The Man From St Petersburg

CHAPTER ONE

IT WAS A slow Sunday afternoon, the kind Walden loved. He stood at an open window and looked across the park. The broad, level lawn was dotted with mature trees: a Scots pine, a pair of mighty oaks, several chestnuts, and a willow like a head of girlish curls. The sun was high and the trees cast dark, cool shadows. The birds were silent, but a hum of contented bees came from the flowering creeper beside the window. The house was still, too. Most of the servants had the afternoon off. The only weekend guests were Walden’s brother George, George’s wife Clarissa, and their children. George had gone for a walk, Clarissa was lying down, and the children were out of sight. Walden was comfortable: he had worn a frock coat to church, of course, and in an hour or two he would put on his white tie and tails for dinner, but in the meantime he was at ease in a tweed suit and a soft-collared shirt. Now, he thought, if only Lydia will play the piano tonight, it will have been a perfect day.

He turned to his wife. ‘Will you play, after dinner?’

Lydia smiled. ‘If you like.’

Walden heard a noise and turned back to the window. At the far end of the drive, a quarter of a mile away, a motor car appeared. Walden felt a twinge of irritation, like the sly stab of pain in his right leg before a rainstorm. Why should a car annoy me? he thought. He was not against motor cars – he owned a Lanchester and used it regularly to travel to and from London – although in the summer they were a terrible nuisance to the village, sending up clouds of dust from the unpaved road as they roared through. He was thinking of putting down a couple of hundred yards of tarmacadam along the street. Ordinarily he would not have hesitated, but roads had not been his responsibility since 1909 when Lloyd George had set up the Roads Boards – and that, he realized, was the source of his irritation. It had been a characteristic piece of Liberal legislation: they took money from Walden in order to do themselves what he would have done anyway, then they failed to do it. I suppose I’ll pave the road myself in the end, he thought; it’s just annoying to pay for it twice.

The motor car turned into the gravel forecourt and came to a noisy, shuddering halt opposite the south door. Exhaust fumes drifted in at the window, and Walden held his breath. The driver got out, wearing helmet, goggles and a heavy motoring coat, and opened the door for the passenger. A short man in a black coat and a black felt hat stepped down from the car. Walden recognized the man, and his heart sank: the peaceful summer afternoon was over.

‘It’s Winston Churchill,’ he said.

Lydia said: ‘How embarrassing.’

The man just refused to be snubbed. On Thursday he had sent a note which Walden had ignored. On Friday he had called on Walden at his London house, and had been told that the Earl was not at home. Now he had driven all the way to Norfolk on a Sunday. He would be turned away again. Does he think his stubbornness is impressive? Walden wondered.

He hated to be rude to people but Churchill deserved it. The Liberal government in which Churchill was a Minister was engaged in a vicious attack on the very foundations of English society – taxing landed property, undermining the House of Lords, trying to give Ireland away to the Catholics, emasculating the Royal Navy, and yielding to the blackmail of trade unions and damned socialists. Walden and his friends would not shake hands with such people.

The door opened and Pritchard came into the room. He was a tall Cockney with brilliantined black hair and an air of gravity which was transparently fake. He had run away to sea as a boy, and had jumped ship in East Africa. Walden, there on safari, had hired him to supervise the native porters, and they had been together ever since. Now Pritchard was Walden’s major-domo, travelling with him from one house to another, and as much of a friend as a servant could be.

‘The First Lord of the Admiralty is here, my lord,’ Pritchard said.

‘I’m not at home,’ Walden said.

Pritchard looked uncomfortable. He was not used to throwing out Cabinet Ministers. My father’s butler would have done it without turning a hair, Walden thought; but old Thomson is graciously retired, growing roses in the garden of that little cottage in the village, and somehow Pritchard has never acquired that unassailable dignity.

Pritchard began to drop his aitches, a sign that he was either very relaxed or very tense. ‘Mr Churchill said you’d say not at ’ome, my lord, and ’e said to give you this letter.’ He proffered an envelope on a tray.

Walden did not like to be pushed. He said crossly: ‘Give it back to him—’ Then he stopped, and looked again at the handwriting on the envelope. There was something familiar about the large, clear, sloping letters.

‘Oh, dear,’ said Walden.

He took the envelope, opened it, and drew out a single sheet of heavy white paper, folded once. At the top was the royal crest, printed in red. Walden read:

‘It’s from the King,’ Walden said to Lydia.

He was so embarrassed that he flushed. It was frightfully bad form to drag the King into something like this. Walden felt like a schoolboy who is told to stop quarrelling and get on with his prep. For a moment he was tempted to defy the King. But the consequences . . . Lydia would no longer be received by the Queen, people would be unable to invite the Waldens to parties at which a member of the Royal Family would be present, and – worst of all – Walden’s daughter Charlotte could not be presented at court as a debutante. The family’s social life would be wrecked. They might as well go and live in another country. No, there was no question of disobeying the King.

Walden sighed. Churchill had defeated him. In a way it was a relief, for now he could break ranks and no one could blame him. Letter from the King, old boy, he would say in explanation; nothing to be done, you know.

‘Ask Mr Churchill to come in,’ he said to Pritchard.

He handed the letter to Lydia. The Liberals really did not understand how the monarchy was supposed to work, he reflected. He murmured: ‘The King is just not firm enough with these people.’

Lydia said: ‘This is becoming awfully boring.’

She was not bored at all, Walden thought, in fact she probably found it all quite exciting; but she said that because it was the kind of thing an English countess would say, and since she was not English but Russian she liked to say typically English things, the way a man speaking French would say alors and hein? a lot.

Walden went to the window. Churchill’s motor car was still rattling and smoking in the forecourt. The driver stood beside it, with one hand on the door, as if he had to hold it like a horse to stop it wandering away. A few servants were gazing at it from a safe distance.

Pritchard came in and said: ‘Mr Winston Churchill.’

Churchill was forty, exactly ten years younger than Walden. He was a short, slender man who dressed in a way Walden thought was a shade too elegant to be quite gentlemanly. His hair was receding rapidly, leaving a peak at the forehead and two curls at the temples which, together with his short nose and the permanent sardonic twinkle in his eye, gave him a mischievous look. It was easy to see why the cartoonists regularly portrayed him as a malign cherub.

Churchill shook hands and said cheerfully: ‘Good afternoon, Lord Walden.’ He bowed to Lydia. ‘Lady Walden, how do you do.’ Walden thought: What is it about him that grates so on my nerves?

Lydia offered him tea and Walden told him to sit down. Walden would not make small talk: he was impatient to know what all the fuss was about.

Churchill began: ‘First of all my apologies, together with the King’s, for imposing myself on you.’

Walden nodded. He was not going to say it was perfectly all right.

Churchill said: ‘I might add that I should not have done so, other than for the most compelling reasons.’

‘You’d better tell me what they are.’

‘Do you know what has been happening in the money market?’

‘Yes. The discount rate has gone up.’

‘From one-and-three-quarters to just under three per cent. It’s an enormous rise, and it has come about in a few weeks.’

‘I presume you know why.’

Churchill nodded. ‘German companies have been factoring debts on a vast scale, collecting cash and buying gold. A few more weeks of this, and Germany will have got in everything owing to her from other countries, while leaving her debts to them outstanding – and her gold reserves will be higher than they have ever been before.’

‘They are preparing for war.’

‘In this and other ways. They have raised a levy of one billion marks, over and above normal taxation, to improve an army which is already the strongest in Europe. You will remember that in 1909, when Lloyd George increased British taxation by fifteen million pounds sterling, there was almost a revolution. Well, a billion marks is equivalent to fifty million pounds. It’s the biggest levy in European history—’

‘Yes, indeed,’ Walden interrupted. Churchill was threatening to become histrionic: Walden did not want him making speeches. ‘We Conservatives have been worried about German militarism for some time. Now, at the eleventh hour, you’re telling me that we were right.’

Churchill was unperturbed. ‘Germany will attack France, almost certainly. The question is, will we come to the aid of France?’

‘No,’ Walden said in surprise. ‘The Foreign Secretary has assured us that we have no obligations to France—’

‘Sir Edward is sincere, of course,’ Churchill said. ‘But he is mistaken. Our understanding with France is such that we could not possibly stand aside and watch her defeated by Germany.’

Walden was shocked. The Liberals had convinced everyone, him included, that they would not lead England into war; and now one of their leading Ministers was saying the opposite. The duplicity of the politicians was infuriating, but Walden forgot that as he began to contemplate the consequences of war. He thought of the young men he knew who would have to fight: the patient gardeners in his park, the cheeky footmen, the brown-faced farm-boys, the hell-raising undergraduates, the languid idlers in the clubs of St James’s . . . then that thought was overtaken by another, much more chilling, and he said: ‘But can we win?’

Churchill looked grave. ‘I think not.’

Walden stared at him. ‘Dear God, what have you people done?’

Churchill became defensive. ‘Our policy has been to avoid war; and you can’t do that and arm yourself to the teeth at the same time.’

‘But you have failed to avoid war.’

‘We’re still trying.’

‘But you think you will fail.’

Churchill looked belligerent for a moment, then swallowed his pride. ‘Yes.’

‘So what will happen?’

‘If England and France together cannot defeat Germany, then we must have another ally, a third country on our side: Russia. If Germany is divided, fighting on two fronts, we can win. The Russian army is incompetent and corrupt, of course – like everything else in that country – but it doesn’t matter so long as they draw off part of Germany’s strength.’

Churchill knew perfectly well that Lydia was Russian, and it was characteristically tactless of him to disparage her country in her presence, but Walden let it pass, for he was highly intrigued by what Churchill was saying. ‘Russia already has an alliance with France,’ he said.

‘It’s not enough,’ Churchill said. ‘Russia is obliged to fight if France is the victim of aggression. It is left to Russia to decide whether France is the victim or the aggressor in a particular case. When war breaks out both sides always claim to be the victim. Therefore the alliance obliges Russia to do no more than fight if she wants to. We need Russia to be freshly and firmly committed to our side.’

‘I can’t imagine you chaps joining hands with the Czar.’

‘Then you misjudge us. To save England, we’ll deal with the devil.’

‘Your supporters won’t like it.’

‘They won’t know.’

Walden could see where all this was leading, and the prospect was exciting. ‘What have you in mind? A secret treaty? Or an unwritten understanding?’

‘Both.’

Walden looked at Churchill through narrowed eyes. This young demagogue might have a brain, he thought; and that brain might not be working in my interest. So the Liberals want to do a secret deal with the Czar, despite the hatred which the English people have for the brutal Russian regime – but why tell me? They want to rope me in somehow, that much is clear. For what purpose? So that if it all goes wrong they will have a Conservative on whom to put the blame? It will take a plotter more subtle than Churchill to lead me into such a trap.

Walden said: ‘Go on.’

‘I have initiated naval talks with the Russians, along the lines of our military talks with the French. They’ve been going on for a while at a rather low level, and now they are about to get serious. A young Russian admiral is coming to London. His name is Prince Aleksei Andreivitch Orlov.’

Lydia said: ‘Aleks!’

Churchill looked at her. ‘I believe he is related to you, Lady Walden.’

‘Yes,’ Lydia said, and for some reason Walden could not even guess at she looked uneasy. ‘He is the son of my elder sister, which makes him my . . . cousin?’

‘Nephew,’ Walden said.

‘I didn’t know he had become admiral,’ Lydia added. ‘It must be a recent promotion.’ She was her usual, perfectly composed self, and Walden decided he had imagined that moment of unease. He was pleased that Aleks would be coming to London: he was very fond of the lad. Lydia said: ‘He is young to have so much authority.’

‘He’s thirty,’ Churchill said to Lydia, and Walden recalled that Churchill, at forty, was very young to be in charge of the entire Royal Navy. Churchill’s expression seemed to say: The world belongs to brilliant young men like me and Orlov.

But you need me for something, Walden thought.

‘In addition,’ Churchill went on, ‘Orlov is nephew to the Czar, through his father the late Prince, and – more importantly – he is one of the few people other than Rasputin whom the Czar likes and trusts. If anyone in the Russian naval establishment can swing the Czar on to our side, Orlov can.’

Walden asked the question that was on his mind. ‘And my part in all this?’

‘I want you to represent England in these talks – and I want you to bring me Russia on a plate.’

The fellow could never resist the temptation to be melodramatic, Walden thought. ‘You want Aleks and me to negotiate an Anglo-Russian military alliance?’

‘Yes.’

Walden saw immediately how difficult, challenging and rewarding the task would be. He concealed his excitement, and resisted the temptation to get up and pace about.

Churchill was saying: ‘You know the Czar personally. You know Russia and speak Russian fluently. You’re Orlov’s uncle by marriage. Once before you have persuaded the Czar to side with England rather than with Germany – in 1906, when you intervened to prevent the ratification of the Treaty of Bjorko.’ Churchill paused. ‘Nevertheless, you were not our first choice to represent Britain at these negotiations. The way things are at Westminster . . .’

‘Yes, yes.’ Walden did not want to start discussing that. ‘However, something changed your mind.’

‘In a nutshell, you were the Czar’s choice. It seems you are the only Englishman in whom he has any faith. Anyway, he sent a telegram to his cousin the King, insisting that Orlov deal with you.’

Walden could imagine the consternation among the Radicals when they learned they would have to involve a reactionary old Tory peer in such a clandestine scheme. ‘I should think you were horrified,’ he said.

‘Not at all. In foreign affairs our policies are not so much at odds with yours. And I have always felt that domestic political disagreements were no reason why your talents should be lost to His Majesty’s Government.’

Flattery now, Walden thought. They want me badly. Aloud he said: ‘How would all this be kept secret?’

‘It will seem like a social visit. If you agree, Orlov will stay with you for the London season. You will introduce him to society. Am I right in thinking that your daughter is due to come out this year?’ He looked at Lydia.

‘That’s right,’ she said.

‘So you’ll be going about a good deal anyway. Orlov is a bachelor, as you know, and obviously very eligible, so we can noise it abroad that he’s looking for an English wife. He may even find one.’

‘Excellent idea.’ Suddenly Walden realized that he was enjoying himself. He had once been a kind of semiofficial diplomat under the Conservative governments of Salisbury and Balfour, but for the last eight years he had taken no part in international politics. Now he had a chance to go back on stage, and he began to remember how absorbing and fascinating the whole business was: the secrecy; the gambler’s art of negotiation; the conflicts of personalities; the cautious use of persuasion, bullying or the threat of war. The Russians were not easy to deal with, he recalled; they tended to be capricious, obstinate and arrogant. But Aleks would be manageable. When Walden married Lydia, Aleks had been at the wedding, a ten-year-old in a sailor suit. Later Aleks had spent a couple of years at Oxford University, and had visited Walden Hall in the vacations. The boy’s father was dead, so Walden gave him rather more time than he might normally have spent with an adolescent, and was delightfully rewarded by a friendship with a lively young mind.

It was a splendid foundation for a negotiation. I believe I might be able to bring it off, he thought. What a triumph that would be!

Churchill said: ‘May I take it, then, that you’ll do it?’

‘Of course,’ said Walden.

Lydia stood up. ‘No, don’t get up,’ she said as the men stood with her. ‘I’ll leave you to talk politics. Will you stay for dinner, Mr Churchill?’

‘I’ve an engagement in Town, unfortunately.’

‘Then I shall say goodbye.’ She shook his hand.

She went out of the Octagon, which was where they always had tea, and walked across the great hall, through the small hall, and into the flower-room. At the same time one of the under-gardeners – she did not know his name – came in through the garden door with an armful of tulips, pink and yellow, for the dinner table. One of the things Lydia loved about England in general and Walden Hall in particular was the wealth of flowers, and she always had fresh ones cut morning and evening, even in winter when they had to be grown in the hothouses.

The gardener touched his cap – he did not have to take it off unless he was spoken to, for the flower room was notionally part of the garden – and laid the flowers on a marble table, then went out. Lydia sat down and breathed the cool, scented air. This was a good room in which to recover from shocks, and the talk of St Petersburg had unnerved her. She remembered Aleksei Andreivitch as a shy, pretty little boy at her wedding; and she remembered that as the most unhappy day of her life.

It was perverse of her, she thought, to make the flower room her sanctuary. This house had rooms for almost every purpose: different rooms for breakfast, lunch, tea and dinner, a room for billiards and another in which to keep guns, special rooms for washing clothes, ironing, making jam, cleaning silver, hanging game, keeping wine, brushing suits . . . Her own suite had a bedroom, a dressing-room and a sitting-room. And yet, when she wanted to be at peace, she would come here and sit on a hard chair and look at the crude stone sink and the cast-iron legs of the marble table. Her husband also had an unofficial sanctuary, she had noticed: when Stephen was disturbed about something he would go to the gun-room and read the game book.

So Aleks would be her guest in London for the season. They would talk of home, and the snow and the ballet and the bombs; and seeing Aleks would make her think of another young Russian, the man she had not married.

It was nineteen years since she had seen that man, but still the mere mention of St Petersburg could bring him to mind, and make her skin crawl beneath the watered silk of her tea-gown. He had been nineteen, the same age as she, a hungry student with long black hair, the face of a wolf and the eyes of a spaniel. He was as thin as a rail. His skin was white, the hair of his body soft, dark and adolescent; and he had clever, clever hands. She blushed now, not at the thought of his body but at the thought of her own, betraying her, maddening her with pleasure, making her cry out shamefully. I was wicked, she thought; and I am wicked still, for I should like to do it again.

She thought guiltily of her husband. She hardly ever thought of him without feeling guilty. She had not loved him when they married, but she loved him now. He was strong-willed and warm-hearted, and he adored her. His affection was constant and gentle and entirely lacking in the desperate passion which she had once known. He was happy, she thought, only because he had never known that love could be wild and hungry.

I no longer crave that kind of love, she told herself. I have learned to live without it, and over the years it has become easier. So it should – I’m almost forty!

Some of her friends were still tempted, and they yielded, too. They did not speak to her of their affairs, for they sensed she did not approve; but they gossiped about others, and Lydia knew that at some country-house parties there was a lot of . . . well, adultery. Once Lady Girard had said to Lydia, with the condescending air of an older woman who gives sound advice to a young hostess: ‘My dear, if you have the Viscountess and Charlie Stott at the same time you simply must put them in adjoining bedrooms.’ Lydia had put them at opposite ends of the house, and the Viscountess had never come to Walden Hall again.

People said all this immorality was the fault of the late King, but Lydia did not believe them. It was true that he had befriended Jews and singers, but that did not make him a rake. Anyway, he had stayed at Walden Hall twice – once as Prince of Wales and once as King Edward the Seventh – and he had behaved impeccably both times.

She wondered whether the new King would ever come. It was a great strain, to have a monarch to stay, but such a thrill to make the house look its very best and have the most lavish meals imaginable and buy twelve new dresses just for one weekend. And if this King were to come, he might grant the Waldens the coveted entrée – the right to go into Buckingham Palace by the garden entrance on big occasions, instead of queuing up in The Mall along with two hundred other carriages.

She thought about her guests this weekend. George was Stephen’s younger brother: he had Stephen’s charm but none of Stephen’s seriousness. George’s daughter Belinda was eighteen, the same age as Charlotte. Both girls would be coming out this season. Belinda’s mother had died some years ago and George had married again, rather quickly. His second wife, Clarissa, was much younger than he, and quite vivacious. She had given him twin sons. One of the twins would inherit Walden Hall when Stephen died, unless Lydia gave birth to a boy late in life. I could, she thought; I feel as if I could, but it just doesn’t happen.

It was almost time to be getting ready for dinner. She sighed. She felt comfortable and natural in her tea-gown, with her fair hair dressed loosely; but now she would have to be laced into a corset and have her hair piled high on her head by a maid. It was said that some of the young women were giving up corsets altogether. That was all right, Lydia supposed, if you were naturally shaped like the figure 8; but she was small in all the wrong places.

She got up and went outside. That under-gardener was standing by a rose tree, talking to one of the maids. Lydia recognized the maid: she was Annie, a pretty, voluptuous, empty-headed girl with a wide, generous smile. She stood with her hands in the pockets of her apron, turning her round face up to the sun and laughing at something the gardener had said. Now there is a girl who doesn’t need a corset, Lydia thought. Annie was supposed to be supervising Charlotte and Belinda, for the governess had the afternoon off. Lydia said sharply: ‘Annie! Where are the young ladies?’

