As soon as I heard it, I looked out of the window with the Binoculars. I could see, on the porch of the third Princess House, the Cossack captain peering around, looking at the lake and the houses. It looked as if he was trying to see who fired the shot. I could not see anyone else.
One second later, a man opened my bedroom door. I had not seen him before. He was an Army General, and he seemed very alarmed. He said ‘I heard a shot. Are you all right, Tsarevitch Alexei?’
I said ‘Of course. But I heard the shot too.’ He told me not to lie down, to not worry, and most of all not to look out of the window.
A few minutes later, exactly the same thing happened again! There was no shot, but a different man came into my room to check if I was all right. But this one wasn’t in the Army. He looked like one of the servants, but I’ve never seen him before. He was shaking and seemed very nervous. After a while, he went away.
July 30th – I can tell from what the grown-ups are all saying to each other that someone was shot yesterday. No-one will talk to me about it. I haven’t seen Nestor, who is the one grown-up who would tell me truthfully what has happened.
But I know the truth already. The person who was shot is Svea, and she is dead.
Mother has said we are leaving today and going back to St Petersburg. I asked about Nestor. But Mother said ‘Tutor Nestor doesn’t work for us anymore.’ I asked and asked, but that is all she would say.
We are getting on the Imperial Train now, so I will finish up my Diary here and send it to you.
Below the prince’s signature is another sketch, this time of a woman standing by the shore of a lake. Emily points to it.
“So that’s Alexei’s impression of Svea Håkansson… are there any clues in that drawing about her?”
We all look carefully at the sketch, but there’s nothing remarkable in the figure, the clothes or the setting. After a minute, Yuri looks up. “If this little picture has secrets, it is not revealing them to us. Better to think about the content of the letter.”
I read it out again, and Yuri sighs. “It doesn’t tell us anything we don’t know. But well done for finding it, Agnes—”
“I disagree, Yuri. On the contrary, Alexei’s letter tells us something extremely important.”
Yuri and Emily look at me in surprise. I carry on.
“Alexei wrote one of his July 29 entries at four o’clock, when the events of the afternoon will have been very clear in his mind. He says that a man, who must be Aristarkhov, came into his room only seconds after he heard the gun. So Aristarkhov can’t have been down on the lake, or in any position where he could have fired a shot at Svea. This letter – it is Aristarkhov’s alibi.”
Emily nods, looking from me to Yuri. “And, the letter also describes where you were when the shot was fired. It says you were in Rasputin’s house on the lake. So the letter is your alibi too, Yuri.”
15
Footsteps in Red Square
Emily and I are browsing the markets of Moscow’s Red Square, just like regular tourists. There’s nothing else we can do this afternoon. This morning, she and I went to the American consulate to inform them that we’re in the city, and tell them what has happened to us. Emily also told them about how she was taken by the Bolsheviks from her flat in the middle of the night. She explained that her belongings have been sent to her at the Metropole, but her passport is missing.
The staff at the consulate took detailed notes, and advised us to co-operate with the authorities’ inquiries. At that point Emily started arguing: how could we co-operate with the Bolsheviks, if they’ve not told us what their inquiry is about?
The man at the desk must have already seen other American citizens in the same position as us. He explained patiently that our situation isn’t unusual, and that in all likelihood in a day or two there will be profuse apologies, we’ll be told we are free, and that we can choose to either return to St Petersburg or travel back to the States.
Either choice would certainly be an easy option in terms of cost. I gasped when I went to the desk last night and found out what my ‘allowance’ is – a small fortune. The Bolsheviks are clearly afraid of upsetting Emily and me, or the consulate, and are throwing money at us.
“This is nice, Agnes. Do you think would suit me?” Emily is standing in front of one of the market stalls; she holds up a beautiful silk scarf. It must have been shipped from some exotic part of the Russian Empire, thousands of miles to the east.
“Emily, why are you a communist?”
“Good question!” She puts the scarf down, and looks at me.
“I must admit, when I was young, I just took things for granted. I never wondered about how unequal society is. Across the tracks, there was a whole town of black people, but it was somewhere I never went.”
“I grew up in a small New England town, Emily. So I never saw that kind of thing. It made me sad, when I started to get older and realised how unfair life is for most people. But it never occurred to me that a revolution was the way to solve things.”
“I think part of what made me a rebel, Emily, comes from deep inside. From my upbringing. My childhood wasn’t happy. My father was a successful attorney – and a drunkard. When I got older, I was glad to get out, to get away as far as I could. I was thrilled, the day I caught that train and went away to college. Ma came to the station with me, and I could see in her face, she was wishing me a better life than she had had. But Pa never even bothered to come to the station.”
“I’m sorry to hear that. I’m still close to my Ma and Pa; I write to them often.”
“Happy families, eh?” Emily poses, holding the scarf against her neck, then passes it to the man behind the stall. “How much?”
“Five roubles.”
“I’ll give you three… Then, Agnes, at college I was involved in putting on a Russian play. Maxim Gorky’s ‘Lower Depths’. I played a character called Natasha who is surrounded by drunks and no-hopers. I realised that there was only one difference between my own family and the down-and-outs in the play. We had money: they didn’t.
It made me wake up to my own privilege – and the injustice of society all around me. So I began to correspond with socialist writers and thinkers. Which led to me writing pieces for left-wing newspapers. After completing my studies, I published my doctorate paper on Russian writers, and since then I’ve written a string of scholarly books and articles. Over the last few years, I’ve become a respected academic. But all the time, I also carried on writing about socialism and communism.
A newspaper called Red Dawn funded me on a reporting mission. Of course, I used a pseudonym for my writings – to protect me, and all the men I interviewed. I spent two years travelling around Colorado, Utah and Nevada, talking to miners about their working conditions, sometimes even going into the places they worked in. They faced – they still face – appalling danger and hardship. Meanwhile, all the profits go to shareholders in New York who’ve never seen a mine in their lives.”
She turns to the stallholder. “Okay, four roubles. My final offer.” He nods; she carries on talking to me.
“Through my work with the miners, I got involved with the Wobblies. They are fighting for something much bigger: worldwide socialism, and equality for all. All workers of the world should unite and rise up against the capitalists. Businesses should be owned by the workers, not by the bosses, Agnes. Injustice and poverty must end. I’ve even written lyrics about it, for the Wobblies’ Little Red Songbook.”