The Killing of Anna Karenina

  THE KILLING

  OF

  ANNA

  KARENINA

  Richard Freeborn

  Contents

  Title Page

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  Epilogue

  Also by Richard Freeborn

  Copyright

  1

  This was no Russian landscape.

  This was England.

  A blue-green stretch of river water. Slabs of sunlight. Butterflies like dry snowflakes blowing horizontally into his eyes.

  And then his momentum increasing down the steep narrow lane.

  He was going faster, faster.

  Suddenly he saw something. In the corner of his eye.

  He felt himself lifted into an exultant new dimension of speed that scattered blues and greens in all directions. The bicycle’s front wheel spun upwards and hurled him violently forwards in a little earth-bound parabola – lightly, wantonly, effortlessly, in a beautiful moment of ecstasy, as only a Russian prince could experience it.

  Then the ground punched him rudely in the mouth, split his lip and a pain shot up his left side. He slithered some way through thick grass on his left arm and came to rest on his back looking up at the curving branches of a willow.

  At once he did what he had learned to do as a young officer in the last war against the Turks. He ran his uninjured right hand over the parts of his body he could reach in order to isolate the pain. His left arm was bleeding, of course, and his shirtsleeve was ripped. He tasted blood, his fingertips were wet with it, but the really sharp and scarcely endurable pain for the moment came from his left side where he had hit the ground hardest.

  A cracked rib? He couldn’t be sure.

  He lay where he was and waited.

  He waited for the new pain to subside or the pain of his old war wound to return as it often did, but it didn’t, so he lay still for a few moments. Closing his eyes, it struck him as particularly odd that some kind of metallic insect was close by, until he realised it was his watch ticking in his waistcoat pocket. Relieved to find it undamaged, he pulled it out and snapped open the lid. Three-thirty.

  Mid-afternoon. Right. He raised himself. The pain thrust him back instantly as if it had slapped him. For some moments he could scarcely breathe. Then he forced himself almost upright again onto his right elbow. He was lying beside a river. All he could see through a line of reeds were birds continually swooping over the water’s surface and half-a-dozen cows standing in tree shade by the far bank.

  Tranquil, English, poetic, rural. Wordsworth’s “sylvan Wye” bathed in the heat of a summer afternoon. What an irony that he should have pedalled all day to reach it, only to fall off his Rudge Explorer at the last moment! But that was a fact: his bicycle lay on its side, bent and unusable, except that his leather-bound water bottle was still sticking out of the bag strapped to the luggage rack. It was close enough to be reached. He inched painfully towards it, unscrewed the cap and took several sips.

  The liquid tasted delicious. Laced with a little brandy, the water had a reviving, uplifting freshness despite being lukewarm. He replaced the bottle and drew himself slowly back into the shade of the willow. At that point he must have fainted.

  He only remembered sliding back against the trunk of the willow before everything changed, “melted into air, into thin air, and like the baseless fabric…” Of what? Of what sort of baseless fabric? Oh, he couldn’t remember! Shakespeare again! He was continuously remembering lines from Shakespeare and then forgetting them! Instead, he was running towards the Turkish lines. To left and right of him, in slow-motion unreeling of a spool of memory, men one by one either fell slowly or slowly raised their arms in mortal agony, their cries as weird and shrill as the grimacing shadows through which he ran. Then as if floating, not flying, the butterfly bullets came at them from the Turkish redoubts with the very slow motion of snowflakes idling their way through clear summer air. Somewhere a scream broke through the rush of air and flashes of sunlight. He knew he had been hit. He awoke suddenly to an awareness of sweat pouring out of his hair and running into his eyes.

  Insects buzzed, water rippled, leaves rustled. Less distinct, hardly audible, perhaps imagined, were voices or cattle lowing. Otherwise a universal hush seemed to engulf the whole of nature.

  Then it was all destroyed like a stone thrown through a windowpane. The shrill noise of a train whistle suddenly cracked the silence to pieces.

