The Great War of the Quartet (The Imperial Timeline Book 1) (5 page)

Just as he was taking a drag on the cigarette, his mousey wife decided to drop a bombshell on him.

“Emily has asked if she wants me to have her come and stay with us for a couple of months.”

Helen looked down at the floor, looking quite different from the rather confident young
woman he had married half a dozen years ago. Indeed, in some ways he liked the new Helen who did not do too much to annoy him but instead kept mostly to her chores and looking after their young son. She was much more disciplined and quiet now, not like she had been when she had been fighting and shouting, or just doing as she pleased even if he told her no. His interest then had been partly her charming appearance, and of course her parentage, but the less annoying she was, the better. Even if she looked less attractive these days. But then, weren’t all women unattractive when one really examined them?

“Doesn’t she have other things to do?” Frederic muttered as he comfortably puffed on his cigarette.

Helen looked up at Frederic, flashing a momentarily indignant face before she lowered her eyes to face the floor again.

“I like her company,
” she quietly mumbled. “And it’s to help me,” she said, putting her hand carefully on the bulge in her dress.

“I don’t like her,” he sighed
, thinking that there was no need to mince words since she knew most of what he thought about her cousin.

Emily Winston had been widowed at a young age, and that had left her with plenty of money and far too much time
on her hands. Some of that time tended to be spent preaching to everyone who couldn’t bother telling what was technically a lady to shut the hell up. He did not appreciate the thought of his wife’s cousin going off as if she was aspiring to run for Congress in his house. It was bad enough to just have her over for an evening, let alone for weeks or months!

“It will do her good. And I would like her company,” Helen said in that weak but all too assertive fashion. “You won’t even notice her.”

Admittedly, Emily Winston was not a bad woman to look at. When she was quiet she could pass as a quite decent woman, especially since she was actually older than Frederic, but he would still find a woman like her attractive enough.

“Fine, do as you please,” he sighed, returning to reading the newspaper with its constant scoreboard of sorts over the ongoing conflagration.

“Thank you,” Helen said, relieved that he wouldn’t fight.

After all, she had already told Emily that she really wanted her to come, so it would be rather awkward if Emily would show up after he told her no. She had decided that if he would say no she would have to hide behind Emily. He wouldn’t ever yell at her or touch her if Emily was in the way, surely.

The apartment was actually rather small as apartments went. There was a nursery, a couple of bedrooms, and a lounge, but it was a rather humble home by any standard. From the outside, Whitehall was a lavish place with tall white walls, and it had been at the heart of the government of England since the days of Henry VIII in Tudor times and had been expanded by the Stuart kings whose vision of kingship had been as grandiose as the 17th century around them—and so much of modern Whitehall had been shaped by the Stuarts. Since the reign of Mary II after William III Philip had died, the Palace of Whitehall had begun to take its present shape as the headquarters of a parliamentary rather than a royal government when Parliament and the First Lord High Commissioner had stripped the unresisting last Stuart queen of any vestige of absolutism and had in the process created the Westminster System of a parliamentary executive. The office of the First Lord High Commissioner had since become known as the prime minister and was formally appointed by the sovereign, but as much as Charles III had tried to follow in the footsteps of his namesakes in defending royal power against parliamentary upstarts, his mother had irrevocably weakened the monarchy and made it completely intolerable to rule without Parliament’s endorsement, and the government departments that dominated the Palace of Whitehall was proof of that victory of Parliament over the monarchy. Charles III had tried to appoint loyal prime ministers, but without a man who could rein in Parliament, it was no good, and the monarchy had slowly been further weakened by Parliament to its present position in which the House of Commons in practice appointed its prime minister whose appointment was then rubberstamped by the monarch.

Tony at least didn’t have to pay rent for the apartment, so it didn’t matter if it was a bit small, and Olga and the children usually hid away in the nursery anyway. As a part of the Crown Estate, all of Whitehall was administered by bureaucrats who served the Prince of Wales as the de facto regent and ruler of the Crown Estate, and the rent from Whitehall was part of the income going to the Royal Household which in turn could be doled out as allowances to members of the family. Whitehall had to be worth millions of pounds with its glorious location and size, but Tony had little knowledge about how much money the Crown Estate’s vast holdings were worth—most of the enormous land holdings in Canada and Australia had been sold so the Crown Estate was no longer claimed to be the world’s largest landowner. Most of the Crown Estate’s land these days were agricultural estates in the Kingdom and across the Empire that were making what Tony could only assume had to be fortunes in revenue from tenants.

