by Kim Wright
Vlad paused here. It was well known throughout the Volya, even before his death, that Yulian Krupin’s resolve had been weakening. Life within the palace walls seemed to have dampened his enthusiasm for destroying the place or perhaps it had been the girl, her soft arms entreating him toward a different sort of life. There had even been talk that Yulian was on the verge of deserting the cause entirely and decamping to Paris. Paris, of all frilly, inconsequential places. Gregor had of course denied these claims and steadfastly defended his brother. He had always sworn that when the time came and the oppressors were trapped within the theater row by row, Yulian would not hesitate to throw the bomb into the imperial box, just as planned. Gregor had said that Yulian’s spoken reservations about doing so were only the natural nerves of a boy his age, a claim Vlad had found ludicrous. Yulian had been seventeen, not twelve. The perfect age for a soldier: old enough to have stepped away from his family of birth but too young to have formed a new one through marriage.
“I was not aware that changing the plan was under discussion,” Gregor said, lighting a cigarette. “You have stated that you wish the plan to change, but that is all. No decision has been made.”
Vlad continued to stare at his coffee. “Without Yulian, it may prove easier and more effective to take a woman out than it is to get a bomb in.”
“Kidnapping is crude. A clumsy way to strike at the heart of the beast.”
“And you’re suggesting that a bomb thrown in a crowded theater would have been precise? This is a strange time for you to become squeamish about the notion of women and children being involved, but even if you are, you must conclude that seizing a hostage is more morally defensible than bombing the theater. We won’t hurt the girl, at least not if her father cooperates.”
“And that’s another thing,” Gregor said, with a shake of his sandy-colored curls. “Why are you so fixated on the tsar’s daughter? She is but a child. Her youth and her sex make her sympathetic, which is the very last thing that we want in a victim. Should she be injured in the process, trust me, the resultant street gossip will not play well to our cause.”
“It has to be someone very close to him. Someone he loves.”
“This Xenia is undoubtedly too well guarded.”
“On any ordinary night, you would be correct. But backstage, awaiting her turn to dance at the ball, she will not be. Look, Gregor, you know what we have in our hands. Yulian’s notes, telling us not only the particulars of key locations but also who will be where and at what time. The Imperial Waltz in which Xenia dances is the first item on a program which begins at eight in the evening. She enters from the left hand side of the stage. She will be wearing a red gown, a gold headpiece on her brow. When else will we know precisely where one of the tsar’s children will be at a specific time, of having the cover of the performance as distraction for our entrance and exit? If Yulian was here with us, I assure you he would approve of this plan, even over the original.”
This last jab struck vulnerable flesh. Gregor looked at him, his expression pained. They waited.
“We should focus on someone else,” Gregor said, seemingly unaware that in discussing a variation in the victim he was indirectly conceding to Vlad’s overall strategy. But Vlad was aware of what this small objection meant, and a sense of victory coursed through him.
“Who might you suggest?” he asked mildly.
“Perhaps that British bitch. The one who’s too proud to bow her neck to the true mother church. No one would care if she got a bit roughed up in transit.”
“Agreed. Including the tsar. Rather than the ransom, he would probably send us a note of thanks.”
The two men contemplated their coffee cups, tilted back in their small black chairs. The day was fine, sunny and fair, with a breeze carrying the sugary aromas of childhood up from the bakery next door. They each thought for a moment of their mothers, standing at stoves, calling out that supper was almost ready, although neither man shared this memory with the other. They were not friends, after all.
Gregor sighed. “Your point is sound. I suppose the little one must go.”
The Winter Palace – The Guest Rooms
11:40 AM
Fortunately, Tom had brought his most recent textbook from Cambridge. He had stuffed it in his black bag, along with some other hastily-gathered accoutrements of the medical profession. At the time he had viewed these instruments as no more than the props an actor would use in a play, but now he was grateful that he had them close at hand. Especially the textbook.
