Lady Lucy stared blankly at the wall with the bookshelves. She knew that Francis had already decided where to put the first of his cathedral volumes when it was published. She wondered how much pain she had caused him since the return from Positano. She wondered if he would be happier now. She wondered if she had loved him too much, trying to wrap him in a cocoon of love that would keep out the rest of the world. She hoped not. She didn’t think you could love a man like Francis too much. She wondered what he would say when she told him he was released from his promise and was now free to go to St Petersburg if that was what he wanted to do. She went and sat in the chair by the window that looked out over Markham Square and waited for Francis to come home.
2
Lord Francis Powerscourt had been told by the Foreign Office that they would provide an interpreter who would travel with him from London. It was, Powerscourt reflected bitterly as he stared down the platform at Victoria station, just about all they had been able to tell him. Sir Jeremiah had, of course, known all the details of Roderick Martin’s early life and career. Educated at Westminster School and New College Oxford, a brilliant linguist, fluent in French, German and Russian and able to cope in Italian, he had entered the Foreign Service with a formidable reputation. Over time he developed a judgement of men and events that was as sharp as his ability at languages. As well as his education in diplomacy, Roderick Martin was trained in the more mundane matters like codes and the use of telegraph machines. He had served in all the great capitals of Europe and by the time of his mission to St Petersburg at the age of thirty-eight, his contemporaries were already speculating about when and where he would take up his first posting as Ambassador. But of the journey to Russia they knew nothing, except that his body had been found early in the morning on the Nevskii Prospekt. Word had come from the Prime Minister that they were to send a man, their best man if possible, to St Petersburg. The Prime Minister himself would brief him. He was to report only to the Prime Minister on his return. That was all. Martin’s wife, Martin’s parents knew no more than his employers. He had stepped into his compartment on this very train, Powerscourt said to himself, he had gone to the Russian capital and he had been killed. That was all anybody seemed to know about him. Maybe the Embassy there would be able to tell him more but they hadn’t been able to tell the Foreign Office very much at all. Even Sir Jeremiah Reddaway, as proper and punctilious as a man in his position should be, had heard the rumours. Martin was having an affair with some diplomat’s wife and had been killed by hired thugs. He had merely run across a bunch of drunken peasants or workers in the wrong part of town and been murdered for his wallet. The beauty of these theories, as Powerscourt saw clearly, was that they disconnected the murder from the mission. Powerscourt believed the opposite was the case. Maybe, Sir Jeremiah had said hopefully, those long legs stretched out in front of his own Foreign Office fire, the mission had to do with the Russian sinking of a British fishing boat and the deaths of two sailors as their navy sailed halfway round the world to fight the Japanese. Maybe they wanted a diplomatic alliance against the Germans. Powerscourt found it hard to believe any of the rumours.
And where was his interpreter? There were only a few minutes to go before departure. Powerscourt had a very clear picture in his mind of the Russian Interpreter as he referred to him. He would be middle-aged, portly, wear thick glasses and fuss a lot about his business. He would look rather like a bank manager going to seed. He would have little conversation outside the business of interpreting and would prove dull company on his journey. He turned to the door of his compartment where a good-looking young man was preparing to stow his case on the luggage rack.
‘I’m afraid that seat is reserved,’ said Powerscourt.
‘I know it is,’ said the young man. ‘It’s reserved for me.’
‘For you?’ said Powerscourt, astonished. ‘That can’t be, I’m afraid. It’s reserved for my Russian interpreter.’
‘I know,’ said the young man with a smile, ‘I am your Russian interpreter. You are Lord Francis Powerscourt. I am Mikhail Shaporov, sent by your Foreign Office to assist you. If you don’t want my services, just let me know.’
Now it was Powerscourt’s turn to smile. ‘Forgive me, please. Delighted to meet you. And my apologies for the confusion. To be perfectly honest, I was expecting somebody older. I had, in fact, decided that my interpreter was going to be middle-aged and look like a bank manager going to seed.’
The young man laughed. Powerscourt saw that he was just under six feet tall with a broad forehead and a Roman nose. His cheekbones were high and he had very fair hair and soft brown eyes. Powerscourt thought he could do considerable damage to the young ladies.
‘Perhaps I should tell you a little about myself, Lord Powerscourt, to reassure you that the young can be as good at interpreting as the middle-aged. My parents – well, I suppose you’d have to call them aristocrats -live in an enormous palace or indeed palaces in St Petersburg. My father has branched out into banking and other sorts of financial business. I have been working in his offices here in London to learn all about it. I lived the first sixteen years of my life in St Petersburg and then I was sent to school in England and then to Oxford, to Trinity College, if you know it. So you see, Lord Powerscourt, I know both societies. I have done quite a lot of translating for my father. I think it must have been he, or your Ambassador in Russia, who recommended me for this kind of work. I have often done it before. I rather enjoy it.’
‘I’m delighted to hear you know St Petersburg,’ said Powerscourt. ‘I’m sure that will be a great advantage in our mission.’
‘Can you tell me something about that?’ said the young man doubtfully. ‘All I learned from the Foreign Office was that it was very secret and I had to set out for the station as fast as possible.’
Very slowly the great train drew out of the station and began its journey towards the hop fields of Kent. A number of friends and relations were left waving disconsolately on the platform. Powerscourt wondered how much he could tell young Shaporov and decided that nothing he knew was a secret worth preserving. So he told him everything.
‘That’s all rather exciting,’ said the young man, ‘except for the fact that this poor man is dead. And nobody, you say, knows what he was doing in St Petersburg?’
‘Only the Prime Minister, as far as I can tell. Have you any idea at all what could bring about such a level of secrecy as far as Russia is concerned?’
‘Scandal?’ said Mikhail Shaporov happily. ‘Blackmail? Secrets of state? Diplomatic treaties that have to be kept hidden for a decade? It’ll be very disappointing, Lord Powerscourt, if we just find that he hadn’t settled his debts at the casino or was carrying on with another man’s wife. Though,’ he went on rather sadly, ‘if people were killed for adultery in St Petersburg, the population would drop very quickly.’ Powerscourt wondered if there was some personal pain hidden behind the sadness.
‘The thing is,’ the young man went on, ‘you did say that this poor dead diplomat was a very important sort of fellow, a top dog in the Foreign Office collection, so the chances are that it has to do with great secrets. I do hope we can find out.’
Shaporov peered out of the window. ‘Forgive me, Lord Powerscourt, but your England always seems quite small to me. Some years ago my parents took us all on the Trans-Siberian Railway just after it opened, thousands and thousands of miles of track. I thought it was splendid. My younger brother, mind you, he got claustrophobia after being kept in the train carriages for days and days. He hardly ever goes in a train now if he can help it.’