He pictures the spider Maximov at home, his three daughters fussing about him, stroking him with their claws, hissing softly, and against him too feels the acutest resentment.

He has been hoping for a speedy answer from Apollon Maykov; but the concierge is adamant that there has been no message.

'Are you sure my letter was delivered?'

'Don't ask me, ask the boy who took it.'

He tries to find the boy, but no one knows where he is.

Should he write again? If the first appeal reached Maykov and was ignored, will a second appeal not seem abject? He is not yet a beggar. Yet the unpleasant truth is, he is living from day to day on Anna Sergeyevna's charity. Nor can he expect his presence in Petersburg to remain unremarked much longer. The news will get around, if it has not already, and when it does, any of half a dozen creditors could initiate proceedings to have him restrained. His pennilessness would not protect him: a creditor might easily reckon that, in the last resort, his wife or his wife's family or even his writer-colleagues would raise the money to save him from disgrace.

All the more reason, then, to get out of Petersburg! He must recover his passport; if that fails, he must risk travelling on Isaev's papers again.

He has promised Anna Sergeyevna to look in on the sick child. He finds the curtain across the alcove open and Matryona sitting up in bed.

'How are you feeling?' he asks.

She gives no reply, absorbed in her own thoughts.

He comes nearer, puts a hand to her forehead. There are hectic spots on her cheeks, her breathing is shallow, but there is no fever.

'Fyodor Mikhailovich,' she says, speaking slowly and without looking at him, 'does it hurt to die?'

He is surprised at the direction her brooding has taken. 'My dear Matryosha,' he says, 'you are not going to die! Lie down, have a nap, and you will wake up feeling better. In just a few days you will be back at school – you heard what the doctor said.'

But even while he speaks she is shaking her head. 'I don't mean me,' she says. 'Does it hurt – you know -when a person dies?'

Now he knows she is serious. 'At the moment?'

'Yes. Not when you are completely dead, but just before that.'

'When you know you are dead?' 'Yes.'

He is overcome with gratitude. For days she has been closing herself off to him, retreating into obtuseness and childishness, indulging her resentments, refusing him the precious memory of Pavel she bears within her. Now she has become herself again.

'Animals don't find it hard to die,' he says gently. 'Perhaps we should take our lesson from them. Perhaps that is why they are with us here on earth – to show us that living and dying are not as hard as we think.'

He pauses, then tries again.

'What frightens us most about dying isn't the pain. It is the fear that we must leave behind those who love us and travel alone. But that is not so, it is simply not so. When we die, we carry our loved ones with us in our breast. So Pavel carried you with him when he died, and he carried me, and your mother. He still carries all of us. Pavel is not alone.'

Still with a sluggish, abstracted air, she says: 'I wasn't thinking of Pavel.'

He is unsettled, he does not understand; but a moment more has to pass before he can appreciate how comprehensively he does not understand.

'Who are you thinking of then?'

'Of the girl who was here on Saturday.'

'I don't know which girl you mean.'

'Sergei Gennadevich's friend.'

'The Finnish girl? You mean because the police brought her? You mustn't lie here worrying about that!' He takes her hand in his and pats it reassuringly. 'Nobody is going to die! The police don't kill people! They will send her back to Karelia, that is all. At worst they will keep her in prison for a while.'

She withdraws her hand and turns her face to the wall. It begins to dawn on him that even now, perhaps, he does not understand; that she may not be asking to be reassured, to be relieved of childish fears – may, in fact, in a roundabout way, be trying to tell him something he does not know.

'Are you afraid she is going to be executed? Is that what you are afraid of? Because of something you know she has done?'

She shakes her head.

'Then you must tell me. I can't guess any further.'

'They have all taken a vow they will never be captured. They vow they will kill themselves first.'

'It's easy to take vows, Matryosha, much harder to keep them, particularly when your friends have deserted you and you are all by yourself. Life is precious, she is right to hold on to it, you mustn't blame her.'

She ruminates again for a while, fiddling abstractedly with the bedsheets. When she speaks, she does so in a murmur, and with her head bent, so that he can barely catch the words: 'I gave her poison.'

'You gave her what?'

She brushes her hair aside, and he sees what she has been hiding: the slightest of smiles.

'Poison,' she says, just as softly. 'Does poison hurt?'

'And how did you do that?' he asks, marking time while his mind races.

'When I gave her the bread. No one saw it.'

He remembers the scene that had affected him so strangely: the old-fashioned curtsy, the offering of food to the prisoner.

'Did she know?' he whispers, his mouth dry.

'Yes.'

'Are you sure? Are you sure she knew what it was?'

She nods. And, recalling now how wooden, how ungrateful the Finn seemed at that moment, he cannot doubt her.

'But how did you lay your hands on poison?'

'Sergei Gennadevich left it for her.'

'What else did he leave?'

'The flag.'

'The flag and what else?'

'Some other things. He asked me to look after them.'

'Show me.'

The child clambers out of bed, kneels, gropes among the bedsprings, and comes up with a canvas-wrapped parcel. He opens it on the bed. An American pistol and cartridges. Some leaflets. A little cotton purse with a long drawstring.

'The poison is in there,' says Matryona.

He loosens the drawstring and pours the contents out: three glass capsules containing a fine green powder.

'This is what you gave her?'

She nods. 'She was supposed to have one around her neck, but she didn't.' Deftly she slips the drawstring around her own neck, so that the purse hangs between her breasts like a medallion. 'If she had had it they wouldn't have caught her.'

'So you gave her one of these.'

'She wanted it for her vow. She would do anything for Sergei Gennadevich.'

'Perhaps. That is what Sergei Gennadevich says, at any rate. Still, if you had not given her the poison it would have been easier for her not to keep the promise to Sergei Gennadevich that is so particularly hard to keep – wouldn't it?'

She wrinkles her nose in an expression he has come to recognize: she is being pushed into a corner and does not like it. Nevertheless, he goes on.

'Don't you think that Sergei Gennadevich deals out death rather too freely? Do you remember the beggar who was killed? Sergei Gennadevich did that, or told someone else to do it, and that person obeyed, just as you have obeyed.'

She wrinkles her nose again. 'Why? Why did he want to kill him?'

'To send a message into the world, I suppose – that he, Sergei Gennadevich Nechaev, is a man not to be trifled with. Or to test whether the person he ordered to do the killing would obey him. I don't know. I can't see into his heart, and I no longer want to.'

Matryona thinks awhile. 'I didn't like him,' she says at last. 'He stank of fish.'

He gives her an unblinking stare, which she candidly returns.

'But you like Sergei Gennadevich.'

Tes.'

What he means to ask, what he cannot bring himself to ask, is: Do you love him? Would you too do anything for him? But she understands his meaning perfecdy well, and has given him his answer. So that there is really only one question left to ask: 'More than Pavel?'