During the day, Wladek took on two Smolenskis at a time to tutor him, and as soon as they grew tired, he would select another two, and so on until they were all exhausted. It was not long before he was able to converse fluently with his new dependants. Some of them he discovered were Russian soldiers, taken prisoner after repatriation for the crime of having been captured by the Germans. The rest consisted of White Russians - farmers, miners, labourers - all bitterly hostile to the Revolution.
The train jolted on past terrain more barren than Wladek had ever seen before, and through towns of which he had never heard - Omsk, Novosibirsk, Krasnoyarsk: the names rang ominously in his ears. Finally, after two months and more than three thousand miles, they reached Irkutsk, where the track came to an end.
All the prisoners were hustled off the train, fed and issued with grey uniforms with numbers on the back, felt boots, jackets and heavy coats. Although fights broke out for the warmest garments, even the most sought-after provided little protection from the wind and snow.
Horseless wagons like the one that had borne Wladek away from his castle appeared and long chains were thrown out by the guards. The prisoners were then cuffed by one hand, fifty to each chain. They marched behind the trucks, while the guards rode on the back. After twelve hours they were allowed a two-hour rest so the dead and dying could be unchained before the living set off again.
After three days, Wladek thought he would die of cold and exhaustion, but once they were clear of populated areas they travelled only during the day and rested by night. A mobile field kitchen run by prisoners from the camp supplied turnip soup that became colder, and bread that became staler, as each day passed. Wladek learned from these prisoners that conditions at the camp were even worse, hence their volunteering for the field kitchen.
For the first week they were never unshackled from their chains, but later, when there could be no thought of escape, they were released at night to sleep, digging holes in the snow to keep warm. Sometimes on good days they found a forest in which to bed down: luxury began to take strange forms. On and on they marched, past vast lakes and across frozen rivers, ever northward, in the face of viciously cold winds and ever deeper drifts of snow. Wladek’s wounded leg gave him a constant dull pain, soon surpassed by the agony of his frostbitten toes, fingers and ears. The old and the sick were dying. The lucky ones, quietly as they slept. The unlucky ones, unable to keep up the pace, were uncuffed from the chains and cast off to die alone. Wladek lost all sense of time, and was conscious only of the tug of the chain, not knowing when he dug his hole in the snow at night whether he would wake the next morning. Those who didn’t had dug their own graves.
After a trek of nine hundred miles, the survivors were met by Ostyaks, nomads of the steppes, in reindeer-drawn sleds. The prisoners were chained to the sleds and marched on. When a blizzard forced them to halt for the best part of two days, Wladek seized the opportunity to try to communicate with the young Ostyak to whose sled he was chained. He discovered that the Ostyaks hated the Russians of the south and west, who treated them almost as badly as they treated their captives. The Ostyaks were not unsympathetic to the sad prisoners with no future, the ‘unfortunate ones’, as they called them.
12
THE FUTURE was also worrying Anne. The first few months of her marriage had been happy, marred only by her anxiety over William’s increasing dislike of her husband, and Henry’s seeming inability to find a job. Henry was a little touchy on the subject, explaining that he was still disoriented by the war, and wasn’t willing to rush into something he might later regret. She found this hard to understand, and finally the matter caused their first row.
‘I can’t understand, Henry, why you haven’t set up that real estate business you seemed so keen on before we were married.’
‘The time isn’t quite right, my darling. The realty market isn’t looking promising at the moment.’
‘You’ve been saying that for nearly a year. I wonder if it will ever be promising enough.’
‘Sure it will. Truth is, I need a little more capital. Now, if you’d allow me to borrow some of your money, I could get myself started.’
‘That’s not possible, Henry. You know the terms of Richard’s will. My allowance was stopped the day we married, and I only have the capital left.’
‘A little of that would be more than enough. And don’t forget that precious boy of yours has over twenty million in his family trust.’
‘You seem to know a lot about William’s trust,’ Anne said.
‘Oh, come on, Anne, give me a chance to be your husband. Don’t make me feel like a guest in my own home.’
‘What’s happened to your money, Henry? You always led me to believe you had enough to start your own business.’
