I .sx Antecedents .sx On 3 June 1831 the ships in the Russian port of Kronstadt flew their flags at half-mast .sx They were not saluting in the death of a Grand Duke or an Imperial officer , but the funeral of a Scottish sea-captain who had died on board his ship two days earlier .sx His name was Peter Black , and he was Constance Garnett's grandfather .sx He was , like her , a pioneer in the history of Russia's communications with the West .sx He was a dark handsome man , stern in command of his crew and his family , and much respected by both .sx He had come a long way in his forty-eight years .sx He had been born into a family of Forfarshire fishermen in 1783 , and started work fishing in open boats before he was ten .sx At eighteen he married Clementina Carie , a farmer's daughter ten years older than himself .sx She was a small woman , warm-hearted and indomitable , with her looks soon to be ruined by smallpox .sx They had a son , Peter , in 1803 , and a daughter , Isabella , was on the way when Black was seized by the press gang in 1805 .sx This turned out to be the making of his career .sx By 1812 he had risen to the rank of Master on the Dispatch , that is to say he had charge of all the gear and stores on board and was responsible , under the Commander , for navigating the ship .sx In that same year , according to family tradition , his wife , hearing that his ship was to put into Plymouth , tramped all the way there and back again from Scotland in the depths of winter .sx She saw him but for a single day , and it was not until the Napoleonic wars were over that their third child , David , was born on 27 December 1817 at Dysart , near Kirkcaldy on the Firth of Forth .sx He was to be Constance's father .sx Peter Black was an able mathematician and engineer and was early involved in designing and managing the new steamships .sx In 1822 he took command of the Lord Melville , a steam-packet which plied between London and Calais .sx For three summers his family lived in Calais , and David learnt to speak French like a native .sx In 1826 Captain Black took charge of the George IV , which he had planned and built himself , one of the largest steamships of her day , and spent a year running a new service to Spain , Portugal and Gibraltar .sx In the spring of 1827 , as soon as the Baltic became free enough of ice to be navigable , he took her on four trips to St Petersburg , the first regular steam-packet on this route .sx Sometimes the ship terminated at Kronstadt , the port on an island fifteen miles offshore which provided a deep-water harbour for St Petersburg .sx This route was unnecessarily tedious and slow .sx There was no need to go all the way round Denmark .sx It was easier to take the ship to Hamburg , travel forty miles overland to L u beck , and pick up another ship there .sx So in the spring of 1828 Peter Black took the George IV to Travem u nde , the village at the mouth of the Trave , off which ships for L u beck usually anchored .sx For a thousand pounds he bought a pleasant house there for himself and Clementina , and sent young David , who had had a year's schooling in London , to a boarding school in L u beck .sx The George IV could now ply back and forth , taking four of five days to cover the seven hundred miles between Travem u nde and Kronstadt .sx From May to October she left alternately from either port about once a fortnight .sx For twenty-four Dutch ducats ( about pounds11 10s .sx in the money of the time ) a gentleman could travel in considerable comfort .sx For pounds10 11s .sx he could bring his carriage or his horse aboard ; children travelled at half price , and a servant's fare was only pounds4 15s .sx Food and wine were available at reasonable rates .sx It was vastly preferable to lumbering across the interminable plains of Poland and the Baltic states .sx There were hundreds of other ships sailing in and out of Kronstadt , but during the seasons of 1828 and 1829 the George IV , Captain P. Black , was the only steamship providing a regular service between St Petersburg and L u beck .sx Newspapers began to print news that had come " by steamship " - often nearly a week ahead of news that had come by land .sx And in June 1829 a new postal service by the same route was announced .sx Peter Black was providing a vital service between St Petersburg and the outside world .sx In the winter the George IV returned to the old Iberian route , while Clementina remained at Travem u nde and looked after the smallholding - for she had two cows and an orchard of fruit trees - and David learned to speak German and to skate as well as his schoolfellows .sx Once he skated right across the Baltic .sx When Peter returned in the spring of 1830 he found that things had changed .sx A Belgian steamship , the Bourse D'Amsterdam , had arrived at Kronstadt and was advertising a competing service .sx And when he returned to Travem u nde from Kronstadt on 18 May he received orders from the owner , the Rev. William Jolliffe , to bring the George IV back to England .sx Jolliffe was no ordinary clergyman , but an entrepreneur who was involved in building no less than four bridges over the Thames .sx For the last five years he had been engaged on the new London Bridge , an enormously expensive undertaking which was eventually to cost one-and-a-half million pounds .sx He had run out of money and had to sell off several of his ships .sx Stieglitz , the shipping agents in St Petersburg , were furious and made it plain to the public that it was no fault of theirs that they had sold tickets for a passage on a ship that was now not going to run .sx Peter Black must have had similar feelings .sx