Fall of Giants

by Follett, Ken

  Clearly they had already argued about this. Ethel did not have the patience for theological disputes that made no difference to anything in the end. She tried to brighten the mood. “Earl Fitzherbert asked me to give you his respects, Da,” she said. “Wasn’t that nice of him?”

  Da did not melt. “I was sorry to see you taking part in that farce on Monday,” he said sternly.

  “Monday?” she said incredulously. “When the king visited the families?”

  “I saw you whispering the names to that flunky.”

  “That was Sir Alan Tite.”

  “I don’t care what he calls himself, I know a lickspittle when I see one.”

  Ethel was shocked. How could Da be scornful of her great moment? She felt like crying. “I thought you’d be proud of me, helping the king!”

  “How dare the king offer sympathy to our folk? What does a king know of hardship and danger?”

  Ethel fought back tears. “But, Da, it meant so much to people that he went to see them!”

  “It distracted everyone’s attention from the dangerous and illegal actions of Celtic Minerals.”

  “But they need comfort.” Why could he not see this?

  “The king softened them up. Last Sunday afternoon this town was ready to revolt. By Monday evening all they could talk about was the queen giving her handkerchief to Mrs. Dai Ponies.”

  Ethel went swiftly from heartbreak to anger. “I’m sorry you feel that way,” she said coldly.

  “Nothing to be sorry for—”

  “I’m sorry because you are wrong,” she said, firmly overriding him.

  Da was taken aback. It was rare for him to be told he was wrong by anyone, let alone a girl.

  Mam said: “Now, Eth—”

  “People have feelings, Da,” she said recklessly. “That’s what you always forget.”

  Da was speechless.

  Mam said: “That’s enough, now!”

  Ethel looked at Billy. Through a mist of tears she saw his expression of awestruck admiration. That encouraged her. She sniffed and wiped her eyes with the back of her hand and said: “You and your union, and your safety regulations and your Scriptures—I know they’re important, Da, but you can’t do away with people’s feelings. I hope that one day socialism will make the world a better place for working people, but in the meantime they need consolation.”

  Da found his voice at last. “I think we’ve heard enough from you,” he said. “Being with the king has gone to your head. You’re a slip of a girl, and you’ve no business lecturing your elders.”

  She was crying too much to argue further. “I’m sorry, Da,” she said. After a heavy silence she added: “I’d better get back to work.” The earl had told her to take all the time she liked, but she wanted to be alone. She turned away from her father’s glare and walked back to the big house. She kept her eyes downcast, hoping the crowds would not notice her tears.

  She did not want to meet anyone so she slipped into the Gardenia Suite. Lady Maud had returned to London, so the room was empty and the bed was stripped. Ethel threw herself down on the mattress and cried.

  She had been feeling so proud. How could Da undermine everything she had done? Did he want her to do a bad job? She worked for the nobility. So did every coal miner in Aberowen. Even though Celtic Minerals employed them, it was the earl’s coal they were digging, and he was paid the same per ton as the miner who dug it out of the earth—a fact her father never tired of pointing out. If it was all right to be a good collier, efficient and productive, what was wrong with being a good housekeeper?

  She heard the door open. Quickly she jumped to her feet. It was the earl. “What on earth is the matter?” he said kindly. “I heard you from outside the door.”

  “I’m very sorry, my lord, I shouldn’t have come in here.”

  “That’s all right.” There was genuine concern on his impossibly handsome face. “Why are you crying?”

  “I was so proud to have helped the king,” she said woefully. “But my father says it was a farce, all done just to stop people feeling angry with Celtic Minerals.” She burst into fresh tears.

  “What nonsense,” he said. “Anyone could tell that the king’s concern was genuine. And the queen’s.” He took the white linen handkerchief from the breast pocket of his jacket. She expected him to hand it to her, but instead he wiped the tears from her cheeks with a gentle touch. “I was proud of you last Monday, even if your father wasn’t.”

  “You’re so kind.”

