There was one person who must have divined from the first what had happened. But she held her tongue.
So far as I could gather from the reports which continued to reach me from Fauchette, the Princess Y—— had sunk into a lethargy after my evasion. She seemed to wish only to be left alone to brood, perhaps to mourn.
The only sign she gave was by depositing a wreath on the empty grave in the English cemetery, a wreath which bore the solitary word, “Remembrance.”
In the meanwhile I had gratifying evidence that the loss of the chief conspirator had completely disorganized the schemes of the plotters in the Ministry of Marine.
My first proceeding, after disconnecting the powerful battery which I had installed in my house for the purpose of the execution, was to summon my assistant Breuil.
With his aid, the corpse was stripped and sewn up in a sheet, together with some heavy weights. In the middle of the night it was committed to the waters of the Neva, almost within sight and sound of the fleet.
The papers which we found in his clothes were not numerous or important. But there was one which I thought worth preserving.
It was a passport, made out in the name of the deceased, issued by the Russian Foreign Office, and viséd by the German Ambassador. This passport I still have in my possession.
I now disclosed to my assistant a plan which had been in my own mind for some time, though, true to my principle of never making an unnecessary confidence, I had not previously mentioned it to him.
“I have decided,” I told him, “to assume the personality of Petrovitch.”