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‘Do you know what I reckon has happened to the Icon?’
‘No?’
‘I reckon they’ve sold it.’
‘Sold it!’
‘Yes. To fetch a rouble or two. For the Monastery.’
‘But I thought you said it was making them a lot of money?’
‘Yes, but she’s been here a long time. There comes a time when you want something fresh. Now, what I reckon is that they’ve sold her and very soon they’ll start saying: “Oh dear, the Old Lady’s gone for good. We’ll have to start looking around for something to go in her place.” And all the time they’ll have had their eye on something else, another icon maybe, or perhaps a holy relic, and they’ll get it and put it in here, and the pilgrims will start flocking, and they’ll say, “Ah, well, reckon it was for the best, after all.” It’s a business to them, you see, and that’s the way it is with business. Now you and I, Your Honour, may think we know a thing or two about business, but, believe me, we’re like newly hatched chicks compared with them. Sharp as knives and about as much feeling. They’ll have been looking on her as a carter looks on a horse: get what you can out of her and then get rid of her. So that’s what’s happened, I reckon. They’ve gone and sold her. Either that,’ said the carpenter with grim satisfaction, ‘or she’s seen it coming and bloody well walked out on them!’
‘So what are your impressions?’ asked the Father Superior, as they were walking across the yard to the sleigh.
‘Oh, mixed,’ said Dmitri. ‘Mixed.’
‘A monastery is like that,’ said the Father Superior fondly.
One of the pilgrims, a large man in peasant shirt and peasant boots, accosted them.
‘I don’t like it, Father!’ he said.
‘Don’t like what?’
‘This business of the Icon. If you ask me, it’s not accidental.’
‘What do you mean, it’s not accidental?’
‘I reckon it’s deliberate. Taking her away just when she’s needed.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘Well, I’ve come here all the way from Tula especially to ask her something and when I get here, she’s not here!’
‘You can ask some other icon, can’t you? We’ve got plenty.’
‘Ah, but she’s a bit different from other icons, isn’t she? She knows what it’s all about. She did something for people, didn’t she? When they were starving. Well, I come from Tula, and we couldn’t half do with her now, I can tell you, because we’re starving again!’
The Father Superior tried to push past.
‘Try some other icon. Or stay here for a day or two. We hope to have her back soon.’
‘I can’t stay here. Not for long, anyway. I’ve got a wife and children at home. My wife’s sick, otherwise she’d have come herself. “I can’t go, Ivan,” she said, “so you’ll have to. I know it’s not your way, but we’ve got to do something and I can’t think of anything else.” So I’ve come, even though it’s not my way. Besides, I thought the Old Girl might listen to me, she knows how it is for people like me. And now I’ve got here, she isn’t here!’
‘We’ll, I’m sorry about that,’ said the Father Superior. ‘We’re doing all we can. This gentleman here –’ he indicated Dmitri – ‘is from the Court House at Kursk and he’s going to look into the matter.’
‘Ah, but is he?’ said the peasant.
‘What do you mean?’ said Dmitri. ‘Am I?’
‘Beg pardon, Your Honour, but you people stick together. It might not be worth your while to look too closely.’
‘Why wouldn’t it be worth my while?’
‘Because they’re all in it together, Tsar, Church, Governor, all of them!’
‘You watch your words, my man!’ warned the Father Superior.
‘They’re not just my words, they’re what everyone is saying.’
The Father Superior turned on him.
‘Enough of that sort of talk! You go and find a Father and tell him I told you to have a few words with him!’
‘Well, I will: but that’s not going to bring me bread, is it?’
‘What you need is not bread but straightening out!’
Dmitri had an unusual feeling as the sleigh approached Kursk; he felt that he was returning to civilization. This was not how he usually felt about Kursk. Dmitri was all for the bright lights of St Petersburg; and light of any sort, in his view, had yet to reach Kursk. Nevertheless, as the sleigh drew up in front of the Court House, he felt a twinge of, well, not quite affection for the city, more the feeling that a sailor has when after long months he returns to the land. Kursk, though on the very edge, was at least on land; whereas the Monastery was very definitely at sea.
‘Oh, that icon business,’ said the Procurator dismissively when Dmitri went in to see him. ‘I wouldn’t spend too much time on that if I were you.’
Which accorded pretty well with Dmitri’s own intentions.
Boris Petrovich pushed a pile of papers towards him.
‘These have just come in,’ he said. ‘Will you take a look at them? I am going out to lunch.’
The Procurator was always going out to lunch.
‘In our position,’ he told Dmitri, ‘it is important to keep a finger on the social pulse.’
Vera Samsonova, the junior doctor at the local hospital, said she knew what that meant and that if Boris Petrovich tried putting his finger on her pulse again, she’d stick a syringe in him.
To Dmitri’s surprise, however, he himself was invited out to lunch. To his even greater surprise, the invitation came from the Governor, whom Dmitri had hitherto supposed to be entirely unaware of his existence.
‘Mr Kameron?’ said the tall dark girl standing beside him. ‘What sort of a name is that?’
‘Scottish,’ said Dmitri. ‘My great-great-grandfather came from Scotland.’
‘But how romantic!’ cried the girl.
‘Kameron?’ said the Governor’s wife. ‘Is that the Kamerons of Gorny Platok?’
‘Why, yes!’ said Dmitri, amazed that anyone had heard of the small farm where his grandfather presently resided. The estate had once been larger but successive generations of spendthrift Kamerons had sold off land until his grandfather had put his foot down and insisted that henceforth male Kamerons should work for a living.
