Death on the Nevskii Prospekt

PROLOGUE

Alexander Palace, Tsarskoe Selo, August 1902

Any minute now, she knew, the proper contractions would start. It was not, after all, the first time she had given birth. Even this evening, when her family knew what was happening, she could hear the excited sounds of her four daughters as they gossiped outside in the corridors. This time it would be different. This time she would give birth to a son. Had not Philippe, her mystic Frenchman from Lyons, promised her this while he hypnotized her soul and stroked her face with those long slender fingers of his? This time, the gunners at the Fortress of Peter and Paul, over fifteen miles away on the other side of St Petersburg, would have to sound out a three-hundred-round salute for a boy rather than one hundred rounds for a girl. This time the people of St Petersburg would have to clap and cheer rather than mock and sneer as they had done so often in the past. The woman looked into her tiny private chapel with its single icon of the Virgin Mary. Mary would be with her on this journey too. Philippe had promised.

Outside the door stood an enormous Negro dressed in scarlet trousers and a gold embroidered jacket with a white turban. Lurking in the passages downstairs were policemen on duty against the arrival of an assassin, regarded as almost as likely as the arrival of a son. Sentries marched continually up and down around the perimeter of the palace. More soldiers were guarding the grounds and searching every visitor who came to call. Around the high fence of the imperial park bearded Cossack horsemen in scarlet tunics and black caps galloped in ceaseless patrol, twenty-four hours a day. Theirs was a watch that would last till eternity. For this was Tsarskoe Selo, the Tsar’s Village in English, some fifteen miles from St Petersburg. It was at this time the principal residence of the Tsar of All the Russias and his wife Alexandra and their family. Alexandra was the expectant mother, anxious to bring forth an heir to her husband’s throne. The threat of terror was so great that the imperial family could feel safe only here. They were too exposed in the vast expanses of their main residence the Winter Palace in the heart of their capital, St Petersburg. Two Tsars had been assassinated the previous century. Nicholas the Second, the latest target, had watched his grandfather bleed to death in the Winter Palace after a terrorist bomb ripped open his stomach and scattered bloody fragments of his body around Palace Square. Government ministers, provincial governors, Ministers of the Interior were regularly blown up by terrorist bombs. Russia did not lead the countries of Europe in many things, except for her size. But she was the terrorist capital of the world, her young people almost queuing up to die in assassination attempts, the reign of terror imposed by the secret police, the Okhrana, the despair of liberals in Moscow and St Petersburg.

Black, Alexandra thought bitterly, black was the colour she had brought to her new home from Coburg in Germany all those years ago. Black, the colour of ravens, black the colour of crows, black the colour of death. She remembered one of the courtiers at home reminding her to pack her mourning clothes when she set off to join her fiance in the Crimea where his father Tsar Alexander was dying. Nicky, or Nicholas the Second, to give him his formal title, had wept not just for his dying father but for himself, unprepared, unfit and unwilling to sit on the throne of the Romanovs. Even then, even before she was married, Alexandra had known that a major part of her role would be to support him, to try and give him the strength he needed to rule his vast empire that covered one sixth of the world’s surface. As she watched him give way to his mother, to his uncles, sometimes, it seemed to her, to the last person who talked to him, Alexandra often felt that she would have done the job much better herself. Black, she remembered again, she had worn the black of mourning when she was inducted into the Russian Orthodox Church as family members arrived in droves from all over Europe to pay tribute to the dead Alexander the Third. Black on that long, slow train journey from the Crimea to St Petersburg, and the sad stops in the major cities on the way for the populace to pay their last respects to the dead Tsar and stare at the woman from Germany who had come to marry his son.

She remembered the worst week of her life which should have been the best, the week of her coronation in Moscow. Hundreds if not thousands of people had been crushed to death in a stampede at Khodynka Field outside Moscow, a crowd that had gathered to receive traditional coronation presents from the Tsar and panicked when told there would not be enough to go round. In the stampede towards the front to grab things before the supply ran out, people had fallen into ditches, or simply tripped and been trampled to death. Even now, she could still see the miserable carts they had used to take the bodies away, the corpses covered by rough tarpaulins or sections of dirty blankets. Cart after cart had lined up to take the dead away for burial, their relations weeping into the summer air, the stench of death inescapable. That night she and Nicky, against her instincts, had gone to a ball at the French Ambassador’s and been condemned as heartless by almost the entire nation. The uncles had pointed out how much money had been spent on the ball with thousands of flowers imported by special trains from the Riviera. They had pointed out how insulted the French would be. The cleverest uncle – the competition was hardly of Olympic standard – said they had to attend or the French bankers would cut off the loans that were the mainstay of the Russian economy. After that, she knew, they stopped calling her the English whore because Queen Victoria was her grandmother. Now they called her the German bitch instead. And every time she produced another daughter they called her the useless German bitch.

