Hadfield remembered why the address was familiar over a breakfast of coffee and warm rolls. Fontanka 16. Foolish to forget. The Third Section of the tsar’s private chancellery. Goldenberg was watching a secret policeman or officer of the Gendarme Corps. Who? He worried at it like a dog with a bone. The answer came to him as he was brushing his jacket. Someone had attempted to take the life of the head of the Third Section. Hadfield had heard mention of it at the opera a few weeks before. A revolutionary fired two shots through the window of General Drenteln’s carriage and narrowly missed with both. Goldenberg was watching the general, no doubt with a view to making a better fist of it next time. But if that was the case, what on earth should he do about it? He was pondering this question before his dressing mirror when there was a sharp knock at the door of the apartment. Sergei, the dvornik, was on the step with an armful of birch logs for the fire, at his back three serving women in peasant smocks with stiff brushes attached to the soles of their boots.
‘The floor, Your Honour,’ he said, reaching awkwardly for his cap. ‘You said it would be convenient?’
Hadfield let them pass, then retreated to his bedroom to finish ministering to collar and tie. Gruff instructions and the squeak of furniture on the move reached him through the door and when, a moment later, he stepped back into the drawing room, it was to find the women gliding across his parquet like patineurs in an ice waltz. By the time he returned from the hospital the floor in every room would be polished to glassy perfection.
A little after eight o’clock the cab rattled to a halt before the main entrance to the Nikolaevsky. Hadfield was so caught up in his thoughts that the driver was obliged to jump from his seat and stand at the front wheel with his dirty palm open for the fare. What was there to decide? Hadfield asked himself as he counted out the kopeks. That he should go to the police was quite unthinkable. A few careless words and he would condemn not only Goldenberg to years in a Siberian camp but Anna and Evgenia too.
‘Very generous, Your Honour.’
The broad smile on the cabby’s face suggested Hadfield should have concentrated harder on the fare. He knew it would be wiser to have nothing to do with the clinic in Peski. Inevitably, he would be drawn into further contact with Goldenberg or men very like him. Resolve to have no more dealings with her while it is in your power to do so, he thought. Resolve now, here in this hospital on this bright morning.
‘Good morning, Your Honour.’ It was the old porter who kept order at the main door, cap in hand like a peasant on rent day. The long benches in the entrance hall were already crowded with soldiers and their families waiting to see a doctor. Nurses in stiff white pinafores and scarves bustled about them taking names and regiments and the symptoms of their complaints. The Nikolaevsky had opened as a military hospital in the reign of the tsar’s father and grown steadily ever since, its imposing yellow and white frontage creeping year by year down Slonovaya Street. In the few months Hadfield had spent there he had formed the impression that it was well run, clean and surprisingly progressive. Most of his patients were on the general wards, but his departmental superior was familiar with a paper he had written on public health and the pathology of diseases, and he had been asked to carry out a discreet review of general practices in parts of the hospital. It was his duty that day to visit the department for the treatment of mental diseases for the first time. The Nikolaevsky was an unforgiving place and although he asked for directions more than once he was still wandering its maze of broad white corridors half an hour later. Finally losing patience, he pressganged a porter into service as a guide. From the main buildings, he was led along a path through a rough garden to the hospital’s boiler house. Two low workmen’s huts had been built against its high wall, their roofs of rusty iron, their rough timber walls weathered and bare but for a few sloughs of green paint, their windows partly boarded.
The porter pointed to the door of the first hut.
‘That’s Department 10? Are you sure?’
‘Yes.’
Hadfield knew a little of its reputation from a Russian colleague who had threatened him in jest with exile to Siberia or worse — Department 10. Knocking at the first hut, he was greeted by an oath then the scraping of a key in the lock. The door was opened by a ruddy-faced man in his early sixties with the broken veins and bloodshot eyes of a heavy drinker. He was wearing a faded green army uniform, the jacket stained with food and unbuttoned to the waist. He took Hadfield in at a glance.
‘Ryabovsky, Your Honour. Fyodor Ivanovich.’ He made a low insincere bow. ‘Warder, porter, nurse and general dogsbody.’
