The People's Will (23 page)

Richard remained silent; his father preferred a speech to a conversation.

‘Now, I won’t beat about the bush, Richard,’ the reverend continued. ‘I’m sorry to have to tell you that this is not to be. You won’t be familiar with these things, but a rector’s stipend isn’t very much. I’d hoped that my Navigational Engine would make me a rich man, but with all the changes the Admiralty wants me to make … well, it’s turned out to have cost me more than the return is ever likely to be. So I’m afraid I can’t afford Oxford. We’ll have to sort out something else; an apprenticeship maybe – something decent – in London perhaps.’

He paused, but Richard said nothing.

‘You do understand, don’t you?’ For a moment there was the hint of an apology in his tone, but it was too late for that.

‘Yes, sir,’ whispered Richard. And with that their meeting was at an end.

Richard fumed. His instinct was for revenge. He was tempted to take his father down to the crypt there and then and thrust him in with Honoré. Better still, he would do the dirty work himself, with his double-bladed knife. But even then he knew that vengeance was a tepid dish. He was too young ever to have seen hangings at Tyburn, but it was not the only gallows in London. He had looked into the eyes of the convicted and known that their deaths would not change the world one jot. The people who jeered in the square might find their spirits momentarily lifted by the swinging rope, but they would not sleep any safer in their beds. Richard had no objection to men’s deaths – be they guilty or innocent – but it was wasteful for a death not to have a practical purpose. Thus to kill his father would be a mere gesture – an admission of defeat. It would not get him to Oxford.

It took four months for Richard to devise a way to give his father a useful ending. He’d turned his mind to methods by which he might raise the money he needed. An early thought had been that his father was simply exaggerating his penury, but a quick examination revealed he had been telling the truth. Moreover, if he were to die, Richard would get very little. Even the house they lived in belonged not to Thomas Cain but to the Church of England.

But then he found the answer. In nearby Ewell there lived a dowager by the name of Lady Agnes Truslove. She and her brother had been the children of a parish vicar and had been orphaned at a young age, thus preventing the brother from going up to Cambridge. He’d been forced to enter the army and had been killed at the Battle of Plassey. She, however, had married well, and was now a rich widow and had used her husband’s vast fortune to establish a fund to assist the education of those who could not afford it themselves. The one criterion was that beneficiaries of the fund must themselves be orphaned sons of the clergy.

Richard was no orphan, but things could change – could change very rapidly if he put his mind to it. He would have liked to effect the transformation from son to orphan himself, but there might be those who were suspicious. There had been sufficient deaths and
disappearances in the village that tongues were already wagging. It would be better if he were a long way away and in company when it happened.

He put the bargain to Honoré.

‘Why don’t you just send him down here, like the others?’

‘Because there must be a body,’ Richard explained. ‘If he merely disappears then I may not get the money – certainly not quickly.’

‘So you propose to let me go, and as a last favour to you I kill your father, leaving you in the clear?’

‘That’s about the size of it.’

‘Why should I do you any service?’

‘Because I’m letting you go.’

‘Excuse me, no.’ Honoré shook his head. ‘You will already have let me go. I will be free to do as I please.’

‘You’ll be hungry and he’ll be there, quite unprotected.’

‘So will many people in the town. Why should I do something for you, my gaoler of two years?’

‘I could have treated you worse. I fed you, didn’t I? And not just anybody.’ Richard felt his throat tighten as he spoke.

‘This is true.’

‘So will you do it?’

‘Release me and you will find out.’

It was the best Richard could hope for. A direct yes he would have taken for a lie anyway. If Honoré didn’t keep up his end of the deal then Richard could always commit the deed himself and forget about the alibi. But Honoré was a member of the French aristocracy. Surely he’d have some sense of honour, as the name suggested.

Two weeks later the opportunity arose. It was after evensong one Sunday. As Thomas’s flock departed, one of their number, Mrs Tregaskis, suggested that Richard should join her and her family for dinner. Her intent was, and had been for some time, to pair off Richard with her daughter Beatrice. Richard had no interest in the girl, at first because of Susanna and now because of his hoped for departure to Oxford. But the circumstances were perfect. He explained to his father, who was quite happy to let him go. Everyone in the church saw father and son part, with the father in perfect health.