Philippe from Lyons would change all that, Philippe Vachot who had brought so much hope into her life. She and Nicholas had met him at the home of two Montenegrin princesses who were interested in the occult, in seances and spiritualism. Philippe was a hypnotist who was sometimes possessed of spirits and talked to them in voices of the dead come back from the other side. The room for these ceremonies was quite small, two walls lined with icons of Christ and the Madonna, pairs of sad eyes sucking you into their embrace. The Montenegrins had hundreds of candles on the walls. Sometimes they had singers in the next room so that ghostly Vespers floated through the walls. The singers were all peasants from the Montenegrins’ estate in the country and were said to live in a hut at the bottom of the garden. Alexandra had misty memories of what Philippe said to her when she was coming out of hypnosis or appearing as one of her long-lost Coburg relations about whom he was prodigiously well informed. First he told her she would have a son, that there would spring forth a rod from the stem of Jesse. Then he told her she was pregnant. Now she was here on her bed, waiting for the most joyous moment of her life. Philippe had told her not to tell any of the normal imperial doctors what was happening. Let God’s work be a surprise to the unbelieving men of science, he had told her. Let them not pollute your body with their examinations or your system with their medicines of modernity. Rather let God work his will and his changes in the temple of your womb. But things seldom remain secret in a royal palace. Even as the Empress lay wreathed in her dreams of glory, the official doctors were pacing up and down in the corridors of the palace downstairs.

Outside it was raining heavily, great drops splattering on to the lakes and soaking the cloaks and the fur caps of the Cossacks on their endless patrol outside the walls. Upstairs was quiet now. The four daughters had gone to sleep. She could hear the faint steps of the guards as they patrolled the hallway on the lower floor. Suddenly Alix began to bleed, as she had not bled for months. There was no child. As one of the Montenegrin sisters put it, a tiny ovule came out. Then her abdomen deflated, the pains stopped. The palace doctors confirmed that she was not pregnant. She was suffering from an amnesia-related condition and should rest in bed, they told her. As they left her room she began to weep as though she had never wept before and would never be able to stop. On and on into the terrible future, a future where she had thought there was hope but now there was only despair, her tears would flow. She might be able to staunch them for her children but it would not be for long. This was the worst day of her life, in a life that had so many contenders for the position. She was humiliated. Alexandra had no doubt that word of what had happened would reach St Petersburg in a day or two, and how society would laugh at her. They had never taken to her, those aristocratic women of the capital, and she had never taken to them. Now the story of her troubles would shoot round the salons and she would be laughed to scorn. And inside the palace, she knew, there would be a campaign against Philippe, orchestrated by the doctors, amplified by the courtiers, prosecuted by the uncles. She hoped her husband would hold firm. But you could never tell. She prayed through her tears, she prayed to the icon of the Madonna in her tiny private chapel: Mother of God, hear my prayer, Mother of God hear my prayer. Don’t let them take Philippe away. Please don’t let them take him away from me. He’s my only hope.

Wells, England, Spring 1903

Lord Francis Powerscourt was lying on the ground at the junction of the nave and the transept of Wells Cathedral, staring upwards. He was inspecting one of the most dramatic features of any cathedral in Britain, the famous scissor arches that curved and swung and swept upwards towards the roof.

‘My goodness me, Lord Powerscourt,’ said the Dean, inspecting his prostrate visitor. ‘I know you asked me if you could lie on the floor, but I didn’t think you meant it. Are you all right down there?’

‘Perfectly happy, Dean, thank you very much. I thought I could get a better idea of what things must have looked like when your tower began to lean and crack open back in thirteen hundred and something or other.’

