Читать книгу Imperial Splendour - Барбара Картленд - Страница 2

The Duke of Welminster walked across the room to pull back the curtains from the window and stare out at the Neva.

In the pale sunlight, which later would deepen to a red heat, the river, one of the shortest in the world, was shimmering on the water.

It reflected the bright and shining gold on the needle-like spire on the Peter and Paul Cathedral on the far shore and the Duke could also see the bastions and battlements of the Fortress built by Peter the Great.

He was for the moment, however, not concerned with the beauty of St. Petersburg, which had left him somewhat surprised by the perfection of its architecture, but with the Russian Army awaiting their Commanders-in-Chief’s conclusion as to the direction that the French intended to advance.

The Duke’s contemplation was interrupted by a soft cry of protest.

“Have you forgotten me?” a woman’s voice asked. “I am still here and wanting you.”

There was no mistaking the invitation and the seductive undertone that made the words, spoken in English but with a distinct trace of a Russian accent, sound passionately alluring.

The Duke turned round with a smile on his lips.

There was no doubt that the Princess Katharina Bagration was very lovely, in fact one of the loveliest women that he had ever seen.

Lying back against the lace-edged pillows with her hair falling over her white shoulders and her huge eyes seeming to fill her whole face, she looked very much younger than she actually was.

There was a distinct Oriental mystery about her, an Andalusian charm and, when she was dressed, a Parisian elegance.

It was not surprising, the Duke thought, that the Czar Alexander I had chosen her to spy on him, a fact that he had been aware of from the moment he had arrived in the City of St. Petersburg.

The Duke was very experienced in the art of intrigue and had carried out a number of unofficial Diplomatic missions with such success that he had not been surprised when the Prime Minister, Lord Liverpool, had sent for him.

“I want your help, Welminster,” he began, “and I think you can guess where I wish you to go.”

“To Russia?” the Duke had queried.

“Exactly,” the Prime Minister replied.

Lord Castlereagh, the Foreign Secretary, who was in the Cabinet Room, interposed to add,

“For God’s sake, Welminster, please find out what is happening. The reports I receive contradict themselves to the point where I don’t know whether I am on my head or my heels as far as that enigmatic country is concerned.”

The irritation in the Foreign Secretary’s voice was very evident and the Duke could well understand his frustration.

Czar Alexander had kept not just the British but most of Europe seriously confused by his behaviour during the last few years.

And even Napoleon Bonaparte might be excused for finding him incomprehensible.

Having moved through the first years of his reign at the beginning of the century, as a shadowy indecisive figure, Alexander’s attention had become focused on Bonaparte.

The Corsican’s astonishing Military successes had turned the whole of Europe into a turmoil.

The Czar could not make up his mind whether to join a coalition against the French or to try to continue his father’s policy of friendship.

Napoleon had actually suggested to Czar Paul, his father, that France and Russia should partition the world, but, when Bonaparte had trampled into the dust the terms of the Treaty of Amiens, the Russian Sovereign had written that he seemed to be ‘one of the most infamous tyrants that history has ever produced’.

After the great disaster at the Battle of Austerlitz, when the twenty-eight year old Czar Alexander, leading his Army as its Commander-in-Chief, had been completely routed, his gallantry had seemed to desert him.

He had ridden away from the battlefield alone, dismounted and collapsed under an apple tree, where he had wept convulsively.

Although he tried to excuse himself by blaming the Austrians, the Russians suffered yet another disastrous defeat at the Battle of Friedland.

It was then, to the amazement of the Russian people, that Alexander had signed ‘a Treaty of Friendship’ with the French when he had promised faithfully that he would take part in the Continental Blockade of trade against England.

This had brought him extreme unpopularity with the Russian people together with the fact that they could not adjust themselves after Catherine the Great’s victories to a number of ignominious defeats.

In the previous year, 1811, Alexander had listened to his subjects and refused to send soldiers to fight for the French and, what was more, he had refused to close Russian Ports to neutral shipping and uphold the Blockade against England.