Annie’s smile disappeared and she dropped a curtsey. ‘I can’t find them, m’lady.’

The gardener moved off sheepishly.

‘You don’t appear to be looking for them,’ Lydia said. ‘Off you go.’

‘Very good, m’lady.’ Annie ran toward the back of the house. Lydia sighed: the girls would not be there, but she could not be bothered to call Annie back and reprimand her again.

She strolled across the lawn, thinking of familiar and pleasant things, pushing St Petersburg to the back of her mind. Stephen’s father, the seventh Earl of Walden, had planted the west side of the park with rhododendrons and azaleas. Lydia had never met the old man, for he had died before she knew Stephen, but by all accounts he had been one of the great larger-than-life Victorians. His bushes were now in full glorious bloom, and made a rather un-Victorian blaze of assorted colours. We must have somebody paint a picture of the house, she thought; the last one was done before the park was mature.

She looked back at Walden Hall. The grey stone of the south front looked beautiful and dignified in the afternoon sunshine. In the centre was the south door. The farther, east wing contained the drawing-room and various dining-rooms, and behind them a straggle of kitchens, pantries and laundries running higgledy-piggledy to the distant stables. Nearer to her, on the west side, were the morning-room, the Octagon, and at the corner the library; then, around the corner along the west front, the billiard-room, the gun-room, her flower-room, a smoking-room and the estate office. On the first floor, the family bedrooms were mostly on the south side, the main guest-rooms on the west side, and the servants’ rooms over the kitchens to the north-east, out of sight. Above the first floor was an irrational collection of towers, turrets and attics. The whole facade was a riot of ornamental stonework in the best Victorian rococo manner, with flowers and chevrons and sculpted coils of rope, dragons and lions and cherubim, balconies and battlements, flagpoles and sundials and gargoyles. Lydia loved the place, and she was grateful that Stephen – unlike many of the old aristocracy – could afford to keep it up.

She saw Charlotte and Belinda emerge from the shrubbery across the lawn. Annie had not found them, of course. They both wore wide-brimmed hats and summer frocks with schoolgirls’ black stockings and low black shoes. Because Charlotte was coming out this season, she was occasionally permitted to put up her hair and dress for dinner, but most of the time Lydia treated her like the child she was, for it was bad for children to grow up too fast. The two cousins were deep in conversation, and Lydia wondered idly what they were talking about. What was on my mind when I was eighteen? she asked herself; and then she remembered a young man with soft hair and clever hands, and she thought: Please, God, let me keep my secrets.

‘Do you think we’ll feel different after we’ve come out?’ Belinda said.

Charlotte had thought about this before. ‘I shan’t.’

‘But we’ll be grown up.’

‘I don’t see how a lot of parties and balls and picnics can make a person grow up.’

‘We’ll have to have corsets.’

Charlotte giggled. ‘Have you ever worn one?’

‘No, have you?’

‘I tried mine on last week.’

‘What’s it like?’

‘Awful. You can’t walk upright.’

‘How did you look?’

Charlotte gestured with her hands to indicate an enormous bust. They both collapsed laughing. Charlotte caught sight of her mother, and put on a contrite face in anticipation of a reprimand; but Mama seemed preoccupied, and merely smiled vaguely as she turned away.

‘It will be fun, though,’ said Belinda.

‘The season? Yes,’ Charlotte said doubtfully. ‘But what’s the point of it all?’

‘To meet the right sort of young man, of course.’

‘To look for husbands, you mean.’

They reached the great oak in the middle of the lawn, and Belinda threw herself down on the seat beneath the tree, looking faintly sulky. ‘You think coming out is all very silly, don’t you?’ she said.

Charlotte sat beside her and looked across the carpet of turf to the long south front of Walden Hall. The tall Gothic windows glinted in the afternoon sun. From here the house looked as if it might be rationally and regularly planned, but behind that facade it was really an enchanting muddle. She said: ‘What’s silly is being made to wait so long. I’m not in a hurry to go to balls and leave cards on people in the afternoon and meet young men – I shouldn’t mind if I never did those things – but it makes me so angry to be treated like a child still. I hate having supper with Marya, she’s quite ignorant, or pretends to be. At least in the dining-room you get some conversation. Papa talks about interesting things. When I get bored Marya suggests we play cards. I don’t want to play anything, I’ve been playing all my life.’ She sighed. Talking about it had made her angrier. She looked at Belinda’s calm, freckled face with its halo of red curls. Charlotte’s own face was oval, with a rather distinctive straight nose and a strong chin, and her hair was thick and dark. Happy-go-lucky Belinda, she thought; these things really don’t bother her, she never gets intense about anything.

Charlotte touched Belinda’s arm. ‘Sorry. I didn’t mean to carry on so.’

‘It’s all right.’ Belinda smiled indulgently. ‘You always get cross about things you can’t possibly change. Do you remember that time you decided you wanted to go to Eton?’

‘Never!’

‘You most certainly did. You made a terrible fuss. Papa had gone to school at Eton, you said, so why shouldn’t you?’

Charlotte had no memory of that, but she could not deny that it sounded just like her at ten years old. She said: ‘But do you really think these things can’t possibly be different? Coming out, and going to London for the season, and getting engaged, and then marriage . . .’

‘You could have a scandal and be forced to emigrate to Rhodesia.’

‘I’m not quite sure how one goes about having a scandal.’

‘Nor am I.’

They were silent for a while. Sometimes Charlotte wished she were passive like Belinda. Life would be simpler – but then again, it would be awfully dull. She said: ‘I asked Marya what I’m supposed to do after I get married. Do you know what she said?’ She imitated her governess’s throaty Russian accent. ‘Do? Why, my child, you will do nothing.’

‘Oh, that’s silly,’ Belinda said.

‘Is it? What do my mother and yours do?’

‘They’re Good Society. They have parties and stay about at country houses and go to the opera and . . .’

‘That’s what I mean. Nothing.’

‘They have babies—’

‘Now that’s another thing. They make such a secret about having babies.’

‘That’s because it’s . . . vulgar.’

‘Why? What’s vulgar about it?’ Charlotte saw herself becoming enthusiastic again. Marya was always telling her not to be enthusiastic. She took a deep breath and lowered her voice. ‘You and I have got to have these babies. Don’t you think they might tell us something about how it happens? They’re very keen for us to know all about Mozart and Shakespeare and Leonardo da Vinci.’

Belinda looked uncomfortable but very interested. She feels the same way about it as I do, Charlotte thought; I wonder how much she knows?

Charlotte said: ‘Do you realize they grow inside you?’

Belinda nodded, then blurted out: ‘But how does it start?’

‘Oh, it just happens, I think, when you get to about twenty-one. That’s really why you have to be a debutante and come out – to make sure you get a husband before you start having babies.’ Charlotte hesitated. ‘I think,’ she added.

Belinda said: ‘Then how do they get out?’

‘I don’t know. How big are they?’

Belinda held her hands about two feet apart. ‘The twins were this big when they were a day old. She thought again, and narrowed the distance. ‘Well, perhaps this big.’

Charlotte said: ‘When a hen lays an egg, it comes out . . . behind.’ She avoided Belinda’s eyes. She had never had such an intimate conversation with anyone, ever. ‘The egg seems too big, but it does come out.’

Belinda leaned closer and spoke quietly. ‘I saw Daisy drop a calf once. She’s the Jersey cow on the Home Farm. The men didn’t know I was watching. That’s what they call it, “dropping” a calf.’

Charlotte was fascinated. ‘What happened?’

‘It was horrible. It looked as if her tummy opened up, and there was a lot of blood and things.’ She shuddered.

‘It makes me scared,’ Charlotte said. ‘I’m afraid it will happen to me before I find out all about it. Why won’t they tell us?’

‘We shouldn’t be talking about such things.’

‘We’ve damn well got a right to talk about them!’

Belinda gasped. ‘Swearing makes it worse!’

‘I don’t care.’ It maddened Charlotte that there was no way to find out these things, no one to ask, no book to consult . . . She was struck by an idea. ‘There’s a locked cupboard in the library – I bet there are books about all this sort of thing in there. Let’s look!’

‘But if it’s locked . . .’

‘Oh, I know where the key is, I’ve known for years.’

‘We’ll be in terrible trouble if we’re caught.’

‘They’re all changing for dinner now. This is our chance.’ Charlotte stood up.

Belinda hesitated. ‘There’ll be a row.’

‘I don’t care if there is. Anyway, I’m going to look in the cupboard, and you can come if you want.’ Charlotte turned and walked toward the house. After a moment Belinda ran up beside her, as Charlotte had known she would.

They went through the pillared portico and into the cool, lofty great hall. Turning left, they passed the morning-room and the Octagon, then entered the library. Charlotte told herself she was a woman and entitled to know, but all the same she felt like a naughty little girl.

The library was her favourite room. Being on a corner of the house it was very bright, lit by three big windows. The leather-upholstered chairs were old and surprisingly comfortable. In winter there was a fire all day, and there were games and jigsaw puzzles as well as two or three thousand books. Some of the books were ancient, having been here since the house was built, but many were new, for Mama read novels and Papa was interested in lots of different things – chemistry, agriculture, travel, astronomy and history. Charlotte liked particularly to come here on Marya’s day off, when the governess was not able to snatch away Far from the Madding Crowd and replace it with The Water Babies. Sometimes Papa would be here with her, sitting at the Victorian pedestal desk and reading a catalogue of agricultural machinery or the balance sheet of an American railroad, but he never interfered with her choice of books.

The room was empty now. Charlotte went straight to the desk, opened a small, square drawer in one of the pedestals, and took out a key.

There were three cupboards against the wall beside the desk. One contained games in boxes and another had cartons of writing-paper and envelopes embossed with the Walden crest. The third was locked. Charlotte opened it with the key.

Inside were twenty or thirty books and a pile of old magazines. Charlotte glanced at one of the magazines. It was called The Pearl. It did not seem promising. Hastily, she picked out two books at random, without looking at the titles. She closed and locked the cupboard and replaced the key in the desk drawer.

‘There!’ she said triumphantly.

‘Where can we go to look at them?’ Belinda hissed.

‘Remember the hideaway?’

‘Oh! Yes!’

‘Why are we whispering?’

They both giggled.

Charlotte went to the door. Suddenly she heard a voice in the hall, calling: ‘Lady Charlotte . . . Lady Charlotte . . .’

‘It’s Annie, she’s looking for us,’ Charlotte said. ‘She’s nice, but so dim-witted. We’ll go out the other way, quickly.’ She crossed the library and went through the far door into the billiard-room, which led in turn to the gun-room; but there was someone in the gunroom. She listened for a moment.

‘It’s my Papa,’ Belinda whispered, looking scared. ‘He’s been out with the dogs.’

Fortunately there was a pair of French doors from the billiard-room on to the west terrace. Charlotte and Belinda crept out and closed the doors quietly behind them. The sun was low and red, casting long shadows across the lawns.

‘Now how do we get back in?’ Belinda said.

‘Over the roofs. Follow me!’

Charlotte ran around the back of the house and through the kitchen garden to the stables. She stuffed the two books into the bodice of her dress and tightened her belt so that they should not fall out.

From a corner of the stable yard she could climb, by a series of easy steps, to the roof over the servants’ quarters. First she stood on the lid of a low iron bunker which was used to store logs. From there she hauled herself on to the corrugated tin roof of a lean-to shed where tools were kept. The shed leaned against the wash-house. She stood upright on the corrugated tin and lifted herself on to the slate roof of the wash-house. She turned to look behind: Belinda was following.

Lying face down on the sloping slates, Charlotte edged along crabwise, holding on with the palms of her hands and the sides of her shoes, until the roof ended up against a wall. Then she crawled up the roof and straddled the ridge.

Belinda caught up with her and said: ‘Isn’t this dangerous?’

‘I’ve been doing it since I was nine years old.’

Above them was the window of an attic bedroom shared by two parlourmaids. The window was high in the gable, its top corners almost reaching the roof which sloped down on either side. Charlotte stood upright and peeped into the room. No one was there. She pulled herself on to the window-ledge and stood up.

She leaned to the left, got an arm and a leg over the edge of the roof, and hauled herself on to the slates. She turned back and helped Belinda up.

They lay there for a moment, catching their breath. Charlotte remembered being told that Walden Hall had four acres of roof. It was hard to believe until you came up here and realized you could get lost among the ridges and valleys. From here it was possible to reach any part of the roofs by using the footways, ladders and tunnels provided for the maintenance men who came every spring to clean gutters, paint drainpipes and replace broken tiles.

Charlotte got up. ‘Come on, the rest is easy,’ she said.

There was a ladder to the next roof, then a board footway, then a short flight of wooden steps leading to a small, square door set in a wall. Charlotte unlatched the door and crawled through, and she was in the hideaway.

It was a low, windowless room with a sloping ceiling and a plank floor which would give you splinters if you were not careful. She imagined it had once been used as a storeroom: anyway, it was now quite forgotten. A door at one end led into a closet off the nursery, which had not been used for many years. Charlotte had discovered the hideaway when she was eight or nine, and had used it occasionally in the game – which she seemed to have been playing all her life – of escaping from supervision. There were cushions on the floor, candles in jars, and a box of matches. On one of the cushions lay a battered and floppy toy dog which had been hidden here eight years ago after Marya, the governess, had threatened to throw him away. A tiny occasional table bore a cracked vase full of coloured pencils, and a red leather writing-case. Walden Hall was inventoried every few years, and Charlotte could recall Mrs Braithwaite, the housekeeper, saying that the oddest things went missing.

Belinda crawled in and Charlotte lit the candles. She took the two books from her bodice and looked at the titles. One was called Household Medicine and the other The Romance of Lust. The medical book seemed more promising. She sat on a cushion and opened it. Belinda sat beside her, looking guilty. Charlotte felt as if she were about to discover the secret of life.

She leafed through the pages. The book seemed explicit and detailed on rheumatism, broken bones and measles, but when it arrived at childbirth it suddenly became impenetrably vague. There was some mysterious stuff about cramps, waters breaking, and a cord which had to be tied in two places then cut with scissors which had been dipped in boiling water. This chapter was evidently written for people who already knew a lot about the subject. There was a drawing of a naked woman. Charlotte noticed, but was too embarrassed to tell Belinda, that the woman in the drawing had no hair in a certain place where Charlotte had a great deal. Then there was a diagram of a baby inside a woman’s tummy, but no indication of a passage by which the baby might emerge.

Belinda said: ‘It must be that the doctor cuts you open.’

‘Then what did they do in history, before there were doctors?’ Charlotte said. ‘Anyway, this book’s no good.’ She opened the other at random and read aloud the first sentence that came to her eye. ‘She lowered herself with lascivious slowness until she was completely impaled upon my rigid shaft, whereupon she commenced her delicious rocking movements to and fro.’ Charlotte frowned, and looked at Belinda.

‘I wonder what it means?’ said Belinda.

Feliks Kschessinsky sat in a railway carriage waiting for the train to pull out of Dover Station. The carriage was cold. He was quite still. It was dark outside, and he could see his own reflection in the window: a tall man with a neat moustache, wearing a black coat and a bowler hat. There was a small suitcase on the rack above his head. He might have been the travelling representative of a Swiss watch manufacturer, except that anyone who looked closely would have seen that the coat was cheap, the suitcase was cardboard, and the face was not the face of a man who sold watches.

He was thinking about England. He could remember when, in his youth, he had upheld England’s constitutional monarchy as the ideal form of government. The thought amused him, and the flat white face reflected in the window gave him the ghost of a smile. He had since changed his mind about the ideal form of government.

The train moved off, and a few minutes later Feliks was watching the sun rise over the orchards and hop fields of Kent. He never ceased to be astonished at how pretty Europe was. When he first saw it he had suffered a profound shock, for like any Russian peasant he had been incapable of imagining that the world could look this way. He had been on a train then, he recalled. He had crossed hundreds of miles of Russia’s thinly populated north-western provinces, with their stunted trees, their miserable villages buried in snow, and their winding mud roads; then, one morning, he had woken up to find himself in Germany. Looking at the neat green fields, the paved roads, the dainty houses in the clean villages, and the flower beds on the sunny station platform, he had thought he was in Paradise. Later, in Switzerland, he had sat on the verandah of a small hotel, warmed by the sun yet within sight of snow-covered mountains, drinking coffee and eating a fresh, crusty roll, and he had thought: People here must be so happy.

Now, watching the English farms come to life in the early morning, he recalled dawn in his home village: a grey, boiling sky and a bitter wind; a frozen swampy field with puddles of ice and tufts of coarse grass rimed with frost; himself in a worn canvas smock, his feet already numb in felt shoes and clogs; his father striding along beside him, wearing the threadbare robes of an impoverished country priest, arguing that God was good. His father had loved the Russian people because God loved them. It had always been perfectly obvious to Feliks that God hated the people, for He treated them so cruelly.

That discussion had been the start of a long journey, a journey which had taken Feliks from Christianity through socialism to anarchist terror, from Tambov province through St Petersburg and Siberia to Geneva. And in Geneva he had made the decision which brought him to England. He recalled the meeting. He had almost missed it . . .

He almost missed the meeting. He had been to Cracow, to negotiate with the Polish Jews who smuggled the magazine, Mutiny, across the border into Russia. He arrived in Geneva after dark, and went straight to Ulrich’s tiny back-street printing shop. The editorial committee was in session: four men and two girls, gathered around a candle, in the rear of the shop behind the gleaming press, breathing the smells of newsprint and oiled machinery, planning the Russian revolution.

Ulrich brought Feliks up to date on the discussion. He had seen Josef, a spy for the Ochrana, the Russian secret police. Josef secretly sympathized with the revolutionaries, and gave the Ochrana false information for their money. Sometimes the anarchists would give him true but harmless tidbits, and in return Josef warned them of Ochrana activities.

This time Josef’s news had been sensational. ‘The Czar wants a military alliance with England,’ Ulrich told Feliks. ‘He is sending Prince Orlov to London to negotiate. The Ochrana know about it because they have to guard the Prince on the journey through Europe.’

Feliks took off his hat and sat down, wondering whether this was true. One of the girls, a sad, shabby Russian, brought him tea in a glass. Feliks took a half-eaten lump of sugar from his pocket, placed it between his teeth, and sipped the tea through the sugar in the peasant manner.

‘The point being,’ Ulrich went on, ‘that England could then have a war with Germany and make the Russians fight it.’

Feliks nodded.

The shabby girl said: ‘And it won’t be the princes and counts who get killed – it will be the ordinary Russian people.’

She was right, Feliks thought. The war would be fought by the peasants. He had spent most of his life among those people. They were hard, surly and narrow-minded, but their foolish generosity and their occasional spontaneous outbursts of sheer fun gave a hint of how they might be in a decent society. Their concerns were the weather, animals, disease, childbirth and outwitting the landlord. For a few years, in their late teens, they were sturdy and straight, and could smile and run fast and flirt; but soon they became bowed and grey and slow and sullen. Now Prince Orlov would take those young men in the springtime of their lives and march them in front of cannon to be shot to pieces or maimed for ever, no doubt for the very best reasons of international diplomacy.

It was things like this that made Feliks an anarchist.

‘What is to be done?’ said Ulrich.

‘We must blaze the news across the front page of Mutiny!’ said the shabby girl.

They began to discuss how the story should be handled. Feliks listened. Editorial matters interested him little. He distributed the magazine and wrote articles about how to make bombs, and he was deeply discontented. He had become terribly civilized in Geneva. He drank beer instead of vodka, wore a collar and a tie, and went to concerts of orchestral music. He had a job in a bookshop. Meanwhile Russia was in turmoil. The oil workers were at war with the Cossacks, the parliament was impotent, and a million workers were on strike. Czar Nicolas II was the most incompetent and asinine ruler a degenerate aristocracy could produce. The country was a powder barrel waiting for a spark, and Feliks wanted to be that spark. But it was fatal to go back. Joe Stalin had gone back, and no sooner had he set foot on Russian soil than he had been sent to Siberia. The secret police knew the exiled revolutionaries better than they knew those still at home. Feliks was chafed by his stiff collar, his leather shoes and his circumstances.

