The People's Will (18 page)

His last chance for freedom might have been under that escort to the fortress, but the guards were wary, and the cold had weakened him. Just as Dmitry had commanded, they had given him a deep, dark cell. High up on the wall, near the ceiling, was a tiny window, the size of just one brick, but it was no danger. The sun was low and the light that shone through stayed high above Iuda as it worked its way across the cell, its journey lasting just a few hours each day.

The cell was old – part of the oldest building in the whole of Petersburg – but it was solidly built. The door was newer, and Iuda doubted he would be able to break it down. It did not concern him; he had only to wait for an incautious guard to enter and he would be free. A pair of water pipes ran along one wall of the cell, just inches from the ground, emerging from the stonework at one end and disappearing into it at the other. Periodically these erupted with the sound of tapping, but currently all was silent; there was a pattern to it – the prisoners were clearly communicating in some form of code. Most of them in here would be political – they’d probably been taught the code as part of their indoctrination, in preparation for their inevitable arrest. The Peter and Paul Fortress had always been a place for that kind of prisoner, since the beginning. The walls of the cell were testament to it – a thousand messages scratched into the stonework, some long, others just
names or initials. They dated back all the way to the time of Pyotr. The authorities could have sanded them away, or painted over them, but they didn’t. Perhaps they felt a sense of history; perhaps they knew it would demoralize the prisoners more to see how many had come before them, and to know that they had failed; the Romanovs still reigned.

Iuda examined the various graffiti; it passed the time and provided some amusement – particularly when he saw the same name or initials repeated with different dates, months or sometimes years apart. He paused at one and smiled broadly.

А.И.Д. – 16.xii.1825

It was beyond coincidence: A.I.D. – two days after the Decembrist Revolt. It could only be Aleksei Ivanovich Danilov – Lyosha. There was no question he would have been sent here, to the Peter and Paul Fortress. Why shouldn’t it be the same cell that Iuda now occupied, fifty-six years on? Their paths had crossed so often, but no more. Lyosha was long dead now.

The tapping on the pipes began again, interrupting Iuda’s thoughts. He sat down on the lumpy straw mattress that was the cell’s only furnishing and listened, trying to identify patterns, trying to make sense of them. It should be easy, as long as he applied the proper scientific method. It was just as his father had always told him, had sometimes beaten into him, but it had served Iuda well – it would serve him now.

Iuda’s father, the Reverend Thomas Owen Cain, was the parish priest of Esher, in the county of Surrey, in England. Iuda himself – Richard Llywelyn Cain – had been born in the rectory of Saint George’s Church on 28 June 1778, killing his mother, quite accidentally, in the process. By the time Richard was old enough to discern such things, he noted that his father seemed none too perturbed by the loss of his mother, and Richard chose to adopt a similar attitude. Thomas Cain’s chief interest, aside from his flock, was in science – particularly its application to maritime navigation, a matter of increasing importance with the rapid expansion of His Majesty’s vast empire.

Thomas seemed almost to regret that the problem of longitude
had been solved, not because he did not admire the solution, but because he had spent so many of his earlier years trying to deal with it by a quite different approach. But he was not disheartened. Even now that the issue of accurately knowing the time was resolved, there were still vast and complex measurements and calculations that needed to be made in order to combine that time with the observed positions of the sun or the stars and thus calculate a ship’s location, allowing it to sail safely across the oceans. The loss of the thirteen colonies, when Richard was just five, was a shock to the whole nation, but Thomas became convinced that they could be won back if only a fleet could be sent that had sufficient navigational agility to outmanoeuvre the rebel forces.

The solution was his ‘Navigational Engine’, a device, in its ultimate form, the size of a small table, with concentric wheels on its surface which allowed the positions of stars to be marked off, the time set and – so Thomas insisted – a course to be plotted. Richard had little interest in it, but that was not a concept that his father could even consider. Each year – sometimes with greater frequency – Thomas would come up with a new generation of his device, with additional features and refinements that would guarantee its effectiveness, and then he and it and young Richard would board a carriage and head out for the Royal Observatory at Greenwich.

