Thirteen Years Later (73 page)

The names of the five ringleaders were read out and they were led up to the gallows; Pestel, Muriev-Apostol, Ryleev, Bestuzhev-Riumin and the murderous Kakhovsky. Each man climbed the ladder and had a noose placed around his neck and tightened. The hangman struggled with the ropes, wet from the overnight rain, but eventually all five men were ready. They were kicked away from the ladders.

A groan was uttered in unison from the watching crowd and heads were turned away. Three of the men slipped from the ropes and landed on the ground below; Muriev-Apostol, Ryleev and Kakhovsky. While the other two men kicked at the air with ever decreasing vigour, the process began again for the ‘lucky’ three. This time there was no mistake. In Aleksei’s mind, only Kakhovsky deserved it.

Another list of names was read out – around thirty in all – Aleksei’s amongst them. Then the sentence was declared. It was not to be hanging. Aleksei could not tell whether he was relieved. To die would have made a quick end of it, but life meant hope, and Aleksei was in need of hope.

A few hours later he was led, in amongst a small group, out of the Neva gate of the fortress and along the short, stone pier to a waiting barge. He looked across the broad, flowing river at Saint Petersburg. He could see the Winter Palace, and a little of the Admiralty, but Senate Square and the statue of Pyotr were out of sight. He stepped down into the boat and within minutes it
pushed off, taking him, and his fellow rebels, to a new life, from which there would be no return: a life of exile.

He looked once again at the city’s skyline. As they moved upstream, he just caught a glimpse of the monument to Pyotr’s proud victory, where once, like Saint George, he had defeated a serpent. If only, like George, he had managed to kill it. The statue disappeared from view. It would be the last he saw of Petersburg, or of any real civilization, but he would get used to it.

Even so, he wished his final glimpse of a city could have been of Moscow. He’d always preferred Moscow.

S
IBERIA. ON THE BANK OF A WIDE, REMOTE RIVER STOOD THE
town of Irkutsk, fifty versts from Lake Baikal, five thousand from Moscow. It had been almost twenty-nine years since the day of the Decembrist Uprising.

Domnikiia toyed with the iron bracelet that encircled her wrist. She had worn it since 1828. Most of her friends – a small and exclusive circle – wore one. 1828 had marked one of the first, slight relaxations that the Decembrist exiles had been allowed – the removal of their leg-irons. It had been Pauline Anenkov who had come up with the idea of having the fetters reforged as a symbol of . . . who knew what? Some of the women had also had wedding rings made from the metal, but Domnikiia had not. As far as they knew, Marfa Mihailovna was still alive.

Many wives, and a few lovers, had come out to Siberia to support their exiled men. Originally, they had been a lot further east than this, and conditions had been indescribable. Aleksei and those others allocated to the second rank of conspirators – those who avoided the death penalty – had been sentenced to various periods of hard labour, followed by permanent exile. Aleksei was ordered to dig in the mines for twelve years; it was neither the longest nor the shortest sentence.

After that, life had become more tolerable, certainly for those men who had female companionship. There had never been any question of Marfa coming to join him, Aleksei had assured
Domnikiia of that even before he left Petersburg. She had written, intermittently, for a few years, but after a while, there had been nothing. The same was true of Dmitry Alekseevich. Aleksei told Domnikiia all about Iuda – in his alter ego Vasiliy Denisovich – soon after she had come out east to join him.

Prince Volkonsky – Pyetr Mihailovich – had made everything possible. He seemed to show more concern for Aleksei than he did for his own brother-in-law, Sergei Grigorovich, though he knew Aleksei not to have truly been a supporter of the cause. Pyetr Mihailovich had ensured that money came to them out in Siberia, and – apparently – to Marfa and Dmitry, and, most importantly, to the Lavrovs.