He looked around at the little group of anarchists: Ulrich, the printer, with white hair and an inky apron, an intellectual who loaned Feliks books by Proudhon and Kropotkin but also a man of action who had once helped Feliks rob a bank; Olga, the shabby girl, who had seemed to be falling in love with Feliks until, one day, she saw him break a policeman’s arm and became frightened of him; Vera, the promiscuous poetess; Yevno, the philosophy student who talked a lot about a cleansing wave of blood and fire; Hans, the watchmaker, who saw into people’s souls as if he had them under his magnifying glass; and Piotr, the dispossessed Count, writer of brilliant economic tracts and inspirational revolutionary editorials. They were sincere and hardworking people, and all very clever. Feliks knew their importance, for he had been inside Russia among the desperate people who waited impatiently for smuggled newspapers and pamphlets and passed them from hand to hand until they fell to pieces. Yet it was not enough, for economic tracts were no protection against police bullets, and fiery articles would not burn palaces.

Ulrich was saying: ‘This news deserves wider circulation than it will get in Mutiny. I want every peasant in Russia to know that Orlov would lead him into a useless and bloody war over something that concerns him not at all.’

Olga said: ‘The first problem is whether we will be believed.’

Feliks said: ‘The first problem is whether the story is true.’

‘We can check,’ Ulrich said. ‘The London comrades could find out whether Orlov arrives when he is supposed to arrive, and whether he meets the people he needs to meet.’

‘It’s not enough to spread the news,’ Yevno said excitedly. ‘We must put a stop to this!’

‘How?’ said Ulrich, looking at young Yevno over the top of his wire-rimmed spectacles.

‘We should call for the assassination of Orlov – he is a traitor, betraying the people, and he should be executed.’

‘Would that stop the talks?’

‘It probably would,’ said Count Piotr. ‘Especially if the assassin were an anarchist. Remember, England gives political asylum to anarchists, and this infuriates the Czar. Now, if one of his princes were killed in England by one of our comrades, the Czar might well be angry enough to call off the whole negotiation.’

Yevno said: ‘What a story we would have then! We could say that Orlov had been assassinated by one of us for treason against the Russian people.’

‘Every newspaper in the world would carry that report,’ Ulrich mused.

‘Think of the effect it would have at home. You know how Russian peasants feel about conscription – it’s a death sentence. They hold a funeral when a boy goes into the army. If they learned that the Czar was planning to make them fight a major European war, the rivers would run red with blood . . .’

He was right, Feliks thought. Yevno always talked like that, but this time he was right.

Ulrich said: ‘I think you’re in dreamland, Yevno. Orlov is on a secret mission – he won’t ride through London in an open carriage waving to the crowds. Besides, I know the London comrades – they’ve never assassinated anyone. I don’t see how it can be done.’

‘I do,’ Feliks said. They all looked at him. The shadows on their faces shifted in the flickering candlelight. ‘I know how it can be done.’ His voice sounded strange to him, as if his throat was constricted. ‘I’ll go to London. I’ll kill Orlov.’

The room was suddenly quiet, as all the talk of death and destruction suddenly became real and concrete in their midst. They stared at him in surprise, all except Ulrich, who smiled knowingly, almost as if he had planned, all along, that it would turn out this way.

CHAPTER TWO

LONDON WAS unbelievably rich. Feliks had seen extravagant wealth in Russia, and much prosperity in Europe, but not on this scale. Here nobody was in rags. In fact, although the weather was warm, everyone was wearing several layers of heavy clothing. Feliks saw carters, street vendors, sweepers, labourers and delivery boys – all sporting fine factory-made coats without holes or patches. All the children wore boots. Every woman had a hat, and such hats! They were mostly enormous things, as broad across as the wheel of a dog-cart, and decorated with ribbons, feathers, flowers and fruit. The streets were teeming. He saw more motor cars in the first five minutes than he had in all his life. There seemed to be as many cars as there were horse-drawn vehicles. On wheels or on foot, everyone was rushing.

In Piccadilly Circus all the vehicles were at a standstill, and the cause was one familiar in any city: a horse had fallen and its cart had overturned. A crowd of men struggled to get beast and wagon upright, while from the pavement flower-girls and ladies with painted faces shouted encouragement and made jokes.

As he went farther east his initial impression of great wealth was somewhat modified. He passed a domed cathedral which was called St Paul’s, according to the map he had bought at Victoria Station, and thereafter he was in poorer districts. Abruptly, the magnificent facades of banks and office buildings gave place to small row houses in varying states of disrepair. There were fewer cars and more horses, and the horses were thinner. Most of the shops were street stalls. There were no more delivery boys. Now he saw plenty of barefoot children – not that it mattered, for in this climate, it seemed to him, they had no need of boots anyway.

Things got worse as he penetrated deeper into the East End. Here were crumbling tenements, squalid courtyards and stinking alleys, where human wrecks dressed in rags picked over piles of garbage, looking for food. Then Feliks entered Whitechapel High Street, and saw the familiar beards, long hair and traditional robes of assorted Orthodox Jews, and tiny shops selling smoked fish and kosher meat: it was like being in the Russian Pale, except that the Jews did not look frightened.

He made his way to No. 165 Jubilee Street, the address Ulrich had given him. It was a two-storey building that looked like a Lutheran chapel. A notice outside said the Worker’s Friend Club and Institute was open to all working men regardless of politics, but another notice betrayed the nature of the place by announcing that it had been opened in 1906 by Peter Kropotkin. Feliks wondered whether he would meet the legendary Kropotkin here in London.

He went in. He saw in the lobby a pile of newspapers, also called The Worker’s Friend but in Yiddish: Der Arbeter Fraint. Notices on the walls advertised lessons in English, a Sunday school, a trip to Epping Forest, and a lecture on Hamlet. Feliks stepped into the hall. The architecture confirmed his earlier instincts: this had definitely been the nave of a nonconformist church once upon a time. However, it had been transformed by the addition of a stage at one end and a bar at the other. On the stage a group of men and women appeared to be rehearsing a play. Perhaps this was what anarchists did in England, Feliks thought; that would explain why they were allowed to have clubs. He went over to the bar. There was no sign of alcoholic drink, but on the counter he saw gefilte fish, pickled herring, and – joy! – a samovar.

The girl behind the counter looked at him and said: ‘Nu?’

Feliks smiled.

A week later, on the day that Prince Orlov was due to arrive in London, Feliks had lunch at a French restaurant in Soho. He arrived early and picked a table near the door. He ate onion soup, fillet steak and goat’s cheese, and drank half a bottle of red wine. He ordered in French. The waiters were deferential. When he finished, it was the height of the lunch-hour rush. At a moment when three of the waiters were in the kitchen and the other two had their backs to him he calmly got up, went to the door, took his coat and hat, and left without paying.

He smiled as he walked down the street. He enjoyed stealing.

He had quickly learned how to live in this town on almost no money. For breakfast he would buy sweet tea and a slab of bread from a street stall for twopence, but that was the only food he would pay for. At lunchtime he stole fruit or vegetables from street stalls. In the evening he would go to a charity soup kitchen and get a bowl of broth and unlimited bread in return for listening to an incomprehensible sermon and singing a hymn. He had five pounds in cash but it was for emergencies.

He was living at Dunstan Houses in Stepney Green, in a five-storey tenement building where lived half the leading anarchists in London. He had a mattress on the floor in the apartment of Rudolf Rocker, the charismatic blond German who edited Der Arbeter Fraint. Rocker’s charisma did not work on Feliks, who was immune to charm, but Feliks respected the man’s total dedication. Rocker and his wife Milly kept open house for anarchists, and all day – and half the night – there were visitors, messengers, debates, committee meetings, and endless tea and cigarettes. Feliks paid no rent, but each day he brought home something – a pound of sausages, a packet of tea, a pocketful of oranges – for the communal larder. They thought he bought these things, but of course he stole them.

He told the other anarchists he was here to study at the British Museum and finish his book about natural anarchism in primitive communities. They believed him. They were friendly, dedicated and harmless: they sincerely believed the revolution could be brought about by education and trade unionism, by pamphlets and lectures and trips to Epping Forest. Feliks knew that most anarchists outside Russia were like this. He did not hate them, but secretly he despised them, for in the end they were just frightened.

Nevertheless, among such groups there were generally a few violent men. When he needed them he would seek them out.

Meanwhile he worried about whether Orlov would come and about how he would kill him. Such worries were useless, and he tried to distract his mind by working on his English. He had learned a little of the language in cosmopolitan Switzerland. During the long train journey across Europe he had studied a school textbook for Russian children and an English translation of his favourite novel, The Captain’s Daughter, by Pushkin, which he knew almost by heart in Russian. Now he read The Times every morning in the reading-room of the Jubilee Street club, and in the afternoons he walked the streets, striking up conversations with drunks, vagrants and prostitutes – the people he liked best, the people who broke the rules. The printed words in books soon meshed with the sounds all around him, and already he could say anything he needed to. Before long he would be able to talk politics in English.

After leaving the restaurant he walked north, across Oxford Street, and entered the German quarter west of Tottenham Court Road. There were a lot of revolutionists among the Germans, but they tended to be communists rather than anarchists. Feliks admired the discipline of the communists but he was suspicious of their authoritarianism; and besides, he was temperamentally unsuited to party work.

He walked all the way across Regents Park and entered the middle-class suburb to its north. He wandered around the tree-lined streets, looking into the small gardens of the neat brick villas, searching for a bicycle to steal. He had learned to ride a bicycle in Switzerland, and had discovered that it was the perfect vehicle for shadowing someone, for it was manoeuvrable and inconspicuous, and in city traffic it was fast enough to keep up with a motor car or a carriage. Sadly, the bourgeois citizens of this part of London seemed to keep their bicycles locked away. He saw one cycle being ridden along the street, and was tempted to knock the rider off the machine, but at that moment there were three pedestrians and a baker’s van in the road, and Feliks did not want to create a scene. A little later he saw a boy delivering groceries, but the boy’s cycle was too conspicuous, with a large basket on the front and a metal plate, hanging from the crossbar, bearing the name of the grocer. Feliks was beginning to toy with alternative strategies when at last he saw what he needed.

A man of about thirty came out of one of the gardens wheeling a bicycle. The man wore a straw boater and a striped blazer which bulged over his paunch. He leaned his cycle against the garden wall and bent down to put on his trouser-clips.

Feliks approached him rapidly.

The man saw his shadow, looked up, and muttered: ‘Good afternoon.’

Feliks knocked him down.

The man rolled on to his back and looked up at Feliks with a stupid expression of surprise.

Feliks fell on him, dropping one knee into the middle button of the striped blazer. The man’s breath left his body in a whoosh, and he was winded, helpless, gasping for air.

Feliks stood up and glanced toward the house. A young woman stood at a window watching, her hand raised to her open mouth, her eyes wide with fright.

He looked again at the man on the ground: it would be a minute or so before he even thought about getting up.

Feliks climbed on the bicycle and rode away rapidly.

A man who has no fear can do anything he wants, Feliks thought. He had learned that lesson eleven years ago, in a railway siding outside Omsk. It had been snowing . . .

It was snowing. Feliks sat in an open railway truck, on a pile of coal, freezing to death.

He had been cold for a year, ever since he escaped from the chain gang in the gold mine. In that year he had crossed Siberia, from the frozen north almost to the Urals. Now he was a mere thousand miles from civilization and warm weather. Most of the way he had walked, although sometimes he rode in railcars or on wagons full of pelts. He preferred to ride with cattle, for they kept him warm and he could share their feed. He was vaguely aware that he was little more than an animal himself. He never washed, his coat was a blanket stolen from a horse, his ragged clothes were full of lice and there were fleas in his hair. His favourite food was raw birds’ eggs. Once he had stolen a pony, ridden it to death, then eaten its liver. He had lost his sense of time. He knew it was autumn, by the weather, but he did not know what month he was in. Often he found himself unable to remember what he had done the day before. In his saner moments he realized he was half mad. He never spoke to people. When he came to a town or village he skirted it, pausing merely to rob the garbage tip. He knew only that he had to keep going west, for it would be warmer there.

But the coal train had been shunted into a siding, and Feliks thought he might be dying. There was a guard, a burly policeman in a fur coat, who was there to stop peasants taking coal for their fires . . . As that thought occurred to him Feliks realized he was having a lucid moment, and that it might be his last. He wondered what had brought it on, then he smelled the policeman’s dinner. But the policeman was big and healthy and had a gun.

I don’t care, Feliks thought; I’m dying anyway.

So he stood up, and picked up the biggest lump of coal he could carry, and staggered over to the policeman’s hut, and went in, and hit the startled policeman over the head with the lump of coal.

There was a pot on the fire and stew in the pot, too hot to eat. Feliks carried the pot outside and emptied it out into the snow, then he fell on his knees and ate the food mixed with cooling snow. There were lumps of potato and turnip, and fat carrots, and chunks of meat. He swallowed them whole. The policeman came out of the hut and hit Feliks with his club, a heavy blow across the back. Feliks was wild with rage that the man should try to stop him eating. He got up from the ground and flew at the man, kicking and scratching. The policeman fought back with his club but Feliks could not feel the blows. He got his fingers to the man’s throat and squeezed. He would not let go. After a while the man’s eyes closed, then his face went blue, then his tongue came out, then Feliks finished the stew.

He ate all the food in the hut, and warmed himself by the fire, and slept in the policeman’s bed. When he woke up he was sane. He took the boots and the coat off the corpse and walked to Omsk. On the way he made a remarkable discovery about himself: he had lost the ability to feel fear. Something had happened in his mind, as if a switch had closed. He could think of nothing that could possibly frighten him. If hungry, he would steal; if chased, he would hide; if threatened, he would kill. There was nothing he wanted. Nothing could hurt him any more. Love, pride, desire and compassion were forgotten emotions.

They all came back, eventually, except the fear.

When he reached Omsk he sold the policeman’s fur coat and bought trousers and a shirt, a waistcoat and a topcoat. He burned his rags and paid one rouble for a hot bath and a shave in a cheap hotel. He ate in a restaurant, using a knife instead of his fingers. He saw the front page of a newspaper, and remembered how to read; and then he knew he had come back from the grave.

He sat on a bench in Liverpool Street Station, his bicycle leaning against the wall beside him. He wondered what Orlov was like. He knew nothing about the man other than his rank and mission. The Prince might be a dull, plodding, loyal servant of the Czar, or a sadist and a lecher, or a kindly white-haired old man who liked nothing better than to bounce his grandchildren on his knee. It did not matter: Feliks would kill him anyway.

He was confident he would recognize Orlov, for Russians of that type had not the faintest conception of travelling unobtrusively, secret mission or no.

Would Orlov come? If he did come, and arrived on the very train Josef had specified, and if he subsequently met with the Earl of Walden as Josef had said he would, then there could hardly be any further doubt that Josef’s information had been accurate.

A few minutes before the train was due a closed coach drawn by four magnificent horses clattered by and drove straight on to the platform. There was a coachman in front and a liveried footman hanging on behind. A railwayman in a military-style coat with shiny buttons strode after the coach. The railwayman spoke to the coachman and directed him to the far end of the platform. Then a stationmaster in a frock coat and top hat arrived, looking important, consulting his fob watch and comparing it critically with the station clocks. He opened the carriage door for the passenger to step down.

The railwayman walked past Feliks’ bench, and Feliks grabbed his sleeve. ‘Please, sir,’ he said, putting on the wide-eyed expression of a naive foreign tourist. ‘Is that the King of England?’

The railwayman grinned. ‘No, mate, it’s only the Earl of Walden.’ He walked on.

So Josef had been right.

Feliks studied Walden with an assassin’s eye. He was tall, about Feliks’ height, and beefy – easier to shoot than a small man. He was about fifty. Except for a slight limp he seemed fit: he could run away, but not very fast. He wore a highly visible light-grey morning coat and a top hat of the same colour. His hair under the hat was short and straight, and he had a spade-shaped beard patterned after that of the late King Edward VII. He stood on the platform, leaning on a cane – potential weapon – and favouring his left leg. The coachman, the footman and the stationmaster bustled about him like bees around the queen. His stance was relaxed. He did not look at his watch. He paid no attention to the flunkies around him. He is used to this, Feliks thought; all his life he has been the important man in the crowd.

The train appeared, smoke billowing from the funnel of the engine. I could kill Orlov now, Feliks thought, and he felt momentarily the thrill of the hunter as he closes with his prey; but he had already decided not to do the deed today. He was here to observe, not to act. Most anarchist assassinations were bungled because of haste or spontaneity, in his view. He believed in planning and organisation, which were anathema to many anarchists; but they did not realize that a man could plan his own actions – it was when he began to organize the lives of others that he became a tyrant.

The train halted with a great sigh of steam. Feliks stood up and moved a little closer to the platform. Toward the far end of the train was what appeared to be a private car, differentiated from the rest by the colours of its bright new paintwork. It came to a stop precisely opposite Walden’s coach. The stationmaster stepped forward eagerly and opened a door.

Feliks tensed, peering along the platform, watching the shadowed space in which his quarry would appear.

For a moment everyone waited; then Orlov was there. He paused in the doorway for a second, and in that time Feliks’ eye photographed him. He was a small man wearing an expensive-looking heavy Russian coat with a fur collar, and a black top hat. His face was pink and youthful, almost boyish, with a small moustache and no beard. He smiled hesitantly. He looked vulnerable. Feliks thought: So much evil is done by people with innocent faces.

Orlov stepped off the train. He and Walden embraced, Russian fashion, but quickly; then they got into the coach.

That was rather hasty, Feliks thought.

The footman and two porters began to load luggage on to the carriage. It rapidly became clear that they could not get everything on, and Feliks smiled to think of his own cardboard suitcase, half empty.

The coach was turned around. It seemed the footman was being left behind to take care of the rest of the luggage. The porters came to the carriage window, and a grey-sleeved arm emerged and dropped coins into their hands. The coach pulled away. Feliks mounted his bicycle and followed.

In the tumult of the London traffic it was not difficult for him to keep pace. He trailed them through the city, along the Strand, and across St James’s Park. On the far side of the park the coach followed the boundary road for a few yards then turned abruptly into a walled forecourt.

Feliks jumped off his bicycle and wheeled it along the grass at the edge of the park until he stood across the road from the gateway. He could see the coach drawn up at the imposing entrance to a large house. Over the roof of the coach he saw two top hats, one black and one grey, disappear into the building. Then the door closed, and he could see no more.

Lydia studied her daughter critically. Charlotte stood in front of a large pier glass, trying on the debutante’s gown she would wear to be presented at court. Madame Bourdon, the thin, elegant dressmaker, fussed about her with pins, tucking a flounce here and fastening a ruffle there.

Charlotte looked both beautiful and innocent – just the effect that was called for in a debutante. The dress, of white tulle embroidered with crystals, went down almost to the floor and partly covered the tiny pointed shoes. Its neckline, plunging to waist level, was filled in with a crystal corsage. The train was four yards of cloth-of-silver lined with pale pink chiffon and caught at the end by a huge white-and-silver bow. Charlotte’s dark hair was piled high and fastened with a tiara which had belonged to the previous Lady Walden, Stephen’s mother. In her hair she wore the regulation two white plumes.

My baby has almost grown up, Lydia thought.

She said: ‘It’s very lovely, Madame Bourdon.’

‘Thank you, my lady.’

Charlotte said: ‘It’s terribly uncomfortable.’

Lydia sighed. It was just the kind of thing Charlotte would say. Lydia said: ‘I wish you wouldn’t be so frivolous.’

Charlotte knelt down to pick up her train. Lydia said: ‘You don’t have to kneel. Look, copy me and I’ll show you how it’s done. Turn to the left.’ Charlotte did so, and the train draped down her left side. ‘Gather it with your left arm, then make another quarter turn to the left.’ Now the train stretched out along the floor in front of Charlotte. ‘Walk forward, using your right hand to loop the train over your left arm as you go.’

