The Shadow of Tyburn Tree (46 page)

Natalia ignored him and leaning forward focussed her eyes on Orlof. ‘Go on, Alexi,' she muttered. ‘You told me about it once before. Tell me again how you and Teplof strangled him.'

Orlof jerked himself back and, his muscles tensed, snatched up his heavy goblet. Roger half rose from the conviction that the drunken giant meant to hurl it in her face; but suddenly Orlof relaxed, set the goblet down, and gave a low laugh:

‘Since you know how things went already, what's the odds? Katinka appointed the brothers Baratinsky to be his gaolers out at Ropcha. She had meant to keep him a prisoner, but the excitement of July the 9th had swept the troops off their feet, and a few days later a reaction set in. It was clear that if Peter Feodorovitch were dead no counter revolution could be launched in his favour. So Katinka sent Teplof and myself out there to see him.'

‘And then?' whispered Natalia Andreovna, eagerly.

‘We asked permission to dine with him. Poison was put in the wine that he was offered before dinner. He drank it and was almost instantly seized with an acute colic. We urged him to drink some more of the wine and thus make a quick finish. But a coward to the end, he refused. I threw him to the floor and Teplof twisted a table-napkin round his neck. We pulled it tight. Thus died a weakling and a traitor.'

‘May God have mercy on your soul!' muttered Roger, shocked into the exclamation by this barefaced confession to most brutal murder.

Orlof swung upon him. ‘Keep your prayers for those who need them, boy! I was but a soldier executing orders. If pray you must, pray for the Empress, who sent me to do her husband's business.'

‘I'll not believe it!' cried Natalia Andreovna. ‘Katinka has too mild a nature to initiate such a crime. 'Twas Gregory and you others who decreed in secret that Peter Feodorovitch must die, from knowing that as long as he lived your own necks would be in jeopardy.'

‘Aye, he had to die!' shouted Orlof. ‘But 'twas the Empress who gave the order!'

‘You're lying.'

‘I am not. 'Tis as I tell you.'

As they glared at one another across the table Roger felt certain that next second they would fly at one another's throats. But once again he was mistaken. Orlof suddenly kicked his
chair from under him, lurched to his feet, and staggered across the room.

‘I'll prove it!' he cried, pressing his great thumbs against two carved rosettes in a heavy oak bureau. ‘May St. Nicholas strike me dead, if I don't prove to you that Teplóf and I did no more than play the part of executioners.'

The hidden locks of the bureau sprang back under the pressure and it opened. Roger saw him jab his thumb again against an interior panel low down on the right, and a door slid back disclosing a secret cavity. For a few moments Orlof rummaged in it muttering angrily. ‘Where is the accursed thing? I've not set eyes on it these ten years past; but I'll swear 'tis here somewhere. Ay! This is it!'

Turning he slammed a piece of yellowed parchment down on the table in front of Natalia Andreovna. Roger peered over her shoulder and saw that it was a brief letter signed ‘Katerina Alexeyevna.' The note was addressed to Prince Baratinsky, the text was in German, and it ran:

A new crisis menaces our authority and life. Therefore we have this day determined on sending Alexi Orlof and Teplof to have speech with the person whom you have in keeping. They have orders not to return until they can hail us with the cry ‘Live long, Czarina
.'

For a moment Roger was puzzled by the last sentence; then he recalled having heard that on the death of a Russian sovereign it was customary for those who brought the news to his successor to break it by using those words in salutation.

He had hardly grasped the full significance of the note when he caught the sound of running feet outside on the landing. Next second a dishevelled officer burst into the room. Flinging himself on his knees before the High Admiral the breathless intruder panted:

‘ 'Tis war, Excellency! 'Tis war! Gustavus of Sweden has landed at Helsingfors with an army of forty-thousand men, and is advancing on Petersburg.'

‘Ten thousand devils!' bellowed Orlof.

Natalia Andreovna sprang to her feet, and cried: ‘I feared as much, although my father would not listen to me! With our armies dispersed all over Southern Russia what hope have we of saving the Residence from that treacherous toad!'

