One Dragon's Dream Read online

  One Dragon’s Dream

  The Tsar’s Dragons: Book One

  Catrin Collier

  An epic historical saga based on the true story of how John Hughes, a lowborn, illiterate Welshman, founded Russia's iron industry on the steppes of the Ukraine.

  In 1869 John Hughes travelled to Russia at the invitation of Tsar Alexander II to build an ironworks and instigate the industrialization of Russia.

  Not everyone welcomes John and the Tsar’s plans. Necessity forces Count Nicholas Beletsky to sell John land, although he abhors ‘dirty’ industry and is furious when son Alexei reveals his ambition to become an engineer. The Jews, who live apart in their shtetl, refuse to believe that John’s plans will halt the persecution of their race. The Cossacks in the village of Alexandrovka, soon to be swallowed by John’s new town, queue to sell John their land and coal mines that have been worked in the same primitive fashion or centuries.

  Undeterred, John signs up workers in Wales, but not all leave in search of fortune. Some, like brother and sister Richard and Anna Parry, are running to escape violence. Will they, and John’s right-hand man Glyn, find the peace they search for in John’s visionary new town?

  ROSS MICHAEL WATKINS

  12.02.1980 – 04.02.2013

  To me there needs no stone to tell

  ’Tis Nothing that I loved so well.

  Lord Byron, ‘Elegy on Thyrza’

  When one has nothing left … but memories, one guards and dusts them with especial care.

  Saki (H. H. Munro)

  The Wolves of Cernogratz

  Press article

  Nikita and Mrs Khrushchev’s ten-day state visit to Britain, April 1956

  Premier and Mrs Khrushchev were guests of honour at a state banquet in Buckingham Palace yesterday. During the course of the evening Mr Khrushchev questioned the Duke of Edinburgh and the Prime Minister, Sir Anthony Eden, as to the history of Welshman John Hughes, who founded the town where Mr Khrushchev was born, Donetsk (formerly Hughesovka) in the Ukraine.

  Neither the Duke nor the Prime Minister had heard of John Hughes. Therefore they could give Mr Khrushchev no information regarding the man, or even confirm his existence.

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Prologue

  Soon I will draw my last breath where I drew my first. But for now this room is my kingdom, this oak-framed bed my county. A compact yet comfortable domain, and I have learned that nothing outweighs comfort in old age. I am clean, well-fed, warm, cared for … lovingly, beautifully cared for. And I have my memories, no small consolation for loss of strength and independence.

  The past is my last and most precious possession. My recall absolute, but I’m no longer certain what I’ve seen with my own eyes and what I’ve been told.

  I’ll concede that some events, some experiences, may have come to me second-hand, but I’ll not admit the great events I’ve witnessed have been tainted by forgotten conversations. What’s the harm if I was told about these things so many times by those who were there, that they’ve been absorbed into my own history? It doesn’t make the past less valid or true.

  I’ve often wondered if memories and emotions, like disease, can be transmitted from one person to another. If so, that would explain why I’ve always felt so acutely the pleasures and pain of those I’ve loved.

  I’ve had a good life, a long one, richer in every way than the one of poverty and bondage to iron and coal I was born into. I’ve seen and done things and travelled to places beyond most people’s imaginations.

  I’ve lived like royalty in a St Petersburg palace and cowered, a hunted animal, in a burrow in the ground without a kopek or crust to my name. But the steepest climb I made was out of the Merthyr hovel where I lost my innocence and abandoned my childhood. I’ve broken more commandments than I care to dwell on, including Thou shalt not kill. But I feel no remorse for that sin – if sin it was. Some men are evil and deserve death. If saying that makes me a poor Christian then so be it.

  Perhaps that’s why I’ve lived so long. Ninety-nine years on this earth and still God doesn’t want me in his heaven. Possibly He’s asked Satan to prepare a place for me but the Devil is also reluctant to extend an invitation.

