Curse Not the King (37 page)

Then one of the younger officers spoke up; the deposition of a reigning sovereign was not part of his experience, for Catherine Alexeievna had been on the throne for fourteen years when he was born; the Revolution and death of Peter the Third were part of history to the boy, who found himself preparing to enforce the same fate on that miserable monarch's son. And though he had been drinking with the rest to still his conscience, he asked the one question uppermost in all their minds.

“What will happen if the Czar resists?”

Pahlen stepped lightly down off the chair, eased his sword in its scabbard and picked up his gloves before replying.

“You can't make an omelette without breaking eggs,” he said. “God save the Emperor Alexander! Come, gentlemen. Let us go!”

Everything went as Pahlen planned. The Saskaïya drawbridge was lowered to admit the treacherous equerry, its guards silenced in a few seconds, and Plato Zubov and his men crept through the unlocked door and began advancing into the heart of Paul's palace.

They were mounting the stairs when hundreds of rooks in the gardens began to scream with the abruptness of a thunderclap. For a moment Plato stopped and stood motionless, while the birds' cawing became a crescendo of protest and alarm.

“God's death,” he snapped in a whisper. “We forgot those damned rooks in the garden.… That's Talysine's men arriving. The fools have disturbed them.… Come on, curse you, hurry! We've got to get upstairs before someone goes out to investigate!”

Inside the palace it was very quiet, their route was deserted and badly lit by torches placed at some distance apart. The vapour seeping out of the walls was so thick that in places they could hardly see each other's faces.

“The crazy devil,” Bennigsen muttered. “He's built himself a death-trap.…”

“Be quiet, damn it!” Plato swung round on him. “That's the White Salon, there at the top of these stairs.” He opened the door and looked through the narrow crack. “It's empty. Come on.”

When they crossed the room, Zubov paused by the double doorway leading to the Emperor's library.

“Supposing there is a guard post there,” one of the officers whispered. “Suppose Pahlen's wrong and he didn't dismiss them.…”

Plato put his head against the panels of the door. Then he straightened and his handsome features relaxed in a small, cruel smile.

“Don't worry, friend. He did as Pahlen told him. There are no troops in there. I'm going to open the door. Now!”

The lackeys on duty in the dim, spacious rooms were overcome before they had time to raise a cry. One of them fell under Nicholas Zubov's sabre as he turned to reach his master's bedroom.

In the little valet's closet, they found Paul's personal servant cowering. With one look at the drawn swords of the intruders he fell on his knees.

“Spare me, for God's sake, gentlemen.…”

“Where's the Czar?” Zubov demanded, his hands twisting the man's coat collar until he almost choked.

“In his room, Sir.…”

“Alone? Where's the Princess Gagarine?”

The valet's face was livid with terror; he twisted his head helplessly to escape the throttling pressure.

“She's upstairs … in her room. Excellency, Excellency, you're choking me.…”

Zubov flung him aside, and he fell heavily against the wall.

“Someone go upstairs and barricade the Gagarine into her room. Come on, my friends. There's the bedroom door. We're going in!”

After Anna Gagarine had left him, Paul's mood of restlessness increased. He walked up and down for several minutes, listening to the angry screaming of the birds outside his window, repeating the question to himself. ‘What's disturbed them? …' and then answering in Anna's words: ‘It's nothing, probably changing the guard, it's only my cursed fancy. I'm always hearing noises. There's nothing, Anna's right. There's no use rousing the guard because of a flock of birds. But I'll have those trees cut down to-morrow. To-morrow morning!'

Then he remembered that there was a letter to be written to Prince Weimar in Paris, before he could mount those stairs and lay his aching head on Anna's breast and try to sleep; he sat down at his bureau and took up his pen.

And while he wrote his thoughts began to riot, until he found that he was fighting an extraordinary impulse to think about his mother and his early life. When the image of Natalie Alexeievna appeared, he pressed his hand over his throbbing eyes in a vain attempt to shut her out, to close his mind to the associations of unhappiness and failure that crowded into his brain, holding up mirrors, showing him himself as he had been that day when a real image had mocked him from a looking-glass, and he'd driven his fist through the reflection.