Orlof seemed to have suddenly sobered up. Snatching the parchment from the table, he threw it among the jumble of papers in the bureau and snapped down the lid. With his heavily-pouched eyes showing something of their old fire he
turned upon her. We still have the Fleet. St. Nicholas be praised that its sailing for the Mediterranean was delayed. It may prove our salvation yet!'

Next moment he had grabbed up a great jewelled scimitar and brandishing it above his head ran from the room shouting at the top of his voice in a jumble of French, German and Russian. To arms! To arms! Find me Admiral Greig! Every man to his post! To arms! To arms! We are attacked!'

The officer who had brought the news, Natalia and Roger all followed him at the run. Halfway across the landing Roger halted in his tracks and shouted to his mistress: ‘I left my snuffbox on the table. Don't wait for me. I'll get it and be with you again in one moment.'

Swinging round he dashed back into the High Admiral's foul-smelling den, went straight to the bureau and pressed the two rosettes, just as Orlof had done. The lid flew open. In frantic haste he searched among the papers. Suddenly his eye fell upon the note that Orlof had produced. Thrusting it into his pocket, he snapped down the lid again and ran to join the others.

The impulse to steal the document had come to him on the spur of the moment. It had suddenly flashed upon him that it was probably the only existing proof in the world that Catherine II was a murderess; and had deliberately ordered the assassination of her husband. As such it was a State paper of incalculable value. Yet he also knew that if the theft were discovered and the paper found in his possession death under the knout would be his portion.

At the bottom of the staircase Roger caught up with Natalia. The scene had changed since they had come upon Orlof sitting there an hour and a half earlier. The long rooms were less crowded, the more respectable guests having gone home, but hundreds of people were still dancing and feasting, the great majority of them now obviously the worse for liquor. The veneer of civilisation symbolised by the minuets, gavottes and quadrilles, danced while the Empress had been present, had been replaced by
Tsards, mazurkas
and wild Russian country-dances; here and there men lying dead-drunk on the floor and couples were embracing openly in nearly every corner.

Towering head and shoulders above the crowd, the giant High Admiral was running through it, bellowing for the bands to stop and beating the drunks he came upon into some sensibility with blows from the flat of his scimitar. Within five minutes the revelry had ceased only to be replaced by panic, as the drunken mob, believing the Swedes to be at the very gates of the city, began to fight its way towards the doors.

Roger kept Natalia well back out of the press. After some twenty minutes it eased; a number of fainting women were carried back into the palace, and they were able to get out into the street. Having found her coach he took her home and it then carried him on to his lodging. He was now feeling cold and stale-tight from the amount of neat brandy he had drunk on top of a wide variety of wines; but little Zaria was, as usual, warming his bed for him, and, tumbling into it, he soon drifted off into a troubled sleep.

When he got up and went out the following morning he found the city in a tumult. Everyone knew that North Russia was entirely denuded of troops, except for a few battalions of the Imperial Guard, and it seemed that short of an abject surrender by the Empress to any terms that Gustavus might dictate there was no way of preventing his army from taking and sacking St. Petersburg.

It occurred to Roger that, since he was posing as a Frenchman,
it might be thought odd if, at such a time of crisis, he did not place himself at the disposal of the French Embassy. On calling there he found a crowd of excited Frenchmen gathered round their Ambassador, who, it transpired, had returned from his fishing trip only the day before. The Comte de Ségur, proved to be a young man still in his twenties. He received Roger very affably and they discoursed for a little on their mutual acquaintances, then he remarked: ‘In the present emergency, Chevalier, you are no doubt anxious to place your sword at the disposal of the Empress?'

Actually there were few things that Roger was less anxious to do than get himself sent to the front just when his introduction to the Court had opened a good prospect of getting to grips with his mission; but in those days, when all armies had large numbers of foreign officers in them, it was as natural to expect visitors who happened to be in a threatened city to participate in its defence as it is now for a house-holder to expect his male guests to assist him in catching a burglar.

Faced with this dilemma Roger swiftly evaded the issue by replying: ‘It so happened, Comte, that I was with Admiral Orlof last night when the news of the invasion reached him, and I am in hopes that he may find some employment for me.'

