Free The People's Will by Jasper Kent Page B

for her, just as she had gone in search of her parents, Aleksei and Domnikiia. But Luka never came. It made her bitter towards him, even though she had loved Luka’s father, her husband Vitaliy, more than she could ever love Mihail’s, a passing encounter. She’d had two other children with Vitaliy. Both had died. Mihail often tried to imagine Milenochka and Stasik – his sister and brother – but Tamara was loath to talk of them.
    Neither did she speak much of Mihail’s father, but of all the things she had told him – drummed into him since before he could remember – this was the aspect over which he most doubted her.
    It would be untrue to say he had not doubted other things. For a boy brought up in the second half of the nineteenth century to be told every day, by the woman whom he is by nature itself compelled to trust, that the
voordalak
– the vampire – was as real a creature as the wolf or the bear was, to say the least, unusual. She had told him of Baba Yaga and Zmey Gorynych, but never pretended that they were real (though she had debated whether Zmey Gorynych might have had a child and called him Zmyeevich).
    When he had gone to school, the other children had laughed at him for his beliefs. Mihail had felt humiliated and realized in an instant that everything his mother told him had been make-believe. She was mad, and whatever the cause, she had moulded her son to believe in her madness. He had ranted and screamed at her, but she had held her ground, though for years after shescarcely spoke of vampires, or of Iuda, or even of Aleksei. Then she had shown him something that had convinced him, the evidence of his own eyes proving that at least part of what she had told him was true and, by inference, that the whole of it was true. She had scolded him for that last leap of misplaced logic.
    But even then, there was nothing she could do to prove to him the identity of his father. She had told him how she, when young, had suspected that
her
real father was a prince, and not just any prince – specifically Prince Pyetr Mihailovich Volkonsky – but Mihail’s supposed father was of a higher rank even than that. He was, Tamara insisted, a grand duke – Grand Duke Konstantin Nikolayevich Romanov, the tsar’s eldest brother. It was preposterous, and yet no one denied there were Romanov bastards scattered across the country. There was no certainty that Mihail was not one of them, but it seemed unlikely. Tamara had told him to go and see his father, and how to prove their kinship, but Mihail had always been afraid, afraid of his own humiliation, but afraid most of seeing his mother’s dreams exposed as rambling self-delusion.
    But now he had to go, for the first time in his life, to Petersburg. Petersburg was where, as far as he knew, Luka still lived. And both Dmitry and Iuda knew of Luka and so to find him might be to find them. Perhaps it would be a good time too to attempt to make himself known to Konstantin and discover whether his mother’s claims could be anything close to the truth. Now of all times, there was least to lose if they proved a lie. Now of all times, Mihail needed a father.
    He read again the words of the letter he had begun writing in hospital:
    My dearest Mama,
    I have seen him, face to face. He was just as you described him. I will not waste your time by recounting my feelings, but must tell you immediately: I failed. I failed in the sole task that you have raised me to accomplish. He escaped me, but he is not free, and I shall soon hunt him down again.
    Let me tell you from the beginning …
    At that point Mihail had put down his pen to think, and soon after the letter to him had arrived, and there was no need to write any more.
    The letter was from Saratov, from Nadia Karlovna Lukina, the matriarch of the family whose surname Mihail had adopted. Tamara had gone to Saratov with Mihail still in her womb and sought out the family, knowing – praying – that they would help her, out of