Russka - Edward Rutherfurd [325]
Strangely, Alexander felt at peace with the world. Though manacled, he sat quite calmly, almost cheerfully, and watched the great city go by. His clothes were in tatters, his head bare, yet it did not seem to concern him unduly. In the distance, across the river, he caught a glimpse of the Bronze Horseman. There was the Winter Palace and the Hermitage. The empress and her lover Zubov were in there somewhere, no doubt. Good luck to them.
It was odd: he had lost everything, yet he actually felt more comfortable now than he had done in years. Here in a cart, his head bare to the elements, he felt absolved of all earthly cares. Perhaps it was personal to Alexander, or perhaps it was a trait often found in Russia, but he realized that he only felt truly himself at life’s extremes. It was as though he had never really felt comfortable when he was striving for mediocrity, as he had been these last few years. Give me a palace, he considered, or a monk’s cell.
Anyway, he had been lucky. He had only been sentenced to ten years.
He had learned of it the day before. For several weeks now, he had been in a small cell with a window. He had not been allowed any visitors, nor any news of the outside world. He still did not even know what crimes he had been charged with. Then, that morning, the interrogator had come and told him his sentence.
‘Your trial went well,’ he blandly announced. Like other such trials, it had been a brief, informal affair at which the accused himself had not been present. ‘The empress had wanted to give you fifteen years. That’s what we gave your friend the professor. But your wife wrote to the empress – a very fine letter, I must say – and so we’ve been lenient. In fact, you’ve been even luckier than that. But I’ll let your wife tell you about it.’
Tatiana had come a few hours later. It was only now that he learned that the countess was still alive. ‘But she has told everyone in St Petersburg that you tried to murder her,’ Tatiana explained. ‘She went to the police that very night and told them to arrest you. And then,’ she paused, ‘it seems there were other charges.’ She looked at him anxiously. ‘They say you were a Freemason. I do not understand.’
He sighed. He thought he was beginning to.
The crackdown of Catherine the Great on the Freemasons in the summer of 1792 was sudden. It was probably caused by Novikov when, under questioning, he had inadvertently revealed the existence of the secret inner order of Rosicrucians. Historical evidence shows that, even afterwards, the authorities had only a very imperfect idea of how the order worked. Since the Rosicrucians always burned all their correspondence, the full membership was never established. The links to Grand Duke Paul were never proved; the international network only vaguely understood. But the empress was adamant. The order was secret, its members probably radical; they might be plotting with her son. She trusted no one, nowadays. They were to be eliminated.
The business, it must be said, was planned intelligently. The men with important connections, like the prince, were to be quietly exiled to their estates. The bookseller who had sold Masonic tracts would be arrested and let out with a terrible warning. The professor was to be made an example of. ‘But I wish,’ the empress had declared, ‘we had someone to make an example of from St Petersburg as well as Moscow.’
It was most fortunate therefore, on the very eve of the crackdown, that the inquisitor Sheshkovsky should have come to her with the surprising news: ‘I think we may have discovered just the man we need. Moreover,’ he added, ‘it seems the fellow’s a dangerous radical.’ And the empress, when she heard who it was, had been delighted.
But how, Alexander wondered, had they known so much about him? Tatiana