“I cannot help thinking,” a famous British General had said to the Duke in London, “that if it comes to a showdown, Russia will prove a poor match for Napoleon’s Grand Army.”

The Duke had felt inclined to agree with him, but now that he was actually in Russia he began to have his doubts.

Indeed yesterday the Czar had shown him a letter from Count Rostopchin, the Governor of Moscow, he had found the contents very convincing.

The Governor had written,

“Your Empire, Sire, has two powerful defenders, its vast space and its climate. The Emperor of all Russia will be formidable at Moscow, terrible at Karzan and invincible at Tobolsk.”

“Stop thinking about war, Blake,” the Princess Katharina now cried insistently. “I can find something far more interesting to talk about.”

The Duke standing by the bed, knew what such a conversation involved, but instead of surrendering to the invitation of her lips he replied,

“I think it is time you returned to your own room.”

“There is no hurry.”

“I am thinking of your reputation.”

The Princess laughed and it was a low musical sound.

“You are the only man I know who is so considerate or is it perhaps that I am boring you?”

There was no doubt she assumed that was an impossibility and the Duke, with just a touch of cynicism in his voice, answered,

“How could I be so ungallant?”

“You are very handsome, mon cher,” the Princess pouted, “as far too many women have told you. I adore handsome men and no man could be a more alluring lover.”

She had then broken into French, as if it was easier to express herself in that language when she spoke of love.

French was the language of the Nobility in St. Petersburg and French culture was a status symbol.

Someone had told the Duke on his arrival,

“Everything is uneatable for dinner if it is not first dressed by a French chef, no gown is elegant if it is not a Parisian one and yet there is surely no one in the whole City who does not blaspheme against Bonaparte and lament Lord Nelson!”

“You are very beautiful, Katharina,” the Duke said now in French,” but I still think that you should leave me for what is left of the night.”

The Princess made a petulant little sound. Then, bending forward to reveal the exquisite curves of her naked breasts, she put her hand on the Duke’s.

“You are too serious,” she murmured, “let’s be happy and enjoy ourselves. After all what is Russia to you?”

“An ally,” the Duke replied, “if a somewhat vacillating one.”

Katharina laughed softly and then she asked,

“Tell me what you want to know about your ‘ally’ and I will give you the right answers.”

“I am sure of that,” he replied. “I am only wondering what such information will cost me.”

Katharina laughed again.

She was well aware that the Duke knew why she had sought him out, why she had flirted enticingly with him since he had arrived at The Winter Palace and why last night after he had retired to bed a secret panel in the wall of his bedroom had opened suddenly and then she had appeared unexpectedly.

That was not entirely true, because the Duke had been expecting her, although not in the particular manner by which she had affected her entrance.

“You know, of course,” Lord Castlereagh had said to him in London, “that the Czar employs some of the loveliest women in St. Petersburg to spy on our Ambassador and any other Emissary we may send to Russia.”

He had seen the smile on the Duke’s face and added,

“Not that, Welminster, it will be a novelty for you.”

“I will admit that it has happened in the past,” the Duke replied, “and, having heard of the beauty of the women at the Court of St. Petersburg, I am quite looking forward to the experience.”

“Be careful,” the Foreign Secretary warned him.

“Of what?” the Duke enquired. “Giving away State secrets, most of which I suspect are known to the Russians already, or of losing my heart ?”

“The latter has not entered into my calculations,” Lord Castlereagh replied with a touch of irony.

The Duke had been expecting an enchantress, but he had to give the Czar full marks for his choice of the Princess.

As it happened, the Duke already knew a great deal about Katharina Bagration. She was half-Russian, half-Polish and had married at twenty a General many years older than herself.

A Countess in her own right with Royal blood in her veins, she was, with her husband, admitted to the highest circles of the Russian Court.

The fact that she was highly intelligent as well as beautiful, together with the traces in her of a Mongolian ancestry, gave her the faint air of Oriental mystery that made her unique even amongst a host of other beautiful Russian women.

It was the Czar who had ordered his Foreign Minister to use this effervescent and lovely young woman as a spy.

The Duke had already heard what had happened at Katharina’s first assignment.

