The Blood Royal (38 page)

He bent and picked up an envelope that had fallen from the wrappings. He waited while she opened it and read the message on the single sheet it contained. When she coloured and put it away he asked no question.

They continued to stare. Joe approached the painting of the Russian forest, now reset in a heavy gilt frame, and peered at it more closely. He shook his head and looked again. His fingers reached out to touch it but left off before they contacted the oil surface. He began to speak hesitantly, as though talking to himself and feeling his way through hostile territory in the dark: ‘I wonder – and you’ll tell me if you think this a fanciful idea – are we … could we possibly be … looking at a motive? Of sorts? A motive for murder? Anna Petrovna’s reason, if you can call it that – most would say “unreason” – for wanting the Prince of Wales dead? Is it staring us in the face? Am I making an unwarranted and utterly crazy assumption? If not, it’s worse than we thought.’

He turned to Lily, full of foreboding. ‘We’re staring into a depth of madness that makes anarchy and revolution look like cool common sense.’

Chapter Twenty-Nine

In the bustle of Simpson’s, Joe sat wrapped in thoughtful silence, paralysed by his insight. Disturbing though this clearly was, it showed no sign of affecting his appetite. He settled to his rib of beef and was halfway through it before he remembered his manners and engaged again in conversation with his equally preoccupied companion.

‘Lamb suit you, Wentworth? Mint sauce not too fierce?’

‘It’s all perfect, sir.’

After a pause: ‘You can’t send it back, you know … The painting, I mean.’

‘That’s exactly what my mind was turning on. I’m not used to receiving such lavish presents. I was trying to find the right phrases for a note to the prince.’

‘Well, you can forget about returning it with a few polite words. Out of the question. No one returns a royal gift. Ever. You must admit that it was a thoughtful gesture – and well deserved. Altogether, highly appropriate.’ He caught his bossy tone and added, more mildly: ‘I say, you weren’t really minded to return it, were you?’

‘Not on your nelly! I’m keeping it. I’m not such an ingrate as to spurn a gracious offering. And besides, I like it. My admiration was genuine. I encouraged the prince to bid for it. I can’t wait to show it to my father. It has an uneasy and depressing presence but it’s wonderfully done.’

‘Know what you mean. One wouldn’t hang it in one’s drawing room, perhaps …’ Joe agreed. ‘Tell me what you see in—’ He stopped talking, seeing the wine waiter approach to pour more burgundy into his glass.

Lily waited until they were left alone. A table discreetly placed in a corner, behind a small tropical forest of broad-leafed plants, had been put at Sandilands’ disposal. And not for the first time, judging by the warm greeting and the swift accommodation from the maître d’hôtel. The rest of the diners who crowded the room had already embarked on their sponge puddings and custard; some were as far advanced as brandy and cigars. All were loudly talkative, cheery and unbuttoned. No one was paying the slightest attention to the quiet couple in the corner.

‘It’s a frightening vision,’ Lily said. ‘Deliberately so. The princess told us all – do you remember – that no photographic equipment is allowed any longer in Russia. The country’s being laid waste, people are fleeing their homes or starving to death, massacres are going on, and what do the rest of us see of this? Nothing! The painting is an allegory. It’s a scream of protest, a warning, a cry to the world for assistance from whoever sees it. It shows the trackless wastes of the artist’s homeland but in the forefront there’s a deep, freshly dug grave. Reminiscent of a plague pit. It’s standing ready to receive its cargo of corpses. We know this from the crosses lining up in the background. Crosses made of human bones. Russian bones.’

‘Is that what you see, Wentworth? An allegory? Is that all?’

Lily looked at him in puzzlement. ‘Isn’t that enough? A foreshadowing of disaster for the Russian people? The death of a great empire?’

‘No. You haven’t looked closely enough. Look – we’ll finish up here and go back. We’ll pass a magnifying glass over the paintwork. And I’ll fill you in on our goddess. I called her the “Morrigan” after the Irish deity but I see I may have been poking about in the wrong pantheon.’

Joe talked on while Lily concentrated on her lamb and mint sauce. ‘She’s really Morana
.
In Russian and Slavic pagan religion, Morana was the goddess of death and winter. A beautiful girl with black hair and light skin but endowed also with wolf’s teeth and clawed hands. And she has form – she’s known to have killed her own husband, the god of fertility. She’s a dangerous goddess of darkness, frost and death.’