‘It works.’ Charlotte smiled. When she smiled, you could feel the glow. She used to be like this all the time, Lydia thought. When she was little, I always knew what was going on in her mind. Growing up is learning to deceive.

Charlotte said: ‘Who taught you all these things, Mama?’

‘Your Uncle George’s first wife, Belinda’s mother, coached me before I was presented.’ She wanted to say: These things are easy to teach, but the hard lessons you must learn on your own.

Charlotte’s governess Marya came into the room. She was an efficient, unsentimental woman in an iron-grey dress, the only servant Lydia had brought from St Petersburg. Her appearance had not changed in nineteen years. Lydia had no idea how old she was: fifty? Sixty?

Marya said: ‘Prince Orlov has arrived, my lady. Why, Charlotte, you look magnificent!’

It was almost time for Marya to begin calling her ‘Lady Charlotte’, Lydia thought. She said: ‘Come down as soon as you’ve changed, Charlotte.’ Charlotte immediately began to unfasten the shoulder-straps which held her train. Lydia went out.

She found Stephen in the drawing-room, sipping sherry. He touched her bare arm and said: ‘I love to see you in summer dresses.’

She smiled. ‘Thank you.’ He looked rather fine himself, she thought, in his grey coat and silver tie. There was more grey and silver in his beard. We might have been so happy, you and I . . . Suddenly she wanted to kiss his cheek. She glanced around the room: there was a footman at the sideboard pouring sherry. She had to restrain the impulse. She sat down and accepted a glass from the footman. ‘How is Aleks?’

‘Much the same as always,’ Stephen replied. ‘You’ll see, he’ll be down in a minute. What about Charlotte’s dress?’

‘The gown is lovely. It’s her attitude that disturbs me. She’s unwilling to take anything at face value these days. I should hate her to become cynical.’

Stephen refused to worry about that. ‘You wait until some handsome Guards officer starts paying attention to her – she’ll soon change her mind.’

The remark irritated Lydia, implying as it did that all girls were the slaves of their romantic natures. It was the kind of thing Stephen said when he did not want to think about a subject. It made him sound like a hearty, empty-headed country squire, which he was not. But he was convinced that Charlotte was no different from any other eighteen-year-old girl, and he would not hear otherwise. Lydia knew that Charlotte had in her makeup a streak of something wild and un-English which had to be suppressed.

Irrationally, Lydia felt hostile toward Aleks on account of Charlotte. It was not his fault, but he represented the St Petersburg factor, the danger of the past. She shifted restlessly in her chair, and caught Stephen observing her with a shrewd eye. He said: ‘You can’t possibly be nervous about meeting little Aleks.’

She shrugged. ‘Russians are so unpredictable.’

‘He’s not very Russian.’

She smiled at her husband, but their moment of intimacy had passed, and now there was just the usual qualified affection in her heart.

The door opened. Be calm, Lydia told herself.

Aleks came in. ‘Aunt Lydia!’ he said, and bowed over her hand.

‘How do you do, Aleksei Andreivitch,’ she said formally. Then she softened her tone and added: ‘Why, you still look eighteen.’

‘I wish I were,’ he said, and his eyes twinkled.

She asked him about his trip. As he replied, she found herself wondering why he was still unmarried. He had a title which on its own was enough to knock many girls – not to mention their mothers – off their feet; and on top of that he was strikingly good-looking and enormously rich. I’m sure he’s broken a few hearts, she thought.

‘Your brother and your sisters send their love,’ Aleks was saying, ‘and ask for your prayers.’ He frowned. ‘St Petersburg is very unsettled now – it’s not the town you knew.’

Stephen said: ‘We’ve heard about this monk.’

‘Rasputin. The Czarina believes that God speaks through him, and she has great influence over the Czar. But Rasputin is only a symptom. All the time there are strikes, and sometimes riots. The people no longer believe that the Czar is holy.’

‘What is to be done?’ Stephen asked.

Aleks sighed. ‘Everything. We need efficient farms, more factories, a proper parliament like England’s, land reform, trade unions, freedom of speech . . .’

‘I shouldn’t be in too much of a hurry to have trade unions, if I were you,’ Stephen said.

‘Perhaps. Still, somehow Russia must join the twentieth century. Either we, the nobility, must do it, or the people will destroy us and do it themselves.’

Lydia thought he sounded more radical than the Radicals. How things must have changed at home, that a prince could talk like this! Her sister Tatyana, Aleks’ mother, referred in her letters to ‘the troubles’ but gave no hint that the nobility was in real danger. But then, Aleks was more like his father, the old Prince Orlov, a political animal. If he were alive today he would talk like this.

Stephen said: ‘There is a third possibility, you know; a way in which the aristocracy and the people might yet be united.’

Aleks smiled, as if he knew what was coming. ‘And that is?’

‘A war.’

Aleks nodded gravely. They think alike, Lydia reflected; Aleks always looked up to Stephen; Stephen was the nearest thing to a father that the boy had, after the old Prince died.

Charlotte came in, and Lydia stared at her in surprise. She was wearing a frock Lydia had never seen, of cream lace lined with chocolate-brown silk. Lydia would never have chosen it – it was rather striking – but there was no denying that Charlotte looked ravishing. Where did she buy it? Lydia wondered. When did she start buying clothes without taking me along? Who told her that those colours flatter her dark hair and brown eyes? Does she have a trace of make-up on? And why isn’t she wearing a corset?

Stephen was also staring. Lydia noticed that he had stood up, and she almost laughed. It was a dramatic acknowledgement of his daughter’s grown-up status, and what was funny was that it was clearly involuntary. In a moment he would feel foolish, and he would realize that standing up every time his daughter walked into a room was a courtesy he could hardly sustain in his own house.

The effect on Aleks was even greater. He sprang to his feet, spilled his sherry, and blushed crimson. Lydia thought: Why, he’s shy! He transferred his dripping glass from his right hand to his left, so that he was unable to shake with either, and he stood there looking helpless. It was an awkward moment, for he needed to compose himself before he could greet Charlotte, but he was clearly waiting to greet her before he would compose himself. Lydia was about to make some inane remark just to fill the silence when Charlotte took over.

She pulled the silk handkerchief from Aleks’ breast pocket and wiped his right hand with it, saying: ‘How do you do, Aleksei Andreivitch,’ in Russian. She shook his now-dry right hand, took the glass from his left hand, wiped the glass, wiped the left hand, gave him back the glass, stuffed the handkerchief back into his pocket, and made him sit down. She sat beside him and said: ‘Now that you’ve finished throwing the sherry around, tell me about Diaghilev. He’s supposed to be a strange man. Have you met him?’

Aleks smiled. ‘Yes, I’ve met him.’

As Aleks talked, Lydia marvelled. Charlotte had dealt with the awkward moment without hesitation, and had gone on to ask a question – one which she had presumably prepared in advance – which succeeded in taking Orlov’s mind off himself and making him feel at ease. And she had done all that as smoothly as if she had had twenty years’ practice. Where had she learned such poise?

Lydia caught her husband’s eye. He too had noted Charlotte’s graciousness, and he was smiling from ear to ear in a glow of fatherly pride.

Feliks paced up and down in St James’s Park, pondering what he had seen. From time to time he glanced across the road at the graceful white facade of Walden’s house, rising over the high forecourt wall like a noble head above a starched collar. He thought: They believe they are safe in there.

He sat on a bench, in a position from which he could still see the house. Middle-class London swarmed about him, the girls in their outrageous headgear, the clerks and shopkeepers walking homeward in their dark suits and bowler hats. There were gossiping nannies with babies in perambulators or overdressed toddlers; there were top-hatted gentlemen on their way to and from the clubs of St James’s; there were liveried footmen walking tiny ugly dogs. A fat woman with a big bag of shopping plumped herself down on the bench beside him and said: ‘Hot enough for you?’ He was not sure what would be the appropriate reply, so he smiled and looked away.

It seemed that Orlov had realized his life might be in danger in England. He had shown himself for only a few seconds at the station, and not at all at the house. Feliks guessed that he had requested, in advance, that he be met by a closed coach, for the weather was fine and most people were driving in open landaus.

Until today this killing had been planned in the abstract, Feliks reflected. It had been a matter of international politics, diplomatic quarrels, alliances and ententes, military possibilities, the hypothetical reactions of far-away Kaisers and Czars. Now, suddenly, it was flesh and blood; it was a real man, of a certain size and shape; it was a youthful face with a small moustache, a face which must be smashed by a bullet; it was a short body in a heavy coat, which must be turned into blood and rags by a bomb; it was a clean-shaven throat above a spotted tie, a throat which must be sliced open to gush blood.

Feliks felt completely capable of doing it. More than that, he was eager. There were questions – they would be answered; there were problems – they would be solved; it would take nerve – he had plenty.

He visualized Orlov and Walden inside that beautiful house, in their fine soft clothes, surrounded by quiet servants. Soon they would have dinner at a long table whose polished surface reflected like a mirror the crisp linen and silver cutlery. They would eat with perfectly clean hands, even the fingernails white, and the women wearing gloves. They would consume a tenth of the food provided and send the rest back to the kitchen. They might talk of racehorses or the new ladies’ fashions or a king they all knew. Meanwhile the people who were to fight the war shivered in hovels in the cruel Russian climate – yet could still find an extra bowl of potato soup for an itinerant anarchist.

What a joy it will be to kill Orlov, he thought; what sweet revenge. When I have done that I can die satisfied.

He shivered.

‘You’re catching a cold,’ said the fat woman.

Feliks shrugged.

‘I’ve got him a nice lamb chop for his dinner, and I’ve made an apple pie,’ she said.

‘Ah,’ said Feliks. What on earth was she talking about? He got up from the bench and walked across the grass toward the house. He sat on the ground with his back to a tree. He would have to observe this house for a day or two and find out what kind of life Orlov would lead in London: when he would go out and to where; how he would travel – coach, landau, motor car or cab; how much time he would spend with Walden. Ideally he wanted to be able to predict Orlov’s movements and so lie in wait for him. He might achieve that simply by learning his habits. Otherwise he would have to find a way of discovering the Prince’s plans in advance – perhaps by bribing a servant in the house.

Then there was the question of what weapon to use and how to get it. The choice would depend upon the detailed circumstances of the killing. Getting it would depend on the Jubilee Street anarchists. For this purpose the amateur-dramatics group could be ignored, as could the Dunstan Houses intellectuals and indeed all those with visible means of support. But there were four or five angry young men who always had money for drinks and, on the rare occasions when they talked politics, spoke of anarchism in terms of expropriating the expropriators, which was jargon for financing the revolution by theft. They would have weapons or know where to get them.

Two young girls who looked like shop assistants strolled by his tree, and he heard one of them say: ‘ . . . told him, if you think just because you take a girl to the Bioscope and buy her a glass of brown ale you can . . .’ Then they were past.

A peculiar feeling came over Feliks. He wondered whether the girls had caused it – but no, they meant nothing to him. Am I apprehensive? he thought. No. Fulfilled? No, that comes later. Excited? Hardly.

He finally figured out that he was happy.

It was very odd indeed.

That night Walden went to Lydia’s room. After they had made love she slept, and he lay in the dark with her head on his shoulder, remembering St Petersburg in 1895.

He was always travelling in those days – America, Africa, Arabia – mainly because England was not big enough for him and his father both. He found St Petersburg society gay but prim. He liked the Russian landscape and the vodka. Languages came easily to him but Russian was the most difficult he had ever encountered and he enjoyed the challenge.

As the heir to an earldom, Stephen was obliged to pay a courtesy call on the British Ambassador; and the Ambassador, in his turn, was expected to invite Stephen to parties and introduce him around. Stephen went to the parties because he liked talking politics with diplomats almost as much as he liked gambling with officers and getting drunk with actresses. It was at a reception in the British Embassy that he first met Lydia.

He had heard of her previously. She was spoken of as a paragon of virtue and a great beauty. She was beautiful, in a frail, colourless sort of way, with pale skin, pale blond hair, and a white gown. She was also modest, respectable, and scrupulously polite. There seemed to be nothing to her, and Walden detached himself from her company quite quickly.

But later he found himself seated next to her at dinner, and he was obliged to converse with her. The Russians all spoke French, and if they learned a third language it was German, so Lydia had very little English. Fortunately Stephen’s French was good. Finding something to talk about was a bigger problem. He said something about the government of Russia, and she replied with the reactionary platitudes that were two-a-penny at the time. He spoke about his enthusiasm, big-game hunting in Africa, and she was interested for a while, until he mentioned the naked black pygmies, at which point she blushed and turned away to talk with the man on her other side. Stephen told himself he was not very interested in her, for she was the kind of girl one married, and he was not planning to marry. Still she left him with the nagging feeling that there was more to her than met the eye.

Lying in bed with her nineteen years later, Walden thought: She still gives me that nagging feeling; and he smiled ruefully in the dark.

He had seen her once more that evening in St Petersburg. After dinner he had lost his way in the labyrinthine embassy building, and had wandered into the music-room. She was there alone, sitting at the piano, filling the room with wild, passionate music. The tune was unfamiliar and almost discordant; but it was Lydia that fascinated Stephen. The pale, untouchable beauty was gone: her eyes flashed, her head tossed, her body trembled with emotion, and she seemed altogether a different woman.

He never forgot that music. Later he discovered that it had been Tchaikovsky’s piano concerto in B flat minor, and since then he went to hear it played at every opportunity, although he never told Lydia why.

When he left the embassy he went back to his hotel to change his clothes, for he had an appointment to play cards at midnight. He was a keen gambler but not a self-destructive one: he knew how much he could afford to lose, and when he had lost it he stopped playing. Had he run up enormous debts he would have been obliged to ask his father to pay them, and that he could not bear to do. Sometimes he won quite large sums. However, that was not the appeal of gambling for him: he liked the masculine companionship, the drinking, and the late hours.

He did not keep that midnight rendezvous. Pritchard, his valet, was tying Stephen’s tie when the British Ambassador knocked on the door of the hotel suite. His Excellency looked as if he had got out of bed and dressed hastily. Stephen’s first thought was that some kind of revolution was going on and all the British would have to take refuge in the embassy.

‘Bad news, I’m afraid,’ said the Ambassador. ‘You’d better sit down. Cable from England. It’s your father.’

The old tyrant was dead of a heart attack at sixty-five.

‘Well, I’m damned,’ Stephen said. ‘So soon.’

‘My deepest sympathy,’ the Ambassador said.

‘It was very good of you to come personally.’

‘Not at all. Anything I can do.’

‘You’re very kind.’

The Ambassador shook his hand and left.

Stephen stared into space, thinking about the old man. He had been immensely tall, with a will of iron and a sour disposition. His sarcasm could bring tears to your eyes. There were three ways to deal with him: you could become like him, you could go under, or you could go away. Stephen’s mother, a sweet, helpless Victorian girl, had gone under, and died young. Stephen had gone away.

He pictured his father lying in a coffin, and thought: You’re helpless at last. Now you can’t make housemaids cry, or footmen tremble, or children run and hide. You’re powerless to arrange marriages, evict tenants, or defeat parliamentary bills. You’ll send no more thieves to jail, transport no more agitators to Australia. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

In later years he revised his opinion of his father. Now, in 1914, at the age of fifty, Walden could admit to himself that he had inherited some of his father’s values: love of knowledge, a belief in rationalism, a commitment to good work as the justification of a man’s existence. But back in 1895 there had been only bitterness.

Pritchard had brought a bottle of whisky on a tray and said: ‘This is a sad day, my lord.’

That my lord startled Stephen. He and his brother had courtesy titles – Stephen’s was Lord Highcombe – but they were always called ‘sir’ by the servants, and ‘my lord’ was reserved for their father. Now, of course, Stephen was the Earl of Walden. Along with the title, he now possessed several thousands of acres in the south of England, a big chunk of Scotland, six racehorses, Walden Hall, a villa in Monte Carlo, a shooting-box in Scotland and a seat in the House of Lords.

He would have to live at Walden Hall. It was the family seat, and the Earl always lived there. He would put in electric light, he decided. He would sell some of the farms and invest in London property and North American railroads. He would make his maiden speech in the House of Lords – what would he speak on? Foreign policy, probably. There were tenants to be looked after, several households to be managed. He would have to appear in court in the season, and give shooting parties and hunt balls—

He needed a wife.

The role of Earl of Walden could not be played by a bachelor. Someone must be hostess at all those parties, someone must reply to invitations, discuss menus with cooks, allocate bedrooms to guests, and sit at the foot of the long table in the dining-room of Walden Hall. There must be a Countess of Walden.

There must be an heir.

‘I need a wife, Pritchard.’

‘Yes, my lord. Our bachelor days are over.’

The next day Walden saw Lydia’s father and formally asked permission to call on her.

Twenty years later he found it difficult to imagine how he could have been so wickedly irresponsible, even in his youth. He had never asked himself whether she was the right wife for him, only whether she was suited to be a countess. He had never wondered whether he could make her happy. He had assumed that the hidden passion released when she played the piano would be released for him, and he had been wrong.

He called on her every day for two weeks – there was no possibility of getting home in time for his father’s funeral – and then he proposed, not to her but to her father. Her father saw the match in the same practical terms as Walden. Walden explained that he wanted to marry immediately, although he was in mourning, because he had to get home and manage the estate. Lydia’s father understood perfectly. They were married six weeks later.

What an arrogant young fool I was, he thought. I imagined that England would always rule the world and I would always rule my own heart.

The moon came out from behind a cloud and illuminated the bedroom. He looked down at Lydia’s sleeping face. I didn’t foresee this, he thought; I didn’t know that I would fall helplessly, hopelessly in love with you. I asked only that we should like each other, and in the end that was enough for you but not for me. I never thought that I would need your smile, yearn for your kisses, long for you to come to my room at night; I never thought that I would be frightened, terrified of losing you.

She murmured in her sleep and turned over. He pulled his arm from under her neck, then sat up on the edge of the bed. If he stayed any longer he would nod off, and it would not do to have Lydia’s maid find them in bed together when she came in with the morning cup of tea. He put on his dressing-gown and his carpet slippers and walked softly out of the room, through the twin dressing-rooms, and into his own bedroom. I’m such a lucky man, he thought as he lay down to sleep.

Walden surveyed the breakfast table. There were pots of coffee, China tea and Indian tea; jugs of cream, milk and cordial; a big bowl of hot porridge; plates of scones and toast; and little pots of marmalade, honey and jam. On the sideboard was a row of silver dishes, each warmed by its own spirit lamp, containing scrambled eggs, sausages, bacon, kidneys and haddock. On the cold table were pressed beef, ham and tongue. The fruit bowl, on a table of its own, was piled with nectarines, oranges, melons and strawberries.

This ought to put Aleks in a good mood, he thought.

He helped himself to eggs and kidneys and sat down. The Russians would have their price, he thought; they would want something in return for their promise of military help. He was worried about what the price might be. If they were to ask for something England could not possibly grant, the whole deal would collapse immediately, and then . . .

It was his job to make sure it did not collapse.

He would have to manipulate Aleks. The thought made him uncomfortable. Having known the boy for so long should have been a help, but in fact it might have been easier to negotiate in a tough way with someone about whom one did not care personally.

I must put my feelings aside, he thought; we must have Russia.

He poured coffee and took some scones and honey. A minute later Aleks came in, looking bright-eyed and well-scrubbed. ‘Sleep well?’ Walden asked him.

‘Wonderfully well.’ Aleks took a nectarine and began to eat it with a knife and fork.

‘Is that all you’re having?’ Walden said. ‘You used to love English breakfast – I remember you eating porridge, cream, eggs, beef and strawberries and then asking cook for more toast.’

‘I’m not a growing boy any more, Uncle Stephen.’

I might do well to remember that, Walden thought.

After breakfast they went into the morning-room. ‘Our new five-year plan for the army and navy is about to be announced,’ Aleks said.

That’s what he does, Walden thought; he tells you something before he asks you for something. He remembered Aleks saying: I’m planning to read Clausewitz this summer, Uncle. By the way, may I bring a guest to Scotland for the shooting?

‘The budget for the next five years is seven-and-a-half billion roubles,’ Aleks went on.

