The Iskander Prophecy — Opening Chapters

May 1453, Constantinople

---

Swim like a dog. Behind him the dogs had reached the beach, their paws scrabbling on the shingle, the wet snap of their jaws in his discarded kaftan. Torches came down through the pines. A crossbow bolt whirred in the still air and skipped away over the water like a flung stone.

Faster.

The second bolt took him. It came in low and tore across the top of his shoulder, opening him from collarbone to blade, and the sea rushed into the wound like boiling milk. He gasped, and sank, and let the black water close over him. He hung there in the inky womb with his lungs screaming and counted, the way he had counted through the beatings.

When he rose the torches had stopped. The dogs still snarled, but only over the kaftan on the rocks, and the voices behind them had turned uncertain.

He rolled onto his back and lay still and let the current have him.

You were tested, Alexander. Keep the faith.

That was the other voice, the one that had spoken to him for three years in the quarry. It was gentle and it was merciless, and it never once said what they both knew: that when they had offered him the sword or the turban, he had taken the turban. He had knelt in the dust with the words in his mouth and said them, and the sun had gone on shining, and God had said nothing at all.

Salt water found the welts that striped his wrists and lit them up. He welcomed it. It was the taste of not being owned.

The stars stood over him in their familiar order, the same stars that wheeled above the Volkhov, above the monastery school where he had ruined three quires of good vellum learning to make his letters small. He had been eleven. The Holy Wisdom of Novgorod had five domes and he had believed, with the whole of his heart, that nothing on earth could be larger. Then he had taken the pilgrim road south to see the Holy Wisdom that was the mother of it, and the Turks had taken him on the road, and he had been three years carving stone.

He turned onto his front and began to swim.

The stone had been the making of him. Fourteen months of iron and dust and rough granite balls for the great bombard, and his scribe’s hands had gone to callus and his shoulders had thickened, and he had learned to listen. The Hungarian’s gun had to cool between rounds or the barrel would crack. Seven shots a day and no more, seven, and they were laying it against the middle wall by the Gate of Saint Romanus, where the ground fell away and the ditch ran shallow. Seven shots. If a man on those walls knew that, he knew when to stand up.

Two more miles. Nothing. You have carried worse.

Lights beckoned along the ramparts, small and yellow and impossibly far. He had to keep to the right and round the point below the Genoese town, and if he was swept past it the Marmara would take him, and out past the Hellespont, and by autumn some fisherman in the islands would haul up a foreigner’s bones.

His right arm was going. Each stroke opened the wound again and the cold went in after it, and he began to swim lopsided, dragging, the way a dog swims.

Acrid smoke drifted across the water. Gunpowder. Then, thin and high above it, the call of the muezzin — Allahu akbar, Allahu akbar — rolling out over the sea to summon the camp to the night prayer, summoning the men he had left behind in the pen: Grigor with the ruined foot, the two Serbs, the boy from Adrianople who cried in his sleep and let nobody speak of it. They would be kneeling now with their faces to the ground.

He choked on a mouthful of sea.

You could not have freed them. What you carry is worth more than they are.

He held that thought a long while, and found that he could not tell whether it had come from the gentle voice or from somewhere lower down, and he swam on with his teeth clenched to stop their chattering.

The current shifted. He felt it take him under the ribs and swing him, and he knew he was at the turning point, and he laughed out loud and swallowed more water.

Then something loomed. Iron clanked in the darkness.

The chain. Twenty paces of great timbers bolted together with iron plates, sheer-sided, stepping back above like a pyramid, and from the top of it the chain itself swept up and away through the stars towards the city — the fabled boom of the Golden Horn, that no fleet had ever broken. Beyond it another raft rode dim against the walls and towers.

You see? God has set a bridge across the water for you.

He clawed at the timber. It was slimed a foot thick and his fingers left four white lines and no more. The water sucked and slapped and shoved him along the side of it. To his right a thinner chain went down into the depths — a mooring, an anchor cable, something — and he lunged and got a hand to it, and a swell picked him up and drove him against the raft and pulled him under.

The shivers had him now. He came up thrashing, all technique gone, a drowning animal, and he found he had breath for one utterance only, and it was not a prayer for his own life.

‘Do not forsake her!’

The city. Constantine had seen an eagle carry a serpent up out of its nest above this water, and the serpent had coiled about the eagle and dragged it down, and the people had run out and killed the serpent and set the eagle free. The walls had never fallen. They would never fall.

