He had just turned fifty, and the intense, glaring good looks of his youth were starting to give way to the haggard, drawn features of his age – the razor cheekbones were hollowing out from beneath, the moustache was thickening, greying and drooping as if it too felt the weight of age, but his piercing black eyes still glittered brightly under the crinkling lids.
To a woman of Moura’s literary pretensions, it was a remarkable achievement to be noticed and offered work by this man. But she played it cool in her letters to Lockhart. ‘We talked of English authors,’ she wrote, ‘of which, strange to say, he knows a good deal, even the modern ones. He asked me to give him a list of books I thought would be interesting to translate! It all amused me rather and I will go there twice a week to kill time. The whole atmosphere there is very bohemian – but rather stimulating.’8
She was curious about Gorky’s politics; although he was a socialist he was protective of his aristocratic acquaintances and used his influence to save them from the Bolsheviks. Moura guessed cynically that he was motivated by a wish not to be ‘compromised abroad’. He told her that his ideal was ‘to have the world ruled by people of creative thought . . . without any distinction of class. He thinks himself a d’Annunzio of Russia.’9
Perhaps in another, earlier time in her life she might have been more impressed by this turn in her fortunes. Now, though, she felt that Russia must change itself or lose her. She wanted freedom and comfort, she wanted her children, and most of all she wanted Lockhart. ‘How I wish I had news from you oftener, Baby-Boy. It would have been such a comfort in these terrible days to know more about you.’ To a woman who lived on attention, thrived on knowledge, it was unbearable. ‘I feel stupid to-day and can’t write. Sometimes the longing for you, for the certainty of you, for the feeling that you belong to me is so great – that writing becomes a torture and words cease to mean anything.’10
Nonetheless she took it as a good omen when the first book she was given to translate (at a fair wage of 10 kopeks a line) was the biography of Walter Scott by John Gibson Lockhart. Perhaps that meant something.11
The official Russian Christmas came in early January. Although she had never felt less like celebrating, Moura bought a bedraggled tree from the market and struggled home with it through the cold streets.
It was now three months and two days since she had last seen Lockhart. (She kept count.) As she did every evening, she sat and wrote to him, pulling together little scraps of news, gossip, political intelligence, all held together with her inner thoughts. She was in the middle of describing a rumour that the charismatic head of the Petrograd Soviet, Grigory Zinoviev, had been arrested by Lenin ‘for disobeying orders about provisions’ when her mother’s voice cut in on her train of thought.
‘Are you writing again to that man?’ she said.
Moura paused. ‘Yes,’ she admitted, tight-lipped.
‘Quite useless – I am sure he has forgotten all about you by this time.’
Ugh. Moura went on writing, and a few minutes later came another interruption. ‘He has been eating pudding for his Christmas,’ said Madame Zakrevskaya bitterly, ‘while we here have to suck our thumbs and grind our oats. But he doesn’t care!’
Staring down at the page, shaken, Moura copied down her mother’s words, and added, ‘Do you, Baby?’12 Did he care? Would he come to Stockholm when it was time? Would he take them both out of this nightmare? She was beginning to lose faith in the future, and sometimes hated writing to him: ‘Letters are such horrible – unsatisfactory things. And you seem so unreal – out there in the darkness – where these little slips of paper perhaps never even reach you.’13
The Christmas season bore upon her for other reasons. As she decorated the tree and prepared her mother’s presents, her heart ached for her children – ‘when I think of my kiddies far away, perhaps in danger, and I not able to put toys in their little stockings. Babykins – I’m having such a terribly hard time – altogether. Riga has been taken to-day by the red army and they are advancing on Reval.’14
And it was two months since Lockhart had last sent her a letter.
Later that month, the Bolsheviks came at last for the remaining Benckendorff wealth. Moura was notified that her husband’s safe deposit box at the bank was going to be broken open and its contents seized. (Other wealthy people who had less influence with the regime had gone through this robbery nearly a year ago.) Moura insisted on being present when the ‘few un-washed boys who are dictators of my bank now’ broke the safe open. She used all her charm and persuasion on them, and managed to keep the contents for herself. These youths presented little challenge for a woman who had seduced statesmen and won her way out of a Cheka prison. ‘One really has such a tremendous privilege over them all,’ she wrote, ‘for even the cleverest ones are perfect infants in arms as far as any training of the mind goes. They . . . continue looking at life from the point of view of the little third-class restaurants in Switzerland where they used to meet.’15
Again she had to use her influence and charm – se mettre en quatre,* as she expressed it – to save the apartment from being requisitioned. She succeeded, but this constant struggle to avoid destitution was a drain on her energy.16
All through what was left of that winter her emotional fortunes rose and fell with the flow and retreat of Lockhart’s letters. After long interludes of silence they would come through in batches, months out of date but bringing floods of joy. ‘Your dear, dear letters – how splendid they are. You tell me all what I could have wished to hear, my Baby, that you love me – that you beleive in me – that you want me.’17
His letters to her did not survive in the historical record, but even in her breathless appreciation of them his misgivings echo. She brushed away his recital of the social awkwardness of their getting together, assuring him that she knew the risks and the shame better than he did, and that she was willing to face anything. She shut out any notion that he might not be so willing, and focused only on his protestations of love.
