‘And all this happened in the dead of night. I can’t begin to imagine …’
‘That’s the way they do things. In the confusion and struggling … the father had armed himself and defended his family with some spirit … no one noticed that Anna was being bundled offstage by one of the guards. A young and impressionable lad.’ Joe sighed. ‘Had he fallen for Anna, are we to suppose? Some of the Bolshevik guards were anything but the sadistic fiends they have been portrayed as … One of the Romanov guards, in Ekaterinburg, with starvation stalking the streets, got hold of the wherewithal to bake a birthday cake for the archduchess Maria’s nineteenth birthday. She was a bonny lass, Maria, flirtatious and friendly. The guard was discovered being given a kiss of thanks and the poor lad was sent off to the front. To certain death.’
‘Our Anna may well now wish she had gone to certain death with her family in the pit,’ was Lily’s comment as she turned the page and read on. ‘I don’t much like the sequel to this tale.’
‘It gets worse. Hardly a romance, is it? A lost year spent hiding in a village somewhere in Siberia in the family of this young ruffian. He claimed to have married her, but she denies this and says she was raped, kept as a slave, overworked and beaten by the members of the family. Finding herself with child, she chose to stay until the baby was born and then escaped and somehow made her way north to Murmansk on the coast. The consul secured her a passage aboard Captain Swinburne’s gunboat — we keep a snarling presence in those waters — and fetched up in London. Where she rejoined her compatriots, nursing her hatred to her bosom.’
‘Not her baby. Left behind? Perished?’
He flipped through the notes again, checking. ‘We don’t know. And Anna’s not saying, apparently. This stage of her life seems to have been reconstructed from accounts of her friends who have chosen to follow a less secretive way of life in their adopted country. Two or more accounts, all telling the same tale.’
‘And after her harrowing time she learns that not only is her own family dead, but Alexei too and her friend Tatiana. But, perhaps most shocking of all for a Russian of her class, the Tsar — “the anointed of God”! He was more than a man, more than a king. By the grace of God, he personified the Russian people. All things considered, this was a crime of heinous proportions.’
‘Proportions big enough to unseat you from your moorings, would you say, Wentworth?’
Lily nodded, her face glacial. ‘I’d go looking for my gun,’ she said quietly. ‘And a target for my rage.’
They were both silent for a moment, Joe turning back instinctively to look once again at the photograph of the five lovely girls in their white silks and satins.