A lantern swung out over a guard rail. Boots on planking. Two heads, black against the stars.

‘Chi va là?’

‘The Turks!’ the second said. ‘The Turks are on us—’

‘The Turks are at their prayers. That’s a man drowning.’ A rope’s end splashed down beside him. ‘Take it, friend, and hold it.’

He held it as close as a splinter of the true cross while they hauled him up the streaming timbers and let him down on the deck. He lay on his side with his cheek on the wet wood, feeling it hum where the great chain went through, and he understood that he had crossed to the other side of the world.

The lantern came down to him. A young face, Genoese, dark with the wind of the sea.

‘You’ve a name?’

He had a name. It had been said over him in cold water at the font of the Holy Wisdom of Novgorod. It was in his mouth and he opened his mouth to give it, and what came out was the name that three years in the quarry had made of it, the name the guards had put on him, the shape his own name took in their tongue.

‘They call me Iskander.’

July 1896, The High Court of Justice, London

---

They had queued along the Strand since seven for a seat, and by ten the public gallery smelled of hot wool, pomade, and appetite.

Leroux took a place at the back, on the aisle, where he could leave. Two rows down and to the right sat the press bench, a hedgerow of shoulders and notebooks, and among them at least four men who knew him by name and one who would want to buy him a drink and ask him what he had seen at Doornkop. He kept his hat in his lap and his eyes on the empty bench.

The woman beside him had brought sandwiches.

‘They say he’ll get off,’ she confided. ‘My husband says the Government daren’t try him properly. My husband is in Colonial Stock.’

‘Does he say why?’

‘Because of what he’d tell them.’ She said it comfortably, the way one relays the weather, and took out a paper of egg sandwiches, and offered him one. ‘Poor little man. He only wanted to help those English miners.’

On the cause list they had printed it Reg. v. Jameson, Willoughby and others, and in the newspapers it came out as R. Leroux had thought about that letter more than was healthy. Two years ago the Queen had pinned the Order of the Bath on Leander Starr Jameson’s breast.

Now she was R.

The prosecutor.

‘All rise.’

Wool and whalebone, four hundred people getting up at once, and the three judges of the trial at bar coming in slowly with the Lord Chief Justice in the middle. They bowed. The court bowed back. It was done without a word of command, the way the men on the veld had gone quiet before the wagons, and it frightened him more than any noise would have.

The defendants came up into the dock.

He had never set eyes on Jameson. He had ruined the man in the last week of December and had somehow never troubled to learn what he looked like, and here he was: a small neat gentleman in a dark frockcoat, spotless necktie, pale grey gloves, standing at the rail with his limbs crossed at the ankle as though waiting for a train. A high colour burned across the wide forehead. He was a man of giant reputation. He did not stand level with the chin of his own counsel.

Timing is everything, Leroux thought, as every lion and springbuck knows.

Jameson had pounced too early. Six hundred men across the Transvaal border, the miners of Johannesburg had not risen, and the reason they had not risen was sitting at the back of the public gallery with his hat in his lap.

He had done it with a telegraph key and a lie. It had cost the Boers nothing. It had cost the Empire a little pride, and Cecil Rhodes his premiership, and it had cost a girl in Johannesburg her life.

There were four hundred people in this room and not one of them had ever heard his name.

Rhodes had resigned in disgrace and had declined, courteously, to produce his cablegrams. The buck would pass no higher. It would stop here, at the rail, in the pale grey gloves.

Nobody had approached him. Not one of the defence counsel had written, or called, or sent a clerk; it was as though he did not exist, and in the ledgers of the Empire he supposed he did not. His evidence would embarrass the Colonial Office and it would not save Jameson. The Crown would not touch him for the first reason and the defence would not touch him for the second, and between the two of them they had made him into weather. Something that had happened at Doornkop. Better to let sleeping dogs lie.

The Lord Chief Justice began to speak, and Jameson bowed his head and gazed absently at the floor with his heavy lids drooping, and then, in the middle of a sentence about the Foreign Enlistment Act, he raised his eyes and looked directly up into the public gallery. At the back. On the aisle.

Leroux did not move.

The gaze rested on him for the length of one breath — mild, faintly puzzled, the look of a family physician who cannot quite place a face. Then it travelled on to the woman with the sandwiches, and to the man beyond her, and Jameson lowered his head again and studied the floor.

Nothing. It had been nothing.

Leroux found that his hands were flat on his thighs, and that he had been sitting for some seconds in the posture of a man about to run.

