David Dickinson - Death Comes to the Ballets Russes

Charles Richard John Spencer-Churchill, 9th Duke of Marlborough, had been a creature of habit since his days in the military when he had served as an Acting Captain and been on the staff of Lord Roberts in the Boer War. His brief political career seemed to have drawn to a close since two short periods as a junior minister under Lord Salisbury and then his nephew, Prime Minister Arthur Balfour. The Duke did not usually breakfast alone — his mistress Gladys Deacon was accustomed to reading him selected extracts from the newspapers as he wrestled with his kedgeree. But today Mrs Deacon, mistress but not wife of his household, had sent word that she would be breakfasting in her rooms on the first floor. It had been the same yesterday and the same the day before.

The Duke had also seen minor but not negligible service in his own locality, serving twice in the past decade as Mayor of Woodstock, the little town that bordered on the Blenheim estates. Some of his fellow peers remained mayor of their local borough year in and year out, regularly returned by a grateful tenantry, but that was not to be the fate of Charles Spencer Churchill. After two terms he was voted out.

At ten o’clock it was his custom to meet with his Steward to discuss the business of the estate. Every day now the Steward made the question of the Ballets Russes the last item on the agenda. Her Ladyship — she might not have been a Ladyship outside the walls of the estate, Mrs Deacon was accustomed to tell friends and visitors, but she bloody well was inside the walls of the Palace — posed the question the Duke thought he had settled once and for all. What was he going to do about the Ballets Russes? Was he going to employ them to dance in the palace or not? Each day, with declining levels of firmness, the Duke had said no. After his meeting, the Duke took some coffee and looked at the racing magazines.

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?’