David Oldman - Dusk at Dawn

‘Do you expect me—’

‘You’ll leave that to Hart,’ Cumming said abruptly.

It seemed to Paul that the need for his presence was becoming ever more superfluous, Hart expected to take charge of everything as he obviously was.

‘You said there were two considerations, sir. What is the other?’

Cumming sat up a little straighter as if protocol demanded it.

‘The Imperial family.’

The train clattered on, the countryside beyond the window baked ochre by summer. Fields of wheat and barley moved sluggishly under a torpid breeze, stoically awaiting — like the rest of the country — the reaper’s blade.

Paul had avoided it, if narrowly. But the thought, instead of bringing a sense of relief, paradoxically filled him with foreboding. He was being saved for something worse.

Cumming’s talk of the Imperial family had recalled the photographs of tsar and his family that had adorned the Rostov house in Petersburg when he was boy. His Uncle Ivan had been nothing if not a toady.

But it wasn’t only photos of the Romanovs that he remembered. The Rostov house on Tavricheskaya, where it met the Neva River, was no more that a short walk along the embankment to the Winter Palace itself. He recalled being taken there as a child to see the tsar and his family wave regally to their subjects from the balcony that overlooked Palace Square.

His most vivid memory of them, though, was oddly of a time when the royal family were not even in Petersburg.

It had been a cold day in January, a Sunday, a bleak morning with the still air frozen under a sky the colour of a shroud. There had been snow overnight and where it had fallen it lay smooth on the frozen river, its pristine whiteness like the pelt of an enormous arctic fox. A celebration had been planned for that afternoon, nothing to do with the tsar but for Paul himself. It was the ninth of the month and Paul’s tenth birthday. His father had already sailed with the Baltic Fleet for the east but his mother made a fuss of him and there was to be a party. All morning the servants had been preparing, although the talk had not been about the party but about a march of the people to the Winter Palace led by a priest. Gunfire had already been heard to the north over the Vyborg district.

Thinking back, he always imagined that he had heard it, too. But he could never really be sure. He had heard it later, watching from their balcony as the soldiers and the cavalry massed in the icy streets below before moving towards Palace Square. The ragged volleys that had followed a few minutes later had seemed to crack the brittle morning air. Then he’d seen the crowds running past, scattering and sliding on the ice. What had stayed most clearly in his memory afterwards, however, was the blood in the snow after the crowd and the soldiers and the horses had passed. And the small, still, trampled bundle of rags in the gutter that, not long before, had been a child.

‘The latest report maintains they are being held in Ekaterinburg. Ostensibly under the orders of the local Soviet but it’s Lenin who calls the tune.’

Cumming shuffled a few papers on the desktop as if adjusting Europe’s monarchical hegemony.

‘Apart from the tsarist faction there are precious few who’d actually like to see the Romanovs returned to power. Nevertheless all sides regard him as a figurehead. There was talk of the family coming here but, given the situation…’

‘What situation?’

‘That we’ve quite enough agitators of our own who sympathise with the Bolsheviks without giving them any more grounds for provocation,’ Browning said.

‘And then there’s the German connection, of course.’ Cumming adopted his pained expression again. ‘The Empress Alexandria… Well, the fact is our royal family doesn’t need the country being reminded of its German origins.’

‘No,’ Paul said. ‘I can see that.’

‘The British Government has advised against offering them refuge. Fortunately, it looks as if the Bolsheviks won’t allow them to leave anyway. So, in the event of an unforeseen outcome, they’ll be the ones to attract the odium.’

‘What odium? What unforeseen outcome?’

‘We are terming it unforeseen, Rostov, but there remains the possibility that the tsar will be executed.’

‘Oh,’ said Paul.

‘Merely a possibility. Another is that if we’re successful in turning the Legion west, the Imperial family might fall into Czech hands. Then, of course, it will be a matter for Kolchak and the Russians to decide what to do with them.’

‘Russians other than Bolshevik Russians,’ Paul said for the sake of clarification.

‘Naturally,’ Cumming replied. ‘Our view is that events should be allowed to take their natural course.’

‘What would that be — our “preferred natural course”?’

‘What is imperative,’ Cumming went on obliquely, his face remaining expressionless, ‘is the need to convey to Admiral Kolchak — and to the Legion for that matter — that in the event of the gold falling into their hands but not the tsar, any attempt to purchase the Imperial family’s freedom which results in the Bolsheviks getting their hands on the gold reserves would be — in our view — unwelcome.’

‘But if the Legion doesn’t get to the tsar but does get the gold and won’t ransom the family, doesn’t that rather reduce the Bolsheviks’ options?’

‘That will be for the Bolsheviks to decide.’

‘So then, in the event of the unforeseen ,’ Paul said, beginning to understand and stressing Cumming’s own word, ‘the odium will fall on them.’

Cumming gave him a wintry smile.

‘Isn’t that going to be counter-productive? I mean for people like Mikhail? One assumes if they want to see the Romanov dynasty returned to power they’re not going to agree to this.’

‘That’s true, which is where a certain delicacy on your part will be required. In dealing with Admiral Kolchak on the one hand and your cousin on the other.’

‘Are you saying you want me to tell Mikhail one thing and tell the admiral another?’

Cumming smiled again, this time the expression not entirely lacking in warmth.

In the years since he had grown old enough to consider the question, Paul had often wondered if a family connection with Russian nobility had done him much good. After meeting Cumming and finding he was to be sent back, he realised it had not.

He suspected his mother had finally come around to the realisation that she was best out of it, too. She was a silly woman, he had with objectivity come to understand: vain, snobbish and not without arrogance. But she was not stupid. She must know that she was being taken advantage of in émigré circles and yet tolerated the fact in order to maintain a social position. Being able to talk politics from a position of equality with men, bourgeois and aristocratic, as well as the radical refugees, no doubt flattered her. Paul himself, as soon as he was old enough to make up his own mind, had decided to leave all that behind. He had had no interest in politics of any colour, Russian or British. Not then, anyway. What he had wanted was to fit in with his fellows and not be regarded as a curiosity.

He had had no trouble passing for English; he had learned the language at his mother’s knee. The rest of the Rostov family had spoken it as well — English having earned something of a social cachet as it was the language the Imperial Family used between themselves. The Empress Alexandria had apparently never achieved more than a rudimentary grasp of Russian. At the time his mother had expressed some qualms about changing his name from Rostov to the more British-sounding, Ross, as if in doing so he was showing a disrespect for his father’s memory. Paul had not seen it that way. He hardly had a memory of his father beyond a vague image of a uniformed character stomping down the path through the snow to a sleigh while he and his mother watched on. He sometimes wondered if the scene was a genuine memory at all and not just a construct fabricated after the fact from stories his mother had used to tell him. What might have been evidence of its authenticity was a recollection he had of throwing a snowball at the departing figure; but whether this was evidence of authenticity or imagination, he could only guess.