Dennis Wheatley - The Shadow of Tyburn Tree

In one corner of the bedroom a spiral staircase, elaborately carved from rare woods, led up to a small circular opening in the high ceiling above. Pointing at the staircase Katerina Ivanovna said with her crook­ed smile: "In ten minutes' time you are to go up those stairs and perform the duties for which you have been selected."

"Duties!" repeated Roger. "To what duties do you refer, Madame?"

She gave him a pitying look. "I thought you keener-witted. These are the apartments of the official favourite. Those of Her Majesty are immediately overhead. I received orders to clear that fool Momonof out this morning."

Suddenly the old harridan sank to the floor in a flurry of black lace and, bowing her head before him, cried:

"Live long, Rojé Christorovitch! These rooms are yours! You are the favourite now! Live long; and while you share the Empress's bed forget not last night, and those who smoothed the path for you to become the most powerful man in All the Russias."

CHAPTER XVIII

HER MAJESTY'S PLEASURE

ROGER'Sheart missed a beat and his mind baulked for a second, refusing to accept the extraordinary vision that Katerina Ivanovna's words had conjured up. It was fantastic, impossible; a dream from which he would soon wake with a start. It simply could not be true. The old witch was seeking to make a fool of him; or perhaps he had not heard her aright.

Then as he stared at her, still sunk in her curtsey at his feet, he knew that she was not making a mock of him, but had hailed him as the new Imperial consort in sober earnest.

Into his racing mind came all that Natalia Andreovna had told him df the making and unmaking of the favourites. When the Empress tired of one she never quarrelled with him or warned him that he was about to be

dismissed. She began to look round for another; and shrewd Potemkin, to whom her mind was an open book on such matters, put a few likely young men in her way, taking care to select only those whom he felt had not sufficiently strong personalities to undermine his own position as her chief counsellor. When she found one of Potemkin's lusty young proteges pleasing to her, old Katerina Ivahovna was called in to give a party. Without knowing himself to be a candidate for the Empress's favour the young man was invited, and she attended as a private guest, so that she could talk to him informally without giving cause for gossip in her court. If, on closer acquaintance, she still found him to her liking, he was given a thorough medical examination. Then, without warning, the old favourite was presented with a big sum of money and told to travel, and the new one was installed in his place.

For many years past this had become an accepted ritual, and in a flash, Roger realised that he had been through it, with the only ex­ception that, Potemkin being away at the wars, in this case the change of favourites was being made without his knowledge.

Raising Katerina Ivanovna to her feet, he said, a little breathlessly: "It is then to you, Madame, that I owe this sudden elevation?"

She leered at him. "I knew Her Majesty to be wearied of Momonof, and saw the moment that you were brought before her that she was taken with you. I have been her confidant for so long that I know her every mood. I had but to drop a word in her ear and arrange for suit­able people to be at last night's supper party, and the result was a foregone conclusion."

As he did not reply, she went on: "For many years past the favour­ites have been no more than puppets dancing to Prince One-eye's tune. But unless I have lost the art of judging men you will prove different. Her Majesty still leans greatly on his advice, but there are times when she resents his dictatorial manner to the point of vow­ing that she will be rid of him. You are handsome enough to become another Lanskoi; but you can become greater than he. If you can establish yourself firmly with the Empress during Potemkin's absence, with my help it should not prove beyond you to unseat him on his return. Then you and I will rule Katinka and Russia between us. Now, what say you to my proposition?"

Roger had been thinking swiftly, and he was quick to realise that it would be madness to antagonise this evil, ambitious woman; so he replied: "I like it well, Madame, and I shall rely upon your guidance in all things."

"You are a youth of sense," she cackled. "We will talk more anon, but now I must leave you. Not more than five minutes remain for you to prepare yourself; then go you up the stairs to reap an Empire."

She curtseyed again, glided to the door and slipped through it with barely a rustle of her laces, leaving him to his wildly whirling thoughts.

The prospect she had offered him was so tremendous that he found it difficult to grasp. Potemkin's drunken, dissolute life had aged him shockingly, and everyone said that he was far from being the man he had been when he first became the Empress's lover. Roger had enormous confidence in his own abilities and believed that, if he could protect himself from assassination, and retain the goodwill of Katerina Ivanovna, between them they would prove more than a match for the one-eyed prince. She evidently believed that too, and she had far better grounds for forming an accurate judgment of the situation than he had. If the intrigue proved successful he would, within a few months, find himself virtually seated on the throne of the greatest Empire in the world.

In such a position his power would be almost limitless. He could change the face of Europe if he would. But better, he could serve his own country infinitely more effectively than his wildest imaginings had ever led him to hope, by making Russia the keystone in a Grand Alliance for the permanent preservation of the peace of Europe. That was the one certain way of saving Britain's substance from being wasted away by future wars. With Russia's might upon the land and England's on the seas, in firm alliance to curb the ambitions of other powers, young Mr. Pitt's great dream of peace and prosperity for all could be made to come true.

But there was a price to be paid for all this. His thoughts reverted to the stocky, elderly woman from whom his power would be derived. She was very far from being evil, and the scope of her mind was infinitely greater than that of any other living ruler. She was courteous, gentle and beneficent by nature. As a girl she had come to a country which was still considered to be outside Europe and peopled almost entirely by savages. In a quarter of a century she had brought it permanently within the family of nations which composed the civilised world, and launched vast educational schemes which had now brought a degree of literacy to the whole of her nobility and more prosperous subjects. She had subdued the wild tribes of Asia and established a Pax Romana among them. At her instigation costly missions of exploration, headed by able scientists, had been sent to China, Persia, and the Arctic. On learning that great tracts of her fertile lands were unpeopled, she had financed whole tribes of industrious Germans and Magyars to migrate and colonise them. Under her sway religious toleration had been established with a completeness unknown to any other country in the world. She had abolished torture and the terrible "crying of the word," which, before her time, had made every Russian go in con­stant fear that an enemy might denounce him for some crime he had not committed, and that, although innocent, the rack and thumb­screws would be applied with the object of wringing a confession from him. She had fought smallpox with inoculation even in the remote villages of the Steppes, and while other rules hypocritically endeavoured to ignore venereal disease she had established clinics where sufferers could be treated without the shame of having to acknowledge their ailment publicly...