Then Catherine came to him, smiling and lovely as a young woman, with her handsome lover Gregory Orlov at her side, two splendid phantoms before debauchery destroyed the one and lunacy the other. But though four years had passed since he had buried her, enclosing her body with the remains of the man she had murdered, he knew that death had not diminished his hatred nor understanding softened his resentment and disgust. For all her glory, she was nothing now, her name preserved in infamy; as for Potemkin, thanks to the action of her son, no man would ever find his bones to honour them.…

He was revenged upon them all, but the years of his youth had been wasted in idleness and gloomy introspection, both marriages had failed, even his son had proved a traitor, and when he thought of Alexander his mood hardened. The sudden weakness, the sense of loneliness that even Anna's presence in the upstairs room could not dispel, were superseded by bitter rage. Marie and Alexander. Three days, Pahlen had promised, wait for three days and then they shall be punished. He had. waited, and by the next morning that time limit would be reached.

Betrayal and suffering were part of his past, but by God, he swore, sweeping the pens and paper to the floor in his excitement, there'd be no place for them in his future. He had come into his birthright and he was going out to conquer and enrich his country at the expense of the most powerful nation in the world. He was going to marry Anna Gagarine and if she bore a child, that child should inherit the throne of Russia; it was the future that mattered, he insisted, and at forty-four he was still young, a man with many years to live.…

It was then that he heard the sound of voices outside his bedroom door. The tones were loud, which was unusual, considering the late hour, though no word of what was said could be distinguished. For a moment he thought it must be Pahlen.… But no, he knew it was not Pahlen, for there must be several of them on the outside of that door. He moved into the middle of the room, listening, waiting for the valet's knock upon the panels before he announced who sought an audience. But no knock came. Instead he heard a scuffling sound as if a man had fallen in the tiny corridor.

Automatically he began to walk forward to turn the key in his door, until the realization came to him that he had never had a key. It was not necessary, Pahlen advised him at the time, when a guard post kept watch in the library and a servant slept by the entrance to his room. Then he remembered that there
was
no guard post. He had dismissed them himself only two hours before. There were no troops protecting him, and something had happened to his valet on duty in the closet.… Someone had got in.

The sweat broke out all over his face and the nerve under his eye gave a tremendous leap, and then suddenly, for the first time in twenty years, it stopped, and the twitch was still. He turned slowly and stared at the archway in his bedroom wall, where the door communicating with the Empress Marie's suite had so recently been bricked up. Beyond that door there was a little ante-room, always filled with troops during the night. But he could not get to them nor they to him. If he shouted, they might not even hear him.

It flashed through his swirling brain that Pahlen had insisted that he block that entry; an entry which was also an exit as he recognized too late.

“I am trapped,” he whispered, glaring round the huge, white panelled room, a room with windows high above the ground, a room with enormously thick walls through which no cry could penetrate.… A room with only one door. And then he knew beyond a doubt what lay beyond that door, as he had known all his life. The horror he had been fleeing in his mind had turned into reality, and finally caught up with him.

And with that acceptance, all fear left him. He wiped the sweat out of his eyes; he picked up the sword that always rested on a chair by his bedside and unsheathed it, then he stood facing the entrance.

At almost the same moment the handle of the door began to turn. His last thought before it opened was thankfulness that Anna Gagarine was safe in her own room.

She too had heard voices, and she sprang up in her nightdress and threw herself at the door, Her fingers caught at the handle which seemed held in a vice, and in an access of terror, she knew that someone was outside, jamming it.

“Paul! Paul!” she screamed, beating her fists on the panels, pulling and struggling to wrench the door open against the strength of her unseen captor. “Paul, look out! It's a trap.… Oh, God, you swine, you devils, let me out.… What are you doing to him!”

The man on the other side of the door held the handle easily with one hand while the imprisoned woman dragged on it.

