Dennis Wheatley - The wanton princess

'Indeed! But I take it that British travellers are still free to come and go without interference?'

'Provided they behave themselves, to interfere with their liberty, either in peace or war, would be an unheard-of barbarity. But I would advise that you keep a guard upon your tongue, and so give the Secret Police no cause to apprehend you for “ Lese-majeste".'

The chaplain was a bachelor so there were only the two of them at supper, and over the meal the Reverend James gave Roger an account of Paul I's earlier life and of the frustra­tions that it was generally accepted had caused his weak mind to brood for years upon revenge then, when he had at last ascended the throne, had made him a tyrannical despot.

It was not until he was forty-two that he had succeeded his lecherous, but great and liberal-minded mother. From boy­hood she had kept him in a state of tutelage and denied him any say in the government of the country. For years the great nobles and ambassadors had fawned on Catherine's lovers while treating her Heir Apparent with ill-concealed contempt. She had even taken his children from him and permitted him no say in their upbringing.

The only liberty she allowed him was to play at soldiers. Like his father, Peter III, he was fascinated by the military achievements of Frederick the Great: so Catherine had per­mitted him to form his own regiment of Marines at Gatshina, his country place at which he passed a good part of the year.

There he had spent eight to ten hours a day drilling his miniature army on the Prussian model and enforcing the harshest discipline.

When he succeeded his mother in November '96, he had at once sent for his Marines, infiltrated them into the Brigade of Guards and promoted their officers to senior commands in these elite regiments. Before the nobles who officered the Brigade fully realized what was happening they found that they were under the thumbs of the newcomers. All leave was abolished and favoured courtier-officers, who had attended only one drill a year, were ordered to march up and down the barrack squares for hours at a stretch. Those who resigned were promptly sent into exile.

Once firmly in the saddle, Paul had changed the aspect of the Court overnight and, out of hatred for his mother, reversed all her policies. Her last favourite, Pluto Zuboff, had been deprived of most of his possessions and exiled to his country estate. Rastopchin had been one of the few ministers to retain his place: but only because formerly he had had the forethought to solicit the favour of wearing the uniform that Paul had designed for his Gatshina regiment.

Under the new regime, familiarity with Gatshina or past loyalty to Paul's father had become the only passports to promotion. The latter had never been crowned, so Paul had his body dug up, crowned in its coffin and laid in state beside that of the dead Empress who had instigated his murder; then the whole Court was required to kiss the hands of both corpses before they were buried side by side.

In the first months of his reign he gained some reputation for clemency by liberating the great Polish leader Kosciuszko and a number of other people whom his mother had imprisoned but, being strongly opposed to revolutionary ideas, he had initiated a ferocious and senseless persecution of the French exiles living in Russia; and had banned the use of French books, furniture, cooking and fashions, to the intense annoyance of his nobility whose culture was almost exclusively derived from France. Another of his pointless and infuriating orders had been that all carriage-owners had to buy a different type of harness and equip their coachmen in the German style. The Russian coachmen refused to part either with their kaftans or their beards; and the price of new harness soon became prohibitive, because the Czar had instructed his police that, after a fortnight, they were to cut the harness of any carriage on which the old style Russian harness was still being used. The upper classes had even greater cause for rage when he revived an old ukase decreeing that whenever a Czar or Czarina drove through the streets, everyone within sight must immediately abase themselves. This meant that even ladies in carriages must stop them, jump out and prostrate themselves in the snow or slush.

The lower classes, too. had cause for complaint. One of Paul's inexplicable idiosyncrasies was a hatred of round hats, and these were the general wear of the masses in Russia. After decreeing their abolition he gave orders to his police that any round hat they saw was to be snatched from the head of its wearer and destroyed: and many of the poorer people could not afford to buy others.

More recently, following his revival the previous summer of the League of Armed Neutrality, he had prohibited all trade with Rritain. As Russia was almost entirely an agricul­tural country she had to import nine-tenths of her manufac­tured goods, and for close on two hundred years by far the greater part of these had come from England. Their present dearth was inflicting a considerable hardship on all classes of people and greatly increasing the rancour against the Czar.

Having listened to all this and more, Roger could only wonder that the Russians had put up with their crazy monarch for so long; but on reflection he realized that the masses, being bond slaves, would have been put down immediately by the military with the full backing of the nobility had they attempted to revolt, and that it was so ingrained in the upper classes to think of 'The Little Father' as almost an embodiment of God that they would never dare unite and openly defy him. Clearly the only hope of bringing his tyrannical reign to an end was by a coup d'etat carried out inside the Palace by a few courageous men.

When Roger entered the city, the early winter darkness had already fallen, so it was not until the following morning that he again saw it by daylight. Unlike Paris, London and other ancient capitals, St. Petersburg having been built less than a hundred years before by Peter the Great, instead of having narrow, tortuous streets with the upper storeys of the houses nearly meeting overhead, had fine, broad boulevards lined with splendid mansions of stone.

As he was driven at a good pace along the Nevsky Prospect in a droshky. while enjoying the crisp clean air he recalled the names of several of the owners of the palaces but noticed that most of them were now shut, and that in the streets there was not a quarter of the handsome equipages that were to be seen in Catherine the Great's day.

He was carrying on him a letter from Count Simon Vorontzoff to his elder brother, Count Alexander, and when he reached the Vorontzoff palace he was considerably relieved to find it still occupied. Having left his letter at the door he spent an hour driving round the city, made a few purchases and returned to the Factory. That evening a running footman brought him a reply in which Count Alexander invited him to breakfast the following morning.

There were several people present at the meal and, as Russian gentry used Russian only when addressing their ser­vants, habitually using French. English or German among themselves, Roger had no difficulty in entering into the con­versation. For a pleasant hour they talked of general topics or of mutual acquaintances, cither that Roger had met on his previous visit to St. Petersburg or that Count Alexander had made when for a short while during the reign of Peter III he had been Ambassador in London. Then, as Roger was about to take his leave he asked the Count in a low voice if he would give him a private interview, to which Vorontzoff replied softly, 'By all means. Leave with the others and return in half an hour.'

When Roger again entered the house he was taken to a small writing room, and there he told the Count the purpose of his mission.