The challenge amounted to indiscipline and he fell silent, seething with indignation and awaiting the commander’s set-down.
Joe grinned and playfully poked a finger at his lieutenant. ‘Gotcha! You walked right into it, Bacchus. Well, what do the rest of you make of my story? Easy enough to get a pair of old romantics like Bacchus and Fanshawe worked up, but will the Russian ladies be deceived? What I’ve just handed you is a load of cobbled-together nonsense. A thumping great lie! Full of holes, I confess. But I find the best way of getting someone to swallow a lie is to season it well and stick it between two thick slices of truth. Worth a try?’
There followed a ruminative silence. Joe followed his audience’s reactions through from sharp anger at being deceived to disgruntlement, puzzlement and finally a cynical acceptance. He pressed on. ‘There you are then — I’ve given you the imaginary skeleton so to speak, now help me put some real flesh on it.’
‘Oh, no. Another corpse that’s going to get up and dance,’ Lily muttered.
‘Exactly that. We’re going to resurrect a princess of the blood royal. Tatiana lives! We’ve got to make them believe that. Get your box out, Bacchus, and let’s see what we can use. Unless I’ve been misinformed, there’s a very particular relic of the second daughter in there.’
Mumbling and mistrustful, Bacchus pulled the box into the centre of the table and opened it up.
Inside was a perfectly ordinary Gladstone bag, its leather stamped with the emblem of the United Kingdom. Bacchus took it out and opened it up. ‘Our man — one of our men — in Ekaterinburg owned this bag. He had it with him when he made a consular call on the villa in the aftermath of the shootings. In the chaos that reigned — there was a squad still mopping up the pools of blood, retrieving shell cases and looting — he quietly helped himself to some Romanov goods. Not the obvious valuables of which there were plenty lying about the place. He went for the more interesting stuff — letters and diaries. He found things hidden behind water cisterns and under the bath — places the guards hadn’t thought to ransack. The outside world had managed to keep in touch with the Romanovs for many a month. Better that such incriminating documents did not fall into the hands of the Bolsheviks, of course.’
He began to take objects from the bag, laying them out with care on the mahogany surface of the table. Lily noticed that he was beginning to sort them as he picked them out. Medals, rings, icons and lockets were put in one corner, small leather-bound diaries and notebooks in another, photographs and letters in the centre. Lily could not hold back a gasp of emotion as she saw a white lace-edged handkerchief embroidered by a child’s hand in red silk at the corner. The wobbly letter A — Anastasia? Lily reached for it and held it, breathing in the trace of a spicy cologne lurking in its folds. No, this A was for Alexandra — a gift from a child to its mother.
‘It’s Tatiana we’re hunting for, remember,’ Joe reminded them, seeing his small group distracted and sinking fast into fascinated absorption. ‘Anything of her in here? We have to reconstitute her from these bits and pieces. We have to breathe life into her … conjure up an image so real that her best friend will be convinced she’s alive and well and calling her to her side.’
Fanshawe found a sheet of paper. ‘Got something, sir! Here’s her writing. That’s a start. Letter to a friend. In English. Thank God they all seem to have used English, or German. It was never sent, apparently.’