Walden was dubious. “How would the revolutionists have found that out?”

“I’m just speculating,” Thomson replied. “Would this be an effective way to sabotage your talks?”

“Very effective indeed,” Walden said. The thought made him go cold. “If the Czar were to be told that his nephew had been assassinated in London by a revolutionist-especially if it were an expatriate Russian revolutionist-he would go through the roof. You know, Thomson, how the Russians feel about our having their subversives here-our open-door policy has caused friction at the diplomatic level for years. Something like this could destroy Anglo-Russian relations for twenty years. There would be no question of an alliance then.”

Thomson nodded. “I was afraid of that. Well, there’s no more we can do tonight. I’ll set my department to work at dawn. We’ll search the park for clues, and interview your servants, and I expect we’ll round up a few anarchists in the East End.”

Aleks said: “Do you think you will catch the man?”

Walden longed for Thomson to give a reassuring answer, but it was not forthcoming. “It won’t be easy,” Thomson said. “He’s obviously a planner, so he’ll have a bolt-hole somewhere. We’ve no proper description of him. Unless his wounds take him to hospital, our chances are slim.”

“He may try to kill me again,” Aleks said.

“So we must take evasive action. I propose you should move out of this house tomorrow. We’ll take the top floor of one of the hotels for you, in a false name, and give you a bodyguard. Lord Walden will have to meet with you secretly, and you’ll have to cut out social engagements, of course.”

“Of course.”

Thomson stood up. “It’s very late. I’ll set all this in motion.”

Walden rang for Pritchard. “You’ve got a carriage waiting, Thomson?”

“Yes. Let us speak on the telephone tomorrow morning.”

Pritchard saw Thomson out, and Aleks went off to bed. Walden told Pritchard to lock up, then went upstairs.

He was not sleepy. As he undressed he let himself relax and feel all the conflicting emotions that he had so far held at bay. He felt proud of himself, at first-after all, he thought, I drew a sword and fought off an assailant: not bad for a man of fifty with a gouty leg! Then he became depressed when he recalled how coolly they had all discussed the diplomatic consequences of the death of Aleks-bright, cheerful, shy, handsome, clever Aleks, whom Walden had seen grow into a man.

He got into bed and lay awake, reliving the moment when the carriage door flew open and the man stood there with the gun; and now he was frightened, not for himself or Aleks, but for Lydia and Charlotte. The thought that they might have been killed made him tremble in his bed. He remembered holding Charlotte in his arms, eighteen years ago, when she had blond hair and no teeth; he remembered her learning to walk and forever falling on her bottom; he remembered giving her a pony of her own, and thinking that her joy when she saw it gave him the biggest thrill of his life; he remembered her just a few hours ago, walking into the royal presence with her head held high, a grown woman and a beautiful one. If she died, he thought, I don’t know that I could bear it.

And Lydia: if Lydia were dead I would be alone. The thought made him get up and go through to her room. There was a night-light beside her bed. She was in a deep sleep, lying on her back, her mouth a little open, her hair a blond skein across the pillow. She looked soft and vulnerable. I have never been able to make you understand how much I love you, he thought. Suddenly he needed to touch her, to feel that she was warm and alive. He got into bed with her and kissed her. Her lips responded but she did not wake up. Lydia, he thought, I could not live without you.

Lydia had lain awake for a long time, thinking about the man with the gun. It had been a brutal shock, and she had screamed in sheer terror-but there was more to it than that. There had been something about the man, something about his stance, or his shape, or his clothes, that had seemed dreadfully sinister in an almost supernatural way, as if he were a ghost. She wished she could have seen his eyes.

After a while she had taken another dose of laudanum, and then she slept. She dreamed that the man with the gun came to her room and got into bed with her. It was her own bed, but in the dream she was eighteen years old again. The man put his gun down on the white pillow beside her head. He still had the scarf around his face. She realized that she loved him. She kissed his lips through the scarf.

He made love to her beautifully. She began to think that she might be dreaming. She wanted to see his face. She said Who are you? and a voice said Stephen. She knew this was not so, but the gun on the pillow had somehow turned into Stephen’s sword, with blood on its point; and she began to have doubts. She clung to the man on top of her, afraid that the dream would end before she was satisfied. Then, dimly, she began to suspect that she was doing in reality what she was doing in the dream; yet the dream persisted. Strong physical pleasure possessed her. She began to lose control. Just as her climax began the man in the dream took the scarf from his face, and in that moment Lydia opened her eyes, and saw Stephen’s face above her; and then she was overcome by ecstasy, and for the first time in nineteen years she cried for joy.

Charlotte looked forward with mixed feelings to Belinda’s coming-out ball. She had never been to a town ball, although she had been to lots of country balls, many of them at Walden Hall. She liked to dance and she knew she did it well, but she hated the cattle-market business of sitting out with the wallflowers and waiting for a boy to pick you out and ask you to dance. She wondered whether this might be handled in a more civilized way among the “Smart Set.”

They got to Uncle George and Aunt Clarissa’s Mayfair house half an hour before midnight, which Mama said was the earliest time one could decently arrive at a London ball. A striped canopy and a red carpet led from the curb to the garden gate, which had somehow been transformed into a Roman triumphal arch.

But even that did not prepare Charlotte for what she saw when she passed through the arch. The whole side garden had been turned into a Roman atrium. She gazed about her in wonderment. The lawns and the flower beds had been covered over with a hardwood dance floor stained in black and white squares to look like marble tiles. A colonnade of white pillars, linked with chains of laurel, bordered the floor. Beyond the pillars, in a kind of cloister, there were raised benches for the sitters-out. In the middle of the floor, a fountain in the form of a boy with a dolphin splashed in a marble basin, the streams of water lit by colored spotlights. On the balcony of an upstairs bedroom a band played ragtime. Garlands of smilax and roses decorated the walls, and baskets of begonias hung from the balcony. A huge canvas roof, painted sky blue, covered the whole area from the eaves of the house to the garden wall.

“It’s a miracle!” Charlotte said.

Papa said to his brother: “Quite a crowd, George.”

“We invited eight hundred. What the devil happened to you in the park?”

“Oh, it wasn’t as bad as it sounded,” Papa said with a forced smile. He took George by the arm, and they moved to one side to talk.

Charlotte studied the guests. All the men wore full evening dress-white tie, white waistcoat and tails. It particularly suited the young men, or at least the slim men, Charlotte thought: it made them look quite dashing as they danced. Observing the dresses, she decided that hers and her mother’s, though rather tasteful, were a trifle old-fashioned, with their wasp waists and ruffles and sweepers: Aunt Clarissa wore a long, straight, slender gown with a skirt almost too tight to dance in, and Belinda had harem pants.