  “There, there,” he said, and he bent down and kissed her lips.

  She was dumbfounded. It was the last thing in the world she had expected. When he straightened up she stared at him uncomprehendingly.

  He gazed back at her. “You are absolutely enchanting,” he said in a low voice; then he kissed her again.

  This time she pushed him away. “My lord, what are you doing?” she said in a shocked whisper.

  “I don’t know.”

  “But what can you be thinking of?”

  “I’m not thinking at all.”

  She stared up at his chiseled face. The green eyes studied her intently, as if trying to read her mind. She realized that she adored him. Suddenly she was flooded with excitement and desire.

  “I can’t help myself,” he said.

  She sighed happily. “Kiss me again, then,” she said.

  CHAPTER THREE

  February 1914

  At half past ten the looking glass in the hall of Earl Fitzherbert’s Mayfair house showed a tall man immaculately dressed in the daytime clothing of an upper-class Englishman. He wore an upright collar, disliking the fashion for soft collars, and his silver tie was fastened with a pearl. Some of his friends thought it was undignified to dress well. “I say, Fitz, you look like a damn tailor, about to open his shop in the morning,” the young Marquis of Lowther had said to him once. But Lowthie was a scruff, with crumbs on his waistcoat and cigar ash on the cuffs of his shirt, and he wanted everyone else to look as bad. Fitz hated to be grubby; it suited him to be spruce.

  He put on a gray top hat. With his walking stick in his right hand and a new pair of gray suede gloves in his left, he went out of the house and turned south. In Berkeley Square a blond girl of about fourteen winked at him and said: “Suck you for a shilling?”

  He crossed Piccadilly and entered Green Park. A few snowdrops clustered around the roots of the trees. He passed Buckingham Palace and entered an unattractive neighborhood near Victoria Station. He had to ask a policeman for directions to Ashley Gardens. The street turned out to be behind the Roman Catholic cathedral. Really, Fitz thought, if one is going to ask members of the nobility to call one should have one’s office in a respectable quarter.

  He had been summoned by an old friend of his father’s named Mansfield Smith-Cumming. A retired naval officer, Smith-Cumming was now doing something vague in the War Office. He had sent Fitz a rather short note. “I should be grateful for a word on a matter of national importance. Can you call on me tomorrow morning at, say, eleven o’clock?” The note was typewritten and signed, in green ink, with the single letter “C.”

  In truth Fitz was pleased that someone in the government wanted to talk to him. He had a horror of being thought of as an ornament, a wealthy aristocrat with no function other than to decorate social events. He hoped he was going to be asked for his advice, perhaps about his old regiment, the Welsh Rifles. Or there might be some task he could perform in connection with the South Wales Territorials, of which he was honorary colonel. Anyway, just being summoned to the War Office made him feel he was not completely superfluous.

  If this really was the War Office. The address turned out to be a modern block of apartments. A doorman directed Fitz to an elevator. Smith-Cumming’s flat seemed to be part home, part office, but a briskly efficient young man with a military air told Fitz that “C” would see him right away.

  C did not have a military air. Podgy and balding, he had a nose like Mr. Punch and wore a monocle
. His office was cluttered with miscellaneous objects: model aircraft, a telescope, a compass, and a painting of peasants facing a firing squad. Fitz’s father had always referred to Smith-Cumming as “the seasick sea captain” and his naval career had not been brilliant. What was he doing here? “What exactly is this department?” Fitz asked as he sat down.

  “This is the Foreign Section of the Secret Service Bureau,” said C.

  “I didn’t know we had a Secret Service Bureau.”

  “If people knew, it wouldn’t be secret.”

  “I see.” Fitz felt a twinge of excitement. It was flattering to be given confidential information.

  “Perhaps you’d be kind enough not to mention it to anyone.”

  Fitz was being given an order, albeit politely phrased. “Of course,” he said. He was pleased to feel a member of an inner circle. Did this mean that C might ask him to work for the War Office?