‘I am delighted to hear it,' replied the young Ambassador. ‘And, since you tell me that you have already been presented, you will doubtless now frequent the Court until you hear further from him.'

Roger readily agreed to the suggestion, although not for the reason it was given; and offered to make one of Monsieur de Ségur's suite should he be going there that evening. The Comte accepted the offer, so later that day Roger found himself one of a company of some dozen Frenchmen who set out in a small cavalcade of coaches for the Imperial Palace of Peterhof.

The Empress, perhaps feeling the need of her most intimate possessions round her, had moved on that day of crisis to her quarters in the Hermitage, and had announced the holding of a special court there for that night. This suite of so-called private apartments was in fact little less than a palace itself, as it consisted of a splendid pavilion containing many reception as well as living-rooms, an art-gallery, a library, various cabinets for the display of her collections of porcelain and coins; and a spacious winter-garden; the whole being connected with the main palace by a covered passage over an archway.

As Natalia Andreovna had, for the first time, failed to visit Roger that afternoon, he was all the more eager to see her; and he had hardly entered the main salon in company with de Ségur when his desire was gratified by catching sight of
her among a bevy of beauties behind Catherine's armchair.

A master of ceremonies having announced the Ambassador, the crowd gave way and he advanced to make his bow. The Empress gave him her hand to kiss and asked at once: ‘Since you are just arrived from the Residence, Monsieur, tell us what the people there are talking?'

‘They say that your Majesty is preparing to seek refuge in Moscow,' he returned at once.

Her fat little body bridled and her blue eyes flashed. ‘I trust then that you did not believe it. 'Tis true that we have ordered great numbers of post-horses to be kept in readiness, but only for the purpose of bringing up soldiers and cannon.'

The Empress's words, Roger soon found, were the keynote of the evening. Gustavus's unprovoked aggression had caught her napping. There were plenty of defeatists round her who counselled a flight to the ancient capital of Russia, but she would not listen to a word of such talk. She had given orders for the mobilisation of every man available, even the convalescents in the hospitals, and the police. Couriers had been sent post-haste in every direction to summon such skeleton garrisons as had been left within five hundred miles of St. Petersburg; and she meant to remain, to fight the invader on the frontier with every resource she could command.

Roger quickly made his way to Natalia, and, as the room grew ever more crowded with people arriving to proclaim their devotion to the throne, she pointed out many of the most interesting.

Among them, Count Cobentzel, the immensely rich and very able Ambassador of Catherine's ally, Joseph II of Austria; old General Sprengtporten, the Finnish nationalist leader who had aided Gustavus III to become an autocratic monarch, then quarrelled with him and come to Russia in the hope of persuading the Empress to champion the discontented Finns against their Swedish sovereign; and another exile, Prince Alexander Mauro-Cordato, Hospidar of Moldavia, who had sided with the Russians in their quarrel with the Turks as the most likely means of securing independence for his Rumanians.

Roger talked for some while with the last in Latin, and as a result of it formed an entirely new view of the then little-known Balkan country from which the Prince came. He had believed it to be even more barbarous than Russia, but learned that the Prince claimed direct descent from a Roman Emperor, and that in spite of three centuries of Ottoman oppression the Rumanian nobility still maintained the culture and traditions of the Græco-Roman civilisation. Mauro-Cordato told him that his library contained many ancient works of the greatest
interest that had never reached the western world, and said that when he was restored to his capital of Jassy he would be delighted if Roger would pay him a visit there.

By contrast with this charming Balkan potentate Roger found Bobrinsky, Catherine's natural son by Gregory Orlof, uncouth and barbarous. So, too, were her legitimate grandsons, Alexander and Constantine. The latter had been so named, and received a Greek education, owing to her ambition to revive the ancient empire of Byzantium and place him on its throne; but both the boys were insufferably conceited and ill-mannered, having been abominably spoiled by her and ruined by bad tutors pandering to their vices.

Their father, the Grand Duke Paul Petrovitch, struck Roger as being of a much quieter and more amiable disposition. The heir to the Imperial throne was now thirty-four years of age, but his mother still kept him very much in the background and he lived in semi-retirement. Only the invasion crisis had brought him and his wife to court on this occasion, and Natalia Andreovna said of him: