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“Oh, I haven’t any doubt.”
They drifted a few more minutes in silence and then Trevor ventured, “Is there any chance you
hallucinated the whole affair? The bit with the women in the boat, I mean.”
“Perhaps. It was a very long afternoon. I have the impression that I slept at one point and
awakened and then perhaps slept again. The light, you know, it’s so disorienting. But I don’t believe
I dreamed that part.”
“You say they call them lilies?”
“Yes.”
“Sheer barbarism.”
“I agree. But Filip Orlov told me that all pleasure is bought at the cost of another being’s pain.”
“And you believed him?”
Rayley shrugged. “It wasn’t my job to believe or disbelieve, it was simply my job to listen to
whatever he had to say.”
“The Queen is quite right. This whole nation is corrupt.”
“Perhaps. But the irony is that my time in that dark little smoking room gave me a better sense
of the scope of Russian empire than the grandest halls of the Palace had yet managed to do,” Rayley
said. “It showed me the variety one can find in a nation that reaches from Europe to the Pacific
Ocean, a mix of the familiar and the exotic. Their sense of what is possible stretches, I believe, with
the vastness of their land.”
His cigar had been out for several minutes, but Trevor still chewed on it. “And who told you
this, that great philosopher and whoremonger Filip Orlov?”
“I’ve never seen you so agitated about a matter completely not related to the case,” Rayley
observed wryly. “Besides, we’re scarcely in a position to judge the Romanovs and their attendants.
Most men in London, and I daresay all over the world, have had their share of similar encounters.
You have, I have. It may not have been our most shining moment, but it hardly makes us monsters.”
“We were with British whores, Abrams. British whores with flat feet and we went to them
alone, ashamed, and cloaked in the darkness of night. It’s an entirely different matter altogether.”
“From a moral standpoint, I’m not sure I follow,” Rayley said.