Under the normal domestic regimen, the Duke and his partner would have luncheon together, but the ‘together’ element had also been disrupted by the authorities upstairs. The Duke, who had always had a dread of eating alone, especially in that triumphant dining room with its works of art proclaiming a military victory that he would never achieve, took himself off to The Bear Hotel in Woodstock and ate in state in a private dining room. The Duke firmly believed that his dread of solitary mealtimes was known only to himself, but he was wrong. Once in his cups at Monte Carlo, he had shouted to Gladys that if she didn’t hurry up he would have to eat alone in that bloody great hotel dining room and that he would, therefore, be the only person doing so. The shame and the boredom, he had yelled through her dressing-room door, would finish him off. Mrs Deacon, unlike the Duke, did not forget very much, but she saved this information for particularly important campaigns, like invitations to Royal Garden Parties or inviting Diaghilev to Blenheim.
What does a Duke do in the afternoons? The 9th Duke of Marlborough was accustomed to walking his estates and checking on the recent work he had ordered. But that was difficult now because half the estate, the half running away from the house past the Palladian bridge up towards the obelisk was destined to be the home of dancing nymphs and the glories of the corps de ballet, if Mrs Deacon had her way. Even his new water garden failed to bring any cheer, the water spouting away in splendour into the late afternoon sun. And his customary large gin at six thirty sharp, the starting pistol for an evening’s refreshment, failed to lift his spirits as he looked at a couple of his ancestors on the walls, destined, like him, never to shine as brightly as the 1st Duke of Marlborough.
Then it was that damned dining room once more, the footmen specifically instructed never to speak in Her Ladyship’s presence, or — by extension of Her Ladyship’s command — to him either. They glided in, taking this plate away and bringing another one in. They hovered discreetly about his glass, with this evening a bottle of his cellar’s finest St Emilion. Even though he had perhaps been — in Lloyd George’s memorable phrase — one of five hundred men chosen at random from the ranks of the unemployed to sit in the House of Lords, the Duke had been brought up to expect and to exercise some measure of power in his own and in the wider world. This was intolerable. The Duke knew that there was a siege in progress, but whether he was the attacking or the defending power he had no idea. His adversary, still taking her meals in solitary splendour upstairs, had no doubt on that question. The Duke was under siege and the Ballets Russes at Blenheim was the prize.
It was the guinea fowl that did it, a guinea fowl served with a rich cream sauce with truffles and mushrooms that finally destroyed the remnants of the Duke’s resistance. He remembered eating a similar dish years before at some grand military dinner at the Carlton Club. He asked for pen, paper and envelope. He wrote out the terms of his surrender. But the lady in question did not abandon the field that evening. She made him wait until after breakfast the following morning.
Sergeant Rufus Jenkins had found his translator at last. She was a teacher, Anna Okenska, and plied her trade at one of London’s leading public schools for girls. The students were delighted to hear that Miss Okenska would be away from school until further notice. Miss Okenska had the reputation of being very strict in class and even stricter in the matter of homework. Miss Irene Delarue, who replaced her, was always susceptible to diversions in class and bouts of generosity on the question of the prompt arrival of written work from home.
Sergeant Jenkins found Anna difficult at first, with her strict dark clothes and no apparent interest in important things like football. But their relationship began to thaw when they discovered a common love of the ballet, for Sergeant Jenkins had taken his mama again after that first rapturous evening. For some reason she only wanted to come when Nijinsky was dancing, or ‘on the menu’, as she put it.
Their task — and it was not a happy one — was to find the strangers whom M. Fokine had identified as wandering round the back of the Royal Opera House during performances. So far they had found two messengers bringing items from the corps de ballet hotel that had been left behind before performances; one drunk who was obsessed with the ballet but too poor to buy a ticket and too far gone to understand what was going on if he had; an eccentric accountant who passed by on his way home eager for a sniff of the world of the Ballets Russes (as his wife would divorce him if he ever went to a performance); and an old lady tramp, festooned with castoffs, who came along to see if any useful clothing had been left behind. This person, Miss Olenska maintained in the face of all opposition, was Sherlock Holmes in disguise, since he often used disguise in such clothes and must be bored to death with those bloody bees in Sussex. There was also, one witness said, a middle-aged man in a long coat who looked foreign.
General Peter Kilyagin was staring moodily at a telegram from his masters in St Petersburg. His faithful deputy Major Tashkin was on the other side of the desk, waiting for orders. The Major usually dealt with the rougher side of things and kept in regular contact with the outstations of violence and torture.
‘Why would Lenin courier London?’ said the General crossly. ‘You’d think they had no bloody money left for telegrams, wouldn’t you? And then it goes on for nearly half a page: our assessment of the purposes of the visit; if this is meant to spark a signal of outbreaks of revolutionary violence across Europe; if it means that there is to be a revolution in England; if Lenin has plans to come to the English capital? I ask you. Have they nothing better to do back there?’
‘It may depend on which faction of the Okhrana or which faction in the Winter Palace sent it,’ said the Major, who would have liked nothing better than to get his hands, literally, on Lenin and sweep him off to one of his special offices where the nearest neighbours were ten kilometres or more away.
‘It is hard to tell who the hell is sending the bloody messages sometimes,’ admitted the General.
‘But the answer’s obvious, surely,’ said the Major. ‘He’s come to find out about the money. Have they got it or haven’t they? That’s all. Come to think of it, General, have they got the money or haven’t they? You’ve been in touch with our man in London, surely?’
‘Any day now, Major. Maybe later today we’ll hear about the money. I think they’ll get it myself. The interesting thing is what are they going to do with the money when they’ve got it. If you were in charge, at long range, of a group of people about to come into such enormous sums, what do you think they’d do with it?’
‘That depends on the hold Lenin has on them, doesn’t it? They could steal half of it for themselves. They could steal most of it for themselves. I can’t see the whole total going straight to Comrade Lenin out there in Cracow, I just can’t see it.’
‘Think of it another way, General. This courier can’t expect to bring the money back himself, can he? He’d be picked up at every customs house between here and Warsaw. So what is he doing?’
The General laughed. ‘Paranoia perhaps, Major. Imagine you are Comrade Lenin, on the run most of the time, forced to take up residence wherever our secret police or somebody else’s secret police may keep an eye on you but won’t actually pick you up and send you back to Russia. I can never understand why somebody’s secret police doesn’t just kill the bugger and be done with it. It might bring forth a howl of squeals and wails from the liberal Press and parliamentarians, but across the whole Continent, honest law-abiding citizens could sleep more easily in their beds, even if they’d never heard of the Lenin person in the first place.’