The Third Section (68 page)

‘Fyodor Kuzmich.’

His head dropped back and he was silent. His hand tightened momentarily on hers and she squeezed it back, feeling the stumps of his missing fingers and remembering doing the same as a child. Then his grip weakened and his arm fell away. She looked over to him and his face was still. A long slow breath escaped his lips,
catching
his vocal cords and producing a low, sustained sound, like a contented sigh. Then he breathed no more.

The carriage rolled jerkily over the unpaved road. There was no railway to take Tamara to where she was heading – not yet. That made it feel so much more like an escape. It was a public coach, and there were three others in it – a couple and a single man. There were few words exchanged, even between the woman and her husband. Occasionally they looked at her, and she wondered if they were staring at the scar on her cheek, however thickly she had covered it with make-up.

As with her mother, Tamara had committed her father’s body to the river. A little exploration had revealed a room furnished only with two coffins – she could easily guess its purpose. She had been tempted to use one as Aleksei’s final resting place, but it did not seem fitting. The room had had another exit, which led to a corridor, and beyond that a maze of tunnels spread out. She had taken the path that led her downhill, carrying her father’s body as she went, and had eventually found herself emerging on to the bank of the Moskva, below the Kremlin’s southern wall. She could find no wood on which to lay him, nor any leaves to cover him, but the river flowed fast and strong here. She pushed her father’s body out from the bank, and whispered the same prayer she had said for her mother. It was the best she could do, and there was some little sense in it; the Skhodnya was a tributary of the Moskva and so, she liked to hope, with a little luck in the currents, the bodies of her father and mother might somewhere be lying side by side in a watery grave.

She had scarcely dared go back down to that short, low corridor with its seven doors. From the far right of them, she still heard the sound of overflowing water. The stench was stronger again now – or was that just an excuse for her not to linger? Gribov’s body lay still. She stood beside the seventh door, resting her ear against the sturdy wood, and listened. Perhaps she heard slight sounds of movement, but nothing more. If those four sorry creatures she had seen were human, then Yudin would easily have dealt with them, but if he had, then he was still trapped. The door was solid –
perhaps
so solid that he would never emerge. And what could she do about it? Dmitry had taken the key.

Then she had heard a muffled scream inches in front of her and something thudded against the far side of the door.

She turned and fled.

Now, a week later, she was still fleeing. It hadn’t taken her long to prepare her escape from Moscow. She had withdrawn all her money from the bank, and that had been enough to get her out of the city and to begin making a new home somewhere else. Her own resources would not last for ever, but she still had, sewn into her dress, the diamonds and pink sapphires of the necklace Konstantin had given her. They would see her through. She had never worn the necklace since the day he gave it to her. She reached up with her hand and felt the small, oval icon that still hung from her neck, and always would.

The necklace was not the sole gift Konstantin had given her, and was only the second most precious. The dearest gift was with her now too, closer even than the sapphires; the carriage’s fifth passenger.

In the hours before he had died, she had told Aleksei of it, and he had been overjoyed. He had asked her who the father was, but she had refused to tell him, and he accepted it. She did tell him that if he knew the man’s name, it would make Aleksei immensely proud, and she was certain that was true.

But she knew that Moscow would not be safe for her, or for her unborn child, and so she left. There was nothing to keep her there. She gazed out of the window and watched the landscape trundle past, so much more slowly than it had done from the train on which her child had been conceived. She rested her hand unconsciously on her belly. It was too soon to feel any kicking; the bump did not even show yet, but she knew it was there.

She would be happy either way, but in her heart she hoped it would be a boy. As to what she would call it, she hadn’t thought yet, not of a Christian name, but she knew the rest. The patronymic would be Konstantinovich or Konstantinovna – the father deserved that much at least. But the child would carry its
surname
with pride. In her last days in Moscow she had called on contacts in the Third Section and acquired a new passport. She could have chosen any name, and the one she decided upon was foolish for a woman going into hiding, but she could no longer live in denial of her true self. She had never been a Lavrova, much as she loved Yelena and Valentin. She had been proud to take Vitaliy’s name, and to call herself Tamara Valentinovna Komarova, but now even that would not do, not any more. The name on her new passport filled her with a pride she had never felt before in her whole life. Sometimes, she sneaked a look at it, just to be sure of who she truly was.

She was Tamara Alekseevna Danilova.

FYODOR KUZMICH DIED
a happy man, in Tomsk, in Siberia, on 20 January 1864. As he lay on a straw bed, in a wooden shack, he knew that death was coming, but he had lived long enough. He had lived, in fact, three years longer than he needed to, but God had granted him those three years to enjoy seeing the fruits of his nephew’s achievement.

In 1861, Tsar Aleksandr II had at last emancipated the serfs. All men in Russia were free. On Kuzmich’s own accession to the throne, as Aleksandr I, sixty years before, it had been his fondest hope to achieve the same, but it had never come to pass. Bonaparte was to blame, at least at first, and then had come all the trouble with Zmyeevich and Cain and the Romanov Betrayal. They’d found a way out of that, he and Volkonsky, Tarasov, Wylie and Danilov. Only Tarasov was left alive now – and possibly Danilov. Kuzmich knew he had returned west when the Decembrists had been pardoned, but had not heard of him since.

It did not matter. They were all old men, and it was meet for old men to die. If he could die happy in the knowledge that he had left his country in a better state than he had found it, all to the good, even if the credit was to his nephew and not to him.

He heard a voice, but he could not make out the words. It was probably his friend Simeon Khromov, who had looked after him in his final months. He knew full well what the man was asking him – it was always the same. Simeon suspected something about Kuzmich, but his guesses were never close to the truth. Now he would never learn it, but Kuzmich knew that his friend deserved a response.

He lifted his hand weakly, remembering the first time he had died, in Taganrog in 1825. He realized now what a good impersonation of a dying man he had given then. But this was no play-acting. He pointed to his heart and whispered as loudly as he could.

‘Here lies my secret.’

Then his arm fell to his side and he was no more.

Four thousand versts away, Zmyeevich’s eyes flicked open. The connection was broken. He had never been able to read Aleksandr Pavlovich’s mind, but Aleksandr could at times sense his, and thus Aleksandr’s existence was always a presence for Zmyeevich.

And now that presence was no more, and Aleksandr was at last dead. He should have realized in 1825, but he had been fooled. By the time he had understood, Nikolai had been well settled on the throne, and the return of his brother would have been pointless. But Aleksandr Pavlovich’s continued existence had acted to protect his nephew, by attracting whatever influence Zmyeevich could exert over the bloodline. If they could have found him, they would have killed him, but Danilov’s silence had prevented that. Even so, Zmyeevich had known he had only to wait and death would come. Now it had done so.

And so now retribution could begin again and at last, in the fifth generation, the Romanov Betrayal would be avenged.

Jasper Kent was born in Worcestershire in 1968 and studied Natural Sciences at Trinity Hall, Cambridge. He lives in Brighton and works as a freelance software consultant.
The Third Section
is the third book in
The Danilov Quintet
. The first two acclaimed novels –
Twelve
and
Thirteen Years Later
– are available in paperback. As well as fiction, Jasper has also written a number of musicals. To find out more, visit
www.jasperkent.com
.