He does not know, he told himself. There is no possible way that he knows.

He waited a decent while, so as not to draw the eye, and went out.

The Strand was white with July. The crowd stood back from the gates to the roadway, four and five deep, women holding children up so that they might one day say they had been there, and as Leroux came down the steps a cheer went up from the far end and rolled towards him like surf. Someone had seen a shadow at a window. Hats went into the air. Good old Doctor Jim. Beside him a man was weeping frankly and without shame.

They would give him fifteen months, Leroux thought. They would give him Holloway, and the attire of an English gentleman would not help him there.

And when he came out they would carry him through these streets on their shoulders.

He settled his battered slouch hat on his head, tilted the brim against the sun, and walked east through the crowd, unrecognised and unrecognisable — the only man in London with any reason to feel guilty, and no one at all to say it to.

July 1896, Ottoman Armenia

---

The bell rang the eleventh hour and its echo came back off the far slope a moment later, the way it had done every hour for six hundred years.

Down in the valley the village lay along a stream, white stone under terracotta, the houses strung out below a church whose steeple tapered like Mount Ararat. Sheep in the meadows. Somewhere near the water a child screamed, and Zeki Pasha’s hand tightened on the reins before he understood that it was a scream of delight.

He looked away. Beside him a man sat a hardy mountain pony that was too small for him, and did not look away at all.

‘Do they know what they have done?’ Zeki said.

‘These people?’ The foreigner had his spyglass up. ‘No. But they will serve, nonetheless.’

Zeki’s fingers found the silver at his breast and turned it over, and he did not need to read the inscription on the back because he had read it a thousand times. For those who have shown exceptional loyalty and bravery to the Ottoman Empire. The Imtiyaz. He remembered the Sultan’s hands fastening it. He prayed that one day he would be able to remember this morning as dimly as he now remembered his childhood.

‘Your information is sound.’ He tried to make it a statement.

‘The name I gave you is a revolutionary.’ The glass did not move. ‘It is you who says he comes from here.’

They spoke French, as men did at the Porte when they preferred not to be understood by their own servants. Zeki watched the side of the man’s face and learned nothing from it. They were not friends. They were two men holding opposite ends of the same rope, and each of them knew it, and one of them was lying about which end he held.

The foreigner looked at his watch.

‘Now,’ he said.

Zeki lifted his hand and his attendant barked, and behind them a great red banner broke and cracked in the wind coming over the ridge. Below, a troop of light cavalry came up the road at a trot. Blue tunics edged with gold on the officers, sheepskin and striped broadcloth on the rest, and the swords already drawn and bright. At the far end of the village a second squadron closed the road to the pass.

‘The Hamidiye,’ the foreigner said. ‘Kurds. Will they do it?’

‘They will do as commanded.’

‘Will they talk?’

Zeki held his stare. ‘They face no punishment in law, so long as they obey the Sultan. And here my orders are the Sultan’s orders.’

‘Ha. So they do your dirty work.’

‘So they protect the eastern provinces from traitors.’

‘Touché,’ the foreigner said. There was no curve in his mouth.

Across the stream the horsemen came down between the rocks, and one hoof dislodged a stone that went bounding towards the water, clacking off the ancient boulders strewn over the slope, and it was the stone that did it. A man straightened in the meadow and shaded his eyes. He shouted. And the bell began.

It rang without measure, without hours, a hand hauling at it in terror, and the children came up from the stream and the old people came out of the doorways and gathered them, and the horsemen put their torches to the thatch and rode down the street driving everything before them like sheep. One man would not run. He stood in his loose shirt in the middle of the road, thin with age, and a scimitar came down out of the sun and he went over and the hooves closed over him.

‘It begins,’ Zeki said.

The people were pouring into the church.

‘How they bleat, flocking into the slaughterhouse.’ The foreigner collapsed his glass. ‘Why will they not fight? Does no man there wish to die with honour?’

‘I have always thought,’ Zeki said, ‘that there is one creature more contemptible than the executioner.’

‘And what is that?’

‘The victim.’

The foreigner laughed. He took out his pocket watch and pressed the stem, and the second hand jumped and began to sweep. ‘How long, would you say?’

‘Until the bell rings three.’

‘And who,’ the foreigner said, without looking up from the dial, ‘will ring the bell?’

Zeki opened his mouth and found nothing in it.

‘A good question,’ he said at last. ‘We shall see to it after lunch.’

