Blood Red Snow White

by Marcus Sedgwick

  “Liar,” he said, but he grinned. “The food was … not great.”

  “I should think not,” I said.

  “Potatoes and soup,” he said. “Every day. Though Peters told me it was all they had to eat themselves.”

  “Peters!” I said. “That rat.”

  Lockhart shrugged.

  “Arthur, I don’t know what’s what anymore. Would you believe me if I told you I have a letter in my possession that Peters has asked me to deliver? To his English wife, when I get home!”

  “English?” I asked, amazed.

  “Remember what I always say…”

  “No one is what they seem. I know, but…”

  “Listen, Arthur. I owe the man no favors. I’ve spent the worst month of my life thanks to him, but there’s always more to know about someone than you might think. I’m not sure he’s the monster we all thought he was. He told me he feels ill every time he signs a death warrant.”

  I laughed bitterly.

  “And that makes it all right, does it?”

  “No. No, I suppose not. But I can’t hate him anymore. He was the only person I saw every day in the prison. He tried to make me as comfortable as he could. When there were idle moments we talked. About England, about history, about his wife. He misses her.”

  Lockhart stopped, and took a drink, his thoughts suddenly far away. There was one thing I hadn’t dared ask him yet, though the answer was, perhaps, obvious. So very obvious to Evgenia and me, as we sat across the table from him—a table for four, with only three present.

  We let him talk.

  “Don’t let me drink too much tonight,” he smiled. “Miss Shelepina, you’ll make sure I don’t overdo it? It’s been a while since I had a drink. But why am I asking a Russian for help with temperance!”

  We laughed, Evgenia frowned, and then we waited while a waitress brought our food. When she had gone, Robert continued his story.

  “I can’t tell you what it was like, not properly. The rooms they gave me in the Kremlin were comfortable, but small. They were some kind of internal apartment, the only windows opened onto corridors outside. There were guards at each window constantly, who changed every four hours, and who woke me up all through the night. But I slept poorly anyway. I was worried out of my mind. Peters played with me, I think. He showed me all the papers, the Russian ones, full of stories about me, about how I would be tried and executed. One day, I was taken for some exercise in the yard, and the guard, who was Polish I think, told me they were having a bet. Two to one I’d be shot.

  “And then there was Moura to think of…”

  Again Lockhart stopped. He pushed his untouched food away and pulled his wineglass closer, filling it from the bottle at our table. He offered it to us then, but we both shook our heads.

  “They had me in solitary, but Peters told me Moura was locked up with the rest of my mission in the Butyrsky jail. Every day I begged Peters to let her go, to let them all go. Whatever I might have done had nothing to do with them, I said.”

  “But you’d done nothing!” I exclaimed.

  Lockhart put his glass down, and stared at the table.

  “I’m afraid,” he said in English, “that’s not entirely true.”

  “I … what do you mean?”

  “Nothing important,” he said, this time in Russian once more. “Miss Shelepina, excuse my manners. Anyway, after a week or two Peters told me that Moura had been released. The relief was enormous. Peters was in a good humor. It seemed that Lenin was getting better; he would probably pull through. That made my position a bit safer. If he had died, I wouldn’t have given tuppence for my chances.

  “A day later and he brought me a package from Moura. She’d sent me clean clothes, the first I’d had for days, some food, even coffee and ham. And a pack of playing cards. The clothes and food were welcome, but it was the cards that stopped me from going crazy. I played patience all morning.”

  “And what of Lenin, now?” I asked.

  “Shh, Arthur,” Evgenia said, gently putting a finger to my lips. “Don’t interrupt.”

  “The last I heard before I left he was sitting up in bed. Peters told me the first words he said were ‘stop the terror’ but I think that’s just a nice Bolshevik story.”

  “Is the terror real?” I asked. “I didn’t want to believe it. I hoped it was Allied propaganda.”

