Russka - Edward Rutherfurd [430]
Popov worked silently. The earth under the staircase was not too hard. In a few minutes he had made a hole nearly a foot deep. Steadily, careful to make no noise, he went on. As he did so, he smiled to himself.
It was the perfect symmetry of this business that he liked. By the end of the evening, Savva Suvorin and Misha Bobrov would neutralize each other. He would be in the clear. Young Peter Suvorin would be the criminal. And the printing press and revolutionary leaflets would have been buried, apparently by Peter, under the house of Suvorin himself. This last, he had to admit, was an artistic flourish; but he could not resist it. I have completely outmanoeuvred them all, he thought.
True, there were a couple of loose ends. Young Grigory and Natalia for instance. He had no special plan for them. But they were harmless. All they knew was that Peter Suvorin gave them the leaflets.
No, his scheme was perfect: he was infinitely superior to them all.
It was when the hole was nearly two feet deep and he was about to stop, that the trowel struck something hard and that, reaching down, Popov felt a smooth, rounded surface. Curiously, he scraped the earth away from it and after a minute or two he was able to pull it up. The object looked pale.
It was a skull. God knew what it was doing here. He examined it. He had enough knowledge of medicine to notice that the shape suggested it might be Mongolian rather than Slav. A Tartar perhaps? He shrugged. He couldn’t imagine what it was doing buried by Suvorin’s house.
Soon afterwards the printing press and the packet containing the leaflets were in the ground. He spread earth on top and patted it down. Then, taking the skull with him, he slipped out and made his way back towards the warehouse.
A little before he got there, he passed a street corner where a small well had been sunk. He paused only a second to drop the skull into this, hearing it splash into the water far below. And so it was that the skull of Peter the Tartar, the unknown founder of the monastery, found a new resting place in the waters under the town.
Natalia and Grigory had lingered by the dormitory until after dark, talking. She had warned him about her father’s attitude but told him: ‘He’ll soon get over it.’ And anyway, as far as she could see, Grigory did not care about her father’s opinion. Her campaign had been so successful that indeed the young man had only one thought now – how to enjoy her body. When, therefore, some time after dusk, she suggested that they go somewhere to be alone, he raised no objection.
It was the custom of young couples seeking privacy, in the warm summer months, to walk in the woods outside the town. They were just making their way towards the lane that led out of Russka when, passing the warehouse, they noticed that the door of the little storeroom was open. Looking inside, they saw to their surprise that it contained a number of bales of straw; and it occurred to Natalia that this was a fine and private place. It was the work of only a few seconds to make a little bed of straw in one corner. Then, motioning to her lover, she closed the door. Soon, she promised herself, very soon, she would be pregnant, and married.
When Popov reached the warehouse he went straight to the main building. Quickly he poured the oil over the torches he had made out of the sacking. Lighting one of them, he put it against the main pile of straw. One after another he lit the rest of the torches and put them against the bales he had prepared round the walls. Then, when he had just two torches left, he ran round to the storeroom.
He had not realized how quickly the fire would take. He had only put the straw in the storeroom because, since it was locked, it would be hard for anyone to put a fire out in there. Yet even as he reached it, the flames were licking the rafters