He dismounted and gave the reins to his valet, and sat down at the trestle table where his attendant had set out the meal, and the foreigner folded himself onto the other stool with the watch face up beside his plate. The wind was blowing up the valley. It brought the smoke to them, and with the smoke a smell that Zeki had known since he was nineteen years old and had told himself, every time since, that he had grown used to.

They ate to the sound of screaming.

‘The Sultan is surrounded by jackals,’ Zeki said.

The foreigner glanced up, uncertain whether he had been addressed.

‘If he grants what the Armenians ask, every province in the Empire will ask the same, and the Europeans will divide what is left between them like a carcass. If he grants what the Europeans ask, then Christians will hold rights that Muslims do not, and his own people will pull him down.’ Zeki heard his own voice, level and reasonable, and it disgusted him. ‘It is better to make the problem go away.’

Had that sounded like a man who believed it? He did not know. He had rehearsed it in the saddle for two days and it had sounded better then.

The foreigner spat an olive stone onto the grass. ‘If an account of today should reach Europe, their politicians will be dragged by their own voters into demanding protection for the Christians. Such is the sickness of democracy.’ He speared a piece of lamb. ‘The less anyone knows, the better.’

‘For now,’ Zeki thought.

He chewed and could not swallow. Below, the church roof caught, and the flame ran along the ridge of it very fast, like something alive that had been waiting under the tiles.

‘They are better treated here than anywhere on earth,’ he said. ‘Why can they not accept it?’

‘That is why they must be crushed,’ the foreigner said, and watched.

‘The Sultan does not like to hear bad news.’

The man turned and looked at him for the first time since they had sat down, and drummed his fingers once on the board. ‘Then bring him none. How will you report it?’

Zeki had written it out three nights ago and burned the draft and written it again. Not finding any rebellion, we cleared the country, so that none should occur in the future.

‘Good,’ the foreigner said. ‘Let him know as little as possible. A man denies most convincingly what he does not know.’

‘The Sultan has spies everywhere.’

‘And you have been loyal, and truthful, and you performed a difficult duty with admirable efficiency, and you spared your master its details.’ The foreigner put a piece of bread in his mouth. ‘And if the worst should come, we will take care of you.’

Zeki looked down into the valley. Take care of. It could be said two ways in French as well.

The screaming had stopped some time ago. He could not say when.

When the looting began they rose and let the horses pick their own way down, and splashed through the cold water and up into the street.

The Hamidiye commander came to meet them, and saluted, and behind him the foreigner drew his sabre and let it hang low along his boot.

‘It is done, my Lord. But the men are uneasy.’

‘No witnesses?’

‘None.’ The Kurd would not look at him. He patted his horse’s neck instead. ‘My father was a bandit, and his father, and his. We have taken tribute from these people since before there were Turks in this country. They are cowardly dogs, but they work hard, and they recover, and they pay again.’ He held out a coin pouch, bulging, and Zeki sat still until his attendant hurried forward and took it. ‘To kill them all is bad business.’

‘It was necessary to send a message,’ Zeki said. ‘The Sultan wished it.’

The Kurd looked at the smoking street for a moment, at the shapes lying face down in the blood-black dust, and Zeki knew what the man was thinking, because he had been thinking it himself since the eleventh hour.

And who is to carry a message, when there is no one left to carry it?

‘As you command,’ the Kurd said. He wheeled his horse and rode to join the column climbing towards the pass with its wagons of grain and its driven cattle and its sacks of a village’s small treasures.

The foreigner rode on down the street alone, leaning from the saddle now and then to turn a body with the point of his sword. Zeki followed at a distance and did not look at what he turned.

At the church the big man stopped.

He sat and stared at the doorway a long time, and then up at the tower, where the bell hung black and silent and would not be rung again, and Zeki saw him take his hand off the rein as though he meant to cross himself, and put it back.

A roof went in somewhere behind them. Dust and sparks came boiling up between the houses and a gust of scorching air rolled over them, and the pony threw its head and shied, and the foreigner brought it round hard with one fist while the flames washed red along the flat of his lifted blade.

There was a wolf on the steel. It ran the whole length of it, head down, engraved, its long legs stretched in a gallop, and the fire ran with it.

The man got the pony under him. He sat listening. Nothing moved in the valley now but the flies, which had already found the dead.

‘What is it?’ Zeki said.

‘Nothing.’ The foreigner sheathed the wolf. ‘Someone walking on my grave.’

