The salon on the right of the grand staircase had also been turned into a refreshment room, so they had a glass of champagne and a helping of lobster mousse apiece there, then carried two more glasses of wine through to a conservatory that lay beyond it.
Immediately they had settled themselves she began to catechise him with a directness that some men might have found embarrassing; but Roger did not mind it in the least. He had played the part of Monsieur le Chevalier de Breuc so long in France that he could give all that suited him of that gentleman’s fictitious history as easily as he could of his own; and he found a peculiar delight in watching the varied emotions aroused by his answers chase each other across his companion’s exceptionally expressive face. Moreover, when she at length began to hesitate over fresh questions to put to him he was able, without impertinence, to catechise her with equal thoroughness.
It emerged that she was the only daughter of Count Razumofsky; that she had lost her mother at the age of ten, and married Baron Stroganof when she was twenty. The Baron’s father had been the Empress’s Chamberlain during the brief reign of her husband, Peter III, and also, for a short time, her lover. The Baron himself had been one of General Suvarof’s aides-de-camp and with him in the Russian-held fortress of Kimburne, on the Black Sea when, in the previous year, five thousand Turks crossed the river from the neighbouring town of Otchakof and attempted to take the Russian garrison by surprise. The plan had miscarried and the Russians, sallying out, had driven the Turks back to their boats; many of which had been sunk by cannon balls and others, during the ensuing confusion, gone aground on mudbanks. An appalling massacre had ensued, for General Suvarof, with ruthless brutality, had refused the Turks quarter; but he was seriously wounded himself, and the young Baron had died on the field from the stroke of a Turkish scimitar.
Natalia Andreovna had then left St. Petersburg to act as hostess for her father in the Embassy at Stockholm. She had one child, a daughter, now four years old; but she did not like children, and had left her own in Russia to be brought up on her late husband’s estate near Vologda, by one of his aunts. She was very rich, owning in her own right over twelve thousand serfs; and was, she declared, enjoying her freedom too much to contemplate marrying again for a long time to come. In fact, fear that the Empress, whose word was law, might marry her off to one of her own ex-lovers whom she wished to enrich had been Natalia Andreovna’s principal reason for settling in Stockholm; since she much preferred life at the Russian court, and despised the Swedes as a soft, cold-blooded, degenerate people.
They had got thus far when Roger heard a rustling of the palms behind him and turned to see that Count Yagerhorn had invaded their corner of the conservatory. The fall fair-haired man was standing there glaring at him, his fresh complexioned face flushed and his pale blue eyes positively popping with anger.
Roger could be more coldly insolent than most people when he chose, and as he was perfectly prepared to fight, he decided to make the most of the situation in order to impress Natalia. Not yet having been introduced to the Count he was not strictly called upon to stand up; so after eyeing him through his quizzing-glass from head to foot he turned his back and lolled again lazily in his chair.
‘Madame, your pardon!’ said the Count in a voice halfchoked with rage. ‘Monsieur, I require a word with you.’
Turning again Roger got slowly to his feet, and murmured: ‘Are you addressing me, Monsieur? I don’t recall you as a person of my acquaintance.’
Natalia Andreovna’s voice came from behind him. ‘Messieurs, allow me to introduce you. Monsieur le Chevalier de Breuc—Count Erik Yagerhorn.’ Then she went on with a hint of amusement in her tone. ‘You seem annoyed about something, Erik. Mayhap ’tis because I shut you out of the library; but ’tis you who were at fault for leaving me in order to talk with Colonel Fricke.’
‘ ’Twas but for a moment; and I had your permission to do so,’ the Count protested quickly. ‘I can scarce believe that you deliberately chose to compromise yourself by locking that door, and….’
‘What!’ snapped Roger. ‘You dare to cast doubt upon this lady’s word?’
The Count went as red as a lobster. ‘That is between her and me. My quarrel with you, Monsieur, is that you have deprived me of her company; and I demand an explanation.’
Roger shrugged. ‘The time and place are ill-chosen. But I am lying at the Vasa Inn. Send your friends to me there at whatever hour you choose after dawn and nothing would please me better than to take a walk with you’
‘Erik! You will do nothing of the kind,’ said Natalia Andreovna sharply. ‘I forbid vou to fight with Monsieur le Chevalier.’
