It was the best Richard could hope for. A direct yes he would have taken for a lie anyway. If Honoré didn’t keep up his end of the deal then Richard could always commit the deed himself and forget about the alibi. But Honoré was a member of the French aristocracy. Surely he’d have some sense of honour, as the name suggested.
Two weeks later the opportunity arose. It was after evensong one Sunday. As Thomas’s flock departed, one of their number, Mrs Tregaskis, suggested that Richard should join her and her family for dinner. Her intent was, and had been for some time, to pair off Richard with her daughter Beatrice. Richard had no interest in the girl, at first because of Susanna and now because of his hoped for departure to Oxford. But the circumstances were perfect. He explained to his father, who was quite happy to let him go. Everyone in the church saw father and son part, with the father in perfect health.
Then Richard slipped down to the crypt. He stood close to the iron gate and peered inside, holding his lantern high to penetrate the shadows, but saw no one. He turned the key in the heavy lock and swung it open. Still there was no sound and no movement from within. He took the key to the padlock that fastened Honoré’s chains and flung it into the darkness, listening to it clatter across the stone floor.
‘It’s tonight, Honoré,’ he said. ‘Thank you and adieu.’
‘Au revoir,’ came a voice from the shadows.
Richard turned away and as he did so the light of his lantern fell briefly upon what looked like a face, white like the full moon against the darkness. But it could not be – not that face. He looked again and it was gone.
He hurried back up to the church and departed in the Tregaskises’ carriage to enjoy a pleasant dinner at their house in Leatherhead. Soon after the meal he complained of an upset stomach and a feeling of light-headedness, with only a partial need to affect the symptoms after what he had seen. Mrs Tregaskis insisted that he should stay the night, while the glint in Beatrice’s eye suggested she thought this was some sort of ruse on his part. It was, but not to the end she had in mind.
He accepted their hospitality with the proviso that a boy be sent to Esher to inform the Reverend Cain of his son’s predicament. The lad was dispatched and Richard retired to bed. The sun had not risen when he was shaken from his sleep to be told the tragic, horrible news of his father’s murder. Not an ounce of suspicion fell on him.
After that the rest of the plan fell into place just as he had known it would. Lady Truslove happily gave him the funds he required – and a little more besides in consideration of the awful circumstances of his father’s death. Richard never knew precisely how awful those circumstances had been. He heard descriptions of the wounds; it was obvious that Honoré had done his duty and then, presumably, gone his merry way. But Richard never went down to the crypt again to check, out of fear for what he might find there.
And so, just after Michaelmas 1795, Richard Llywelyn Cain arrived at the College of the Holy and Undivided Trinity in the University of Oxford to begin the next stage of his education.
Honoré’s imprisonment, under Richard’s watchful eye, had lasted for two years, but in the end he had been able simply to walk free. In the Peter and Paul Fortress, Iuda planned to do the same, and was not prepared to wait nearly so long. But he would need help. There was only one man in Petersburg he could trust – and even then he had begun to fear that his trust might be misplaced.
He began to tap a message on the pipes, knowing it would be relayed across the fortress, transferred to some sentry or visitor who was able to walk freely out through the gates, and that soon it would be with its intended recipient. And soon after, Iuda would have a visitor.
CHAPTER XI
KONSTANTIN’S NOTE HAD been brief. ‘Take the 1.15 train. You will be met at Pavlovsk.’
The officer who met him there, a colonel of the Semyonovskiy Regiment, did not give his name, but escorted Mihail to a sled which took them from the station through