It had been the most appalling decision that Domnikiia or Aleksei had ever had to make, tearing their hearts in two, but for Tamara’s own sake, they had abandoned her. It would have been misery for her to live in the conditions they at first suffered – though children had been born out here to the wives of exiles – and to live and grow in Moscow, stigmatized as the child of a Decembrist, without any hope of ever seeing her parents again would have been a pointless cruelty. Fortunately, the seeds of deception had already been sown.

Toma would grow up as Tamara Valentinovna Lavrova, daughter of Valentin Valentinovich and Yelena Vadimovna. Aleksei had smiled at the thought she would be Vadim’s granddaughter, but it was little compensation. Yelena had been saddened but supportive when the idea was put to her. Valentin had been surprisingly accommodating. He was not a cruel man and he loved Tamara as he loved any child. In his mind, she would be far happier as his own than as the daughter of Aleksei and Domnikiia. The regular payments from Volkonsky had been persuasive too.

As for Tamara herself, both hoped – and feared – that she had been young enough to forget them. They would never know if some memory of them lingered in her heart, but years of life under the name of Lavrova would obscure whatever of her true parents remained with her. And it was not simply the shame of
having a Decembrist father they were protecting her from. If Toma had stayed with Domnikiia, in Petersburg, Siberia or anywhere, Iuda would eventually have made the connection. Would he have pursued the daughter, seeking revenge on the father? Aleksei had been certain that eventually he would. It wasn’t a risk they could take. At least Aleksei had been lucky enough not to have had the opportunity to say goodbye.

Volkonsky had written to them regularly. Letters in both directions were censored, but both Aleksei and the prince were wise enough to be able to write a great deal with few words. Almost every letter from Volkonsky contained a phrase along the lines of ‘Tsar Nikolai and Tsarevich Aleksandr are both in the rudest of health,’ or – less frequent but not uncommon – something like ‘The tsarevich was seen today inspecting the guard under the glare of the midday sun.’ Aleksei had not been so forward with Domnikiia over affairs of state as he had with regard to his home life, but she could make some vague guess as to the significance of the midday sun.

Since their periods of hard labour had expired, the Decembrist families had moved from town to town, but always with a tendency to head back west – and always having leaped through the hoops of bureaucratic approval. Tsar Nikolai was vindictive in his attitudes towards his would-be usurpers, but none of them could honestly swear that they would have behaved any differently in his shoes – a few of them swore it dishonestly. Many of them – Aleksei included – tried to better the lot of the Siberian peasants, through improvements primarily in agriculture and education. Aleksei knew nothing of farming, though he learned much, but he taught the local children Russian, French, Italian, German and even some mathematics. The fact that most of his mathematical examples involved predicting the trajectory of a cannonball did not discourage him, and the better of his students worked out how to transfer that knowledge to the problems they themselves faced in building, farming, fishing and so forth.

Volkonsky had died two years before. He had continued writing
– and sending money – to the last, but it was through his brother-in-law that they had heard the news. He had been seventy-six – just five years older than Aleksei, and the news had been for him a
memento mori
. It was sad, but in terms of the practicalities of lessening the misery of their exile, he had already done his duty. There was no need for more money. Dmitry was a major, last thing they had heard. They knew nothing of Tamara – they had specifically instructed Volkonsky not to tell them; it would have been too painful – but she would be thirty-three by now, happily married, and no doubt with children of her own.

Domnikiia and Aleksei had themselves saved much of what Pyetr Mihailovich had sent them. They owned this house, never mind that it was made of wood and not stone. And they owned land, which Aleksei farmed. ‘We must cultivate our garden,’ Lyosha always said to her, and then told her she should read Voltaire – but she never did. What mattered was that they were contented, even if it was a life that neither had envisaged. True, it was horribly cold here in the winter, but that only reminded them they were in Russia. In the summer, it was usually pleasant – rarely too hot. Now it was somewhere between summer and autumn, and still comfortable to sit out in front of the house and gaze down to the river, even after sunset. Today it was particularly important that she could sit outside, because Aleksei had a visitor.

