AFTERWORD

This book is a work of fiction, though it was closely modeled on real events and people. Following, I list the various true personages in my story, and some of the facts I used to flesh out their character, as well as a few other odds and ends. I am a history geek, so I hope you find these details as interesting as I do.

PEOPLE

Archduke Franz Ferdinand

Fourteen years after Queen Victoria’s death, her grandson would wage war with England, one caused by the assassination of the queen’s tablemate the night prior to her royal procession. The portly Archduke Franz Ferdinand was felled by Gavrilo Princip, a member of the Black Hand, a secret Serbian military society dedicated to the unification of the Slavic people under one throne. He was not an anarchist, as several history books have erroneously reported.

As predicted by Herr Grüber, the war which followed brought the end of ruling aristocracies in Europe.

Queen Victoria

Queen Victoria insisted that no ruling heads of state be invited to her Diamond Jubilee celebration because she didn’t want to bother with protocol, nor with having to house them during their visit. (Lesser nobility were allowed.) From 1861 until her death in 1901, in mourning for Prince Albert, she wore only black and she refused to wear a crown or carry her scepter during the royal procession. Her one concession to her status was having gems sewn around the brim of her bonnet, and this became quite the fashion for a short time afterward.

In real life, she survived eight assassination attempts by seven would-be assassins. John Francis tried to kill her on two successive days (May 29 and 30, 1842) while she rode in her carriage through a park. The Queen refused to alter her route the second day despite the danger, though she forbade her ladies-in-waiting to accompany her. The assassin’s pistol misfired on the first attempt, but on day two it functioned flawlessly. Fortunately, Prince Albert pulled his wife down just as the bullet flew over her head. The Queen’s concern for the safety of others while disdaining the risk to herself inspired the scene when she has her ladies-in-waiting shift to their right, out of the assassin’s line of fire, leaving her fully exposed.

A video segment of the Diamond Jubilee’s procession can be found on YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jnip7RRc3Q4). Between the timestamps of 1:38 and 1:50, the Queen is shown briefly in the carriage drawn by six cream-colored horses: She is the small dark figure in the carriage that appears for perhaps three seconds. At approximately four feet ten inches, this diminutive woman was empress to the largest realm ever known.

Police Commissioner

Sir Edward Bradford

Sir Edward Bradford spent the majority of his military career in India, where he lost his left arm to a tigress, greatly impressing Indian royalty. He was appointed police commissioner after his tour of duty as Queen Victoria’s aide-de-camp and served in that capacity from 1890 to 1903. He was responsible for the preservation of law and order in a city with over six million inhabitants, utilizing a force of only fourteen thousand men. He was active and well-respected by the men of his force. He insisted all stations be linked by telegraph, greatly enhancing the communications within the force, though in later years he refused to install telephones, preferring the brevity that telegraphs required.

His record of accomplishment as police commissioner is remarkable. When he assumed command, the Metropolitan Police were held in poor regard for their beatings of protestors during a public demonstration in 1887, and the police were actively striking. He settled the strike, established more stations, bettered the conditions in the older ones, established a summer uniform and insisted shifts be varied to prevent boredom. Easygoing by nature, at one time or another he visited every station, talked with the officers, and listened. In 1899 London recorded its lowest crime rate in the city’s history, and the force was respected by all law-abiding citizens.

Luigi Parmeggiani

Signore Parmeggiani was a man of many talents, few of them legal. He was at one time an ardent anarchist and bomb-maker, but by the time we meet him in the story he had become the manager of two antiquity stores, one in Paris and the other in London. He often went by the name of Louis Macy. He founded the “Macy Collection,” a line of minor art objects which wound up in private collections and smaller museums. Most of them turned out to be fakes.

Peter Kropotkin

Descendent of royalty (the Rurik Dynasty), as a young man he led geographic expeditions into Siberia and the Arctic, but his political activities led to his imprisonment in Russia. He escaped to Western Europe and lived in England, Switzerland, and France before returning shortly after the Bolshevik Revolution to Russia, where he died four years later.

