Something was very wrong.
Cyril went to stand some yards away and stare. He fiddled with his camera, pretending to line up angles to disguise his surveillance of the group.
Lily had vanished, and sitting in her place was a nightmarish figure he thought he ought to know. A Danish name came to mind. Or was it Swedish? No — wasn’t the man a Balkan of some kind? Serbian? Romanian? Cyril vaguely recollected that there was some scandal associated with the name … if only he could remember it.
As he watched, the dark and the fair princely heads bent towards each other in perfect amity. Cyril’s alarm increased. Then the stranger looked up. Registering the newsman’s attention, he turned his face away from Edward to reveal the scar on his left cheek. He smiled for the camera. Cyril pressed the shutter in automatic reaction to the offered pose, nodded an acknowledgement and scrambled to gather up his equipment.
He dashed off into the fray to find Princess Ratziatinsky.
Chapter Twenty-Two
‘His prey, Zinia — what do you mean? Tell me! Quickly! Is he planning to shoot him?’ Lily’s fingers itched to take the girl by the shoulders and shake her.
The Russian gave a bitter laugh. ‘Heavens no! What would he do for a gun? The men were all searched, you know. But it’s a shot he’s interested in.’ She sniggered at the irony. ‘He’s ambitious. He’s attempting to insinuate himself into English society. He wants to appear in photographs in the fashionable journals sitting alongside the prince — his bosom companion to all appearances. He’s been planning this coup for some time. Marrying me was part of his grand plan. I … in my homeland … was connected with the imperial family. I enjoyed the consequence that went with that status. Many doors are still open to me, even here in London, on account of my family name. But when the revolution burst over our heads, like thousands more I had to flee with my parents or face at best imprisonment, at worst execution. Unlike the poor Tsar and his family, I found shelter in this country. They were not so fortunate,’ she added bitterly. ‘But tonight, with so many of my compatriots surrounding me, people who knew me in another life, I could not dissemble. I refused to lend him countenance. I came and hid myself away down here. Though that wasn’t my only reason.’
She twirled round again for Lily, hands extended in a parody of a mannequin’s pose. ‘Just look at me. What do you see?’
Lily could not tell her the sad truth. The girl resembled nothing so much as a sofa doll, one of those slim, silken puppets with huge glass eyes and painted faces whose floppy limbs her mother liked to drape along the couches to startle the unwary visitor. Half alive and wholly sinister.