Cometh the Hour (The Clifton Chronicles 6)

“Has he ever asked you for the code to Mr. Mellor’s private safe?”

“Several times.”

“What did you tell him?”

“The truth. I didn’t even know Mr. Mellor had a private safe.”

“If he should ask you again, tell him that I’m the only other person who knows the code.”

“Certainly, my lady.”

“And I think you have something for me, Miss Castle.”

“Oh, yes.” The secretary unlocked the top drawer of her desk, took out a thick white envelope and handed it to Lady Virginia.

This package she did open, but not until she was locked into a first-class lavatory on the train to Paddington. As promised, it contained a thousand pounds in cash. She only hoped Desmond would ask her to visit him again, and in the not-too-distant future.

49

FOUR OUTRIDERS FROM the royal motor pool led a convoy of vehicles out of the palace gates and made their way toward the city centre. King Carl Gustaf and Queen Silvia traveled in the first car, while Prince Philip and the two princesses were in the second

, with Yelena, Harry and Emma in the third.

A large crowd had gathered outside the town hall, and cheers broke out when the King’s car came into sight. The royal equerry and a young ADC leapt out of the fourth car even before the first had come to a halt and were standing to attention when the King stepped out onto the pavement. King Carl Gustaf was met on the steps of the town hall by Ulf Adelsohn, the Mayor of Stockholm, who accompanied Their Majesties into the building.

When the King entered the great hall, half a dozen trumpeters nestling in the archways high above them struck up a fanfare, and three hundred guests—the men in white tie and tails, the women in brilliantly colored gowns—rose to greet the royal party. Yelena, Emma and Harry were guided to three chairs in the middle of the row behind the King.

Once Harry was seated, he began to study the layout of the room. There was a raised platform at the front, with a wooden lectern placed at its center. Looking down from the lectern, a speaker would see eleven high-backed blue velvet chairs set out in a semicircle, where that year’s Laureates would be seated. But, on this occasion, one of the chairs would be left empty.

Harry glanced up at the packed balcony, where there was no sign of an empty seat. But then, this was not one of those occasions you might decide to miss because you’d received a better offer.

The trumpets sounded a second time to announce the arrival of the Nobel Laureates, who processed into the hall to warm applause and took their places in the semicircle of seats.

Once everyone was seated, Hans Christiansen, the chairman of the Swedish Academy, made his way up onto the stage and took his place behind the lectern. He looked up at, for him, a familiar scene, before he began his speech, welcoming the prizewinners and guests.

Harry glanced nervously down at the cards resting in his lap. He reread his opening paragraph and felt the same raw emotion he always experienced just before making a speech: I wish I was anywhere but here.

“Sadly,” continued Christiansen, “this year’s winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, the poet and essayist Anatoly Babakov, cannot be with us this evening. He suffered a severe stroke yesterday morning, and tragically died on his way to hospital. However, we are privileged to have with us Mr. Harry Clifton, a close friend and colleague of Mr. Babakov’s, who has agreed to speak on his behalf. Will you please welcome to the stage, the distinguished author and president of English PEN, Mr. Harry Clifton.”

Harry rose from his place and made his way slowly up onto the stage. He placed his speech on the lectern and waited for the generous applause to die down.

“Your Majesties, Your Royal Highnesses, distinguished Nobel Laureates, ladies and gentlemen, you see standing before you a rude mechanical who has no right to be in such august company. But today the paperback has the privilege of representing a limited edition, who has recently joined your ranks.

“Anatoly Babakov was a unique man, who was willing to sacrifice his life to create a masterpiece, which the Swedish Academy has acknowledged by awarding him literature’s highest accolade. Uncle Joe has been published in thirty-seven languages and in one hundred and twenty-three countries, but it still cannot be read in the author’s native tongue, or in his homeland.

“I first heard of Anatoly Babakov’s plight when I was an undergraduate at Oxford and was introduced to his lyrical poetry that allowed one’s imagination to soar to new heights, and his insightful novella, Moscow Revisited, evoked a sense of that great city in a way I have never experienced before or since.

“Some years passed before I once again became acquainted with Anatoly Babakov, as president of English PEN. Anatoly had been arrested and sentenced to twenty years’ imprisonment. His crime? Writing a book. PEN mounted a worldwide campaign to have this literary giant released from an out-of-sight—but not out-of-mind—gulag in Siberia, so that he could be reunited with his wife, Yelena, whom I’m delighted to tell you is with us this evening, and will later receive her husband’s prize on his behalf.”

A burst of sustained applause allowed Harry to relax, look up and smile at Anatoly’s widow.

“When I first visited Yelena in the tiny three-room flat in Pittsburgh in which she was living in exile, she told me she had secreted the only surviving copy of Uncle Joe in an antiquarian bookshop on the outskirts of Leningrad. She entrusted me with the responsibility of retrieving the book from its hiding place and bringing it back to the West, so that it could finally be published.

“As soon as I could, I flew to Leningrad and went in search of a bookshop hidden in the backstreets of that beautiful city. I found Uncle Joe concealed in the dust jacket of a Portuguese translation of A Tale of Two Cities, next to a copy of Daniel Deronda. Worthy bedfellows. Having captured my prize I returned to the airport, ready to fly home in triumph.

“But I had underestimated the Soviet regime’s determination to stop anyone reading Uncle Joe. The book was found in my luggage and I was immediately arrested and thrown in jail. My crime? Attempting to smuggle a seditious and libellous work out of Russia. To convince me of the gravity of my offense, I was placed in the same cell as Anatoly Babakov, who had been ordered to persuade me to sign a confession stating that his book was a work of fiction, and that he had never worked in the Kremlin as Stalin’s personal interpreter but had been nothing more than a humble schoolteacher in the suburbs of Moscow. Humble he was, but an apologist for the regime he was not. If he had succeeded in convincing me to repeat this fantasy, the authorities had promised him that a year would be knocked off his sentence.

“The rest of the world now acknowledges that Anatoly Babakov not only worked alongside Stalin for thirteen years, but that every word he wrote in Uncle Joe was a true and accurate account of that totalitarian regime.