‘Thirteen hundred and thirty-eight,’ said the Dean with a faint note of irritation in his voice. He liked people to do their homework properly. ‘Anyway, I think you’ll find the cracks were more apparent higher up than they were at ground level.’

‘I’m sure you’re right, Dean,’ said Powerscourt, rising nimbly to his feet. ‘I have to go and have a tutorial from your librarian in a quarter of an hour. He’s promised to tell me all about the cracks and your clever master mason William Joy who invented the arches and saved the building. The great curves, I’m told, transfer weight from the west, where the foundations sank under the tower’s weight, to the east where they remained firm. I’m going to write it all down in my little black book.’

And Powerscourt patted one of his pockets which gave out a dull thud of reassurance. The Dean sighed as he looked around his kingdom of space and light.

‘I envy you, you know, Lord Powerscourt. You come here and you work hard and then you move on to another cathedral for your book. We’re left here with all the problems of the damp and the lack of money and the lack of interest. I sometimes wish I’d stayed where I was as Vicar of St George’s in Bristol.’

Powerscourt looked closely at the Dean. ‘I think you’re wrong there, Dean,’ he said quietly. ‘Your problems may be formidable, the lack of money difficult, but you are charged with the upkeep in fabric and liturgy and service of one of the most beautiful buildings in England. It is I, and many others, who envy you, you know.’

The Dean patted Powerscourt on the shoulder in a gesture that might have been a sign of friendship or a truncated blessing. He moved off towards the Chapter House.

Lord Francis Powerscourt had not intended to become a historian of cathedrals. He was just under six feet tall, clean-shaven, his head crowned with a set of unruly black curls, his eyes blue, inspecting the world with irony and detachment.

For many years Powerscourt had worked in Army Intelligence in India. When he left the military he and his great friend and companion in arms Johnny Fitzgerald had embarked on a successful career as investigators, solving murders and mysteries right across Britain. The year before, in 1902, he had been shot and very badly wounded at the end of a murder case involving one of London’s Inns of Court. For days he had been on the brink of death, his wife Lady Lucy and a team of doctors and nurses in constant vigil by his side. Several months after the accident, when he was well enough to travel and to climb a few hills, she took him away to a hotel in Positano in Italy to convalesce. Powerscourt loved Positano, hanging on to its cliff above the blue water, the streets often replaced by stairs as you climbed towards the top, the foundations of the houses horizontal rather than vertical, or so the natives said, and the legends of pirates and abductions of Black Madonnas that peopled its turbulent history. And then, on the fifth morning, in a scene Powerscourt later referred to as The Ambush, Lucy sat him down on the balcony of their sitting room that looked out over the sea and took both of his hands in hers. Powerscourt had replayed the scene in his mind virtually every day since.

‘Francis, my love, I cannot tell you how happy we all are to see you getting better. I want to ask you something today. It is important, it’s very important to me.’

She paused and Powerscourt could see that she must have been rehearsing this speech in her mind for days if not weeks. ‘I don’t expect an answer today, Francis. I don’t expect an answer tomorrow. Only when you’re ready.’

Powerscourt thought she was delaying the heart of her message. Only when he looked into the steadfast courage in Lucy’s blue eyes did he know that she was trying to spare him. He thought he knew what she was going to say. He had been expecting it for some time.

‘Francis, I want you to give up detection, investigations, murders, mysteries, all of it. You know I have never tried to stop you in the past, I have never asked you and Johnny to abandon a case because it was dangerous. But that last case with the bullet wound in the chest nearly killed you. You were unconscious for days. You didn’t see the agony for our children, for Thomas and Olivia as they thought their Papa might be dead. Children don’t want that at the age of nine or seven. The twins would have had to grow up without a father at all. You’re a very good father, Francis, no mother and no child could ask for better. But surely the greatest gift a father can give his children is to stay alive for them, to be there as they grow up, to help and bless them on their way into the world. Dead fathers may be heroes, they may even be martyrs, but they don’t help their children with their homework or teach them how to play tennis or read them bedtime stories. Children need fathers built into the brickwork of their lives, into the patterns of their days and the weeks of the passing years. They don’t want that contact to be with some stone monument in a cemetery with rotting flowers lying at the side of the grave.’