He sighed as he tried to read the newspaper. Over in the long sofa along the wall by the radio, Olga was using that grating voice she liked to use whenever she was addressing the children. Although he found Russian to be rather harmonious to listen to at times, the way she sounded when she was talking to the children annoyed him to no end. That high-pitched child voice was just horrible on the ears, and had he been a lesser man he would have snapped at her to shut up. However, he tried not to be angry with him with other people around, and the more time she spent in the nursery, the less he bothered with her.

He had been reluctant to agree to her idea of hiring a Russian governess, but when he had refused she had decided to try to teach them herself by spending at least an hour a day reading or just doing monologues. Apparently, she had gotten the bright idea that they would just start to speak if she kept talking to them, and that resulted in his hearing her silly baby voice a great deal. At least she had enough sense of shame to not let anyone but the servants and Tony hear her use it, and whenever Natalya came over she only spoke in her ordinary voice even when she was talking to the children. Usually she would be in the nursery with the children, but she had wanted to listen to the radio to hear the news before she began her daily Russian exercises with them today.

Today’s
Daily Mail
had a rather long piece in which a journalist summarized the state of the war and the changes over the past few weeks and what might be in store for the rest of 1936. Although the
Daily Mail
had been blatantly anti-German to such a degree that it had early on in the war been part of the pro-war party of newspapers, its analysis was quite open-minded, and the correspondent in Japan reported that the country had been ablaze with a spirit of an impending crusade against the “foreign devils” as the little squats liked to call their enemies. So far, the Chinese had not had the kind of impact writers had warned about for at least the past three decades when novels and non-fiction volumes had been written ad nauseam to proclaim the inevitable war between Christendom and the barbarism of the Orient—one influential book had even argued for the necessity of a united Christian Europe to fight a war for the survival of Christianity against the savage, godless orientals. It had been fashionable to suggest that the yellow race would overwhelm the world, and many novelists had presented bleak, terrifying scenarios of a world governed by them in which white men would be murdered and white women put in chains for the rat-faced men’s pleasure—some people obviously had quite pornographic doomsday fantasies. Throughout 1934 and 1935, the frontlines had indeed been pushed deeply inside Russia, particularly to the east of Lake Baikal in the distant Far East. However, the Chinese had not come close to reaching the Caspian Sea, and their initial offensive back in 1934 into the heartland of Russian Central Asia and the following Russian counteroffensive had still not resulted in the kind of crushing tide of little yellow men sweeping away the Russian armies like the mongers of the Yellow Menace narrative had predicted.

The primary concern of the
Mail
, however, was Europe, and Asia remained a small sideshow in what was essentially a great battle between Russia and Germany. The fronts in Italy and Germany/Russia had moved back and forth with offensives and counteroffensives during the past autumn and the winter so far, although the French had still not even really tried to force themselves through the supposedly impregnable Gneisenau Line in western Germany like the men behind the
Mail
had probably hoped they would. In the French spring offensive last year, they had actually penetrated the fortifications at the northern end up just south of the Dutch province of Wallonia, but German counteroffensives had recreated the stalemate which had then been broken only for a few weeks back this past fall. Although the maps of the present frontlines did not move greatly along the Franco-German border, there had been news of battles and offensives for much of the past year and a half up by the Dutch border, particularly by the French who kept the initiative in the West, although the Germans had launched their own small attacks in the West as well. For much of 1935, the Germans and the Russians had fought a very mobile war until the Russians had been forced to abandon their occupation of large chunks of South Prussia in the easternmost part of Germany and flee, and now the frontline in Eastern Europe had moved almost entirely out of Germany and into Russia, although big parts of the long frontier between Austria and Russia was on the Austrian side of the prewar border.

In only a couple of weeks, the war would have its second birthday, and there was no immediate end in sight. The cabinet right here in Whitehall had made it its policy to pursue an “immediate and just” settlement through mediation, although it was clear even to someone as politically and diplomatically ignorant as Tony that both sides agreed with that formula but had diametrically opposite definitions of what a
just
end to the war would mean. The original quarrel between the little Balkan countries had been superseded by a conflict between great powers, and by the logic of great power politics France in particular needed the war to achieve a great victory since that country had been sliding from being Europe’s preeminent power into being its most irrelevant one. Tony’s family mostly was naturally aligned with Germany, and surely Britain would not gain anything from Russian continental domination, although many Britons were still afraid of unchecked Teutonic power on the continent, and some cabinet members were apparently interested in undermining the possible future German domination of the continent, although for the past twenty or thirty years the only viable alternative was Russian domination, and Russia was no prize when it came to Britain’s global interests.