21st July 1896, Vienna

---

He had written to them four times.

Twice to the Foreign Office and twice to men whose names he had been given by men who no longer took his calls, and from London there had come no refusal, no acknowledgement, not so much as a printed slip. He had come to prefer the Rothschilds’ contempt. Contempt at least conceded that he existed.

Then, out of nothing, a note in a cramped hand. Come at three. I have been waiting for you longer than you know.

The stuccoed fronts of the Metternichgasse glowed in the afternoon sun. Above the door of Number 6 hung the flag of Great Britain and Ireland, and Theodor Herzl stood beneath it on the warm stone and waited for his breath to come back, which took longer than it should have, and which he did not choose to think about.

So they had read his letters.

He went in.

He laid his card on the desk and turned it round so that the clerk could read it the right way up. Neue Freie Presse — Feuilleton Editor. The clerk read it upside down anyway, and blinked once, and consulted his appointment book at length, and rose from his chair as a man rises from a warm bed on a cold morning.

‘Reverend Hechler,’ Herzl said. ‘He expects me.’

The staircase went up from the hall in a great slow spiral, wrought iron and gilt, and along the landing the doors of the staterooms stood ten feet high, greens and greys picked out in the panelling, chandeliers hanging in the well like frozen fountains. Herzl put his hand on the balustrade. Up there was a room in which men decided things. Up there, perhaps, an undersecretary had read four letters from Vienna and had said to some other man: this fellow is not a crank, we ought to see him.

The clerk went past the staircase.

He opened a plain door beneath it, and beyond that was a corridor with no carpet, and along the corridor was a row of anonymous doors, and behind each door as they passed it Herzl heard nothing at all. His heart went down with every one. At the last the clerk knocked, waited a moment out of some private ceremony, and put his head in.

‘A Mr Herzl. For you, Reverend.’

The room had no window. It was hot as a glasshouse and it smelled of dust, hot paper, glue, and mildew, and of a man who had been shut in it since morning. Books stood on every wall from floor to ceiling and lay in stacks on the floor and on the chair, and they were, so far as Herzl could see at a glance, all of them Bibles, or books about Bibles, or books about books about Bibles.

Behind a small desk in the middle of it sat a very small man in plain black, and he was bald on the crown and wore a prophet’s beard below, so that his head appeared to have been fixed upside down.

He rose. His scalp went pink.

‘You came!’ he said. ‘You came. Oh, we have so much to discuss.’

Herzl worked himself out of his frockcoat and found nowhere to put it and laid it across a tower of commentaries. The man must be fifty, he thought. Fifty, and still in a storeroom under the stairs. So it was not the Foreign Office who had written to him, and it was not the Ambassador, and nobody upstairs had read a word he sent.

He should have been in his own bed on the Pelikangasse. It was twenty minutes’ walk.

‘Reverend, I am afraid there has been a misunderstanding about the nature of— ’

‘Sit! No, not there, the Septuagint. Here.’ Hechler swept a chair clear with his forearm and turned a book round on the desk, opened already, held flat with a paperknife. He put his finger on the page. ‘Luke, chapter twenty-one, verse twenty-four. And Jerusalem shall be trodden down of the Gentiles, until the times of the Gentiles be fulfilled. Do you understand what that means?’

Herzl had been thirteen when he last sat with a text and a man’s finger on it. He looked at the words, and the man’s eyes searched his face, and he understood that some enormous thing was being placed in his hands and that he could not see the shape of it.

‘I think so,’ he said. ‘Go on.’

‘Until.’ Hechler struck the page. ‘Until, until. There is an hour appointed and it is not the Lord’s habit to be vague about hours. I have made all the calculations.’ He laid his palm flat on a folder as a man might lay it on a child’s head. ‘The times of the Gentiles end at Easter, in the year eighteen ninety-eight.’

‘Reverend—’

‘And then I read your book,’ Hechler said, ‘and I knew you were the one.’

The room was very quiet.

‘You have read Der Judenstaat.’

‘Read it!’ He laughed, delighted, a squeak of a laugh. ‘Mr Herzl, I have read it as I have read Ezekiel. Don’t you see what you have done? You have raised the banner. They will follow you, and you will bring them home to Zion, and when Zion is peopled the last condition is satisfied, and He will come.’ The little man’s eyes had gone somewhere past Herzl’s shoulder. ‘And ye shall know that I am the Lord, when I shall bring you into the land of Israel, into the country for the which I lifted up mine hand. Ezekiel, twenty, forty-two.’

