Death In Hyde Park Read Free Page B

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.”
    Charlotte rose and went to the window, gazing down at the stream of horse-drawn vehicles and motorcars passing along rainy Hampstead Road, nearly three stories below. She had joined the Anarchist movement some ten years before, when she was still in her teens and full of fury against the suffering and injustice she saw around her. Now, halfway through her twenties and with a decade’s experience behind her, she still believed in the movement’s purposes and was committed to doing all that she could to achieve them, but she knew in her heart that The Times was right. Terrorism was not the way to a brave new world. Attempting to blow up the King and Queen had been a terrible idea, and was bound to turn all London—all England, for that matter—against them.
    Yet despite her cautions, Ivan and Pierre had insisted on trying to transform poor Yuri into a martyr. What few bits of his body the police had found and scooped up had been placed in a coffin, which was sealed shut and balanced across two chairs draped with red and black in the parlor of the meeting house a few blocks down Hampstead. But when Adam, Ivan, and the others carried the coffin out to the hearse, they had been met by an unruly crowd, booing and throwing rotten vegetables, scarcely restrained by a few policemen, who obviously had orders to let the crowd do all the damage it would. Another hostile crowd waited at St. John’s Wood, where Yuri was to be buried. Stepping forward to make a speech, Ivan had got no further than “Fellow Anarchists, we are here today to bury a brave man,” when he was rushed. A cordon of police pushed the crowd back, and the small group of mourners saw Yuri’s remains lowered into the grave without even the comfort of a revolutionary song.