‘I begin to think you see one of these charmers around every corner, sir. Herr Freud might suppose you were frightened at an impressionable age by an odd-looking nursemaid!’

Joe reflected that Miss Jameson would never have dared to tease him so blatantly and wondered why he allowed it.

‘And is there any remedy against this recurrent nightmare?’ she wanted to know. ‘Or is Morana invincible?’

‘Apparently not. No. It’s her only useful attribute: she
can
be overcome – if only temporarily. She’s the spirit of winter, after all, and winter passes into spring. Even on the Russian steppes. Just to be quite certain they were rid of her, the country people used to make a straw puppet representing Morana and throw it into the river.’

Lily grunted. ‘And we know what
that
signifies. It’s just another way of celebrating the destruction of the matriarchal society and its replacement with a patriarchal one.’

Joe shot a warning glare across the table. ‘Stop right there. I must ask you, Wentworth, not to bend my ear with all that suffragist talk. You’re preaching to the converted. The Pankhurst ladies are good friends of my mother’s and therefore – of mine.’

‘Well, I’ve never heard of your Morana – I think you’re making her up – but it wouldn’t surprise me if she existed. She’s probably Celtic in origin like the Morrigan … similar names. Same root? All these stories come with a warning – women are nasty, dangerous creatures. Chuck ’em off the nearest bridge.’

The flippant comment provoked a dry response. ‘No use. They’d bob to the surface in that annoying way they have and float, then we medieval-minded men would have the bother of fishing them out and burning them. Look here, I think we can manage without pudding, don’t you? In all the excitement I forgot to warn you that we’re expected for tea at Cassandra’s. Better leave room for the tea cakes.’ He signalled to the waiter that he’d like his bill. ‘She’s got her two boys back home and I think she rather wants to introduce us to the new head of the family. We’ve just got time to go back to my office and take a proper look at that painting.’

‘I see a Russian landscape. Desolate place, miles from anywhere … probably Siberia. Summer time – there’s no snow. Thick forest,’ Lily offered in return to his challenge.

‘You’re not looking carefully enough. Stand closer.’ Joe put a hand on her shoulders and steered her towards the canvas. Surely this bright girl could see what he was seeing? ‘It’s all in the detail. It’s summer time, yes. Forest – yes. And I think the trees: birch, larch, pine … and the soggy terrain … would indicate a scene in the Ural mountains. But miles from anywhere? No. I think we can tie this spot down very precisely. In fact I can point it out to you on a map.’

He produced a map of Asia from a drawer of his desk and, after a moment’s search, found the place he was looking for. Lily’s eyes widened as she read off the name and she went back to stare at the painting.

He followed her. ‘There, what do you see on the horizon?’

‘I think I see the gates of hell,’ Lily murmured. ‘Hieronymus Bosch would have admired this.’

‘Many would agree with that interpretation. A hellish place. And it’s not imaginary. It’s very real. What seems to be the entrance to the underworld or a town on fire is the heat and smoke of dozens of factories, smelting works, and mineral processing plants. The biggest iron works in Europe is what you see belching away there, Wentworth. And the whole hot nastiness is emanating from a mineral-rich earth. There’s a saying that “If you haven’t found gold within twenty miles of Ekaterinburg, it’s because you haven’t looked for it.” Precious stones and metals – they’ve been dug out of the soil here and fashioned into the jewels and precious objects that decorated the Tsar’s palaces for years.’

‘Ekaterinburg! I had no idea. That’s the city? It’s just a name … a rather terrifying name … the place where the royal family was murdered.’

‘It’s terrifying for the poor souls who work there and for those who make their way through it – in shackles. It’s in the Ural mountains – the division between Europe and Asia. Ekaterinburg is the gateway to the prison camps of Siberia. Thousands of the Tsar’s prisoners were sent from jails in Moscow and Petrograd to walk with shackled feet and bound hands on their way across Russia to a miserable death. Men, women and children tramped through. And still do. But now they tramp in greater numbers and these prisoners have the benefit of no legal process. They’re condemned for no good reason by the Bolshevist butchers who rule the empire now. It’s enough to be intelligent, skilled, outspoken, unpopular with a neighbour – any of those qualities or none will have you arrested and obliterated.’ Joe gave a sharp grunt of laughter. ‘You and your father wouldn’t last two minutes in the new Russia, Wentworth. But in Ekaterinburg in 1918, the Tsar and his secret police force were hated. The “Crowned Executioner” they called him … or “Nicholas the Bloody”. This was the last place on earth he would have wished to be sent himself as a prisoner. He knew that he and his family could expect no mercy at the hands of the Ural Regional Soviet.’

