Death Comes to the Ballets Russes (44 page)

‘We have all heard of the thought processes of Alexander Taneyev from his letters home, and that diary which ends so abruptly. We know that he was deeply worried about this information. I suspect that he confronted Bolm with what he had read. I believe
he told him that he was intending to pass it on to the English authorities or, equally likely perhaps, that Bolm thought that was what he intended to do. Bolm passes this information on to Spy A, the most important link in the chain, who has already garnered crucial military intelligence. Spy A, operating under the pseudonym Andrei Rublev, kills Alexander Taneyev to shut him up. He can’t talk to the authorities if he is dead. I suspect Andrei Rublev was rather good at that sort of thing. I would be surprised if Alexander was his first victim. Taneyev must have let slip to Bolm that he had told the dancer Vera of his plans. That was why Spy A went to Blenheim Palace to kill her too. He had to get rid of them both before they had time to walk into an English police station. After that, Spy A moved on to the experiment near Goring where he met me.’

‘Do you know who the identity of the spy is, Lord Powerscourt?’ Natasha had been staring at Powerscourt for some time, trying to work out what the yellow on his skin meant.

‘I do not; I mean, I do not know his real name. Thanks to the activities of Colonel Brouzet in Paris, and what the man said to me when we met at Goring, we know his work name was Rublev, Andrei Rublev. But I have no more idea of what his real name is than I do the name of the man in the moon.’

‘Andrei Rublev was a famous icon painter hundreds of years ago,’ said Natasha. ‘Would I be right in thinking, Lord Powerscourt, that you are unable to tell us anything more about the nature of that military experiment? I presume that was what caused the injuries to your arm and your skin.’

‘I cannot say any more than I just have. It took me two and a half hours of argument before the secret people allowed me even to use the phrase “military experiment”. I should say that Andrei Rublev is dead. He met with an unfortunate accident at the military experiment and will not trouble us any more. Inspector Dutfield is in the middle of a report to the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police saying that the case of the murder of Alexander Taneyev and the poor girl at Blenheim Palace is now closed.’

‘I see,’ said Natasha.

‘Perhaps I could reassure you, Mrs Shaporova,’ said Inspector Dutfield, ‘that even I have not been permitted to know what went on at that experiment.’

Fouetté

Literally ‘whipped’. The term indicates either a turn with a quick change in the direction of the working leg as it passes in front of or behind the supporting leg, or a quick whipping around of the body from one direction to another. There are many kinds of
fouetté
:
petit fouetté
(
à terre
,
en demi-pointe
or
sauté
) and
grand fouetté
(
sauté
,
relevé
or
en tournant
). Similar to a
frappé
. An introductory form for beginner dancers, executed at the barre, is as follows: facing the barre, the dancer executes a
grand battement
to the side, then turns the body so that the lifted leg ends up in
arabesque
.

The silver hairs first appeared on Powerscourt’s temples shortly before his birthday. For some days nobody talked about them in Markham Square. Oddly enough, it was Christopher, the reading twin, who had recently demolished
The Hound of the Baskervilles
over a single weekend when staying with some of his mother’s more boring relations, who solved the problem.

‘I know,’ he said suddenly one morning after his father had left the house, ‘let’s call Papa Silver Blaze. You know, like the horse in the Sherlock Holmes story that is stolen but comes back to win the big race.’

‘Didn’t he kill somebody on the way?’ said Thomas, who knew most Holmes stories virtually off by heart.

‘He didn’t mean to,’ said Christopher, ‘and they’d been cutting bits out of his leg or something.’

‘I think it’s horrid giving Papa a nickname, however nice it is,’ Olivia complained.

In the end the Powerscourt young did what they had always done – they talked to their mother. Lady Lucy laughed. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘you could ask him, couldn’t you? I’m sure he would be rather proud to be known as Silver Blaze. The horse did win the Wessex Cup after all, didn’t he?’

For his birthday, Powerscourt decided to reverse the usual order of celebrations. He handed out the presents early. He took the twins, Christopher and Juliet, fifteen years old now, to Paris for the weekend. They talked non-stop through all the delights of the French capital in English and French – Powerscourt, in his role of educating parent, was delighted to see that their French, which Lucy spoke a lot to them at home, was now almost fluent. Only one place reduced them to silence.

‘Oh, my God,’ Christopher whispered, and began writing in his notebook when confronted with the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles. ‘Oh, my God.’

Christopher wanted to be a journalist. He really wanted to be an investigator like his papa, but he didn’t think that would go down too well at the family
dinner table. Juliet, showing a greater maturity than people credited her with, wanted to be a doctor. Her fate had been sealed when she’d asked Lady Lucy if she could be a doctor and have lots of children as well.

‘Why ever not?’ her mama had said. ‘You carry on. I’ll back you all the way.’

Robert, Lady Lucy’s son by her first marriage, was now First Lieutenant of a frigate on patrol in the cold grey waters of the North Sea, playing war games against Tirpitz’s Dreadnoughts.

Powerscourt took the greatest care of his second child, Olivia. Caught between the precocious Thomas and the talking twins, she sometimes felt left out.

