Powerscourt thought now was the time to ask his questions.
‘Forgive me for asking you, Lieutenant, about your relations with the late Mr Martin. Did you ever meet him?’
‘I did not, sir. I could see little point in shaking the hand of a man who has had intimate relations with my wife.’
‘Quite so, Lieutenant, quite so. I think on this last occasion you had advance warning of his coming to St Petersburg, is that not so?’
‘I did,’ said Kerenkov, ‘lots of people knew he was coming.’
Powerscourt suspected this was not true, but felt there was little he could do about it. ‘And why do you think, Lieutenent,’ he went on, ‘that Mr Martin kept away from your wife on this occasion? He never had before, after all. Did you warn him off?’
Kerenkov looked at him blankly. He did not reply. ‘You were seen, you know,’ Powerscourt went on, ‘at the station, on the evening Martin was killed. Were you waiting for him to come back from Tsarskoe Selo? Were you waiting to take him off to the Nevskii Prospekt? And then to kill him?’
Kerenkov turned red suddenly. Veins began throbbing in his temple. His hand moved ominously towards his pocket. ‘Look here, Powerscourt, I know I’m a rough sort of a fellow,’ he began, restraining himself with difficulty. ‘My profession is killing people, rather as yours is finding out who killed them. But the people I want to kill are Japanese. My country is at war with them. We are not at war with England. Some people think I had every reason to kill Martin but in today’s St Petersburg that sort of morality has long gone. It’s melted away like the snows in spring. I didn’t kill him, please believe me, and I have no idea who did.’
‘I do believe you, Lieutenant,’ said Powerscourt with a smile, ‘but could you set my mind at rest about one thing?’
‘What’s that?’ Kerenkov asked, staring down below at the worker ants engaged on painting the sides of the ship.
‘Your presence at the railway station the night Martin was killed.’
For the first time Kerenkov laughed. ‘I’m not quite sure how to put this, Lord Powerscourt. Following the example of my wife perhaps? When in St Petersburg carry on as the St Petersburgers do? I was waiting, Lord Powerscourt, for a lady who is not my wife.’
Successful voyage round the inner islands, Powerscourt said to himself as they set out back towards the city. Pirate strikes gold.
PART THREE
THE TSAR’S VILLAGE
All Russia is our orchard.
13
Natasha Bobrinsky was feeling confused as she sat in the train carriage bringing her back to St Petersburg. For well over a week she had been more intimately involved with the royal household in Tsarskoe Selo than ever before, taking care of the four daughters, helping with Alexis, trying to provide care and support for the Empress Alexandra. Strange fragments of news filtered into her part of the Alexander Palace. Natasha heard whispered conversations about strikes and industrial disputes, about the lack of enthusiasm for the monarchy, about peasant unrest in the provinces. The previous evening the Empress seemed to have cracked. She did not sink to her knees in private prayer once she had emerged from caring for the sick baby as she usually did. She stared at Natasha as if she didn’t know who she was and began attacking the aristocrats of St Petersburg. Vain, worthless, godless, hopeless, selfish, arrogant, self-indulgent, drunk, were some of her kinder adjectives. None of them, according to the Empress, were fit to serve the Tsar, none of them truly fit to speak for the soul of Mother Russia. And on the peasants she bestowed the blessings of the beatitudes: blessed were the poor in spirit for theirs was the kingdom of Heaven, blessed were the meek for they should inherit the earth, blessed were the merciful for they should obtain mercy. These peasants, according to Alexandra, were the true supporters of the monarchy. They knew instinctively about the sacred relationship between Tsar, peasant and God that sustained the Romanovs on their throne and kept the wheels of Russian society turning properly.
It was, perhaps, regrettable that Alexandra should have sounded off in this fashion, for Natasha had been feeling a growing sympathy for the Empress. Now, she thought, as the Tsar’s countryside rolled past her windows, she was not so sure. Maybe it was unfortunate that Natasha’s parents chose to spend more of their life in Paris and on the Riviera than they did in Russia. Natasha could see the appeal. Nobody said that her father, a man devoted to the joys of the table and the wines of Bordeaux, on which, indeed, he had written a short monograph for a Russian publishing house in Paris, had to spend his time in St Petersburg or Moscow. A career in the public service, ascending the slow steps on the ladder of bureaucratic advancement, he would have regarded as beneath contempt. And as for Natasha’s mother, she had never heard her speak of the Empress with anything other than a withering scorn about her German ancestry, her lack of social graces and the vulgarity of her personality. Natasha would never have claimed to be an expert on the peasants. But one of her brother’s friends at university, in a fit of misplaced zeal for the general advancement of mankind, had gone with some like-minded souls to live with a group of peasants, to try to improve their lot and welcome them into the joys of civilization. Their reception showed little of the spirit of the meek or the merciful and plenty of that of the poor in spirit or, more precisely, poor in worldly goods. One of Natasha’s brother’s friends had been beaten up so badly he had to be taken into hospital, their money and valuables were all stolen by the peasants, even their clothes were taken from them. Such people might embody the Tsar’s support in his wife’s view, but Natasha wanted nothing to do with them.
She was carrying the one word she had heard from the doctors to pass on to Mikhail and to Powerscourt. She had looked it up in the big dictionary in the Tsarskoe Selo library and felt as she read the entry that this particular page had been visited many times in recent weeks. As she left the station and set off to walk to the Shaporov Palace, the man in soldier’s uniform followed her once again. Hello, missy, he said to himself, I haven’t seen you for a week or more, welcome back. And as Natasha crossed the street with a toss of her head, the soldier grinned. You haven’t grown any uglier while you’ve been away, missy, that’s for sure. I do hope they’re not going to do anything nasty to you when they read another of my reports.
‘Haemophilia,’ said Natasha firmly when she and Mikhail and Powerscourt were all seated on their eighteenth-century French chairs in the Shaporov library.
‘What on earth is that, Natasha?’ said Mikhail.
‘Is that what the little boy has? The Tsarevich, out there at the Alexander Palace?’ Powerscourt had turned pale.
‘It is,’ said Natasha, slightly cross that anybody could have guessed her secret so quickly. ‘How did you know, Lord Powerscourt?’
‘It was a guess, Natasha. You said the word with so much meaning it obviously had to be something very important. But please, please, don’t tell a single soul about it apart from the two of us. It could be fatal. It may already have been fatal.’
‘But what does it mean?’ asked Mikhail, feeling slightly left out.
Powerscourt nodded slightly to Natasha as if to indicate that she should provide the definitions.