Castlereagh was British, and the British were always more astute in war than in peace. They maintained their own peace by allowing Europe to be at war. Aleksandr had beaten him – beaten Britain – on that. There had been peace now in Europe for ten years, and there was no prospect of it breaking down – all thanks to Aleksandr’s Holy Alliance. Metternich had played his role, but only as a broker. To make peace one had to be capable of war, and Austria, even with Metternich as her chancellor, had little strength in that direction when compared with Russia.
For it was war that had proved Aleksandr to be the only man capable of bringing peace. It was Russia that had turned the tide of Bonaparte’s domination; Russia that had proved he was not invincible; Russia that had pursued him all the way back to France. Other armies had played their part, Aleksandr would happily concede that, but it was Russia – Aleksandr – that had led the way.
And yet they still belittled him. Years before Metternich had spoken, Aleksandr’s friend and advisor Speransky had expressed much the same sentiments. ‘Too feeble to reign and too strong to be governed.’ That had been the real reason Speransky had had to go. The most laughable thing was, they thought he would never hear. Scientia potentia est – knowledge is itself power. It was another thing Yekaterina had taught him. He had spies everywhere, who could report to him what anyone said – be they enemies or friends, foreigners or compatriots.
But Yekaterina had lacked one thing a truly great leader required – a devotion to God. Sure enough she worshipped Him, acted in His name, but she believed that the Lord was simply a judge within whose rules – at the boundaries of whose rules – she must operate. Aleksandr knew that God did not exist simply to be feared, but to be loved. It was Castlereagh, again overheard by an ear friendly to the tsar, who had noted it, though he meant it as a criticism: ‘The tsar’s mind has of late taken on a deeply religious tinge.’
It was an accurate observation – and one in which Aleksandr revelled. He had been mistaken in his youth. He had had a zeal to do right, but it had been misdirected. God’s will was not to overthrow the old order – to make serfs into princes – but to protect it; to make serfs prosper as serfs and princes thrive as princes, each knowing his place and doing good for the other. And peace was the foundation for that – an end to ‘the destruction that wasteth at noonday’, as the psalm put it. Aleksandr had achieved peace in a way his babushka never had, and that was what made him greater than she.
But would he yet prove himself to be greater than Tsar Pyotr, his great-great-grandfather? Time would tell – perhaps very little time. He had come to Taganrog to find it out, to face ‘the pestilence that walketh in darkness’. And yet he had been in Taganrog now for three weeks, with no sign of how the question was to be answered – with little sign of anything happening at all.
He glanced out to sea again. At least there there was some change. A new sail could be seen on the horizon. She was too small to be a barque – little more really than a large yacht. She was too far to see the name, or even the flag.
It was pleasant to have something to break the smooth horizon, and a single vessel sailing into harbour could do no harm – not to a man who could outsmart Metternich.
Even now, Aleksei felt a thrill as their eyes locked and did not separate for four, five, six seconds. As ever, it was he who looked away first, despite the pleasure he derived from the sensation of his heart beating faster and the flush of blood he felt to his face, and elsewhere. Why did he break away from her gaze? Was it simply out of some sense of gentlemanly etiquette – the idea he had been brought up with since birth that any woman of good breeding would feel ashamed to sense the eyes of a man on her for so prolonged a period of time? Possibly, but Aleksei knew Domnikiia well enough to understand that no such sense of shame would ever cross her mind in those circumstances.
And therein lay the attraction. To stare into Domnikiia’s eyes was to see no semblance of resistance, to see no veil of diffidence that said, ‘That part of me is not for you,’ or even ‘You must wait.’ Her eyes would yield and allow the gaze of a man to fall upon them almost as though at the same time she had stood up and slipped out of her gown, allowing those same eyes to meander over every curve of her still delectable body. Not that there was anything wrong with that, had they been in the privacy of their own bedroom, where he would have happily gawped at the reality of her nakedness for minutes on end and yet still returned his attention with inescapable frequency to her eyes.
But they were not shielded by privacy. They were sitting across from each other at a table in a teahouse off Tverskaya Street. Anyone who even glimpsed Domnikiia would instantly see her as the most desirable woman in the room. Anyone who saw Aleksei as he fell into those dark, wide, acquiescent eyes of hers would understand exactly what was going on between them, and might as well be sitting beside their bed as they made love.
As ever, Domnikiia could read his thoughts.
‘Do you think they know?’ she asked quietly. He glanced back at her. She was sipping her tea, but had not moved her eyes from him.
‘Who?’ he countered. ‘And for that matter, what?’
‘All these people.’ Her eyes left him only briefly to take in the rest of the clientele. ‘And what you’re thinking of doing to me.’
‘Planning on doing to you,’ corrected Aleksei.
She raised an eyebrow and sipped more of her tea. ‘Do I get a say?’ she asked.
It had been Aleksei’s idea that they should go out together. They didn’t often, in part because Domnikiia hated to leave Tamara, in part because they might be seen together by somebody who knew Marfa. But on this visit to Moscow, he had been so busy with Kyesha, and not with her, that he had looked for an opportunity to make amends. She had displayed no general envy of his time away from her – an occasional comment, perhaps, but as far as he perceived, those were intended more to tease than to rebuke. In that way, and in most others, she was almost perfect, or at least that version of perfection which Aleksei might have come up with if given a blank page to start from: beautiful, witty, irresistibly sensuous and, with all that, as it had turned out, a doting mother. There was just that one niggling cloud on the horizon, which threatened to fill the whole sky: the possibility that the entire thing was founded on a pack of lies.
‘Don’t you hate me sometimes?’ he asked. He had changed the subject, but apparently not her mood.
‘Constantly,’ she replied. ‘Any specific reason you want to focus on?’
‘For my absence.’
‘I could only hate you for your absence because I love you for your presence.’
‘You could love another man who was never absent.’
She paused. ‘Lyosha,’ she asked. ‘Have you made love to any other woman since we met?’
‘There’s Marfa, obviously,’ he mumbled.
‘I understand that,’ she said. ‘That’s marriage. But anyone else?’
Embarrassingly, Aleksei had to think. There had been several women in his life over the years, even since he and Marfa had married, but it was a case of going through them in his mind to see if any had been since he had first met Domnikiia – seen her, met her and screwed her, all within the space of about half an hour – back in late 1811.
‘You haven’t,’ she said, before he could reply, ‘and believe me, I’d know. But I’m glad you had to think about it, because that’s the point.’
‘Glad?’
‘Absolutely. Ask yourself why you haven’t. You never made any promise to me of your undying faith. And even if I found out, I’d probably let you get away with it – a couple of times.’