The leader among them, though not the eldest, was clearly Tatiana, a thin-faced girl of twenty. She sat silent for a while, listening as I spoke, and then broke in: 'Commissar Yakovlev, we are of one mind. If our parents and our sister are imprisoned, we wish to be with them. Please take us to Ekaterinburg.'

I had hoped to avoid telling them of my own arrest and expulsion from the city, because to do so must increase their burden of worry, but it became impossible to conceal.

'I cannot take you,' I told her, and explained why.

'Then who is responsible?' she demanded. 'We all understood you to represent the highest Bolshevik authority. We understood also that safety, at the very least, was guaranteed.'

'I have informed Moscow by telegraph,' I told them. 'And I feel sure that authority will soon be re-established over the Ekaterinburg Regional Soviet.' I tried to sound convincing, and perhaps the younger ones believed me, but plainly Tatiana did not.

'Did you really come on orders from Lenin and Sverdlov?' she asked me. 'Is it true?'

'Perfectly true.'

'But they are masters of all Russia now! How can this happen, this defiance?'

I told her what I had once thought myself: that the answer lay in a failure of communication, and perhaps in rivalry.

T, she said, 'think it is all a trick! Commissar, if our request cannot properly be made to you, to whom can it be made?'

'I will pass it on to Moscow. That is all I can do. And now I must speak alone to your brother.'

'Why?'

'I have a gift for him, and a message.'

Tatiana blinked distrustfully at me, but of course she was powerless to prevent it. She led the girls from the room and I was alone with Alexei.

He smiled at me, quite cheerfully. 'Tatiana always looks on the black side,' he said. 'I'm sure we'll all be together soon.' And then the smile broadened. 'You said you had a gift and a message. Who from Papa?'

I took out the sapphire-studded crucifix and held it up by its chain so that it swung.

'A crucifix,' Alexei said confidently, 'must be from Mama. Am I right?'

'Not entirely," I said. 'The gift and the message go together, and really they're from your father. He told me that he had left something with you, a document -'

I saw the boy's quick frown and made myself smile. 'It is just that he changed his mind, you see. He told you to keep the document safely and to give it to him only when the four of you are taken to join him. I know that's what he said. He told me so. You were to keep it secret and give it to nobody. But now he wants you to give the paper to me.'

'No.' Alexei's lips were clamped together. 'He said I must give it to nobody.'

I know he did. You heard me say so. Alexei, he sent the crucifix so you would know the message was from him, because you would recognize the crucifix. I'm sure you do.'

He was distressed now, and I hated myself for lying to him. The fact remained that the paper might well be the only means of saving all their lives. He said, on the edge of tears, 'But he told me, and made me promise!'

I said gently, 'Alexei, did you tell me about the paper?'

He shook his head. 'Of course not.'

'Did anybody else know - your sisters, for instance?'

'No.'

'It was between the two of you, between you and your father - a secret between men?'

'Yes.'

'Then how do I know?'

He stared at me, blinking.

I said, 'Only he or you could have told me, Alexei, and you didn't, did you? So it must have been your papa, mustn't it? And the crucifix is to show you that's the truth.'

A moment passed, and his brow cleared a little. Then he stretched out a hand for the crucifix. I gave it to him and he examined it.

'You know it, don't you?' I said.

Alexei rose. 'I'll bring you the paper, Commissar,' he said politely. With the paper safe in my pocket I next sought out Kobylinsky and took up with him the matter of the steamer Rus and her contents. Discussion produced the stratagem that I, as emissary of the Central Executive, issue papers to the vessel's master and to the Tobolsk manager of the shipping company commandeering the boat, and then handing control of it to Kobylinsky in the name of the Central Executive committee. He was greatly concerned about the position of himself and his men. Kobylinsky, after all, had no standing at all. In a country increasingly controlled by the Bolsheviks, he was an officer of a former regime and one, furthermore, tainted by personal contact and service with his old master, Nicholas. He could never live it down; he knew that and was accordingly hoping for the advance of the White armies to Tobolsk so he could join them. Kobylinsky's life was difficult. Elements of the guards from both Omsk and Ekaterinburg still remained, and though the good colonel had nominal command, it was in truth beyond his exercising. All in all, I determined, it was better that I leave at once. I went on horseback. The Rus had to stay where she was, and with the spring thaw now powerfully under way, a sled would prove impossible, for its runners would cut through the wet snow and scrape the ground beneath.

So I made the decision to ride, and a foolish choice it was - one that was to cost me dear. But as I rode those first two or three miles, the document given so trustingly to me by young Alexei, and so much wanted by Lenin and by Zaharoff and apparently by half the world, was burning a hole in my pocket. From the beginning, from the very first awed conversation in Lenin's room in Moscow, I had had a notion of what it must contain. Now I found I had to know. And so, in the last of the light, I reined in my horse, took the envelope from my pocket, and broke the seal.

I checked first that it had indeed been signed - and there was his signature: not a simple Nicholas as once it must have been, but 'Nicholas Romanov'. I saw, too, that it had been witnessed by Kobylinsky. Surprising, I thought, that it had been witnessed at all; but then I realized the document was composed in English, a language Kobylinsky did not speak.

It was only then that I read it through. My eyes followed the typewritten lines with growing incredulity, for though something of what I expected was there in the dry, legal language, there was far more. So much more! At stake with this document was so much that my senses reeled. Then the questions flooded in. Who knew? Did King George the Fifth? I couldn't believe that] Lenin then? No, the deceit encompassed him too.

But two men had known. Nicholas Romanov, ex-Tsar of all the Russias - he knew. And so did Basil Zaharoff, whom many held to be the most sinister figure in Europe. And now there was a third, for Henry George Dikeston knew . . . Progress in snow depends upon the condition of the snow, and a horse is as dependent upon it as is a man. Set the animal upon firm, hard-packed snow and a horse is happy and moves well. Set him upon soft slush, which is half-water, half-ice, and all treachery and discomfort, and the horse prefers to pick his way.