  What startled him about it was not so much the sound as the added awareness of being where he was and seeing for the first time the blood running down his left forearm. He at once did what he should have done earlier. Tearing away the already torn shirtsleeve, he quickly devised a kind of tourniquet bandage by drawing the cloth tightly round the wound with the aid of his teeth. That effort as well as the sharp pain in his left ribcage convinced him he ought to stay where he was for the time being. He must give himself time to recover, he told himself. In any case, the low hanging willow branches provided shade and concealment while a gap in the nearby reeds gave a good view of the river.

  He was content to fantasise that here, right in front of him, was the poetic essence he had been searching for, the essence, that is to say, of England at its most bucolic and beautiful. As for the train whistle, it was consoling to think that civilisation could only be a short distance away. His bicycle being broken, he would have to go back to London as soon as possible. In the meantime, he allowed himself the luxury of watching the vista of river water sparkle in the sunshine.

  It was so long what he had wanted to experience, the ultimate insight into what English poetry celebrated, the true pantheistic meaning of Wordsworth’s poem about Tintern Abbey and the “sylvan Wye”. True, it was sylvan, tree-lined, that is to say, shady along its banks, sun-flecked in the unshaded midstream and a metaphor for life itself in its slow, endless flow. Until, that is, a movement near the far bank attracted his attention. A white figure looking exactly like a ghost was standing in shallow water, its whiteness accentuated by the deep shade of the overhanging trees. To see a ghost on a hot summer afternoon was certainly surprising, but he was fond of reading English literature and there were all manner of ghosts scattered around English literature. He was quite content to believe he was seeing a ghost here on the banks of Wordsworth’s “sylvan Wye”.

  Even English ghosts, though, were unlikely to wear full-length white cotton pants and a white shirt. Nor would they be launching a rowing boat. This was exactly what this ghost was doing.

  Black-canopied, oar-less, the boat came slowly floating out of the jade depths of the trees. For a moment, startlingly, it seemed trapped like a fly in a magnifying glass in the full glare of sunshine falling on that area of open water.

  At that very moment the train whistle sounded again. Simultaneously the prolonged wailing of its echo seemed to be interrupted by a gunshot. There was no doubt about the gunshot, nor about the sound of a locomotive going at full speed. The chatter of train wheels punched gradually decreasing holes in the stillness. By that time the white figure had come out into the sunlight. It seemed about to scramble aboard the boat when there was a sudden cry of agony more piercing than the train whistle. A certain amount of hopping about in the water followed.

  He had been shot! The figure in white had been shot!

  It was the only possible conclusion. A Russian prince, used to Turkish gunfire, could only as
sume that the practically simultaneous sound of a train whistle, a gunshot and a piercing scream was no coincidence. He naturally raised himself to see more, but all he could see was the boat floating out into the river’s flow, still close to the far bank and apparently empty.

  A boat launched without oars would most likely be empty, of course, especially if the likely occupant had just been shot. On the other hand, its black canopy seemed to match another blackness. There was someone lying in it. Someone dressed in black. He drew himself almost upright despite the pain.

  Yes, peering above the reeds he saw quite clearly there was a figure dressed in black in the boat with a heavily veiled face propped up against a headboard. The sight was sombre and funereal in the brightness of the afternoon. The idea that it might be a corpse going downstream on a sort of waterborne catafalque was so appalling it came as a real relief to find the impression contradicted almost immediately. A modest fluttering of the tassels fringing the canopy seemed to be copied by a matching flicker in the blackness of the shaded interior. A hand emerged. Thin fingers stood out against the side of the boat.

  This looked like an appeal for help, except that it soon turned into an elegant gesture. Something was thrown in a ritual fashion on to the river’s surface. The prince saw it was a red rose. Gliding onwards, the black boat went gently downstream quite close to the far bank and the red rose floated behind it on the sunlit surface of the river water with the glistening brightness of a drop of fresh blood.