  “They may have exaggerated it,” Lockhart said, “but I’m afraid it’s true. I saw it with my own eyes. Before they moved me to the Kremlin I was in a room in the Lubyanka with a window that looked down onto the courtyard. I saw the executions myself. Three Tsarist ministers and a priest on my last day there.”

  I shook my head sadly.

  “I know, Arthur. I know what you’re thinking. But this is a war. It might not be as clear as the one against Germany, but Russia is at war with herself now. You always were too kindhearted. I’d say naïve, but that’s unfair. You’re a dreamer, Arthur. A visionary. You champion the underdog whether he’s right or wrong, and I’m afraid that ultimately the Bolsheviks are just dogs like the rest of us politicians. It’s not about good or bad, though we like everyone to think it is. It’s about power.”

  “You’re right of course,” I said. “It’s just that it’s the individual who suffers. People like you. And Moura.”

  Lockhart nodded.

  “Guess who made exactly the same point to me about a week ago,” he said. “Peters, of the Cheka. Yes, I know it’s crazy. But it’s true.”

  I raised an eyebrow.

  “I know. I know. But let me tell you this about Peters. He may be a ruthless killer, but then he does extraordinary things. One day near the end he came into my cell. He announced that it was his birthday, but said that since he preferred giving presents to receiving them, he had brought me a present. He opened the door and called down the corridor and Moura came in. Nothing else could have been a better present. Peters wouldn’t leave us on our own, but sat on my chair and began to reminisce, in the way that you do on your birthday. He talked about his life as a young revolutionary. He’d been locked up, tortured and so on, but I wasn’t really listening. My heart was in my mouth, because Moura, who was standing behind Peters, did an incredibly dangerous thing.

  “She’d been standing fiddling with the books I’d been allowed to have. She caught my eye, and then pulled a piece of paper from the top of her dress. She slid it into the top book on the pile. If Peters had seen…”

  “What did you do?”

  “I nodded to Moura, ever so slightly, to show I understood,” Lockhart said. “And then. My God! She hadn’t seen me, so she took the paper out and repeated the performance. I started nodding like an epileptic. Somehow Peters was too lost in his story to notice me.

  Shortly after, he stood up and took Moura away again. I waited for them to go then rushed to the book to find the note. Six words, that was all. ‘Say nothing. All will be well.’”

  “She risked her life to put your mind at rest,” Evgenia said. “How great is love!”

  Lockhart smiled, but it was a sad smile.

  The story did not have a happy ending.

  He told us of his final days in the cell. Of his release. He’d been given two days to pack and leave. He told us of his final evening with Moura, and as he did so, my heart bled for him. Under the table, I held Evgenia’s hand as Lockhart told us how he’d had to tell Moura he was leaving, and how dignified she’d been.

  “I understand.”

  That was all she’d said.

  He knew he would never see her again.

  We were all silent. The waitress came and cleared our plates, brought us coffee, which Lockhart clung to as if it were a lifeline. Evgenia excused herself and went to the bathroom. Lockhart stared into the deep brown swirls of coffee in his cup.

  “Do you know,” he said after a while. “The most ridiculous thing of all. At the end, after Peters told me he was going to let me go. He offered me a job. Can you believe that? He wanted me to becom
e a Bolshevik.”

  I didn’t know what to say.

  “And do you know what, Arthur? I was bloody tempted. Just to be able to stay. With her.”

  10

  I SHALL NEVER FORGET LOCKHART’S STORY.

  Nor what he told me before he left for home, for England.

  What he told me in the Finland bar and that night in Stockholm showed that the Bolshevik claims about him were not unfounded. I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t heard him say it, but it seems that in his last few months in Moscow, he had changed his mind about the situation in Russia.