At ten roubles to the pound sterling, Walden calculated, that made £750 million. ‘It’s a massive programme,’ he said, ‘but I wish you had begun it five years ago.’

‘So do I,’ said Aleks.

‘The chances are that the programme will hardly have started before we’re at war.’

Aleks shrugged.

Walden thought: He won’t commit himself to a forecast of how soon Russia might be at war, of course. ‘The first thing you should do is increase the size of the guns on your Dreadnoughts.’

Aleks shook his head. ‘Our third Dreadnought is about to be launched. The fourth is being built now. Both will have 12-inch guns.’

‘It’s not enough, Aleks. Churchill has gone over to 15-inch guns for ours.’

‘And he’s right. Our commanders know that, but our politicians don’t. You know Russia, Uncle: new ideas are viewed with the utmost distrust. Innovation takes for ever.’

We’re fencing, Walden thought. ‘What is your priority?’

‘A hundred million roubles will be spent immediately on the Black Sea fleet.’

‘I should have thought the North Sea was more important.’ For England, anyway.

‘We have a more Asian viewpoint than you – our bullying neighbour is Turkey, not Germany.’

‘They might be allies.’

‘They might indeed.’ Aleks hesitated. ‘The great weakness of the Russian Navy,’ he went on, ‘is that we have no warm-water port.’

It sounded like the beginning of a prepared speech. This is it, Walden thought; we’re getting to the heart of the matter now. But he continued to fence. ‘What about Odessa?’

‘On the Black Sea coast. While the Turks hold Constantinople and Gallipoli, they control the passage between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean; so for strategic purposes the Black Sea might as well be an inland lake.’

‘Which is why the Russian Empire has been trying to push southward for hundreds of years.’

‘Why not? We’re Slavs, and many of the Balkan peoples are Slavs. If they want national freedom, of course we sympathize.’

‘Indeed. Still, if they get it, they will probably let your navy pass freely into the Mediterranean.’

‘Slav control of the Balkans would help us. Russian control would help even more.’

‘No doubt – although it’s not on the cards, as far as I can see.’

‘Would you like to give the matter some thought?’

Walden opened his mouth to speak then closed it abruptly. This is it, he thought; this is what they want, this is the price. We can’t give Russia the Balkans, for God’s sake! If the deal depends on that, there will be no deal . . .

Aleks was saying: ‘If we are to fight alongside you, we must be strong. The area we are talking about is the area in which we need strengthening, so naturally we look to you for help there.’

That was putting it as plainly as could be: Give us the Balkans and we’ll fight with you.

Pulling himself together, Walden frowned as if puzzled and said: ‘If Britain had control of the Balkans, we could – at least in theory – give the area to you. But we can’t give you what we haven’t got, so I’m not sure how we can strengthen you – as you put it – in that area.’

Aleks’ reply was so quick that it must have been rehearsed. ‘But you might acknowledge the Balkans as a Russian sphere of influence.’

Aah, that’s not so bad, Walden thought. That we might be able to manage.

He was enormously relieved. He decided to test Aleks’ determination before winding up the discussion. He said: ‘We could certainly agree to favour you over Austria or Turkey in that part of the world.’

Aleks shook his head. ‘We want more than that,’ he said firmly.

It had been worth a try. Aleks was young and shy, but he could not be pushed around. Worse luck.

Walden needed time to reflect, now. For Britain to do as Russia wanted would mean a significant shift in international alignments, and such shifts, like movements of the earth’s crust, caused earthquakes in unexpected places.

‘You may like to talk with Churchill before we go any farther,’ Aleks said with a little smile.

You know damn well I will, Walden thought. He realized suddenly how well Aleks had handled the whole thing. First he had scared Walden with a completely outrageous demand; then, when he put forward his real demand, Walden had been so relieved that he welcomed it.

I thought I was going to manipulate Aleks, but in the event he manipulated me.

Walden smiled. ‘I’m proud of you, my boy,’ he said.

That morning Feliks figured out when, where and how he was going to kill Prince Orlov.

The plan began to take shape in his mind while he read The Times in the library of the Jubilee Street club. His imagination was sparked by a paragraph in the ‘Court Circular’ column:

Now he knew for certain that Orlov would be at a certain place, on a certain date, at a certain time. Information of this kind was essential to a carefully planned assassination. Feliks had anticipated that he would get the information either by speaking to one of Walden’s servants or by observing Orlov and identifying some habitual rendezvous. Now he had no need to take the risks involved in interviewing servants or trailing people. He wondered whether Orlov knew that his movements were being advertised by the newspapers, as if for the benefit of assassins. It was typically English, he thought.

The next problem was how to get sufficiently close to Orlov to kill him. Even Feliks would have difficulty getting into a royal palace. But this question also was answered by The Times. On the same page as the Court Circular, sandwiched between a report of a dance given by Lady Bailey and the details of the latest wills, he read:

Feliks read it several times: there was something about the prose style of The Times that made it extremely difficult to comprehend. It seemed at least to mean that as people left the palace their footmen were sent running to fetch their carriages, which would be parked somewhere else.

There must be a way, he thought, that I can contrive to be in or on the Walden carriage when it returns to the palace to pick them up.

One major difficulty remained. He had no gun.

He could have got one easily enough in Geneva, but then to have carried it across international frontiers would have been risky: he might have been refused entry into England if his baggage had been searched.

It was surely just as easy to get a gun in London, but he did not know how, and he was most reluctant to make open inquiries. He had observed gun shops in the West End of London and noted that all the customers who went in and out looked thoroughly upper-class: Feliks would not get served in there even if he had the money to buy their beautifully made precision firearms. He had spent time in low-class pubs, where guns were surely bought and sold among criminals, but he had not seen it happen, which was hardly surprising. His only hope was the anarchists. He had got into conversation with those of them whom he thought ‘serious’, but they never talked of weapons, doubtless because of Feliks’ presence. The trouble was that he had not been around long enough to be trusted. There were always police spies in anarchist groups, and while this did not prevent the anarchists welcoming newcomers, it made them wary.

Now the time for surreptitious investigation had run out. He would have to ask directly how guns were to be obtained. It would require careful handling. And immediately afterwards he would have to sever his ties with Jubilee Street and move to another part of London, to avoid the risk of being traced.

He considered the young Jewish tearaways of Jubilee Street. They were angry and violent boys. Unlike their parents, they refused to work like slaves in the sweat-shops of the East End, sewing the suits that the aristocracy ordered from Savile Row tailors. Unlike their parents, they paid no attention to the conservative sermonizing of the rabbis. But as yet they had not decided whether the solutions to their problems lay in politics or in crime.

His best prospect, he decided, was Nathan Sabelinsky. A man of about twenty, he had rather Slavic good looks, and wore very high stiff collars and a yellow waistcoat. Feliks had seen him around the spielers off the Commercial Road: he must have had money to spend on gambling as well as clothes.

He looked around the library. The other occupants were an old man asleep, a woman in a heavy coat reading Das Kapital in German and making notes, and a Lithuanian Jew bent over a Russian newspaper, reading with the aid of a magnifying glass. Feliks left the room and went downstairs. There was no sign of Nathan or any of his friends. It was a little early for him: if he worked at all, Feliks thought, he worked at night.

Feliks went back to Dunstan Houses. He packed his razor, his clean underwear and his spare shirt in his cardboard suitcase. He told Milly, Rudolf Rocker’s wife: ‘I’ve found a room. I’ll come back this evening to say thank you to Rudolf.’ He strapped the suitcase to the back seat of the bicycle and rode west, to central London, then north to Camden Town. Here he found a street of high, once-grand houses which had been built for pretentious middle-class families who had now moved to the suburbs at the ends of the new railway lines. In one of them Feliks rented a dingy room from an Irish woman called Bridget. He paid her ten shillings in advance of two weeks’ rent.

By midday he was back in Stepney, outside Nathan’s home in Sidney Street. It was a small row house of the two-rooms-up-and-two-down type. The front door was wide open. Feliks walked in.

The noise and the smell hit him like a blow. There, in a room about twelve feet square, some fifteen or twenty people were working at tailoring. Men were using machines, women were sewing by hand, and children were pressing finished garments. Steam rose from the ironing-boards to mingle with the smell of sweat. The machines clattered, the irons hissed, and the workers jabbered incessantly in Yiddish. Pieces of cloth cut ready for stitching were piled on every available patch of floor space. Nobody looked up at Feliks: they were all working furiously fast.

He spoke to the nearest person, a girl with a baby at her breast. She was hand-sewing buttons on to the sleeve of a jacket. ‘Is Nathan here?’ he said.

‘Upstairs,’ she said without pausing in her work.

Feliks went out of the room and up the narrow staircase. Each of the two small bedrooms had four beds. Most of them were occupied, presumably by people who worked at night. He found Nathan in the back room, sitting on the edge of a bed, buttoning his shirt.

Nathan saw him and said: ‘Feliks, wie gehts?’

‘I need to talk to you,’ Feliks said in Yiddish.

‘So talk.’

‘Come outside.’

Nathan put on his coat and they went out into Sidney Street. They stood in the sunshine, close to the open window of the sweat-shop, their conversation masked by the noise from inside.

‘My father’s trade,’ said Nathan. ‘He’ll pay a girl fivepence for machining a pair of trousers – an hour’s work for her. He’ll pay another threepence to the girls who cut, press, and sew on buttons. Then he will take the trousers to a West End tailor and get paid nine-pence. Profit, one penny – enough to buy one slice of bread. If he asks the West End tailor for tenpence he’ll be thrown out of the shop, and the work will be given to one of the dozens of Jewish tailors out in the street with their machines under their arms. I won’t live like that.’

‘Is this why you’re an anarchist?’

‘Those people make the most beautiful clothes in the world – but did you see how they are dressed?’

‘And how will things be changed – by violence?’

‘I think so.’

‘I was sure you would feel this way. Nathan, I need a gun.’

Nathan laughed nervously. ‘What for?’

‘Why do anarchists usually want guns?’

‘You tell me, Feliks.’

‘To steal from thieves, to oppress tyrants, and to kill murderers.’

‘Which are you going to do?’

‘I’ll tell you – if you really want to know . . .’

Nathan thought for a moment, then said: ‘Go to the Frying Pan pub on the corner of Brick Lane and Thrawl Street. See Garfield the Dwarf.’

‘Thank you!’ said Feliks, unable to keep the note of triumph out of his voice. ‘How much will I have to pay?’

‘Five shillings for a pinfire.’

‘I’d rather have something more reliable.’

‘Good guns are expensive.’

‘I’ll just have to haggle.’ Feliks shook Nathan’s hand. ‘Thank you.’

Nathan watched him climb on his bicycle. ‘Maybe you’ll tell me about it, afterwards.’

Feliks smiled. ‘You’ll read about it in the papers.’ He waved a hand and rode off.

He cycled along Whitechapel Road and Whitechapel High Street, then turned right into Osborn Street. Immediately, the character of the streets changed. This was the most run-down part of London he had yet seen. The streets were narrow and very dirty, the air smoky and noisome, the people mostly wretched. The gutters were choked with filth. But despite all that the place was as busy as a beehive. Men ran up and down with handcarts, crowds gathered around street stalls, prostitutes worked every corner, and the workshops of carpenters and bootmakers spilled out on to the pavements.

Feliks left his bicycle outside the door of the Frying Pan: if it was taken he would just have to steal another one. To enter the pub he had to step over what looked like a dead cat. Inside was a single room, low and bare, with a bar at the far end. Older men and women sat on benches around the walls, while younger people stood in the middle of the room. Feliks went to the bar and asked for a glass of ale and a cold sausage.

He looked around and spotted Garfield the Dwarf. He had not seen him before because the man was standing on a chair. He was about four feet tall, with a large head and a middle-aged face. A very big black dog sat on the floor beside his chair. He was talking to two large, tough-looking men dressed in leather waistcoats and collarless shirts. Perhaps they were bodyguards. Feliks noted their large bellies and grinned to himself, thinking: I’ll eat them up alive. The two men held quart pots of ale, but the dwarf was drinking what looked like gin. The barman handed Feliks his drink and his sausage. ‘And a glass of the best gin,’ Feliks said.

A young woman at the bar looked at him and said: ‘Is that for me?’ She smiled coquettishly, showing rotten teeth. Feliks looked away.

When the gin came he paid and walked over to the group, who were standing near a small window which looked on to the street. Feliks stood between them and the door. He addressed the dwarf. ‘Mr Garfield?’

‘Who wants him?’ said Garfield in a squeaky voice.

Feliks offered the glass of gin. ‘May I speak to you about business?’

Garfield took the glass, drained it, and said: ‘No.’

Feliks sipped his ale. It was sweeter and less fizzy than Swiss beer. He said: ‘I wish to buy a gun.’

‘I don’t know what you’ve come here for, then.’

‘I heard about you at the Jubilee Street club.’

‘Anarchist, are you?’

Feliks said nothing.

Garfield looked him up and down. ‘What kind of gun would you want, if I had any?’

‘A revolver. A good one.’

‘Something like a Browning seven-shot?’

‘That would be perfect.’

‘I haven’t got one. If I had I wouldn’t sell it. And if I sold it I’d have to ask five pounds.’

‘I was told a pound at the most.’

‘You was told wrong.’

Feliks reflected. The dwarf had decided that, as a foreigner and an anarchist, Feliks could be rooked. All right, Feliks thought, we’ll play it your way. ‘I can’t afford more than two pounds.’

‘I couldn’t come down below four.’

‘Would that include a box of ammunition?’

‘All right, four pounds including a box of ammunition.’

‘Agreed,’ Feliks said. He noticed one of the bodyguards smothering a grin. After paying for the drinks and the sausage, Feliks had three pounds fifteen shillings and a penny.

Garfield nodded at one of his companions. The man went behind the bar and out through the back door. Feliks ate his sausage. A minute or two later the man came back carrying what looked like a bundle of rags. He glanced at Garfield, who nodded. The man handed the bundle to Feliks.

Feliks unfolded the rags and found a revolver and a small box. He took the gun from its wrappings and examined it.

Garfield said: ‘Keep it down, no need to show it to the whole bleeding world.’

The gun was clean and oiled, and the action worked smoothly. Feliks said: ‘If I do not look at it, how do I know it is good?’

‘Where do you think you are, Harrods?’

Feliks opened the box of cartridges and loaded the chambers with swift, practised movements.

‘Put the fucking thing away,’ the dwarf hissed. ‘Give me the money quick and fuck off out of it. You’re fucking mad.’

A bubble of tension rose in Feliks’ throat, and he swallowed dryly. He took a step back and pointed the gun at the dwarf.

Garfield said: ‘Jesus, Mary and Joseph.’

‘Shall I test the gun?’ Feliks said.

The two bodyguards stepped sideways in opposite directions so that Feliks could not cover them both with the one gun. Feliks’ heart sank: he had not expected them to be that smart. Their next move would be to jump him. The pub was suddenly silent. Feliks realized he could not get to the door before one of the bodyguards reached him. The big dog growled, sensing the tension in the air.

Feliks smiled and shot the dog.

The bang of the gun was deafening in the little room. Nobody moved. The dog slumped to the floor, bleeding. The dwarf’s bodyguards were frozen where they stood.

Feliks took another step back, reached behind him, and found the door. He opened it, still pointing the gun at Garfield, and stepped out.

He slammed the door, stuffed the gun in his coat pocket, and jumped on his bicycle.

He heard the pub door open. He pushed himself off and began to pedal. Somebody grabbed his coat sleeve. He pedalled harder and broke free. He heard a shot, and ducked reflexively. Someone screamed. He dodged around an ice-cream vendor and turned a corner. In the distance he heard a police whistle. He looked behind. Nobody was following him.

Half a minute later he was lost in the warrens of Whitechapel.

He thought: Six bullets left.

CHAPTER THREE

CHARLOTTE WAS ready. The gown, agonized over for so long, was perfect. To complete it she wore a single blush rose in her corsage and carried a spray of the same flowers, covered in chiffon. Her diamond tiara was fixed firmly to her upswept hair, and the two white plumes were securely fastened. Everything was fine.

She was terrified.

‘As I enter the Throne Room,’ she said to Marya, ‘my train will drop off, my tiara will fall over my eyes, my hair will come loose, my feathers will lean sideways, and I shall trip over the hem of my gown and go flat on the floor. The assembled company will burst out laughing, and no one will laugh louder than Her Majesty the Queen. I shall run out of the palace and into the park and throw myself into the lake.’

‘You ought not to talk like that,’ said Marya. Then, more gently, she added: ‘You’ll be the loveliest of them all.’

Charlotte’s mother came into the bedroom. She held Charlotte at arm’s length and looked at her. ‘My dear, you’re beautiful,’ she said, and kissed her.

Charlotte put her arms around Mama’s neck and pressed her cheek against her mother’s, the way she had used to as a child, when she had been fascinated by the velvet smoothness of Mama’s complexion. When she drew away, she was surprised to see a hint of tears in her mother’s eyes.

‘You’re beautiful too, Mama,’ she said.

Lydia’s gown was of ivory charmeuse, with a train of old ivory brocade lined in purple chiffon. Being a married lady she wore three feathers in her hair as opposed to Charlotte’s two. Her bouquet was sweet-peas and petunia roses.

‘Are you ready?’ she said.

‘I’ve been ready for ages,’ Charlotte said.

‘Pick up your train.’

Charlotte picked up her train the way she had been taught.

Mama nodded approvingly. ‘Shall we go?’

Marya opened the door. Charlotte stood aside to let her mother go first, but Mama said: ‘No, dear – it’s your night.’

They walked in procession, Marya bringing up the rear, along the corridor and down to the landing. When Charlotte reached the top of the grand staircase she heard a burst of applause.

The whole household was gathered at the foot of the stairs: housekeeper, cook, footmen, maids, skivvies, grooms and boys. A sea of faces looked up at her with pride and delight. Charlotte was touched by their affection: it was a big night for them, too, she realized.

In the centre of the throng was Papa, looking magnificent in a black velvet tail-coat, knee breeches, and silk stockings, with a sword at his hip and a cocked hat in his hand.

Charlotte walked slowly down the stairs.

Papa kissed her and said: ‘My little girl.’

The cook, who had known her long enough to take liberties, plucked at her sleeve and whispered: ‘You look wonderful, m’lady.’

Charlotte squeezed her hand and said: ‘Thank you, Mrs Harding.’

Aleks bowed to her. He was resplendent in the uniform of an admiral in the Russian Navy. What a handsome man he is, Charlotte thought; I wonder whether someone will fall in love with him tonight.

Two footmen opened the front door. Papa took Charlotte’s elbow and gently steered her out. Mama followed on Aleks’ arm. Charlotte thought: If I can just keep my mind blank all evening, and go automatically wherever people lead me, I shall be all right.

The coach was waiting outside. William the coachman and Charles the footman stood, wearing the Walden livery, at attention on either side of the door. William, stout and greying, was calm; but Charles looked excited. Papa handed Charlotte into the coach, and she sat down gratefully. I haven’t fallen over yet, she thought.

The other three got in. Pritchard brought a hamper and put it on the floor of the coach before closing the door.

The coach pulled away.

Charlotte looked at the hamper. ‘A picnic?’ she said. ‘But we’re only going half a mile!’

‘Wait till you see the queue,’ Papa said. ‘It will take us almost an hour to get there.’

It occurred to Charlotte that she might be more bored than nervous this evening.

Sure enough, the carriage stopped at the Admiralty end of The Mall, half a mile from Buckingham Palace. Papa opened the hamper and took out a bottle of champagne. The basket also contained chicken sandwiches, hothouse peaches, and a cake.

Charlotte sipped a glass of champagne but she could not eat anything. She looked out of the window. The pavements were thronged with idlers watching the procession of the mighty. She saw a tall man with a thin, handsome face leaning on a bicycle and staring intently at their coach. Something about his look made Charlotte shiver and turn away.

After such a grand exit from the house, she found that the anticlimax of sitting in the queue was calming. By the time the coach passed through the palace gates and approached the grand entrance she was beginning to feel more her normal self – sceptical, irreverent and impatient.

The coach stopped and the door was opened. Charlotte gathered her train in her left arm, picked up her skirts with her right hand, stepped down from the coach and walked into the palace.

