Blotto Twinks and the Heir to the Tsar Read online

  (Twinks had suggested helping the Count out with garments from her late father’s wardrobe and offering Sergei some clothes which Blotto had grown out of, but again the Dowager Duchess had put the kibosh on the suggestion. ‘If we let them start to feel comfortable here, Honoria, we’ll never see the back of them.’ And Twinks had to concede that her mother had a point.)

  Masha let out another lengthy sigh before repeating, ‘I want to go back to Moscow.’

  Blotto was getting very sick of his distant cousin’s moaning. From what he’d heard of Moscow, it sounded pretty much of a swamp-hole and how anyone could want to spend time there rather than at Tawcester Towers baffled his intellect (which, it has to be said, did not require a great deal to baffle it). Apart from any other considerations, everywhere else was ‘abroad’.

  He was also getting very sick of the Bashuskys hogging the fireplace in the Pink Drawing Room, where traditionally pre-prandial drinks were served by Grimshaw the butler. Tawcester Towers, in common with most aristocratic homes, had very little heating. In some of the favoured bedrooms fires were lit in the evening, but they had always died out by morning and residents and guests were used to waking up to frost on the inside of their windows and the water in their ewers frozen solid.

  They were also used to plumbing that clanked through the night like some ghost army stirring after a century of sleep, to inefficient rose-adorned toilet bowls encased in mahogany boxes, and taps which rarely coughed up more than a few spits of unnervingly brown water. These were amongst the charms of the traditional English country house.

  Yet another sigh burst from the tortured breast of Masha. ‘I want to go back to Moscow,’ she said (unsurprisingly).

  Her mother picked up the mood. With a sigh even more elaborate than her daughter’s, Countess Bashuskaya announced, ‘I want to go back to Zoraya-Bolensk.’

  This was at least a change of wished-for destination and Blotto might have welcomed the variety, were it not for the fact that Lyudmilla Bashuskaya had expressed the desire to return to the family estate of Zoraya-Bolensk almost as frequently as Masha said she wanted to go back to Moscow.

  ‘At Zoraya-Bolensk,’ she went on, ‘we had everything we needed. Oh, how we enjoyed the unending summer days. How long we would spend sitting in the garden, with iced lemonade . . . and of course samovar . . .’ She lapsed into mournful silence.

  After a polite pause, Blotto asked, ‘So what did they do?’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘What did the people do?’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘You said, “And of course some of our . . . ” And then you stopped. I wanted to know what some of your people did.’

  A puzzled furrow dug itself into the Countess’s brow, and Twinks quickly interceded – as she had done so many times in the past – to explain things to her brother. ‘The expression she used, Blotto me old back-scratcher, was “samovar”, not “some of our”. She was referring to a Russian tea-making machine.’

  ‘Machine, eh? I thought they had serfs to do everything for them in Russia.’

  ‘The serfs were all emancipated in 1861,’ said Twinks, who always knew that kind of stuff.

  ‘Ah. Were they?’ Blotto nodded sagely. Then he said, ‘Emanci-whatted?’

  ‘Freed.’

  ‘Ah.’ He nodded again. ‘Good ticket,’ he said approvingly.

  ‘But some of the serfs,’ Count Bashusky contributed, ‘did not feel the need to be free.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Some were happy under the gentle yoke of their kind benefactors.’

  ‘When you used the word “benefactors”,’ asked Twinks, ‘do you mean “owners”?’

  ‘Yes. At Zoraya-Bolensk the serfs were happy to serve us. There was a family who had been at Zoraya-Bolensk for generations, the Oblonskys. The head of the household was called Vadim Oblonsky, and his wife was called Galina. They and their many children worked for us, did everything for us. And no, of course they did not get paid. They did it for love.

  ‘It was part of their tradition, an instinctive thing for them. They recognised that we were superior to them in every way and that it was an honour for them to work for us. That is the natural order of things.’

  ‘What you say, Igor, is so true.’ The Countess dabbed a patched handkerchief to her eye. ‘I wonder how things are now at Zoraya-Bolensk . . .’

  ‘We must not think of it,’ said her husband. ‘That way lies only more unhappiness.’