The old starets – a few years older than Aleksei, she would guess – had arrived on horseback. He looked in some strange way familiar to Domnikiia, but she could not place him. He had given her his name and she had, with ridiculous but somehow appropriate formality, gone to announce him to Lyosha. The old man had followed her into the house and Aleksei had seen and recognized him. He had rushed over – as best he could – and hugged the old man like a long-lost brother before she had been able even to repeat the name she had been given – Fyodor Kuzmich.

She had sensed that Aleksei and the old man – the
other
old man – had things to discuss and had left them alone, despite both
their protestations. Now they had been together for almost half an hour, and she was tempted to go back in. She peeked through the window and Aleksei saw her. He beckoned her in enthusiastically, and she complied.

Aleksei was sat in his favourite chair, a rug over his knee despite the warmth. He was seventy-three now – to her sixty-one – and showed many of the superficial indications of aging that one might expect. The hair of his head and beard was white. His skin was thin and pale, but not excessively wrinkled. His body was wizened, but not weak – the years of forced labour in the mines had helped with that. His hearing was poor, as was his eyesight, but he had a pair of eyeglasses that he used whenever he wanted to read.

The man who sat opposite him – Fyodor Kuzmich – seemed wiser, but less contented. Age had affected him similarly, except that the top of his head was completely bald. Aleksei still possessed a full head of hair, but for a tiny gap on the crown that Domnikiia had only recently noticed.

‘And Cain never knew?’ Kuzmich asked just as Domnikiia entered. She shuddered silently at the name.

‘No – much as I was tempted to tell him.’

‘You think he still lives?’

‘I’d be a fool to make any other assumption,’ said Aleksei.

‘So our deception – your deception – remains a victory; a suitable reimbursement for the times he deceived you.’

‘He never deceived me,’ said Aleksei. ‘He just persuaded me to deceive myself.’ His eyes flicked up and looked straight into hers. ‘But I’ve understood the truth for a long time. Some things don’t need faith – some things you just know.’

Domnikiia had no idea what he was talking about, but she saw the look of love in his eyes, the same look she had seen every day since she had climbed out of that troika after a journey of thousands of versts and their eyes had met for the first time in two years. She did not care to listen to their conversation any more; she did not need to.

She went back outside and walked slowly, with a little pain in her knees, back to her chair. She sat down and gazed up above her. There was no moon tonight, but the sky glittered. It was strange, but she sat out there most nights – when it was neither cold nor cloudy – and gazed at the constellations, most of which Aleksei had taught her. He was smart enough to know that the patterns were just random, not icons set into the sky by the gods, and she was smart enough to believe him, but it wasn’t for that that she gazed at them.

Her reasoning was simple. It wouldn’t be every night, it probably wasn’t tonight – it might only be one in a hundred or even a thousand nights – but just occasionally, Domnikiia was sure, as she looked up at Pegasus or Orion or Cassiopeia, that somewhere, across half a continent, her daughter would be walking along a street, or sitting in a chair, or lying in a bed with the man she loved, and lifting her eyes skyward to gaze, like her long-forgotten mother, upon those same stars.

The official record tells us that Tsar Alexander I entered immortality in Taganrog on 19 November 1825, attended by his wife and his closest advisors. But almost immediately, rumours began to circulate that he had not died but had faked his own death, in order to abdicate a crown with which he had never felt comfortable. The tale was that he lived out the remainder of his long life in the guise of an impoverished holy man, by the name of Fyodor Kuzmich, dying finally in Tomsk in 1864. If Alexander and Kuzmich were one and the same, then he would have been eighty-six years old. While many historians regard these stories as worth little more than a footnote, within the Romanov family itself they were widely held to be true. As recently as 1958, the Grand Duchess Olga Alexandrovna, sister of the last tsar, Nicholas II, is quoted as saying, ‘I am old and not long for this world; you are young and apparently have understanding of these things. You should know that we have no doubt that Fyodor Kuzmich
was
the emperor.’