She had been told to make the acquaintance of Count Metternich, the Austrian delegate to Dresden, who the Russian Diplomats in Vienna insisted was of far greater importance than his youth and minor appointment suggested.

Count Metternich, then an almost unknown young man, was described on the secret files in the Kremlin as an intimate of the Emperor of Austria and the instrument who had been primarily responsible for the downfall of Thugut.

Princess Katharina, young, lovely, but with a shrewd little mind well hidden behind her childlike face, had called at the Legation in Dresden and, as a footman opened the door, it happened that Count Metternich was passing through the hall.

He was expecting the arrival of one of the Imperial Couriers with grave news.

Then framed in the sunlight against the dark hallway he saw a small exquisite figure.

She was wearing one of the thin, almost transparent muslin gowns that were the fashion and against the sun her body showed through the diaphanous material like a beautiful marble statue.

Count Metternich was for the moment spellbound into a strange stillness.

He said afterwards to one of his friends who repeated it to the Duke,

“She was like a beautiful naked angel.”

At that moment the young Austrian and the Russian Secret Agent fell in love.

Their affair was a wild, fiery and insatiable union of all-consuming passion that had all Dresden talking.

The Duke had trained himself to file away information about people, especially those concerned in the Diplomatic world and he remembered as soon as he was introduced to Princess Katharina in The Winter Palace that he had been told that within three months of her meeting with Count Metternich, she found that she was to have a child.

This had been whispered about, argued over, discussed and re-discussed and there was actually a great deal of speculation as to what would happen next.

In fact, the Duke recalled, there had been an urgent command from the Czar, who wished to safeguard his beautiful agent’s reputation at all costs.

General Bagration went through the ritual of announcing that his marriage was shortly to be blessed with a child and after the birth of a daughter he formally acknowledged paternity.

The Czar was no less accommodating and the Court of St. Petersburg formally recorded the birth.

The baby was summarily handed over to Count Metternich’s adoring, patient and very understanding wife.

Utterly without conscience about the love-children he fathered, he was only grateful that his love affair could continue and, whatever was said privately, there would be no outward scandal.

Ten years later the Duke, however, was quite certain that, because Katharina had been so successful with by now the most outstanding Diplomat in Europe, the Czar had chosen her to win another triumph where he himself was concerned.

He was certain that the efficiency of the Russian Secret Service had noted that he was most fastidious where women were concerned, that he was the most sought-after bachelor in England and that, if they had recorded his many love affairs, they would doubtless by this time have filled many files in the Diplomatic archives.

At the same time he found Katharine’s expertise and her sophisticated art in love-making a very pleasant part of his visit.

The Duke was, however, quite ruthless where his own interests were concerned.

If he had been approached by a woman who did not attract him or by one who offended his very fastidious taste when making love, he would have had no compunction about locking his door or, if that had proved ineffective, of turning her out of his bed.

But Katharina had appealed to him sensually and her body was, as many other men had found, irresistible.

The Duke had thought, as the passion they felt for each other burst into flame in the huge carved and gilded bed in a room decorated in the French manner and filled with priceless pictures that Catherine the Great’s agents had bought in France, that she was the complement to everything that proclaimed culture.

When she had captured Count Metternich’s heart, she had been very young and perhaps he had been her first lover after her marriage.

But now, the Duke thought, she had blossomed into a woman polished like a flawless gem into a brilliance that aroused the endless admiration of the mind as well as the desires of the body.

The Duke enjoyed the duels that they exchanged with words, both witty and provocative, even while she used every feminine wile to enslave him physically.

Now, as he looked at her with his grey eyes, she leaned back against the pillows and with her long-fingered little hands pulled the sheet over her nakedness until it was just beneath her chin.

There was something young and modest in the movement and yet at the same time it was a deliberately seductive action thought out and perhaps practised like the ritual steps of a ballerina. And the Duke appreciated the very artistry of it.

“What do you think about, Katharina,” he asked, “when you are not ‘working’?”

For a moment she looked at him doubtfully and then made no pretence not to understand the innuendo that lay behind his words.

