Web of Discord (19 page)

The man she had come to see sat in a tall chair beside an open window, a bent and aged figure with gnarled hands like the exposed roots of dead trees. His thin face was almost completely hidden by a long and fulsome white beard. She saw that his right eye was blind, and that the left could focus only with difficulty. She crossed the room, and placed her fingers on one of the gnarled, unmoving hands.

‘Nikolai Ivanovich Karenin,’ said Fr Seraphim, ‘you have a visitor today. I will leave you together.’ Turning to Lady Courteline, he added in a low voice, ‘He is frail, and older than his years, but his health is quite sound. Come to see me before you return to Odessa.’

‘I thought, you see, that you had avenged yourself on John by shooting him. I have never in my life experienced such
desolation 
and despair when I saw your calling-card beside my husband’s hand.’

Dr Karenin permitted himself a slight smile. He moved in the tall chair, and looked at the woman who had been talking to him for the last half-hour. It had been twenty-five years since he had seen her, but it seemed more like a century. He was glad of the visit, moved, even; but Maria Alexeievna was as one with the many faded daguerreotypes of his long-dead family that the good fathers had shown him when they had begun their task of dragging him, body and soul, from the living death of the Imperial Russian prison system.

‘No, I would not have done such a wicked thing. My quarrel was with a dying social system, not with poor fellow-victims and their foreign friends. That quarrel is over for me, though others, no doubt, will continue it. Look at me, Maria: could such a human wreck have embarked on a venture of that nature? You say that my simulacrum, this second Dr Karenin, hired a professional assassin to do the deed. How would a man, imprisoned in the labour colonies of Siberia for a quarter of a century, know how to do that? When we are finally expelled from those places, Maria, we are like the dead.’

‘But you hated him, I expect?’

‘No! That is your woman’s vanity speaking. After my arrest, I was as good as dead. John Courteline was alive, a man with great prospects. You did right to marry him.’

Dr Karenin stopped speaking, and his eyelids began to close. A table stood beside him, on which reposed a great open Russian Bible, and an anthology of prayers. Lady Courteline glanced round the room. It was not a monk’s cell, but a
well-furnished
guest room. Nikolai Ivanovich belonged here.

She looked at him, old before his years, his revolutionary zeal silenced, and suddenly felt great pity and anger for his situation. And with that pity came a realization that her consuming love for this man had in reality perished in the ’60s, leaving only a romantic illusion behind. It was with John Courteline that her true life had been lived out.

‘Nikolai,’ she said, laying a hand once more on his sleeve,
and watching his tired eyes open and focus once more, ‘there is something that I must know about those vanished times. It has been said that John Courteline betrayed you to the authorities so that he could marry me. Was that true?’

‘No! I have heard of that false calumny. Courteline did nothing of the sort. I was betrayed by my “faithful” friend and fellow dissident, Zinoviev, who was in the pay of the secret police. It was they who circulated that rumour in order to protect their informer. They made a point of telling me so, soon after I was taken to the Peter-Paul Fortress! It is all folly, and all past. My life will be lived out here, at the Monastery of the Holy Trinity, in the tender care of the holy Archimandrite Seraphim and his brethren.’

‘I will say goodbye, then, Nikolai Ivanovich. By seeing you, some of the ghosts of my troubled past have been laid.’

‘Goodbye, Maria Alexeievna,’ said Dr Karenin. ‘Remember, that I am a guest here, not a monk. You can visit when you will, and I will enjoy talking to you about the olden times.’

‘No, my friend,’ said Lady Courteline. ‘It is all folly, and all past. If I call –
when
I call – we will talk about the present, and about the many steps that must be taken on the road to your complete restoration. In the meantime, I will return to London, and throw my energies into continuing the many saving works instituted by my late husband. My work shall be his memorial.’

She gently kissed the ruined man on the brow, and saw his pleased but passionless smile of contentment.