  I sense my thoughts meandering into philosophy; the hobby of the ancients, the bane of the young. I’m not so decrepit that I can’t recall my irritation when I was on the receiving end of lectures from my elders. I believed I knew everything then, just as my grandchildren and great-grandchildren do now. They sit next to my bed with grave, unlined faces, solemn-eyed in the face of my old age and impending death, so sure of their knowledge and themselves.

  They try to fool me and themselves that I have a future. That my life isn’t coming to an end.

  It is, but it’s not over … not while I can still dream …

  A shaft of light pierces the darkness. The door opens. I keep my eyes closed but I sense him creeping in, wary of disturbing me. It’s too dark for me to see his face but I don’t need the light. His features are imprinted on my memory. They are those of his great-grandfather, alive again.

  He steals to the bed, removes the photograph album from my hands, and lays his fingers gently on my forehead.

  His touch is soft, cool, like the whisper of the spring wind brushing over the Russian Steppe …

  Chapter One

  Owen Parry’s ironworker’s cottage

  Broadway, Treforest. Pontypridd, 1956

  So many papers to put into order. So much history to be preserved.

  As I sift through the dry, brittle, letters, diaries, plans, age-tarnished albums, and photographs – Glyn’s photographs – scents rise from the papers and the long-dead flowers pressed between their pages. The perfume of old summers fills the air, drifting through the mist that shrouds the years, evoking memories of my Russia more vivid and redolent than those conjured by mere words alone.

  Where to begin?

  I recall Glyn Edwards’ letters, written on the same day from the same house and yet so very different. I search for them and look once more on his strong firm hand. The first is a detailed letter to his brother Peter and sister-in-law Sarah, the second, shorter, little more than a note, to his wife Betty.

  Strange to think Glyn penned these before a single brick of the ironworks had been laid. Before John Hughes imported the Welsh metalworkers and colliers and long before the gamblers and adventurers flocked to colonise the Iron Master’s new town. Men and women who saw the possibility of making their own fortunes in the enterprise of Mr Hughes’s New Russia Company. They came, first in their hundreds, then their thousands.

  Salesmen, shopkeepers hoteliers, priests, whores and whoremongers, murderers, thieves, the steadfastly moral and downright criminal of every nationality, all crowded into a few square miles. Forced to live next to, if not respect, their neighbours. Every one of them drawn by one man’s vision of a brave new industrial town that promised freedom, equality, wealth, and a better life for all who had the strength to work and the courage to join him, no matter what their class, creed, or lineage.

  John Hughes had the vision but he couldn’t have realised it alone. It was Glyn Edwards who recruited the men who built the town. I look at the words etched on the thick cream paper, engraved with the address of the Beletsky Dower House and beyond the page I see them as they were.

  Glyn, over six and a half feet tall in his stockinged feet, heavily built, as handsome, swarthy, black-haired and eyed as a gypsy. My brother, Richard Parry, just out of boyhood, with the dark curly hair and blue eyes
of the Irish; Russian aristocrat Alexei, with blond hair and mischievous blue eyes that belied his angelic features; Nathan Kharber and his sister Ruth, slight, dark, with Jewish features and piercing eyes that penetrated the soul; Huw Thomas, born to subservience, mousy in looks and nature; Dr Peter Edwards; Count and Countess Beletsky; and myself, Anna Parry, the youngest, smallest, and least significant emigrant, taken to Russia as a charity case because I was the subject of salacious interest and gossip in Merthyr. The women who became closer to me than sisters. Sarah Edwards, healer, mentor, friend; Cossack Praskovia, who could have modelled for Titian with her voluptuous figure, red hair, and emerald eyes. And Sonya, who saved us all in the end with her self-sacrificing, unconditional love.

