Oh, on Coronation Day, on Coronation Day,

We’ll have a spree, a jubilee, and shout Hip, hip, hooray.

For we’ll all be merry, drinking whiskey, wine, and sherry,

We’ll all be merrily drunk on Coronation Day.

Walking through Green Park, London came across an old man on a bench and asked him how he had liked the procession.

“’Ow did I like it?” the old man replied scornfully. “A bloody good chawnce, sez I to myself, for a sleep, wi’ all the coppers aw’y, so I turned into the corner there, along wi’ fifty others. But I couldn’t sleep, a-lyin’ there ’ungry an’ thinkin’ ’ow I’d worked all the years o’ my life an’ now ’ad no plyce to rest my ’ead; an’ the music comin’ to me, an’ the cheers an’ cannon, till I got almost a hanarchist an’ wanted to blow out the brains o’ the Lord Chamberlain.”

There were others who planned to attend the pageant and were, for various reasons, prevented. Perhaps the most notable of these was a certain Yuri Messenko, a tall, well-built young man, slightly stooped, with a fair complexion, a blond beard and moustache, and fervent eyes. Wearing an old black woolen overcoat with a frayed velvet collar and carrying a satchel, he was striding swiftly through Hyde Park in the direction of Hyde Park Corner, beyond which lay Buckingham Palace, where crowds awaited the return of their newly-crowned King.

Hyde Park occupies 615 acres taken by Henry VIII from Westminster Abbey, to use as his hunting grounds. It was opened to the public in the seventeenth century, and it quickly became a popular site for horse-racing, duels, games, and fairs. By the mid-nineteenth century, it was also the site of gatherings of dissenters of various stripes, with as many as 150,000 people thronging the Park to protest such things as the Sunday Trading Bill, the high price of food, and the violation of the people’s rights, and to demand the right of access to the Park itself. After the riots there in the summer of 1866, Parliament began to debate the issue of free speech, and in 1872 set aside a space in the northeastern corner of the Park for the open expression of dissent. By now, the area around Speakers’ Corner was hallowed ground to Yuri Messenko and his comrades, and fiery orators cried their views on every subject, free of interference by the authorities, although they might be, and often were, hissed and booed by their audiences.

Ignoring the rain that dripped down his collar, Yuri smiled to himself at the thought of the heroic deed he was about to perform, with the assistance of a new friend named Rasnokov, who had helped him gather and assemble the materials. He, Yuri Messenko, was about to send King Edward of England to join the elite group that had gone before: the premier of Spain, Empress Elizabeth of Austria, King Umberto of Italy, and President McKinley of the United States, all four of whom had been assassinated in the past four years.

And who better than he? Yuri thought jubilantly. He had come to London from the slums of Manchester three years before, his father a Ukranian refugee who worked as a boot-maker, his English mother long since worn down by the twin devils of pregnancy and poverty. He had worked diligently, doing his part to keep the Anarchist Clarion alive and thriving, helping to print and distribute the newspaper throughout London, taking leaflets to meetings, and working among the filthy warrens of the poor, where a dozen hungry men, women, and children crowded together in a single fetid room, desperate for work, sickened by the unsanitary conditions, with no hope for a better future. Assassination was a moral response to the immoral institutions and governments that spawned such horrors.

Yuri glanced across the crowded park, but he did not see the many celebrants gathered there, or the heroic statue of Achilles, erected in honor of the Duke of Wellington and cast from cannon captured at Waterloo, where the Iron Duke had defeated the Emperor Napoleon. He did not see, either, the watchful man, thickset and wearing brown tweeds and a brown derby hat, who had followed him through the park since he had entered at Speakers’ Corner. Instead, he was gazing into a future when there would be no more coronations and no more emperors and dukes, when the yoke of capitalist oppression had been thrown off and the downtrodden peoples of the world had risen up, glorious and free.

Of course, Yuri did not work just for the Cause, although that was uppermost in his loyalties. He also worked for love, for the love of a female comrade named Charlotte Conway, who was the editor of the Clarion and, in everyone’s estimation, the most dedicated member of the group. As he strode purposefully through the Park, he thought with pleasure of the look on Lottie’s face when she learned that it had been he, Yuri, who had carried out this momentous work, who had rid the world of-

But Yuri Messenko did not finish his thought, or his task, either. He had barely reached Hyde Park Corner when it seemed that someone called his name. He turned, tripped over a stone, and pitched forward upon his satchel. Instantly, it exploded, the blast ripping Yuri into little pieces and scattering them across the ground, under the triumphant sword and victorious gaze of the bronze Achilles.

CHAPTER TWO

Charlotte Conway pulled the sheet of paper out of her typewriter, put it on the desk in front of her, and reached for her pencil to make revisions. It was nearly 10 A.M. on Wednesday morning, and she needed to finish the article-the story of Yuri Messenko’s funeral the day before-in time for Ivan to set up and print it. The Anarchist Clarion was scheduled to come out on Friday, although things were always in such chaos in the newspaper’s office that to get it out at all seemed a miracle.

Charlotte reached for a loose hairpin and pinned it through the mop of dark hair piled carelessly on top of her head. She had been astonished when she heard what had happened in Hyde Park on the previous Saturday. She had not known Yuri especially well-no better, that is, than she knew Ivan and Pierre, who also worked for the Clarion, or any of the other comrades in their Hampstead Road cell. Since the upheavals in Spain and France, attendance at meetings had been irregular and people kept to themselves, fearing that they might be turned in by one of the police spies that swarmed everywhere. But the Yuri who had run errands and helped Ivan with the press had seemed far more idealistic than militant, and while he might not have been very bright, he had always seemed much more interested in changing people’s lives for the better than in blowing things up. But one never knew what lay hidden in another’s heart. Obviously, there had been a streak of dark violence somewhere within Yuri’s depths that she had never glimpsed.

Charlotte took out a cigarette, lit it, and leaned back in the rickety wooden chair, turning to glance out the grimy dormer window of the loft she used for her office, overlooking Hampstead Road. If those who had encouraged the boy-and she felt sure that trusting, dim-witted Yuri had not conceived or carried out the plot on his own-had imagined that an explosion on Coronation Day would encourage the workers to rise up against the rich and powerful, they had been very wrong. Two days after Yuri’s death, The Times had written, “Everywhere, the Anarchists are hated. To step out on the street is to encounter a storm of abuse heaped on Anarchist heads. Terrorism is not the way to a brave new world, and those who practice it only damage themselves and their cause.”