There was an insolence in his manner that made Hadfield’s hackles rise. ‘Where are the patients?’ he snapped.
Ryabovsky turned to the inner door behind him and unlocked it with a key that was hanging from the chain on his belt. Even before it was fully open, Hadfield was revolted by the overpowering smell of stale urine. Reaching for his handkerchief, he stood in the doorway, his eyes slowly adjusting to the gloom. By the light of a single oil lamp he could see the hut was laid out as a ward, but in place of beds the floor was strewn with rough straw mattresses. And it was heaving with bodies, young men for the most part, military coats fastened over dirty hospital gowns. The plank walls were caked in soot and smoke hung thick about the hut, although the two primitive stoves that were the only source of heat were unlit.
‘Who are these men?’ he asked, turning again to Ryabovksy.
‘The war with Turkey. They’re sick in the head.’
‘Why don’t these men have proper beds?’ It was a sordid unsanitary scene that brought to his mind an engraving of the hospital at Scutari twenty-five years before.
Ryabovsky gave a careless shrug: ‘Perhaps no one knows what to do with them, Your Honour.’
Frightened faces, empty faces, hollow faces, half-dressed, bare chilblained feet, some with dirty bandages or undressed bed sores, some curled tightly into whimpering balls like children, others defiant. Hadfield stepped among them, stopping to examine those with symptoms of a condition he was qualified to treat, but most were beyond his help. Perhaps they were lucky not to have been shot. He had read enough of these strange war injuries to know there was precious little sympathy in the army for casualties like these. He knew what Anna and Evgenia would say: ‘Fool! See how the tsar treats his most loyal servants.’
‘And is it the same in the other hut?’
‘A few less, Your Honour.’
‘This is a disgrace!’ Hadfield spat the words at Ryabovsky. But the old man merely shrugged again.
Hadfield was still shaking with rage five minutes later as he stood among the brambles in the boiler-house garden, the June sun warming his back. Cross with the army for neglecting the men, and with the hospital authorities, but cross most of all with his medical colleagues for making a joke of such a place. But he knew too that if he confronted them they would give him a very Russian shrug of resignation. ‘How can you be surprised?’ they would ask. ‘Such places exist in Russia. What would you have us do?’
The superintendent’s suite was on a bright first-floor corridor above the main entrance. It was the one place in the hospital that did not smell of ammonia or boiled cabbage but of floor polish and gentleman’s cologne. Military clerks in immaculate green uniforms glided from panelled room to panelled room through perfectly weighted mahogany doors that swung silently to behind them. It was as remote from the day to day business of the hospital as his uncle’s ministry.
‘Have you an appointment?’ the superintendent’s secretary asked. ‘As you can see, Doctor, there are others waiting.’ He turned to indicate two uniformed public servants and an elderly man in a frock coat whom Hadfield had seen in the corridors of the hospital and knew to be a surgeon.
‘It is a matter of great urgency,’ Hadfield replied calmly. ‘One that affects the reputation of the hospital.’
The secretary frowned. ‘May I suggest you go through the usual channels, Doctor, and speak to your head of department?’ This was clearly meant to be his final word on the matter. Turning to the surgeon, he opened his leather-bound file and was on the point of handing him an official-looking letter when Hadfield gripped him firmly by his upper arm.
‘I really think you should speak to him,’ he said, tugging him to one side. ‘Believe me, you’ll regret it if you don’t.’
‘Why will I regret it, Doctor?’
‘You know, of course, that my uncle, General Glen, is a good friend of the superintendent’s?’
He had promised himself he would never use his uncle’s name for advantage but he had to admit to a quiet satisfaction as the supercilious expression on the secretary’s face changed in the blink of an eye.
‘Of course, of course. I understand.’ The secretary’s words pattered like gentle rain.
‘And did reason prevail?’ Dobson asked.
Exhausted, Hadfield had collapsed into one of the leather smoking chairs in the correspondent’s office at a little after six o’clock that evening. He was still angry, but satisfied too that a day of frantic activity, of threats, flattery and cajoling, promised to make a difference to the lives of seventy very sick men.