  ‘You say I must not think about it, but there is nothing else I can think about, from the misery of our exile in this God-forsaken country.’

  Blotto was instantly incensed. He always got a bit vinegared off when people started criticising either his King or his Country. ‘Now hold back the hounds a moment,’ he said. ‘You are talking about Great Britain, you know, which is not so much a “God-forsaken country” as “God’s own country”.’ He looked curiously at the four Russians for a moment. ‘I say, you don’t by any chance play cricket, do you?’

  ‘No,’ they all agreed.

  ‘I thought not,’ said Blotto, his point made.

  ‘But,’ the Countess mourned on, ‘it is impossible for my mind not to go back to Zoraya-Bolensk. This time of year it looks so beautiful under the snow, when frost outlines the branches of the cherry trees.’

  ‘They will probably have cut down the cherry orchard,’ said her husband lugubriously.

  ‘No, I cannot bear it!’ Countess Bashuskaya brought her free hand (the one that wasn’t on the mantelpiece supporting her cheek) up to her brow. ‘If I find out that they have cut down the cherry orchard, I will take my own life!’

  ‘If you do that,’ said the Count, ‘I will not be able to survive without you. I will take my own life!’

  Masha, who didn’t want to be left out of the family aspirations, said, ‘If I cannot go back to Moscow, then I will take my own life!’

  Blotto looked across hopefully at his sister. Maybe a version of the solution he’d proposed to her in the stables might work after all . . .?

  But then Twinks was distracted by Sergei Bashusky saying, ‘And if I do not win the love of Honoria, then I will take my own life!’

  This was followed by a silence while Twinks looked up towards the ceiling in exasperation. Finally it was broken when Blotto, ever the genial host (even when he was entertaining guests who seemed unaware of what a great privilege it was for them to be at Tawcester Towers) said, ‘Well, that’s all tickey-tockey then.’

  Grimshaw the butler circulated more drinks. It was noticeable that, in spite of their suicidal intentions, all of the Bashuskys had very healthy thirsts and appetites. Their presence was virtually doubling the Tawcester Towers victualling bills. And money was always a problem for the Lyminsters. Though Blotto and Twinks were continually going off on exploits of derring-do from which they returned loaded with loot, it got spent with amazing speed. Owning an English stately home was an expense of the scale of running a string of racehorses. It only took a collapsed roof in the East Wing or the death of a boiler for the cash to whoosh away like water down a plughole.

  Nor did the local tradesmen show any awareness of the honour they were being granted by working for the aristocracy. Rather than the reduced bills and extended credit the Dowager Duchess and her ilk had grown up with, the modern-day artisans seemed actually to increase their prices for titled clients. And had a nasty habit of delivering final demands before they had sent out any other kind of demand.

  The old respect for the Great and the Good was long gone. One of the few sentiments on which the Dowager Duchess of Tawcester and her unwanted guests might have agreed was a nostalgia for the days of serfdom. It was much more difficult to maintain a country estate now that everyone expected to be remunerated for their services.

  And indeed, looking back in history, few of the world’s famous monuments – the Pyramids, the Acropolis, the Colosseum – would survive if the people building them had expected to be paid. It w
as not everything, the Dowager Duchess frequently reflected – and here also the Bashuskys would have agreed with her – that had changed for the better. And indeed, when she brought her mind to focus on the subject – she couldn’t actually think of anything that had changed for the better since her young days.

  One striking feature of the group assembled for pre-prandial drinks in the Pink Drawing Room was the absence of the Dowager Duchess. It was quite common for her – and indeed her right – to appear later than her guests, leaving Blotto and Twinks to fulfill any hostly duties that might be required, but that particular evening the normal hour for the dinner gong to be struck had been passed by a good ten minutes and still there was no sign of the Dowager Duchess.

  Twinks sidled across to Grimshaw to see if he had any explanation of her absence. He said he would dispatch Harvey, one of the older housemaids with whom he had a ‘special’ relationship, to make enquiries and left the room to find her.

  He returned only moments later to confide to the young mistress that the Dowager Duchess was indisposed and would be taking a light supper in her bedroom.