She concocted a plan. Even if they couldn’t yet be reunited permanently, they could come together for a short time – their meeting in Stockholm, proposed months ago and continually put off, could be just a brief reunion, an affirmation of their love in advance of the moment when they would be reunited permanently in England. Moura worked out how the visas could be arranged by way of the Swedish Consulate and Lockhart’s diplomatic contacts in Helsingfors and Stockholm.
As the weeks went by, she began putting it in motion, looking for the opportunity to make her move. At the same time, she proposed to enter Estonia to initiate her divorce proceedings – an extremely risky prospect, given the war for independence that was going hammer-and-tongs not far from Yendel and Reval, not to mention her reputation in some quarters as a spy. It would be safest, she reasoned, to go via Finland and make the fifty-mile sea crossing from Helsingfors to Reval.18
The plan was postponed in February, when she learned that Lockhart had been ill and needed an operation to remove cartilage from his nose. He wrote complaining of feeling tired and run-down. His health worried her dreadfully – not just the thought of him suffering but the idea that his wife might win him back by nursing him to health (after his influenza she’d been tormented by a dream in which Lockhart told her that he was giving her up in gratitude to Jean).19 It worried her too that she had failed to give him the son he wanted, and promised that it would be ‘the aim of my life – as something necessary to your happiness’.20
Her feelings were starting to take on a fatalism, her optimistic faith taken over by a darker, heavier sense of the future. ‘I love you,’ she assured him. ‘With a grave, sublime love, that is stronger than death.’21 Her words were more than mere effect. Death was all around her – not only the friends she had lost to the Bolsheviks but to disease and starvation too. Spotted typhus had broken out again in Petrograd, and by February several acquaintances had died from it. There was a constant fear that the Finns, whose border was just a few
miles away, would invade the city. ‘Oh Baby-Boy,’ she wrote, ‘what I would give to have you here, near me, with your arms round me, and have you comfort me and cuddle me and make me forget all the nightmare.’22
On the eve of her birthday, Moura received the best possible present – a letter from Lockhart inquiring whether their meeting was still going to take place. ‘My little one, my dearest,’ she replied, ‘of course I am coming . . . perhaps in a week or ten days from to-day I will be in your arms. My beloved, my Baby – what happiness, what joy it is going to be.’23
The actual day of her birthday was bittersweet. It was a year since the party at her own apartment, with all her men – Lockhart, Cromie, Garstin – when there had been caviar, blinis and vodka. Now there was bran-smash and oats in the bitterly cold flat, and a sad letter from Garstino’s mother, who knew what a friend Moura had been to her boy. There were new people in her life, but they seemed unimportant – even the august, fascinating Gorky was little more than an employer. Frazier Hunt, the Chicago Tribune journalist and Gorky’s rapturous admirer, gave her Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass (‘as a young American democrat should’), and there were chocolates and wine from Folmer Hansen, head of the Danish Red Cross, who had also brought a letter from Lockhart and joked about being the postillon d’amour.24
She was now twenty-seven years old, but felt older.
Everything was blotted out by the prospect of being with Lockhart himself, in the beloved flesh. It was going to happen soon – unbearably, impossibly, happily soon. Theirs, she believed, was a love like no other – greater and more potent than Walt Whitman’s ‘unspeakable passionate love’, his ‘sobbing liquid of life’.25 It must and would be fulfilled.
Saturday 12 April 1919, Helsingfors, Finland
The Hotel Fennia was supposed to be one of the best in the city. It towered grandly over the wide boulevard adjoining the railway station, seeming to promise luxury and comfort. But Finland had suffered from its civil war just as Russia had, and Moura’s wealth had long since been exhausted. Her room was tiny and horrid; it had no bath, and the bed was alive with bugs.26 In a way, this was the perfect place in which to consider her situation.
The reunion had not taken place.27
Moura had made it out of Russia and into Finland – crossing the frontier into what was effectively enemy territory. At Helsingfors she had found herself trapped. In order to reach Lockhart in Stockholm she needed a Swedish visa. But the Swedes in Helsingfors, despite her and Lockhart’s good relations with Asker, the Swedish representative in Russia, wouldn’t give it to her without a British visa. Lockhart had been supposed to wire a consular friend (either in Helsingfors or Christiania,† it wasn’t clear) to arrange it. The whole plan, which Moura had worked out in every detail, should have fallen neatly into place, and she should have been able to cross into Sweden and fall into the arms of Lockhart. To feel his warming, consoling presence again, to see his dear face, plan the next stage of the bureaucratic game which would let them come together permanently.
But the visa hadn’t been arranged. Not only that, but she discovered that Lockhart wasn’t waiting for her across the border in Stockholm. Instead there was a telegram for her. He was ill again. He couldn’t travel. He pressed her, as he had before, to abandon everything and come straight to England.
