no pain, and he dashed for the communicating door that led to the dining room.
He heard the soldier shout: “She’s getting away!”
Fitz burst through the door as another bullet hit the woodwork. Ordinary soldiers were not trained with pistols and sometimes did not realize how much less accurate they were than rifles. Moving at a limping run, he went past the table elaborately laid with silver and crystal ready for four wealthy aristocrats to have dinner. Behind him he heard several pursuers. At the far end of the room a door led to the kitchen area. He passed into a narrow corridor and from there to the kitchen. A cook and several kitchen maids had stopped work and were standing around looking terrified.
Fitz’s pursuers were too close behind him. As soon as they got a clear shot he would be killed. He had to do something to slow them down.
He set Valeriya on her feet. She swayed, and he saw blood on her dress. She had been hit by a bullet, but she was alive and conscious. He sat her in a chair, then turned to the corridor. The grinning soldier was running toward him, firing wildly, followed by several more in single file in the narrow space. Behind them, in the dining room and drawing room, Fitz saw flames.
He drew his Webley. It was a double-action gun so it did not need to be cocked. Shifting all his weight to his good leg, he aimed carefully at the belly of the soldier running at him. He squeezed the trigger, the gun banged, and the man fell on the stone floor in front of him. In the kitchen, Fitz heard women screaming in terror.
Fitz immediately fired again at the next man, who also went down. He fired a third time at a third man, with the same result. The fourth man ducked back into the dining room.
Fitz slammed the kitchen door. The pursuers would now hesitate, wondering how they could check whether he was lying in wait for them, and that might just give him the time he needed.
He picked up Valeriya, who seemed to be losing consciousness. He had never been in the kitchens of this house, but he moved toward the back. Another corridor took him past storerooms and laundries. At last he opened a door that led to the outside.
Stepping out, panting, his bad leg hurting like the very devil, he saw the carriage waiting, with Jenkins in the driver’s seat and Bea inside with Nina, who was sobbing uncontrollably. A frightened-looking stable boy was holding the horses.
He manhandled the unconscious Valeriya into the carriage, climbed in after her, and shouted at Jenkins: “Go! Go!”
Jenkins whipped the horses, the stable boy leaped out of the way, and the carriage moved off.
Fitz said to Bea: “Are you all right?”
“No, but I’m alive and unhurt. You…?”
“No damage. But I fear for your brother’s life.” In reality he was quite sure Andrei was dead by now, but he did not want to say that to her.
Bea looked at the princess. “What happened?”
“She must have been hit by a bullet.” Fitz looked more closely. Valeriya’s face was white and still. “Oh, dear God,” he said.
“She’s dead, isn’t she?” Bea said.
“You must be brave.”
“I will be brave.” Bea took her sister-in-law’s lifeless hand. “Poor Valeriya.”
The carriage raced down the drive and past the small dowager house where Bea’s mother had lived after Bea’s father died. Fitz looked back at the big house. There was a small crowd of frustrated pursuers outside the kitchen door. One of them was aiming a rifle, and Fitz pushed Bea’s head down and ducked himself.
When next he looked they were out of range. Peasants and the staff were pouring out of the house by all its doors. The windows were strangely bright, and Fitz realized that the place was on fire. As he looked, smoke drifted from the front door, and an orange flame licked up from an open window and set fire to the creeper growing up the wall.
Then the carriage topped a rise and rattled downhill, and the old house disappeared from view.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT – October and November 1917
Walter said angrily: “Admiral von Holtzendorff promised us the British would starve in five months. That was nine months ago.”
“He made a mistake,” said his father.
Walter suppressed a scornful retort.
They were in Otto’s room at the Foreign Office in Berlin. Otto sat in a carved chair behind a big desk. On the wall behind him hung a painting of Kaiser Wilhelm I, grandfather of the present monarch, being proclaimed German emperor in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles.
Walter was infuriated by his father’s half-baked excuses. “The admiral gave his word as an officer that no American would reach Europe,” he said. “Our intelligence is that fourteen thousand of them landed in France in June. So much for the word of an officer!”
That stung Otto. “He did what he believed was best for his country,” he said irately. “What more can a man do?”
Walter raised his voice. “You ask me what more a man can do? He can avoid making false promises. When he doesn’t know for sure, he can refrain from saying he knows for sure. He can tell the truth, or keep his stupid mouth shut.”
“Von Holtzendorff gave the best advice he could.”
The feebleness of these arguments maddened Walter. “Such humility would have been appropriate before the event. But there was none. You were there, at Castle Pless-you know what happened. Von Holtzendorff gave his word. He misled the kaiser. He brought the Americans into the war against us. A man could hardly serve his monarch worse!”
“I suppose you want him to resign-but then who would take his place?”
“Resign?” Walter was bursting with fury. “I want him to put the barrel of his revolver in his mouth and pull the trigger.”
Otto looked severe. “That’s a wicked thing to say.”
“His own death would be small retribution for all those who have died because of his smug foolishness.”
“You youngsters have no common sense.”
“You dare to talk to me about common sense? You and your generation took Germany into a war that has crippled us and killed millions-a war that, after three years, we still have not won.”
Otto looked away. He could hardly deny that Germany had not yet won the war. The opposing sides were deadlocked in France. Unrestricted submarine warfare had failed to choke off supplies to the Allies. Meanwhile, the British naval blockade was slowly starving the German people. “We have to wait and see what happens in Petrograd,” said Otto. “If Russia drops out of the war, the balance will change.”
“Exactly,” said Walter. “Everything now depends on the Bolsheviks.”
Early in October, Grigori and Katerina went to see the midwife.
Grigori now spent most nights in the one-room apartment near the Putilov works. They no longer made love- she found it too uncomfortable. Her belly was huge. The skin was as taut as a football, and her navel stuck out instead of in. Grigori had never been intimate with a pregnant woman, and he found it frightening as well as thrilling. He knew that everything was normal, but all the same he dreaded the thought of a baby’s head cruelly stretching the narrow passage he loved so much.
They set out for the home of the midwife, Magda, the wife of Konstantin. Vladimir rode on Grigori’s shoulders. The boy was almost three, but Grigori still carried him without effort. His personality was emerging: in his childish way he was intelligent and earnest, more like Grigori than his charming, wayward father, Lev. A baby was like a revolution, Grigori thought: you could start one, but you could not control how it would turn out.