‘Then we have something in common,’ said the Governor’s wife, giving Dmitri her arm and leading the way into lunch. ‘Our side of the family have always been gentlemen.’
‘But Mr Kameron no longer lives on his estate. Mother,’ said the tall dark girl. ‘He is a lawyer.’
‘Well one has to be something. I suppose.’
‘And how do you find the law, Mr Kameron?’ asked the dark girl.
‘It is at an interesting stage in Russia at the moment. Miss Mitkin. It could go either forward or backward. Until recently, as I’m sure you know, the only law we had was what the Tsar decreed.’
‘Well, isn’t that enough?’ said the Governor’s wife.
‘Not always. What if the Tsar himself does something wrong?’
‘But is that likely?’
‘Not the Tsar himself, perhaps; but what about those who serve him?’
‘The Government, you mean?’
‘Possibly.’
‘Governors?’ said the Governor.
‘Well –’
‘These are radical notions, Mr Kameron,’ said the Governor heavily.
‘Mr Kameron is, of course, very young,’ said the Governor’s wife.
‘But in touch with the new tone of the times, don’t you think?’ said her daughter.
‘Ah, the tone of the times!’ said the Governor’s wife, steering the conversation into safer channels.
After lunch the two women retired and the Governor led Dmitri into a pleasant room which seemed to serve as a second sitting room. Its walls were covered with icons.
‘Quite nice, aren’t they?’ said the Governor, seeing, and mistaking, Dmitri’s interest.
‘And some of them are not without value. They’re all domestic icons, of course. Not,’ he smiled, ‘like the Lady whose acquaintance you have recently been making.’
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‘Dmitri Alexandrovich,’ said the Governor in a fatherly tone, ‘– a little more cognac? – are you religious?’
The question caught Dmitri off guard. The fact was that this was a tricky point in the Kameron family. For generations the Kamerons, as loyal servants of the Tsar, had been members of the Orthodox Russian Church. Then with Dmitri’s grandfather the line had hiccuped. Awkward as always, he had announced that he had become a Freethinker, with the result that he had been dismissed from the Tsar’s service. His son, awkward, too, and determined, as all male Kamerons, to quarrel with his father, had conversely announced his return to the faith; only the faith that he had elected to return to was that of his Scottish ancestors. Since, however, there were no Presbyterian churches in Russia at the time, the genuineness of his return had not been able to be tested and while the Tsar’s officials were working this out he had been allowed to continue in the Tsar’s service and had been still serving at the time of his unfortunately early death. All this had left Dmitri in some difficulty as to his own position.
‘Well –’
‘My advice,’ said the Governor,’– another cognac? – is to leave unto God the things that are God’s and unto man the things that are man’s.’
‘Seems reasonable,’ said Dmitri.
‘That is what it says in the Bible. Or more or less. And I have always found it a sound maxim to follow. At least as far as the Russian Church is concerned.’
‘Good idea,’ said Dmitri. The last cognac had left him rather blurred.
‘I commend the principle to you as a good one to adopt. Especially in the case of the One-Legged Lady.’
‘But that’s just what has not happened!’ cried Dmitri. ‘Man has just walked in and helped himself to –’
‘I was not speaking of others,’ said the Governor, annoyed. ‘I was speaking of you.’
The haze descended again.
‘Of me? Oh, yes, well –’
‘And of the One-Legged Lady.’
The One-Legged Lady? Who the hell was she? It sounded intriguing. He must look her up some time. But, wait a minute –
‘The One-Legged Lady?’
‘Is no business of yours. It will only lead to trouble. You mark my words, Dmitri Alexandrovich, I have a nose for such things. You keep right out of it. Assume a wisdom if you have it not. That’s what the English poet, Shakespeare, says. Or more or less. Wise man, Shakespeare. What he doesn’t know about the Russian Church isn’t worth knowing. You keep right out of it. That’s my advice, Dmitri Alexandrovich. Keep right out of it.’
He had invited a few friends round that evening to celebrate his promotion to Assistant Procurator. Unfortunately, their congratulations fell short of the whole-hearted.
‘You’ve let them buy you off, Dmitri,’ said Vera Samsonova, never one to shrink from telling other people the truth about themselves.
‘The surprise is that you were prepared to let yourself go so cheaply,’ said Igor Stepanovich.
Dmitri fired up.
‘If you tried to sell yourself, you wouldn’t get an offer!’ he retorted.
It had been a hard decision on his return from Siberia whether to stay in state service or to try to pursue an independent career at the St Petersburg Bar.
‘But to agree to work for them!’ said Sonya reproachfully. ‘After all they’ve done!’
Sonya had recently returned from Europe, where she had drunk deep of the liberal notions that the little group of friends liked to meet regularly to discuss.
‘And you’ve said!’ put in Vera Samsonova.
‘If you want to improve them,’ said Dmitri, employing one of the arguments that Prince Dolgorukov had used to persuade him, ‘the best way is from the inside.’
‘If you want to improve your career,’ said Vera Samsonova nastily, ‘the best way is from the inside.’
The thought, it must be admitted, had crossed Dmitri’s own mind. It was all very well for the others to tell him to abandon his career in the State Prosecution Service and work for the greater good of mankind. The trouble was that mankind was unlikely to pay him; and if you were a young lawyer struggling to make your way in Tsarist Russia of the eighteen nineties, that was quite a consideration.
It was not that he was against working for the greater good: it was just that he wanted to eat while he was doing it. So when Prince Dolgorukov had approached him after that little business of the massacre at Tiumen, he had been willing to lend at least a quarter of an ear.
‘You will rise more quickly than most,’ the Prince had assured him. ‘A glittering career awaits you!’