  Twinks was not fooled by this at all – nor indeed did it occur to her for a moment to worry about her aged parent’s health. She knew full well that her mother would be ensconced in her bedroom with a couple of bottles of gin, listening to military marches on the gramophone.

  It was a measure of how exasperated the Dowager Duchess was with the Bashuskys that she had taken this course. Normally the ingrained force of her breeding would make her sit through all kinds of grisly social events. Indeed people of her class never went to social events that were enjoyable. But that didn’t normally stop them from attending. The fact that she had deliberately ducked out of another evening with her Russian cousins was a measure of how sick to death she was of them.

  And when the Dowager Duchess was sick to death of a situation, she usually took speedy measures to bring it to an end. Twinks felt pretty sure that the next morning she and Blotto would receive a summons to attend their mother in the Blue Morning Room.

  In the meantime, she and her brother had the unenviable task of managing a whole dinner of the Bashuskys without the welcome interpolations of their mother’s patronising and belittling their guests.

  As Grimshaw finally struck the gong and announced that dinner was served, Masha was heard to observe, with the inevitable sigh, how much she wished to get back to Moscow.

  3

  The Dowager Duchess Makes a Stand

  There are windswept crags at the extremities of various landmasses to which the adjective ‘forbidding’ has frequently been applied, but none of them compare for sheer cragginess to the face of the Dowager Duchess of Tawcester when she’s in a snit. And she was in quite a snit the following morning when she summoned her younger son and daughter to attend her in the Blue Morning Room.

  ‘Devereux,’ she said, ‘Honoria, something must be done!’

  Blotto knew exactly what she meant, but still tried the diversionary tactic of asking, ‘About what?’

  That ploy, however, was immediately blown out of the water by his mother’s roar of: ‘About those four-faced filchers the Bashuskys.’

  ‘Ah yes,’ said Blotto.

  ‘Have either of you got a mouse squeak of an idea how we can get rid of them?’

  ‘Well . . .’ Blotto began.

  ‘I wasn’t asking you, Devereux.’

  ‘But you did say “either of you”.’

  ‘When I am looking for an idea and I say “either of you” of course I am only referring to Honoria. You ought to know that by now.’

  ‘Good ticket,’ murmured Blotto.

  ‘So, Honoria . . . do you have any ideas?’

  A furrow spoiled the perfect surface of Twinks’s brow. Then, very tentatively, she suggested, ‘Couldn’t we just ask them to leave?’

  Metaphorical thunder and lightning now played around the craggy surface of the Dowager Duchess’s face. ‘Honoria, how dare you suggest such a thing? After all that money and effort that was spent on your breeding. There are certain contractual duties that you have to take on automatically if you are born into our class, and one of them is the obligation to provide hospitality to one’s relations.’

  ‘Even one’s poor relations?’ asked Blotto.

  ‘Particularly one’s poor relations!’ boomed the Dowager Duchess. When she was in this mood, to call her ‘a tough old bird’ would have been an insult to boiling fowl. ‘However loathsome they are, however appalling their table manners and general deportment, noblesse oblige insists that they should be looked after in the ancestral home.’

  ‘Is that true however badly the stenchers behave?’ asked Twinks. ‘Aren’t there some kinds of actions that would have them hounded out like rats from the family vault?’

  ‘What kind of actions?’ asked her mother.

  ‘Well, say a male guest has an unsuitably close physical encounter with his hostess – would that get them turned out?’

  ‘Of course not, Honoria, don’t be such a silly chit. That is how most aristocratic families have ensured the continuity of their line.’

  ‘What,’ suggested Blotto, ‘if the guests stole something from their hosts?’

  ‘That again,’ said his mother, ‘is a practice which has a long tradition in circles like ours. The theft of wives, daughters, armies and titles has been commonplace through the generations.’

  ‘But what if . . .’ Twinks proposed ‘. . . one of the guests actually killed his host or hostess? Wouldn’t that be stepping over the line?’

  ‘Great Wilberforce, no! That is part of the normal social interaction between people of breeding. A lot of it went on during the Wars of the Roses. I’m surprised, Honoria, that – given your supposed intelligence – you know so little of the history of families like ours.’

