“It does seem like an awful lot of bother,” says the lawyer.
Agatha tries to stifle her irritation. “It will be difficult work for all of us but the benefits will be substantial. We need to get them out, Tobias.”
Tobias waits on the line. Agatha can tell he’s thinking of another question. He finds it difficult to construct thoughts and turn them into sentences, but Agatha doesn’t want this to become a protracted conversation. After years of enlisting his legal services, she knows it’s best to keep the conversations frequent and brief.
“We’ll talk again tomorrow,” she says curtly. “Goodbye.” She has spoken with him too many times to bother waiting for a response. She places her phone on the large, walnut desk and slides her hand to the furry head resting between her legs. She takes one of the silken ears and threads it between her fingers, rubbing the soft tip with her thumb. He is a pedigree borzoi: the size and shape of a greyhound, with long white fur and a pointed face.
Fedor opens his eyes. His irises are as black as his pupils, and in the dim light they almost look recessed. He pulls his jaws into a wide, prolonged yawn, revealing thin canines, broad and jagged molars, and a pink, colubrine tongue with short, coarse bristles. Agatha takes hold of Fedor’s head with both hands, and when he closes his mouth and settles his jaws together, she draws her palms towards her, along the length of his nose, then back again towards the flopping ears.
The dog fidgets. He sniffs at her lap then begins to whine. He wants up. His hind legs are tensed and he bobs on the spot several times, asking for permission. Agatha pushes her chair back to give the pup room to emerge, and Fedor springs to her lap. He places his bony hips on her knees and his front paws on the tops of her thighs. Spindle claws dig deep. She will have red indentations later.
Agatha’s study is on the second floor of her Georgian townhouse, in Mayfair. It is where she spends most of her day and is one of the finest rooms in the house, with an intricate parquet floor, high ceilings framed with Roman cornicing, and three tall sash and case windows along one side. Through the windows she can see the street, which is wide, clean, and lined with plane trees and expensive cars.
Her desk is littered with documents. There are tenancy contracts and outlines of planning permissions. There is a letter from one of her sisters. It reads: Give us our fucking money, you fucking Russian slag. This is on top of a pile of documents she was readying for the forthcoming arbitration. Beneath a newspaper, she finds the photograph the antique dealer showed her earlier in the day. It shows a white handkerchief marred by a small, somewhat faded bloodstain. According to the letter of verification, the handkerchief is French, dates from the 1790s, and the blood came from the foot of the guillotine. During the Great Terror, when notable individuals were decapitated, spectators used to rush forward and collect souvenirs: blood, hair, items of clothing. The morbid mementos are still collected: the more famous the decapitated party, the higher the price.
Agatha has been fascinated by the Revolution since childhood and has accumulated items from the period ever since she has had the money to do so. She used to spend the summer school holidays with her mother in Monaco. She was alone much of the time. She sat and read by the hotel pool, or in the restaurant between meals while the staff were clearing breakfast and preparing for lunch. Sometimes she wandered down to the beach by herself and read her books on the sands while watching leathery old ladies in bikinis arrange and rearrange diamond necklaces on their sagging chests. She covered herself head to toe in factor-50 sun cream and propped herself up with a couple of towels and her school rucksack. In the evenings, her mother went to parties and Agatha was left in the hotel room. She ordered room service and was later told off for drawing attention to her neglect.
One morning at breakfast, Agatha’s mother, Anastasia, told her that the King of France had arrived in town. She said she would be going to a party with him that night.
“But there is no King of France,” Agatha pointed out.
“He is some kind of pretender,” Anastasia explained. “He’s descended from the old kings and queens. The ones who were overthrown and slaughtered by the guillotine.”
“So he isn’t really the king.”
“He would be the king if they hadn’t been deposed. If there had been no revolution and no Napoleon.”
“But there was a revolution and Napoleon.”
“But apparently lots of people in France would rather there hadn’t been, and they see him as the rightful king.”
During this exchange Anastasia had avoided making eye contact with her daughter. Agatha was skeptical, and Anastasia quietly agreed with her, and Agatha knew her mother agreed with her.
Later, when Agatha returned to school, she went to the library and got out all the books she could find on the French Revolution, the ancien régime and the Bourbon succession. She read about their descent into decadence, their lavish lifestyles, their fashions, their affairs, their huge gambling debts, their war debts, their parties, their illegitimate children. Then she read about their demise. The trials. The executions. She read about all the chances they were given by the revolutionaries to save themselves, and about how they squandered those chances. She read about their unquenchable belief in their own rights, their total ignorance of or refusal to believe what was happening right in front of their eyes.
The fragility of law and order is never far from Agatha’s thoughts. News had recently come in of a revolution