‘But, Madame …’ he began in protest.
‘You heard what I said,’ she interrupted him. ‘Later, and it so please me, I’ll afford you an opportunity to settle your difference with Monsieur de Breuc. But for the time being I’ll not have you risk a wound that may place you hors de combat.’
To Roger’s surprise the Count calmed down at once. He even smiled as he said: ‘Later then, Madame. I shall take that as a promise,’ and, having made a formal bow, he walked away.
The more Roger thought about it the more extraordinary this denouement of the affair appeared. He had often known cases in which women had intervened to stop a duel, from a natural desire to prevent two men whom they liked or respected injuring one another, but apparently Natalia Andreovna had not been moved by any such humane motive. She had as good as said that she would have not the the least objection to their slitting one another’s throats at some later date, but that it did not suit her that they should do so for the present. Her attitude could be explained by the opinion he had already formed, that she was a hard-hearted, bloodthirsty little piece; but what puzzled him more was that she should have the power to make any man take a step so compromising to his honour as to withdraw a challenge, at her bare order.
‘I hardly know,’ he said, after a moment, ‘if I should thank you for having ensured my keeping a whole skin for a week or two, or reproach you with having deprived me of the chance of bringing you a handkerchief dipped in Count Yagerhorn’s blood tomorrow. But I pray you satisfy my curiosity as to why he should have instantly withdrawn his challenge at your bidding?’
She shrugged. ‘ ’Tis one of the prerogatives of royalty to forbid a duel.’
Seeing his puzzled look she smiled, and went on. ‘Surely you realise that ’tis not the unhappy woman upstairs but myself who is the real Queen of Sweden.’
‘In beauty, without question,’ he said gallantly.
‘Ah, and in power, too.’ Her voice took on a haughty note, and her green eyes narrowed. ‘There is not a Finnish noble in the land, and scarce a Swede, who would dare to disregard my wishes. How think you it comes about, otherwise, that we have been sitting here for over an hour, yet not one of the men to whom I promised a dance after midnight has had the temerity to claim me?’
‘I had wondered at my good fortune in retaining you so long,’ remarked Roger, still considerably mystified.
She shrugged again. ‘With your back to the passageway between the palms you would not have noticed the people who have passed or approached us. Had Eirk Yagerhorn not been a special pet of mine he would never have had the self-assurance to break in upon us in the way he did. But half a dozen others have discovered us here, and one glance from me has been enough to inform them that I did not wish our tête-à-tête interrupted, so they have withdrawn discreetly without a word.’
Roger bowed. ‘Then, fairest of Queens, I am more favoured than I knew, and humbly thank you for it. Yet I am still at a loss to apprehend whence comes your Royal status.’
Her dark, tapering eyebrows lifted in surprise. ‘La! Monsieur! Even your having landed in Sweden but this morning is hardly excuse enough for such ignorance. Have I not told you that I am the daughter of the Russian Ambassador?’
This sounded to Roger as if the girl was suffering from la folie des grandeurs’, yet he could not help but be imp
ressed by the deference that her partners had shown in taking a mere glance as an order not to disturb her, and he felt that if he led her on there might be something worth knowing at the bottom of her strange pretensions, so he said with a smile: ‘Forgive me, your Majesty; but I still fail to understand why your father should consider himself as of more importance than—er—let us say, Monsieur de Pons, or yourself than Madame la Marquise?’
‘Then you are more stupid than I thought, Monsieur. The Empress Catherine being the greatest sovereign in the world, it follows that her Imperial Majesty’s representatives are regarded as the equals of Prime Ministers, wherever they may be, and of a rank hardly less than those Sovereigns to whose courts they are accredited.’
‘ ’Tis not so in France, England or Holland,’ Roger averred. ‘Nor in any country in Southern Europe, as far as I am aware.’