‘Not reason. Nepotism and naked self-interest. And you know, George,’ he said, as Dobson pressed a glass into his hand, ‘I was surprised by my own mendacity.’
Dobson laughed. ‘You’re an educated man, Hadfield. You used the weapons available to you for the benefit of those men. Besides, there is nothing you can teach a public servant in Russia about lying he doesn’t already know. ’
‘But where does one draw the line?’ Hadfield had spoken to the superintendent of public scandal, of a friend on the St Petersburg Gazette who was pursuing a story on the treatment of casualties in the recent war. He had mentioned a confidential visit his uncle was hoping to make to the hospital with other members of the government. And he had told the bucolic old superintendent that the general had told him a prominent member of the royal family had expressed his concern.
‘I even mentioned the foreign press and my friend on The Times.’
‘You snake,’ said Dobson with a short barking laugh. He took a cigarette from a silver box on his desk, lit it then flopped into the armchair opposite Hadfield. ‘And what is going to happen to Department 10?’
The superintendent had promised beds and nursing care, that he would gradually transfer the men to the body of the hospital and contact their families. ‘And those who do not recover will be moved to an asylum — although I suppose that will be like jumping from the frying pan into the fire.’
‘But you’ve done what you can,’ Dobson replied, leaning forward with the wine bottle to fill Hadfield’s glass. ‘And risked a good deal to do so.’
‘Not really.’
‘Well, what about good relations with General Glen? It would be unwise to rub him up the wrong way. You will forgive me for saying so, I hope, but your uncle is not a man to cross.’
It was rumoured the general was pursuing newspapers that had the temerity to criticise his stewardship of the empire’s finances and that the censor was on the point of stepping in to suppress further adverse comment. ‘At least the general has helped you do a good turn, even if he is threatening to put the rest of us out of our jobs,’ he said with a cheerful twinkle.
It was entirely typical of Dobson to find humour and the kernel of something positive in even the grimmest of situations. In a relatively short time, he and Hadfield had become friends. They were much the same age, Englishmen who considered Russia to be home, they shared a passion for the language and a fascination with the people and their customs. Dobson had taught himself Russian, then persuaded The Times to accredit him as a war correspondent, and had reported with distinction on the recent conflict with Turkey. His father owned a small cotton mill in one of the new manufacturing towns in the Midlands. Less fortunate in his education than Hadfield, he had more than made up for his shortcomings by becoming a ruthless autodidact. He was a little on the plump side, but his flabby good-humoured face and high forehead leant him a certain ageless quality. One of the second secretaries at the embassy had likened him cruelly to Mr Pickwick. But anyone who took Dobson for a gull was a poor judge of character. He was not only resourceful but determined, with a reputation at the embassy for clinging to a story like a ferret to a rabbit. In politics, he was a new town liberal, in favour of universal suffrage for men but not for women, an admirer of Mr Gladstone and a passionate supporter of a free press. In his column for The Times, he was a discreet critic of Russia’s despotic government but had no time for ‘nihilists’ or ‘socialist revolutionaries’. As they sat in the correspondent’s comfortable study, surrounded by piles of Russian newspapers, books and maps, and his prints of Petersburg, Hadfield wondered what his friend would say if he knew the sort of people he had been consorting with at the clinic. A little heady after two glasses of wine on an empty stomach, he was almost tempted to confide in him, but Dobson would speak sharply to him of the risk he was running, would advise having nothing further to do with Anna and the Figners and might even suggest reporting Goldenberg to the police: in the end he chose to keep his counsel.
‘Let me ask you again, Dobson, where does one draw the line beyond which the means cannot be justified by the ends?’
Easing his heavy frame from the chair, the correspondent reached across the desk for another cigarette, lit it and inhaled a long thoughtful stream of smoke: ‘Are you suggesting one is obliged to draw a different line in Russia?’
‘Yes, I suppose I am.’
‘Of course one has to be guided by conscience…’ Dobson paused to flick a little ash from his cigarette, ‘but perhaps we can be forgiven for taking a few more liberties with the truth in this country. It would be quite impossible to change anything for the better otherwise.’