‘But who sent them there? They were doing no harm where they were held in detention in … Tobolsk, was it? Siberia?’

‘As long as they were alive, they were always going to be a focus for the royalist party. In 1918 the White Army was still active and making progress. They’d joined forces with a rather effective Czech contingent and were fighting their way towards the city. In the last days, you could hear the guns getting closer. It was undoubtedly Lenin, back in Moscow, who gave the order – by telegraph – for the guard to carry out the assassination of the whole family before they could be rescued. He was wily enough not to sign his name on any incriminating documents.’

‘Lenin? It was reported that the local Ural Soviet took matters into its own hands.’

‘A cover story! The whole affair has his fingerprints – if not his signature – all over it. Never forget who sent them to the Urals in the first place. And to whom did the executioners dash to report success? To Lenin in Moscow. All part of a larger plot. Many other Romanovs were executed in various unpleasant ways at about the same time. The Bolsheviks were making certain that Russia would never be in thrall to the imperial family again.’

‘And this is where they shot them? In the forest?

‘No. They were executed in the cellar of the house in which they’d been imprisoned. A villa requisitioned from a local industrialist called Ipatiev. The bodies were transported by lorry into the countryside some miles away, we’re told. To just the place you see here,’ he added thoughtfully.

‘And this pit isn’t a broad allegorical reference to the death of Russia at all? It’s very specific? To one family?’

‘Yes. Highly specific. It’s the Romanov grave. And geographically specific, too. Do you see the light in the sky?’

‘Ah, yes. Yellowish – white. Too pale to be sunset. Dawn? The light’s breaking on the left of the picture, so that must be the east.’

‘So where does that place the city in relation to the artist’s viewpoint?’

Lily thought for a bit, moving her hands about, and then she said: ‘It would be to the south-east. So this grave is … um … ten miles or so north-west of Ekaterinburg.’

‘Well done! It is – to be exact – a particularly depressing corner of the Koptyaki Forest, a place called the Four Brothers, after four tall pine trees that grow hereabouts. That could be one of them, there, on the right. It’s a quagmire underfoot and riddled with old mine workings. Just the place to lose eleven bodies.’

‘Eleven, sir?’

‘The Tsar and his wife, their five children and four of the household. Maid, valet, footman and the loyal family doctor – Botkin – all went to their deaths with the imperial family. But there’s something else we can glean from the picture. Take this magnifying glass. Go and see what you can find carved on the surface of the crosses. I’m sure I noticed something.’

‘There’s an A, an N, and smaller – an O, another A, an M and a T and a third A. You could easily miss them. These are crosses for the Tsar Nicholas and his wife, Alexandra, and their five children, aren’t they? Olga, Tatiana, Maria and Anastasia. And this smallest cross here is for the youngest, the boy Alexei, the heir to the throne.’

‘Aged only thirteen when he died.’

‘Are you thinking, sir, that this was done by an eyewitness? Now I see the precision …’

‘Yes. Or by someone who was given a detailed description by an eyewitness.’

‘Sir? May I ask you how you come by all this knowledge? You seem to know more than I’ve managed to glean from the news reports. I’d expect that, but … well, this is a remote place we’re talking about. It’s thought that no one really can be sure what happened to the Romanovs. Their death was announced on three different occasions by the British press in the months
before
that July. By the time they really died, people were shrugging their shoulders – it sounded like old news. But I was the same age as one of the girls and my nephew was thirteen at the time like little Alexei – I felt for them. I read and was convinced by each account of their massacre. Like the rest of the nation. But, then, I found myself equally convinced by the stories that it was all a smokescreen and that the family had been taken to safety. Who’s to say this isn’t all a pack of lies? That this grave in the forest story isn’t false? A bumbling amateurish set-up. Who could possibly have witnessed this scene? Lived to record it? And got it out of the country?’