Put like that, it wasn’t a difficult decision. I opened my mouth, and Ivanov stuffed it full of woolen cloth. For good measure, he tied a length of the muffler around my face to hold in the gag. French succumbed to the same treatment with an air of imperious indifference, but I knew he was seething inside, as was I, and that the rest of our journey would be spent plotting our revenge.
TWELVE
W
e set off then, with Ivanov up top driving the coach and Oksana perched on the seat opposite us with her pistol pointed at us. I won’t bore you with the details, for I don’t like reminding myself of the hours we spent in that coach. If I’d thought the trip had been uncomfortable so far, from this point it was hellish. It wasn’t pleasant, sharing a coach with a stiffening corpse, but that was the least of our worries.
With both hands and feet bound, French and I had no way to brace ourselves against the constant pitching and yawing of the coach. We jolted against the sides of the coach, and against each other, and against the sides of the coach again, and so on, for hours. Our plight amused Oksana, and I won’t soon forget the sight of her sneering Slavic face as we ploughed through the drifts and bounced over the frozen ruts in the road. She sat across from us in her fine fur coat and hat, the gun in her hand never wavering, with her feet propped casually on the dead Dmitri.
After an hour of jouncing over the rough track, the coach halted, and I felt Ivanov spring from the driver’s seat. The door opened and he looked in.
“Is everything satisfactory?” he asked Oksana.
She nodded, without removing her eyes from us. “The prisoners are cooperative, Vasily Kristoforovich.”
“There’s an inn just down the road. We’ll be stopping there to change horses.” Ivanov stared hard at French and then turned his steely gaze on me. “Listen to me, both of you. You will not make a sound while we are at the inn. You will not create a disturbance, or attempt in any way to alert the innkeeper to your presence. If you do, I’ll shoot the innkeeper and any witnesses. Then I’ll shoot you both, place your bodies in the building, and set it on fire. Is that clear?”
It was indeed. We could only nod silently. Well, I suppose it was too much to expect that we would have been untied and escorted into the inn to warm ourselves by the fire and have a bite to eat.
We complied with Ivanov’s directions at the inn, and the change of horses was accomplished quickly. We could hear the rough voices of the innkeeper and his stable boy as they harnessed the fresh horses to the coach. It sounded very English and homely, and for a minute I almost lost my nerve and wished myself back safe in Lotus House, away from the cold and the dead Cossack and the exquisitely turned out Oksana. I could feel the sting of tears close to the surface, but I refused to give way. Then I recollected that I had had little to eat since dawn, my hands and feet were numb from lack of circulation, it was colder than the proverbial witch’s tit, and French and I were being held prisoner by a ruthless Russian major and his bitch of an accomplice. No wonder I was feeling a bit down.
Cheered by the revelation that I did not in fact have a serious character flaw, I turned my thoughts to our predicament, and the prospects for extricating ourselves from it. We had a decent shot at escaping, I thought. The coach pulling into Dover would surely (please, God) arouse the interests of the British agents who had been alerted to watch the port for stray Russians. If the agents were worth their salt (perhaps an unreasonably sanguine view of their capabilities, given past performance), we could expect the coach to be stopped and ourselves freed. Provided Oksana didn’t get trigger happy at the first alarm.
As that didn’t bear thinking about, I moved on to ponder what might happen if the Russian arrival into the port escaped notice. They would surely take a ship to Calais as quickly as possible. What, I wondered, did they intend to do with us? Shoot us both and leave us to be found when the snow melted? French’s disappearance would certainly cause alarm at the highest levels of government, and a search would be mounted immediately when it was known he had gone missing. The Russians could ill afford the diplomatic contretemps that would ensue if Ivanov were tied to our deaths (at least French’s death, that is; I doubt anyone would give a toss about the odd tart being eliminated from the picture). Of course, you can’t always count on the Russians giving a fig about public opinion. They’re an odd lot, those Russkis, and just as inclined to poke a sleeping dog as let it lie.
