HIS Excellency Prince Nikolai Derentsov, Order of Czar Peter, First Class, hereditary chamberlain to the czars of all the Russias, and Russian ambassador to the Sublime Porte, watched his knuckles whiten against the edge of his desk.
He was, as he would have been the first to admit, an extraordinarily handsome man. Now in his late fifties, well over six feet, his broad shoulders exaggerated by a high-collared, cutaway coat, his neck in a starched cravat, lace at his sleeves, he looked both elegant and formidable. He wore his steel-gray hair short and his side-whiskers long. He had a fine head, cold blue eyes, and a rather small mouth.
The Derentsov family had found that life was expensive. Despite vast estates, despite access to the highest positions in the land, a century of balls, gowns, gambling, and politics in St. Petersburg had led Prince Nikolai Derentsov to the uncomfortable discovery that his debts and expenses greatly exceeded his income. His success in attracting a very beautiful young wife had been the talk of the late season—although beautiful young women are as common in Russia as anywhere else.
What animated the talk—what spurred the envy and congratulation—was that through his marriage the prince had also secured the benefit of her considerable fortune. Not that the people Derentsov moved among always put it that way. Behind his back they sniffed that the girl—for all her beauty—was trade. Her father had made millions in fur.
“It appears that you have been careless,” Derentsov was saying. “At my embassy I cannot afford to maintain people who make mistakes. Do you understand me?”
“I am so sorry, Your Excellency.”
The young man bent his head. Nikolai Potemkin certainly looked sorry. He was sorry, too: not for what he had done, which was not his fault, but because the chief was angry and unfair and sounded as if he was going to sack him on the spot. He had been here only two months, slipping from a dead-end desk job in the Russian army to the diplomatic service on the back of an elderly relative’s interest at court—a distant relative, the slenderest interest. The chance would not come again.
He was, like his chief, over six feet tall, but he was not handsome. His face, scarred from a saber cut received in the Turkish war, had never healed well: a livid weal ran from the corner of his left eye to his upper lip. He was very fair, and his almost lashless eyes were watery and pale. In that struggle with a Turkish cavalier, he had grappled the saber with his bare left hand, and three of his fingers were now curled into a useless hook. Young Potemkin had come to understand that it was the diplomatic service or—nothing. Five thousand acres on the borders of Siberia. A third-rate estate, shackled with debt, a thousand miles from anywhere at all.
Prince Derentsov drummed on the desk with his fingertips.
“The damage is done. In a few minutes we will talk to an emissary of the Sublime Porte. Let’s get it clear. You met the men once. You spoke in French. You gave them a lift and dropped them—where?”
“Somewhere near their barracks, I’m not sure. I’ve only been out in the city a few times.”
“Hmph,” the prince grunted. “Nothing else, understand?” Potemkin nodded. “Very well.”
He rang a bell and asked the orderly to bring in the Ottoman gentleman.