Lady Lucy paused, her hands still locked into her husband’s, her eyes watching his face. ‘Think of the number of times you have nearly lost your life, my love. When you were investigating the death of Prince Eddy, the Prince of Wales’s son, Johnny Fitzgerald was nearly killed because your enemies thought he was you as he was wearing your green cloak. When you looked into the death of Christopher Montague the art critic, you and I were nearly killed in Corsica with mad people pursuing us down a mountain road and firing guns at us. In that cathedral case they tried to kill you by dropping a whole heap of masonry on top of you from high up in the building. A few months ago you nearly breathed your last on the first floor of the Wallace Collection in Manchester Square. It can’t go on, Francis. Please don’t be cross with me, my love, I’ve nearly finished. I don’t know if you remember the day you came back from the dead, when Johnny Fitzgerald was reading Tennyson’s “Ulysses” and little Christopher smiled his first smile at you. We were all hand in hand then, by the side of your bed, you and me and Thomas and Olivia and Christopher and Juliet, all joined in a circle of love. I want you to remember those faces, to think of them on that day, as you make your decision. I know it won’t be easy, I know how much satisfaction you take from another mystery solved, from the knowledge that other people will now live because the murderer has been caught. I just want you to think of your children’s faces and the love in their eyes and the relief in their hearts when their father came back to them. Please don’t let them go through that again. And remember, Francis, you know it’s because we all love you so much.’

Lady Lucy removed her hands at the end. Suddenly, overcome by the strain and her memories of the days when death seemed so close in Manchester Square, she started to cry. Powerscourt held her in his arms and said nothing at all. He had known it was coming, this request. He hadn’t known how difficult he would find it to give her an answer. For three days he stared at the dark blue waters of the Mediterranean and took little walks along the coast as his strength returned. He was being asked to give up his career. If he had stayed in the army, he told himself, he would have been exposed to much more danger than he was as an investigator. Was it unmanly to give up his own interests for those of his wife and children? He wondered what his male contemporaries would have said about that. He tried to make a comparison, to draw up a balance sheet between Lady Lucy and his children’s happiness and the dangers of an undiscovered murderer roaming the streets of London, and he knew he couldn’t do it.

He watched Lady Lucy a lot in those three days. He saw the joy in her face when she looked at him when she thought he wasn’t noticing. She’s so happy I’m alive, he said to himself. He saw the grace of her movements as she walked into a room or crossed a street and he knew he was as much in love with her as he had been the day they were married. When he told her he was giving up detection she ran into his arms and buried her face in his shoulder. ‘Francis, I promise I won’t mention it again unless you do,’ she told him. ‘Now let’s go and have a very expensive dinner and an early night.’

For a long time afterwards Powerscourt was to wonder if she chose her moment when he was still quite weak. Would he have given the same answer if he had been at full strength? For he found life growing more difficult as they returned from Positano and back into their London routine. Only Powerscourt had no routine now. Buying more newspapers in the morning, taking longer and longer walks in the afternoon, was no compensation for the lack of purpose in his life. He didn’t think you could enter your occupation in some survey or census as Father. It wouldn’t do. He began to grow listless. He found it harder and harder to get out of bed in the morning. He drank too much in the evening. Lady Lucy and Johnny Fitzgerald held an emergency meeting with Powerscourt’s brother-in-law William Burke, a great financier in the City of London. It was Johnny who came up with a possible answer.

‘Look here, Lady Lucy, William, I’ve got an idea. Remember what happened to me first of all. I used to be a bit wild, drinking too much when I wasn’t working with Francis on a case. Now I’ve got my first bird book coming out soon and they want another two after that. I’m not saying that Francis should start watching the lesser peewit or the great praticole or any of that stuff, but he’s so clever he could write books about lots of things. Maybe he could describe some of his greatest cases – but I suppose they’d be too delicate for that.’

Johnny paused and took a sip of his glass of William Burke’s finest Chablis. ‘I know,’ he said, leaning forward in his excitement. ‘How about this? Do you remember during our art case there was that character who was arrested for Christopher Montague’s murder and we had to get him off? Buckley, that’s the man’s name, Horace Aloysius Buckley. He was going round the country attending Evensong in every cathedral in England when Francis and the police caught up with him in Durham, I think, no, it was Lincoln. Anyway, after he was acquitted there was a party in that barrister Charles Augustus Pugh’s chambers, and I asked this Buckley person if there wasn’t a book about the cathedrals for the general reader, thinking that he could have stopped home if there was and not spent all that money on the train fares. He said there wasn’t. So there we are. Francis becomes an author. Francis writes histories of cathedrals. He’d like that. He dedicates one of the books to Mr Buckley, maybe. Bloody cathedrals are like bloody birds, they’re everywhere, England, France, Germany, Italy, there’s enough to keep him going for years.’

