To Kill a Tsar Read Online Free PDF Page B

later as Frederick Hadfield’s droshky began pushing slowly through the crowd spilling on to the road before the Admiralty. Caught by the change in the weather, his driver was sweating profusely in a padded kaftan, exuding a vintage odour of stable shit, foul enough to offend even the horse. With relief they turned on to the Fontanka Embankment at last, and at the Chernyshev Bridge he jogged the smelly Ivan’s elbow. The cab rattled to a halt, he paid then waited at the edge of the pavement as it pulled away.
    The three- and four-storey mansions on either side of the Fontanka were not as imposing as those a little further up the river; many had been sold by the great families that once owned them and divided into apartments for army officers, lawyers, Class 6 civil servants and below, and after years of neglect they were in desperate need of a coat of paint. Number 86 was on the opposite bank, a pink and white house in the Russianclassical style with an elegant blind colonnade of four pillars in the middle of its facade. Hadfield had found an excuse to saunter past earlier in the week – to check the address, he told himself – but once there, he had begun to make a mental note of the embankment, to search for men loitering in doorways or at windows, to scrutinise the faces of passers-by. After only a short time he had given up, forced to acknowledge he had no idea what he was looking for and that an anxious imagination was capable of turning every builder and bargeman into a police informer.
    Number 86 looked a brighter shade of pink in the sunshine but in all other respects quite as it had before. Did it matter? He was visiting it at the invitation of his friend Vera: a tight ball in the pit of his stomach told him it did matter. A scruffy dvornik was loafing at the door of a neighbouring mansion with his pipe in hand, but he eyed Hadfield with no more than mild curiosity. Beyond him four well-dressed children and their governess were throwing crusts to a flotilla of swans. A fine brougham with a coat of arms painted on its shiny blue door clattered past. It was Sunday quiet and Hadfield had the uncomfortable feeling that the only person behaving furtively was himself. He leaned forward to flick imaginary dust from his trousers, then, rising quickly, he walked across the road to the end of the bridge and between its great stone pavilions to the opposite bank.
    After glancing up and down the street again, he stepped forward to the door of Number 86 and gave the bell a decisive tug. It was opened by a footman in a faded green velvet uniform, a gangly youth of no more than eighteen with a long pimply face. He ushered Hadfield inside at once. The entrance hall and the marble stairs that led from it were elegantly proportioned but shabby, the yellow and white painted walls stained with damp, the burgundy runner threadbare. With a graceless sweep of his hand, the footman indicated to Hadfield he should follow him to the first floor.
    ‘Who lives in the house?’
    The footman sneezed then wiped his nose on his sleeve. The iron filigree of the banister was thick with dust.
    ‘My mistress, Yuliya Sergeyovna Volkonsky, Your Honour.’
    An aristocratic name – Hadfield remembered from his school books that a Volkonsky had commanded Russian forces at the battle of Austerlitz – this member of the family must have fallen on hard times. A full-length portrait of a soldier in the white uniform of the Life Guards dominated the landing. A polished mahogany door to the right of the picture was ajar and voices were gusting through it. The footman walked across the landing and opened it without ceremony. The sudden movement must have startled those close to the door because faces turned to Hadfield and for a few seconds there was a wary hush. But a young man in tweed with a rakish soft blue tie and shoulder-length hair was most unlikely to have arrived with a troop of gendarmes and conversation resumed with something close to a