"All right, but..." Laughter from the men surrounding Maureen attracted their attention there.
Then to Angelique. "Smashing, isn't she?"
Jamie said. "Angelique, I mean."
Angelique and Sir William were waiting for Zergeyev to join them. Tonight's dress and coiffure had been decided on earlier-- selected specifically for Tess and this soiree which was to have been their first battleground. Though her enemy had not arrived she resolved not to alter her plan, the effect was so pleasing. She had considered wearing the Imperial Jade ring that Malcolm had ordered from Hong Kong and had been delivered by mail ship a week after his death, causing her another flood of private tears. If Tess had been here she would not have hesitated. Without that reason the ring was wrong.
Actually I'm glad she isn't here, she told herself. Thank God Vargas warned me.
I need more time to prepare for that joust, person to person--ah time, am I or am I not bearing Malcolm's child... "Good evening, Count Zergeyev," she said with her gentle smile.
"Thank you for inviting me."
"You're so welcome, you've already made the evening a success. Evening Sir William. You both know everyone, except a new guest." In a sudden hush, everyone watching, comparing, Zergeyev beckoned Maureen from the circle of admirers, Marlowe amongst them now. "Miss Maureen Ross, from Edinburgh, Jamie's fiancee.
Madame Angelique Struan."
The moment Angelique had come in she had seen Maureen, instantly scrutinized her from nice head to neat shoe and decided she was no threat-- noticing Gornt in passing, but leaving him for later. "Welcome to the furthest British outpost in the world, More'selle Ross," she said pleasantly, wondering how old she was, and thinking, Yes, at night, in a muffler, this one could easily be mistaken for that woman--same tall, imposing way of standing; same direct gaze. "Jamie is very lucky."
"Thank you." The moment Angelique had come into the room Maureen had scrutinized her from shining head to tiny foot, recognized her beauty, and while instinctively liking her, decided at once she was a threat--her eyes had switched to Jamie to see his open admiration, and the men around him, no way of missing the general hum of appreciation--and she readied for battle.
"I'm so pleased to meet you and was awful sorry to hear about your tragedy, I'm so... everyone's so sorry." With genuine feeling, she leaned down and touched a cheek against Angelique's. "I do hope we'll be friends." A special smile.
"Please, let's be friends. I'll need a friend, dinna fear. Jamie said what a good friend you've been to him."
"No need for "please", Maureen--may I call you Maureen, and would you call me Angelique?" she said with a special smile, acknowledging and understanding the warning put nicely and without claws, that Jamie was personal property and not to be flirted with. "Good, it would be very good to have a girl friend. Perhaps we could have tea tomorrow?"
"Och, I'd enjoy that. Angelique, what a pretty name and pretty dress." Too severe, yet too hourglass for mourning.
"And so is yours, that color goes marvelously with your hair." Green silk, expensive, but English not Parisian and the cut old-fashioned.
Never mind. That can be improved, if she becomes an intimate. "Jamie was a great friend to my husband, and to me when I needed one badly. You are very lucky," she said truthfully. "Now where is your handsome fianc`e? Ah, there he is!"
Watched by all eyes she linked arms with her.
Everyone beamed at the Entente Cordiale and, still the center of attention, she guided Maureen to him.
"Be careful, Jamie, it's easy to see this lady is very precious--there are too many pirates in Yokohama."
Those around laughed and she left them and went back to Sir William, greeting Ketterer en route--a special compliment and smile to him, and later to Marlowe--as well as Settry Pallidar, resplendent and rivaling Zergeyev in his Cossack uniform. "La, Sir William," she said. "How lucky we are."
"To be..." Zergeyev stopped himself in time. He almost said, To be alive?
Instead he took a glass of champagne from a silver platter held by a liveried manservant and said, "To be in the presence of two such lovely ladies, we are lucky! Your healths."
Everyone drank, and continued to compare. Zergeyev was too worried to follow suit, much more concerned with what other foul news had arrived with Prancing Cloud, particularly for the other Ministers.
An urgent, coded dispatch from St.
Petersburg--three months old--had arrived.
First, it related the usual trouble with Prussia, troops massing on their Western borders, six armies sent there; trouble expected soon with the Ottoman Empire and Moslems to the south, three armies sent there; famine everywhere, with intellectuals such as Dostoyevesky and Tolstoy advocating change and liberalization.
Second, it ordered him to press the Japanese to remove their fishing villages from the Kuriles and Sakhalin under threat of "serious consequences." And third, much trouble for him personally: You are appointed Governor General of Russian Alaska. In the spring the warship, Tsar Alexandre, will arrive with your replacement for the Japans, and then carry you and your entourage to our Alaskan capital Sitka where you will be in residence for at least two years to expedite Friendship.
"Why so glum, friend?" Sir William asked in Russian.
Zergeyev saw that Angelique was again surrounded, so drew him aside and told him about his new posting. But not about "Friendship." This was the code name of a top-secret State plan to facilitate enforced, massive immigration of hardy Siberian tribes into their vast Alaskan-American territories that spread hundreds of miles inland, adjoined Canada and hugged the coast southwards to end not far from the American-Canadian border. Hardy, tough, warlike peoples who could, and would, over a generation or three, trickle southwards and eastwards to the vast prairies and warm exotic lands of California, eventually to possess America. The plan had been proposed by an uncle twenty-five years earlier. "Two years! A fornicating prison sentence!"
"I agree." Sir William felt equally uncomfortable with the vicissitudes of his own Foreign Office, their aptitude for sudden postings, equally olympian. "Alaska? Ugh!
Know nothing about it--have you ever been there? Last year, the ship I was on stopped at Vancouver, in our colony there. It's just an outpost, and we went no further north."
"Sitka's not much further. I was there as a youth once. Now we've permanent settlement, lots of traders, a few hundred shacks,"
Zergeyev said sourly. "Furs, freezing, lawlessness, illiterates, Indians, drunks, and no society. The place is a foul wasteland, discovered by Bering and Chirikov a hundred odd years ago... at first they thought it was just part of our northern territories, fifty-odd miles across an inlet, not realizing it was a Strait they named after Bering.
Sixty-odd years ago, one of my granduncles helped form the Russian American Fur Company, our fur-trading monopoly, and appointed an imperious son of a whore--a cousin called Baranof--to be Director who moved the capital to Sitka. It's on an island off the coast, totally miserable and called, guess what, Baranof Island. Unfortunately my family made Alaska a special interest. Hence the posting. Matyeryeybitz! Both of them."
Sir William laughed and Angelique turned back to them. "May I share the joke?"
"Er, it wasn't well, very funny, my dear," he said, docketing the highly interesting data for transmission to London, "just a Russian vulgarity."
"English humor, Angelique," Zergeyev laughed. "And on that happy thought, it is time for dinner."
Gallantly he bowed, went over and took Maureen into the dining room, Sir William and Angelique followed, then the others.
Abundant silver on refectory table, liveried menservants behind each chair, others to bring in huge quantities of meats and borscht and beets and pies and jugs of iced vodka, champagne and French wines and sorbets.