Russka - Edward Rutherfurd [326]
‘Madame de Ronville told me what was happening,’ she explained. ‘She came to see me after you were arrested. It seems there was a letter of some kind that the countess had – from Professor Novikov the Freemason. She didn’t know what it was, but she showed it to the authorities. She was using anything she could find to have you prosecuted.’
Alexander could imagine it.
‘Then a man called Sheshkovsky went to see her. Do you know him?’
‘Yes, I know him.’
‘He spent a whole afternoon talking to her. She showed him a lot of articles you had written, years ago. He was very interested.’
‘I expect he was.’ He could imagine the scene: the old countess and the skilful interrogator. How easy it would have been for the inquisitor to get the information he wanted out of her. How the subtle fellow must have smiled to himself, and no wonder he had seemed to know everything!
And yet … even as Alexander considered the matter, a new and even grimmer thought suddenly came into his mind. Had the interrogator cunningly coaxed the information out of the foolish old lady, or, in a terrible act of irony, was it possible that she had done it deliberately: revealed those articles to him – the very articles she had praised and which represented her own, most passionate views – knowing that they would seal Alexander’s fate?
He would never know.
‘Yes,’ he said sadly. ‘She had her revenge.’
‘There is one piece of good news though,’ Tatiana told him. ‘You are not to be imprisoned in a fortress, like the professor. Guess where your prison is?’
Alexander had looked blank.
‘You’re to be imprisoned in the monastery,’ she smiled. ‘At Russka.’
And so it was, he reflected, as the little cart bumped out of the city on that chilly October morning, that Empress Catherine had, in the end, found a use for Bobrov the gambler after all.
1796
How slow, how quiet, was the passing of the years.
He would listen to the bell that tolled the monks to prayer, and by this means would always know the hour. Yet sometimes it seemed to Alexander that the little monastery was half-empty: one day, he fancied, he might wake up to silence – which would tell him that the remaining monks were gone, leaving him alone in his cell with only his strange companion.
The cell was quite spacious; its walls were painted white, and there was a high, barred window. With a small jump he could catch hold of the bars, pull himself up and look out of the top of the monastery wall at one of the corner towers, also painted white. So he could see the outside world – the sky at least.
They let him have books, but no writing materials. One of the monks gave him a book of psalms. Every month Tatiana, who spent most of the time at Russka, was allowed to visit him, and usually she brought the children. Indeed, if I were ready to be a hermit, I should almost be contented, he thought.
And so the years passed quietly – almost, one could say, untroubled – but for certain thoughts that occurred to him by day; and at night, by a certain dream.
How strange it was to be so near one of his own estates, yet so far. The place was much the same as in former times – and yet it was not. The monastery, certainly, was only a shadow of its former self. When he had visited it as a young boy, it had still owned the lands around as far as his own estate of Dirty Place. But since Catherine had taken over all the Church lands, the peasants who worked them all belonged to the state now. The monastery was no longer the local landed power, but only a rather forlorn collection of religious buildings, set in the midst of state-owned fields. As a young man he had welcomed the change. ‘Let the Church stick to religion,’ he had said. But now, even cut off in his cell, he could sense the different atmosphere in the place, and he was not so sure. Part of Old Russia had gone from the land; the monastery had been hollowed out, into an empty shell.
It was never a prison before, either, Alexander reflected. But twenty years ago, Catherine had decided that the little Russka monastery would be a convenient