But Zinia wasn’t interested in hearing a response from Lily. ‘The princess could hardly believe her eyes when I arrived looking like this.’ Her voice took on a tone that managed to be both imperious and petulant. ‘Wearing a five-year-old rag cobbled up at the hem. And a single strand of mediocre pearls. She didn’t know where to look. I couldn’t bear the disgrace. What you see me in now is all I have left. I’ve sold off and pawned everything of value I had. Since I married the scoundrel six months ago he’s got through all I own. He found my last precious gem, a diamond brooch that I had from my mother, and donated it … donated it! … to Princess Ratziatinsky for her auction tonight. His way of buying access to English royalty.’
‘You married him. And yet you can never have loved such a man.’
‘In my world one does not marry for love,’ Zinia announced. ‘My parents died of the influenza soon after we came here. I was alone for months in a foreign country, my wealth eroded, living like a mouse. Someone introduced him to me. He offered to marry me and remake my fortune. Oh, he told me exactly who and what he was before I accepted him. He confessed his roguery with disarming honesty, he promised to involve me in an adventure. “Bury the past,” he told me, “it saps the strength. The future is for those who have the wits and the energy to make it theirs.” And it seemed an entertaining future. Too late I discovered the chapters in his life he had omitted. The violence, the perversion. The murder.’
Unmoved by the dramatic delivery, the tears, the flashing eyes, Lily came straight to the point. ‘If he isn’t Prince Gustavus, then who is he?’ She was sure Sandilands would expect her to establish an identity.
‘Oh, when he says he’s the son of a Serbian prince, he’s telling nothing less than the truth,’ said Zinia, annoyingly Sphinx-like. ‘In fact he’s the spitting image of Gustavus Alexis, they tell me. But he’s his illegitimate son. One of many. His mother was a serving maid or something of the kind.’ Zinia shrugged a shoulder. ‘He was brought up alongside his half-brother, the legitimate heir, in a ramshackle castle in a remote corner of a continent about to burst into flames … as his brother’s valet.’
‘Good Lord! What a very medieval way of going on.’
‘On the death of their father, and the ruin of the estate in the war, they harnessed up the one remaining carriage and set off, master and man, to try their luck in Paris.’
‘Don’t tell me. Only one of them survived the journey?’ Lily was eager to cut short a predictable and most probably deceitful story. She was quite certain she’d read something of the kind in a book by Alexandre Dumas. Zinia’s wild pronouncements were beginning to irritate her and annoyance sharpened her tongue. ‘Another tawdry tale in the annals of Mendacia, my granny would say.’
Zinia was not affronted. She replied to Lily’s jibe with a look of knowing superiority. ‘Oh, it does happen. Someone has popped up recently in Germany claiming to be the Grand Duchess Anastasia of Russia. The remaining members of the imperial family have been assembled to pass her in review and establish or demolish the young woman’s claims.’
‘I had heard. Varying opinions given, I believe.’