On some occasions the trip would take the whole day – a third of it for the journey there, another third for the journey back and the remaining third sitting, waiting for the committee to find a moment to allow Thomas admittance to their presence. On others they would set out the day before the appointed meeting and spend the night with Thomas’s brother, Edmund, across the Thames in Purfleet. There, as his father snored beside the fire, Uncle Edmund taught Richard to play chess. After the age of ten, Richard never lost a game to him.

Whether their travels took one day or two, the actual examination and discussion of the Navigational Engine took only minutes, and the result was always the same. Travelling out there, Thomas would be full of optimism. He and Richard would look out of the carriage window and he would answer Richard’s questions about the flora and fauna they could see. But the return journeys
were more sombre. Thomas would emerge from his discussions with ostensible cheer, speaking of the points which the committee had liked and the recommendations they had made for further improvement, but as the journey home progressed he would fall into a morose silence, his face flushed and scowling. On occasions he would grab the white powdered wig from his head and hurl it on to the floor of the carriage, revealing the sparse ginger hair that naturally topped his scalp; hair which Richard was thankful not to have inherited. On those dark days Richard knew not to ask about or even to look at the world that sped past.

Richard’s fascination had always taken him more in the direction of living things than of astronomy and mathematics. At first his father had discouraged him, telling him that nothing would ever come from the study of plants and animals, but later he had relented, reasoning, Richard supposed, that it was better for his son to show an interest in something, however unimportant it might be to the fate of the empire, than to be interested in nothing.

Even so, Thomas Cain was not prepared to allow his little boy merely to take pleasure in the beauty of the world that God had created; he must experiment and he must discover. Richard’s approach, like his father’s, should be scientific and methodical. It was not enough to marvel at the beauty of a butterfly; the creature must be caught and pinned in a case to be studied and documented. It was not enough to ponder the mathematical symmetry of a spider’s web; the web must be broken, and the steps taken by the spider to mend it recorded; a fly must be placed on the web, and the speed at which the spider scampered over to devour it measured. It was not enough to watch a rat devise and execute a plan to steal grain from a sack that the farmer had thought beyond reach; the creature must be trapped and dissected in order to gain a better understanding of how its organs operated, and compare it with the same organs in other animals and then – perhaps one day at university – with those of a human being.

Richard had not enjoyed it at first – it was tiresome, mundane work, with little reward, but it was incentive enough to keep his father happy and to keep the cane (Thomas never tired of the pun: ‘Master Cain, the cane awaits!’) in its place on the mantelpiece. Later, though, he began to get a sense of satisfaction when his
pages of notes and measurements revealed some general principle of which he had not previously been aware: that the spacing between threads on a spider’s web was proportional to the size of its body; that a rat could not vomit.

By the age of eleven, Richard had already filled a dozen volumes with his observations. Such subjects were not studied at school, but even there he did well, with Latin a particular favourite. But he had no interest in divinity – his father had bored him with the subject before he began school, and the more he learned of the detailed mechanisms of nature, the more he doubted that the Lord could have created them in the space of just a few days. More than that, even if the Bible were true, he despised it for the cursory disregard with which it so fleetingly skipped over the magnificence of what God was supposed to have achieved. Six verses to deal with every animal of the sea, the air or the land. Where was the respect? Where was the wonder? Richard could have spent six chapters simply describing the wing of a butterfly.

Richard’s disregard for religion inescapably led to a disregard for his father, for whom, as God’s representative on earth, religion played an important role. But it was more than that; it was Thomas Cain’s failure as a scientist that inspired the most loathing in his son. As the expectant journeys out to Greenwich – and the disappointed trudges back – came and went, Richard began to understand more and more the gap between his father’s ambition and his ability. Others around them saw it too – parishioners, the bishop – but in them it inspired sympathy, an admiration for the heroic failure. But he was not
their
father and they didn’t have to grow up worrying that one day they might end up like him. There was little Richard could think of that might solve the problem of his father, but at least he could make sure that he did not become him.

