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Chapter Seven<br />
St. Petersburg, the Winter Palace<br />
June 18, 1889<br />
2:27 PM<br />
It is not a difficult thing to be an imperial spy. If one wishes to gain details of the intimate lives<br />
of powerful people, all one really must do is befriend their servants. Cynthia Kirby had not been in<br />
St. Petersburg for a week before she knew that the Grand Duchess Ella’s personal maid liked apricot<br />
jam, and was furthermore vulnerable to the charms of French cologne and American tobacco. In the<br />
afternoons, when Ella napped, her British lady in waiting and her Russian maid would sit in one of<br />
the courtyards located adjacent to her suite of rooms, sometimes sharing a cigarette, sometimes just<br />
talking. By the time April had gone to May and then to June, they had swapped all the stories of their<br />
girlhoods and of their long departed husbands, and moved on to the gossip of the present. Gossip<br />
which primarily circled around the lady they both served and, most specifically, the sad state of her<br />
marriage.<br />
The halls and rooms of the Winter Palace were so numerous and labyrinthine that when she had<br />
first arrived, Cynthia had despaired that she would ever learn her way around them. So it had been a<br />
shock to realize that there was an additional unseen structure within the visible one, an entire second<br />
layer of halls, tunnels, and staircases, vital passageways concealed like veins beneath the skin.<br />
Sometimes these passageways served a utilitarian function, such as allowing food to be transferred<br />
swiftly from the great kitchen to the private suites, or to permit soiled laundry and other refuse to be<br />
carted away without its foul presence assaulting the sensibilities of the people who had created it.<br />
Sometimes these halls served as conduits of intrigue, the means by which a man might visit his<br />
mistress or his wife slip her own lover from her apartments upon his return. They also provided an<br />
extra buffer of protection, being the primary means by which the imperial guard came and went,<br />
keeping them unobtrusive and yet close to the tsar and his family.<br />
In fact, one could argue that this network of tunnels, halls, and stairways – which the servants<br />
collectively called “the web” - was where the true drama of the palace was played out. It was the<br />
route by which Katya and Yulian had been carried away on the morning their bodies had been found,
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