  Suddenly, to the prince’s astonishment, the figure in white reappeared, clearly dressed in long white pants and white shirt. He had evidently not been shot! He did not even seem to be seriously injured, because he was walking swiftly along the far bank beside the boat, evidently holding a rope or some kind of line to guide it. What is more, even more astonishing in the circumstances, the prince thought he heard words being called out he could understand – calls of encouragement, that is to say, instructions about what to do next. He could understand the words. They were in Russian, in a language a Russian prince would not have dreamed of hearing on the banks of Wordsworth’s “sylvan Wye”! Amazed, he sank back into a sitting position against the trunk of the willow. Soon, though, all calls were out of earshot, just as the black boat was out of sight. The former quiet descended.

  What had he just seen and heard?

  Dreamy images floated in front of him with the coloration and inconsequence of butterflies passing in and out of beams of sunlight. Then English poetry came to his aid once more. He was reminded of Shakespeare. The stately progress of the boat downriver brought to mind the lines describing Cleopatra’s barge –

  “The barge she sat in, like a burnished throne,

  Burned on the water” –

  The boat he had seen had indeed seemed to burn blackly on the water! No funereal catafalque, he was sure of that now. His imagination had run away with him. No, it was a black boat burning on the water, in itself, of course, a source of awe and wonder, at which surrounding nature and the very air itself had gone to gape, as Shakespeare had described it so vividly, and made “a gap in nature”.

  Yes, he had seen “a gap in nature”!

  A return of the breathtaking ache in his left side brought him sharply back to reality. No, if he could glimpse that rose on the water once again, he would know he hadn’t been dreaming. So he began climbing to his feet.

  At that moment he heard a jingling noise close by. Something was approaching. He flopped back against the tree.

  2

  ‘Ah! I saw your legs sticking out. So you’re hurt?’

  A man was looking at him through the willow fronds. Moist hazel eyes blinked and sandy eyebrows were raised anxiously in pink, clean-shaven, chubby features. An open collarless shirt, baggy shorts, bare knees and thick stockings contrasted with a middle-aged, well-bred voice and a military style peaked cap worn straight across the forehead. Just behind him stood a pony and trap.

  ‘Yes, I see what may have happened. You’ve hurt your mouth. And your arm. I say, I haven’t, er, have I? I’m most terribly sorry if I’ve… you know… Have I?’ The questioning could only produce a quandary of puzzlement and gratitude that was immediately succeeded by a change of tone when the speaker noticed the twisted bicycle frame. ‘Ah, yes, of course, of course, a nasty accident! I see now – your bicycle! Too bad, too bad!’ He seemed relieved to acknowledge that it was an accident. Simple understanding of the reason soon followed. ‘You’re a stranger to these parts, I imagine. You didn’t know how steep that lane was? I’m right, aren’t I?’

  ‘Yes, I fell.’

  ‘Oh, dear! Oh, dear! Are you, er?’ The bloodstained makeshift bandage was referred to. ‘Nothing untoward, I hope?’

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘Badly hurt or broken, I mean?’

  ‘I don’t think so. A bad, er… my rib, I think… I’ll be all right… in one moment.’

  ‘I thought it might have been… something worse. You may have heard a gunshot?’

  ‘Oh, I did, yes!’

  The hazel eyes gave one frowning glance and then blinked hastily in what appeared to be embarrassment at not observing the proper etiquette, gunshot or no gunshot.

  ‘Let me introduce myself. My name’s Holmcroft, Oswald Holmcroft. Glad to meet you.’

  A hand was offered out of politeness. A Russian prince would probably have disdained it in other circumstances. Now, though, it was a welcome aid in the effort of standing upright. What Oswald Holmcroft saw as he helped the stranger to his feet were deep-blue eyes, dark hair clinging in strands to damp temples, a straight nose in a handsome, manly face notable for long, pallid cheeks either side of a firm, frankly arrogant mouth.

