A hush fell on the room and everyone crowded round the punch bowl. Anna touched Hadfield’s arm: ‘Come on.’
Zhelyabov struck a match and put it to the punch and a flame began to dance about the bowl. The earnest fellow who had called the room to order pulled out his dagger and laid it across the bowl. Zhelyabov did the same, and then another man and another, as if enacting a pagan blood ritual, gold and red shimmering on their blades. Then one of the men began to hum a lively folk tune.
‘It’s a song from the Ukraine,’ Anna whispered, her eyes shining with pleasure.
The candles were lit again and the strong rum punch served to all.
‘Here.’ A petite young woman soberly dressed in black offered him a glass. ‘Dr Hadfield, isn’t it?’
‘Yes.’ He seemed to tower over her.
‘My name is Sophia Perovskaya. I’m glad to make your acquaintance.’
So, this was the daughter of the former governor general of the city. She was rather plain, with an oval face and high forehead. There was a girlish innocence in her expression that was difficult to reconcile with her reputation. He had heard her name spoken at the best parties, invariably with a disapproving and incredulous shake of the head.
‘Anna says you love our country and that you’re a socialist,’ Sophia said, her blue eyes wide, her gaze uncomfortably intense.
‘Yes, yes, I am.’
‘Let us hope Russia changes for the better in the year to come.’
‘Yes.’
‘Perhaps you will play a part in that transformation.’
He gave a slight nod, hoping this would satisfy her. One of the comrades called for music to general approval, and for a while Hadfield was spared awkward questions by some hearty folk-singing. At midnight there were kisses and they drank to freedom for the homeland. The earnest young man who had been the first to place his dagger over the punch — his name was Nikolai Morozov — predicted the new year would bring an end to ‘slavery’. Then, from the edge of the circle, the man Hadfield knew as ‘Alexander’ spoke. He must have slipped into the apartment just before midnight because he was wearing his heavy black overcoat, wet with melting snowflakes.
‘To Alexander Soloviev. To our comrades in prison, to “The People’s Will” and to our revolution.’
As Hadfield raised his glass with the rest, he could sense Alexander’s sharp little eyes upon him, and he made a point of holding his gaze. He was heavier than Hadfield remembered him, his fine frock coat stretched tightly across his chest, that rarest of men, a plump revolutionary. He saluted Hadfield very deliberately with his glass before someone plucked at his sleeve and he was obliged to look away.
The new year ticked on into the early hours. Anna showed no inclination to leave. ‘No doubt you believe it your duty to be with your comrades even to the end of a party?’ Hadfield risked teasing her. Anna gave a little frown, but the corners of her mouth twitched as she struggled to suppress a smile. A woman called Olga suggested a seance and a large sheet of paper was conjured up from somewhere, the letters of the alphabet written around its edge.
‘No one believes in this superstitious nonsense, do they?’ he whispered to Anna.
‘I do,’ she said crossly.
‘But I thought you were an atheist.’
‘I am.’
‘But you believe in this?’
‘I don’t know. Yes, a little.’
They took their places at the table, a saucer upside down on the paper, and by the light of a flickering candle they tried to summon the spirit of Tsar Nicholas.
‘We must ask him how his grandson will die,’ Olga whispered.
‘Why do we want to spoil our new year by inviting an old tyrant to join us?’ asked Zhelyabov.
Olga hissed at him to be quiet. ‘How will Alexander meet his death? How will the tsar meet his death?’ she intoned.
The saucer began to move, dragging Hadfield’s forefinger across the table. The whole thing seemed not only ridiculous but in very poor taste, and he was grateful for the anonymity of darkness. For ten minutes the saucer glided meaninglessly about the table as if struggling to find a common will and then it moved to ‘P’ and ‘O’ and the letter ‘I’ in front of Hadfield, then to ‘S’ and to ‘O’ again, and finally ‘N’. POISON.
‘But that’s impossible!’ said Olga.
Hadfield could not help smiling: how very ‘old Russia’.
‘It’s ridiculous,’ said someone else. No one at the table believed the tsar would die from poisoning because it was not a weapon the executive committee of The People’s Will would ever approve.
Zhelyabov tried to laugh it off: ‘What can we expect from such nonsense?’ But it seemed to Hadfield that instead of raising spirits the seance had only succeeded in dampening them.
‘It’s almost three o’clock. We must leave,’ Alexander said from the darkness beyond the table. ‘But first — the
‘Do you know the words, Doctor?’ asked Sophia Perovskaya.
Yes, Hadfield knew the words well and he joined with the singing, softly and cautiously, lest the neighbours heard their call to arms. But he was conscious of Anna silent beside him, shifting uncomfortably, the revolutionary from the village who did not know the words to a socialist anthem but believed spirits could be summoned to a drunken table. And he felt a warm surge of love for her difference and reached for her hand.
They left the party in pairs and threes to avoid the unwelcome attention of the street superintendent, and at last he was alone with her. As soon as he could he pulled her into the shadow of a yard and bent to kiss her tenderly. ‘Happy New Year, my darling’.
‘Am I your darling?’
‘How can you doubt it?’
They spent the rest of the night wrapped in each other’s arms on the mattress in the old Ukrainian woman’s cell. There had been other women in Switzerland and London but none that had touched him like Anna. She was always with him, every minute, every second, at the core of his being. It troubled him that he could not understand why it was so. There was a darkness in her, fragility, confusion, a stubbornness beyond reason. What was it she felt for him? She did not say, and he wondered if she knew. She was capable of slipping from submissiveness to defiance and intemperate anger in little more than the blink of an eye. And yet there was a femininity and subtle intelligence there, too, that was deeply attractive. Lying beside her, the early sun dropping down the wall opposite, Hadfield knew that for better or worse their fates were bound together — and that this new year marked a new phase in his life.
1880
Yes, it’s a sin for revolutionaries to start a family. Men and women both must stand alone, like soldiers under a hail of bullets. But in your youth, you somehow forget that revolutionaries’ lives are measured not in years, but in days and hours.
You can call [terror] the heroic method but it is also the most practical… if you keep on with it unceasingly. Occasional individual attacks may alarm the public, but they do not effectively demoralise an administration. You must make attack after attack uninterruptedly and relentlessly against one fixed and prearranged target.