“Now I am thinking of you,” she said softly, “and there is no reason to think of myself.”

It was an answer, he reflected that revealed the very subtlety of her mind.

Who else would she think about when she was not acting on the Czar’s instructions, but about herself, her fiery, passionate Russian nature making it an absorbing subject?

The Duke glanced towards the elaborate gold and diamond encrusted clock that stood on the marble mantelpiece.

It was one of hundreds of beautiful clocks that decorated the glorious apartments of The Winter Palace, which on three floors extended for half a mile and had been part of Peter the Great’s supreme collection.

“It is five o’clock,” he observed, “and in four hours I have promised to breakfast with the Czar. Until then I intend to sleep, Katharina.”

There was a note in his voice that told her it would be useless to plead with him.

She merely smiled and, rising from the bed apparently completely unselfconscious of her nakedness, she walked to a chair where she had thrown down the elaborate satin and lace negligée which she had entered the room in.

She might have had a child, but her body was still that of the beautiful naked angel as Clement Metternich had described her.

Wrapped in her negligée, she slipped her feet into a pair of velvet mules embroidered with pearls.

“Sleep well, my adorable Englishman,” she purred. “I shall count the hours until I can kiss you again.”

She flashed him a smile that gave her face a sudden witchery and she then moved across the room.

She touched the panel in the wall. It opened and, without looking back, she stepped into the dark aperture. Then the panelling swung back and closed behind her.

The Duke sat still for a moment and then he climbed into bed and closed his eyes, but he found, however, that the sleep he desired eluded him for the moment.

His brain was still active and again he was thinking not of Katharina and the fire that they had ignited in each other, but of Russia and the Grand Armée of France. Six hundred thousand men strong and immensely impressive.

Equally the Duke argued with himself that a third of the soldiers were unwilling German conscripts drawn from subject territories.

The first thing he had learned on reaching St. Petersburg was that Alexander had been astounded when he heard that Napoleon was heading towards the ancient and sacred Capital of Russia.

He had never imagined that the Emperor would actually attempt to march to Moscow and the thought of the inevitable carnage appalled him.

The one blessing from the Russian point of view, the Duke told himself, was the fact that the Czar was not himself leading the Russian Armies.

His record as a Military leader had been so disastrous that even now every setback was attributed to his influence.

Because his sister had been so desperate, she had written to him bluntly in a manner that no one else would have dared to do,

“For God’s sake, do not decide to assume command yourself. There is no time to lose to give the Armies a Chief in whom the men will have confidence. As for you, you cannot inspire them with any.”

Amazingly, Alexander had heeded her pleas and left the Army.

He had travelled back to Moscow, then to St. Petersburg. Everywhere he heard criticisms of the High Command and everywhere there was a cry for Kutuzov, whose name spelt magic for the people.

Alexander had no faith in General Kutuzov. He felt that he was a figure from another century, but he decided to bow to popular demand and told the Duke on his arrival,

“The public want him so I have appointed him. As for me I wash my hands of the whole affair!”

The Duke understood that he was feeling peeved at being more or less deposed in favour of a sixty-seven year old General who was lazy, licentious and knew nothing about modern warfare.

Other people in The Winter Palace, however, informed the Duke that Kutuzov, despite all his shortcomings, had the common sense born of long years of experience.

“He is slow but tenacious,” an elderly statesman said, “lazy, but discerning, impassive but cunning.”

All this information the Duke conveyed in code by special Courier to London.

He hoped with one of his more mocking smiles that the Prime Minister and the Foreign Minister would be able to make something out of it.

‘The one thing about Russia,’ he told himself, ‘is that the unexpected always happens and at least there is nothing monotonous here in day to day life.’

He realised that he was enjoying himself in his own rather cynical fashion and with that thought in his mind he fell into a deep sleep.

*

At nine o’clock the Duke was admitted to the Czar’s private apartments.

To get there he walked through what seemed to him to be miles of the most beautiful and finely decorated rooms that he had ever seen in his whole life.

He had been quite prepared for magnificence for the stories of St. Petersburg’s treasures and the splendour of its buildings had been told and retold in London.

