The Blood Royal(142)

‘Certainly. Let’s drink to Stout Cortez! And may our absent friend be struck with the same paralysing wonder when she claps eyes on the Pacific.’

‘Ah! Cortez! Now tell me – wasn’t he the Spanish gentleman who set the fashion for burning one’s boats?’ The princess dimpled and twinkled and sipped her champagne in a high good humour.

‘Indeed. I understand he set fire to his whole fleet to prevent any retreat from the New World to Europe,’ Joe confirmed with relish. ‘And a further toast to the equally stout-hearted gentleman who is at present accompanying our adventurer. I’m thinking he too deserves our good wishes. Are you ever going to tell us, Your Highness, who it was who drew the short straw?’

‘Villain!’ The princess smiled flirtatiously. If she’d had a fan she would have tapped him with it, Joe thought. ‘I’m only surprised you haven’t worked it out, Commander. He’s the best of men and now has what he’s long wanted. He would expect our congratulations. It was difficult to decide and I cannot be certain even now that I made the right choice. If I’ve got it wrong, you’re not to tell me!’

Sandilands poured out more champagne and waited.

‘Choice?’ Lily filled the silence. ‘You mean there was more than one candidate for this position?’

‘You are surprised? She is rich (I have seen to it that her affairs are in order) and lovely. There are many men in her past who would have died for her. But there was one special man, an officer in the White Army, with whom she fell in love when she was nursing. He is alive. I have kept him in focus all these years, never quite knowing whether I might need to call on him. He lives in France now … something of a wastrel it has to be said, but free. I do not enjoy playing God and I might well have done the wrong thing. I shall try to think of myself as God’s instrument,’ she said with a slight smile. ‘But I rejected him. A gambler I’m told. I take no risks with the Romanov fortune.’

Sandilands and Wentworth exchanged anxious glances and waited.

‘When Tatiana fetched up on that doorstep in Murmansk, your consul identified her correctly – indeed she made no secret of her identity to him. She declared herself and demanded protection. He knew there was a price on all Romanov heads – they were being purged all over Europe. A discreet man who had the good sense to trust no one, not even the secret services available to him, he gave her an alternative identity that she could fit into easily. That of her own dearest friend Anna Petrovna. She had heard of Anna’s death with that of her family. It was the consul who whispered in the right ears the story that the body had never been recovered – indeed, it hasn’t, but in the chaos that reigns over there, who will ever know? The consul’s wife had a bottle of black hair dye and used it to good effect to turn out a convincing Anna. The three of us – the consul, his wife and I – were the only ones who were aware of her identity. From that moment she had become in all our minds, and in her own, Anna Petrovna. And, of course, when she arrived, she slipped easily enough into English life since she spoke English as her first language, albeit with a strong Scottish accent.’

‘I think I might have noticed that,’ said Lily, drily. ‘The last words you hear before you die tend to make an impression.’

‘The children all spoke thus. When young they conversed solely with their nannies and the upper servants – all of whom were brought in by the Empress from Edinburgh where, she’d been told, the best English was spoken.’ The princess smiled. ‘Elocution lessons in later years failed to eradicate it.’

‘There was more to her disguise than hair dye and a Scottish accent,’ said Lily. ‘The appalling story about the baby and the sufferings in the Siberian village – was that also a deceit?’

The princess shook her head sadly. ‘No. That was her own experience. She merely told the truth, but as if it had happened to Anna. She related her hideous tale bit by bit to the captain of the frigate that brought her back to England. Told him everything. She trusted this officer, grew very close to him, I believe. He is the one man who knows the depths of her degradation, is aware of the violence and anger she clutches to her and understands it. The one man who can love her.’

‘Except that he can’t,’ Sandilands objected, remembering. ‘Swinburne. Navy man. Married, I understand.’

‘Was. No longer, Commander. His wife died of the influenza last year. He immediately took advantage of the reduction in the naval service to resign his commission, to everyone’s surprise, and set off into Europe. To travel about and lose himself, no doubt. As men of a certain age with certain concerns do. I didn’t let him go. I have always taken an interest in the good captain, though he was becoming ever more difficult to track. Luckily he was in France latterly, where they know how to keep a record of visiting foreigners. And if you know the right man at the top of the right department – and I do – you can find someone without much difficulty.’