The Peril and The Prince

Chapter One 1886-1

Chapter One

1886The clerk knocked tentatively on the door of the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs.

There was a pause before the Marquis of Salisbury replied,

“Come in.”

He was writing at his large flat-topped desk and did not look up for some seconds while the clerk stood somewhat uncomfortably at the doorway.

“What is it?”

“I am sorry to disturb your Lordship, but there is a young lady here who insists on seeing you.”

“A young lady?”

“Her name, my Lord, is Miss Anstruther.”

For a moment the Marquis looked blank and then he said,

“I wonder – ? Show her in.”

“Very good, my Lord.”

The clerk closed the door quietly and returned a few minutes later to announce,

“Miss Vida Anstruther, my Lord.”

The Marquis rose slowly to his feet as his visitor came towards him.

She looked very young, but her composure and self-confidence made him think that she was very likely older.

She was certainly very lovely and, as he held out his hand, he said,

“I think you must be the daughter of Sir Harvey Anstruther.”

She smiled and it was as if sunshine suddenly filled the rather gloomy office.

“Indeed I have come to talk to you about him.”

“I rather suspected that,” the Marquis said. “Will you sit down?”

He indicated an upright chair on the other side of his desk and she seated herself slowly and without the indecision that he might have expected from a girl.

The Marquis of Salisbury, who was also the Prime Minister, was in fact a very intimidating man. Even his colleagues in the House of Lords looked on him with awe.

He was also extremely clever and he knew that he had the full confidence of Queen Victoria as well as the whole Cabinet.

“What I have come to ask you, my Lord,” Vida Anstruther began, and now there was undoubtedly a worried note in her soft voice, “is what has happened to my father?”

“It is a question I have been asking myself since I received a report a few weeks ago that he was missing,” the Marquis replied. “But I am quite certain, considering where he is, it is too soon for you to worry about him.”

“That is where you are wrong, my Lord,” Vida Anstruther contradicted. “I am, in fact, extremely worried, for while it is only in the last few weeks that you have heard that my father is missing, I have not heard from him for nearly two months.”

The Marquis leant back in his chair and said in a serious tone,

“As long as that? I am surprised that you did not communicate with me before.”

“I did not do so because, as you know, Papa dislikes very much being interfered with when he is travelling more or less incognito.”

She paused and then went on.

“But I expect you know why he went to Hungary. The reason he gave to his friends was that he was visiting my mother’s family and he was taking a holiday after so many strenuous years in the service of his country.”

“Of course I understand,” the Marquis said, “and that was exactly what your father told me he would say before he left.”

Vida Anstruther did not speak and he continued,

“What I suspect has happened is that he crossed into Russia, which is what he intended to do and is either on the track of something of great importance and therefore will not return immediately or else he has decided to go on to Odessa and come home by a different route from the one he took on his outward journey.”

“That sounds very plausible, my Lord,” Vida Anstruther replied, “but I am quite certain that Papa is in danger!”

She thought that the Marquis looked sceptical and she added,

“You may think it strange, but because Papa and I have been so close to each other since Mama died, we each know what the other is thinking. My sixth sense, if that is what you like to call it, tells me that either the Russians have arrested him or else he is in hiding and finding it impossible to return home.”

“I can understand your feelings,” the Marquis remarked after a moment, “but what you are saying is entirely supposition and you have no genuine foundation for such ideas.”

“Only my conviction that what has undeniably saved my father’s life many times in the past has been his instinct.”

There was silence.

Then, as if the Marquis was convinced by the certainty with which his visitor spoke, he said after a moment,

“I think you must be aware, Miss Anstruther, that even if you are right there is nothing I can do about it.”

“I know that, my Lord, and that is why I am going to do something myself.”

The Marquis stiffened.

“I hope that you are not speaking seriously.”

“I am very serious. I intend to try to find Papa and I need your help.”

“If you are thinking of going out to Hungary and from there into Russia, I can only say that it would be an extremely foolhardy action of which I know your father would disapprove. I shall try my very best to make you change your mind.”

“You will not be able to do so, my Lord,” Vida Anstruther replied, and now there was a touch of steel in her voice. “I have thought it out very carefully and what I intend is to tell everyone that I am going out to join Papa in Hungary and that we had arranged it before he left.”

She looked at the Marquis as if she was challenging him. He did not speak and she went on.

“All I need from your Lordship is a passport with a false name under which I shall travel. It would be very stupid, if I am right in thinking Papa is in danger, to be known as his daughter once I have left these shores.”

The Marquis appreciated that this was common sense, but he had no intention of giving in so easily.

“Let me make a suggestion, Miss Anstruther,” he said. “I will send one of my most trusted men to look for your father. I have already had reports that he arrived safely in Hungary and was received by your mother’s family with enthusiasm.”