When Hadfield visited Department 10 the following day, things had already changed markedly for the better. Most of the men had been moved to other wards, but those that remained were in beds, the floors were clean, the rooms well lit and workmen were fitting glass to the windows. Warder Ryabovsky had been replaced by two large and efficient-looking middle-aged women in blue uniforms who were dispensing Hadfield’s prescription of potassium bromide and morphine to the patients. Some of the men were sitting on benches in the sunshine, watching a work gang cutting back the brambles and burdock in the garden. The story of the ‘English doctor’s’ triumph was already known throughout the hospital and military doctors he had never met stopped him in the corridors to offer their congratulations. He took particular care to ensure a favourable report reached his uncle by visiting his aunt and cousin during the day when the general was at his ministry. ‘But he will want to hear all about it,’ his aunt said, holding his hand between hers. ‘How on earth did you manage to persuade the hospital?’ In reply, Hadfield was fulsome in his praise for the superintendent — ‘a most reasonable and caring man’.
His aunt pressed him to join the family for a carriage ride into the countryside on the Sunday, but he made his excuses. Although he had resolved more than once not to go to the clinic, he went to some lengths to be sure he had no other commitments. He was still debating the wisdom of his promise to Anna in the droshky that afternoon as it rattled and swayed across the Nikolaevsky Bridge, and even while he stood in the fine summer rain before St Boris and St Gleb, waiting for his guide. The boy with red hair who had met him on his first visit was his silent companion again. After twenty minutes weaving through the streets of the district, they reached the clinic at last to find a crowd gathered about the entrance. His guide drew him by the sleeve round the throng to where Anna was standing a little apart. She glanced up at him as he approached, then away without a word, the intense frown that never left her for long troubling her brow. A frosty sort of welcome, Hadfield thought, and particularly galling after a week in which she had often been in his thoughts. He stared at her for a moment, hoping she would register the frustration in his face, but her attention was fixed on the circle of men. Turning to follow her gaze, he caught a glimpse of what he took to be a man kneeling, crumpled forward at their feet, and he pushed forward, parting the shoulders of the men in front of him: ‘I’m a doctor.’ The circle began to close, heads straining to see what the gentleman was doing. A woman was shouting at them to step back and as he sank beside the slumped figure he was conscious of Anna standing above him.
‘Can you hear me?’ he asked, and he shook the man gently. But it took only a few seconds for Hadfield to realise he was never going to hear anything in this world again. By a quirk of fate the man had collapsed to his knees as if in prayer. Too late for that, Hadfield thought, lifting his head to look into his lifeless brown eyes. Early forties, grizzled beard, florid face, his mouth a little open, revealing black and broken teeth, a dribble of blood at the corner. A broad man reduced in death to a malodorous ball.
‘No one wants to touch him,’ said Anna in a low voice.
Hadfield looked up to find her bending close. ‘Do you know who he is?’
‘They say he’s a drunk, a vagrant,’ she said hesitantly. ‘He’s been seen loitering in the district, sleeping rough.’
‘Well, why on earth doesn’t someone move him or call the police?’ He realised at once that this was a foolish question to ask.
‘It’s bad luck.’
There was a murmur of assent from those close by.
‘For God’s sake! Do you believe that?’
‘Of course not,’ said Anna. The colour rising in her neck and cheeks suggested this was a half truth.
‘We can’t leave him here for people to step over. You and you,’ said Hadfield, pointing at two men in the crowd, ‘help me, will you?’
It took an hour of bullying and coaxing in equal measure before they were able to persuade willing souls to help them move the body into the school. And in that hour a waiting room packed with the sick and anxious began to empty.
‘It’s him,’ said Anna when they were alone, and she nodded at the corpse on the table before them. ‘It’s bad luck to be in the same building.’
‘Superstitious nonsense. I’m going to look at him. He wasn’t struck down by a devil.’
‘Does it matter what he died of?’
The wariness in her voice surprised him: ‘Well, for one thing it’s important to know if it was something infectious. You can leave this to me if you like?’
‘No,’ she said firmly.
‘Here…’ He tossed her a surgical mask.