‘But I don’t—’

‘Blessed are those servants, whom the Lord when he cometh shall find watching.’

He came round the desk. He was so short that even seated Herzl was nearly of a height with him, and he reached up and took Herzl’s face between his hands, both palms warm and dry against his beard, and held it, and looked at him with enormous joy, and Herzl — who had been called many things in coffee houses and had answered all of them — could not think of one single thing to do about a man’s hands on his face.

‘I have waited thirty years,’ Hechler said, ‘and I did not know if I should live to see it.’

He is mad, Herzl thought.

And then, immediately, in the cold place at the back of his mind that never stopped working, that had gone on working through the degradation of Dreyfus and through the death of his own child’s christening-cup dream of belonging: He is mad, and he is the only man in Europe who has read my book and believed it.

‘And I don’t believe a word of it,’ Herzl said.

Hechler let go of his face. He returned to his side of the desk, unhurried, and sat, and folded his hands, and was not in the least discomposed.

‘Then your quarrel is with the words of Scripture,’ he said, ‘and not with me.’

He said it so mildly. Herzl looked at the little black-coated figure in the storeroom, walled in on all sides by the Word, hung about by a life’s work that no one upstairs would ever ask to see, and thought: You do not need me to believe. You need me to go.

And thought, further, with the cold part: If they are restored to Zion, and He comes, and the Jews do not receive Him — what then becomes of the Jews?

Hechler smiled at him.

He knows, Herzl thought. He has always known, and he does not think of it, because a thing that will be settled by God is not a man’s business to think of.

Downstairs the clerk would be looking at the clock. Upstairs, the staterooms. Four letters, unanswered, in a basket in London. Baron Hirsch dead in April. The Rothschilds shut like a bank on a Sunday. He was thirty-six years old, and he had a wife who did not speak to him and a fortune he was spending on postage, and there was no one, no one at all, in the whole of Christendom, who had ever once said to him: yes, and I will help you.

‘What is it that you propose?’ Herzl said.

Hechler leaned forward. His scalp shone in the lamplight.

‘You must be given Palestine, and only the Sultan can give it, and the Sultan will not listen to you.’ The pink hands spread. ‘But there is a Grand Duke who will listen to me, because I taught his children their catechism. And the Grand Duke has a nephew.’

Herzl waited.

‘The nephew,’ said the Reverend Hechler, ‘is the German Emperor.’

Out on the Metternichgasse the light had swung round and the far side of the street was in shadow. Herzl stood on the step under the flag, buttoning his coat, and looked back up at the front of the building, at the tall windows of the rooms where nothing concerning him had ever been discussed.

A cab came past and he did not raise his hand.

He would say nothing to Hechler. That was the arrangement, and it had been made without a word spoken, and both of them had made it. The Reverend would go on believing that he was hastening the return of Christ, and would open the doors of Baden and Berlin and anywhere else he could, and Herzl would walk through them, and afterwards God could settle His accounts with whom He pleased.

He proceeded rationally in all things. He had said so himself, in print, more than once.

He began to walk home, and found that he was walking too quickly, and that he had to stop halfway up the hill with his hand against a wall, waiting for his breath, and that he was smiling.

23rd July 1896, 10 Downing Street, London

---

‘I have come from the Palace,’ Lord Salisbury said, ‘where the only subject Her Majesty wishes to discuss is the Armenians.’

He came down the long room with the stiff-legged roll of a man whose knees have outlived his opinions, and he threw a folded copy of The Times onto the coffin-shaped table, where it slid a little way and stopped.

Rear-Admiral Lewis Beaumont pushed on his palms and got up. ‘Prime Minister.’

‘Sit, Beaumont. Sit.’

The chair took him back with a creak like a mooring line coming under strain. Beaumont was Director of Naval Intelligence, which sounded a great deal grander than it was: eleven officers, three rooms above a corridor at the Admiralty, and a budget that would not have kept a torpedo boat in coal. He had asked for agents twice and been refused twice. He glanced down at the newspaper.

Salisbury put a finger on it and read aloud, from memory, without looking.

‘It is idle to pretend that Europe does not know what is happening in the Armenian vilayets, or that Her Majesty’s Government is not aware that Europe knows.’ He lifted his hand. ‘That is the third leader in nine days. Her Majesty has them cut out and pasted into a book, and this morning she read one of them to me, aloud, with expression.’

