“By God, you will do your utmost!” Adam shouted, now on his feet and pushing his face against the wire barricade. “I am innocent, Morley. You know it, and you’ll prove it, or I’ll-”
A guard emerged out of the darkness behind him. “Here,” he said severely. “We can’t ’ave this.” He seized Adam by the collar of his prison shirt and yanked him backward. “This interview is done. Back to yer cell wi’ ye.”
Morley straightened his lapels, as if he had been physically assaulted. “I will do my utmost,” he said, speaking with gravely offended dignity. “In the meantime, sir, I most heartily counsel you to pray. You should depend not upon the power of earthly men, who must all certainly fall short of perfection, but upon the mercy of the Almighty. You must-” The rest, thankfully, was lost in the clanging of the cage door and the vituperative mutterings of the guard as he roughly escorted Adam down the passageway and back to the prison block.
A few minutes later, Adam was alone in the damp darkness of his cell, sitting on the wooden plank that served as a bed, his face in his hands, thinking despairingly of what Morley had told him.
He had been seized in the Anarchist newspaper where the Hyde Park bomber had been employed, in the company of the bomber’s comrades. Some sort of bomb had been discovered in his rooms, and he had been charged with the possession of explosives. In the current climate, in the after-math of what must have been a plot to assassinate the King, such a charge was tantamount to a charge of treason. Furthermore, his persecutors would draw no distinction between an Anarchist and a trade unionist; both would be tarred alike with the same awful brush. And that incompetent fool of a solicitor, who believed the police lies, would be of no help at all. He had been given a certain ticket to doom.
And he was not the only one. In a cell down the passageway sat Ivan, and some little distance away, Pierre. No doubt explosives had been found in their rooms, as well, and they were charged as he was. When they came to court, they would all three share the same miserable fate.
And this was not the only thing that tore at Adam’s heart. Somewhere out there in the great, gray inhospitable city was Lottie, alone, a fugitive from the police. She couldn’t go home to her mother, or to any of her comrades, for no doubt the police had planted spies at every place she was known to frequent. Where would she go? How would she survive? Adam shivered as he thought of the ugly things that could happen to a woman, the terrible things that happened every day to women who were alone and undefended on the streets of London.
But then he took heart, and smiled a little. He could not believe that Lottie would allow herself to become a victim. She was far too clever and too resourceful to come to serious harm, and he wouldn’t be surprised if she was even now attempting to find a way to help him. The image of her dark, dancing eyes, the dazzling impudence of her smile, seemed almost to lighten the darkness of his cell. He had no idea how she had managed to escape from her little loft office-across the roof perhaps, although that seemed impossible. But Lottie was never constrained by what others considered impossible. Lottie had the heart of a man, and the courage of a man, and a man’s daring.
And the body and soul of a woman, he thought with a little smile. He lay back on the wooden plank and let himself dream of Lottie.
A few paces down the passageway, Ivan Kopinski was also lying on his wooden plank. Jails were not new to him, and he had long ago learned that a man who exercised both his body and his mind during his imprisonment was far likelier to survive it than one who did not. Consequently, he allocated his time, alternately, between stretching exercises and running in place, and mental exercise. Just now, he was rigorously reviewing a certain period of his past, casting his mind month by month over the five years he had spent studying the writings and work of his mentor, Prince Peter Kropotkin. He found that he could name all of Kropotkin’s many writings, in the order of their publication, and could mentally compose a brief synopsis of each, including its major arguments. He could also recall where he had been when he read these, and what he had been doing, and how they had changed his thinking. It was an excellent exertion, and he smiled with satisfaction. During his next period of mental exercise, he would review the works of Bakunin, another of his teachers.
Ivan had lived in France while he was studying Kropotkin’s work. He had been employed as a printer’s apprentice and had spent all his spare time perusing Anarchist books and pamphlets with the passion of a zealot-and a zealot he was. As a very young man, Ivan had been seized by the Russian police for refusing to serve in the Czar’s army; imprisoned, he had refused to recognize the authority of his judges and jailers, and had been brutally beaten for his resolute nay-saying. The way out of prison had involved taking as hostage Georgi Fedorov-an important official, the son of Princess Fedorovna and the nephew of Grand Duke Gerasimov, a favorite of the Czar-and when Fedorov was shot by prison guards during the escape, a price was laid on Ivan’s head. He had fled to his village for a last farewell before leaving Russia forever, but there he discovered that his parents had been brutally executed by the police, in retribution for their son’s escape. Until then, he had been genuinely remorseful at Fedorov’s death, but this pitiless murder of innocents hardened him. There was nothing left for Ivan, as there was nothing left for so many dispossessed, dispersed Russians, but to stoke the flaming fires of hatred in his heart and vow to find a way to bring down the hated regime of the Czar.
And Anarchism seemed to offer that way. Living on his luck and by his wits in some of the filthiest slums of Paris, Munich, and Brussels, he had met many other comrades who shared his passionate views, his hatred of corrupt regimes, his fury at the ruling class. And at last, he met Kropotkin, a Russian nobleman who had repudiated rank and riches and become an uncompromising apostle of the necessity of violence as a means of destroying the old world and clearing the way for the new. This should be done, Kropotkin urged, “by speech and written word, by dagger, gun, and dynamite,” and when the revolution had come (Kropotkin calculated that it would take no more than three to five years), all governments would be destroyed, and all property would become the property of all the people. Each person would draw upon the community warehouses for food and goods according to his needs, and each person would work according to his talents, for the good of all. In such a world, there would be no greed, no oppression, no slums, no prisons-and no murder of innocents.
Ivan’s hungry soul had been fed by Kropotkin’s shining, inspiring dream. He knew that he was strong and dedicated enough to answer the stirring summons to “men of courage willing not only to speak but to act, men who prefer prison, exile, and death to a life that contradicts their principles.” These men of courage-and Ivan knew that he was one-would make up the advance guard of the revolution, prepared to act long before the masses were awake to the possibility of a new future. Men of strength like himself and Pierre and even Adam (although he was a trade unionist, and a reformer, and not an Anarchist). Women of strength, like Lottie, lovely Lottie, whom Ivan would have loved with all the fierce passion of his Slavic soul, had he allowed himself to do so. Lottie, whose mischievous smile and gay laugh so belied her firm will, her dedication to all that was right and just and noble. And then there was Yuri.
Still on his back, Ivan raised his right leg and began to flex it rhythmically. It was ironic, wasn’t it? He had considered himself in the advance guard, laboring to spread the Anarchist word through the pages of the Clarion, when all the time, unbeknownst to anyone, Yuri Messenko-affectionate, gentle, Yuri, a boy to whom no one had paid any special regard-had been plotting a revolutionary deed so bravely violent and so startlingly audacious as to bring credit to them all.