It took only a few minutes for Hadfield to be sure they were in no danger of catching a disease. Beneath the dead man’s jacket, his shirt was stained with a ragged circle of congealed blood. A thin blade had been driven into his heart.
‘Murdered,’ Hadfield muttered, ‘and by someone who knew what he was doing.’ He turned to look at Anna: ‘Are you all right?’
Her gaze was fixed on the seeping wound in the vagrant’s chest. He watched her lift a trembling hand to her lips where it hovered uncertainly. She looked pale, her eyes large and glittering, the pupils dilated.
‘You look as if you’ve seen a ghost.’ He touched her elbow gently. ‘Do you recognise him?’
She turned quickly, suddenly aware of his hand on her arm. ‘No. No.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘I’ve never seen him before.’
‘I’m sorry. It was crass of me to ask you to help…’
‘No, it’s quite all right,’ she said. ‘I am used to the dead.’ She was her brisk matter-of-fact self again.
There were precious few patients left to see, and within an hour the waiting room was empty but for the school dvornik dozing on a bench, his shoulders wedged into the angle between two walls.
‘Did the crowd know our man was murdered?’ Hadfield asked as he slipped back into his jacket.
‘Yes,’ she said simply. ‘The waiting room will be full again next week.’
They covered the body with a dirty blanket and left it in the surgery for the priests. Tearing a leaf of paper from his journal, Hadfield began writing a note. ‘I’m going to tell them he was murdered. I’ll leave my address. I don’t expect the police will bother to contact me but they may want…’
‘No.’ She took an urgent step towards him and snatched at the paper.
‘What on earth-’
She stood over him tugging at the top edge of the note, but he had it firmly anchored to the table with his fist and after a few seconds she let go.
‘Let me have it!’ Her jaw was set, the colour high in her cheeks, that same deep, stubborn frown on her face. ‘Please.’
‘Certainly not,’ he said quietly. ‘Not until you explain yourself, Miss Kovalenko.’
She took a deep breath and turned reluctantly away. ‘Isn’t it obvious?’
‘Not to me.’
‘The police would want to know what a smart foreign doctor was doing in Peski on a Sunday afternoon. And they would want to know who was with you,’ she said. ‘Leave it to the dvornik. He will say he found the body outside.’
‘I see. But why didn’t you say so? Why throw a tantrum?’
‘Wasn’t it ladylike?’ she said with something close to a sneer in her voice.
‘It was ill-mannered.’
Her shoulders seemed to drop a little, and she closed her eyes, the anger and tension draining from her: ‘Yes, perhaps. You won’t leave your name?’
‘No. If it’s so important, no, I won’t.’ He picked up the paper, ripped it in half and offered her the pieces: ‘Here.’
Anna took them without making eye contact and tore them in half again: ‘I’ll speak to the dvornik.’
Hadfield waited beside the body. He was astonished by her outburst. After a few minutes she returned and began clearing away the things they had used for the surgery in silence, at pains to avoid his gaze. She was clearly a little embarrassed and would probably have welcomed an excuse to soften the atmosphere that lingered in the room like the smell of formaldehyde. But Hadfield was content to watch her, enjoying her discomfort.
‘I will take you to the church,’ she said, turning to look at him at last.
‘Thank you.’
Standing awkwardly at the school door, Hadfield could not suppress an acute sense of disappointment and frustration. This was not how the day was supposed to be, and he fought to extinguish the ember of resentment that was still glowing inside. Anna was in conversation with the dvornik who was leaning against the door jamb, a sullen look on his face. Hadfield cleared his throat and was on the point of addressing her when she turned sharply to look at him: ‘Do you have a few kopeks you can give him?’
‘Of course. Twenty?’ He gave them to the dvornik, who counted them laboriously then held out his greasy palm for more.
‘That’s enough,’ said Anna sharply, but the grizzled old yard keeper stood there unmoved, his hand held flat like a Russian Buddha.
‘Oh, for God’s sake, take this!’ Hadfield handed him twenty kopeks more. ‘Satisfied?’
The dvornik gave a broad toothless grin.