He asked Lucy to take Olivia shopping for some fashionable clothes. Although Olivia was young and coltish, Lady Lucy was correct in believing that Olivia would be the fairest of them all.

So here they were, Powerscourt and Olivia, drinking blanc-cassis in the dining room of the Ritz Hotel on London’s Piccadilly, only open for six years, but already the place to be seen for the young and the fashionable. Olivia shared her father’s intense dislike of champagne. Powerscourt suddenly thought back to when this about-to-be-very-beautiful young woman was small. Sometimes he would take a tiny Olivia out of the bath and wrap her in an enormous towel. Then he would write an imaginary address on her back with much tickling and thumps and bangs as the parcel progressed through the postal system. This process was usually punctuated by squeals and laughter. The whole event was characterized by a continuous running commentary by Olivia’s papa. The parcel was always addressed to Olivia’s grandmother. There, he was told later, she always
behaved beautifully. As the only child in the house, she was fussed over at great length. She spent a lot of time talking to the animals. She had talked of a career with horses for as long as anybody could remember.

She still had not taken a sip of her blanc-cassis. There was a great sadness in her demeanour, as if she had been recently bereaved.

‘What’s the matter, my love?’ asked Powerscourt. ‘It’s you, Papa. We’re all so worried about you. You don’t look well. You haven’t looked well since you came back. And those doctors keep coming and they all leave looking like sick owls.’

Powerscourt saw at once that this was a crucial moment in his relations with his – as it were – adult children. Tell the truth? Procrastinate? Try to muddle through? In the end he knew he had no choice.

‘I should have told you before,’ said Powerscourt, taking a large gulp of his blanc-cassis. ‘It’s the gas, you see, the poison gas. I had to breathe in too much of it. The doctors have told me I should be dead by now.’

‘Gas? Poison gas?’ said Olivia. ‘I don’t understand.’

‘If there’s another war, my love, both sides are developing different forms of nerve gases which they say they would only use if the other side starts using theirs. They could kill people in enormous numbers. There you are, sitting in your trench or your tent. There’s a slight breeze. Your enemies have shells and other forms of ammunition filled with this poisonous stuff. The Germans – let’s not beat about the bush – the Germans are the best chemists in Europe and they are believed to have the most dangerous forms of gas. It can kill you. It can send you blind. It can destroy your mind but leave your body intact, or the other way round. It’s
terrible stuff, my love. I just happened to inhale rather too much of it in my last investigation. I got caught up by accident in the British nerve-gas experiments. I sometimes feel as if I’m choking, as if the gas is going to pull my lungs out. It is getting better. It’s just very slow.’

‘And the scar on your arm, Papa, that terrible scar?’

Powerscourt told her of the death struggle in the nerve centre of the gas research establishment, hidden next to a hotel on the banks of the Thames so the toxic wastes could be carried away, and the Russian spy holding on to Powerscourt’s foot and his arm as he was sucked into the terrible mixture in the middle of that vast laboratory.

‘That’s it,’ said Powerscourt finally, ‘but there’s one thing above all else that is very important.’

‘What’s that?’

‘I’m still here,’ said Powerscourt with a grin. ‘I’m bloody well still here!’

‘So you are, Papa, so you are.’ The girl’s eyes were filled with tears. ‘Thank God you’re still here.’

‘Don’t be upset, Olivia, please,’ said Powerscourt, noting that Olivia had still not touched a drop of her blanc-cassis. ‘I give you a toast, my love. Raise your glass, please.’

Two glasses clinked together under one of César Ritz’s more extravagant chandeliers.

‘Your future, Olivia.’

The girl’s eyes were brighter now.

‘And yours, Papa. I love you so much. We all do, you see.’

This special birthday celebration was taking place at Powerscourt House in the Wicklow Mountains south of Dublin. When Lady Lucy realized that it was also twenty-five years since Powerscourt sold the family home in Ireland, she wrote to the new owners, a branch of the Guinness brewing dynasty, still there after all these years. Lady Lucy asked if the old owner and his friends could come back for a special anniversary and birthday combined. They replied that they would be delighted to welcome the Powerscourt family and friends back on this special day. Most of the invitations were carried out by telephone in case her husband became suspicious.

It was a beautiful summer’s day, the sea sparkling in the distance, the mountains keeping watch over the great house. A couple of kestrels circled overhead and the seagulls seemed to be flying in relays from the sand dunes to the great fountain at the bottom of the steps.

There was only one person who held the threads or the skeins of Powerscourt’s life in his hands, and that was Johnny Fitzgerald, a descendant of the famous rebel Lord Edward Fitzgerald, who had died of his wounds in the 1798 rebellion led by the United Irishmen. Johnny promised to bring one or two or three others who also claimed an affinity with the United Irishmen, a group composed of men of all religions who believed in the ideals of the French Revolution and freedom for Ireland. Their leader was Theobald Wolfe Tone, an unsuccessful Dublin barrister who had persuaded thousands and thousands of his illiterate fellow countrymen to sign the Oath of the United Irishmen.