Death In Hyde Park Read Free Page A

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
    I felt a strong desire to free myself from all the ideas, customs, and prejudices which usually influence my class, to throw myself into the life and the work of the masses. Thus it was that I worked hard to learn how to compose and print, that I might be of use to the Cause of Anarchism in the most practical manner of all—the actual production of its literature.
     
Isabel Meredith,
A Girl Among the Anarchists, 1903
     
 
 
 
Charlotte Conway pulled the sheet of paper out of her typewriter, put it on the desk in front of