‘The old devil!’ Anna said as the door closed behind him.
‘What did I buy?’
‘The right story, of course. He found the body. We weren’t here.’
‘Ah.’
‘This way.’ She set off down the street at a brisk pace, passing from sunlight into the shadow of the four-storey lodging house opposite. From every open window, from the doorways and the yards on that hot summer Sunday, the restless sound of humanity packed cheek-by-jowl into single rooms and corners. He watched her stride purposefully on as if careless whether he followed or not: past a little group of children, barefoot, in rags, racing sticks across a puddle of dirty water, and on a little further to where three immodestly-dressed young women were gossiping in a doorway — one of whom directed a remark at Anna then burst into a peal of raucous tipsy laughter. He caught up with her at the end of the street.
‘Miss Kovalenko, if you have no other appointments, can I persuade you to walk with me a little?’
She turned to him with a shy smile, her blue eyes twinkling like sunshine on ice. ‘Yes, you can persuade me.’
From St Boris and St Gleb, they ambled north along the bank of the Neva, and Hadfield told her of his first meeting with the Figners, of their time together in Zurich and of the unhappy years he had spent in London since. ‘It was always my ambition to return to St Petersburg.’
‘To leave your home?’
‘St Petersburg is my home.’
‘And General Glen is your uncle?’
He smiled at the disingenuously casual way the question was slipped into their conversation. ‘Yes. Of course, we don’t see eye to eye on many things but he has been very kind to me.’
‘Does he know about your time in Switzerland, your views?’ she asked.
‘I try not to talk politics.’
‘Do you go to grand parties with him?’
‘Sometimes.’
‘What are they like?’
‘What are they like?’ He turned to look at her to be sure she wasn’t teasing. ‘Actually, rather dull.’
But Anna was not to be deflected and pressed him to describe a ball he had attended, from the sparkling crystal to the servants and the dance card, and — in so far as he was able — the dresses of the society ladies. And although he failed to do justice to the opulence of the occasion in his rather clinical descriptions, she seemed captivated by the picture he painted for her.
‘But ask the Figners! I’m sure they’ve been to fashionable parties and could tell you much more about dresses than I can,’ he said.
She pretended to look shocked. ‘What on earth would they think of me?’ she asked, and her shoulders shook a little with silent laughter.
In the gardens of the Smolny, they settled on a bench close to the School for Noble Girls and he asked her of her family and her home. Her father had been an army officer and a gentleman with an estate near Kharkov, her mother one of his servants. As a small child she had lived with an old babushka in the village, and on winter nights had sat at the stove and listened to folk tales in the Ukrainian language and stories of Cossack heroes. With the emancipation of the serfs, Colonel Kovalenko had used his influence to register Anna as a member of the meschanstvo — the lower middle class — and sent her to the local gymnasium. She was never close to her father, she said, even as a young girl the thought that her mother was no more than a chattel who could be sold to another member of the gentry was intolerable. At school she had been teased and bullied because she was illegitimate, and even her father’s servants spoke of her as ‘the bastard’ behind his back. One summer her father had hired a student who had been exiled for his part in the Polish Revolt to tutor her, and he had spoken of his own country’s struggle for freedom. ‘Then someone gave me a copy of Kondraty Ryleev’s poem “Nalivaiko”. Do you know it?’ she asked. ‘It had a great effect on me. It’s the story of a Ukrainian uprising, of the struggle for justice and freedom: “There is no reconciliation, there are no conditions / Between the tyrant and the slave; / It is not ink which is needed, but blood, We must act with the sword.” There — what do you think of that?’ Anna’s eyes were shining and she was twisting her small hands in her lap.
‘Yes, I…’ He was groping for something that might do justice to her feelings.
‘And you know Ryleev gave his own life for freedom!’ Her voice was shaking with emotion. ‘He was executed by Tsar Nicholas. Freedom and revolt always walk arm in arm with suffering and death. That is what history teaches us.’
