The Third Section Part 38

'To your father?'

'To you.'

The conversation apparently over, Dmitry turned difficult in the tight corridor and began to depart. Yudin stared ahead blankly. Behind him, Tamara thought she glimpsed movement. Then he turned his gaze downwards.

'Ah, Lyosha. You keep your petty victories over Aleksandr Pavlovich. You can die in the knowledge that he's safe; he won't be long behind you anyway. But there's one thing you must hear before you die.' As Yudin spoke, Dmitry stopped in his tracks and turned. 'One thing you really do deserve to know about your beloved son.'

'No, Vasya,' said Dmitry firmly. He took three steps forward and was now at a level with Tamara.

'Why not? You wouldn't want me to lie to him.'

Dmitry took another step so that he was face to face with Yudin, towering over his father, who stared up at him.

'Who'd have thought, Lyosha, that the little boy I first met when he was five years old while you were hiding away with your wh.o.r.e who'd have thought that one day he'd grow up to be someone of whom I could be so proud; would grow up to be ...'

Dmitry raised his arms on either side of him, bracing himself against the close walls almost as though he were Samson about to bring down the Philistine temple. But that was not his plan. He raised up his legs, his whole weight supported on his arms, and kicked forward, his feet landing squarely on Yudin's chest. Yudin's words were cut short as he was forced to take a step backwards.

At the same instant, Tamara saw more movement in the cell behind him human figures creeping forward apprehensively, awaiting their moment. As Yudin stumbled backwards, they pounced. Two of them grabbed his legs and one his arm, dragging him back into their domain, but it was the fourth who most caught Tamara's attention. It was an old woman, her flesh sunk tight into her cheeks. Between her hands she held a chain, which somehow seemed to be attached to her as well. She flung it around Yudin's neck and then twisted it behind him with a strength that Tamara could not have supposed she had in her. It would have killed any human in minutes. Judging by the look of triumphant hatred in the old woman's eyes, Tamara wondered if it might not be effective even on a vampire.

Dmitry kicked again and Yudin fell backwards into the cell, dragged down by his attackers. Tamara moved fast. She threw herself towards the door and slammed it shut, holding for one final moment the victorious gaze of the old woman as she tightened the chain around Yudin's throat. Once the door was closed, she slid the bottom bolt across. Dmitry rammed the other two into place and twisted the key in the lock, then pocketed it. He turned and marched back up the corridor without a word.

'Dmitry!' Aleksei called plaintively after his son. Dmitry turned and looked at his sister, then down at his father. For years after, Tamara would try to a.n.a.lyse what she remembered of his expression at that moment, to make some sense of it, but now there was no time. A moment later he was gone, his footsteps retreating up the stairs.

She looked down at her father. His s.h.i.+rt was stained with his own blood and his breathing was weak.

'He had to go,' she said.

'Why?'

She could not think of an answer.

'Can you move?' she asked. She knew he wouldn't get far, but she didn't want to leave him here, so close to Yudin, whatever might be happening to him in there and however st.u.r.dy that door might appear.

'I think so.'

She helped Aleksei back to his feet and forced him to walk with her towards the stairs. Aleksei had no strength to climb them in the normal way, but instead sat down on them and pushed himself up, one step at a time. It took them five minutes just to get as far as the landing where the stairs split, and then Aleksei insisted he could go no further. He sat with his back to the wall, one foot resting on the step below, the other leg bent and held close to his chest. Tamara sat beside him, her hand in his. It was dark here, and neither of them could see very much, but it hid from her his wrinkled skin and white hair and, though his voice was soft and faltering, she could easily picture him as the strong man she had always imagined her father to be. Likewise, he would not notice the horrible laceration that Raisa had engraved in her cheek.

They talked for hours. Tamara told him everything that she could think of, and he did the same though his voice was weak and he frequently coughed up blood. She knew that his body was beyond salvation, and she could think of no way that either of them would rather spend his final moments than together. He told her of his exploits in 1812 and 1825, and at Austerlitz and on the Danube. He showed her his hand, telling her of how he lost two fingers in Silistria, and half of the third as he hung from a ledge of the Winter Palace. Tamara had to laugh at his stories at times, but she knew that was his intention in the way he described things. He did not want her to have to know the terror of it, though she could well imagine.

He told her as much of his military exploits as he did of his dealings with voordalaki, and seemed to take a far greater pride in the former than the latter. Much of it tied in with what Dmitry had already told her, but there was more that Aleksei could add. She could not guess whether it was because Aleksei had kept it from his son, or that Dmitry had kept it from her.

In turn, Tamara told her father of her life, with none of the blissful deceit she had employed when speaking of it to Domnikiia. She told him of how her husband and children had died, and of how Luka still lived. Her description of her occasional sightings of her living child seemed to affect him more than the deaths of the others. She could easily understand why.

Aleksei was at his happiest when he spoke of his friends of Vadim, Maks and Dmitry Fetyukovich and their adventures and most of all when he spoke of Domnikiia and the thirty peaceful and strangely contented years they had spent in Siberia. In turn Tamara told him of her encounter with Domnikiia, of how mother and daughter had been reunited, and of how her mother had saved her life. When he asked, Tamara told him the little she knew about his wife, Marfa that she had died in 1848. He seemed relieved she had not lived to see him like this.

It was over Dmitry that she deceived her father utterly. She said she had met him, said what a fine soldier he was, how brave he had been in Sevastopol, and even how he had fought against Tyeplov and the others. She relayed pretty much everything that had occurred up until Dmitry's ill-fated journey to Klin, and then made up a story about brother and sister coming here together to save Aleksei. She could never have brought herself to tell him the truth.

'Why did he have to go?' Aleksei asked.

'He went to get help,' Tamara extemporized. 'He'll be back soon.'

'What did Iuda mean, about how Dmitry had grown up?'

'Who knows? Dmitry's no saint, you know.'

Aleksei chuckled and that made him cough more. 'It doesn't matter. I wouldn't believe a word Iuda said anyway. He taught me that long ago.'

Eventually, they came to talk of the Lavrovs, and Aleksei wept again when he explained how they had decided to leave Tamara with them. 'Did we do right, Toma? We had to protect you. Iuda would have come for you to get at me. We had to do it.'

It was the same question her mother had asked. 'We're together now, Papa,' she said.

He fell into silence. His breathing was shallow now, and it was obvious that he had only a short time left to live. The bullets had done their work, little though that had aided the man who fired them. After a few minutes, Aleksei spoke again, suddenly urgent.

'Where's Dmitry?'

'He'll be here soon,' she replied.

'There's something I have to tell you. The name that they wanted to know; I must tell you it.'

'I don't need to know that,' she said. Moreover, she did not want to. It seemed like dangerous knowledge. It was Yudin's plan, but with the daughter replacing the son as heroic rescuer.

'Please, Toma,' said Aleksei. 'He's our tsar. Someone must remember.'

Tamara bent forward and Aleksei raised his lips to her ear, whispering two words that were so quiet she could scarcely make them out. It was disappointing to learn that he had sacrificed so much to protect so little.

'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 st.u.r.dy 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 m.u.f.fled 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 pa.s.senger.

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 b.u.mp 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 pa.s.sport. 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 pa.s.sport 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.

EPILOGUE.

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 G.o.d had granted him those three years to enjoy seeing the fruits of his nephew's achievement.

In 1861, Tsar Aleksandr II had at last emanc.i.p.ated 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 pa.s.s. 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.

About the Author.

Jasper Kent was born in Worcesters.h.i.+re 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.

Also by Jasper Kent.

TWELVE.

THIRTEEN YEARS LATER.

end.