So here was Powerscourt, many months after his trip to Positano, travelling nearly six hundred years back in time to learn about the scissor arches that saved Wells Cathedral.

He had grown to love the strange vocabulary of cathedrals, the ambulatories and clerestories, the chantry chapels and the Angel Choirs, the sacristies and the triforia, the transepts and the cloisters, the choir stalls and the fonts, the Chapter Houses and the stained glass windows, the recent memorials to the dead in the Boer Wars, the tattered flags that had once led soldiers into battle and death. He was still astonished at the sheer size of them, how twelfth-or thirteenth-century men could have built these massive monuments to their God. He had talked to contemporary masons and carpenters and architects about their perspective on the buildings. He had tried to discover what the citizens of the cathedral cities thought of them when they were built, but no records survived. He had talked to the present-day citizens, the shopkeepers, the tradesmen, the lawyers, the publicans, the Deans and Chapters, about what the cathedral meant to them now in the first years of the twentieth century. For the citizens, he discovered, the cathedral was like a remote grandparent with eternal life, part of the fabric of their lives and their families’ lives as far back as their memories extended and the city records survived. The cathedral, in Gloucester or Hereford, in Salisbury or Norwich, brought honour to the city and growing numbers of visitors to inspect its glories. But nowhere was it seen as a beacon of faith, a monument to man’s quest for the eternal or the spiritual. Cathedrals were friendly, cathedrals were beautiful, cathedrals were awesome feats of construction, but they were not the light that shineth in darkness. Even the Deans, like the Dean of Wells, the men responsible for the running of these vast buildings and the scheduling of their daily services, approached their task, Powerscourt felt, in the manner of men organizing the Post Office mail delivery system or planning the transportation of an army across a continent. The cathedral, in Canterbury or Worcester or Exeter, must have seemed to its people at one early point to tower above society, to float next to heaven far above the mundane concerns of the city. Once it was a miracle. Now it was just another cog in the wheel, like the town hall or the public library.

Sarov, Russia, July 1903

The film of dust, thicker than the smoke from a cigarette, less dense than a cloud, rose some twenty feet above the road and a long way out on either side. The roads were dusty in the summer of 1903 and not designed to carry so many pilgrims. These travellers had come from all over Russia, mystics from Siberia, Holy Fools from the Crimea, mountain people from the Caucasus, peasants in their rough clothes from the very heart of Russia. The sick had come as well as the healthy, amputees brandishing their crutches as they limped along, desperate mothers holding pale and diseased children in their arms, or pushing them in home-made handcarts, children who looked as if they might never reach their destination. The pilgrims carried icons of St Serafim or the Virgin, many of them muttering prayers to themselves or their paintings every step of the way. Some carried baskets of food, others had resolved to fast until they saw the relics of the saint installed in glory in the new cathedral. The mad and deranged had come, sometimes shrieking out their private visions at the side of the road, sometimes screaming in pain as the Cossack horsemen or the police beat them into silence. And at the heart of this progression of pilgrims, travelling in their imperial troikas, Nicholas and Alexandra, Emperor and Empress of All the Russias, were bent on the same journey of pilgrimage to the same destination as their subjects. Word of their journey had spread through the villages they passed. Crowds would come out to stare and shout oaths of loyalty to their Emperor, never before seen in these remote parts and never seen since.

Sarov was the goal, Sarov, home to one of the most famous holy men in Russia whose remains were to be removed from his grave in the convent cemetery and transferred to a new cathedral that was to be consecrated in his name. Serafim was the name of the holy man. He had already been declared a saint on the orders of the Tsar. Everyone, even the babies in the handcarts, knew the story of St Serafim. Many of the pilgrims had shouted out the best known of his prayers to encourage themselves on the road. He had gone as a monk to live alone in a cottage in the forest to be close to nature and closer to his God. For many years he lived the simple life there, alone with his prayers and his Creator. Then three robbers came to his hut one day and demanded money. When Serafim told them he had no money, they beat him senseless and left him for dead. Serafim returned to the monastery near Sarov and refused to let the robbers be punished. Now began his late career as mystic and healer. People believed he could make the blind see and the deaf hear and cure any number of ailments that oppressed the peasants. The numbers of the sick he had cured ran into thousands. That was why the people of Russia marched in such numbers to the consecration of his cathedral.

All of the pilgrims had their own special reason for their journey: a child to be healed, a parent brought back to health, a husband or wife restored to sight or to sanity. But one woman had a very special cause very close to her heart. In spite of the humiliation of her false pregnancy, in spite of the fact that the Foreign Service had reported that Philippe Vachot was a butcher from Lyons who had been arrested for fraud in France, the Empress Alexandra still believed in him. She persuaded Nicholas to have the offending civil servant who had imparted the news of Vachot’s disgrace in his native land stripped of his position and sent to Siberia. She still believed. The candles and the incense still burned in the Montenegrins’ apartment, the icons still shimmered on the walls as the mystic work went on. In some ways Alexandra was a practical woman. She bought most of the furniture for her palace from that Mecca of the English middle class, Maples department store in London’s Tottenham Court Road. But she seemed to need spiritualism the way other people in St Petersburg needed love affairs or yachts or fine horses. And she carried two messages from Philippe along the dusty roads to Sarov. Among his many powers the saint was said to be able to cure the barren, to give the infertile children. Surely a man who could do that could make her bring forth a son? She was to pray to the saint for a son and she was to bathe in the holy waters of the spring that bore his name. The second message was more cryptic and Alexandra was not sure of its meaning. Philippe had told the imperial couple that he had been sent on a mission and that his mission was almost over. But after his death, he assured them, another man would take over his spirit and his work, a greater man than he, a true holy man who would bring great glory to Russia.

The first couple of days were spent consecrating the cathedral. The Metropolitan of St Petersburg, an enormous man well over six feet six inches tall, led the prayers. Some of the pilgrims went to the services, standing patiently while the choir and the priests worked their way through the special liturgy for the consecration of a cathedral, crossing themselves with the three-fingered cross of the Russian Orthodox, kissing the icons. But most of them waited. They had not travelled these enormous distances for the blessing of a new church. They were waiting for the moment when the bones of the saint would be moved in their new coffin and installed in front of the chancel. Then the proper business of the pilgrimage could begin. Meanwhile they slept in the fields. The police reported that they were one of the best behaved crowds they had ever seen. Drunkenness, that curse of all Russian gatherings from two to twenty thousand people, had not appeared. The pilgrims rapidly emptied the shops of Sarov of all available food and waited, uncomplaining, for fresh supplies to arrive.

Shortly after ten o’clock on the fourth day the most dramatic part of the service began. Under the great golden dome the choir and the priests sang one of the opening sections of Matins.

Choir:

Lord, have mercy.

Deacon:

For the peace from on high and for the salvation of our souls, let us pray to the Lord.

Choir:

Lord, have mercy.

Deacon:

For the peace of the whole world, for the stability of the holy Churches of God, and for the union of all, let us pray to the Lord.

Choir:

Lord, have mercy.

Deacon:

For this holy house, and for those who enter it with faith, reverence and the fear of God, let us pray to the Lord.

Choir:

Lord, have mercy.

Outside, the Tsar, his uncle Grand Duke Serge and various members of the imperial family carried the gold coffin with the relics of St Serafim on their shoulders right round the exterior of the cathedral. The peasants who had been leaning against the walls or making pathetic encampments with their few belongings parted before the coffin like the waters of the Red Sea. Then the coffin was carried round the inside of the building before being placed in front of the chancel.

