‘Interior Ministry, January , et cetera et cetera . . . Dear Lord Powerscourt, Please forgive me for not attending our meeting as we arranged. I apologize most sincerely. Something else of great importance to my Ministry has taken me to very urgent meetings elsewhere. More apology, Lord Powerscourt, a paragraph and a half of it. Can you survive without it?’
‘Certainly,’ said Powerscourt, ‘I think I could manage very well.’
‘We talked,’ Mikhail peered down at some indecipherable piece of Bazhenov handwriting, ‘about Mr Martin’s visits. I promised to give you some dates of the earlier occasions when he was a visitor to our city. Here they are. 1904, January 5th to 11th, March 21st to 29th, October 15th to 22nd. 1903, January 4th to 12th, March 23rd to 30th, October 1st to 9th. 1902, January 6th to 14th, October 5th to 12th. We have been unable to find information on previous years. I hope this is useful.
‘There’s another paragraph of apology, Lord Powerscourt. Translate or not translate?’
‘Don’t bother,’ said Powerscourt, who had filled one sheet of his notebook with the dates in English. ‘I think I can manage with what we’ve got, thanks.’
Now Powerscourt was perched on a sixteenth-century French chair in the Great Drawing Room, thinking his hair should be powdered and his shoes buckled and his legs in tights with a ceremonial sword, perhaps, hanging by his side. Mikhail was opposite him, frowning at the dates.
‘Can you attach any significance to the timings of these earlier visits, Lord Powerscourt?’
‘Easter perhaps, with your different calendar, Mikhail? Would the man come for Easter?’
‘God knows. I think it is more important here than in England. It is the most important religious festival in the Orthodox calendar. Somewhere there’s going to be some prayer book or other in this place which will tell us.’
‘I think,’ said Powerscourt, ‘that I should fill you in on what happened in my happy visit to the Okhrana. Then, perhaps, it would be time to review what little we know, Mikhail, and see if we can deduce anything useful for our investigation of the late Mr Martin.’ With that, Lord Francis Powerscourt, in behaviour that would have been instantly recognizable to his wife and children, began walking up and down the room. Except that in London his drawing room was the length of his house in Markham Square, while here in St Petersburg the Great Drawing Room was nearly as long as Markham Square itself. Powerscourt spared Mikhail none of the horrors of the basement, the whips, the screams, the General interfering in fury himself.
At a quarter past four a young visitor swept into the main entrance of the Shaporov Palace. Mikhail had sent her a note that morning, saying that if she were able to get away, he hoped to be at home by four in the Great Drawing Room. Natasha Bobrinsky had walked all the way from the railway station to the palace, hoping to see some remains of the massacre on the way. She was disappointed, but her cheeks were bright from the walk, her black boots clattered happily over the Shaporov marble and her long fashionable coat kept out the January cold. A dark blue fur hat protected her curls from the freezing air. She resisted all attempts to detain her. The doorman assured her that she could not just march in like this and assume young Mr Shaporov would be able to see her. They had no idea, the servants, what he was doing at this moment. They all had fearful memories of Mikhail’s father swearing viciously at them when he did not want to be disturbed, in one case throwing a junior footman right out of the room until he crashed into the opposite wall. Natasha swept past them, ignoring all their pleas to wait.
The geography of the vast Shaporov Palace meant she had to walk halfway along the front of the building before turning right. Then she had to progress down a very long corridor, the Mirror Corridor, created by some late eighteenth-century Shaporov, which connected with the Italian Corridor at the back of the palace, lined with Italian paintings, and led directly to the entrance to the Great Drawing Room, halfway along another corridor.
After her initial escape towards the Mirror Corridor, the butler despatched three groups of footmen to head her off. One was to pursue Natasha up the corridor, trying to persuade her to pause in one of the libraries or sitting rooms off the main route.
‘Please, Miss Bobrinsky, please step in here, it’ll only take a second . . .’
‘I’m sure Mr Shaporov will be only too happy to see you, but we must preserve appearances . . .’
‘We could all lose our jobs here, Miss Bobrinsky, I’m sure you wouldn’t want that to happen.’
Natasha swept majestically on. The footmen watched helplessly as she turned into the Mirror Corridor. Her back began to multiply as she progressed up the great passage. Soon there were ten, fifteen Natashas reflected in the huge mirrors sent centuries before from the island of Murano near Venice and the St Gobain glass factories in France. Occasional glimpses of black boot, multiplied ten or twenty fold, reduced the footmen to a moonstruck combination of admiration and lust. At the top of the corridor the underbutler watched the marching army approaching his position at the turn of the two corridors. All the Natashas he could see wore expressions of great determination. Every now and then there was a defiant toss of twenty beautiful heads as she approached the corner. The underbutler withdrew his two colleagues and himself to the opening of the rear corridor just before she reached it. He formed his little band up, arms linked, across the corridor, stretching almost to the opposite wall. Behind them a dazzling array of Raphaels and Botticellis and Andrea del Sartos guarded the entrance into the Great Drawing Room. But not a single Natasha arrived. She dived through a side door, hurried down three flights of stairs, found the lift that connected with the side door into the room three floors up and presented herself in the Great Drawing Room where her young man was deep in conversation with the man from London they called Lord Francis Powerscourt.
‘Natasha! How nice to see you!’ Mikhail Shaporov seemed to cover the hundred yards or so between his chair and the lift in a couple of seconds, switching effortlessly into their common language of French. ‘Have you just arrived in St Petersburg? How are they all out there in Tsarskoe Selo?’
Natasha strode imperiously across the drawing room and sat down on a French chaise longue next to Powerscourt while Mikhail made the introductions. Powerscourt and Natasha had not met before. ‘Never mind all of them out at Tsarskoe Selo,’ she said briskly, beginning to peel off her black leather gloves, ‘what has been happening here in St Petersburg? My family are away in the south of France, as you know, so I rely on you to keep me informed, Mikhail. What took place here on Sunday? We heard rumours of marches and hundreds of protesters shot dead by the Tsar’s troops. That can’t be true, can it?’
Mikhail Shaporov sat down beside her. The pair of them, Powerscourt thought, looked absurdly young, absurdly innocent, absurdly ill equipped maybe to cope with what was happening in their country.
‘We watched it all from the roof of the Stroganov Palace,’ he began, ‘Lord Powerscourt and I and a colleague of his from the British Embassy.’ He told her of the marching columns, of the singing of the National Anthem, of the hymns rising up into the sunshine, of the children on their parents’ shoulders, of the portraits of the Tsar and the icons of the Virgin. He told her how all the different columns began to concentrate on Palace Square where they hoped to hand in their petition with its absurdly optimistic demands for the vote, for free elections, for a constituent assembly, for laws to regulate the wretched lives of the wretched workers in their wretched factories. He told her of the charges of the cavalry, sabres slashing into innocent faces, lances cutting into innocent backs. He told her of the round after round of infantry fire, smashing into the bodies of the marchers, reducing them to random chunks of flesh bleeding to death on the streets. He told her of the red blood staining the ice and the shattered remains of one hundred and fifty thousand protesters whose journey had started with hope and ended in total despair. He told her of the pathetic attempts the three of them had made to help the wounded as they lay dying on the Nevskii Prospekt. He told her of the aftermath, the corpses waiting for the carts to take them away, the pathetic children’s toys broken on the ground from the gunfire, the waves of hatred that had flown across the city.