Then Richard slipped down to the crypt. He stood close to the iron gate and peered inside, holding his lantern high to penetrate the shadows, but saw no one. He turned the key in the heavy lock and swung it open. Still there was no sound and no movement from within. He took the key to the padlock that fastened Honoré’s chains and flung it into the darkness, listening to it clatter across the stone floor.

‘It’s tonight, Honoré,’ he said. ‘Thank you and adieu.’

‘
Au revoir
,’ came a voice from the shadows.

Richard turned away and as he did so the light of his lantern fell briefly upon what looked like a face, white like the full moon against the darkness. But it could not be – not that face. He looked again and it was gone.

He hurried back up to the church and departed in the Tregaskises’ carriage to enjoy a pleasant dinner at their house in Leatherhead. Soon after the meal he complained of an upset stomach and a feeling of light-headedness, with only a partial need to affect the symptoms after what he had seen. Mrs Tregaskis insisted that he should stay the night, while the glint in Beatrice’s eye suggested she thought this was some sort of ruse on his part. It was, but not to the end she had in mind.

He accepted their hospitality with the proviso that a boy be sent to Esher to inform the Reverend Cain of his son’s predicament. The lad was dispatched and Richard retired to bed. The sun had not risen when he was shaken from his sleep to be told the tragic, horrible news of his father’s murder. Not an ounce of suspicion fell on him.

After that the rest of the plan fell into place just as he had known it would. Lady Truslove happily gave him the funds he required – and a little more besides in consideration of the awful circumstances of his father’s death. Richard never knew precisely how awful those circumstances had been. He heard descriptions of the wounds; it was obvious that Honoré had done his duty and then, presumably, gone his merry way. But Richard never went down to the crypt again to check, out of fear for what he might find there.

And so, just after Michaelmas 1795, Richard Llywelyn Cain arrived at the College of the Holy and Undivided Trinity in the
University of Oxford to begin the next stage of his education.

Honoré’s imprisonment, under Richard’s watchful eye, had lasted for two years, but in the end he had been able simply to walk free. In the Peter and Paul Fortress, Iuda planned to do the same, and was not prepared to wait nearly so long. But he would need help. There was only one man in Petersburg he could trust – and even then he had begun to fear that his trust might be misplaced.

He began to tap a message on the pipes, knowing it would be relayed across the fortress, transferred to some sentry or visitor who was able to walk freely out through the gates, and that soon it would be with its intended recipient. And soon after, Iuda would have a visitor.

KONSTANTIN’S NOTE HAD
been brief. ‘Take the 1.15 train. You will be met at Pavlovsk.’

The officer who met him there, a colonel of the Semyonovskiy Regiment, did not give his name, but escorted Mihail to a sled which took them from the station through the town to the gates of a large estate. This, it was easy to guess, was the Pavlovsk Palace, Konstantin’s country retreat. The sled took them through the estate and past the great palace itself, but stopped ultimately at a much smaller building in the grounds.

The colonel remained seated, but indicated to Mihail a door in the side of the modest house. It opened on to a long corridor, at the end of which Mihail saw his father in earnest conversation with a slightly built woman in her thirties. In the army Mihail had heard all the rumours and guessed that this was Konstantin’s mistress, Anna Vasilyevna Kuznetsova. Perhaps this was even the house he had set aside for her, so close to the home of his official family. It was an appropriate place for a man to make a rendezvous with his bastard son.

Konstantin noticed Mihail’s arrival and held up his hand, signalling that Mihail should not come any further. Mihail obeyed and Konstantin finished the conversation with his lover. She disappeared and the grand duke beckoned Mihail forward, then went through a door. Mihail followed.

Konstantin was not alone. Another man stood in the room – some sort of study – facing the hearth, his hands clasped behind his back. He was tall; immense in comparison with the diminutive Konstantin.

Konstantin strode across the floor, grasping Mihail’s hand in both of his and shaking it vigorously. He seemed warmer than he had done two days before.

‘It’s good to see you, my boy,’ he said.

‘You too, sir.’ Mihail did not know where the ‘sir’ came from, but ‘Papa’ still did not seem appropriate.