But it was when Richard was just eleven, in 1789, that the revolution in France changed everything. This was far more terrifying than the loss of the colonies; this was on England’s very doorstep. Richard’s world changed in a hundred ways as his country came to terms with what had happened to a fellow monarchy of equal age, pedigree and grandeur. But for Richard there was one great practical benefit.

Within a few years of the Revolution, thousands of French émigrés had left their homeland and come to England, many to live in Surrey. And it was among these émigrés that Richard was first to make the acquaintance of a vampire.

KONSTANTIN WAS TRUE
to his word, and late that evening Mihail stepped from the gates of Fontanka 16 a free man. He went straight back to his hotel, but slept badly. He lay, gazing up through the darkness towards the ceiling, trying to work out what he felt. But the answer he began with was the one he ended with. It was quite, quite simple.

He felt nothing.

Konstantin seemed an amiable enough individual. Mihail had enjoyed his company, but in his short career in the army he’d met several men he could have said that about, many he’d liked less, a few he’d liked more. Throughout his life he’d downplayed the prospect of this event. His mother had told him of his lineage as a fact, not as something in which she took joy or pride. And on top of that Mihail had always doubted that what she had said was even true.

He wished he could have the chance to apologize to her for that. He still felt a greater love for his grandfather, Aleksei, who had died before he was born, but that too came from Tamara. And Aleksei had loved his tsar – had saved him from the plans of Zmyeevich and Iuda. It would be the act of a hero to emulate him, and yet if he did so it would be for the sake of his grandfather’s memory – not out of any love for his father.

And today his task was to unearth another relative for whom he could find in himself no familial love – his brother, Luka. So why seek him out? Why add further worries to the life of this young man whose fate would seem to be to die in a failed attempt to assassinate the tsar? Even towards that, Mihail felt indifferent.
In principle he loved and obeyed his tsar, but he could not stir in himself any hatred towards Luka for holding a different position. Mihail had only one hatred, for Iuda. And that was why he knew he must seek out his brother: Iuda and Dmitry had spoken of Luka. Either directly or indirectly, Luka might lead to Iuda.

Mihail walked alongside the Moika, frozen over by the January cold. The river meandered a little, always taking him in a direction that led roughly to the centre of town, but before he reached Saint Isaac’s Square he turned off and soon found himself at the address Konstantin had given him: Maksimilianovsky Lane 15, apartment 7.

He asked the
dvornik
whether Luka Miroslavich was in, but the man just shrugged. It was rumoured that half the
dvorniki
in Petersburg were in the pay of the Ohrana – they saw who came and went and knew the names of all the tenants of their buildings. It would explain how Konstantin had unearthed the information about Luka so easily.

Mihail climbed the twisting stairs up to the third floor and knocked on the door of apartment 7. The man who answered looked nothing like the picture of Luka. This one was in his late twenties, with a trimmed beard that did not cover his cheeks. He was thin and pale, with a sharp nose on which sat a pair of pince-nez.

‘Oh!’ He seemed disappointed at what he saw. Mihail had changed out of his military uniform, thinking it unwise for his sojourn in the Petersburg underworld. He hoped his profession didn’t shine through even without it.

‘You were expecting somebody else?’ Mihail asked.

‘Yes, I was rather.’

‘I’m here to see Luka Miroslavich Novikov. Is he in?’

‘He’s not here.’ The man kept glancing over his shoulder, back into the apartment. He kept the door almost closed, with his weight against it so that Mihail could not push his way through, not that he had attempted it. None of it served to convey an impression of innocence.

‘Will he be long? Might I wait?’

‘He moved out weeks ago. I don’t know where he went.’

With that the door was closed. Mihail went back down the
stairs and out into the street. Not far away, on the corner, was a tavern. He ordered tea and found himself a seat by the window where he could look back towards number 15. He was the only man in the place who didn’t have a cigarette between his lips. He breathed deeply of the smoky atmosphere, the smell bringing his mother to mind. He could rarely remember her without one. In a provincial town like Saratov, it had been a minor scandal for a woman to smoke in public.