Free A Little White Death by John Lawton Page A

and sad. They should not put out its eyes.
    The spook stood at the corner. Awkward and idle. Her back to him as though waiting for anyone but him. She was small, even in the bulk of furs; he thought she could not be much more than five
foot four and eight stone.
    Troy turned on his heel and set off across the street to the house on the other side, to No. 21, a clay-coloured house with green shutters, looming lime trees beyond a garden fence, and a bigger
brass plate reading ‘Tolstoy House Museum. Home of Lyev Nikolayevich Tolstoy 1828–1910. Writer.’ It could not have been more different as a house. A glorified wooden cottage on a
grand scale, grander than the Troitskys’ brick house, and found for Count Tolstoy by Troy’s grandfather some time in the 1880s.
    It reminded him of similar houses he had visited in London. The Soane House in Lincoln’s Inn. A house more interesting for itself than any of the junk of antiquity Old Soane had collected
and stuffed into it from floor to ceiling. A house that seemed designed for living, inviting one always to sit down. The last thing one was expected to do. So it was here. He felt he wanted to sit
in the chair where Tolstoy sat, to have the same view across the desk, to doodle on the same blotter, to look out of the same window as Tolstoy himself, to see a lamplit in the windows of the
Troitsky house. It was all wired off against the invasive backside, just like Sir John Soane’s sitting room.
    Tolstoy’s study was a small, pale green room on the mezzanine. His bicycle was propped outside the door, as though he’d parked it there only yesterday and nipped in for a quick
scribble. The pervasive illusion of the preserved home – the big bug-in-amber – that the occupant was merely out for an hour, not long dead. His writing desk was a plain deal table,
covered in green baize, at which the old man had worked by the light of a single candle. Just to the left of the desk was a group of framed photographs. Tolstoy in many of the poses made famous in
the countless biographies. Young Count Tolstoy in his artillery uniform during the Crimean War. Old Count Tolstoy in peasant garb, the demonically forked beard, the great dome of his forehead. The
reluctant husband standing with his dumpy, grumpy wife. The assembled sons of Lyev and Sonya Tolstoy – Sergéi, Ilyà, Lyev Jr, Andréi, Mikhàil – sat on a park
bench sporting an array of moustaches and beards and winged collars, looking less like the sons of a writer, more like the board of a continental bank posing for the photographer. And shots of the
great man and his disciples.
    One was a pale print of four people, a little girl, two men – and a boy, stuck between the men, receiving the avuncular touch of Tolstoy’s hand upon his shoulder, and looking at the
camera over the little girl’s head. It was dated 1877 and captioned ‘Yasnaya Polyana. Tolstoy with his daughter Marya, Rodyon Rodyonovitch Troitsky and unknown youth.’
    Troy stared. His grandfather was just recognisable. A younger version of a man he had known only in extreme old age, a man who must have been over eighty when Troy was born. A tall man, seen
here in his late forties, sporting a full, greying beard and looking much like his mentor Tolstoy. The unknown youth standing between the two men he knew at once. He looked to Troy to be no more
than fifteen or sixteen, but the look in his eyes was far from young, the eyes of a man already more worldly, more calculating than the two old men he stood between, with their air of Christian
innocence, their peasant clothing and their faux-paysan surrender to nature. It was his father Alexei Rodyonovitch.
    He had never known Alex Troy surrender a damn thing. Never gave uphis gripon the solid world and its reality. Left it to his father to idle away time in philosophy and pamphleteering. He had
grown upto take responsibility for a family which seemed beyond the practicalities of the Tolstoyan ethic; he