By then she was hysterical, her hands were bleeding where the carved door panels had cut them, and her shrieks drowned the noise of falling furniture, and the single, hoarse yell of rage and defiance which was suddenly cut short. At last Anna stopped; she clung to the wall tapestries, listening to a terrible silence.

“Paul … Paul,” she whimpered. “Oh, Merciful Jesus.…”

When Pahlen arrived he was met by Bennigsen at the entrance to the Imperial bedroom. The Hanoverian was very pale, and to his astonishment the Count saw that the intrepid and pitiless old man was trembling.

“Why weren't you here?” Bennigsen snapped.

“Is it over?” Pahlen ignored the question. He could not see into the room properly, but he knew that Plato Zubov was standing over something.

Bennigsen moved back. “Look for yourself, Count!”

Pahlen walked in and stepped over the legs of an upturned chair. He saw a sword lying in a corner and recognized it as the Czar's. Then he stared down at the body which lay on its back on the carpet, staring sightlessly at the ceiling, with an officer's sash knotted round its neck. There was blood on the clothes and on the floor.…

Pahlen looked round him.

“Why did you have to sabre him as well as strangle him?” he asked coolly. “It'll take hours to make the body look respectable. I see he tried to defend himself.”

Plato Zubov said nothing, he only sheathed his sabre and walked to the window; he seemed as if all interest and energy had gone out of him. It was his brother Nicholas who answered.

“There was a struggle,” he said slowly. “When we came in he was waiting for us, sword in hand. Plato told him he was to abdicate in favour of his son.… He just laughed like a madman. He shouted, ‘You'll have to kill me first, damn you,' or something like that and he lunged at Plato.… Then he fell down.… There was great confusion, Count, it's difficult to tell what happened.…”

Pahlen regarded him and smiled unpleasantly. “I can well imagine, my dear Nicholas. However, it's very well done. I suppose no one can remember who put the scarf round his neck?”

Nobody answered. Pahlen nodded, still smiling. “Of course not … and just as well, it might be awkward if Emperor Alexander were to ask.…”

At the door, he looked back over his shoulder, his eyes focused on the ground, and the ends of the bloodstained yellow sash. “He always tried to imitate his father,” he remarked. “It's curious that he got his wish in death.…”

Then he went to inform the new Emperor.

On the morning of the twelfth of March, 1801, the Emperor Alexander the First appeared in public at the Winter Palace. He was very pale, and witnesses whispered of terrible scenes of grief when the news of his father's death was first brought to him. He fainted, they said, and refused to take the crown.… He was not really responsible at all, the rumours insisted. It was the Courlander Pahlen and the German Bennigsen who had planned and carried out the murder. And a brutal murder it was, for though the physician Rogerson spent six hours preparing the body, it was possible to see that the Czar Paul had not only been choked to death but beaten and stabbed as well.… No wonder the young Emperor looked so grieved and ill.…

Pahlen knew what was being said, but he walked at Alexander's side and pretended not to hear. He was still confident, assured of his protégé's gratitude, and he proved his talent for organization in the hours that followed the death of Paul. Orders were issued to arrest Koutaïssof; and the Princess Gagarine, who had heard so much but seen nothing, was given into her husband's charge. The country, Gagarine was informed, would be the best place for his wife.…

Unlike her eldest son, the Empress Marie remained calm, while her unimaginative mind refuted the details of her husband's death. He was gone, his mistress banished, and her beloved Alexander safely in possession of the crown. Her gratitude for their deliverance took on a pious form, and in consequence she found the presence of Paul's murderers an increasing inconvenience.

Within a week she went to the young Emperor, and embracing him in her familiar way, proceeded to advise him on his future conduct.

Alexander listened quietly; he looked ill and his fine eyes were red-rimmed. In fact his capacity for shedding tears had served him well; he wept publicly and presented a picture of grief and distraction that deceived many who should have known better. He took the crown of Russia with humility and an air of duty unwillingly done, while he rejoiced in his heart, and could scarcely wait to destroy all traces of his hated father's work.