  Whenever I had spoken to him before, he would always agree with me about the British policy toward the Bolsheviks, but behind the scenes, he was doing what his government wanted him to do. He’d secretly been collecting money from the rich White Russians, money that was being used to fight the Bolsheviks. He said he’d been lucky that the Cheka were as stupid as they were terrifying, or they’d have found a lot more evidence to use against him. The night they burst into his flat he had the coded book he’d once shown me in his pocket. It was obvious he was going to be searched, and in desperation he asked to use the toilet before they took him away. They agreed but wouldn’t let him close the door. A guard stood with his back to him, and Robert did the only thing he could think of. Page after page of the incriminating note book he used as toilet paper, and if he hadn’t, then maybe he’d never have left the Kremlin alive.

  * * *

  I saw him off at the station.

  “I’ve had enough of the spying game,” he said. “It’s no way for men to be.”

  “What will you do?” I asked.

  “Go back to England and try to repair my ruined career. And my marriage, too, if I can. But first I’m going home. To Scotland. Home for me is where the rivers run north.”

  * * *

  I wrote in my reports about what Lockhart had told me. Not everything of course, but what I knew I was supposed to say. I told of the Red Terror, and the Cheka, and Lenin’s recovery.

  And I continued to write my stories, though deep down I still felt I wanted to write something for children. I was sick of revolution, and of the adult world. Children go on and on, and the thought of Tabitha’s easy happiness made me want to write a simply stunning book for children like her.

  * * *

  Then, one day in November, the war ended. We heard the news straightaway; it spread like wildfire across the city in a matter of moments. That evening I walked by myself down to the bay and lit a pipe.

  I’d been sent some good black tobacco by Gardiner at last, and I puffed away furiously to keep out the cold. In seconds I was taken home. I was in the snug at the Hark to Melody, drinking beer with old friends, long since dead. Then I was talking to charcoal burners in the woods above Coniston Water, and then on the mining train to Millom.

  So the war was over. I thought of the doorman and his daughter.

  How many times had she asked me her question? How many times had I answered it; soon, soon. But of course, I realized abruptly, the war was not over in Russia, not yet. There were still battles to be fought.

  I smoked some more.

  Russia had got under my skin, I knew, but despite everything it had failed to change me. I was the same man I was all those years ago when I ran away to escape from Ivy.

  And yet, as I stood watching the ships slip from the harbor in Stockholm, and followed the glow of their taillights as they drifted between the low line of rocky hills, out to the Baltic, and then to Russia, a lump stuck in my throat and I was overwhelmed by a desire to follow them.

  11

  BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR, it may just come true. The world war may have been over, but peace had not spread everywhere. There was war still in Russia, civil war, and if Evgenia and I thought we were free of it, we were mistaken.

  Stockholm was flooded every day with refugee White Russians, bringing with them stories of the horrors of the Bolsheviks, of Cheka reprisals, and of starvation and cholera. Pressure was growing on all sides for the Swedes to expel the Bolshevik delegation from their city and, early in the new year, they did.

  Vorovsky and his whole party would return to Moscow, and Evgenia with them; since Britain’s borders remained firmly closed to her.

  * * *

  I had a choice; go home to England without her, or follow her back to Russia, into its red heart.

  I thought of Robert, saw his face as he spoke of leaving Moura behind, and knew that there was only one way open to me.

  That’s when I went to see Wyatt at the Legation, and talked of his silly plan once more, and that’s how I became S76, British agent, and headed for Moscow.

  12

  IT WAS A LONG AND EPIC TRAIN JOURNEY and with every mile my fear grew. The coaches rattled like the rhythm section of a jazz band drunk on its own beat, and though Evgenia slept, I could not. All I could find was fear. It had seemed so easy to become S76 in Stockholm, and be drilled in an agent’s methods, but now it was real, and we were approaching the lions’ den. What if I’d been watched by Bolshevik spies? What if they already knew about me? I felt as if the word was written in inch high letters on my forehead.

  Spy.

  * * *

  Our first night back in Russia my dreams were not easy ones.