Herman Ott/Viktor Zhelyabov

Andrei Zhelyabov, the lover of Sofia, was a leader of the anarchist group which successfully assassinated Tsar Alexander II on their third attempt. Sofia Perovskaya was also a real person and served as lookout for the assassination. She was reunited with her lover Andrei in prison after the assassination and they were hanged together shortly afterward. His younger brother, Viktor/Herman, is a fictional character.

Professor Joseph Bell

Fourth generation of a line of surgeons in Edinburgh, Bell was renowned both for his clinical skills (he was the Surgeon in Attendance to Her Majesty when she was in Scotland), and his keen powers of observation. He assisted the police in various cases. The two best known are the Jack the Ripper murders, in which he analyzed the handwriting of the notes signed Jack the Ripper, and the Monson murder case in Argyle, Scotland, this being the case that Oberst Adler mentions when first meeting Bell in my story.

Bell was Arthur Conan Doyle’s professor of surgery while Doyle was a student in Edinburgh, and Doyle served briefly as his clerk of the surgery service. Years later Doyle would recall Bell’s keen powers of observation and create the most famous fictional detective of all time, Sherlock Holmes.

Margaret Harkness

The image to the right is the only portrait of Margaret I could find. Despite spending some time in the company of George Bernard Shaw, an avid cameraman, no photograph of her is known to exist, which I believe only adds to her mystique.

I do not know if she was in the habit of wearing men’s clothing or carrying a derringer, but everything else I have written in the book regarding her literary career and biography is accurate, except that in 1897 she was already residing in Australia.

Those interested in knowing more about Margaret can reference the excellent article about her on the Victorian Web (http://victorianweb.org/gender/harkness.html), a website for researchers into that era.

The Harkives is a fabulous website devoted entirely to Margaret’s life and works (https://theharkives.wordpress.com).

ODDS AND ENDS

The Girandoni Air Rifle

I am indebted to Dr. Beeman and his excellent website (http://www.beemans.net/Austrian%20airguns.htm).

The air rifle I use in the story is closely modeled on one used by the Austrian army in the late eighteenth century. Capable of firing large-caliber lead balls at the astounding rate of one shot per second from a magazine holding up to twenty balls, it was greatly feared, and any soldier captured with one in their possession was executed on the spot as a sniper.

In my story, I make the butt-stock/air reservoir more fragile than it was in real life, though it wasn’t as sturdy as a conventional firearm. Its principal weakness was the difficulty in pressurizing the flasks up to 800 psi, and the hand pump issued with it required over one thousand strokes. Typically, a sniper would be issued three flasks and they would be repressurized in the rear lines by a large rotating pump.

A Girandoni rifle, or one very similar to it, was carried by the Lewis and Clarke expedition but was used mainly for demonstrations to intimidate the tribes they encountered.

There’s an excellent YouTube video demonstrating the operation and the actual sound of one firing (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VPjJlJcznzw).

St. Paul’s Boys Choir Boarding School

I am indebted also to the staff of the Youth Hostel Association (YHA) London St.

Paul’s Youth Hostel (https://www.hihos-tels.com/hostels/yha-london-st-pauls).

The picture to the right was taken by my daring wife, Chere, from the (second floor European, third floor American), window of the old boarding school for the boys’ choir as she lay on the top bunk. As you can see, it is on a side street ending at the plaza outside the cathedral. Together we measured eighty-eight paces from the inscription marking where the royal carriage sat to the wall directly beneath this window, well within the range of the model air rifle Herman carries in my story.

The Kruger Telegram

The Kruger Telegram was sent by Kaiser Wilhelm II to president Kruger of the Transvaal Republic, on January 3, 1896, congratulating the president on repelling the Jameson Raid, a sortie by six hundred British irregulars from Cape Colony into the Transvaal. The raid was a disaster for the British with sixty-five raiders killed to only one Boer, the rest surrendering. The telegram caused great indignation in Great Britain as it was taken as an endorsement by the Kaiser of the Transvaal’s independence in what was seen by the British as their sphere of influence.

People in England were so angry that the windows of German shops were broken, and German sailors were attacked on the streets of London. A chastened Kaiser wrote a letter of apology to his grandmother and the anger died down somewhat, but was still a sore spot at the time of the Diamond Jubilee.