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extraordinary, with dimples and heavily-lashed eyes and cheeks which glowed without benefit of
rouge. She was what the others wish to look like, Trevor thought. She is the prototype they aspire to,
the way jewelers cut glass in a doomed attempt to emulate diamonds.
“You like her?” his companion asked sharply.
He had evidently given himself away, so there was no need to lie.
“She is beautiful.”
The woman shrugged, and her ruby rose and fell. “Her birth was common.”
As was mine, Trevor thought, raising a glass of champagne to his lips and smiling
apologetically at his companion. At times like this he often pondered what throws of chance had
brought him to these grand and foreign places, so far from the simple village of his youth. Back then
he had often announced to his schoolfellows that when he was a man he would go to the city, and they
had all jeered at his boast. By “the city,” he had of course meant London. A portrait of the muchyounger
Victoria had hung on the wall of his schoolhouse, a map of England beside her, and this was
as far as Trevor’s mind could expand. If anyone had suggested he would someday find himself in
France or Russia, serving Her Majesty on missions of intrigue, he would not have deemed such a
thing possible. The life of the man had exceeded the dreams of the boy, a state of being which may
sound marvelous, but which actually had left him adrift, unsure of what to hope for next. He
wondered if Tatiana Orlov, raised from her own humble past to become one of the acknowledged
beauties of the Romanov court, ever felt the same way.
The first course, thank heaven, was finally being served. Not by the Cossacks, whom Trevor
thought might double as footmen, but instead by a host of servants in full livery. They swarmed the
tables with serving dishes while the Cossacks remained farther back, lining the walls, where
evidently they would remain for untold hours at military attention. As the tureens of soup were
circulated around the table, Trevor’s dining companion drained her champagne glass and then – or
could he have imagined this? – winked at him.
From there, the procession of dishes was rapid enough to confuse a scholar and the wines were
potent and plentiful enough to knock a gourmand to the floor. At one point, an entire fawn, his legs
curled beneath him, his eyes bright and trusting, was carried in on a great silver platter and deposited
on the head table between the Tsar and the Queen. This grand entrance was meant to signal the
arrival of the venison course - the seventh or perhaps the eighth, for it was impossible to keep count
in the face of such an onslaught. The one thing that Trevor did note was that the manners of the