  Every one of us over-shadowed by John Hughes, who strode over the steppe and through life with the air of a medieval king born to govern, to command, and above all to build and create …

  Letter from Glyn Edwards to his brother Dr Peter Edwards and sister-in-law Sarah Edwards

  Oakleigh, High Street, Merthyr Tydfil

  The Beletsky Dower House

  The Donbas region of the Ukraine

  Saturday April 10th 1869

  Dear Peter and Sarah,

  We’ve been here four days and for the first time since our arrival I’ve found time to write to you. This trip with Mr Hughes is the journey of a lifetime. Believe me when I say you can’t begin to imagine the size of Russia. There are no mountains where we’ll be living. Not a one. So there’s nothing to stop the wind blowing across a plain (the Russians call it steppe, although the ground is as level as a Welsh cake) that stretches as far as the eye can see. Little wonder the peasants, or Mujiks , as they’re called here, believe the world to be flat.

  Mr Hughes has commissioned a German architect and master builder to design the buildings, including your twelve-bed hospital and accommodation for his key workers (you as the company doctor as well as the managers), and after looking at the preliminary plans, I can confidently say that when they are built our houses will be fine ones, with ten family rooms, plus bathroom, kitchens, pantries, and separate living space for up to six indoor servants. There’ll also be outbuildings and rooms above them for a coachman and outside staff. As agreed, Betty and I will share a house with you, but only until sufficient are built to accommodate all the senior management.

  Mr Hughes has arranged mortgages for the senior employees of the New Russia Company, repayments to be taken directly from our wages. He doesn’t want company houses as he believes people look after their own possessions better than those of others. He asked me to warn you that the furnaces, plant, collieries, and hospital will take precedence over domestic accommodation. I told him you and our wives are prepared for initial hardships, which will be more than compensated for by the excitement of seeing life in a foreign land, but most of all being part of his enterprise.

  Tomorrow morning we’ll be viewing the site Mr Hughes has marked for his works. Our party will be thirty in number, and as the Tabernacle minister’s wife would say, ‘very select’. There’s a prince, two counts, three dukes (including one grand duke; Mr Hughes explained the difference. I’ll pass the information on when I see you), several landowners, and two Russian ironmasters, Mr Pastukov and Mr Levsky. Every man other than me and Mr Hughes’s deputy, Huw Thomas, is immensely wealthy and every man aside from Mr Hughes, Huw, and me again, high born.

  Mr Hughes, Huw, and I are guests of a local landowner, a charming widow, Mrs Catherine Ignatova. Her Dower House is a twenty-minute ride from the Beletsky Mansion where her daughter Olga and son-in-law Count Nicholas Beletsky reside. Mrs Ignatova has a companion, an orphaned distant relative, Sonya, a young girl who bears a striking resemblance to Botticelli’s Venus . Well educated by Mrs Ignatova and multi-lingual in Russian, French, English, and Polish, she’s sixteen and promises to become a real beauty.

  The Beletsky and Ignatova families will be our nearest neighbours. Count Beletsky is a cultivated man, well-educated, well-manicured, well-dressed, and he speaks several languages, including English, French, German, and Russian, but he couldn’t be more different from Mr Hughes. He insists on everyone deferring to him because of his exalted birth. That doesn’t make him a bad man, only narrow-minded, arrogant, and overbearing.

  His wife has invited Mr Hughes, Huw, and I to dine with her family tomorrow. Apparently she’s a perfect hostess and mother, but she has the advantage of a staff of forty indoor servants as well as coachmen, stable boys, gardeners, and estate workers whose sole purpose in life is to ensure the Beletsky Mansion is perfectly run. The count and countess have six sons but only their eldest, Alexei, lives with them. He’s a bright, inquisitive boy who puts me in mind of poor Mary’s son Richard. Their five younger sons are in a military academy in Allenstein in East Prussia. They also have four daughters who are being educated at home by an English governess, a Miss Smith, who will dine at the count’s table with their eldest daughter, Katya , in honour of our visit. When the count and countess called on us, Katya interpreted for her mother as the countess (unlike her mother) doesn’t speak English, only French, German, and Russian.

  Nicholas Beletsky has sold Mr Hughes several parcels of land but he has made it clear he believes industry is for the lower classes, not aristocrats. He owns houses in St Petersburg and Moscow as well as the mansion, which his wife inherited from her father. It’s enormous, half as large again as Cyfarthfa Castle.