‘You’ve always known I wasn’t in Richard’s league financially, and there was a time, Anne, when you said it didn’t matter: “I’d marry you, Henry, if you were penniless,”’ he mocked.
Anne burst into tears, and Henry tried to console her. She spent the rest of the evening in his arms, neither of them referring to the subject again. She managed to convince herself she was being unfair, and lacking understanding. She had more money than she could ever possibly need. Shouldn’t she entrust a little of it to the man to whom she was so willing to entrust the rest of her life?
The next morning, she agreed to let Henry have $100,000 to set up his own real estate business in Boston. Within a month he had rented a smart new office in a fashionable part of town, appointed a staff of six and started work. Soon he was mixing with influential city politicians and established real estate men of Boston. They drank with him in their clubs and talked of the boom in farmland. They told him of investments that couldn’t lose, and joined him at the race-track. They put him up for expensive country clubs where he would meet future clients. It wasn’t long before Anne’s $100,000 had disappeared.
When William celebrated his fifteenth birthday, he was in his third year at St Paul’s, sixth in his class overall, and top in mathematics. He had also become a rising figure in the Debating Society, if not on the sports field.
He wrote to his mother once a week, reporting his progress, always addressing his letters to Mrs Richard Kane, refusing to acknowledge that Henry Osborne even existed. Anne wasn’t sure whether she should talk to him about it, and she was careful to hide the envelopes from Henry. She continued to hope that in time William would come around to liking her husband, but as the months passed it became clear that such a hope was unrealistic. William hated Henry Osborne, and nursed his hatred passionately, although he wasn’t sure what he could actually do about it. He was grateful that Osborne never accompanied her when his mother visited him at school; he could not have tolerated having the other boys see his mother with that man. It was bad enough that he had to live with him in Boston.
In one letter William asked if he could spend the summer holidays with his friend Matthew Lester, first at a summer camp in Vermont, then with the Lester family in New York. The request came as a painful blow to Anne, but she took the easy way out and gave her permission. Henry seemed quite happy to go along with her decision.
For the first time since his mother’s marriage, William was looking forward to the holidays.
The Lesters’ Packard chauffeured William and Matthew noiselessly to the summer camp in Vermont. On the journey, Matthew casually asked William what he intended to do when the time came for him to leave St Paul’s.
‘When I leave, I will be the top student of our year, class president, and will have won the Hamilton Memorial Mathematics Scholarship to Harvard,’ replied William without hesitation.
‘Why is all that so important?’ Matthew asked innocently.
‘My father achieved all three.’
‘When you’ve finished battling with your father, I’ll introduce you to mine.’
William smiled.
The two boys had a lively and enjoyable six weeks in Vermont, playing every game, from chess to football. When camp finally broke up, they packed and boarded a train for New York to spend the last month of the holiday with the Lester family.
They were greeted at the door by a butler, who addressed Matthew as ‘Sir’, and by a twelve-year-old girl covered in freckles who called him ‘Fatty’. It made William laugh, because his friend was so slim, while it was she who was overweight. The girl smiled, revealing teeth almost totally hidden behind braces.
You’d never believe Susan was my sister, would you?’ said Matthew disdainfully.
‘No, I wouldn’t,’ said William, smiling at Susan. ‘She’s so much better looking than you.’
Susan adored William from that moment on.
William adored Matthew’s father the moment they met; he reminded him in so many ways of his own father, and he begged Mr Lester to let him visit the great bank of which he was chairman. Charles Lester thought carefully about the request. No child had ever entered the orderly precincts of 17 Broad Street before, not even his own son. He compromised, as bankers often do, and showed the boy around the Wall Street building on a Sunday afternoon.
William was fascinated by the large offices on so many floors, the vaults, the foreign exchange dealing room, the boardroom, but most of all the chairman’s office. The Lester bank’s activities were considerably more wide-ranging than Kane and Cabot’s, and William knew from his own small personal investment account, which provided him with a copy of the annual general report, that Lester’s had a far larger capital base than Kane and Cabot. He remained silent as they were driven back to the Lesters’ home.
‘Well, William, did you enjoy looking around?’ Charles Lester asked eventually.
‘Oh yes, sir,’ replied William. ‘I certainly did.’ He paused for a moment before adding, ‘But I feel I should warn you, sir, that it’s my intention to be chairman of your bank one day.’