Slowly at first, then in a trickle, then in a steady stream, came the pilgrims. They limped, they shuffled, they came with their crutches, some of them crawled, one or two ran to kiss the coffin of the dead saint. They knew, these faithful – had not their own priests lectured them about this before they set off on their pilgrimage? – that they were not to expect God’s grace to make itself manifest immediately. It might be days or weeks or even years before the Holy Spirit revealed itself. There was so much hope in the building, irrational hope, unreasonable hope that illnesses, which must of themselves be the work of God, could be halted or reversed by one of his saints. The choir sang on. The Metropolitan Antony blessed the pilgrims in the chancel. Gradually the atmosphere became very tense, as if the entire congregation and those denied entry standing outside were all desperate for a miracle. Some of the pilgrims were praying for one. The anthems and responses of the choir grew ever more hypnotic. Then there was a sign. A madman was brought up, his arms waving wildly, his eyes staring intently at some private reality of his own, two friends or relations guiding him forwards. As he kissed the coffin and received the blessing of the Metropolitan, a peace seemed to descend on him. His limbs returned to normal. His eyes stopped the staring of the deranged and looked about him intelligently. Whether it was the work of the saint or the atmosphere or a fluke did not matter to the congregation. ‘He is healed!’ ‘Thank the Lord!’ ‘St Serafim be praised!’ rang round the cathedral until the Metropolitan himself had to look sternly down the nave for the noise to stop. Later on a dumb child seemed to be cured. After four hours the pilgrims were convinced that their journey was worthwhile, that God and his saint had indeed come to Sarov to cast his blessings on his people and work miracles on their afflictions.

Late in the evening of the last day of the ceremonies Nicholas and Alexandra and some of their party went very quietly to bathe in St Serafim’s pool. A group of Cossacks were on duty, facing outwards, in case of assassins. Staff had brought towels and dry clothes. The cathedral was outlined faintly against a crescent moon. A pair of owls could be heard hooting in the distance. The waters in the pool were very cold. As Alix slipped in and lowered herself until she was almost completely covered, she prayed to St Serafim. She prayed that he would take pity on a poor sinner whose dearest wishes had been denied. She prayed that he would take heed of her husband, a good man denied the one thing he most needed, a son and heir. She prayed that St Serafim would take heed of his own country, that he would ensure that Russia was not left to lawlessness and crime and anarchy and depravity because there was no proper heir to the throne of the Romanovs. This time, shivering slightly now in the evening chill, she knew her prayers would be answered. She knew now that she would have a son. In the end Philippe had not failed her.

St Petersburg, October 1904

Ever since she had read Anna Karenina two years before, Natasha Bobrinsky thought of Tolstoy’s heroine every time she was in a railway station. This particular engine driver seemed intent on raising so much steam that any putative suicides would have been completely invisible. She peered, fascinated, at those enormous wheels and wondered what it would be like to be crushed to death beneath them. She shuddered slightly, for Natasha had no intention of dying just yet. The Bobrinskys had come to St Petersburg with Peter the Great and had been rewarded for their loyalty and devotion to his new capital with grants of thousands of acres. Successive Bobrinskys, in their turn, had served their Tsars and been rewarded with yet more grants of land. Natasha’s father had once tried to show her on a map where the family estates were, many of them thousands and thousands of miles away. In the end her parents too had moved thousands of miles away for most of the year, not to the badlands of Siberia, but to the sunnier climes of Paris and the French Riviera. Natasha wasn’t particularly interested in her father’s estates. Surely girls of eighteen couldn’t be expected to be interested in places that far away from civilization, which stopped, as everyone who was anyone in St Petersburg knew, at the end of the Nevskii Prospekt.

Even Natasha’s four elder brothers, who had teased and tormented their only sister from earliest times, would have said she was pretty. She was taller than average, without being liable to stand out in a crowd, slim, with very dark eyes and thick brown hair. For her trip to the station Natasha was clad from head to foot in fur and reminded more than one of the passengers on the platform of Tolstoy’s eponymous heroine. She had come to see a young man off on a journey of adventure. Natasha had known Mikhail Shaporov since she was a child. Just when she thought their friendship might turn into something different, something altogether more exciting, he had to leave Russia to go and live in the fogs of London. And where was he? she thought, looking up at the clock and seeing that the train would leave in nine minutes’ time. If you were a Shaporov, she reflected with a smile, you probably wouldn’t mind missing a train. You could probably buy yourself another one on the spot. For the Shaporovs had not been content with the great estates they had received on government service. They had branched out into banking and insurance and all kinds of other things to do with money that Natasha didn’t understand. People said they were now much richer than the Romanovs.

Then she saw him, running at full speed towards her, his eyes filled with happiness.