  ‘Well,’ asked Blotto, ‘what kind of behaviour on the part of lumps of toad-spawn like the Bashuskys would justify seeing them off the premises with red ears?’

  ‘Well, obviously, some lapse of protocol which might suggest that their aristocratic credentials are not up to snuff.’

  ‘Like?’ asked Twinks.

  ‘Like using the wrong cutlery at the dinner table.’ Oh, broken biscuits, thought Blotto, they’re actually rather good at all that stuff. ‘Like,’ his mother went on, ‘making their own beds or pouring drinks for themselves.’ No, the Bashuskys didn’t do that either. ‘Like,’ the Dowager Duchess concluded, ‘treating the servants as their equals.’

  Again no dice, thought Blotto. Though the Bashuskys were much more shabbily dressed than the meanest stable boy at Tawcester Towers, they still treated everyone below stairs with the proper contempt. There was no danger of anything nice being said about them in the kitchens. No, getting the Bashuskys out of his home, Blotto realised even more forcibly than before, was going to be a tough rusk to chew.

  But there was still one glimmer of a possibility. ‘Actually, Mater,’ he said, ‘Twinks and I were discussing one idea yesterday.’

  ‘Oh yes? And what was that?’ asked their mother in a manner that showed she had few expectations of the answer.

  ‘Well, we thought it’d be rosettes for everyone if the Bashuskys all topped themselves.’

  ‘And why might they take such an extreme course of action?’

  ‘Ah, now this is where it gets clever,’ said Blotto. His mother and sister exchanged looks. They knew that the word ‘clever’ used in any context related to Blotto inevitably involved an oxymoron. ‘You see, that poor young droplet Sergei Bashusky has fallen for Twinks like a partridge stuffed to the gills with lead. She’s told him his chances are rather less than those of a one-legged prizefighter. Result is, the pot-brained pineapple has announced he’s going to top himself. And I was just thinking that we only have to get all the other Bashuskys to fall for Twinks and we’ll . . . have . . . a . . . great . . .’ His mother’s look seemed to draw out his breath like a vacuum pump and he had none left to articulate any more wor
ds.

  The reptilian eyes of the Dowager Duchess flicked across to her daughter. ‘Have you got any sensible ideas, Honoria?’

  ‘Well, short of going to Limehouse to contract a gang of thugs to come here and strangle the lot of them, I don’t have too many, no.’

  The Dowager Duchess gave a peremptory shake of the head. ‘We couldn’t do that. It’d be against our code. We have a duty not only to welcome family members to Tawcester Towers but also to ensure their safety whilst they are within the estate boundaries.’

  ‘Oh, tough Gorgonzola,’ said Twinks.

  A calculating look came into her mother’s eye. ‘On the other hand . . . if we were to get someone to take the Bashuskys up to Limehouse and introduce them to the thugs . . . well, the Lyminsters would have no responsibility for what happened to them there.’

  Twinks pursed her lips. ‘The only chock in the cogwheel there, Mater, is that – as you may have noticed – the Bashuskys never seem to want to go anywhere. We’ve suggested many expeditions which might get them off the premises, but they’ve turned down all such suggestions. All they seem to want to do is stay inside Tawcester Towers.’

  ‘Eating our food and drinking our liquor,’ said the Dowager Duchess peevishly. ‘You’re right, Honoria. And if we had someone kidnap them and take them off to Limehouse . . . well, once again we’d be offending against the Lyminster code of hospitality.’

  ‘Yes, isn’t that just the flea’s armpit?’ Twinks observed ruefully.

  There was a silence. Then her brother said suddenly, ‘Toad-in-the-hole! I’ve had a real bingbopper of an idea!’

  His mother and sister once again looked towards him with low expectations. ‘What is it, Devereux?’ asked the Dowager Duchess.

  ‘Well, I was thinking – and when you hear it you’ll really have to admit that it’s a beezer idea – that whereas the Bashuskys being coffinated by hired thugs might look a tidge suspicious, accidents can happen to anyone.’