Natalia Andreovna’s green eyes went a little sullen, but she said stubbornly: ‘Well, ’tis so in the North. When my uncle, Count Stackelberg, was Ambassador at Warsaw, he always treated the Polish King, Stanislas Augustus, as an inferior and would not even stand up when he came into the room. Here too, although my father shows King Gustavus a reasonable politeness, he stands no nonsense from him; and does not hesitate to hammer the King’s table with his fist when he is presenting a demand on behalf of her Imperial Majesty.’
‘You intrigue me greatly, Madame; but I must confess my surprise that King Gustavus should submit to such treatment. If I were he I should be tempted to send your father home.’
‘No doubt he would like to, but he dare not,’ she sneered. ‘And ’tis clear you know little of Swedish politics to suggest it’
‘I know nothing,’ Roger admitted, ‘and would be grateful for enlightment.’
‘You will know at least that for the half-century preceding Gustavus’s ascension of the throne, the Kings of Sweden were but puppets, entirely under the control of an oligarchy; and that in 1772, just a year after he become King, he carried out a coup d’étát by which he put a curb upon their power and became in theory an autocratic monarch?’
‘Yes, I have heard tell of that swift and bloodless revolution. For a young Prince of twenty-six, he appears to have carried it through with remarkable skill and resolution; but I thought that he had made himself absolute in fact.’
She shook her head. ‘He has all the appearance of a despot without the actual power. His mistake lay in the new Constitution he gave Sweden, which he wrote himself. He gave his pledge that he would never alter it, and although, by it, he reassumed many of the prerogatives of the ancient monarchy, he also bound himself not to do certain things without the consent of his Riksdag. For example, he not only allowed them to retain the purse-strings of the nation but solemnly undertook not to engage in an offensive war without their agreement. To Russia the knowledge that her north-west frontier cannot be attacked without the consent of the Swedish parliament is worth an Army Corps.’
‘You mean because the obtaining of such an assent would give her ample warning of Sweden’s hostile intentions?’
‘Not only that. Russia controls the Riksdag and so could ensure its veto.’
‘How so, Madame?’
‘You will have heard of the Caps and the Hats?’
‘They were the two great political parties of Sweden, were they not? But I had thought that King Gustavus abolished both on his seizure of power.’
‘He forbade the use of the terms, but the parties still exist. The nicknames arose, I am told, from Old Count Horn, who was Prime Minister of Sweden some sixty years ago, being dubbed a ‘Night-cap’ from the sleepy, unambitious policy that he pursued. His opponents, a group of vigorous, warlike young nobles, then adopted the soubriquet “Hats” from the tricornes that they wore. In due course the Hats got the upper hand, and financed by France, made war on Russia. The war proved disastrous for Sweden and gradually the power of the Hats declined. In the meantime Russia had begun to finance the nobles of the Cap party in secret and they in turn came to power. The pendulum has oscillated a little since; but the Caps still take their orders from Petersburg, and the leading Hats are still the pensioners of France. And France, having in recent years become Russia’s ally, no longer disputes her policies in the Baltic, but instructs her Swedish bondmen to dance to Russia’s tune. So you see now why nine-tenths of the Swedish nobility look, not to their King, but to my father, as their suzerain.’
Roger ‘saw’ in no unmistakable fashion, and was appalled to learn that Sweden, the only possible bulwark in the north of the new Triple Alliance, was so riddled with venal treachery.
Without waiting for an answer Natalia Andreovna added: ‘As for the Finns, they have long been bitterly resentful of Swedish despotism. In the event of war, Gustavus would find himself hard put to it to prevent his Finnish levies from going over to Russia, and offering to liberate their country in order that they might lay it at the feet of the Empress. Therefore, whatever ambitions Gustavus may cherish in secret, he can do little to further them at the expense of Russia, unless he is prepared to defy his Riksdag and jeopardise his crown.’
It was just such intelligence of the way the Russians saw things, garnered from the highest sources, that Mr. Pitt had foreseen, that Roger, in his character of a well-bred, wealthy, young idler, might be able to pick up; and as Natalia Andreovna clearly knew what she was talking about he would have liked to continue the conversation for much longer. But, rising to her feet and shaking out her wide, star-spangled skirts, she said with a smile: ‘And now, Monsieur, for one evening I have given you a more than fair measure of my time; so you may take me back to the ballroom, that I may dance with a few of my beaux before I go home.’
