‘You don’t understand. I assure you…’ he began.
But she cut in: ‘You think I don’t know you for what you are. This is the second time you’ve come sneaking in here, you snake.’
‘I most certainly have not,’ he retorted hotly.
‘Liar!’ She fell silent, then continued her colloquy with herself. ‘Oh, yes, I saw him creeping in here in the middle of the night like a wolf. Thief! Thinks he can just come in here and mock me. Blackguard! Picking up my books, dancing about in front of me like a lunatic. Snake! Viper!’ She spat out the words.
My God! Then she had not been asleep that far-off night. Her eyes had been open because she was awake. It had never occurred to Alexander that the old lady had been brooding secretly about his foolish nocturnal visit for the last five years. And how on earth could he explain it now? ‘Who do you think you are?’ she suddenly demanded furiously. ‘You think you can deceive me too? Liar!’ she rasped.
He was shattered, yet furious. He was not a liar!
‘All this because I said a few words about Voltaire! What about my children – your own kinsmen? You mean to disinherit them?’
‘You mean to disinherit them?’ She mimicked his words with surprising accuracy and a vicious contempt. ‘I care nothing for your children. Serpent’s brood. Let them starve! Now get out of here. Traitor!’
It was too much. It was cruel beyond reason. The rage and frustration of the day, perhaps of his whole life, suddenly welled up and flooded over.
‘You old witch!’ he cried out. ‘You stupid, senile old hag! What do you know about anything? Damn your Voltaire! Damn you too!’ He raised his fists above his head, tightly clenched. ‘My God, I’ll kill you!’ And he took a step towards her.
It was a gesture of frustration. He had meant, perhaps, to shock her. He hardly knew himself. But now to his horror he saw her shudder, watched her eyes open very wide, then roll up. Then she fell back on her pillow.
He stood still. It was very quiet. He glanced at the door, expecting to see servants, but there was nobody. It suddenly occurred to him that in that huge house, the servants on other floors had probably not heard them. He looked back at her. Her mouth had fallen open, making a small, rather pathetic little O. Her few yellow teeth seemed very long, like a rat’s. She did not seem to be breathing.
Trembling, he went over to her. What should he do? Gingerly he felt her pulse. He could feel nothing. He continued to gaze at her nervously for some time before he fully realized that she was dead.
Because he was so afraid of her, a simple and obvious fact had never entered his mind – that the frail old woman had been terrified of him. He must have given her a heart attack. He crossed himself.
And only after several moments more, as he stood there wondering what to do next, did the true significance of what had happened occur to him.
‘Praise be to God,’ he whispered. She was dead – and she hadn’t yet altered her Will. ‘I’m saved after all.’
Cautiously he went to the door and looked out on to the landing. Everything was quiet, just as it had been before. He glanced back once more at the figure of the countess. She had not moved. He went out, descended the staircase to the main body of the house, then slipped quietly along the passage to Madame de Ronville’s quarters.
A few minutes later, he was letting himself out of the little street door. No one saw him. He locked the door behind him. Then, walking swiftly, he made his way through the tenuous late evening light to the Strelka where his carriage was waiting.
It was just as his carriage was rolling over the bridge towards Peter’s Square that, in the great house on Vasilevsky Island, Countess Turova’s eyes fluttered and slowly opened.
The dead faint into which she had fallen had lasted some time. She had, indeed, been lost to the world and had herself no idea how long she had been unconscious. Nor was it surprising that Alexander should have believed her dead: for having little experience of old people he did not know that their pulses often become almost impossible to feel. For some while she lay very still, collecting her strength. She called for her maid, but obviously the woman was still downstairs somewhere. Her face puckered up into an expression of disgust and she muttered something to herself. Carefully, she levered herself round, so that her legs hung over the side of the bed, and slowly lowered them to the floor. Holding the bedside table, she made sure that she could walk. Then she went over to the little writing table. Feeling in one of the drawers, she pulled out a piece of paper and looked at it thoughtfully; she had no idea what it meant, but she was sure it meant something.
It was the letter Alexander had unknowingly dropped from his pocket when he had done his foolish little dance in her room that December night, five long years before. And it was signed – ‘Colovion’.
Then, unaided, Countess Turova started to make her way towards the stairs.
Alexander could not sleep that night; perhaps it was the excitement of what had passed, or perhaps it was merely the season, but a little after midnight he set out from his house and began to walk.
There were others about, in that pale gloaming: young couples, even children, walking along the broad embankments of the Neva or beside the silent canals with their little bridges, enjoying the warm magic of those early hours. Sometimes a little party would go by, singing and laughing in the glimmering greyness.
Alexander made his way to the embankment. Slowly he walked along, across the great square where Peter’s mighty statue reared up, past the long, bare walls of the Admiralty, and out on to the broad expanse before the Winter Palace and its extension, the Hermitage. On his left lay the wide pale expanse of the Neva. On the Strelka, in mid-river, a light was glowing. Now and then, people passed by like shadows. And as he stood gazing north-wards, the little flashes of the Aurora, like silent lightning, ignited past the horizon, over the Arctic wastes.
Unreal season. Unreal city. As he looked back over the last ten years of his life, and thought of the strange events of that day, it seemed to Alexander that his whole existence had been like a tiny walk-on part on this huge St Petersburg stage-set. For wasn’t it all just a play? Wasn’t poor Empress Catherine with her young lovers a pathetic personal sham? Wasn’t this huge city, built on a northern marsh, with its Italian façades gazing over an icebound wasteland, another kind of improbable deception? The city is built on wooden piles, he thought. One day they will rot and it will all fall back into the marshes. Wasn’t the enlightened noble class to which he belonged the greatest sham of all – speaking of Voltaire, yet ruling as it did over a vast empire of villages and serfs, stuck in the Middle Ages, or even the Dark Ages, if truth be told? Was Peter the Great’s vision of Russia as a great Continental Empire – wasn’t the boundless energy and ambition of the Bronze Horseman – just a wild dream, impossible ever of being achieved? As he stared over the huge river and then looked back at the great open space beside the palace, he suddenly had an overwhelming sense that the vast Russian land of marsh and forest might advance, at any moment, into the emptiness of this unnatural city.
‘Why, the whole city,’ he murmured aloud, ‘is just a huge Potemkin village – a façade. And if so, what has my life been – my gamble for power, my love of display, my desire for earthly and even heavenly rewards? Was it all a great illusion?’
It seemed to him, at that moment, that it was so. As he slowly made his way home, revolving this thought in his mind, he would glance up from time to time to notice a piece of broken-off stucco here, or the rotting bricks on the corners of the houses there, and murmur to himself: ‘Yes, it is vanity. All is vanity.’