The great red-carpeted hall was a blaze of light and colour. Despite her scepticism she felt a thrill of excitement when she saw the crowd of white-gowned women and men in glittering uniforms. The diamonds flashed, the swords clanked and the plumes bobbed. Red-coated Beefeaters stood at attention on either side.

Charlotte and Mama left their wraps in the cloakroom then, escorted by Papa and Aleks, walked slowly through the hall and up the grand staircase, between the Yeomen of the Guard with their halberds and the massed red and white roses. From there they went through the picture gallery and into the first of three state drawing-rooms with enormous chandeliers and mirror-bright parquet floors. Here the procession ended and people stood around in groups, chatting and admiring one another’s clothes. Charlotte saw her cousin Belinda with Uncle George and Aunt Clarissa. The two families greeted each other.

Uncle George was wearing the same clothes as Papa, but because he was so fat and red-faced he looked awful in them. Charlotte wondered how Aunt Clarissa, who was young and pretty, felt about being married to such a lump.

Papa was surveying the room as if looking for someone. ‘Have you seen Churchill?’ he said to Uncle George.

‘Good Lord, what do you want him for?’

Papa took out his watch. ‘We must take our places in the Throne Room – we’ll leave you to look after Charlotte, if we may, Clarissa.’ Papa, Mama and Aleks left.

Belinda said to Charlotte: ‘Your dress is gorgeous.’

‘It’s awfully uncomfortable.’

‘I knew you were going to say that!’

‘You’re ever so pretty.’

‘Thank you.’ Belinda lowered her voice. ‘I say, Prince Orlov is rather dashing.’

‘He’s very sweet.’

‘I think he’s more than sweet.’

‘What’s that funny look in your eye?’

Belinda lowered her voice even more. ‘You and I must have a long talk very soon.’

‘About what?’

‘Remember what we discussed in the hideaway? When we took those books from the library at Walden Hall?’

Charlotte looked at her uncle and aunt, but they had turned away to talk to a dark-skinned man in a pink satin turban. ‘Of course I remember.’

‘About that.’

Silence descended suddenly. The crowd fell back toward the sides of the room to make a gangway in the middle. Charlotte looked around and saw the King and Queen enter the drawing-room, followed by their pages, several members of the Royal Family, and the Indian bodyguard.

There was a great sigh of rustling silk as every woman in the room sank to the floor in a curtsey.

In the Throne Room, the orchestra concealed in the Minstrels’ Gallery struck up ‘God Save the King’. Lydia looked toward the huge doorway guarded by gilt giants. Two attendants walked in backwards, one carrying a gold stick and one a silver. The King and Queen entered at a stately pace, smiling faintly. They mounted the dais and stood in front of the twin thrones. The rest of their entourage took their places near by, remaining standing.

Queen Mary wore a gown of gold brocade and a crown of emeralds. She’s no beauty, Lydia thought, but they say he adores her. She had once been engaged to her husband’s elder brother, who had died of pneumonia; and the switch to the new heir to the throne had seemed coldly political at the time. However, everyone now agreed that she was a good queen and a good wife. Lydia would have liked to know her personally.

The presentations began. One by one the wives of ambassadors came forward, curtsied to the King, curtsied to the Queen, then backed away. The ambassadors followed, dressed in a great variety of gaudy comic-opera uniforms, all but the United States Ambassador who wore ordinary black evening clothes, as if to remind everyone that Americans did not really believe in this sort of nonsense.

As the ritual went on, Lydia looked around the room, at the crimson satin on the walls, the heroic frieze below the ceiling, the enormous candelabra, and the thousands of flowers. She loved pomp and ritual, beautiful clothes and elaborate ceremonies; they moved and soothed her at the same time. She caught the eye of the Duchess of Devonshire, the Mistress of the Robes, and they exchanged a discreet smile. She spotted John Burns, the socialist President of the Board of Trade, and was amused to see the extravagant gilt embroidery on his court dress.

When the diplomatic presentations ended, the King and Queen sat down. The Royal Family, the diplomats, and the most senior nobility followed suit. Lydia and Walden, along with the lesser nobility, had to remain standing.

At last the presentation of the debutantes began. Each girl paused just outside the Throne Room while an attendant took her train from her arm and spread it behind her. Then she began the endless walk along the red carpet to the thrones, with all eyes on her. If a girl could look graceful and unselfconscious there, she could do it anywhere.

As the debutante approached the dais she handed her invitation card to the Lord Chamberlain, who read out her name. She curtsied to the King, then to the Queen. Few girls curtsied elegantly, Lydia thought. She had had a great deal of trouble getting Charlotte to practise at all: perhaps other mothers had the same problem. After the curtsies the debutante walked on, careful not to turn her back on the thrones until she was safely hidden in the watching crowd.

The girls followed one another so closely that each was in danger of treading on the train of the one in front. The ceremony seemed to Lydia to be less personal, more perfunctory than it had used to be. She herself had been presented to Queen Victoria in the season of 1896, the year after she married Walden. The old Queen had not sat on a throne, but on a high stool which gave the impression that she was standing. Lydia had been surprised at how little Victoria was. She had had to kiss the Queen’s hand. That part of the ceremony had now been dispensed with, presumably to save time. It made the court seem like a factory for turning out the maximum number of debutantes in the shortest possible time. Still, the girls of today did not know the difference and probably would not care if they did.

Suddenly Charlotte was at the entrance, and the attendant was laying down her train, then giving her a gentle push, and she was walking along the red carpet, head held high, looking perfectly serene and confident. Lydia thought: This is the moment I have lived for.

The girl ahead of Charlotte curtsied – and then the unthinkable happened.

Instead of getting up from her curtsey, the debutante looked at the King, stretched out her arms in a gesture of supplication, and cried in a loud voice:

‘Your Majesty, for God’s sake stop torturing women!’

Lydia thought: A suffragette!

Her eyes flashed to her daughter. Charlotte was standing dead still, halfway to the dais, staring at the tableau with an expression of horror on her ashen face.

The shocked silence in the Throne Room lasted only for a split second. Two gentlemen-in-waiting were the fastest to react. They sprang forward, took the girl firmly by either arm, and marched her unceremoniously away.

The Queen was blushing crimson. The King managed to appear as if nothing had happened. Lydia looked again at Charlotte, thinking: Why did my daughter have to be next in line?

Now all eyes were on Charlotte. Lydia wanted to call out to her: Pretend it never happened! Just carry on!

Charlotte stood still. A little colour came back into her cheeks. Lydia could see that she was taking a deep breath.

Then she walked forward. Lydia could not breathe. Charlotte handed her card to the Lord Chamberlain, who said: ‘Presentation of Lady Charlotte Walden.’ Charlotte stood before the King.

Lydia thought: Careful!

Charlotte curtsied perfectly.

She curtsied again to the Queen.

She half-turned, and walked away.

Lydia let out her breath in a long sigh.

The woman standing next to Lydia – a baroness whom she vaguely recognized but did not really know – whispered: ‘She handled that very well.’

‘She’s my daughter,’ Lydia said with a smile.

Walden was secretly amused by the suffragette. Spirited girl! he thought. Of course, if Charlotte had done such a thing at the court he would have been horrified, but as it was someone else’s daughter he regarded the incident as a welcome break in the interminable ceremony. He had noticed how Charlotte had carried on, unruffled: he would have expected no less of her. She was a highly self-assured young lady, and in his opinion Lydia should congratulate herself on the girl’s upbringing instead of worrying all the time.

He had used to enjoy these occasions, years ago. As a young man he had quite liked to put on court dress and cut a dash. In those days he had had the legs for it, too. Now he felt foolish in knee-breeches and silk stockings, not to mention a damn great steel sword. And he had attended so many courts that the colourful ritual no longer fascinated him.

He wondered how King George felt about it. Walden liked the King. Of course, by comparison with his father Edward VII, George was a rather colourless, mild fellow. The crowds would never shout ‘Good old Georgie!’ the way they had shouted ‘Good old Teddy!’ But in the end they would like George for his quiet charm and his modest way of life. He knew how to be firm, although as yet he did it too rarely; and Walden liked a man who could shoot straight. Walden thought he would turn out very well indeed.

Finally the last debutante curtsied and passed on, and the King and Queen stood up. The orchestra played the national anthem again, the King bowed, and the Queen curtsied, first to the ambassadors, then to the ambassadors’ wives, then the Duchesses, and lastly the Ministers. The King took the Queen by the hand. The pages picked up her train. The attendants went out backwards. The royal couple left, followed by the rest of the company in order of precedence.

They divided to go into three supper-rooms: one for the Royal Family and their close friends, one for the diplomatic corps, and one for the rest. Walden was a friend, but not an intimate friend, of the King: he went with the general assembly. Aleks went with the diplomats.

In the supper-room Walden met up with his family again. Lydia was glowing. Walden said: ‘Congratulations, Charlotte.’

Lydia said: ‘Who was that awful girl?’

‘I heard someone say she’s the daughter of an architect,’ Walden replied.

‘That explains it,’ said Lydia.

Charlotte looked mystified. ‘Why does that explain it?’

Walden smiled. ‘Your Mama means that the girl is not quite out of the top drawer.’

‘But why does she think the King tortures women?’

‘She was talking about the suffragettes. But let’s not go into all that tonight; this is a great occasion for us. Let’s have supper. It looks marvellous.’

There was a long buffet table loaded with flowers and hot and cold food. Servants in the scarlet-and-gold royal livery waited to offer the guests lobster, filleted trout, quail, York ham, plovers’ eggs, and a host of pastries and desserts. Walden got a loaded plate and sat down to eat. After standing about in the Throne Room for more than two hours he was hungry.

Sooner or later Charlotte would have to learn about the suffragettes, their hunger strikes, and the consequent force-feeding; but the subject was indelicate, to say the least, and the longer she remained in blissful ignorance the better, Walden thought. At her age life should be all parties and picnics, frocks and hats, gossip and flirtation.

But everyone was talking about ‘the incident’ and ‘that girl’. Walden’s brother George sat beside him and said without preamble: ‘She’s a Miss Mary Blomfield, daughter of the late Sir Arthur Blomfield. Her mother was in the drawing-room at the time. When she was told what her daughter had done she fainted right off.’ He seemed to relish the scandal.

‘Only thing she could do, I suppose,’ Walden replied.

‘Damn shame for the family,’ George said. ‘You won’t see Blomfields at court again for two or three generations.’

‘We shan’t miss them.’

‘No.’

Walden saw Churchill pushing through the crowd toward where they sat. He had written to Churchill about his talk with Aleks, and he was impatient to discuss the next step – but not here. He looked away, hoping Churchill would get the hint. He should have known better than to hope that such a subtle message would get through.

Churchill bent over Walden’s chair. ‘Can we have a few words together?’

Walden looked at his brother. George wore an expression of horror. Walden threw him a resigned look and got up.

‘Let’s walk in the picture gallery,’ Churchill said.

Walden followed him out.

Churchill said: ‘I suppose you, too, will tell me that this suffragette protest is all the fault of the Liberal Party.’

‘I expect it is,’ Walden said. ‘But that isn’t what you want to talk about.’

‘No indeed.’

The two men walked side by side through the long gallery. Churchill said: ‘We can’t acknowledge the Balkans as a Russian sphere of influence.’

‘I was afraid you’d say that.’

‘What do they want the Balkans for? I mean, forgetting all this nonsense about sympathy with Slav nationalism.’

‘They want passage through to the Mediterranean.’

‘That would be to our advantage, if they were our allies.’

‘Exactly.’

They reached the end of the gallery and stopped. Churchill said: ‘Is there some way we can give them that passage without redrawing the map of the Balkan Peninsula?’

‘I’ve been thinking about that.’

Churchill smiled. ‘And you’ve got a counter-proposal.’

‘Yes.’

‘Let’s hear it.’

Walden said: ‘What we’re talking about here are three stretches of water: the Bosphorus, the Sea of Marmara, and the Dardanelles. If we can give them those waterways, they won’t need the Balkans. Now, suppose that whole passage between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean could be declared an international waterway, with free passage to ships of all nations guaranteed jointly by Russia and England.’

Churchill started walking again, slow and thoughtful. Walden walked beside him, waiting for his answer.

Eventually Churchill said: ‘That passage ought to be an international waterway, in any event. What you’re suggesting is that we offer, as if it were a concession, something which we want anyway.’

‘Yes.’

Churchill looked up and grinned suddenly. ‘When it comes to Machiavellian manoeuvring, there’s no one to beat the English aristocracy. All right. Go ahead and propose it to Orlov.’

‘You don’t want to put it to the Cabinet?’

‘No.’

‘Not even to the Foreign Secretary?’

‘Not at this stage. The Russians are certain to want to modify the proposal – they’ll want details of how the guarantee is to be enforced, at least – so I’ll go to the Cabinet when the deal is fully elaborated.’

‘Very well.’ Walden wondered just how much the Cabinet knew about what Churchill and he were up to. Churchill, too, could be Machiavellian. Were there wheels within wheels?

Churchill said: ‘Where is Orlov now?’

‘In the diplomatic supper-room.’

‘Let’s go and put it to him right away.’

Walden shook his head, thinking that people were correct when they accused Churchill of being impulsive. ‘This is not the moment.’

‘We can’t wait for the moment, Walden. Every day counts.’

It will take a bigger man than you to bully me, Walden thought. He said: ‘You’re going to have to leave that to my judgement, Churchill. I’ll put this to Orlov tomorrow morning.’

Churchill seemed disposed to argue, but he restrained himself visibly and said: ‘I don’t suppose Germany will declare war tonight. Very well.’ He looked at his watch. ‘I’m going to leave. Keep me fully informed.’

‘Of course. Goodbye.’

Churchill went down the staircase and Walden returned to the supper-room. The party was breaking up. Now that the King and Queen had disappeared and everyone had been fed there was nothing to stay for. Walden rounded up his family and took them downstairs. They found Aleks in the great hall.

While the ladies went into the cloakroom Walden asked one of the attendants to summon his carriage.

All in all, he thought as he waited, it had been a rather successful evening.

The Mall reminded Feliks of the streets in the Old Equerries Quarter of Moscow. It was a wide, straight avenue that ran from Trafalgar Square to Buckingham Palace. On one side was a series of grand houses including St James’s Palace. On the other side was St James’s Park. The carriages and motor cars of the great were lined up on both sides of The Mall for half its length. Chauffeurs and coachmen leaned against their vehicles, yawning and fidgeting, waiting to be summoned to the palace to collect their masters and mistresses.

The Walden carriage waited on the park side of The Mall. Their coachman, in the blue-and-pink Walden livery, stood beside the horses, reading a newspaper by the light of a carriage lamp. A few yards away, in the darkness of the park, Feliks stood watching him.

Feliks was desperate. His plan was in ruins.

He had not understood the difference between the English words ‘coachman’ and ‘footman’ and consequently he had misunderstood the notice in The Times about summoning carriages. He had thought that the driver of the coach would wait at the palace gate until his master emerged, then would come running to fetch the coach. At that point, Feliks had planned, he would have overpowered the coachman, taken his livery, and driven the coach to the palace himself.

What happened in fact was that the coachman stayed with the vehicle and the footman waited at the palace gate. When the coach was wanted, the footman would come running; then he and the coachman would go with the carriage to pick up the passengers. That meant Feliks had to overpower two people, not one; and the difficulty was that it had to be done surreptitiously, so that none of the hundreds of other servants in The Mall would know anything was wrong.

Since realizing his mistake a couple of hours ago he had worried at the problem, while he watched the coachman chatting with his colleagues, examining a nearby Rolls-Royce car, playing some kind of game with halfpennies, and polishing the carriage windows. It might have been sensible to abandon the plan, and kill Orlov another day.

But Feliks hated that idea. For one thing, there was no certainty that another good opportunity would arise. For another, Feliks wanted to kill him now. He had been anticipating the bang of the gun, the way the Prince would fall; he had composed the coded cable which would go to Ulrich in Geneva; he had pictured the excitement in the little printing shop, and then the headlines in the world’s newspapers, and then the final wave of revolution sweeping through Russia. I can’t postpone this any longer, he thought; I want it now.

As he watched, a young man in green livery approached the Walden coachman and said: ‘What ho, William.’

So the coachman’s name is William, Feliks thought.

William said: ‘Mustn’t grumble, John.’

Feliks did not understand that.

‘Anything in the news?’ said John.

‘Yeah, revolution. The King says that next year all the coachmen can go in the palace for supper and the toffs will wait in The Mall.’

‘A likely tale.’

‘You’re telling me.’

John moved on.

I can get rid of William, Feliks thought, but what about the footman?

In his mind he ran over the probable sequence of events. Walden and Orlov would come to the palace door. The doorman would alert Walden’s footman, who would run from the palace to the carriage – a distance of about a quarter of a mile. The footman would see Feliks dressed in the coachman’s clothes, and would sound the alarm.

Suppose the footman arrived at the parking-place to find that the carriage was no longer there?

That was a thought!

The footman would wonder whether he had misremembered the spot. He would look up and down. In something of a panic he would search for the coach. Finally he would admit defeat and return to the palace to tell his master that he could not find the coach. By which time Feliks would be driving the coach and its owner through the park.

It could still be done!

It was more risky than before, but it could still be done.

There was no more time for reflection. The first two or three footmen were already running down The Mall. The Rolls-Royce car in front of the Walden coach was summoned. William put on his top hat in readiness.

Feliks emerged from the bushes and walked a little way toward him, calling: ‘Hey! Hey, William!’

The coachman looked toward him, frowning.

Feliks beckoned urgently. ‘Come here, quick!’

William folded his newspaper, hesitated, then walked slowly toward Feliks.

Feliks allowed his own tension to put a note of panic into his voice. ‘Look at this!’ he said, pointing to the bushes. ‘Do you know anything about this?’

‘What?’ William said, mystified. He drew level and peered the way Feliks was pointing.

‘This.’ Feliks showed him the gun. ‘If you make a noise I’ll shoot you.’

William was terrified. Feliks could see the whites of his eyes in the half-dark. He was a heavily built man, but he was older than Feliks. If he does something foolish and messes this up I’ll kill him, Feliks thought savagely.

‘Walk on,’ Feliks said.

The man hesitated.

I’ve got to get him out of the light. ‘Walk, you bastard!’

William walked into the bushes.

Feliks followed him. When they were about fifty yards away from The Mall Feliks said: ‘Stop.’

William stopped and turned around.

Feliks thought: If he’s going to fight, this is where he will do it. He said: ‘Take off your clothes.’

‘What?’

‘Undress.’

‘You’re mad,’ William whispered.

‘You’re right – I’m mad! Take off your clothes!’

William hesitated.

If I shoot him, will people come running? Will the bushes muffle the sound? Could I kill him without making a hole in his uniform? Could I take his coat off and run away before anyone arrives?

Feliks cocked the gun.

William began to undress.

Feliks could hear the increasing activity in The Mall: motor cars started, harness jingled, hooves clattered and men shouted to one another and to their horses. Any minute now the footman might come running for the Walden coach. ‘Faster!’ Feliks said.

William got down to his underwear.

‘The rest also,’ Feliks said.

William hesitated. Feliks lifted the gun.

William pulled off his undershirt, dropped his underpants, and stood naked, shivering with fear, covering his genitals with his hands.

‘Turn around,’ said Feliks.

William turned his back.

‘Lie on the ground, face down.’

He did so.

Feliks put down the gun. Hurriedly, he took off his coat and hat and put on the livery coat and the top hat which William had dropped on the ground. He contemplated the knee-breeches and white stockings, but decided to leave them: when he was sitting up on the coach no one would notice his trousers and boots, especially in the uncertain light of the street lamps.

He put the gun into the pocket of his own coat and folded the coat over his arm. He picked up William’s clothes in a bundle.

William tried to look around.

‘Don’t move!’ Feliks said sharply.

Softly, he walked away.

William would stay there for a while then, naked as he was, he would try to get back to the Walden house unobserved. It was highly unlikely that he would report that he had been robbed of his clothes before he had a chance to get some more, unless he was an extraordinarily immodest man. Of course if he had known Feliks was going to kill Prince Orlov he might have thrown modesty to the winds – but how could he possibly guess that?

