Alexei returned the first secret letter unanswered.
It proposed preserving the Moscow rules after Peter's death, restoring the rights of the old families and reducing military expenditure. From Alexei's useful system, the letter's author moved directly to restoring old privileges and cutting the army.
Alexei wrote in the margin: the fleet, the artillery standard and the Baltic route were not open to debate. Ending service without a fixed term did not mean ending service. A grievance did not confer the right to reclaim a post by birth.
He ordered the letter burnt.
The second was more cautious. Its sender agreed that the military foundations must be preserved and asked only for the names of those prepared to defend open hearings of complaints and the report on the two capitals against a sudden ban. Alexei replied through an intermediary. He neither promised the throne nor called for revolt. He demanded written terms and a renunciation of any attempt to restore the old privileges.
At a secret meeting, one of the patrons accepted every condition. Another waited until the servants had left and proposed disbanding the costly naval schools after Peter's death. Alexei ordered him out. A third said he would support neither the old appointments by birth nor the secret murder of Catherine's children.
Alexei decided that he had succeeded in separating the moderates from those who wanted to turn the country back. But he did not enter the participants' names or the substance of the meeting in the common book. In practice, he alone decided whom to trust and allowed no one to scrutinise that choice.
Luka saw the draft after the third letter. "Why is the author's name not in the common book?"
"Because Father will close the way before he hears the terms."
Luka replied, "That is how every hidden contractor explained an oral commission."
Alexei answered that he was defending a rule, not a profit.
Luka laid beside it the list of omissions from Menshikov's household. Several men on it retained their posts on the strength of claims about Catherine's kinsman. The first narrow case had already gathered intermediaries whom no one had investigated.
"A good reason leaves no record by itself," Luka said. "Its author leaves one."
Alexei read the names and noticed one intermediary who also appeared in the secret correspondence. The men offering protection to Peter's son already knew how to exploit the family exception granted to Peter's wife.
He ordered all contact with the man broken off. The intermediary had already managed to send one last letter.
It was intercepted.
What landed on Peter's desk was neither a fabricated accusation nor a confession obtained by torture. The letter contained Alexei's demands that the military foundations be preserved, his refusal to restore hereditary posts and his agreement to continue secret negotiations for the sake of open hearings of complaints. His son was not preparing to destroy the state. But he was deliberately gathering supporters outside the common rules he himself defended.
At the bottom stood the name of an intermediary connected with Menshikov's household. The very oral exception intended to protect one of Catherine's kinsmen for a few weeks had helped the letter pass between the capitals without the customary entry. Family concern, civic fear and someone else's thirst for power had found the same unrecorded road.
Peter read to the end.
In his first life, Alexei's name beside an offer of protection from others would have been enough. Now the evidence was more complicated and more dangerous: his son was not an innocent victim, but a man in his own right, with justice on his side, fear in his heart and a mistake of his own.
Menshikov proposed a closed hearing. In a small circle, Alexei could be forced to renounce his connections, an illness could be announced, and the country need never see that father and son offered two different systems of government.
"And if he refuses?" Peter asked.
Fyodor Romodanovsky replied that his refusal could be broken by morning.
The investigators were already gathering men capable of confirming the required account. One knew the intermediary, another had overheard a conversation through a door, a third was prepared to remember more after his first interrogation. A genuine letter made it possible to construct any convenient accusation around a real mistake.
Catherine saw a copy among Peter's papers. Her first question was whether Alexei threatened her children. Peter answered that the heir's secret supporters might one day decide for themselves which children were legitimate and which promises still held.
She demanded an open hearing.
"You asked for an oral exception for your kinsman," Peter reminded her.
Catherine fell silent. Her request had not been a conspiracy, but it had used the same passage: a good personal reason, a name given by word of mouth and no common scrutiny. If she now allowed Alexei to be shut away without a record, the same procedure could tomorrow remove her children for the sake of some other useful end.
"Then open my request as well," she said.
Peter was not yet ready to enter the family matter in the common book. But for the first time his wife had not asked him to choose between his son and her children. She had demanded a rule that belonged to none of them.
The Book showed new figures. The fleet's victory, Moscow's procedure for complaints and the hospital rules had raised Might to seventy-three. The ban on the full report and Alexei's secret negotiations had lowered Trust to thirty-two. Debt had reached ninety-seven. Both capitals functioned, but had almost ceased to trust each other.
Three points remained before collection.
Alexei was brought in at night. He did not ask his father to take his word for anything. He demanded that the letter be read in full and that a clear distinction be made between his secret contacts, his demand that the army be preserved and the men who had tried to hide old privileges behind talk of open hearings for complaints.
"You sought protection from me," Peter said.
Alexei answered, "Because you called an open report treason before there was any secret letter."
Neither man was lying. But that absolved neither father nor son.
The interrogation room had been prepared before their conversation. On the table lay a pen like the one Peter had used to put questions to his son in his first life. Straps, water and iron stood by the wall. An attendant checked the knots as matter-of-factly as a gunner checked a charge.
Romodanovsky laid a blank sheet before the sovereign.
"There will be a confession by morning."
In his first life Peter had already obtained such a confession. This time he knew how many hours his son would live after giving it.
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