  ‘I can see you’re…’

  There was a pause as he probably noticed that the torn shirtsleeve used as a tourniquet and bandage served merely to enhance the irreproachable upper-class good taste of white linen waistcoat and linen trousers of a quality entirely suited to the owner of a Rudge Explorer. Oswald Holmcroft went on briskly: ‘Yes, well, I can see your poor bicycle is, well, yes… I ought to explain I was shooting rabbits, you see. There are a couple there.’ He made a swift gesture towards the trap and then, to prove his readiness to be a Good Samaritan, added: ‘You’ll need medical help. Can you, er, get up there, do you think?’

  He indicated the fairly high step needed to get into the trap. To his surprise, he received a quite different response.

  ‘Did you see it?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I saw a boat… a black boat… Did you see it?’

  ‘A black boat? No. I can’t say I did.’ Quite justifiably the subject was changed. ‘I can see you’ve had a shock. Coming down that lane, so overgrown now. It used to be the way down to the old ford, you know. Here, let me help you up into my trap. Do you think you can manage it?’ The wilful overplaying of the Good Samaritan role seemed deliberately evasive. ‘There’s a good chap, let me…’

  The offer was waved aside. Natural arrogance led to a clenching of princely teeth and a determination to climb into the trap unaided. A handhold was reached. At the same time contact was made with the barrel of a sporting rifle. The metal was still suspiciously warm, either from the sun’s heat or recent use. A couple of dead rabbits lay beside it. Also on the floor of the trap was a long hooked object resembling a Bishop’s crozier. This had to be stepped over, causing the trap to jerk forward. The pony swished its tail somewhat indignantly.

  Both movements, especially the swishing of the tail, occurred virtually simultaneously and were more likely the result of Oswald Holmcroft lifting the twisted Rudge Explorer into a sort of luggage net attached to the back of the trap. He almost immediately sprang up into the trap and seated himself beside the prince. As he seized the reins, he asked blithely what the initials stood for – D R?

  The initials D R stamped on the leather bag strapped to the bicycle’s luggage rack had been noticed, the prince realised. Shame, not to say sheer reticence, always made him reluctant
to reveal his full name for the simple reason that it naturally invited a title and the title could hardly pass as normal in any but the most sophisticated of English venues.

  ‘So sorry. Forgetting my manners…’ The D, he admitted, stood for Dmitry.

  ‘Perhaps it would be a good thing if we introduced each other formally,’ said Oswald Holmcroft. ‘As I’ve told you, my name’s Oswald. Good to meet you, Dmitry.’ He held out his hand for a handshake and they shook hands. ‘My old trap won’t jar you, I hope. It’s got nice soft springs. Off we go!’ A light smack from the reins set them in motion to a jingling of harness bells. ‘And the “R”?’

  ‘Ros-tov. Prince Dmitry Nikolaevich Ros-tov. The last syllable is accented.’

  ‘Good heavens!’

  The surprise on hearing the name was so great the trap almost jerked to a halt. Oswald Holmcroft instantly apologised for distressing his companion but then quickly set the pony going again at a gentle walk.

  ‘Prince Rostov! What a very extraordinary thing!’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Well, Prince Rostov, I suppose you must be here for our soiree?’

  Our soiree? What on earth could that mean? The prince was used to sudden deference and indeed perhaps momentary confusion when people heard the title. Talk of a soiree was completely unexpected. He explained he had been on a bicycling holiday for the past week because his wife had had to return to Russia to look after a sick mother.

  ‘I was at a loose end’ (he emphasised the phrase in demonstration of the kind of apologetic, throwaway ease that he felt a true freeborn Englishman would make in explaining what he was doing there) ‘at a loose end, you see, I decided I would enjoy a holiday looking for…’ He licked his lips, tasted blood and added a little awkwardly that he was a great admirer of English poetry, feeling that his companion was unlikely to share his enthusiasm and might even regard it as eccentric. ‘Wordsworth, for example,’ he explained. ‘I was looking for Tintern… for his “sylvan Wye”.’