A Very Dangerous Woman: The Lives, Loves and Lies of Russia's Most Seductive Spy (33 page)

At one o’clock it was decided that they’d better go looking for him. The three children were dressed up in their coats and hats by their Russian nurse, Mariussa. (Micky was more than ever a member of the family rather than a servant, and childcare was no longer her task.) Leaving the cosy little house with its smell of cooking and oil lamps and paraffin heaters, Kira, Pavel, Tania and Mariussa set out along the lake shore towards the Red House.

Winter was receding – the deep snow was melting and the frozen lake breaking up into floes. The children prodded at the ice with sticks as they passed. Beyond the second corner there was a lane that went uphill, while the footpath carried on between two hills. The lane crossed between the hills on a little span known as the Devil’s Bridge. It was a secluded spot, hemmed in by trees and always shadowy. As the party approached, they could see the shape of a man lying across the path where it passed under the bridge.

It was clear at a glance that it was Djon. Mariussa shrieked and tried to shoo the children away, but they had already seen, and even the youngest had realised that something dreadful had happened. Mariussa knelt beside him and tried to raise him up. It was no use; he was dead.

Djon von Benckendorff had been shot. As for who had done it, there was no trace – not a sign, not a footprint, not a whisper. Only the memory of those three gunshots heard at some unremembered time in the morning.

Easter Sunday, Terijoki, Finland
^‡

It was a strange little town, Terijoki. Standing in the angle where the Russian frontier met the Gulf of Finland, it was where the Finns regulated border crossings. The town had been carved out of thick forest, and woodland took up most of the space between the streets.

Moura had been stranded here for a couple of days, trying to make her way back into Russia after the travels and travails of the past few weeks. She felt that Lockhart was slipping irretrievably away from her. She had phoned the Hotel Fennia to find out whether he had sent her any more telegrams, but there was nothing.

Today, it being Easter Sunday, she went to Terijoki’s little church. When the service was over she set out to walk back to the little
pension
she was staying in. She had quickly grown to loathe her terrible room there, with its geraniums and white lace curtains, where at night the moon shone in on her. She was in no hurry to get back, and she walked slowly.
³⁰

The path from the church led – as most paths in Terijoki did – through a wood of tall, tall trees. The weather was warming – so much that the thawing snow was making rivers in the main streets. There was green grass underfoot, and blue sky in the gaps at the tops of the trees. As she looked up, Moura recalled strolling arm in arm with Lockhart in the tree-lined avenues of Sokolniki Park in Moscow. Suddenly, with the blue sky in her eyes, it was as if he were there. She felt his real, physical presence as powerfully and vividly as a hallucination . . . and then, just as suddenly, he was gone.

As soon as the moment passed and she felt the return of her perpetual, crushing loneliness, she broke down. For the first time in all the months since he had gone away, Moura abandoned herself to the ferocity of her grief. She threw herself on the wet, cold ground and sobbed her breaking heart out.

When the fit had passed, she picked herself up and went back to her room. A few days later she crossed the border into Russia. It closed behind her with a finality that must have been almost audible.

Less than two weeks after her return to Petrograd, Moura found herself suddenly free of the two ties which had held her back. On 7 May she received the news that Djon had been murdered. She wrote Lockhart a short, frantic letter – ‘My husband has been killed on the 19th of April by some Esthonians out of revenge’.
³¹
At the time she was writing, Moura was struggling to keep her feelings under control in front of her mother, who was in hospital, scheduled for an operation the next day. ‘Can you see what a strain it is?’ Moura wrote to Lockhart. ‘I can make no plans, I cannot think of anything yet, Baby. I must try and get the children away from that place as soon as possible’.

Why had there been no word from him, no letters, no telegrams?

I don’t understand your silence, Baby. For God’s sake

be frank with me, Baby, play fair with me as I always

have and always will with you.

May God keep you safe and well.

And remember, Baby, how much I love you.

Yours for ever

Moura

She never received a reply. Within the week her mother died. Moura was utterly alone.
³²

Who killed Djon von Benckendorff? Was Moura present? Did she pull the trigger? On 18 April, the day of the murder, she wrote to Lockhart from Terijoki and added the postscript: ‘I have started my divorce the day before yesterday.’
³³
To do so, she must have met with Djon – either in Reval or at Yendel – to obtain his signature. Two days later he was dead.

Moura certainly had a powerful motive to wish herself rid of Djon quickly before the political situation, together with her reputation for espionage, trapped her permanently inside Russia. But there must have been many around Yendel who hated the master of the estate for his Germanism. He might well have been one of those Baltic German landowners who turfed out ethnic Estonian peasants and gave tenancies to Germans.

Moura’s letter from Terijoki on the day of the killing was a kind of alibi, but not a very strong one.

But even assuming she didn’t fire the shots that killed him, she could have wielded an influence. Few people knew the political situation in Estonia better than Moura; she knew the people of Yendel and would have understood their grievances. And she was extremely skilled in persuasion and manipulation, as she had proved with the commissars at the bank – ‘One really has such a tremendous privilege over them all, for even the cleverest ones are perfect infants in arms as far as any training of the mind goes.’
³⁴
If there were locals with a grudge against Djon, she would have been quite capable of influencing them. And having spent most of the past year in the company of men who habitually armed themselves with revolvers, she might even have been able to supply the means.