Konstantin turned to his companion. ‘Here he is then, Sasha.’

The tall figure turned to face them. Mihail recognized him immediately, though he had never before seen him in the flesh. He bowed deeply, driven by the same instinct that had made him call his father ‘sir’, but magnified a thousand times.

‘Your Majesty!’ he whispered.

Mihail straightened up to see Konstantin turning once again to his brother, Tsar Aleksandr II. ‘Sasha, may I introduce my son, Mihail Konstantinovich.’

The tsar looked Mihail up and down, but did not offer any form of greeting. He turned to his brother.

‘He’s a fine boy, I’m sure, Kostya, and I know you must be proud of him, but I really don’t see the need to be introduced to every one of your offspring.’

Mihail felt much the same. It was all a little excessive. He had revealed himself to Konstantin only for the sake of his mother’s memory, not to inveigle his way into royal circles.

‘There’s a little more to it than that,’ Konstantin explained, walking behind Mihail as he spoke. ‘This young man, you see, has a very illustrious grandfather.’

‘Well of course he does!’ snapped the tsar. ‘His grandfather is your father – and mine. He was a tsar of Russia as appointed by God. You don’t get much more illustrious than that.’

‘I was meaning on his mother’s side.’

The bemusement on Aleksandr’s face reflected Mihail’s own feelings.

‘I haven’t mentioned,’ Konstantin continued, ‘this young man’s surname. It’s Danilov. His grandfather was Colonel Aleksei Ivanovich Danilov.’

Aleksandr turned his head a little to one side, as though attempting to hear more clearly. He stood frozen in the pose for perhaps a second, then lunged forward, seemingly on the point
of dropping to his knees, but then regained his composure. He grasped Mihail’s hand and pulled it to his lips, kissing the knuckle of his middle finger. He stepped back.

‘I never got to meet the man – to thank him on behalf of our family. I thank you in his place.’

Mihail had no doubt as to what the tsar meant. He’d heard it all from Tamara, who’d heard it from Aleksei in his dying hours.

Konstantin turned to Mihail. ‘I’m sorry to have deceived you the other day, but when you mentioned his name I was too shocked even to think. I could never have dreamed that Tamarushka was Danilov’s daughter.’

Mihail thrilled a little at Konstantin’s affectionate name for his mother. Suddenly, for the first time he could imagine his mother and father together as a single entity, and himself as
their
son, not just hers. And yet at the same time he couldn’t ignore how easily Konstantin had deceived him. Mihail prided himself on his ability to catch people in their dishonesty, and yet his father had been utterly convincing. It was a trait that had helped the Romanovs to survive the centuries.

‘I presume you’ve verified his claim.’ Aleksandr had become stiff again after his lapse. Mihail felt a glimmer of pity for him; in how many members of the Romanov dynasty did the blood of the father not run in the veins of the son? Mihail could at least be confident of his mother’s side of the family.

‘As soon as I heard I went back and looked at Volkonsky’s papers,’ Konstantin explained. ‘Danilov had a daughter, Tamara, who was put into the care of a man called Lavrov and her upkeep paid for by Volkonsky himself. This was when Danilov went into exile after the Fourteenth. The woman I knew was most certainly Danilov’s child, and I have no doubt that this is her son – and mine.’

The tsar looked at Mihail gravely. ‘Sit down, Mihail Konstantinovich,’ he said.

Mihail sat, as did the other two men. The tsar continued.

‘You know, I take it, of the great service that your grandfather did for our uncle, Aleksandr I.’

Mihail nodded. ‘He and Prince Volkonsky helped Aleksandr to
counterfeit his own death. Aleksandr went on to live the life of a normal man. He called himself Fyodor Kuzmich.’

The tsar sat upright in his chair. ‘You even know the name he took?’

Mihail nodded. ‘Aleksei told Mama and she told me.’

‘But no one else?’

‘Iuda tortured my grandfather to get the name, but he failed.’ Mihail felt his face redden as he spoke. The image of Iuda ducking his aged grandfather beneath the water and screaming at him for a name was something that Mihail had never witnessed, but his mother’s description of it had been vivid. It was adopted memories such as this that kept his hatred for Iuda alive.