Dennis Wheatley - The Shadow of Tyburn Tree

Roger kept Natalia well back out of the press. After some twenty minutes it eased; a number of fainting women were carried back into the palace, and they were able to get out into the street. Having found her coach he took her home and it then carried him on to his lodging. He was now feeling cold and stale-tight from the amount of neat brandy he had drunk on top of a wide variety of wines; but little Zaria was, as usual, warming his bed for him, and, tumbling into it, he soon drifted off into a troubled sleep.

When he got up and went out the following morning he found the city in a tumult. Everyone knew that North Russia was entirely denuded of troops, except for a few battalions of the Imperial Guard, and it seemed that short of an abject surrender by the Empress to any terms that Gustavus might dictate there was no way of preventing his army from taking and sacking St. Petersburg.

It occurred to Roger that, since he was posing as a Frenchman, it might be thought odd if, at such a time of crisis, he did not place himself at the disposal of the French Embassy. On calling there he found a crowd of excited Frenchmen gathered round their Ambassador, who, it transpired, had returned from his fishing trip only the day before. The Comte de Segur proved to be a young man still in his twenties. He received Roger very affably and they discoursed for a little on their mutual acquaintances, then he remarked: "In the present emergency, Chevalier, you are no doubt anxious to place your sword at the disposal of the Empress?"

Actually there were few things that Roger was less anxious to do than get himself sent to the front just when his introduction to the Court had opened a good prospect of getting to grips with his mission; but in those days, when all armies had large numbers of foreign officers in them, it was as natural to expect visitors who happened to be in a threatened city to participate in its defence as it is now for a house­holder to expect his male guests to assist him in catching a burglar.

Faced with this dilemma Roger swiftly evaded the issue by reply­ing: "It so happened, Comte, that I was with Admiral Orlof last night when the news of the invasion reached him, and I am in hopes that he may find some employment for me."

"I am delighted to hear it," replied the young Ambassador. "And, since you tell me that you have already been presented, you will doubt­less now frequent the Court until you hear further from him."

Roger readily agreed to the suggestion, although not for the reason it was given; and offered to make one of Monsieur de Segur's suite should he be going there that evening. The Cbmte accepted the offer, so later that day Roger found himself one of a company of some dozen Frenchmen who set out in a small cavalcade of coaches for the Imperial Palace at Peterhof.

The Empress, perhaps feeling the need of her most intimate possessions round her, had moved on that day of crisis to her quarters in the Hermitage, and had announced the holding of a special court there for that night. This suite of so-called private apartments was in fact little less than a palace itself, as it consisted of a splendid pavilion containing many reception as well as living-rooms, an art-gallery, a library, various cabinets for the display of her collections of porcelain and coins, and a spacious winter-garden; the whole being connected with the main palace by a covered passage over an archway.

As Natalia Andreovna had, for the first time, failed to visit Roger that afternoon, he was all the more eager to see her; and he had hardly entered the main salon in company with de Segur when his desire was gratified by catching sight of her among a bevy of beauties behind Catherine's armchair.

A master of ceremonies having announced the Ambassador, the crowd gave way and he advanced to make his bow. The Empress gave him her hand to kiss and asked at once: "Since you are just arrived from the Residence, Monsieur, tell us what the people there are talking?"

"They say that your Majesty is preparing to seek refuge in Moscow," he returned at once.

Her fat little body bridled and her blue eyes flashed. "I trust then that you did not believe it. 'Tis true that we have ordered great numbers of post-horses to be kept in readiness, but only for the purpose of bringing up soldiers and cannon."

The Empress's words, Roger soon found, were the keynote of the evening. Gustavus's unprovoked aggression had caught her napping. There were plenty of defeatists round her who counselled a flight to the ancient capital of Russia, but she would not listen to a word of such talk. She had given orders for the mobilisation of every man available, even the convalescents in the hospitals, and the police. Couriers had been sent post-haste in every direction to summon such skeleton garrisons as had been left within five hundred miles of St. Petersburg; and she meant to remain, to fight the invader on the frontier with every resource she could command.

Roger quickly made his way to Natalia, and, as the room grew ever more crowded with people arriving to proclaim their devotion to the throne, she pointed out many of the most interesting.

Among them, Count Cobentzel, the immensely rich and very able Ambassador of Catherine's ally, Joseph II of Austria; old General Sprengtporten, the Finnish nationalist leader who had aided Gustavus III to become an autocratic .monarch, then quarrelled with him and come to Russia in the hope of persuading the Empress to champion the discontented Finns against their Swedish sovereign; and another exile, Prince Alexander Mauro-Cordato, Hospidar of Moldavia, who had sided with the Russians in their quarrel with the Turks as the most likely means of securing independence for his Rumanians.

Roger talked for some while with the last in Latin, and as a result of it formed an entirely new view of the then little-known Balkan country from which the Prince came. He had believed it to be even more barbarous than Russia, but learned that the Prince claimed direct descent from a Roman Emperor, and that in spite of three centuries of Ottoman oppression the Rumanian nobility still main­tained the culture and traditions of the Greeco-Roman civilisation. Mauro-Cordato told him that his library contained many ancient works of the greatest interest that had never reached the western world, and said that when he was restored to his capital of Jassy he would be delighted if Roger would pay him a visit there.

By contrast with this charming Balkan potentate Roger found Bobrinsky, Catherine's natural son by Gregory Orlof, uncouth and barbarous. So too, were her legitimate grandsons, Alexander and Constantine. The latter had been so named, and received a Greek education, owing to her ambition to revive the ancient empire of Byzan­tium and place him on its throne; but both the boys were insufferably conceited and ill-mannered, having been abominably spoiled by her and ruined by bad tutors pandering to their vices.

Their father, the Grand Duke Paul Petrovitch, struck Roger as being of a much quieter and more amiable disposition. The heir to the Imperial throne was now thirty-four years of age, but his mother still kept him very much in the background and he lived in semi-retirement. Only the invasion crisis had brought him and his wife to court on this occasion, and Natalia Andreovna said of him:

"He takes after his father in that he is a great admirer of the Prussians, and spends much of his time training his regiment in their barrack-square evolutions. He and his wife are very devoted to one another, and I should think, the only couple in the whole court who have remained faithful to their marriage-vows. She was a Princess of Wurttemberg, and is of a very different nature from her predecessor. His first wife was Wilhelmina, the youngest of the three Hesse-Darmstadt girls, and she had a great taste for gallantry. My father became her lover. The Empress found them out and packed him off as her Minister to the two Sicilys; but the Queen of Naples then became his mistress, so he lost nothing by the exchange."