She turned away, but not before he saw her brush a tear from her cheek. They sat there in silence for a minute or more as well-dressed, comfortable Petersburg ambled past, promenading couples, children in straw hats and lace with ruby and plum coloured bows and sashes, merchants in light summer suits, a nanny with the latest English perambulator, a peaceful, ordered, somnolent scene as remote from the revolution and sacrifice that filled Anna’s thoughts as it was possible to be. Before he could speak to her again, the bells of the Smolny Cathedral began to chime for the evening service and roused by their restless rhythm, she rose quickly to her feet. ‘I must go.’
It was apparent from her face that there was little point in attempting to persuade her to change her mind. As they strolled slowly through the garden towards the road, he asked her about the children she taught at the school in Alexandrovskaya and the life she lived in the village.
‘Do you think I’m a sentimental revolutionary?’ she asked. ‘It’s different for you. I’m used to a simpler life than you and Vera.’
‘And the gentleman I saw you with at Madame Volkonsky’s?’
‘Who do you mean?’
‘The man sitting on the couch.’
‘Alexander? He’s a friend.’
The wariness in her voice and the colour that rose to her cheeks suggested more.
Hadfield hesitated, trying to find a propitious way to say what he wanted to say. ‘ C’est ton fiance, n’est-ce pas? Cet homme, tu vas l’epouser. C’est evident. ’
Anna stared at him for a moment. ‘Are you trying to humiliate me, Doctor?’ she asked in Russian.
‘Of course not,’ he said, taken aback. ‘What on earth makes you think that?’
‘You are making fun of me,’ she said coldly. And she turned her back on him and began walking briskly towards the cab stand in front of the cathedral.
‘Miss Kovalenko, I don’t understand…’
Her step did not falter for an instant. She had clearly made up her mind to have nothing more to do with him that day.
‘Wait…’ He began to hurry after her.
Their little pantomime was attracting smiles and the comment of cabbies on the opposite side of the square, and a smartly dressed elderly gentleman in a top hat shook his head in disapproval as Hadfield hurried past. As he fell into step with her, Anna quickened her pace.
He reached for her arm: ‘Please. Look, I’m sorry but…’
‘Don’t touch me,’ she said, shaking herself free. ‘I didn’t have the privilege of an education like yours but I understand our people!’ She turned away from him with a disdainful toss of the head.
‘So you don’t speak French,’ he shouted after her. ‘Is that it?’ She had turned away from the cab stand, conscious of the glances they were attracting from the drivers. ‘This is ridiculous. Please stop.’
And she did stop, turning angrily to him. ‘You are drawing attention to us.’
‘I’m sorry, I didn’t know you couldn’t speak French,’ he said in exasperation. ‘It means nothing. I just thought perhaps that Alexander was your fiance.’
‘What business is it of yours anyway?’ she snapped at him. ‘Now let me go.’
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I had no right to ask. And I’m sorry this afternoon has ended so badly.’ He was confused, a tangle of feelings, aching with regret and anger. ‘Let me see you to a cab.’
Her face softened a little with the suggestion of a smile. ‘No, I’m quite all right, thank you. And you should know he is not my fiance. He’s a good comrade. He will never be my fiance…’ For a few seconds she stood there avoiding his gaze, biting her bottom lip uncertainly, and then she continued. ‘I am not interested in such relationships…’ Something in his expression must have suggested he did not take this remark as seriously as she would have liked because she took an urgent step closer, fixing him with an intense blue stare. ‘Believe me, Doctor. Revolutionaries should not marry or have families.’
Hadfield pulled a sceptical face: ‘Aren’t socialists just like everybody else?’
‘No. I’ve given my life to the struggle — like Kondraty Ryleev and many others…’
‘And what of love?’
‘I will not change my mind, and…’ she hesitated and looked away again, the colour rising to her cheeks, ‘and you should know.. ’ She did not finish the sentence but stood there avoiding his gaze. The seconds passed, a minute, and worshippers began to trickle from the west door of the cathedral onto the pavement, old ladies hobbling home with their black shawls pulled tightly about them even on a summer evening.
‘What should I know?’
Anna turned to look at him and he was taken aback by the intense expression on her face — not of anger this time, or defiance or resentment, but a deep trembling sadness close to pain.
‘You should know I’m married.’