‘… like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He star’d at the Pacific — and all his men
Look’d at each other with a wild surmise —
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.
‘It’s all about eagerness to seize the next experience, to watch the next horizon come into view … the elation of discovery.’
‘Ah, that was you, the line of verse? You have strange skills for a policewoman. The tickets? Entirely appropriate and welcome. Those I shall keep and use. But not for the reason you ascribe to me. Do you think I could be deceived by a clumsy lie? Fools! What an irony. There will be no wild surmise for me on the heights … no Russian welcoming committee on the quay.’
She turned at last to face Lily directly and spoke with emphasis. ‘In San Francisco there are no Romanovs. No Tatiana, no Tsar, no Tsarina, no Tsarevich.’
‘How can you be so certain?’ Lily’s voice was scarcely audible as she at last made sense of the familiar features and the appalling answer struck her. ‘Who are you, Anna?’
With a wide gesture, the woman swept off her hat and ruffled her hair with a hand. Hair cut short as a boy’s. And not the black hair Lily was expecting. It gleamed and glinted like a cap of bronze around a lovely face in the morning sunshine. Dark eyes looked down at her with the bitter mischief of a Peter Pan.
‘I wish I knew! I have been so many people in the last five years I can’t be certain. I do know there is one man who will tell me who I am. But I’ll remember the manners I used once to have and introduce myself properly, shall I?’ The Russian tilted her head in an old-fashioned gesture of greeting. ‘You have the honour of addressing the Grand Duchess Tatiana Nikolaevna of the House of Romanov. How do-’