Roger was too tactful to seek to detain her; but, as he escorted her upstairs he pressed her to give him an early opportunity of seeing her again, and she said that he might present himself at her salon on Thursday evening. They had hardly reached the ballroom before half-a-dozen men came up and formed a little court round her, so with one last, meaning look straight into her green eyes, he bowed himself away.’
It was now past two o’clock. Queen Sophia Magdalena had already left and many of the older guests were leaving. As the party no longer held any interest for Roger he decided to go too, and, having made his adieu to his pretty hostess, he went downstairs again and had his hired coach called up to the door.
As it rumbled back towards the city he felt that he had ample cause to congratulate himself on the fruits of his first night in Sweden. In it he had accomplished more than during the whole of the fifteen days he had spent in Denmark; as the good relations he had established with the French Ambassador’s wife and the Russian Ambassador’s daughter could not possibly have been bettered for his purpose.
He smiled to himself a little as he thought of the familiarities he had so boldly taken with Natalia, and wondered if he would have dared to do so had he then known that she was regarded as semi-royalty. All unknowing he had taken a big risk, for had she been of a different temperament she might have held it against him and seriously queered his pitch, but it seemed that he could hardly have played his cards better.
She had not the faintest resemblance to any other girl that he had ever met, and he could not make up his mind if he liked her or not. She had a great opinion of herself, but not without reason, as she was unusually intelligent as well as beautiful in a strange way that was all her own. He recalled the Marquise’s warning that the slim, green-eyed Russian was reputed to have a most malicious sense of humour, and his own experience of her led him to believe that when her passions were aroused she would prove extremely vicious; but he knew that he was already strongly attracted, and decided that it was, perhaps, just as well that his inclination coincided with his duty, since it was so clearly in the interests of his mission to develop his budding affaire with her.
The whole of the next day he spent in exploring the city and entering into conversation with everyone with whom he came in contact; and the opinions of the townsf
olk gave him cause to moderate the view that Natalia Andreovna had given him of King Gustavus, as a monarch with little real power or prestige.
He gathered that before Gustavus’s reign Sweden had been reduced to abject poverty by the misrule of several generations of rapacious nobles who had preyed upon her mercilessly; whereas, during the past sixteen years the King had brought her people both freedom and prosperity. With the aid of the banker Liljencrantz he had straightened out the appalling mess in which he found the country’s finances; and with the aid of the jurist Liliestrale he had restored both justice and the dignity of the church. He had himself impeached the two Supreme Courts before the Senate, disbenched five of the eight judges, and dismissed scores of lesser magistrates convicted of taking bribes. He had redistributed the clergy’s livings and compelled the venal priests among them to live in their parishes and serve their parishioners, instead of taking their fees for doing nothing. He had reorganised the army, abolished the sale of commissions, and made merit the only road to promotion.
The latter step was one of the causes of the hostility with which the nobles regarded him, but their main grievance was that, having robbed their Estate of much of its former power, they could no longer sell their votes on domestic matters to the highest bidder, which venality had previously been one of their main sources of income.
The King, it emerged, was a great lover of the spectacular and also of the theatre. Some people resented the large sums he spent on display, and his purchase of a magnificent collection of art treasures from all parts of Europe; but most were of the opinion that the former was compensated for by the resulting free entertainments and that the latter redounded to the glory of their country.
The only matter in which Gustavus had seriously jeopardised his popularity with the masses was in the taxation of spirits. Formerly it had been an age-old right for everyone to distil whatever they required for their own consumption, and the bare idea of taxing liquor raised a most frightful outcry. Troops had to be employed to collect the tax, and, on even this proving ineffective, the King had sought to turn the manufacture into a royal monopoly by ordering the destruction of all private stills and erecting large distilleries of his own. Riots had ensued, and the indignant mob burnt down several of the royal distilleries, so the King had endeavoured to sell the monopoly to the Government, but without success, and the struggle still continued.
The Shadow of Tyburn Tree Page 22