It had been the extravagant Empress Elizabeth who had pulled down the original wooden Winter Palace built by Peter the Great and her architect, Rastrelle, in eight years covered an area of two million square feet with over one thousand rooms and one hundred staircases.

The Empress Catherine, when she came to power, commissioned a Summer Palace that would outshine Versailles and in St. Petersburg she had added three buildings to the immense Winter Palace, which were known as ‘The Hermitage’.

Between the two buildings there were courtyards heated in winter where rare birds flitted amongst the trees and shrubberies.

The Empress had instructed her Ambassadors in Paris, Rome and London to keep a sharp lookout for art bargains and they bought her plenty of fine pictures by great Masters such as Rembrandt, Tiepolo, Van Dyck and Poussin.

The Duke glanced only perfunctorily at these magnificent works of art for his mind was still concerned with Bonaparte’s advance into Russia.

‘It would be a tragedy,’ he told himself, ‘if treasures such as I see here should be lost to posterity.’

When he reached the Czar’s apartments, he was saluted by the sentries of the Grenadiers of the Golden Guard.

Picked for their great height, out of all the Regiments who wore the Russian bearskins, they were the most gorgeous.

They wore white trousers and leggings, a black tunic with gold cuffs and collar and cutaway tails, gold-edged with red on which was fastened a cartridge case embossed with a double-headed eagle.

The Duke found the Czar waiting for him. Tall, fair-haired and externally handsome it was easy to understand that the Russian people had looked at Alexander on his accession like a Fairytale King come to save them from all their miseries.

Yet when, at twenty-four years of age, he had ridden to his Coronation in 1801, a wit in St. James’s had remarked,

“He was preceded by men who had murdered his grandfather, escorted by men who had murdered his father and followed by men who would not think twice about murdering him!”

The Duke had heard from one of the Czar’s closest friends that, when Alexander had learned of his father’s cruel death, he had burst into tears.

“I have not the strength to reign,” he had sobbed to his wife. “Let someone else take my place”

The Duke had begun to think that the vision of Paul’s strangled battered body haunted the Czar.

He was perceptive enough to know that Russians could suffer in their souls in a way that perhaps men of other nations are unable to do.

He had known the Czar for some years personally and he was aware that he was often mentally convulsed with an inner agony that would, he thought, become worse rather than better as he grew older.

As he might have expected, the Czar was this morning looking worried and speaking in a manner that had a touch of hysteria about it.

“The news is bad – very bad!” he told the Duke after he had greeted him.

“What have you learned, Sire?” the Duke enquired.

“That Bonaparte is still marching towards Moscow!”

The Czar spoke as if he could hardly bear to say the words and then he sighed,

“God knows if it is the truth. To be honest no one seems to know what is happening.”

The Duke was not astonished at this statement.

Methods of communication between the Army and the Czar were mostly haphazard and incompetent, as were a great many other things in Russia.

They sat down to breakfast at which, as was usual, there were three kinds of bread.

One was a roll of white bread called kalatch, as light as a feather and eaten hot, which was made from water brought especially from the River Moska.

This water was delivered to all the Palaces in St. Petersburg, a custom that dated from the previous century.

As they ate, the Czar, instead of talking about what was happening to the troops under Kutuzov’s direction, did nothing but quote passages from the Bible.

When the Duke looked at him in surprise, he explained,

“Yesterday I was told that my lifelong friend, Prince Alexander Golitzen, is a traitor.”

“That is impossible!” exclaimed the Duke, who knew the Prince quite well.

“I tried not to believe what I was told,” the Czar said in a low voice, “but my informant said that he is constructing an impressive new Palace where he could entertain Napoleon.”

“Surely you don’t believe such a wild tale?” the Duke asked.

“I went at once to visit Golitzen and asked him point-blank why he had chosen to build in such troubled times.”

“What was his reply?” the Duke asked.

“The Prince answered, ‘Your Imperial Majesty need not fear an invasion if you trust in Divine Providence’.”

