A Very Dangerous Woman: The Lives, Loves and Lies of Russia's Most Seductive Spy (30 page)

She managed to sustain her courage in spite of everything, but it was hard. If Cromie and Garstino could be taken so violently, how could she expect any process of natural justice to reunite her with Lockhart? Nothing could be relied on any more in this world.

The grief was brought still closer when she visited the former British Embassy. She went there looking for some letters that had been sent to Cromie by Meriel Buchanan and Edward Cunard.
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The building was being used as a left-luggage store and occasionally as a refuge for desperate British expatriates still trapped in Russia. Princess Anna Saltikoff, the owner of the building, was still living in one wing, but the rest was now deserted, and it was easy for a person with connections to gain entry. The only person remaining from the old embassy days was William, Sir George Buchanan’s chasseur and butler, now the building’s caretaker. He had once been a proud figure, but now he was aged and sad, reduced by loneliness and hunger.
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It was a desperately melancholy visit. There were boards over the broken windows, and a piece of paper still pinned to the front door declaring that the place was under the protection of the Dutch Legation.

Stepping inside, Moura found herself at the foot of the long staircase that led up to the first landing. Less than a year ago she had ascended those stairs on the arm of her husband to attend the Buchanans’ Christmas party, the weirdly mournful-convivial gathering where there had been bully beef for dinner, impromptu national anthems, and rifles stored ready for use in the chancery.

On the hall floor and the bottom step was a dark, rusty bloodstain. Moura guessed whose it was, and it cut her to the heart. Cromie had fallen here with the Cheka’s bullets in his back – there on the bottom step was where his head had lain. Poor dear old Crow. Only a few days ago, Moura had been sorting through old letters and books when she came across the copy of Stevenson’s
Virginibus Puerisque
that he had given her ‘to remember him by if he was killed’. It brought on a rush of pain and regret.
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She had immersed herself in the book’s lavish, heartfelt essays, and their moods and thoughts permeated the letters she wrote during those last months of 1918.

What had Cromie had in mind when he selected this particular volume to give to Moura, the lady who returned his affection but not his love? Almost every other page seemed to contain something that spoke about himself and Moura. Perhaps he hoped she might be struck by Stevenson’s suggestion that ‘A ship captain is a good man to marry if it is a marriage of love, for absences are a good influence in love and keep it bright and delicate’.
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Yet what about Cromie’s wife, Gwladys, the Welsh cousin he had married in Portsmouth over a decade ago – what had she felt about being wife to a ship’s captain? What was she feeling now?

And what of Moura’s own husband? How staid and tedious Djon seemed in comparison to the men Moura admired and loved. Here again was Stevenson, so apt to the moment:

To be suddenly snuffed out in the middle of ambitious schemes, is tragical enough at best; but when a man has been grudging himself his own life in the meanwhile, and saving up everything for the festival that was never to be, it becomes that hysterically moving sort of tragedy which lies on the confines of farce.
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There was Djon to a T – hiding away at Yendel, saving up his life for a doomed Germanic future and for the imperial social order that would never return. If he were to die violently, like Cromie (some hope!), the comparison would be complete.

But it was in the book’s third essay, on falling in love, that Stevenson’s words truly cut into Moura’s heart and spoke to her innermost soul:

Falling in love is the one illogical adventure, the one thing of which we are tempted to think as supernatural, in our trite and reasonable world. The effect is out of all proportion with the cause. Two persons, neither of them, it may be, very amiable or very beautiful, meet, speak a little, and look a little into each other’s eyes . . . They fall at once into that state in which another person becomes to us the very gist and centrepoint of God’s creation, and demolishes our laborious theories with a smile . . . and the love of life itself is translated into a wish to remain in the same world with so precious and desirable a fellow-creature. And all the while their acquaintances look on in stupor, and ask each other, with almost passionate emphasis, what so-and-so can see in that woman, or such-a-one in that man? I am sure, gentlemen, I cannot tell you.
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Neither could Moura explain how love had caught her so unexpectedly, changed her, made her act against her innate self-regard. ‘The fact that you are far away,’ she wrote to Lockhart, ‘hurts with an acute pain that is almost unbearable and theories of courage and reason are swept away.’
¹⁴

Her heart quailed at the sorry sight of Cromie’s blood, and the ghostly atmosphere of the old Embassy. Every room was a mess; the place had been looted for valuables by Red Guards and ransacked for evidence by the Cheka. In the ballroom Moura found damaged furniture and despatch boxes piled up, their locks broken, and a safe, also broken open. ‘What a pitiful sight,’ she wrote. ‘Even for my half-British heart it was too much and lifted a storm of indignation in me.’ She found Cromie’s letters and left. ‘My heart fell so . . . all my world contains you alone and how all the rest has lost any importance.’
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All she could do was work to bring about their reunion. It would have to take place in Stockholm, and would require a bewildering array of permits, passes, visas, documents and money. Putting forth all her charm, Moura acquired a permit to travel between Moscow and Petrograd, and cultivated the diplomats of every neutral nation, as well as Soviet ministers. She visited Yakov Peters, and relied on his influence to keep her safe from further arrest; she was concerned that the Petrograd Cheka (which now had a female chief, a fact that worried Moura) might have suspicions about her and take it upon themselves to snatch her. She had only just learned that the Estonian official who had helped her cross the border in July had been arrested by the Germans.
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This kind of talk made her nervous.