“And what did you hear after that?”

“I was told that your father had gone on a hunting expedition which might or might not have carried him into Russia, but he had not returned and there was a certain amount of anxiety as to what might have happened to him.”

Vida Anstruther’s eyes were stormy as she asked,

“And you were content with that report?”

“Of course I was not content with it,” the Marquis replied, “but there can be many reasons for your father’s disappearance. The last thing he would want is for anyone to go looking for him and perhaps reveal his identity. That could prove embarrassing and might even endanger his life.”

He spoke sharply because he told himself that the young girl facing him had no idea of the difficulties her father might be encountering or what damage might be done by inexperienced handling of the delicate situation.

Vida Anstruther merely said in much the same tone as the Marquis had used to her,

“Of course I am well aware of what you are saying, my Lord. You forget that I have been with Papa for the last five years in all sorts of strange places and at times in very uncomfortable circumstances. That is why you can trust me not to do anything foolish or what you would call unprofessional when I go to look for him.”

The way she spoke made the Marquis feel, although it seemed ridiculous, that he ought to apologise and after a moment he said,

“I must admit, Miss Anstruther, that I was not aware how close you are to your father. In fact I had supposed that when he went ‘travelling’ as one might say, you were left behind in whatever Embassy he was posted at that time.”

“I never allowed Papa to go alone,” Vida replied, “and I can assure you he found me very useful. When I was younger, people usually did not think it mattered what they said in front of a child and later he found that, since I am as good at languages as he is himself, I could often pass on information to him which was extremely useful.”

The Marquis thought with a glint of amusement in his eyes that if Miss Anstruther had acted as a spy, which was what she was implying, she was certainly a very attractive one.

It was a pity that the Foreign Office could not make use of her!

But he knew it was his duty to dissuade her from becoming mixed up in what he was well aware was a very tricky situation.

The Russian Czar had, for some time, been behaving in a manner described by Queen Victoria as ‘shameful’.

Alexander III was an unpredictable and an extremely unpleasant ruler. He liked to play the part of a simple-minded muzhik, but he had a strong streak of Asiatic cunning in his make-up.

He locked up all revolutionaries at home, but encouraged them abroad.

He was in fact, although no one realised it at the time, the first leader in history of a great country to wage an organised ‘cold war’.

He had Russians stirring up trouble for the regimes established in the Balkans by the Treaty of Berlin in 1878 and Russian undercover men posing as icon-sellers wandering through Serbia setting up subversive cells and Russian Embassy officials paying crowds to stage riots.

In Bulgaria, Russians had actually kidnapped Prince Alexander of Battenberg and forced him to abdicate at pistol point.

The outcry in Europe had been stupendous, but the new ruler of Bulgaria, Prince Ferdinand of Coburg, was supported by a staunch patriot, Stambulov, who was just as hostile to Russia as the former Government had been.

Russian agents were therefore at the moment concentrating on murdering him.

What concerned Britain even more closely than what was happening in Europe was that the Czar’s armies were moving steadily outwards in Asia and by infiltrating into Afghanistan were menacing India.

Reliable information was very scarce from that isolated country, but Sir Harvey Anstruther had volunteered to try to find out what was happening within Russia itself.

He had the perfect excuse of visiting his former wife’s relatives, who lived in the Eastern part of Hungary, very close to the frontier with Russia.

“Some of your mother’s cousins have, I know, married Russians,” Sir Harvey had said to Vida before he left, “and I may learn something from them. I am, moreover, quite certain that I shall hear a great deal from the Hungarian families in the neighbourhood who, unless they have changed a great deal in the past few years, have always disliked the Russians and mistrusted them.”

Vida had smiled.

She was only too well aware of how patriotic the Hungarians were and how they disapproved of the way the Russian aristocrats treated their serfs and of the systematic terrorism that was an integral part of Russian rule.

She had wanted to go with her father, but he had dissuaded her.

“I have arranged for the Duchess of Dorset to present you at one of the first drawing rooms,” he had said, “and it would not only be rude if you cried off but might lead to a number of awkward questions as to why I am going so far afield.”

He had smiled before he added,

“I shall not be away long, my dearest. And when I return I shall expect to find you the Belle of the Season and, although it is something I would deplore, the acknowledged toast of St. James’s.”

She had given in to him because she knew how anxious he was that she should take her proper place in Society.

At the same time, when he had finally left on a cold windy day at the beginning of February, she had put her arms round his neck and said,

“Promise me you will take care of yourself, Papa. You know how much you mean to me. I cannot possibly lose you!”

“I will be careful for your sake,” her father had replied, “and to me you mean everything in the whole world.”

‘I knew then that it was wrong for him to go,’ Vida had thought to herself later.

But by then it was too late and, while her father was speeding across Europe, she was choosing the clothes in which she was to make her debut.