Perhaps Ivanov was planning to take us with him, keeping us as hostages until he’d safely delivered the news of the state of the British army on to St. Petersburg. Once that message was on its way, French and I no longer constituted any threat to Ivanov or Oksana. In fact, there would no longer be any need for French to kill Ivanov. I sat back with satisfaction, pleased with this script, not least because Ivanov was a sharp one, and he had probably figured out that once he’d sent the telegram, French, being the schoolboy he was, wouldn’t think it honourable to kill him out of spite.
We jolted along for the best part of the day, changing horses frequently, as Ivanov pushed the creatures hard. Having found that French and I were on his trail, he seemed imbued with a sense of urgency, as though he feared that other agents might be after him, and we did not linger at any inn. Ivanov brought bread, meat, and brandy to Oksana, but she never alighted at any of the public houses to stretch her limbs or answer nature’s call. The woman had a bladder of iron.
French and I spent the day trying to keep our balance as the coach lurched through the drifts, slamming into one another and trying to ignore Oksana’s ruthless smile while she watched our acrobatics. I needed sleep, but it was impossible. With a mouthful of wool, I was desperately thirsty. Every time Oksana had a nip of her brandy, my throat contracted painfully. There’d been no food since early that morning, and my hands and feet were cold lumps of flesh. All in all, I wouldn’t rate the Russians very highly as hosts for your next coach tour.
There wasn’t anything to do but ruminate about the situation. I invented several exquisite forms of torture for Ivanov and Oksana to entertain myself and spent a good bit of time thinking of ways to relieve Oksana of her stunning coat and hat.
Near dusk, the coach slowed, and Oksana pulled back the curtain to look out the window. Then the coach tipped and swayed, and it was clear we had left the main road for a smaller track. French looked up sharply.
Oksana smiled. “As you have surmised, we will not be going to Dover. No doubt you were hoping for some assistance from your associates there. You will be disappointed.”
Spoken in that gloomy Russian voice, it sounded like an announcement that the end of the world was nigh. Perhaps it was.
We creaked along slowly for an hour or more, until darkness had fallen. Then the coach came to a stop, and Oksana stirred.
“We have arrived,” she announced.
Ivanov opened the door of the coach and peered in at us. Beyond his head, I could make out a few faint lights and hear the dull, insistent thump of the sea on the rocks. I could also hear voices.
English
voices. My heart quickened.
“Just a little longer, Miss Black, and we shall set out on the last leg of our journey. Hawkins!” The latter was a summons, for in a moment more heads blocked out the dim lights on the shore and I felt rough hands grasping my person, in ways I’d have made any other bloke pay for. Obviously, these particular Englishmen were in the pay of the Russians. An appeal to their patriotism would likely be futile.
I let out a strangled yelp, and Ivanov said sharply, “Careful there.”
I was hauled unceremoniously from the coach and tossed over the shoulder of a giant ruffian, who smelled strongly of herring. He was also lame, with one leg shorter than the other, but he managed to carry me effortlessly, one arm swinging loose and the other clamped over the back of my legs. The only difficulty was that his halting gate caused me to slam into his back at every second step, which was deuced uncomfortable for me but didn’t seem to affect my captor in the least. (As he appears at a later point in this narrative, I shall christen him “Bob.”) My view was also somewhat constricted, being comprised primarily of the coarse cloth of his coat, but I could see from the corner of my eye that we were passing along an irregular track of shingle, between a number of small wooden shacks. Here and there, a lantern gleamed dully through a window. A fishing village, by the looks of it, though I’d wager that the chief source of revenue here was smuggling.
The roar of the sea grew louder, and my bearer’s feet left shingle and trod onto a wooden pier, which swayed precariously under our weight. Waves lashed at the pilings, sending sprays of foam over us. Since night had fallen, the wind had risen sharply, and now I heard it moan through the rigging of a ship. It had started to sleet again, and the pellets stung my cheeks. I had been all for the scenario of being carried alive to France and left to find my way home to England after Ivanov had wired his news to St. Petersburg. I hadn’t given much thought to the actual journey across the Channel. Until now. The prospect of such an excursion in this weather seemed rather dismal.
