‘Calm yourself, my friend, calm yourself,’ and Zhelyabov placed his arm about his shoulders. ‘We have only a few minutes to wait and then we’ll be away.’
They stood in restless silence in the shadows beneath the arch in the General Staff Building, fidgeting with hats and gloves, glancing every few seconds at Zhelyabov’s pocket watch. Ministry officials and soldiers scurried past in search of shelter or a cab to take them home. Anna watched the fuzzy glow from the lighted palace windows and tried to imagine the scene in the dining room; the footmen gliding about the table with wine and silver serving dishes, the flutter of excitement at the door as the butler whispered sharp instructions to the servants — perhaps there was someone to taste the emperor’s food for poison. She blinked, then looked away as another image flitted through her mind — the eruption from below, splintering mirrors and the crystal chandelier, tiny stabbing pieces of glass whirling in a dusty vortex. Would there be children at the tsar’s table? She shuddered at the thought. Taking it for nervousness or the cold, Zhelyabov gave her forearm a reassuring squeeze.
‘Any minute now, Anna, then we will—’
But before he could finish his sentence there was a sharp orange flash and the palace plunged into darkness. A throaty rumble like thunder split the heavy white silence, rolling across the square towards them.
‘Oh God,’ Khalturin muttered. ‘Oh God.’
Seconds only, then silence again. They could see nothing but the silhouette of the building through the snow falling steadily, a soft blanket over all.
‘We must leave now,’ said Zhelyabov, turning quickly from the palace.
But Anna could not move. She watched, transfixed, as soldiers poured into the square from the barracks buildings close by and began to form a cordon about the commandant’s entrance.
‘Come on!’ Zhelyabov tugged at her arm: ‘Come on.’
They walked towards the Nevsky, not daring to glance back again. Police and soldiers hurried past. In the distance they could hear the clanging of fire bells.
‘You’ve done it, my friend, you’ve done it!’ Zhelyabov whispered to the carpenter. ‘I congratulate you.’
But Khalturin’s face was rigid, his eyes fixed on a point directly ahead. Anna could see he was close to collapse.
‘Think what people will say!’ Zhelyabov continued. ‘We have struck at the evil heart of this empire — believe me, my friends, we have shaken the world today.’
What reply could she give her comrade but a polite nod and a smile? If it was a blow for liberty and justice, why did she feel so very sad?
The tsarevich was still at the door of the main guard room when Anton Dobrshinsky arrived twenty minutes after the explosion. The heir to the throne looked like a wraith in the candlelight, his uniform, his face and beard grey with dust.
‘Appalling,’ he muttered, and taking Dobrshinsky for a medical man, urged him with trembling voice to do what he could for the wounded.
The air was thick with choking smoke and dust and the sulphurous smell of dynamite.
‘More light — at once!’ Dobrshinsky shouted to no one in particular.
It was evident from the coughing and heart-wrenching groans — someone was screaming uncontrollably — that the guard room was full of injured and dying men. As his eyes adjusted to the darkness, he could see that the force of the explosion had blown a huge hole in the floor, tossing granite paving slabs to the sides of the room. Chunks of plaster and rubble had collapsed into the cellar below.
Behind him he heard General Gourko, the governor of the city, coaxing the tsarevich to leave for ‘the good of the empire’. ‘Your Highness, there is nothing you can do here.’
A troop of firemen arrived with a doctor and began to pick their way through the ruins of the room. By the light of their torches, Dobrshinsky could see figures trapped in the debris — to judge from their dusty uniforms soldiers of the Finland Regiment. Among the smoking mounds of stone and plaster, arms and legs, the ragged white remains of those blown apart in the explosion. And on the walls, black stains where they had left their bloody shadows.
‘More light, for God’s sake!’ barked the governor. ‘Is that you, Dobrshinsky?’
‘Yes, Your Excellency,’ he said.
‘A damn mess. A little more dynamite and they would have wiped out the imperial family. This granite floor…’ the general prodded a broken slab with the toe of his boot, ‘saved them — this and a little discourtesy. You know the Yellow Dining Room is directly above us?’
‘No, Your Excellency.’
The hero of the battle of Plovdiv looked uncommonly fierce in the flickering torchlight: ‘What on earth are you chaps at the Third Section doing? This is a disgrace.’
‘Regrettably, I’m not responsible for security within these walls, Your Excellency,’ the special investigator replied coolly.
‘If you’d caught these madmen they wouldn’t have been able to carry out an attack,’ replied the general, pulling distractedly at his large moustache. He turned back to the chaos of the room, bellowing orders to the rescue party, anger and frustration ringing in his voice. Judging there was nothing to be discovered in the rubble while the wounded were the first concern, Dobrshinsky made his way up the dark marble staircase to the first floor and into the dining room. One of the gas chandeliers was still burning and he could see by its light that the blast had blown open the windows, the draught drawing in flurries of snow and stirring the smoke that hung in a sulphurous yellow layer about the room. The carpets and furniture were covered in dust, and fissures had opened up in the plaster ceiling and walls. China and crystal had been shaken from the table and lay in sad splinters about the floor, but he noticed that none of the chairs had been pulled away, which suggested no one had taken their place for dinner. General Gourko was right: the terrorists had hoped to wipe out the tsar and his immediate family. The bomb must have been planted in the cellar with a timing mechanism, something like a Thomas device. Perhaps a soldier — or more likely a workman — but how had he managed to smuggle so much explosive into the palace undetected? It was fiendishly clever. If anyone was still foolish enough to underestimate the audacity and skill of these people after the train bomb, this would serve as a rude awakening.
‘Can I help Your Excellency?’
A young footman, his uniform and hair thick with dust, had slipped into the room with the silent discretion of the better sort of servant. In answer to Dobrshinsky’s question, he confirmed the tsar had not sat for dinner at the appointed hour but had been kept waiting by Prince Alexander of Hesse who had been late arriving at the palace. This impropriety on his brother-in-law’s part had probably saved the lives of the emperor and his family.
There would be questions, changes, Dobrshinsky thought as he made his way carefully down the dark stairs. Those who gave thanks to God for saving their emperor were unlikely to ascribe the failure in security to his hand too. There would be many — like General Gourko — who would account the Third Section responsible. The clamour for vengeance and arrests would be deafening.
A crowd was gathering beyond the cordon in the square, and some simple souls were singing a hymn of praise to the Virgin, standing in the driving snow with their heads bent in thanks for the deliverance of their tsar. Were these the people the terrorists were acting in the name of? Dobrshinsky wondered. Mikhailov, Figner, Perovskaya — what did they know of the will of the people? He elbowed his way roughly through the cordon and walked quickly across the square to where his carriage was waiting in front of the General Staff Building. The driver was shivering on the box, nipping surreptitiously at a bottle of vodka wrapped in brown paper.
‘The House of Preliminary Detention, and quick about it,’ Dobrshinsky barked.
He would not leave the Jew’s cell until he’d squeezed every last drop of advantage from him. Every last drop.
The wounded began arriving at the Nikolaevsky in the hour after the explosion. Sixty casualties, soldiers and palace servants, severed limbs and broken bones, severe blast burns and shock. Frederick Hadfield assisted as a colleague operated on one of the soldiers — no more than nineteen years of age — his chest crushed by falling masonry, his right leg attached by only a white sliver of bone. His chances of survival were slim: a tall fair-haired Finnish soldier who would die because he had the misfortune to be on duty at that hour. Had The People’s Will given him a thought? Hadfield wondered. No one was sure how many men had died in the guard room or how many would die of their wounds in the days to come. And yet not a hair of the tsar’s head had been harmed in the attack. On
