JACK OF DIAMONDS

PART TWO THE PROMISE OF A NEW DAY

Chap 5 - Pt 1 (BUT IN A PRINCELY HOME THERE SITS...)

Marlborough was the smallest of the six Manor houses located in what the locals were now calling Chumley Glen; it boasted eighteen bedrooms. It was what one might label the senior representative of the six; the arbiter of local history. It’s own colourful history went back to 1705, and the house had been through as many renovations as it had owners. Some claimed it was haunted, others that the walls were simply too tight. It hosted all the major celebrities of Europe through its colourful history: Handel, Mendelssohn, Litz; Christopher Wren, Isaac Newton, Edmund Halley; Pope, Defoe, Swift—the anecdotal tales about the house had gone through as many incarnations as it had renovations.

After a while, ownership was a guess, at best.

Finally, in 1907, the house was purchased, and renovated, by Dmitri Alexandrovitch Chernetsov—scion of a well-connected, as well as influential, Russian family—and commonly referred to as Prince Igor. He was a Russian businessman said to be tied to the Boyars; others said that he was the romantic encapsulation of what an aristocrat should be in exile; some believed his to be a self-imposed exile; a few even suggested he was an exile of love.

Chernetsov had been living in Britain since 1910, sent to London as part of the family’s business empire. He was forty-two at the time. It was a good decision on the family’s part. Chernetsov had been educated at Oxford, graduating in 1892, spending his formative years at a boarding school in Kent. He bought Marlborough House as an investment, and then decided it was the perfect home for his growing family. He had three boys and two girls, seven years apart.

Thirteen years later, his oldest was twenty-seven and would never see Russia again.

That’s not to say he wasn’t patriotic. He was. There was no one more patriotic, or Russian, than Chernetsov. He’d actually tried mounting a small force to rescue the Russian Royal Family, but failed in his attempt, arriving two days too late. It was that experience which convinced him Lenin and the Revolution had to be stopped, at any cost.

With the Civil War over and the Reds declaring victory, the Whites—monarchist armies and allies alike—began withdrawing with as much organized chaos as possible. While most of the Boyars and aristos in Russia were looked upon as ‘Former People’, loyalists like Chernetsov did what they could to help rescue those trapped and looking to get out. That he was involved in trying to topple the newly established Communist regime there could be no denying; it was the lengths to which he was willing to go people didn’t fully understand.

People like Aleksandr Antonov, he thought as he took a slow sip of his whiskey sour, looking out over the magnificent garden his wife insisted they plant. His grandchildren were outside playing in the October chill, and while his daughter-in-law would often insist they come in out of the cold, he smiled, reminded of what it had been like to be a child—until he was sent off to boarding school.

A tall, thin man of fifty-five, Chernetsov dressed as befit a gentleman, elegantly. His hair was always maintained, and though it had lost the once upon a time sheen of his youth, the grey somehow added to the image he projected. The grey came in light at the temples, and peppered his thin beard and sculpted goatee, giving him a cavalier appearance. His eyes were dark brown, his brows grey, and together with the hair, added one more layer to the mystique that seemed to surround the man as if an aura.

Women were said to hide behind their fans and all but swoon at the sight of him.

He put his empty glass down on the sideboard, knowing a maid would come in to pick it up, and made his way downstairs to the floating cellar. The walls were papered in red and gold, with white coving above, the meander—a decorative baseboard—in the design of a Greek fret, with twisted pillars and sculpted cornices at each inside and outside corner. The walls were decorated with paintings of the Romantic Age; one entire wall devoted to the Russian painter Ivan Aivazovsky. The floor was wall to wall carpeting because nothing annoyed him more than listening to boot heels in the middle of the night when he was trying to sleep.

He opened the door to the cellar using the key he kept in his wallet. He could feel the cold air rushing out of the room as he entered, closing the door quickly and picking up the heavy wool sweater his wife knitted him twenty years ago. It felt comfortable.

It was a small room, once used for cold storage. The floor was built to float on the fast running currents of the River Chumley, supported by four large iron turnbuckles; the walls were made of heavy brick, two feet thick, made to keep the cold in. It was ill-lit, with a single bulb hanging from a long wire that seemed to sway in time with the floor.

Chernetsov looked down at the man tied to the chair. His face was a bloody mess, his naked chest stained with his own blood. His shirt had been ripped open and his chest bore the lacerations of the many knife strokes inflicted upon him; his feet were tied to the legs of the chair, his arms tied behind his back.

He was a young man, strong-willed, Chernetsov could see, but he’d break eventually. They always do, he reminded himself. He looked at the other three men in the room and gave a quick nod. The first man, his hands bound with cords, let loose with a vicious punch to the ribs and Antonov gasped for breath, knowing his ribs had broken with the impact.

“You can scream if you wish,” Chernetsov said in his impeccable Russian. “No one will hear you, I assure you. This used to be a storage room when they first built this place—what?—two hundred years ago? They call it a floating floor. Have you even seen anything like it? It might be a Dutch innovation, who knows? The Dutch have given us so much, don’t you think? But with refrigeration, the room’s no longer needed. So I took it and made it into my interrogation room. No one comes down here. They know better than to ask questions about the room at the bottom of the steps. No one witnessed your arrival, and they certainly will not see you when you leave. So, I’ll ask you one more time, after that, I’m be done with you, one way or the other.”

“What does that mean?”

“What does what mean?”

“One way or the other?” Antonov asked.

“It means, if you do not tell me what I wish to know, I will kill you and dispose of your body. If you cooperate, I will set you free.”

“Free?”

“Do you doubt me?”

The man simply nodded.

“I can understand that. But I assure you, I am a man of my word,” Chernetsov smiled.

“The word of Prince Igor?” Antonov said with a sneer, spitting blood on the floor.

“Ah, the English and their strange antics,” Chernetsov smiled. “Had Borodin never written that piece, they would have never heard of the man.”

“What is it you wish to know?”

“I’m sorry? You undergo eight hours of beatings, broken bones I imagine, and lacerations, and now you ask me what I want to know? Were you not paying attention earlier? I simply want to know who sent you? You’re not the first man Lenin’s sent to kill me.”

“I was not sent by Lenin.”

“Someone else then? Is there a power struggle happening in the Kremlin?”

“It’s more than that.”

“More?” He crouched down in front of Antonov, looking up into his bloody, swollen face. “Tell me, what do you mean by more?”

“Lenin’s had a stroke.”

“A stroke? Stroked by the Hand of God? Well, I doubt that, considering what he’s done to the Russian Church. But it’s a serious hiccup in the upper echelons of the Kremlin. Who’s vying for power?”

“Stalin.”

“Who’s he?”

“He’s the general secretary of the party. He’s in charge of Lenin’s convalescence.”

“Is it really that bad?”

“He’s had two strokes.”

“And why does this man Stalin want me dead?”

“Why not? You control all the wealth of the Chernetsov family. We’ve managed to kill most of them—aunts, uncles, cousins—but you never returned, except that one time when you tried to save the Royal Family. That was Stalin’s doing, as well. Lenin was prepared to let them leave and go to England, but Stalin went behind Lenin's back. He went to see Trotsky, whom he knew wanted the Royal Family killed, and the two came up with a plan.”

“So this Stalin, he killed the Royal Family?”

“And we believe he’s muffled Lenin’s correspondences.”

“But why kill me?”

“Because he knows you will not stop until you bring down the Soviets.”

“Is that all of it?”

“You said you were a man of your word?”

“And I will free you,” Chernetsov smiled, turning and drawing a small pistol out of his coat.

He shot him dead.

“You are free.”