The Duke raised his eyebrows, but made no comment and the Czar went on,

“Golitzen then reached up to a bookshelf to take down a heavy volume of the Bible. It slipped to the floor and fell open at the page on which is printed Psalm 41.”

The Czar paused impressively and the Duke said,

“I am afraid, Sire, I have forgotten that particular Psalm.”

“‘I will say of the Lord, He is my refuge and fortress, my God, in Him will I trust’,” the Czar quoted.

His voice had deepened and sounded impressive as he added,

“Golitzen convinced me that the opening of the Bible at this place was not a coincidence but a direct message from God.”

“I hope the Prince was right,” the Duke commented dryly.

“I am sure of it!” the Czar said. “All night I have been reading the Bible and meditating on God and our situation. I believe we will be saved.”

The Duke found it difficult not to remark that the Russians would certainly need the help of the Almighty as they could not hope to rely entirely on their Army.

Before he left England, he had seen a report by Dr. Clarke, an Englishman who had paid a visit the Tula arms factory only two years earlier in 1810 and he had been appalled by the incompetence he found there.

His report said,

“The machinery is ill-constructed and worse preserved. Everything seemed out of order. Workmen with long beards stood staring at each other wondering what was to be done next, while their intendants or directors were either drunk or asleep. Notwithstanding all this, they pretended to issue thirteen hundred muskets a week from the manufactory!”

“What was the actual figure?” the Duke had asked.

“I have no idea,” was the answer, “but we have learnt that the Russian muskets, besides being clumsy and heavy, misfire five times out of ten and are liable to burst when they are discharged.”

The Duke had thought that French spies must have provided Napoleon Bonaparte with the same type of report as Dr. Clarke’s.

On invading Russia he was doubtless anticipating that the resistance he would encounter would not be very effective against his forces, highly organised and armed as they were with the latest most up to date equipment.

It would, however, have been pointless and merely unkind to repeat any of this to the Czar. So the Duke did his best to talk of other things, knowing that there was nothing to be gained by having ‘The Little Father’ of such a great country in such depths of despair.

‘Perhaps things will turn out better than I anticipate,’ he told himself optimistically.

But he found, when he moved amongst the Royal Family and other people staying in the Winter Palace, that they were as apprehensive as he was.

He also found the whole atmosphere so depressing that he decided to call on Princess Ysevolsov whom he had known for many years.

He had found when he arrived at The Winter Palace, a letter written in her usual animated and flowery manner, begging him to take the first opportunity he could find of renewing their friendship.

“My poor husband is, of course, away on the Battlefield,” she wrote, but I will receive you with open arms as one of my closest and dearest friends in England and I want too for you to meet my Little Tania. She was only ten or eleven when you last saw her. Now she is very beautiful and, when this tiresome War is over, I want to present her to our friends in London and have her make her curtsey to the Queen at Buckingham Palace.”

The Duke had read the letter and found quite a lot of information written ‘between the lines’. He knew that Prince Ysevolsov was one of the richest men in Russia. His family, like other members of the Nobility for some generation’s past not only owned huge estates but a fantastic number of serfs.

Prince Ysevolsov, the Duke remembered, was supposed to own twenty-five thousand serfs in different Provinces of the country.

He not only used them as goldsmiths, carpenters and ebony carvers but for his private theatrical company and his Corps de Ballet.

He had his own theatre where he gave performances for his friends and his wife was as beautiful and valuable as his other possessions.

She had, however, both Austrian and English blood in her and she had often said to the Duke that she hoped that her children, when they grew up, would not marry Russians.

The Duke, with his retentive memory, had now a very good idea why she was pressing upon him the attractions of her daughter Tania.

It would, in fact, be a very suitable match for the daughter of one of the richest and most important Noblemen in Russia to marry one of the richest and most prestigious Noblemen of England.

But the Duke told himself that the Princess would be disappointed. He was now thirty-three and had so far evaded matrimony.

Although he had come perilously near to being swept up the aisle from time to time, he had always at the last moment extracted himself from a difficult position.

In the past few years he had ensured that the danger did not occur by having little or nothing to do with young girls.