‘The reports come from missionaries, my Lord. The Sultan has denied them to Currie in the strongest terms.’

‘Of course he has.’ Salisbury began to pace, throwing an arm out now and then as though beating time for an orchestra he could not see. ‘The Liberals are making a meal of it. They have their eye on the by-election and their nostrils full of principle. I have to govern, Beaumont, and they are trying to skewer me with the Sermon on the Mount.’ He turned at the fireplace. ‘They know perfectly well I cannot lean on the Sultan. If I lean on him he falls into the Tsar’s arms, and then it’s Russian coal at Suez and Russian consuls at Bombay, and I will not be the Prime Minister who buggers up India. Rosebery knows it too, which is why he means to table a motion for an inquiry. And what in God’s name does the Queen care for the Armenian Church? They are Monophysites. They have been in schism since Chalcedon.’ He arrived at the window, and spun about, scarlet above the collar. ‘And we do not know that any of it is true.’

‘The missionaries have no reason to lie.’

‘Everyone has a reason to lie. The missionaries want money and the newspapers want blood.’ Salisbury lowered himself onto the leather couch and put two fingers to his temple, where a vein was going. ‘And I distrust an expert on principle. If you believe the doctors, nothing is wholesome. If you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent. If you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe.’

Beaumont let a moment go by.

‘The Liberals have been played before,’ he said. ‘On precisely this question. By the Russians.’

Salisbury did not open his eyes.

‘She is at Symonds’ Hotel,’ he said. ‘She took a suite on the eighth of June and she has had Labouchère to dinner twice and a bishop once. Yes, Beaumont, I know that Olga de Novikoff is in London.’

Beaumont said nothing. He had known for a week and had been saving it.

‘The M.P. for Russia.’ Salisbury’s mouth moved. ‘Disraeli’s, that. She wrote Gladstone forty letters and he answered every one, the old goat, and between them they very nearly gave the Balkans away.’ The smile faded off him. ‘Twenty years, and she comes back, and she comes back in the same month that the missionaries begin to write. Well.’

‘Then it may be that there is more to the Armenian business than meets the eye.’

‘It may be.’ The Prime Minister looked at the ceiling for a while. ‘Rosebery wants an investigation.’

‘Rosebery could have one,’ Beaumont said, ‘if it were quiet.’

‘Go on.’

‘The Sultan would take it as an insult if we sent a commission, or worse, if we pretended to believe him and sent one anyway. But suppose a man went out there who was nothing to do with us. Who had a reason of his own to go, and a trade that took him about the country asking questions.’ Beaumont had the folder open on his knee. He did not look at it. ‘If he is unofficial the Sultan cannot complain of us. And if the Sultan should find him out—’

‘Then he is a journalist,’ said Salisbury, ‘and we have never heard of him.’

‘Just so.’

‘It cannot be one of Currie’s people.’

‘It cannot be anyone the Porte can recognise. The Sultan’s spies read our post before we do.’

Salisbury turned his head and looked at him for the first time.

‘You have a name.’

Beaumont drew out a single sheet and sent it down the table, and it came to rest by the Prime Minister’s hand, and Salisbury put on his spectacles and read it with a stubby finger travelling down the page, grunting at intervals like a man testing a floorboard.

‘A Boer.’

‘Half. The mother is English. He was raised on the veld.’

‘He’s a boy.’

‘He is twenty-seven. Rhodes recommends him. He broke a German agent in Johannesburg last winter, on his own, without instruction.’ Beaumont paused exactly long enough. ‘And he writes for The Times.’

Salisbury made a sound of appreciation that was not quite a laugh.

‘Will the Sultan let a journalist into Armenia?’

‘He can hardly refuse. Refusal would be an admission. I should expect him to grant the permit within the week and to attach a bodyguard to the man for the whole of his journey, so that he never sees anything he ought not to see.’

‘And if he does see it?’

‘Then it will be dangerous for him.’

The grandfather clock in the corner cleared its throat and struck the half hour, and Beaumont sat very still, because he had said everything he had come to say and the only thing that could ruin it now was another word.

Salisbury took his spectacles off.

‘This German agent of his,’ he said. ‘That was tied up with the Jameson affair.’

‘It was.’

‘There will be a select committee. After the criminal trial. There must be. Jameson will take the weight of it, and Rhodes will take what Jameson cannot carry, but the question is how much higher it goes, and the answer is that nobody knows, and the man who cabled the Colonial Office from Krugersdorp on the twenty-ninth of December is at present sitting in an office two hundred yards from the House of Commons.’ He tapped the sheet, twice, with one finger. ‘They will want to put him in a chair and ask him questions on oath.’

