Chapters (13)
Rachkovsky was real, as was the Third Section, and the basement offices at Rue de Grenelle. I owe a big debt to Alex Butterworth’s excellent The World That Never Was. The CIA have made available online a declassified history of the Russian secret service in nineteenth-century Paris. I have taken huge liberties with the facts, but the essential truth of an arch-schemer working on the Tsar’s behalf profiting from a war on terror is, I believe, accurate.
Skobelev and MacGahan are loosely based on real characters. Januarius MacGahan (a man) was a correspondent for the London Daily News. Two volumes of the paper’s anthologised war correspondence were my chief sources for the Russo-Turkish War. The account of the massacre at Batak I drew from its pages. Skobelev was a Russian war hero but his later life took him to Central Asia, where he died. I have merged him with a character called Seliverstov who was murdered, probably on Rachkovsky’s orders, in Paris in 1887.
Bessie is a fiction, but the woman I’ve described as her sister, Gesya, was a conspirator in the assassination of Nicholas II and her death and that of her baby happened much as I recounted it.
Nicolas Notovitch and the tale of his lost gospel are real. It was my fascination with him and his motives that resulted in this book. Its method – slapdash, wilful, knowingly anachronistic – will not conceal my vast ignorance of many of the subjects I’ve touched upon. I’ve been guided by the precepts of Novalis and Tolstoy, who said, respectively: ‘Novels arise out of the shortcomings of history,’ and ‘History would be an excellent thing if only it were true.’ I blame Flaubert among others for propagating the misconception that stories exist and writers find the best way to tell them. I believe that writers – and in this sense, we are all writers – construct everything, including their own identities as writers.
It wasn’t until 1965 that the Second Vatican Council issued the document Nostra Aetate, which included these words: ‘What happened in His passion cannot be charged against all the Jews, without distinction, then alive, nor against the Jews of today. Although the Church is the new people of God, the Jews should not be presented as rejected or accursed by God, as if this followed from the Holy Scriptures.’
In case any ambiguity remains: my great-uncle Leonard Castle was killed in action in 1916.
If you close this book moderately entertained, more suspicious of assertions of expertise and alerted to the seepage of the modes of fiction into areas of life that conventionally claim to be concerned only with the facts, then I’ve exceeded every hope I had for the book. The method I commend to you, though perhaps the outcome of such an exercise is already obvious at the outset: pursue someone, anyone, into the worlds that might have been, and the soul you glimpse can only be your own.