Emma had interpreted Mrs. Kirby’s diary as suggesting that Ella’s marriage was unconsummated. If so, this certainly explained why she and Serge were childless, but there were other possible explanations as well. Tom had spent the morning going back and forth between his medical textbook pages on hemophilia and picking certain pertinent facts from the bulging file Trevor kept on the royal family. This was a tricky matter, since the Queen had never directly acknowledged that hemophilia, most often passed from mother to son, was present in her family history at all. And she had certainly never entertained the suggestion that through her penchant for marrying her daughters and granddaughters as advantageously as possible, she thus had been instrumental in spreading the disease into half the royal houses of Europe.
Through the Hanover family tree Trevor had supplied, Tom could surmise that not only the Queen but two of her five daughters were carriers, including Ella and Alix’s mother, the Princess Alice. Hemophilia was a mercurial disease, and there was no known explanation for why some siblings were cursed and others were not. Just as not all of Victoria’s daughters appeared to be carriers, not all the boys born of carrier mothers were stricken with the disease. Alix and Ella’s brother Ernest was one of the lucky ones, apparently hale and hearty and next in line for their father’s German title. But their brother Frittie had not been so fortunate. A tumble from a window had triggered an unstoppable bout of bleeding when he was but three years old.
But despite this tragedy – and similar tales involving three more of Victoria’s sons and grandsons – the family remained publically mute on the subject and Tom doubted that they even discussed it among themselves. There was a chance, ridiculous as it may seem to the educated mind, that neither Alix nor Ella fully understood that it was hemophilia and not a fall from a window that had killed their brother or that there was a possibility the same villain slept tangled in the strands of their own genetics, waiting to claim their unborn sons.
The cynical side of Tom wondered if the Queen’s silence on the subject was her refusal to lessen the currency she held in her hands with so many grandchildren. If it was known throughout Europe that the Hanovers were, to put it in the crudest possible terms, defective breeding stock, her ability to forge alliances through international marriages would come to an abrupt end. The more sympathetic side of Tom suspected that the Queen simply could not face the truth: that despite her obsessions about assassinations and governmental overthrows and revolution and riots, the single greatest threat to her family actually coursed within their own veins.
Tom closed the textbook and the file and sat staring off into space. All the information he had gathered boiled down to one most pertinent fact: Since their mother carried the gene for hemophilia, there was a chance that either Ella or Alix did as well, or possibly both of them. There was no way to test a woman for this, no way to predict which of Alice’s daughters, if any, would also be forced to watch her own sons die young, but Tom suspected that the next generation would suffer more than the present. In many ways, the Hanovers were their own worst enemy. Their tendency to marry their own cousins, this arrogant belief that no one was good enough for a royal except another royal, had only served to increase the risk, multiplying the statistical chance of a familial disease striking each new child that was born.
But then again, horrible but true, hemophilia might also be Ella’s way out of her marriage to Serge, should she wish to take it. If Ella’s rumored virginity was indeed just a rum
or, then the true reason for her childlessness might lie in infertility or a series of early miscarriages as nature struggled to correct itself. Too many lost babies might convince the Grand Duke to abandon her, or at least to readily agree to her return to England. Many high-ranking families followed this pattern, and Tom had also seen it among the landed gentry in the countryside. While divorce might be scandalous, extended holidays were not. Unhappy husbands and wives often opted to live in separate houses – if not separate nations – for years. Ella could go to visit her dear Granny in London and simply never return.
It would be a neat solution. A logical solution. Bloodless and painless and practical, with no unnecessary suffering and no loss of face.
Which is why Tom doubted that anyone involved would choose it.
The River Neva
Noon
“Somehow you and I keep ending up in boats,” Rayley said wryly and Trevor leaned his chin against the handle of the oar and laughed.