  Towers rose on all sides, the great onion domes of St Basil’s, in all their various many-colored patterns. At first I admired them, then horror grew in my chest as the towers multiplied and pressed in around me, growing so high the sky was obliterated. The ground fell away beneath me and I tumbled like Alice into a space that had no end. I woke, panting in the dark, and sleep was hard to come by after that. When finally it did return, I was assailed by more and more bizarre dreams and woke early, having dreamed I’d been riding around Red Square on Trotsky’s back, while unseen assassins fired potshots at me from their Mausers.

  But my worries were unfounded, and though Trotsky was wary of me, and evidently thought I was a spy, I was rescued by Lenin himself, who told Trotsky not to be so suspicious of an old friend of the Bolsheviks.

  * * *

  I spent a harmless couple of months preparing material for the Daily News, and for the Secret Intelligence Service, too, of course, though it was pretty anodyne stuff.

  Life settled down; for form’s sake Evgenia went to live with her mother and sister, who had moved to Moscow, and got a new job in the Department of Education.

  We fell into an everyday routine.

  One day, two American journalists came to see me, asking that I accompany them on a mission to London with a set of Bolshevik peace proposals. Bullitt and Steffens had been sent from Washington to gather information about Russia. Having done so, they seemed to think that the Allies would listen to them more seriously with my firsthand experiences to back them up.

  I agreed to go. It would be a good chance to go home for the first time since before the October Revolution. I could see Tabitha, Mother, and the Lakes. Evgenia was safe, and happy, and I had no fear of any difficulties in getting back into Russia; I was in favor with both the Bolsheviks and some of the British authorities, at least.

  Evgenia was unsure about me leaving at first, but I explained that I wouldn’t be gone long, and that if the peace proposals were listened to, the war in Russia might end, too.

  “All right,” she said, at last. “All right, but Arthur, one day I want us to be together. For always.”

  I nodded, and pulled her into my arms.

  “I know,” I said. “One day. Soon. We’ll find a way to be together. We’ll find a way.”

  * * *

  So I left Moscow, and traveled with the Americans across Finland and Sweden and Denmark and eventually to England, though if I had known then what was going to happen, I would never, ever have left Evgenia.

  13

  TABITHA.

  What a superb child. On the way back to England with the Americans I thought of little else but her. What would have happened to my daughter since I had last
seen her? How much would she have changed in eighteen months? I remembered that previous visit clearly, every moment of it. It was back when Russia had been about to throw herself into the second Revolution of 1917, though I knew nothing of it at the time.

  What did Tabitha say, that day?

  What did she do?

  Yes! She ran out of the gate the moment she saw me.

  “Daddy!” she cried, and flung herself at me.

  “You’re so tall!” I said, laughing.

  “Daddy!” she said, moaning, “why do all grown-ups say that?”

  “You’re right. I’m a bad grown-up and I won’t say it again. Ever.”

  “Promise?”

  “I promise.”

  That was one promise to Tabitha I kept. Though there were others, whispered into the dark air above her sleeping head, that I did not.

  * * *

  At tea she gazed at me as if I was a creature from another world, and to be honest I felt like one. I was intensely aware of the triangle between the three of us. I wanted so much for Tabitha to like me, not to hate me for going away, but I didn’t want to do anything to upset Ivy, who was in as good a mood as I could remember.

  After tea Tabitha pulled out a penny whistle and begged me to play her favorite tune, “The Lincolnshire Poacher.”

  I obliged, and obliged twice more, until finally I suspected Ivy’s patience might be wearing thin.

  “Think what you’d like to do tomorrow,” I called softly as Ivy took her upstairs.

  “I will!”

  * * *

  I sat and watched the fire for a long time, my mind drifting pleasantly, until finally Ivy came back down.

  “She seems happy,” I said, idly.

  “She is happy, Arthur,” Ivy replied.

  “Yes, of course,” I said quickly. “I only meant…”

  “What?”

  “Well, of course I don’t see her so very much.”

  “No.”

  “It’s just that she seems to cope with it all. Very well. With my not being here.”

  Ivy looked at the fire, her face showing no emotion.