‘Natasha!’ he panted. ‘I’m at the other end of the train! This way!’

With that he grabbed her hand and pulled her at breakneck speed down the platform, dodging a considerable amount of luggage and annoying a great many other travellers who had to get out of their way.

‘Here we are,’ he said, still out of breath. ‘This compartment is mine.’

Natasha saw that he had a sleeping compartment and a well-furnished living room at his disposal. Shaporovs didn’t travel third class.

‘Do you think you’ll have enough room in there, Mikhail? You don’t think you should have ordered a dining suite and a chef for yourself as well?’

The young man laughed. ‘I didn’t book it, Natasha. I’d have been perfectly happy with first class. My father booked it for me.’

Natasha still remembered the first time she had met Mikhail’s father at a children’s party. He had given rides on his back to every single small guest, some of them up the marble staircase accompanied by wolf noises. Now the man was booking luxury train suites for his children.

‘You’ve been to London a lot, haven’t you?’ asked Natasha, anxious perhaps lest her young man, or one who might become her young man, be going to an alien world.

‘I have been there a lot. They sent me to school there, you may remember, for two years before I went to Oxford. London’s splendid. It’s not as beautiful as St Petersburg and the English are more reserved than we are, but it’s a fine city. And,’ he went on, noticing that Natasha was looking sad all of a sudden, ‘my father says I can come home after three months if I do well.’

Natasha wondered where he might be sent then, New York, or Siberia perhaps. Maybe she should find herself a more stationary sort of young man.

‘I haven’t told you,’ she said, ‘I’ve been offered a job as a lady-in-waiting.’

‘Waiting for whom or for what?’ said Mikhail gravely.

‘The Empress and her children out at Tsarskoe Selo,’ said Natasha proudly. ‘They want to have a sensible young girl to talk to the daughters and so forth. The only thing they checked about me was whether I was fluent in French or not. I am, as you know. So I got the position.’

Mikhail looked at her carefully. Sensible? Would he have called Natasha sensible? It wasn’t the first word that would have come to mind. Beautiful, certainly. Attractive, yes. Desirable, undoubtedly. Maybe Natasha was sensible too. It seemed such a mundane, a prosaic adjective to describe such a gorgeous creature.

‘Congratulations, Natasha! What an honour to be picked for that post!’

‘I may not like it, Mikhail,’ she said. ‘My mother says they’re all mad out at the Alexander Palace and my father says to keep an eye out for the bombs and the terrorists.’

‘Not sure it’s bombs you need to keep an eye out for. Beware faith healers, ouija boards, necromancers, fakes and phoneys of the spiritual world. One of these fiends convinced the Empress she was pregnant a couple of years back.’

There was a sudden burst of whistles from the front of the train. Natasha thought she saw something like a flag waving. Mikhail hopped on to the step at the door of his compartment. He thought he would still be able to kiss her from there if the opportunity presented itself.

‘You be careful in London, Mikhail Shaporov,’ said Natasha firmly. ‘There are all kinds of bounty hunters and wicked people over there. I read about them in a book by Henry James.’

‘Not females, surely, Natasha? Not members of your own sex, trying to trap a man for his money? Impossible, surely.’ The young man laughed.

The train began to move very slowly. The engine was giving out great gasps as if it were in labour. The white-grey smoke billowed back down the platform. Natasha began walking alongside Mikhail’s carriage. Very suddenly he reached down and pulled her up on to the same step. He kissed her firmly and then returned her to the platform.

‘Take care, Natasha,’ he said, ‘take great care out there in your palace.’

Natasha’s head was spinning. Why did this have to happen now when he was going away? Was that the kiss of a friend or a lover? Lover, she thought, every memory on her lips said lover. She was nearly running now.

‘Take care in your wicked city, Mikhail! Come back safely! Will you write to me?’

There was an enormous roar, almost an explosion, as the train gathered speed and began to move clear of the station.

‘Of course I’ll write,’ Natasha thought she heard him say. The train was disappearing now. Natasha made her way home slowly. She was not going to tell anybody about the kiss. It would be a secret between them. Natasha rather liked secrets. And London? Well, she remembered a governess in her youth who had tried in vain to teach them about distances. London, she thought, was only about two thousand, one hundred and fifty miles away. Not really that far when you considered how far it was to Siberia.