Arnold Box stood on the sandy beach at Porthcurno, looking out to sea. A few hundred yards offshore a ship lay at anchor, smoke drifting lazily from its single funnel. A crowd of men had assembled at the sea’s edge to help as a new imperial cable was floated into Porthcurno Bay on a long line of bobbing buoys.

‘It’s an amazing business, Bob,’ said Box, shading his eyes against the bright sunlight of the May afternoon. ‘That ship out there – it makes me think of the
Lermontov,
lying in wait for us off the Rundstedt Channel.’

Bob Jones laughed, and removed his pipe from his mouth.

‘That’s the old
Venturer,
Mr Box. No hidden shells in her. She’s a good old British cable-layer. Come on, let’s leave them to it.’

He turned away from the beach, and Box followed him up the steep path that would take them both back to Porthcurno Cable Station. The way was bright with early summer flowers, and a warm breeze blew.

‘Porthcurno’s an amazing place altogether, Mr Box,’ said Bob Jones, ‘but it’s only the tip of the iceberg where the Eastern Telegraph Company’s concerned. We’ve got twenty-three
thousand
miles of submarine cable altogether, and sixty-four cable stations. You’ll find us in France and Spain, in Portugal and Egypt, in— But there, you didn’t come down to Cornwall to hear me advertising the company.’

They came at last to the impressive cable station, and stopped on the grass bordering the tennis court. The company’s flag blew proudly in the breeze.

‘So it’s all over, Mr Box?’ asked Bob Jones.

‘It is. Captain Adams was as good as his word, trailing Bleibner back here to Cornwall, and then alerting Scotland Yard to the fact. We arranged a trap for him, and he walked right in to it. I’ve spent the morning with my colleague Inspector Tregennis, assembling our evidence, including the signed
deposition
of Caleb Strange, who witnessed the murder of your friend William Pascoe. Hans Bleibner will pay the ultimate price for the murder of that young man.’

‘He was a clever lad, you know,’ said Jones, ‘and a brave one, too. He’s sadly and sorely missed down here at Porthcurno. He was a native Cornishman, and very friendly with Squire Trevannion. I wonder what’ll happen to him?’

‘In my book, Bob, he was an accessory after the fact, but the powers-that-be think otherwise. They’ve got the doctors to say that he wasn’t responsible for his actions when he harboured Bleibner in his house. I think he’ll be back at St Columb’s Manor, miraculously restored to sanity, before the month’s out.

‘But we got our surly friend Sedden, landlord of The Cormorant at Spanish Beach. There’s no way that he’ll be able
to wriggle out of a long spell in gaol. Quite a revelation, he was – a one-man immigration business. They’ll be sweeping out a cell for him at Dartmoor before long.’

‘Does Captain Adams work for Colonel Kershaw?’ asked Bob Jones. ‘I feel entitled to ask, seeing that Kershaw, you, and I, were all “stormed at with shot and shell” together in Prussia.’

‘Captain Adams was working
with
Colonel Kershaw, Bob, but he’s actually employed by Admiral Sir James Holland, of Naval Intelligence – the man who saved the day last January up in Caithness. In the end the whole lot of us work for the same person. I’m referring, of course, to the Widow Lady who lives in a castle at Windsor.’

Bob Jones laughed good-humouredly, and shook hands with Box.

‘You’ll find a pony and trap waiting in the stable yard, Mr Box, to take you back to Inspector Tregennis at Truro. I wish you well. Maybe we’ll meet again. It’s a small world.’

The two men parted, and Bob Jones, recently promoted to chief cipher clerk in place of his dead friend, returned to the main office of the cable station. He was greeted by the busy clicking and clattering of the telegraph engines receiving cables from the farther reaches of the Empire, and transmitting messages in diverse languages to the four corners of the earth.

The Dried-Up Man

The Dark Kingdom

The Devereaux Inheritance

The Haunted Governess

The Advocate’s Wife

The Hansa Protocol

The Ancaster Demons