Beaumont waited.

‘It might be useful,’ Salisbury said, ‘if he were out of the country for a while.’

The room was quite silent.

‘An excellent suggestion, Beaumont,’ Salisbury continued. ‘See to it.’

And there it was. It had cost eleven minutes and it had not required a single word about Russia, and Beaumont understood, with a clarity that he found he did not much enjoy, that the Prime Minister had not authorised an investigation into a massacre. He had authorised the removal of a witness, and had discovered, gratifyingly, that it could be made to look like something else.

Which was, after all, exactly what Beaumont had come to obtain. It was disagreeable to get a thing by accident that one had meant to get by argument.

‘Of course, my Lord. Though there is no purpose in it unless Rosebery is satisfied.’

‘Leave Rosebery to me, I shall see him at the club.’ Salisbury pushed the sheet away. ‘And find out what Madame de Novikoff is doing at Symonds’. That will be all.’

Beaumont closed the folder and stood, and did not move.

‘There is one further matter,’ he said. ‘Related, in a way.’

‘Sit down, then.’

He remained standing. It was the surest way of keeping a thing small.

‘The chaplain at our embassy in Vienna. A Reverend Hechler. He has written to us six times in as many weeks concerning a journalist he has taken up with — an Austrian Jew named Herzl, who has written a book proposing a Jewish state. Hechler is convinced that this man will lead the Jews back to Palestine, and that when he has done it, the world will end.’

Salisbury’s eyebrows travelled up his forehead.

‘He wishes us to petition the Sultan for a Jewish homeland,’ Beaumont said. ‘He has sent me his calculations. He offers to send the proofs.’

‘The proofs?’

‘Of the prophecy, my Lord.’

‘Good God.’ Salisbury got up off the couch as though something had bitten him. ‘Who is he? Not the parson. The other one.’

Beaumont consulted his notes, though he did not need to. ‘Theodor Herzl. Thirty-six. Feuilleton editor of the Neue Freie Presse in Vienna, a man of some private means, no political following whatever. There are perhaps two hundred people in Europe who take him seriously and one of them is our chaplain.’

‘Then why are we discussing him?’

‘Because there is nothing on earth that would enrage the Sultan more than a Christian proposal to hand him Jerusalem, and because if we do not humour Hechler he will write to his bishop, and the bishop will write to the Archbishop, and the Archbishop will speak to the Defender of the Faith.’ Beaumont let that sit. ‘And Her Majesty will send for you again.’

Salisbury had gone back to the window. He stood with his hands behind him, looking out at the garden and the wall and the back of the Foreign Office beyond it, and he was quiet for long enough that Beaumont heard a horse go by in Whitehall.

‘Tell him we take it up with the utmost urgency,’ he said. ‘And have your man call at Vienna on his way east and collect the wretched thing. Before the Reverend shows it to somebody else.’

‘And when he has it?’

‘He gives it to Currie.’ Salisbury did not turn round. ‘Currie will know what to do with it.’

‘Currie is not to be told about the other business.’

‘Currie is not to be told anything at all.’ A pause. ‘Carry on.’

Beaumont was left alone in the Cabinet Room with the newspaper and the clock.

He picked up the single sheet from the table and stood looking at it in the flat grey light from the garden windows. A photograph would have been useful. There was no photograph. There was a name, and a date of birth, and four lines about a farm outside Krugersdorp, and the note in his own hand: fluent French, some Zulu, served with a Boer commando, cannot return.

So the boy would go to Vienna and take up a document that the Prime Minister wished to have buried, and carry it to an ambassador who had not been told why he was coming, and go on from there into a country where the Sultan’s soldiers would walk beside him for a thousand miles to make certain that he saw nothing. He would do all this without official standing, without an embassy to run to, and without any means whatever of being acknowledged if he were taken.

And if he came back with proof, the Prime Minister would be presented with the last thing on earth he wanted, which was proof.

Beaumont folded the sheet and put it in the breast of his tunic. He had wanted an intelligence service for two years. He had one now, and it consisted of one man who did not yet know he was in it, and a nephew.

He went out past the footman and down the stairs into the sun. It was a fine afternoon, and Whitehall smelled of dust and horses, and he thought that he had better write to Randolph tonight.