Feliks pushed William’s clothes under a bush, then walked out into the lights of The Mall.

This was where things might go wrong. Until now he had been merely a suspicious person lurking in the bushes. From this moment on he was plainly an imposter. If one of William’s friends – John, for instance – should look closely at his face, the game would be up.

He climbed rapidly on to the coach, put his own coat on the seat beside him, adjusted his top hat, released the brake, and flicked the reins. The coach pulled out into the road.

He sighed with relief. I’ve got this far, he thought; I’ll get Orlov!

As he drove down The Mall he watched the pavements, looking for a running footman in the blue-and-pink livery. The worst possible mischance would be for the Walden footman to see him now, and recognize the colours, and jump on to the back of the coach. Feliks cursed as a motor car pulled out in front of him, forcing him to slow the horses to a halt. He looked around anxiously. There was no sign of the footman. After a moment the road was clear and he went on.

At the palace end of the avenue he spotted an empty space on the right, the side of the road farther from the park. The footman would come along the opposite pavement and would not see the coach. He pulled into the space and set the brake.

He climbed down from the seat and stood behind the horses, watching the opposite pavement. He wondered whether he would get out of this alive.

In his original plan there had been a good chance that Walden would get into the carriage without so much as a glance at the coachman, but now he would surely notice that his footman was missing. The palace doorman would have to open the coach door and pull down the steps. Would Walden stop and speak to the coachman, or would he postpone inquiries until he got home? If he were to speak to Feliks then Feliks would have to reply and his voice would give the game away. What will I do then? Feliks thought.

I’ll shoot Orlov at the palace door, and take the consequences.

He saw the footman in blue-and-pink running along the far side of The Mall.

Feliks jumped on to the coach, released the brake, and drove into the courtyard of Buckingham Palace.

There was a queue. Ahead of him, the beautiful women and the well-fed men climbed into their carriages and cars. Behind him, somewhere in The Mall, the Walden footman was running up and down, hunting for his coach. How long before he returned?

The palace servants had a fast and efficient system for loading guests into vehicles. While the passengers were getting into the carriage at the door, a servant was calling the owners of the second in line, and another servant was inquiring the name of the people for the third.

The line moved, and a servant approached Feliks. ‘The Earl of Walden,’ Feliks said. The servant went inside.

They mustn’t come out too soon, Feliks thought.

The line moved forward, and now there was only a motor car in front of him. Pray God it doesn’t stall, he thought. The chauffeur held the doors for an elderly couple. The car pulled away.

Feliks moved the coach to the porch, halting it a little too far forward, so that he was beyond the wash of light from inside, and his back was to the palace doors.

He waited, not daring to look around.

He heard the voice of a young girl say, in Russian: ‘And how many ladies proposed marriage to you this evening, Cousin Aleks?’

A drop of sweat ran down into Feliks’ eye and he wiped it away with the back of his hand.

A man said: ‘Where the devil is my footman?’

Feliks reached into the pocket of the coat beside him and got his hand on the butt of the revolver. Six shots left, he thought.

Out of the corner of his eye he saw a palace servant spring forward, and a moment later he heard the door of the coach being opened. The vehicle rocked slightly as someone got in.

‘I say, William, where’s Charles?’

Feliks tensed. He imagined he could feel Walden’s eyes boring into the back of his head. The girl’s voice said: ‘Come on, Papa,’ from inside the carriage.

‘William’s getting deaf in his old age . . .’ Walden’s words were muffled as he got into the coach. The door slammed.

‘Right away, coachman!’ said the palace servant.

Feliks breathed out, and drove away.

The release of tension made him feel weak for a moment. Then, as he guided the carriage out of the courtyard, he felt a surge of elation. Orlov was in his power, shut in a box behind him, caught like an animal in a trap. Nothing could stop Feliks now.

He drove into the park.

Holding the reins in his right hand, he struggled to get his left arm into his topcoat. That done, he switched the reins to his left hand and got his right arm in. He stood up and shrugged the coat up over his shoulders. He felt in the pocket and touched the gun.

He sat down again and wound a scarf around his neck.

He was ready.

Now he had to choose his moment.

He had only a few minutes. The Walden house was less than a mile from the palace. He had bicycled along this road the night before, to reconnoitre. He had found two suitable places, where a street lamp would illuminate his victim and there was thick shrubbery near by into which he could disappear afterwards.

The first spot loomed up fifty yards ahead. As he approached it he saw a man in evening dress pause beneath the lamp to light his cigar. He drove past the spot.

The second place was a bend in the road. If there was someone there, Feliks would just have to take a chance, and shoot the intruder if necessary.

Six bullets.

He saw the bend. He made the horses trot a little faster. From inside the coach he heard the young girl laugh.

He came to the bend. His nerves were as taut as piano-wire.

Now.

He dropped the reins and heaved on the brake. The horses staggered and the carriage shuddered and jerked to a halt.

From inside the coach he heard a woman cry and a man shout. Something about the woman’s voice bothered him, but there was no time to wonder why. He jumped down to the ground, pulled the scarf up over his mouth and nose, took the gun from his pocket and cocked it.

Full of strength and rage, he flung open the coach door.

CHAPTER FOUR

A WOMAN CRIED out, and time stood still.

Feliks knew the voice. The sound hit him like a mighty blow. The shock paralysed him.

He was supposed to locate Orlov, point the gun at him, pull the trigger, make sure he was dead with another bullet, then turn and run into the bushes . . .

Instead he looked for the source of the cry, and saw her face. It was startlingly familiar, as if he had last seen it only yesterday, instead of nineteen years ago. Her eyes were wide with panic, and her small red mouth was open.

Lydia.

He stood at the door of the coach with his mouth open under the scarf, the gun pointing nowhere, and he thought: My Lydia – here in this carriage . . .

As he stared at her he was dimly aware that Walden was moving, with uncanny slowness, close by him on his left; but all Feliks could think was: This is how she used to look, wide-eyed and open-mouthed, when she lay naked beneath me, her legs wrapped around my waist, and she stared at me and began to cry out with delight . . .

Then he saw that Walden had drawn a sword –

For God’s sake, a sword?

– and the blade was glinting in the lamplight as it swept down, and Feliks moved too slowly and too late, and the sword bit into his right hand, and he dropped the gun and it went off with a bang as it hit the road.

The explosion broke the spell.

Walden drew back the sword and thrust at Feliks’ heart. Feliks moved sideways. The point of the sword went through his coat and jacket and stuck into his shoulder. He jumped back reflexively and the sword came out. He felt a rush of warm blood inside his shirt.

He stared down at the road, looking for the gun, but he could not see it. He looked up again, and saw that Walden and Orlov had collided as they tried simultaneously to get out through the narrow carriage door. Feliks’ right arm hung limply at his side. He realized he was unarmed and helpless. He could not even strangle Orlov, for his right arm was useless. He had failed utterly, and all because of the voice of a woman from the past.

After all that, he thought bitterly; after all that.

Full of despair, he turned and ran away.

Walden roared: ‘Damned villain!’

Feliks’ wound hurt every step. He heard someone running behind him. The footsteps were too light to be Walden’s: Orlov was chasing him. He teetered on the edge of hysteria as he thought: Orlov is chasing me – and I am running away!

He darted off the road and into the bushes. He heard Walden shout: ‘Aleks, come back, he’s got a gun!’ They don’t know I dropped it, Feliks thought. If only I still had it I could shoot Orlov now.

He ran a little way farther then stopped, listening. He could hear nothing. Orlov had given up.

He leaned against a tree. He was exhausted by his short sprint. When he had caught his breath he took off his topcoat and the stolen livery coat and gingerly touched his wounds. They hurt like the devil, which he thought was probably a good sign, for if they had been very grave they would have been numb. His shoulder bled slowly, and throbbed. His hand had been sliced in the fleshy part between thumb and forefinger, and it bled fast.

He had to get out of the park before Walden had a chance to raise the hue and cry.

With difficulty he drew on the topcoat. He left the livery coat on the ground where it lay. He squeezed his right hand under his left armpit, to relieve the pain and slow the flow of blood. Wearily, he headed toward The Mall.

Lydia.

It was the second time in his life that she had caused a catastrophe. The first time, in 1895, in St Petersburg—

No. He would not allow himself to think about her, not yet. He needed his wits about him now.

He saw with relief that his bicycle was where he had left it, under the overhanging branches of a big tree. He wheeled it across the grass to the edge of the park. Had Walden alerted the police yet? Were they looking for a tall man in a dark coat? He stared at the scene in The Mall. The footmen were still running, the car engines roaring, the carriages manoeuvring. How long had it been since Feliks had climbed up on to the Walden coach – twenty minutes? In that time the world had turned over.

He took a deep breath and wheeled the bicycle into the road. Everyone was busy, nobody looked at him. Keeping his right hand in his coat pocket, he mounted the machine. He pushed off and began to pedal, steering with his left hand.

There were bobbies all around the palace. If Walden mobilized them quickly they could cordon off the park and the roads around it. Feliks looked ahead, toward Admiralty Arch. There was no sign of a roadblock.

Once past the arch he would be in the West End and they would have lost him.

He began to get the knack of cycling one-handed, and increased his speed.

As he approached the arch a motor car drew alongside him and, at the same time, a policeman stepped into the road ahead. Feliks stopped the bicycle and prepared to run – but the policeman was merely holding up the traffic to permit another car, belonging presumably to some kind of dignitary, to emerge from a gateway. When the car came out the policeman saluted then waved the traffic on.

Feliks cycled through the arch and into Trafalgar Square.

Too slow, Walden, he thought with satisfaction.

It was midnight, but the West End was bright with street lights and crowded with people and traffic. There were policemen everywhere and no other cyclists: Feliks was conspicuous. He considered abandoning the bicycle and walking back to Camden Town, but he was not sure he could make the journey on foot: he seemed to be tiring.

From Trafalgar Square he rode up St Martin’s Lane, then left the main streets for the back alleys of Theatreland. A dark lane was suddenly illuminated as a stage door opened and a bunch of actors came out, talking loudly and laughing. Farther on he heard groans and sighs, and passed a couple making love standing up in a doorway.

He crossed into Bloomsbury. Here it was quieter and darker. He cycled north up Gower Street, past the classical facade of the deserted university. Pushing the pedals became an enormous effort, and he ached all over. Just a mile or two more, he thought.

He dismounted to cross the busy Euston Road. The lights of the traffic dazzled him. He seemed to be having difficulty focusing his eyes.

Outside Euston Station he got on the bicycle again and pedalled off. Suddenly he felt dizzy. A street light blinded him. The front wheel wobbled and hit the kerb. Feliks fell.

He lay on the ground, dazed and weak. He opened his eyes and saw a policeman approaching. He struggled to his knees.

‘Have you been drinkin’?’ the policeman said.

‘Feel faint,’ Feliks managed.

The policeman took his right arm and hauled him to his feet. The pain in his wounded shoulder brought Feliks to his senses. He managed to keep his bleeding right hand in his pocket.

The policeman sniffed audibly and said: ‘Hmm.’ His attitude became more genial when he discovered that Feliks did not smell of drink. ‘Will you be all right?’

‘In a minute.’

‘Foreigner, are you?’

The policeman had noticed his accent. ‘French,’ Feliks said. ‘I work at the Embassy.’

The policeman became more polite. ‘Would you like a cab?’

‘No, thank you. I have only a little way to go.’

The policeman picked up the bicycle. ‘I should wheel it home if I were you.’

Feliks took the bicycle from him. ‘I will do that.’

‘Very good, sir. Bong noo-wee.’

‘Bonne nuit, officer.’ With an effort Feliks produced a smile. Pushing the bicycle with his left hand, he walked away. I’ll turn into the next alley and sit down for a rest, he resolved. He looked back over his shoulder: the policeman was still watching him. He made himself keep on walking, although he desperately needed to lie down. The next alley, he thought. But when he came to an alley he passed it, thinking: Not this one, but the next.

And in that way he got home.

It seemed hours later that he stood outside the high terraced house in Camden Town. He peered through a fog at the number on the door to make sure this was the right place.

To get to his room he had to go down a flight of stone steps to the basement area. He leaned the bicycle against the wrought-iron railings while he opened the little gate. He then made the mistake of trying to wheel the bicycle down the steps. It slid out of his grasp and fell into the area with a loud clatter. A moment later his landlady, Bridget, appeared at the street door in a shawl.

‘What the divil is it?’ she called.

Feliks sat on the steps and made no reply. He decided he would not move for a while, until he felt stronger.

Bridget came down and helped him to his feet. ‘You’ve had a few too many drinks,’ she said. She made him walk down the steps to the basement door.

‘Give us your key,’ she said.

Feliks had to use his left hand to take the key from his right trouser pocket. He gave it to her and she opened the door. They went in. Feliks stood in the middle of the little room while she lit the lamp.

‘Let’s have your coat off,’ she said.

He let her remove his coat, and she saw the bloodstains. ‘Have you been fightin’?’

Feliks went and lay on the mattress.

Bridget said: ‘You look as if you lost!’

‘I did,’ said Feliks, and he passed out.

An agonizing pain brought him around. He opened his eyes to see Bridget bathing his wounds with something that stung like fire. ‘This hand should be stitched,’ she said.

‘Tomorrow,’ Feliks breathed.

She made him drink from a cup. It was warm water with gin in it. She said: ‘I haven’t any brandy.’

He lay back and let her bandage him.

‘I could fetch the doctor but I couldn’t be payin’ him.’

‘Tomorrow.’

She stood up. ‘I’ll look at you first thing in the morning.’

‘Thank you.’

She went out, and at last Feliks allowed himself to remember.

Feliks looked up from Kropotkin’s pamphlet. The bookshop was empty. The bookseller was an old revolutionist who made his money selling novels to wealthy women, and kept a hoard of subversive literature in the back of the shop. Feliks spent a lot of time in here.

He was nineteen. He was about to be thrown out of the prestigious Spiritual Academy for truancy, indiscipline, long hair and associating with Nihilists. He was hungry and broke, and soon he would be homeless, and life was wonderful. He cared about nothing other than ideas, and he was learning every day new things about poetry, history, psychology, and – most of all -politics.

The anarchist slogans had sounded ridiculous when he had first heard them: Property is theft, Government is tyranny, Anarchy is justice. It was astonishing how, when he had really thought about them, they came to seem not only true but crashingly obvious. Kropotkin’s point about laws was undeniable. No laws were required to prevent theft in Feliks’ home village: if one peasant stole another’s horse, or his chair, or the coat his wife had embroidered, then the whole village would see the culprit in possession of the goods and make him give them back. The only stealing that went on was when the landlord demanded rent; and the policeman was there to enforce that theft. It was the same with government. The peasants needed no one to tell them how the plough and the oxen were to be shared between their fields: they decided among themselves. It was only the ploughing of the landlord’s fields that had to be enforced.

Feliks was vaguely aware that a customer had come into the shop and was standing close to him, but he was concentrating on Kropotkin.

The customer dropped a book and he lost his train of thought. He glanced away from his pamphlet, saw the book lying on the floor beside the customer’s long skirt, and automatically bent down to pick it up for her. As he handed it to her he saw her face.

He gasped. ‘Why, you’re an angel!’ he said with perfect honesty.

She was blonde and petite, and she wore a pale grey fur the colour of her eyes, and everything about her was pale and light and fair. He thought he would never see a more beautiful woman, and he was right.

She stared back at him and blushed, but she did not turn away. It seemed, incredibly, that she found something fascinating in him, too.

After a moment he looked at her book. It was Anna Karenina. ‘Sentimental rubbish,’ he said. He wished he had not spoken, for his words broke the spell. She took the book and turned away. He saw then that there was a maid with her, for she gave the book to the maid and left the shop. The maid paid for the book. Looking through the window, Feliks saw the woman get into a carriage.

He asked the bookseller who she was. Her name was Lydia, he learned, and she was the daughter of Count Shatov.

He found out where the Count lived, and the next day he hung around outside the house in the hope of seeing her. She went in and out twice, in her carriage, before a groom came out and chased Feliks off. He did not mind, for the last time her carriage passed she had looked directly at him.

The next day he went to the bookshop. For hours he read Bakunin’s Federalism, Socialism and Anti-Theologism without understanding a single word. Every time a carriage passed he looked out of the window. Whenever a customer came into the shop his heart missed a beat.

She came in at the end of the afternoon.

This time she left the maid outside. She murmured a greeting to the bookseller and came to the back of the shop, where Feliks stood. They stared at each other. Feliks thought: She loves me, why else would she come?

He meant to speak to her, but instead he threw his arms around her and kissed her. She kissed him back, hungrily, opening her mouth, hugging him, digging her fingers into his back.

It was always like that with them: when they met they threw themselves at each other like animals about to fight.

They met twice more in the bookshop and once, after dark, in the garden of the Shatov house. That time in the garden she was in her nightclothes. Feliks put his hands under the woollen nightgown and touched her body all over, as boldly as if she were a street girl, feeling and exploring and rubbing; and all she did was moan.

She gave him money so that he could rent a room of his own, and thereafter she came to see him almost every day for six astonishing weeks.

The last time was in the early evening. He was sitting at the table, wrapped in a blanket against the cold, reading Proudhon’s What is Property? by candlelight. When he heard her footstep on the stairs he took his trousers off.

She rushed in, wearing an old brown cloak with a hood. She kissed him, sucked his lips, bit his chin, and pinched his sides.

She turned and threw off the cloak. Underneath it she was wearing a white evening gown that must have cost hundreds of roubles. ‘Unfasten me, quickly,’ she said.

Feliks began to undo the hooks at the back of the dress.

‘I’m on my way to a reception at the British Embassy, I only have an hour,’ she said breathlessly. ‘Hurry, please.’

In his haste he ripped one of the hooks out of the material. ‘Damn, I’ve torn it.’

‘Never mind!’

She stepped out of the dress, then pulled off her petticoats, her chemise and her drawers, leaving on her corset, hose and shoes. She flung herself into his arms. As she was kissing him she pulled down his underpants.

She said: ‘Oh, God, I love the smell of your thing.’

When she talked like that it drove him wild.

She pulled her breasts out of the top of her corset and said: ‘Bite them. Bite them hard. I want to feel them all evening.’

A moment later she pulled away from him. She lay on her back on the bed. Where the corset ended, moisture glistened in the sparse blonde hair between her thighs.

She spread her legs and lifted them into the air, opening herself to him. He gazed at her for a moment, then fell on her.

She grabbed his penis with her hands and pushed it inside her greedily.

The heels of her shoes tore the skin of his back and he did not care.

‘Look at me,’ she said. ‘Look at me!’

He looked at her with adoration in his eyes.

An expression of panic came over her face.

She said: ‘Look at me, I’m coming!’

Then, still staring into his eyes, she opened her mouth and screamed.

‘Do you think other people are like us?’ she said.

‘In what way?’

‘Filthy.’

He lifted his head from her lap and grinned. ‘Only the lucky ones.’

She looked at his body, curled up between her legs. ‘You’re so compact and strong, you’re perfect,’ she said. ‘Look how your belly is flat, and how neat your bottom is, and how lean and hard your thighs are.’ She ran a finger along the line of his nose. You have the face of a prince.’

‘I’m a peasant.’

‘Not when you’re naked.’ She was in a reflective mood. ‘Before I met you, I was interested in men’s bodies, and all that; but I used to pretend I wasn’t, even to myself. Then you came along and I just couldn’t pretend any more.’

He licked the inside of her thigh.

She shuddered. ‘Have you ever done this to another girl?’

‘No.’

‘Did you used to pretend, as well?’

‘No.’

‘I think I knew that, somehow. There’s a look about you, wild and free like an animal, you never obey anyone, you just do what you want.’

‘I never before met a girl who would let me.’

‘They all wanted to, really. Any girl would.’

‘Why?’ he said egotistically.

‘Because your face is so cruel and your eyes are so kind.’

‘Is that why you let me kiss you in the bookshop?’

‘I didn’t let you – I had no choice.’

‘You could have yelled for help, afterwards.’

‘By then all I wanted was for you to do it again.’

‘I must have guessed what you were really like.’

It was her turn to be egotistical. ‘What am I really like?’