It wasn’t a question of resisting temptation – even if she had been able to abandon her mother and any prospect of seeing her children again, she couldn’t pass through Sweden without that visa. And now the Finns were putting pressure on her to go back to Russia.
The disappointment was bitter. She was haunted – ‘with a poignancy which leaves me cold and numb’ – by the thought that Lockhart might think her a coward for lingering in Russia instead of coming to England. That he might not care for her any longer; that he might not want her. It was a worry that had dogged her always, and he had stoked her concerns. She had been reminded of this a few weeks ago, when she heard Gorky lecture on French poetry, and she remembered how Lockhart liked to recite Maurice Magre’s ‘Avilir’, which seemed to resonate with him:
J’ai le besoin profond d’avilir ce que j’aime . . .
Je sais que la candeur de ses yeux ne ment pas,
Qu’elle m’ouvre son coeur quand elle ouvre les bras,
Je sais à voir ses pleurs que sa peine est extrême
Et malgré tout cela j’affecte de douter.
Je cherche avec une soigneuse cruauté
Ses erreurs, ses défauts, ce qui fait sa faiblesse,
Et m’en sers pour froisser, déchirer sa tendresse28
(I have a profound urge to demean that which I love . . .
I know that the candour in her eyes doesn’t lie,
That she opens her heart to me when she opens her arms,
I know by the sight of her tears that her suffering is great
And despite all that, I affect to doubt.
With careful cruelty I seek out
Her errors, her faults, her weakness,
And in so doing, crumple and tear her affection)
Was that how he felt now? Would he misinterpret her actions? Did he share Magre’s urge to destroy his love and escape from it?
There was no option but to go back to Russia. She must free herself from all ties – then she would travel from Helsingfors to Stockholm and England, ‘having put a full stop on all my obligations of the past’.
One obligation, one particularly irksome tie, was her marriage. Well, that could be dealt with immediately. Only a narrow waist of sea separated her from Estonia and Djon. She had been there before, and now was the time to go there again. Here was one part of her plan that could not go wrong.
The events of the days that followed grew into one of the most insidious mysteries of Moura’s life.
Saturday 18 April, Yendel, Estonia
The Germans had gone from Estonia, and anarchy had returned. Peasant bands were roaming the countryside again, the violence exacerbated by the nationalist war that had broken out.
At Yendel the Benckendorff family had suffered more raids, even worse than the one over a year ago, in which Moura had had to hide in the garden with the children. One day, while Djon was away, a group of bandits got into the manor and rampaged through the living rooms, plundering and vandalising.
It had become too dangerous to stay there, and at the end of March Djon made the decision to move the family to another part of the estate. On the far side of the south lake was a much smaller house, named Kallijärv, where Djon’s mother had once lived (this was the lair from which she had sourly observed Moura and her disreputable friends sporting in the lake in summers past). It was more modest and much more removed from the main roads, and therefore less likely to attract the attention of raiders.
On the Saturday before Easter, Djon left Kallijärv to walk up to the Red House to check that everything was in order, and to see to some estate business. He had talked about taking four-year-old Tania – his ‘little woman’ – with him, but her nurse forbade it, so he went on his own. He promised the children and the servants he’d be back in time for lunch.29
The hours ticked by, and he didn’t return. Lunchtime came and still there was no sign of him. It would later be recalled by several people that three gunshots were heard during the morning, but nobody could remember exactly when. Gunshots were not at all unusual in the countryside around Yendel, and nobody thought anything of it. Except for Micky – afterwards she would claim that the sound had given her a presentiment of calamity. But she didn’t do or say anything at the time.
At one o’clock it was decided that they’d better go looking for him. The three children were dressed up in their coats and hats by their Russian nurse, Mariussa. (Micky was more than ever a member of the family rather than a servant, and childcare was no longer her task.) Leaving the cosy little house with its smell of cooking and oil lamps and paraffin heaters, Kira, Pavel, Tania and Mariussa set out along the lake shore towards the Red House.
Winter was receding – the deep snow was melting and the frozen lake breaking up into floes. The children prodded at the ice with sticks as they passed. Beyond the second corner there was a lane that went uphill, while the footpath carried on between two hills. The lane crossed between the hills on a little span known as the Devil’s Bridge. It was a secluded spot, hemmed in by trees and always shadowy. As the party approached, they could see the shape of a man lying across the path where it passed under the bridge.
It was clear at a glance that it was Djon. Mariussa shrieked and tried to shoo the children away, but they had already seen, and even the youngest had realised that something dreadful had happened. Mariussa knelt beside him and tried to raise him up. It was no use; he was dead.
Djon von Benckendorff had been shot. As for who had done it, there was no trace – not a sign, not a footprint, not a whisper. Only the memory of those three gunshots heard at some unremembered time in the morning.
Easter Sunday, Terijoki, Finland‡
It was a strange little town, Terijoki. Standing in the angle where the Russian frontier met the Gulf of Finland, it was where the Finns regulated border crossings. The town had been carved out of thick forest, and woodland took up most of the space between the streets.
A Very Dangerous Woman: The Lives, Loves and Lies of Russia's Most Seductive Spy Page 22