“Thank you for agreeing to confer with me in such an unlikely place,” he said, indicating the broad expanse of the Neva in front of the Winter Palace. “But I felt a need for some fresh air and I’ve always found that the repetitive motions of piloting a boat have a remarkable power to settle the mind. I row the Thames nearly weekly back in London. Weather permitting, of course.”
“Indeed?” said Rayley, with some surprise. For all their professional collaboration, he knew very little about what Trevor did in his private hours. Rayley leaned back against the side of the boat to regard the Winter Palace which, if possible, looked even larger and more imposing from the angle of the water. When the two men had wandered down to one of the docks they had been promptly issued this small red rowboat and Rayley had to admit there was a kind of peace here along the river. Trevor braced the oars and settled back as well, lighting a cigar and letting the current simply pull them.
“Is there more to confide about your evening in the men’s enclave?” Trevor inquired with a deceptive nonchalance.
“It’s exactly as I told you,” Rayley said. “We were invited there apparently for no other reason than for Filip Orlov to impart his heavy handed and self serving theories about who might have killed the ballet dancers and Mrs. Kirby. The fact that his wife is having an affair with the dark eyed dance master only makes Filip’s true motives even more transparent. At this point I’m inclined to see Konstantin Antonovich as simultaneously our only named suspect and the least likely person in the whole Winter Palace to have committed the crime.”
“But you think Emma is safe alone with him?”
Rayley indulged a slight smile. “I’d agree with Tom that she’s precisely as safe as she wishes to be.”
Trevor exhaled a puff of smoke, coughing slightly with the effort.
“We can talk of personal matters, you know, Welles,” Rayley finally said. “I’d like to think that if my misadventures in Paris served any purpose, it’s that the door to greater conversational intimacy now stands open between us.”
“Then you must share with me the details of your evening in the men’s enclave, even those too bizarre for our young teammates. All I can gather is that you smoked opium, frolicked with women from the orient, and let men oil you up and beat you with bulrushes.”
“I assure you no man has ever beaten me with a bulrush and I find ‘frolick’ a rather imprecise verb.”
The two men chuckled, Rayley also digging in his vest pocket for a cigar. All right, so Trevor was as disinclined as ever to speak of his true affections for Emma, an attraction which Rayley feared might be the eventual undoing of their unity as a team. He had tried to bring it up several times in an indirect way, but Trevor always evaded the issue with some sort of joke or conversational redirection.
“Perhaps not in terms of the case, but in general it was a most informative afternoon,” Rayley finally said.
“I have no doubt.”
“Go ahead and laugh at me. I fear I am on the verge of becoming the fool of the force, but I assure you that whatever degree to which I entered into any alleged frolicking, it was only so Orlov and his men would accept me as a fellow.”
“What tremendous sacrifices you make in the name of Queen and country,” Trevor said, his hand cupped around his cigar to keep it from extinguishing in the breeze. “Were you able to keep your wits about you well enough to observe the design of the place?”
“Observe, yes. Comprehend, no. The long halls end in a snarl of passageways and small individual rooms which I would deem nearly impossible for any private guard to monitor, no matter how many men they employ.”
“I suppose Orlov and his squad would tell us that the numerous halls work to the advantage of the protectors, not any invading force. After all, they presumably understand the design of the maze rather well whereas an outsider would become immediately confused.”
“That’s what they would most certainly say, but damn it all, Welles, you didn’t see the place. Dark and labyrinthine, with business of every conceivable sort being conducted in every corner.”
“I suppose you felt the need to brag of your own exploits,” Trevor said indulgently, digging for another match.
Rayley had already tamped out his own cigar, for the steady wind over the water had almost immediately proven that smoking would be impossible. He supposed that was one of the key differences between Trevor and himself – Rayley conceded to the inevitable quickly, devising alternative plans within seconds of an initial failure, while Trevor charged on in the face of all obstacles, as if his very will was a battering ram which would eventually shatter any reality he found displeasing. Rayley was not at all sure which of them was the closest to right, but he did know one thing. It was their differences, not their similarities, which made them such a formidable team.