There was gossip about her of a more trivial nature too. Everyone, from Moscow to Petrograd to London, knew about her affair with Lockhart, and her husband’s ‘high-falutin relations’ had begun ‘rather turning up their noses’ at her. Her friend Miriam wasn’t permitted by her parents to be seen in public with Moura. ‘I don’t mind one little bit, really,’ she wrote to Lockhart. ‘And it will all blow over sometime.’
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What worried her far more was that he might have heard damaging gossip about her from people he met on his way home through Finland and Sweden. The dreaded, spiteful Thornhill, who had been with the British force at Archangel, was abroad again, with his inexplicable grudge against her. Now that Lockhart was beyond her reach, it terrified her that something might happen to lessen his love for her. ‘I’d go like a shot to Stockholm for a week and come back again,’ she wrote, ‘if it weren’t that gossip clings to me like flies to Tanglefoot paper – and people would surely call me a spy on either side.’
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It hurt her that he seemed to write so rarely. Weeks and months went by with no word. She knew perfectly well that their letters could only pass in and out of Russia when a friendly diplomat was available to carry them, but the long silences pained and worried her.

Lockhart’s journey home had been long and fraught. He had travelled in a group with his surviving comrades – George Hill (who had evaded capture and resumed his own identity), Lingner, Tamplin, and of course Hickie and his new wife Liuba. They talked over their experiences, trying to make sense of it all.

The recriminations started coming at them as soon as they were out of Russia. Their fellow refugees blamed Lockhart for their plight, and let him know it to his face. It was a foretaste of the hostility he would experience when he got home.

In Sweden he succumbed to the Spanish flu pandemic which had been killing people off at a rate to compete with the war. He survived it, just as he had survived his brush with the epidemic of Bolshevism, and arrived in England by way of Aberdeen on 19 October. At King’s Cross he was surrounded by reporters before he’d even got off the train – they got into his compartment and questioned him excitedly, demanding to see the revolver with which he had shot Lenin.
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He was more worried about the interrogation he was going to receive from his wife and family. His affair with Moura was known about at the Foreign Office, and his enemies would have spared no effort in spreading it more widely. The person he most feared, though, was his formidable Scottish grandmother, who was a more effective investigator than any Chekist. She would inevitably subject him to a stern dressing-down, ‘richly illustrated with Biblical metaphors, on the inevitable consequences of sowing in the flesh’.
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His concern was practical – he would be dependent on this old lady for financial support if he failed to get a new posting from the Foreign Office.

That seemed a likely outcome – his cosying-up with the Bolsheviks, his collusion with Lloyd George behind Balfour’s back and his nefarious dealings with intelligence agents had made him deeply unpopular in the Foreign Office.

While he waited for the future course of his career to reveal itself, he recuperated from the effects of his ordeal and his illness. He went through the motions of patching up relations with Jean, and spent time at Bexhill-on-Sea and Exmouth, where he fished and played golf. He wrote a long, detailed report on Russia and Bolshevism, and recommended that if Britain were to continue its intervention, it must do so in proper numbers. The war with Germany had ended now, and the required troops would be available – he suggested two forces, each of fifty thousand men, invading by way of the Black Sea and Siberia. His report was received well in the Foreign Office (whatever they thought of his diplomacy, Lockhart couldn’t be faulted for his knowledge and his intelligence), but his proposal was dismissed.

As he convalesced, as he dined out with Jean, clubbed with his friends, paced the golf courses, and politicked with the intelligence services and the Foreign Office, he thought constantly of Moura. He loved her still. He recalled how she had sustained him during his imprisonment, and saved him from despair. ‘Had this cataclysm of our arrest not intervened, I think I would have stayed in Russia for ever. Now we had been forcibly torn apart . . . For all I knew I might never see her again.’
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He wrote to her, and experienced the same frustration she did at the long intervals caused by their reliance on the travels of friendly diplomats. Moura’s letters kept him going – ‘the mainstay of my existence’.
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He hoped that either Moura could get out of Russia or the Bolsheviks would fall. There was no telling which of those possibilities was the more remote.

Some believed that Bolshevism must end soon; others (including British conservatives and King George V) feared that it would spread throughout Europe. Germany looked a likely next victim. Lockhart thought so too, but noted that ‘I think Germany, too, will have her Bolshevik phase, although it will be different from the Russian process.’
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He hadn’t wholly lost his ideals, and his sympathies were with the fledgling Labour Party. Lunching with some friends at his club, they realised that they wouldn’t know which side to take if it ever came to war between the ‘White’ and ‘Red’ sides in England. ‘Decided that we should all prefer to remain in bed.’
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One way for him to be reunited with Moura would be if he were to return to Russia in an official capacity. In late November the Foreign Office proposed to give him a posting to Petrograd as ‘assistant commercial attaché’. But it was more a calculated insult than an opportunity, and completely unthinkable.
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It would also have been fatal. The furore over the Lockhart Plot hadn’t gone away. Despite the efforts of Yakov Peters to downplay Lockhart’s involvement, on 25 November the Revolutionary Tribunal formally indicted him, along with a batch of other counter-revolutionary agents and agitators, on charges of espionage and conspiracy. Lockhart and Sidney Reilly, along with their French colleague Grenard, were found guilty
in absentia
and sentenced to death. If they were ever apprehended on Soviet soil, the sentence would be carried out.
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Lockhart could never return to Russia as long as the Soviet state endured. And Moura couldn’t come to England – at least not yet. Their only hope in the meantime was a reunion in Stockholm; and then, in time, Moura might succeed in arranging all the prerequisites for their permanent reunion. She needed money, she needed to be free of Djon and ensure the safety of her children and mother. It all looked insurmountable.