“
The weapons we fight with aren’t normal weapons
,” Olga read from the book where she had scribbled and underlined parts, substituting words here and there as she pleased to suit her. “
They have the power to destroy fortresses
,” she explained, looking over at Fedosya who seemed much too bored, “
because they’re the weapons of God
.”

Patricia was holding Fedosya while Alice was holding her little Vasiliy. Sasha and Constance were sitting on either side of her while she read from the bible Prince Yazov had acquired for her. It wasn’t written in church language, but she had wanted something that would help Sasha, Constance, Fedosya, and Vasiliy get a good understanding of their
mother
tongue—that pun never failed to make her smile—and she thought that nothing could be better than to use a bible translated into ordinary Russian so she could kill two birds with one stone; teach them religion and Russian at the same time.

She used her own memory as well as the help of Prince Yazov who had consulted a priest to get her a list of especially good portions of the Bible to read in addition to Emperor Paul II’s authorized
Holy Lives of the Saints
, a giant tome filled with hagiographies. She liked to read funny things too, and she had been given a good deal of children’s books by her brother Roman and her nice uncle Alexander Konstantinovich before the war when she had had the opportunity to ask them to buy as many funny picture books as they could and bring with them to England.

From his seat at the table by the window, Tony glanced over at his energetic young wife reading with that squeaky baby voice. He pitied the poor Michael who might be old enough to feel condescended by her demeanor, and he hoped that she would not leave the children with a boorish attitude towards learning from her immature style of tutoring. He didn’t really understand Russian at all, but he had some actual sympathy for her general aim which seemed perfectly reasonable if only a bit crudely articulated. Her sense of nationalism was as immature and naïve as that of the basest men in the street, and he had begun to increasingly suspect that she had never really been educated as a child and was a bit stupid. He had noticed her because of her appearance and her apparent interest in him and his brother when they were in Russia, and he had been drawn to her far more on account of, say, her chest than her brain which still remained a bit of a peripheral factor as far as he was concerned.

Her father was still a senior officer within the Russian air arm, and it had been that shared interest that had introduced him first to Colonel P. K. Romanov and then to his daughter, the fair, then-teenaged Princess Olga Pavlovna. She had been seventeen at the time to his thirty-five, and he had begun to suspect that she should perhaps have been left to mature a bit more before marrying him less than a year after first seeing him. Nevertheless, before the war she had been a model wife, if only a bit quiet when there was a lot of people around. She had grown up in a sort of idyllic rural gentry setting with a martial father and austere mother that seemed at odds with her sunny demeanor that had only begun to change the more things she heard that she couldn’t understand.

It was so exhausting to read, but Olga was confident that all humans had an understanding of the language of God which the Bible spoke regardless of the written language used to convey the message. That was why her mother was a genius for suggesting the idea in the first place when Olga had written to her about her worries that she wouldn’t be able to speak with her own little children if they would be little Englishmen. Although she was tempted to leave her children in the care of the servants who were supposed to be experts, she was not going to surrender and watch them grow up as foreigners. Only if Anthony told the Prince of Wales that he really wanted to take up the offer from Prince Yazov would she dare stop her personal tutoring, but Anthony didn’t see through the unfairness of denying the help Prince Yazov was offering without asking for anything in return, and she was starting to enjoy making her little study plans together with Yevdokiya.

She had told Prince Yazov how her English in-laws did not trust him, and she was sure that it had to be a lie to say that it was because he was a representative of the Russian government that they could not let him help with teaching her children. Surely it would hurt no one if someone from Prince Yazov’s household could come and stay with them and help tutor the little children at his expense. He just wanted to help, and it didn’t matter if he was a Russian.

“She’s very tired, ma’am,” Patricia said as soon as Olga took a short break to have a glass of sparkling water.

Olga looked first at the woman and then down at her precious little Fedosya who was pulling at the ear of her little stuffed cat. She didn’t look very tired, did she? She always felt uneasy when someone said something she couldn’t quite see, especially when it seemed like she should have the natural ability to tell it with her own eyes. It was part of being a mother; to know what your babies needed. Nobody else could know them like she did. Besides, what was more fun and important than the word of God?