“Yes, I told them of my American whore,” Rayley said. “But they were hardly impressed. I take it that what you and I would consider unspeakably exotic entertainments are a daily occurrence in the gentleman’s enclave. It was first with the sauna and steam, then on to a lounge for brandies and opium-treated cigars and at one point in the afternoon a gong sounded and we all stood up. An accomplishment in itself under the circumstances. We went to the dock outside the boathouse and saw a profusion of women approaching in a sort of gondola, each dressed in a different hue. The most poetic of colors - deep pinks and purples and golds and that shade which is neither blue nor green, what do they call it?”
“A boatload of Asian women actually sailed right up to the dock?”
“And they then had to be carried out by these big hulking men who were rowing them. I would scarcely have believed it if I hadn’t seen it.”
“The Grand Duke Serge was in your party? Did you observe him with any of the women?”
“No, but nor did I notice him showing interest to any of the men. He is a distant fellow. More of the type who stands and watches, you know.”
Trevor frowned and shook his head as if he was having trouble taking it all in. “The women had to be carried from the boat?”
“Their feet were bound as children, you know. I saw a few of them taking these little hobbled steps but for the most part they were carried.”
“A dreadful business.”
“Indeed, “Rayley said. “And I never understood the reason for it, at least not fully, until that afternoon. They call their feet their lilies, you know, because the bones have been broken and reformed to curve in the most extraordinary way, rebuilt in such a manner as to emulate…”
“Emulate what? Flowers?”
“Well, you know, Welles.”
“I’m quite certain I do not.”
“Shaped as they are, it creates a…a secondary sort of ingress.”
“Ingress?” Trevor said blankly, gazing toward the shore. Then suddenly the meaning of Rayley’s words struck him and he startled. “Good God man, are you serious? You saw this?”
“I believe so.”
“And did you participate?”
“Of course
not. Despite what you may think, I am still Scotland Yard. Now, look up the riverbank, will you? That must be some sort of chapel.”
They had drifted some distance from the original dock, far enough that Rayley had already begun to dread the lengthy row back upriver, and were now passing a chapel and graveyard. It was a lovely little situation designed to a human scale – the only part of the Winter Palace Rayley had yet seen which did not seem to be an overblown and oversized architectural brag.
“Perhaps we should not have left the Queen unguarded,” Trevor said, the thought perhaps prompted by the resemblance of the free-growing chapel gardens to those in England.
“Tom is near her rooms if assistance is needed. He planned to spend the morning in study.” Rayley watched clouds of dragonflies hovering over the still water, the sun reflecting in brilliant shards off of their doubled wings. “Whatever was driving our young Mr. Mabrey last night? I’ve never known him to be so contrary.”
“A bit of sympathy for the devil, I’d imagine,” Trevor said. When Rayley raised a questioning eyebrow, he elaborated. “How long had you been in service when you first found yourself reluctant to arrest a particular criminal? Because you recognized that if you had been in his position you might have done the exact same thing?”
“Oh, I see where you’re going. Not long. Some desperately poor man and a bit of petty theft, as I recall. The temptation to look the other way can be quite strong in certain cases. So you think Davy feels an affinity with the students he met at the Volya?”
“I would imagine that he does. And so might you and I if we had met them. In a country which flaunts the appalling inequities between its classes and is ruled by a tsar who shows no heart for his people, it seems any man of conscience might be drawn to the idea of revolution. Especially university students who have means to understand that things are done differently elsewhere.” Trevor continued to study the chapel, thinking how different it seemed from the other chapel they had seen, an ornate gilded hall within the palace where weddings and coronations were held. This humble little structure would have been more in place in a rural town, overseen by a kindly pastor, filled with flowers brought from the women of the village. “I am actually quite pleased that Davy felt free to speak as he did in our presence. I would never have been so frank with a superior at his age.”