It grew dimmer when the fellow carrying me came alongside a boat tied to the pier. As it was dark and the boat bucking like a mustang, I couldn’t discern many details, but first impressions did not inspire confidence. The planks and beams creaked audibly under the pressure of wind and water, and the mast seemed oddly pliant. Or perhaps it was just my point of view; it was difficult to make a careful observation when turned upside down.
My confidence ebbed further when the ruffian loosened a hatch cover and we descended a few steps into the main cabin of the boat. It was a dreary place, enlivened only by a single lamp that struggled to illuminate the gloom. I was carried down the narrowest of passageways, between a miniature galley and a small coal stove on one side and a set of two bunks, one on top of the other. The cabin smelled of damp wool, paraffin and dead fish. Despite the odor, my spirits rose at the sight of the stove. If the Russians had sprung for some coal, the passage to France might just be bearable. The blankets on the bunks looked tumbled and filthy, and probably hosted a whole colony of bedbugs, but even they looked tempting.
The fellow carrying me, however, passed through this luxury suite and into the “C” class accommodations. He wrenched open a door in the bulkhead, and we entered the forward cabin where he dumped me (rather harder than strictly necessary, I thought) onto a rough wooden floor. I heard the rasp of a match, and then a weak yellow glow filled the cabin as my captor lit a lantern fastened to the wall. He gave me a wide smile, filled with discoloured stumps of what had once been teeth, and stamped out.
I struggled to an upright position and surveyed my surroundings. Clearly, our vessel had seen better days. The cabin was tiny. I could have extended my arms (had they not still been tied behind my back) and touched both sides of the hull. The floor and walls were warped and damp, and the room smelled of previous cargoes, which had not included any tulips from Amsterdam. There was no furniture; the only fixture was the lantern on the wall. I was hoping at least for a stove, but there was none, and the air was frigid. The only entrance was the one we’d come through; there was not even a porthole to be opened for a breath of fresh air. Obviously, the Russians hadn’t heard of the accommodations available on the P&O.
The door to the cabin opened and two men struggled through, carrying French by the shoulders and legs. He, too, was deposited on the floor with a thump, and then Oksana and Ivanov, carrying Bowser’s case, entered the cabin, and they and the local brigands stood looking down at us, like so many entomologists observing two particularly interesting beetles. The two Englishmen who had carried in French were not the finest specimens of our fair race. The first was squat as a toad, with a cast in one eye and a hairy mole on his upper lip (“Beauty” seemed an appropriate moniker for this bloke). The second villain was short and wiry as a terrier, with a mouthful of green teeth, which he displayed by leering continuously at me. I dubbed him “Moss Mouth.”
At an order from Ivanov, Beauty and Moss Mouth knelt and loosened the bonds on my feet and hands. The restoration of blood to these appendages was first a relief, and then excruciating. I had to bite my lip to keep from crying out. I set to work, chafing my hands and feet fiercely, trying to restore the circulation. Beside me, French was massaging his own wrists and glaring up at Ivanov. Mercifully, the two ruffians also removed our gags, and I laboured to produce some spittle, a difficult task after a day spent gnawing on my muffler.
“I gather we are to accompany you to France,” French said hoarsely.
“I think you’ll agree that it’s much the wisest course of action,” said Ivanov. “Once I’ve telegraphed the information from your War Office to my superiors, you’ll be free to go. I’d leave you behind, but you’re a dogged fellow, and I’m sure you’d find a way to prevent me sending that telegram.” He looked around the cabin. “I’m sorry these conditions are so Spartan, but I’ll see that you have something to eat and drink. We’ll be casting off soon. And, please, no heroics. As you can see, there is only one way in and out of here, and it will be closely guarded.”
He turned on his heel and departed through the doorway, followed by Oksana (still looking dazzling in that sable coat and hat), Moss Mouth and Beauty. The door shut behind them with a thud.
“Do you really think he’ll let us go once we reach France?” I asked.
French shrugged. He was on his feet, prowling around the cabin, examining every nook and cranny.
The door cracked open and the two men returned, with Beauty carrying a small bundle and Moss Mouth sporting a revolver, which he pointed at French.
“’Gainst the wall there, guv,” he said, waving the gun to illustrate his point.