him.
‘Then join us for some tea.’
‘Yes, Doctor, you must,’ said Evgenia from the door. Hadfield turned to reach for a cloth and glanced over at Anna but her back was turned to him, her head bent over a box of dressings.
‘Perhaps just for a few minutes,’ he said.
The samovar was set at the edge of a rough table in a long low-vaulted room that looked and smelt like a refectory. Evgenia explained that the building was a poor school but the church had given permission for it to be used as a clinic on Sunday afternoons. What would the priests say if they knew why these ‘good women’ were administrating to the corporeal needs of their flock, Hadfield wondered. But perhaps that was unduly cynical. Goldenberg’s presence was acting as a dark prism, distorting his perception of the work they were doing.
‘No milk, I’m afraid,’ said Goldenberg. He filled a tarnished pewter pot with water from the samovar, poured a glass and pushed it towards Hadfield. ‘We drink tea the Russian way.’
‘And so do I,’ said Hadfield, settling at the edge of a bench.
‘Would you like something to eat, Doctor?’ Evgenia asked. ‘Thank you, but I’m not hungry.’
‘Grigory?’ Reaching down to her bag, Evgenia removed the remains of a loaf and some sausage and slid them across the table to Goldenberg, who set about them with gusto.
‘Do you intend to make St Petersburg your home, Doctor?’ Goldenberg asked between mouthfuls.
‘I think of it as home already. I was born here.’
‘Dr Hadfield was a close friend of my sisters in Switzerland,’ said Evgenia.
‘Lydia?’ Goldenberg gave a little shake of the head, showering wet crumbs on the table. ‘Poor Lydia.’
‘I must go,’ Hadfield replied and he swung his legs over the bench to rise.
‘So soon? Have a little more tea,’ said Evgenia.
‘My medical bag is in the treatment room.’
‘I’ll fetch it,’ said Anna.
‘No, no, that’s perfectly all right, I know my way.’
The battered old Gladstone was just where Hadfield had left it on a shelf above the dispensary. He picked it up and made his way back along the dim corridor towards the refectory. The door was ajar and as he approached it he could hear Goldenberg’s high-pitched voice.
‘I’ve been following him all week — to and from his office…’
On an impulse Hadfield did something he would have condemned as ungentlemanly in others: he waited and listened and watched at the door.
‘It would be foolish to attempt it from a moving cab — not after the last time,’ Goldenberg continued. The women exchanged a worried glance.
‘I don’t think we should speak of it now,’ said Anna.
‘He’s guarded, of course: four gendarmes and the driver.’ Goldenberg ignored her. ‘But it would be possible from the pavement outside Fontanka 16 or close to his home.’
‘Let’s wait until Alexander’s here,’ he heard Anna say with steel in her voice.
‘What — oh, the doctor…’ Goldenberg tailed off.
Taking this as his cue, Hadfield pushed open the door and stepped inside. For a few seconds there was an embarrassed silence in which they were careful not to make eye contact with each other. It was Anna who eventually broke it: ‘Let me take you to the church, Doctor. You can pick up a cab there.’
‘Thank you, but I can find my own way.’
Anna was insistent, rising to her feet: ‘The streets are badly lit and it would be easy to lose your way.’
Snatching her coat from the table, she made for the door, plainly anxious to guide him from the building as quickly as possible.
Walking beside her in the dark street, Hadfield was deeply troubled by what he had heard, and he knew from the charged silence that she was conscious of it.
‘Are you involved in this?’ he asked at last.
She flinched, startled by his directness: ‘What did you hear?’
‘Enough.’
They were at the corner of a street immediately opposite a small church, a cluster of golden domes, the patriarchal cross silhouetted against the faint gaslight of the city. From a lane a little further on, angry drunken voices drifted closer.
‘I’ve known Grigory a long time, Doctor,’ she said, and even in shadow he could see the furrow between her dark eyebrows. ‘He has a wild imagination. Yes, we talk of the need for action to bring about the revolution, but…’
Her words tailed away as the drunken argument spilled from the lane on to the street. They waited, looking everywhere but at each other, while three peasants, to judge from their clothes, staggered past and into a yard.
‘It’s idle talk — that’s all. Who would trust Grigory to carry out such a…’ she hesitated, ‘delicate, such a delicate task?’
‘Murder?’
‘No. No,’ and she recoiled a little, hurt by the suggestion, ‘an attack on the system of oppression.’
‘Ah. Yes.’
‘Grigory is a talker, that’s all. Please believe me. There are no plans for any sort of…’ she hesitated again, ‘political action. I will talk to Grigory, warn him he must be careful what he says.’
She took a step forward, her head at his shoulder, her white face tilted up to him, and his heart beat so fast he was sure she would hear it pounding.
‘You won’t speak of this to anyone, will you?’
‘No.’
‘Please forget it. Foolishness, that’s all.’ She paused and retreated a step, satisfied. ‘I’m glad we’re going to be friends.’
It was only five minutes more to the square in front of St Boris and St Gleb. There was not a soul to be seen and little prospect of a cab. She offered to wait with him and he wanted to accept for the pleasure of her company, but he brushed the thought aside as ungallant. ‘I know my way from here. I’ll take a cab on the embankment. But how will you get back to the school? You can’t walk alone.’
She was capable of looking after herself and knew the district well, she said, but thanked him for his concern with a summer smile that set his heart fluttering like the wings of a butterfly.
‘And will you help us again?’
‘Yes. I will help you.’
Yes, he would visit the clinic the following Sunday and perhaps the Sunday after that. But not for the poor of Peski or from the same woolly operatic urge to ‘do something’ that had led him to agree in the first place. No. It was curiosity, the shadow of her smile, the scent of her hair as she bent close over the treatment table, and the effortless grace with which she moved.
Not for a moment, for a second, was he taken in by the gossamer thin veil she had attempted to weave about Goldenberg’s words. Yes, he was vain and boastful and insecure, so much was obvious, but he was dangerous too. There was a certain self-righteous vanity in all who felt they had a right to kill in cold blood in the furtherance of their cause. Hadfield had met men and women who for all the talk of freedom were motivated by something more prosaic — self-regard or money or sexual desire, or by a simple need to belong — and they would play their part in the revolution too — if it came.
‘Ah, Anna, you’re back. And how is the good doctor? I was just telling our comrades the story of St Boris and St Gleb Church.’
Alexander Mikhailov had a soft, cultivated voice and a good-humoured if slippery smile. He was perched at the edge of a long refectory table, Goldenberg and Evgenia sitting on the bench at his feet, and a young man with bad skin and lank greasy hair — a student, to judge from his shabby uniform coat — was standing behind him.
‘The city’s bakers are paying for the church as a thanks offering for the miraculous deliverance of the tsar