His love affairs were always conducted with married women or widows and he made it clear from the beginning of his acquaintance with the widows that he preferred his bachelor freedom.

“You will have to marry one day to have a son.”

It was a sentence that was repeated and re-repeated to him until he told himself that, as far as he was concerned, the Dukedom could go to his younger brother and his family without it causing him one qualm of regret.

The more he saw of the women who had made London under the Prince of Wales, now the Prince Regent, the gayest and one of the most promiscuous Cities in the world, the more he was determined that love affairs were one thing but marriage was most certainly another.

He had no intention of marrying a woman who would be unfaithful to him and disliked the idea of having to deceive his wife or to lie in an effort to protect himself.

He knew that he was too proud and had too much integrity to wish to debase himself in any way least of all by falsehood and deception.

“I shall never marry,” the Duke had said not once but a thousand times.

He thought now that it would be a pity if he could no longer indulge in such delightful intrigues such as the one that had happened last night without experiencing a somewhat guilty conscience the following morning.

As it was, he imagined with amusement, that either the Czar or someone in the Foreign Ministry would undoubtedly be now asking Katharina what she had learned from him the night before.

And, although he was certain that with her agile mind, she would give them something to chew over and he had said nothing to her that could not have been published in every Russian newspaper that existed.

He had seen Katharina in the distance at luncheon looking alluringly attractive in a gown that was definitely Parisian and wearing fantastic jewels, which he was certain had not been given to her by her aged and fortunately absent husband.

Their eyes had met for just one moment across the Reception room into which they had moved when the meal was over.

She told the Duke without words that she wanted him and he had only to lift his finger for her to be at his side.

What she signalled, however, made the Duke decide that before he concerned himself once again with their fiery love-making, he should extend his knowledge of St. Petersburg and perhaps find out from outside The Winter Palace what other people were thinking.

Accordingly he walked down the magnificent marble stairway with its white and gold pillars to the front door.

Here he ordered one of the drotskis that were always at the disposal of the Czar’s guests and, having given instructions to be taken to the Ysevolsov Palace, set off in the sunshine.

Even for August it was very hot and there was just a little breeze coming from the river although there was a touch of salt in the air.

The enormously wide roads laid out by Peter the Great had practically no traffic on them at this time of the day when most people preferred to remain at home, and anyway, owing to the ominous news, there was less entertaining than usual.

As he drove along, the Duke enjoyed looking at the magnificent Palaces and buildings so different in their brilliant colours to the grey Palladians of England.

The Roumainzov Palace was painted orange, the Ministry of Justice blue, the enormous Pavlovski Barracks designed for Czar Paul was yellow.

The Duke was most interested in the Manège de la Garde à Cheval. It was painted green and had a portico of eight Doric columns of white granite.

With his great knowledge of horseflesh, the Duke had already admired the black horses of the Gardes à Cheval, the chestnuts of the Chevaliers Gardes and the dapple greys of the Gatchina Hussars.

The drotski drawn by two excellent horses reached the Ysevolsov Palace within five minutes.

The Duke entered the hallway, which if not as magnificent as that in The Winter Palace, could certainly stand comparison with any house he had visited elsewhere in the world.

A footman took him up the grand marble staircase, which divided and rose to a landing ornamented with exquisite specimens of Chinese porcelain.

They passed through a huge Reception room so large that two hundred people or more could easily be entertained in it without crowding.

The Duke expected to be asked to wait, but the footman, speaking in hesitating French, explained,

“Madame la Princesse is in the theatre, monsieur.”

The Duke nodded his understanding and they then walked on again through a number of magnificently decorated rooms until, in the centre of one of them, they reached a staircase made of priceless malachite descending to the floor below.

The Duke had heard in England that Prince Ysevolsov’s private theatre was exceptional, but he was not prepared for the utmost beauty of what he saw when the servant opened a gold-encrusted door and he was shown in to what was obviously a Royal Box.

Very small and holding fewer than a hundred people, it was like a child’s doll’s house in a Royal Mansion and yet it had all the charm and the beauty of an Imperial theatre.