In the end, the truth – whatever it might be – was never discovered. Moura’s close family – her children – never suspected her. And only the most tenuous evidence remained of her ever having been in Estonia in April 1919. The letter she wrote Lockhart from the Hotel Fennia, which would have marked the eve of her crossing to Reval, has a page missing – a page which appears to be about to mention her visit: ‘The worst, the longest bit in our parting is over,’ she wrote, still trying to convince herself that it was worth going on with the plan, ‘we have only a little more to wait. I hope to get . . .’
³⁵

What did she hope to get? Did Lockhart remove the page to protect her from suspicion? If so, it would not be the only letter of hers where he appears to have excised indiscreet pages.

At the end of 1919 Lockhart left England for a new posting. He had been appointed commercial secretary in the British Legation in Prague. He had turned down a second (more serious) appointment in Russia, on the grounds that ‘I had better leave Russia for a bit’.
³⁶
Either the Foreign Office didn’t know about the death sentence hanging over him there, or thought he would be safe from it.

There had been no letter from Moura for months – the last word from her was the disturbing news of the death of her husband. Now, with the closing down of Russia’s relations with the outside world, there were no friendly diplomats who could be relied on to get letters in and out.

He still loved Moura, but in his mind their impossible affair was at an end: ‘She had left a wound in my heart, but it was healing.’
³⁷
Perhaps he was thinking of Magre, as Moura had guessed he would, unconsciously echoing the words of the poem in his recollection – ‘C’est une tache au coeur dont aucune eau ne lave. / Je voudrais oublier, je voudrais m’en guérir’ (It is a stain on my heart that no water can wash away. / I want to forget, I want to be healed).

At the same time, Moura was setting about trying to heal herself. For her, it would be a lifelong quest.

No man would be allowed to come so close to her again; no man would be loved or idolised; and no man would ever be allowed to possess her.

Except Lockhart. No matter where she went or what she experienced, she would never regain the part of herself that belonged to him.

Notes

*
Bend over backwards (lit. ‘go on all fours’).

^†
Now Oslo.

^‡
Now Zelenogorsk, Russia.

PART 3

In Exile: 1919–1924

Her I loved naturally and necessarily and – for all the faults and trouble . . . she has satisfied my craving for material intimacy more completely than any other human being. I still ‘belong’ so much to her that I cannot really get away from her. I love her still.

H. G. Wells, ‘Moura, the Very Human’ in
H. G. Wells in Love

15

‘We’re All Iron Now’

1919–1921

Late September 1920, Petrograd

The city was all but dead; its heart had stopped beating and yet it was still somehow breathing and stirring.

When H. G. Wells arrived in Petrograd in that autumn of the third year of the Revolution, he could scarcely believe the transformation. He had last visited in 1914, before the start of the war, when the imperial capital was still a teeming, thriving metropolis of well over a million souls, with glittering palaces and streets packed with shoppers and strollers. That had all gone, and in its place was desolation.

A Russian acquaintance in London had suggested that Wells, well known to be sympathetic to the spirit of the Revolution (although emphatically not a Communist), would be interested to see how things were working out since his last visit. And so, near the end of September 1920, he had set off with his nineteen-year-old son George Philip (known as ‘Gip’) for a two-week tour of the new Russia.

It was a profoundly dispiriting experience. The palaces were still there, but most stood empty. Perhaps because of his family background in shopkeeping, it was the closed shops that struck Wells’ heart most keenly. He reckoned there were no more than half a dozen still functioning in the city. The rest were dead. They had ‘an utterly wretched and abandoned look; paint is peeling off, windows are cracked, some are broken and boarded up, some still display a few fly-blown relics of stock in the window, some have their windows covered with notices . . . the fixtures have gathered two years’ dust. They are dead shops. They will never open again.’ It had killed off the city streets. ‘One realises that a modern city is really nothing but long alleys of shops . . . Shut them up, and the meaning of a street has disappeared.’
¹

Eschewing the Hotel International, where foreigners usually stayed, Wells was put up by his old friend Maxim Gorky. He found himself entering a peculiar domestic scene, a sort of commune in which Gorky presided over a ménage of writers, artists and intimate friends, all crammed together in a huge apartment on the fourth floor of a block on Petrogradsky Island, overlooking Alexander Park.

Among the inhabitants was a young woman who was apparently Gorky’s live-in secretary and (though Wells didn’t realise it) his mistress. Despite her drab, makeshift clothing and a rather unsightly broken nose, she was an attractive, captivating creature, and Wells was pleased to learn that she had been approved by the authorities to act as his guide and interpreter during his stay. Her name was Maria Ignatievna Zakrevskaya, but everybody knew her as Moura.

Wells, who was almost as prolific a womaniser as he was a writer, would always remember this meeting as one of his life’s great encounters.
²

How Moura came to be living in the Gorky commune, and how she had passed the sixteen months since her last contact with the world outside Russia, is mostly a blank page. Or, to be more precise, blank with a few daubs and doubtful sketches on it, and only a few definite impressions.