  Unlike me, Mr Hughes has adopted Russian outer dress. His hat and coat are sable, costly even here, his suits are hand-tailored in London, but expensive as his clothes are, he wears them as a workman would his overalls. I don’t know if you realised when you met him in Greenwich, but there’s no false ‘show’ with Mr Hughes, which is just one of many reasons I admire and respect him. He’s never forgotten his origins which are as humble as ours.

  Did he tell you he started his apprenticeship before his thirteenth birthday in Cyfarthfa ironworks just like me and our brother Edward?

  I digress. The purpose of this letter was to tell you about Russia. In many ways the country resembles the Britain of a century ago. Outside of Moscow and St Petersburg, which are beautiful cities, it has few of the modern luxuries we take for granted, like train travel, good roads, well-stocked shops, or towns that offer hotels, inns, restaurants, libraries, museums, and hospitals. After living in London I hope you won’t miss city life when you reach here. On reflection, you probably won’t, considering you’ve lived in Merthyr for the last few months but I warn you, the journey here and the first few years won’t be easy.

  Shipping the vast amount of supplies and materials we need to build the works is daunting. Everything is being manufactured in Britain and transported to Southampton. From there, Mr Hughes has charted a fleet of ships to take the goods and all his workers, including us, round the Bay of Biscay through the Mediterranean, on to the Sea of Azov and the port of Taganrog. There, the supplies will be loaded on bullock carts for the last eighty-mile leg of the journey.

  Mr Hughes has bought thousands of the animals and we’ll be reliant on them for transport until the works has produced enough rails to lay a line to the Donbas.

  Mr Hughes hopes to have all the arrangements finalised, the licences signed, and the materials shipped before next summer, so you and Sarah can make preparations to leave Merthyr early next spring.

  The dinner gong has sounded so I must end this. The lawyers are preparing more government forms and leases that will have to be signed on behalf of the New Russia Company so Mr Hughes and I will be back in our Moscow office before the end of the month. Please write to me there. I want you to know there is nothing Mr Hughes has not thought of. You and Sarah will sleep as safe in Russia as you do in Merthyr, if not safer and in time just as comfortably.

  Good night, God bless and keep you until we are together again. Look in on Betty now and again for me if you can spare the time.

  Your loving brother,

  Glyn

  P.S. I spoke to
Mr Hughes after dinner this evening about our plans to open an independent coal mine. He’s agreed to lend us company money at a preferential rate and offered to take our entire output provided it’s of suitable grade. After studying the geologist’s reports I’ve chosen a site and tomorrow will open discussions with the Cossack owners on the possibility of taking a fifty-year option on the mineral rights. So the ‘Edwards Brothers Colliery’ may rise alongside The New Russia Company’s ironworks. God willing, we’ll fulfil Mr Hughes’s prophecy and become the Russian Crawshays. Who’d have thought when we were growing up in Georgetown that we’d have the opportunity to become as wealthy as the coal and iron barons of Wales?

  I imagined Glyn writing the letter, full of enthusiasm and plans for the future. Pictured the people who’d taken it out of the envelope over the years to read and re-read his words; all wanting to find out about the initial steps John Hughes had taken to transform his dream of a Russian industrial city into reality.

  Beneath the envelope I found the second letter I’d sought; a single page written the same day, but shorter, more formal, hardly the letter of a lover to his sweetheart – or a man of thirty to his wife of ten years.

  Letter from Glyn Edwards to his wife Betty

  Boot Inn, High Street, Merthyr Tydfil

  The Beletsky Dower House

  The Donbas region of the Ukraine

  Saturday April 10th 1869

  My dear wife,

  I’ve seen the plans for our house and assure you it will be comfortable and spacious. You asked in your last letter if Russia is cold. It is, but only in winter, and I promise to buy you a fur coat before the first snow falls. You may think our new country barren and inhospitable at first, but I’m confident that given time we’ll make a fine life for ourselves here and, God willing if he sends them, our children.