In the stalls there were white and gold carved chairs. The circle was supplied with seats in crimson velvet, as was the box he had entered.

The footman had not announced him and he stood at the back noting that in front of him was the figure of the Princess, who had not heard his arrival as she was intent on watching what was taking place on the stage.

A girl was dancing to the music of a small orchestra seated in the pit below.

The Duke glanced at the performer perfunctorily. He then assumed with the Prince’s obsession for the theatre that it would be either a member of his own special Corps de Ballet giving a performance or else, what was more likely, one of his family.

At the back of his mind he remembered the Princess or someone else telling him that the Prince himself enjoyed acting and expected his family to perform with him.

If there was one thing that the Duke really disliked, it was amateur theatricals and he hoped what was taking place would not continue for too long as he wanted to talk to the Princess.

Then the girl who was dancing made a deep curtsey.

‘Thank goodness!’ the Duke sighed to himself.

He was just about to move forward to make his presence known to his hostess, when the girl, and he could see that she was very pretty, ran from the stage and the music changed and another performer appeared.

She was moving on the tips of her toes and wearing the traditional ballet skirt worn by those who took part in Les Sylphides.

It reached to her ankles and there was a tight bodice, low-cut to display a long swan-like neck and her bare arms.

The Duke mused impatiently that the new ballet that he had seen performed the previous evening in Catherine the Great’s theatre in The Winter Palace had rather bored him.

Then he realised that it was not the music of that ballet and he had not heard it before, also the movements of the dancer on stage were exceptionally graceful.

Despite his irritation he found himself watching the way she moved.

He had a feeling that the dance was not traditional or, if it was, he had never seen it before.

He knew too that the music, while strange, was particularly tuneful and had a melodious beauty about it that intrigued him.

The Duke, like the Prince Regent, was very fond of music. As in everything else that he was really interested in, he was a connoisseur and a very discriminating one.

Now he knew that he was listening to an exceptionally fine work that did not sound to him in the least Russian.

Then, as he watched the girl moving around the stage, dancing with a spontaneity and a kind of joy that he had never seen expressed before, he was sure, although he had no reason for it, that she too was unusual.

He could not explain why she seemed different, except that, as far as he was concerned, she was original both in her movements, in her grace and in her dance.

‘Russia is full of surprises,’ he told himself and found that the music of the dance evoked some response in him that he had not felt for a very long time.

Earlier, when he was young, he had been deeply moved not only by music but also by poetry until, like everything else in his life, it had grown far too familiar. He had found that, while he appreciated the subtleties of such things, they no longer aroused him as they had in his youth.

Now oddly and almost inexplicably he felt his mind, or was it something deeper, flying as if it had wings on the music as his eyes watched the grace and joy expressed by the dancer.

It seemed to him as if she moved amongst trees covered with blossom and the whole world was awakening with spring.

There was something young and creative about her and the Duke thought that he saw butterflies hovering around her and birds in the sky above.

It was almost with a sense of loss when he realised that the dance was over as the dancer swept to the ground in the traditional curtsey and the music came to an end.

Two red velvet curtains fell and then rose as the two girls came forward hand in hand to take a final bow.

There was only the Princess to clap her hands, but she did so with enthusiasm.

“Excellent,” she called out. “Both of you were very good. Go and change and come to the White Salon.”

The two girls then slipped away through the curtains and for the first time the Princess became aware that the Duke was standing behind her in the box.

She gave a little cry of delight and, rising, held out both her hands.

“Blake!” she cried. “You have come and I am so very pleased to see you.”

“As I to see you, Sonya,” the Duke answered. “Who were those entrancing creatures? They held me spellbound.”

“The first was Tania, my little Tania, whom I so much want you to meet,” the Princess replied. “You will see her in a few moments and I know that you will believe everything I have told you about her and so much more.”

The Princess linked her arm through the Duke’s as she spoke and led him through the door at the back of the box.

As they started to climb the malachite staircase, the Duke asked,

“And the other dancer?”

There was a quite perceptible pause before the Princess replied,

“Oh, that was Zoia!”