‘Cold as ice on the surface, hot as hell below.’

She giggled. ‘I’m such an actor. Everyone in St Petersburg thinks I’m so good. I’m held up as an example to younger girls, just like Anna Karenina. Now that I know how bad I really am, I have to pretend to be twice as virginal as before.’

‘You can’t be twice as virginal as anything.’

‘I wonder if they’re all pretending,’ she resumed. ‘Take my father. If he knew I was here, like this, he’d die of rage. But he must have had the same feelings when he was young – don’t you think?’

‘I think it’s an imponderable,’ Feliks said. ‘But what would he do, really, if he found out?’

‘Horsewhip you.’

‘He’d have to catch me first.’ Feliks was struck by a thought. ‘How old are you?’

‘Almost eighteen.’

‘My God, I could go to jail for seducing you.’

‘I’d make Father get you out.’

He rolled over on to his front and looked at her. ‘What are we going to do, Lydia?’

‘When?’

‘In the long term.’

‘We’re going to be lovers until I come of age, and then we’ll get married.’

He stared at her. ‘Do you mean that?’

‘Of course.’ She seemed genuinely surprised that he had not made the same assumption. ‘What else could we do?’

‘You want to marry me?’

‘Yes! Isn’t that what you want?’

‘Oh, yes,’ he breathed. ‘That’s what I want.’

She sat up, with her legs spread either side of his face, and stroked his hair. ‘Then that’s what we’ll do.’

Feliks said: You never tell me how you manage to get away to come here.’

‘It’s not very interesting,’ she said. ‘I tell lies, I bribe servants, and I take risks. Tonight, for example. The reception at the embassy starts at half past six. I left home at six o’clock and I’ll get there at a quarter past seven. The carriage is in the park – the coachman thinks I’m taking a walk with my maid. The maid is outside this house, dreaming about how she will spend the ten roubles I will give her for keeping her mouth shut.’

‘It’s ten to seven,’ Feliks said.

‘Oh, God. Quick, do it to me with your tongue before I have to go.’

That night Feliks was asleep, dreaming about Lydia’s father – whom he had never seen – when they burst into his room carrying lamps. He woke instantly and jumped out of bed. At first he thought students from the university were playing a prank on him. Then one of them punched his face and kicked him in the stomach, and he knew they were the secret police.

He assumed they were arresting him on account of Lydia, and he was terrified for her. Would she be publicly disgraced? Was her father crazy enough to make her give evidence in court against her lover?

He watched the police put all his books and a bundle of letters in a sack. The books were all borrowed, but none of the owners was foolish enough to put his name inside. The letters were from his father and his sister Natasha – he had never had any letters from Lydia, and now he was thankful for that.

He was marched out of the building and thrown into a four-wheel cab.

They drove across the Chain Bridge and then followed the canals, as if avoiding the main streets. Feliks asked: ‘Am I going to the Litovsky prison?’ Nobody replied, but when they went over the Palace Bridge he realized he was being taken to the notorious Fortress of St Peter and St Paul, and his heart sank.

On the other side of the bridge the carriage turned left and entered a dark arched passage. It stopped at a gate. Feliks was taken into a reception hall, where an army officer looked at him and wrote something in a book. He was put in the cab again and driven deeper into the fortress. They stopped at another gate, and waited several minutes until it was opened from the inside by a soldier. From there Feliks had to walk through a series of narrow passages to a third iron gate which led to a large damp room.

The prison governor sat at a table. He said: ‘You are charged with being an anarchist. Do you admit it?’

Feliks was elated. So this was nothing to do with Lydia! ‘Admit it?’ he said. ‘I boast of it.’

One of the policemen produced a book which was signed by the governor. Feliks was stripped naked, then given a green flannel dressing-gown, a pair of thick woollen stockings, and two yellow felt slippers much too big.

From there an armed soldier took him through more gloomy corridors to a cell. A heavy oak door closed behind him, and he heard a key turn in the lock.

The cell contained a bed, a table, a stool and a washstand. The window was an embrasure in an enormously thick wall. The floor was covered with painted felt, and the walls were cushioned with some kind of yellow upholstery.

Feliks sat on the bed.

This was where Peter I had tortured and killed his own son. This was where Princess Tarakanova had been kept in a cell which flooded so that the rats climbed all over her to save themselves from drowning. This was where Catherine II buried her enemies alive.

Dostoevsky had been imprisoned here, Feliks thought proudly; so had Bakunin, who had been chained to a wall for two years. Nechayev had died here.

Feliks was at once elated to be in such heroic company and terrified at the thought that he might be here for ever.

The key turned in the lock. A little bald man with spectacles came in, carrying a pen, a bottle of ink, and some paper. He set them down on the table and said: ‘Write the names of all the subversives you know.’

Feliks sat down and wrote: Karl Marx, Frederick Engels, Peter Kropotkin, Jesus Christ—

The bald man snatched away the paper. He went to the door of the cell and knocked. Two hefty guards came in. They strapped Feliks to the table and took off his slippers and stockings. They began to lash the soles of his feet with whips.

The torture went on all night.

When they pulled out his fingernails, he began to give them made-up names and addresses, but they told him they knew they were false.

When they burned the skin of his testicles with a candle flame he named all his student friends, but still they said he was lying.

Each time he passed out they revived him. Sometimes they would stop for a while, and allow him to think it was all over at last; then they would begin again and he would beg them to kill him so that the pain would stop. They carried on long after he had told them everything he knew.

It must have been around dawn that he passed out for the last time.

When he came round he was lying on the bed. There were bandages on his feet and hands. He was in agony. He wanted to kill himself but he was too weak to move.

The bald man came into the cell in the evening. When he saw him, Feliks began to sob with terror. The man just smiled and went away.

He never came back.

A doctor came to see Feliks each day. Feliks tried without success to pump him for information: Did anyone outside know that Feliks was here? Had there been any messages? Had anyone tried to visit? The doctor just changed the dressings and went away.

Feliks speculated. Lydia would have gone to his room and found the place in disarray. Someone in the house would have told her that the secret police had taken him away. What would she have done then? Would she make frantic inquiries, careless of her reputation? Would she have been discreet, and gone quietly to see the Minister of the Interior with some story about the boyfriend of her maid having been jailed in error?

Every day he hoped for word from her, but it never came.

Eight weeks later he could walk almost normally, and they released him without explanation.

He went to his lodging. He expected to find a message from her there, but there was nothing, and his room had been let to someone else. He wondered why Lydia had not continued to pay the rent.

He went to her house and knocked at the front door. A servant answered. Feliks said: ‘Feliks Davidovitch Kschessinsky presents his compliments to Lydia Shatova—’

The servant slammed the door.

Finally he went to the bookshop. The old bookseller said: ‘Hello! I’ve got a message for you. It was brought yesterday by her maid.’

Feliks tore open the envelope with trembling fingers. It was written, not by Lydia, but by the maid. It read:

He looked up at the bookseller with tears of anguish in his eyes. ‘Is that all?’ he cried.

He learned no more for nineteen years.

Normal regulations had been temporarily suspended in the Walden house, and Charlotte sat in the kitchen with the servants.

The kitchen was spotless, for of course the family had dined out. The fire had gone out in the great range, and the high windows were wide open, letting in the cool night air. The crockery used for servants’ meals was racked neatly in the dresser; the cook’s knives and spoons hung from a row of hooks; her innumerable bowls and pans were out of sight in the massive oak cupboards.

Charlotte had had no time to be frightened. At first, when the coach stopped so abruptly in the park, she had been merely puzzled; and after that her concern had been to stop Mama screaming. When they got home she had found herself a little shaky, but now, looking back, she found the whole thing rather exciting.

The servants felt the same way. It was very reassuring to sit around the massive bleached wooden table and talk things over with these people who were so much a part of her life: the cook, who had always been motherly; Pritchard, whom Charlotte respected because Papa respected him; the efficient and capable Mrs Mitchell, who as housekeeper always had a solution to any problem.

William the coachman was the hero of the hour. He described several times the wild look in his assailant’s eyes as the man menaced him with the gun. Basking in the awestruck gaze of the under-house-parlourmaid, he recovered rapidly from the indignity of having walked into the kitchen stark naked.

‘Of course,’ Pritchard explained, ‘I naturally presumed the thief just wanted William’s clothes. I knew Charles was at the palace, so he could drive the coach. I thought, I wouldn’t inform the police until after speaking to his lordship.’

Charles the footman said: ‘Imagine how I felt when I found the carriage gone! I said to myself, I’m sure it was left here. Oh, well, I thinks, William’s moved it. I run up and down The Mall, I look everywhere. In the end I go back to the palace. “Here’s trouble,” I says to the doorman, “the Earl of Walden’s carriage has gone missing.” He says to me: “Walden?” he says – not very respectful—’

Mrs Mitchell interrupted: ‘Palace servants, they think they’re better than the nobility—’

‘He says to me: “Walden’s gone, mate.” I thought Gorblimey, I’m for it! I come running through the park, and halfway home I find the carriage, and my lady having hysterics, and my lord with blood on his sword!’

Mrs Mitchell said: ‘And, after all that, nothing stolen.’

‘Alewnatic,’ said Charles. ‘An ingenious lewnatic.’

There was general agreement.

The cook poured the tea and served Charlotte first. ‘How is my lady now?’ she said.

‘Oh, she’s all right,’ Charlotte said. ‘She went to bed and took a dose of laudanum. She must be asleep by now.’

‘And the gentlemen?’

‘Papa and Prince Orlov are in the drawing-room, having a brandy.’

The cook sighed heavily. ‘Robbers in the park and suffragettes at the court – I don’t know what we’re coming to.’

‘There’ll be a socialist revolution,’ said Charles. ‘You mark my words.’

‘We’ll all be murdered in our beds,’ the cook said lugubriously.

Charlotte said: ‘What did the suffragette mean about the King torturing women?’ As she spoke she looked at Pritchard, who was sometimes willing to explain to her things she was not supposed to know about.

‘She was talking about force-feeding,’ Pritchard said. Apparently it’s painful.’

‘Force-feeding?’

‘When they won’t eat, they’re fed by force.’

Charlotte was mystified. ‘How on earth is that done?’

‘Several ways,’ said Pritchard with a look which indicated he would not go into detail about all of them. ‘A tube through the nostrils is one.’

The under-house-parlourmaid said: ‘I wonder what they feed them.’

Charles said: ‘Probably ’ot soup.’

‘I can’t believe this,’ Charlotte said. ‘Why should they refuse to eat?’

‘It’s a protest,’ said Pritchard. ‘Makes difficulties for the prison authorities.’

‘Prison?’ Charlotte was astonished. ‘Why are they in prison?’

‘For breaking windows, making bombs, disturbing the peace . . .’

‘But what do they want?’

There was a silence as the servants realized that Charlotte had no idea what a suffragette was.

Finally Pritchard said: ‘They want votes for women.’

‘Oh.’ Charlotte thought: Did I know that women couldn’t vote? She was not sure. She had never thought about that sort of thing.

‘I think this discussion has gone quite far enough,’ said Mrs Mitchell firmly. ‘You’ll be in trouble, Mr Pritchard, for putting wrong ideas into my lady’s head.’

Charlotte knew that Pritchard never got into trouble, because he was practically Papa’s friend. She said: ‘I wonder why they care so much about something like voting?’

There was a ring, and they all looked instinctively at the bellboard.

‘Front door!’ said Pritchard. ‘At this time of night!’ He went out, pulling on his coat.

Charlotte drank her tea. She felt tired. The suffragettes were puzzling and rather frightening, she decided; but all the same she wanted to know more.

Pritchard came back. ‘Plate of sandwiches, please, Cook,’ he said. ‘Charles, take a fresh soda-siphon to the drawing-room.’ He began to arrange plates and napkins on a tray.

‘Well, come on,’ Charlotte said. ‘Who is it?’

‘A gentleman from Scotland Yard,’ said Pritchard.

Basil Thomson was a bullet-headed man with light-coloured receding hair, a heavy moustache, and a penetrating gaze. Walden had heard of him. His father had been Archbishop of York. Thomson had been educated at Eton and Oxford, and had done service in the Colonies as a Native Commissioner and as Prime Minister of Tonga. He had come home to qualify as a barrister and then had worked in the Prison Service, ending up as Governor of Dartmoor Prison with a reputation as a riot-breaker. From prisons he had gravitated toward police work, and had become an expert on the mixed criminal-anarchist milieu of London’s East End. This expertise had got him the top job in the Special Branch, the political police force.

Walden sat him down and began to recount the evening’s events. As he spoke he kept an eye on Aleks. The boy was superficially calm, but his face was pale, he sipped steadily at a glass of brandy-and-soda, and his left hand clutched rhythmically at the arm of his chair.

At one point Thomson interrupted Walden, saying: ‘Did you notice when the carriage picked you up that the footman was missing?’

‘Yes, I did,’ Walden said. ‘I asked the coachman where he was, but the coachman seemed not to hear. Then, because there was such a crush at the palace door, and my daughter was telling me to hurry up, I decided not to press the matter until we got home.’

‘Our villain was relying on that, of course. He must have a cool nerve. Go on.’

‘The carriage stopped suddenly in the park, and the door was thrown open by the man.’

‘What did he look like?’

‘Tall. He had a scarf or something over his face. Dark hair. Staring eyes.’

‘All criminals have staring eyes,’ Thomson said. ‘Earlier on, had the coachman got a better look at him?’

‘Not much. At that time the man wore a hat, and of course it was dark.’

‘Hm. And then?’

Walden took a deep breath. At the time he had been not so much frightened as angry, but now, when he looked back on it, he was full of fear for what might have happened to Aleks, or Lydia, or Charlotte. He said: ‘Lady Walden screamed, and that seemed to disconcert the fellow. Perhaps he had not expected to find any women in the coach. Anyway, he hesitated.’ And thank God he did, he thought. ‘I poked him with my sword, and he dropped the gun.’

‘Did you do him much damage?’

‘I doubt it. I couldn’t get a swing in that confined space, and of course the sword isn’t particularly sharp. I blooded him, though. I wish I had chopped off his damned head.’

The butler came in, and conversation stopped. Walden realized he had been talking rather loudly. He tried to calm himself. Pritchard served sandwiches and brandy-and-soda to the three men. Walden said: ‘You’d better stay up, Pritchard, but you can send everyone else to bed.’

‘Very good, my lord.’

When he had gone Walden said: ‘It is possible that this was just a robbery. I have let the servants think that, and Lady Walden and Charlotte too. However, a robber would hardly have needed such an elaborate plan, to my mind. I am perfectly certain that it was an attempt on Aleks’ life.’

Thomson looked at Aleks. ‘I’m afraid I agree. Have you any idea how he knew where to find you?’

Aleks crossed his legs. ‘My movements haven’t been secret.’

‘That must change. Tell me, sir, has your life ever been threatened?’

‘I live with threats,’ Aleks said tightly. ‘There has never been an attempt before.’

‘Is there any reason why you in particular should be the target of Nihilists or revolutionists?’

‘For them, it is enough that I am a p-prince.’

Walden realized that the problems of the English establishment, with suffragettes and Liberals and trade unions, were trivial by comparison with what the Russians had to cope with, and he felt a surge of sympathy for Aleks.

Aleks went on in a quiet, controlled voice: ‘However, I am known to be something of a reformer, by Russian standards. They could pick a more appropriate victim.’

‘Even in London,’ Thomson agreed. ‘There’s always a Russian aristocrat or two in London for the season.’

Walden said: ‘What are you getting at?’

Thomson said: ‘I’m wondering whether the villain knew what Prince Orlov is doing here, and whether his motive for tonight’s attack was to sabotage your talks.’

Walden was dubious. ‘How would the revolutionists have found that out?’

‘I’m just speculating,’ Thomson replied. ‘Would this be an effective way to sabotage your talks?’

‘Very effective indeed,’ Walden said. The thought made him go cold. ‘If the Czar were to be told that his nephew had been assassinated in London by a revolutionist – especially if it were an expatriate Russian revolutionist – he would go through the roof. You know, Thomson, how the Russians feel about our having their subversives here – our open-door policy has always caused friction at the diplomatic level. Something like this could destroy Anglo-Russian relations for twenty years. There would be no question of an alliance then.’

Thomson nodded. ‘I was afraid of that. Well, there’s no more we can do tonight. I’ll set my department to work at dawn. We’ll search the park for clues, and interview your servants, and I expect we’ll round up a few anarchists in the East End.’

Aleks said: ‘Do you think you will catch the man?’

Walden longed for Thomson to give a reassuring answer, but it was not forthcoming. ‘It won’t be easy,’ Thomson said. ‘He’s obviously a planner, so he’ll have a bolt-hole somewhere. We’ve no proper description of him. Unless his wounds take him to hospital, our chances are slim.’

‘He may try to kill me again,’ Aleks said.

‘So we must take evasive action. I propose you should move out of this house tomorrow. We’ll take the top floor of one of the hotels for you, in a false name, and give you a bodyguard. Lord Walden will have to meet with you secretly, and you’ll have to cut out social engagements, of course.’

‘Of course.’

Thomson stood up. ‘It’s very late. I’ll set all this in motion.’

Walden rang for Pritchard. ‘You’ve got a carriage waiting, Thomson?’

‘Yes. Let us speak on the telephone tomorrow morning.’

Pritchard saw Thomson out, and Aleks went off to bed. Walden told Pritchard to lock up, then went upstairs.

He was not sleepy. As he undressed he let himself relax, and feel all the conflicting emotions which he had so far held at bay. He felt proud of himself, at first – after all, he thought, I drew a sword and fought off an assailant: not bad for a man of fifty with a gouty leg! Then he became depressed when he recalled how coolly they had all discussed the diplomatic consequences of the death of Aleks – bright, cheerful, shy, handsome, clever Aleks, whom Walden had seen grow into a man.

He got into bed and lay awake, reliving the moment when the carriage door flew open and the man stood there with the gun; and now he was frightened, not for himself or Aleks, but for Lydia and Charlotte. The thought that they might have been killed made him tremble in his bed. He remembered holding Charlotte in his arms, eighteen years ago, when she had blonde hair and no teeth; he remembered her learning to walk and forever falling on her bottom; he remembered giving her a pony of her own, and thinking that her joy when she saw it gave him the biggest thrill of his life; he remembered her just a few hours ago, walking into the royal presence with her head held high, a grown woman and a beautiful one. If she died, he thought, I don’t know that I could bear it.

And Lydia: if Lydia were dead I would be alone. The thought made him get up and go through to her room. There was a nightlight beside her bed. She was in a deep sleep, lying on her back, her mouth a little open, her hair a blonde skein across the pillow. She looked soft and vulnerable. I have never been able to make you understand how much I love you, he thought. Suddenly he needed to touch her, to feel that she was warm and alive. He got into bed with her and kissed her. Her lips responded but she did not wake up. Lydia, he thought, I could not live without you.

Lydia had lain awake for a long time, thinking about the man with the gun. It had been a brutal shock, and she had screamed in sheer terror – but there was more to it than that. There had been something about the man, something about his stance, or his shape, or his clothes, that had seemed dreadfully sinister in an almost supernatural way, as if he were a ghost. She wished she could have seen his eyes.

After a while she had taken another dose of laudanum, and then she slept. She dreamed that the man with the gun came to her room and got into bed with her. It was her own bed, but in the dream she was eighteen years old again. The man put his gun down on the white pillow beside her head. He still had the scarf around his face. She realized that she loved him. She kissed his lips through the scarf.

He made love to her beautifully. She began to think that she might be dreaming. She wanted to see his face. She said Who are you? and a voice said Stephen. She knew this was not so, but the gun on the pillow had somehow turned into Stephen’s sword, with blood on its point; and she began to have doubts. She clung to the man on top of her, afraid that the dream would end before she was satisfied. Then, dimly, she began to suspect that she was doing in reality what she was doing in the dream; yet the dream persisted. Strong physical pleasure possessed her. She began to lose control. Just as her climax began the man in the dream took the scarf from his face, and in that moment Lydia opened her eyes, and saw Stephen’s face above her; and then she was overcome by ecstasy, and for the first time in nineteen years she cried for joy.