It may well have made him decide to go his own way , for on 23 September it was announced that Nicholas I , the Tsar of all the Russias , whose ice-cold eyes so alarmed the young Queen Victoria , had granted a twelve-year monopoly of steam navigation between L u beck and St Petersburg to a new company set up by a consortium of Russian and German merchants from the two cities .sx Captain Black was commissioned to design and build two ships especially for the purpose , with a shallow draft so that they could steam right up the Neva .sx They were to be called the Nikolai I and the Alexandra after the Tsar and his Tsaritsa , and they were to be Russian ships , flying the Russian flag .sx Peter arranged to build them at Blackwell .sx There was not much time , and the work had to be hurried on to have them ready by the spring .sx It was a hard and exhausting task , and not until the beginning of May was the Nikolai I , 533 tons , ready for sea .sx It was none too soon .sx On 17 April a salvo of guns announced that the ice on the Neva had broken up and the river was open for navigation , and by 1 May the roads outside were entirely free of ice .sx On 31 May the Nikolai I arrived in Kronstadt for Peter Black to begin his new career in the Russian merchant navy .sx But he was already severely ill with diabetes exacerbated by " a foolish prejudice against much clothing " and a neglect " to protect himself properly against severe " .sx On the following day he died .sx The Nikolai I pursued her career without him .sx In November of that year , dangerously late in the season , she battled her way to the mouth of the Neva bringing the vast blocks of granite to form the plinth of the great column that was to be erected in memory of Tsar Alexander I outside the Winter Palace .sx In the spring of 1838 on her first trip south she caught fire , and Ivan Turgenev , the novelist , then aged nineteen and leaving Russia for the first time , was overcome by panic and had to be restrained by the Russian captain from forcing his way into a lifeboat .sx The ship was rebuilt , and with a Dutch captain continued the service that Peter had begun .sx With Peter dead there was no need to stay on in Travem u nde .sx David left the school in L u beck , where he had received an excellent education .sx Afterwards he said , as people so often do , that his schooldays were the happiest of his life ; and since his later years were to be shadowed by strange clouds of guilt and self-doubt , they almost certainly were .sx His elder brother Peter lived in Brighton , where he had found a job as agent for the General Steam Navigation Company and Consular Agent for France .sx Clementina and David went to join him , and she remained there for the rest of her life .sx David completed his peripatetic schooling at Brighton in the summer of 1832 .sx About this time his sister Isabella married Joseph Glynn , an engineer who had been at school with Robert Stephenson and was as active and important in the development of marine and stationary steam engines as the Stephensons were in the railways .sx On leaving school at the age of fifteen David made a brief attempt at a career in engineering with Glynn but soon concluded that he had no aptitude for it .sx He decided instead to take up the law ; and the following year he was articled to Thomas Freeman in Ship Street , Brighton .sx He had to pay a premium of no less than three hundred and fifty pounds , which he was just able to find from the money left him by his father .sx He served his articles for five years in Brighton , earning nothing , and then moved to London .sx It took him eight years , three of them as a junior chancery clerk in London , before he was admitted to practise as an attorney , and a further year before he had earned enough to recoup his premium .sx Then , just as he was beginning to make a career as a lawyer , he decided to throw it up and emigrate to Canada .sx David was not worried about leaving his old mother .sx He had a wild idea that she might follow him out when he had established himself in Canada , though she might well have preferred , at the age of sixty-nine , to have remained where she was in Brighton with Peter and his growing family .sx He was not going to Canada to earn a living as a lawyer or a linguist but as a labourer on the land .sx He managed to find work of a kind and stuck at it for a little over a year , with his beard frozen to the counterpane on winter nights , and ploughing on summer days " with bare feet in the hot loose black loamy soil formed of the decomposed leaves " .sx He began to think of settling permanently and wrote home to try to raise the money to do so .sx He received instead the news that his mother was dangerously ill .sx He hurried home only to find that Clementina was already dead .sx He never forgave himself for having left her .sx There was now no reason why he should not return to Canada , and he fully intended to do so .sx But his brother and brother-in-law persuaded him to stay in Brighton and to resume his career in the law , this time practising on his own .sx He lodged with the Peter Blacks and took an office at 56 Ship Street , but found it hard going to earn even as much as he did before he went to Canada .sx He was now twenty-five years old , with a dark curly beard and the somewhat semitic good looks one occasionally finds in Scotland .sx A distant cousin of Constance's who met him at dances at this time told her " that he was the handsomest man she knew and that all the girls were in love with him " .sx He was no libertine .sx His character had more of the Scottish Sabbath than of the Scottish Saturday night .sx