The Romanov succession

“Glad to see you here, Alex. Very glad,” he murmured in his slow splendid deep voice. Genuine feeling trembled in it; he gripped both Alex’s shoulders and gave his grave paternal nod, the next thing to a smile; and limped back toward the others. His hair had thinned and gone silver; the lameness of his battle-shattered leg had grown worse; but his eyebrows remained thick and black over the obsidian eyes and he was very much in command of it all. The name at the head of the family was that of the Grand Duke Feodor but it was Leon who had kept them all together in their endless gypsy exile.

Alex waited for Vassily Devenko to reappear; the Grand Duke was still pressing his dream of restoration.

Count Anatol Markov had returned to his seat-in the circle yet apart from it, quietly drinking vodka from a chilled glass. He watched Alex as he might watch an inanimate object.

Alex had been a long time seeking clues to Count Anatol’s composition; it was very hard to understand the chemistries that had produced Irina out of Anatol’s genes. He was dry, distant, epicene in disposition; cynical and suspiciously skeptical of everyone. He was thin as a sapling, the hair lying across his neat little cannonball head in lonely strands. His face was pale and his mouth in repose looked like a surgeon’s wound.

Tragedy seemed to have hovered around him for decades. At Ekaterinburg in 1918 a Bolshevik fanatic named Jacob Sverdlov had engineered the assassinations of Czar Nicholas and the Empress Alexandra and their children. A month after the brutal murders Jacob Sverdlov had been found beaten to death in a Moscow street; systematically bludgeoned out of existence, every bone in his body shattered. It was fairly well accepted by a good number of the White exiles that it had been Count Ahatol who had thus avenged the Royal Family. It was said that it was the first and last time in his life that Anatol had shown passion; but surely Irina Anatovna was not the product of an emotionless conception.

Of the seven men in the room-Vassily would make the eighth-one was not a Russian.

Prince Leon said, “Our American representative, Colonel Alexsander Danilov. Alex, I am sure you know General Sir Edward Muir.”

He’d seen the old photographs; now he made the connection. The Scotsman nodded to Alex, neither rising nor offering a hand. He was a very tall old man, noble and grand with a white military mustache stained to amber by cigar smoke. His longevity appeared to fall little short of immortality: he’d commanded the British Expeditionary Force in the Crimea in 1919 and he’d been on the verge of retirement age even then.

Prince Leon said, “Sir Edward is here to represent the viewpoint of the British crown.”

“Unofficially of course.” The Scotsman spoke in a Russian that was fast and without hesitation but thickly accented with an Edinburgh burr. He wore grey evening clothes well-cut to his long gaunt frame but too heavy for the Mediterranean climate; there was a sheen of perspiration on his smooth ruddy face.

Alex moved toward the chair beside Prince Leon’s. “Am I here as an American army officer or as a White Russian?”

“Decide that for yourself,” Count Anatol said coolly. “After you have heard our plans.”

“Here is General Devenko,” Prince Leon said. “We can begin now, I think.”

“About bloody time,” said Baron Oleg Zimovoi in his harsh peasant Russian.

Before Vassily sat down he gave each man in turn a studied scrutiny. Alex saw him nod his head half an inch to the British general; Sir Edward cracked a sliver of a smile. It was the extent of their greeting-two men who’d soldiered against a common enemy in the bleeding Crimea of twenty years ago.

Vassily’s face was ungiving: he looked like a man who knew better than to expect too much. “What is it to be then-action or only more debate?”

“The decision will be made tonight,” Prince Leon said. “Every man here has made assurances of that.”

Vassily’s intolerant gaze swept their faces, lingering briefly on Anatol’s and Baron Oleg Zimovoi’s. “I remind you all-Hitler is not standing still while you dispute politics.”

Anatol’s eyes narrowed to slits in the pale flesh. “You doubt our word, Vassily?”

“Only your willingness to keep it if it means the sacrifice of some petty political objective.” Vassily snapped it; clearly his nerves were on a raw edge.

Prince Leon said, “We must put Sir Edward and Alexsander in the picture before the decisions are taken.”

Vassily leaned his head back against the top of the chair. He crossed his legs and closed his eyes. “Let us get at it then.”