Charles Lester smiled. He told his dinner guests that night about young William Kane’s visit to Lester and Company, and the fact that he was after his job. His guests laughed. But William had not meant the remark as a joke.
Anne was shocked when Henry asked her for another loan.
‘It’s as safe as houses,’ he assured her. ‘Ask Alan Lloyd. As chairman of the bank, he can only have your best interests at heart.’
‘But two hundred and fifty thousand?’ Anne queried.
‘A once in a lifetime opportunity, my darling. Look upon it as an investment that will double within a couple of years.’
After another, prolonged row, with several mentions of Richard and William thrown in, Anne gave in once again, and life returned to normal. When she next checked her investment portfolio with the bank, she found her capital was now only $150,000. However, Henry seemed to be seeing all the right people, and kept repeating that he was about to sign an ‘impossible to lose’ deal. She considered discussing the situation with Alan Lloyd at Kane and Cabot, but decided against it; after all, it would have meant questioning her husband’s judgement. And surely Henry would never have made the suggestion in the first place if he hadn’t been sure the loan would meet with Alan’s approval.
Anne had started seeing Dr MacKenzie again to find out if there was any possibility of her having another baby, but he still advised against it. After the high blood pressure that had caused her earlier miscarriage, he did not consider thirty-six a sensible age for Anne to start thinking about being a mother again. Anne raised the idea with the grandmothers, but they agreed wholeheartedly with the views of the good doctor. Neither of them cared for Henry much, and they cared even less for the thought of an Osborne offspring making claims on the Kane family estate after they departed this world. Anne resigned herself to being the mother of only one child, but Henry became very vocal about what he described as her betrayal, telling her that if Richard were still alive, she would have tried again. How different the two men were, she thought, and she was unable to explain why she loved them both. She tried to soothe Henry, praying that his business projects would work out and keep him fully occupied, while at the same time replenishing her dwindling coffers. He had certainly taken to working very late at the office.
13
NINE DAYS later, in the half-light of an early Arctic winter night, Wladek and his band reached Camp 201. Wladek would never have believed he could be glad to see such a place: row upon row of wooden huts in the midst of a stark, barren wilderness. The huts, like the prisoners, were numbered. Wladek’s hut was number 33. There was a small black stove in the middle of the room, and along the walls were tiered wooden bunks on which rested hard straw mattresses with one thin blanket each. Few of the prisoners managed to sleep that first night, as they had become accustomed to sleeping in the snow. The groans and cries that came from Hut 33 were often louder than the howls of the wolves outside.
Long before the sun rose the next morning, they were roused by the sound of a hammer against an iron triangle. There was thick frost on the insides of the windows, and Wladek thought he must surely die of the cold. Breakfast in a freezing communal hall lasted for ten minutes, and consisted of a bowl of lukewarm gruel with pieces of rotten fish and the suggestion of a cabbage leaf floating in it. The newcomers spat the fish bones out onto the table, while the more seasoned prisoners devoured the bones and even ate the fishes’ eyes.
After breakfast, the new prisoners’ heads were once again roughly shaved, and then they were allocated tasks. Wladek became a wood chopper. He was taken several miles through the featureless steppes to a forest where he was ordered to cut down ten trees each day. The guard would leave him and his little group of six alone with their food ration, tasteless yellow magara porridge and bread. They had no fear that the prisoners would attempt to escape, as it was more than a thousand miles to the nearest town - even if they knew in which direction to head.
At the end of the day the guard would return and count the number of trees they had felled: if they failed to reach the required number, their food ration would be reduced the following day. But by the time the guard arrived at seven in the evening it was already dark, and he could not always be sure how many new trees they had cut down. Wladek taught the others in his team to spend the last part of the afternoon clearing the snow off two or three trunks they had cut down on the previous day and line them up with those they had chopped that day. The plan always worked, and Wladek’s group never lost a day’s food. Sometimes they managed to return to the camp with a small piece of wood, tied to the inside of a leg, to put in the stove at night. Caution was required, as there was always a risk they would be searched as they entered the camp, often having to remove one or both boots while they stood in the frozen snow. If they were caught with anything on their person, the punishment was three days without food.
