The remnant of the marchers, those not yet bloodied by the Tsar, and the stragglers of the other columns met up on Nevskii Prospekt, and made a last doomed effort to reach Palace Square. A huge body of cavalry and several cannons had been drawn up at the edge to blast or slash any marchers impertinent enough to reach it into eternity. But the crowd, swollen now by students and onlookers, began to push forward once again. Soldiers were ordered to disperse the marchers using whips and the flats of their sabres. When that proved unsuccessful, they began firing once more. Powerscourt watched in horror as a young girl who had climbed on to an iron fence was crucified to it by a hail of bullets. The screams of the wounded and the dying carried up to the roof of the Stroganov Palace. A small boy who had mounted an equestrian statue was hurled into the air by a volley of artillery. Other children were hit and fell from the trees where they had been perching to get a better view. It was twenty to two, just a few short minutes before their intended rendezvous with the Tsar. The great crowds, sullen now and silent, their anger growing, began to trudge home, many of them helping wounded comrades on their way. Only when the dead lay thick on the ground and the shattered stragglers turned to retreat back up the Nevskii Prospekt did the firing cease. The lancers harried them on their way, slashing the faces of any brave or foolhardy enough to press onwards towards the Winter Palace. Powerscourt watched one cavalryman collect a great mass of papers at the end of his lance. Powerscourt had no idea what he was doing until two of his colleagues dragged a dying man towards the paper. The lancers smeared it with his blood. Then they made a hole in the ice of the Neva and thrust the remains of the proclamations down into the swirling waters beneath. The demands for the vote, for freedom of speech, for a constituent assembly, for equality before the law, all the dreams of Father Gapon and his hundred and fifty thousand supporters ended up stuffed down a hole in the river. The ink would have gone long before the proclamations made landfall, if they ever did.
‘They’ll never forgive him for this,’ Mikhail said. ‘Never. As long as this city survives, as long as the last of the marchers survive, as long as their children and grandchildren survive, the people of St Petersburg will remember this day and hate the man who caused all the suffering.’ He was still holding on to Powerscourt. His face was wet with tears.
‘Mikhail,’ said Powerscourt, ‘perhaps we could provide some help for the wounded down below. The palace here must have some bandages, we could bring water, vodka perhaps as a disinfectant, whatever the women in the palace think would be best. But I think we should do it quickly.’
And so, as the afternoon wore on, a small party tried to bring what help they could to the dying and the wounded, an Irish peer, a Russian aristocrat and a fastidious diplomat who cared nothing for his appearance as he tried to bring some comfort to the dying. Powerscourt made himself one promise that afternoon: that, whatever it took, he would get to the bottom of the strange death of Roderick Martin.
That evening, out at the Alexander Palace in his village called Tsarskoe Selo, the Tsar did not disturb his routine for the unfortunate events in his capital. He had his afternoon walk, and tea as usual with his family. Then they all spent a busy half-hour sticking their latest photographs into their albums. That evening after supper he read aloud to them from a book his librarian had ordered specially from London. Every evening when he could, the Tsar read aloud to his wife and children. He had not bothered to tell his family about the terrible events in St Petersburg. Much better, he thought, to take their imaginations to a different country altogether, to the West Country of England, to the strange case involving an enormous dog and Mr Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson and a treacherous bog.
Later that evening there were sporadic disturbances in St Petersburg. Barricades were set up, slogans shouted at the soldiers who continued patrolling the streets. When the workers reached their homes, many of them bleeding to death from their wounds, or carried to their pathetic hovels on makeshift stretchers, they realized the full horror of what had happened. Fathers, husbands, sons, wives, daughters, so many were lost in the massacre. Hope, the hope that had led them on to the streets, the hope that tomorrow might be better than today or yesterday, that hope had died with the blood on the ice. The more perceptive understood that night what else they had lost. Faith in the Tsar, the father of his people, the protector of his flock, the true shepherd of his subjects, all that had gone with the sabres and the bullets and the corpses littering the streets that led to the Winter Palace. A new watchword went out, travelling round the streets behind the Narva Gates where Father Gapon had marched from, to the Vyborg side with its factories and its squalor, to Petrograd and to Vasilevsky Island. Men spoke the slogan only to those they knew they could trust. ‘Death to the Tsar!’ The marchers had already decided what to call this day. They christened it Bloody Sunday. The blood was the blood of their comrades who lost their lives to death on the Nevskii Prospekt.
That evening the writer Maxim Gorky sent a message to the American newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst in New York. ‘St Petersburg, Bloody Sunday, 9th January 1905,’ the message read. ‘The Russian Revolution has begun.’
PART TWO
THE TRANS-SIBERIAN RAILWAY EGG
This time has come, a great mass is moving towards all of us, a mighty healthy storm is rising, it’s coming, it’s already near, and soon it will blow sloth, indifference, contempt for work, this festering boredom right out of our society. I will work and in some twenty-five or thirty years’ time everyone will work. Everyone!
5
Natasha Bobrinsky sat as quietly as she could at the back of the room while the Tsar read The Hound of the Baskervilles to his family. Surely, she thought to herself, the Tsar must know what had happened in his city earlier that day. Tsars are meant to know everything. Surely he must have told his wife. Why didn’t they tell the children some version of events, however sanitized? The girls would hear about it from the servants soon enough. Word had reached the Tsar’s village by about four o’clock in the afternoon. The driver of one of the afternoon trains to Tsarskoe Selo had seen the final massacre on the Nevskii Prospekt and had brought the news with him. Natasha felt tenser than she had ever felt in her life. She knew her face was very pale. This day, she thought, must be a turning point. Nothing in Russia would ever be the same after the day when the Tsar’s soldiers mowed down their fellow citizens on the streets of the capital as if they were barbarian invaders from afar. As she listened to that soft voice reading on, about the Stapletons, about the escaped prisoner on the moor and the terrible dangers of the Grimpen Mire, Natasha fell into a reverie where most of the Russian land mass toppled slowly into the Gulf of Finland and St Petersburg, her elegant, sparkling, beloved St Petersburg, began to sink slowly beneath the waters of the Neva, the great spires of the churches and the Admiralty the last to disappear. Maybe the great Hound is the symbol of Revolution, Natasha said to herself as she came round, come to devour the people who look after him and crush their bones in his fearful embrace.