  “Congratulations on the success of your royal house party. I believe you put together an impressive group of well-connected young men for His Majesty to meet.”

  “Thank you. It was a quiet social occasion, strictly speaking, but I’m afraid word gets around.”

  “And now you’re taking your wife to Russia.”

  “The princess is Russian. She wants to visit her brother. It’s a long-postponed trip.”

  “And Gus Dewar is going with you.”

  C seemed to know everything. “He’s on a world tour,” Fitz said. “Our plans coincided.”

  C sat back in his chair and said conversationally: “Do you know why Admiral Alexeev was put in charge of the Russian army in the war against Japan, even though he knew nothing about fighting on land?”

  Having spent time in Russia as a boy, Fitz had followed the progress of the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905, but he did not know this story. “Tell me.”

  “Well, it seems the grand duke Alexis was involved in a punch-up in a brothel in Marseilles and got arrested by the French police. Alexeev came to the rescue and told the gendarmes that it was he, not the grand duke, who had misbehaved. The similarity of their names made the story plausible and the grand duke was let out of jail. Alexeev’s reward was command of the army.”

  “No wonder they lost.”

  “All the same, the Russians deploy the largest army the world has ever known—six million men, by some calculations, assuming they call up all their reserves. No matter how incompetent their leadership, it’s a formidable force. But how effective would they be in, say, a European war?”

  “I haven’t been back since my marriage,” Fitz said. “I’m not sure.”

  “Nor are we. That’s where you come in. I would like you to make some inquiries while you’re there.”

  Fitz was surprised. “But surely, our embassy should do that.”

  “Of course.” C shrugged. “But diplomats are always more interested in politics than military matters.”

  “Still, there must be a military attaché.”

  “An outsider such as yourself can offer a fresh perspective—in much the same way as your group at Tŷ Gwyn gave the king something he could not have got from the Foreign Office. But if you feel you can’t . . . ”

  “I’m not refusing,” Fitz said hastily. On the contrary, he was pleased to be asked to do a job for his country. “I’m just surprised that things should be done this way.”

  “We are a newish department with few resources. My best informants are intelligent travelers with enough military background to understand what they’re looking at.”

  “Very well.”

  “I’d be interested to know whether you felt the Russian officer class has moved on since 1905. Have they modernized, or are they still attached to old ideas? You’ll meet all the top men in St. Petersburg—your wife is related to half of them.”

  Fitz was thinking about the last time Russia went to war. “The main reason they lost against Japan was that the Russian railways were inadequate to supply their army.”

  “But since then they have been trying to improve their rail network—using money borrowed from France, their ally.”

  “Have they made much progress, I wonder?”

  “That’s the key question. You’ll be traveling by rail. Do the trains run on time? Keep your eyes open. Are the lines still mostly single-track, or double? The German generals have a contingency plan for war that is based on a calculation of how long it will take to mobilize the Russian army. If there is a war, much will hang on the accuracy of that timetable.”

  Fitz was as excited as a schoolboy, but he forced himself to speak with gravity. “I’ll find out all I can.”

  “Thank you.” C looked at his watch.

  Fitz stood up and they shook hands.

  “When are you going, exactly?” C asked.

  “We leave tomorrow,” said Fitz. “Good-bye.”

  { II }

  Grigori Peshkov watched his younger brother, Lev, taking money off the tall American. Lev’s attractive face wore an expression of boyish eagerness, as if his main aim was to show off his skill. Grigori suffered a familiar pang of anxiety. One day, he feared, Lev’s charm would not be enough to keep him out of trouble.

  “This is a memory test,” Lev said in English. He had learned the words by rote. “Take any card.” He had to raise his voice over the racket of the factory: heavy machinery clanking, steam hissing, people yelling instructions and questions.

  The visitor’s name was Gus Dewar. He wore a jacket, waistcoat, and trousers all in the same fine gray woollen cloth. Grigori was especially interested in him because he came from Buffalo.

  Dewar was an amiable young man. With a shrug, he took a card from Lev’s pack and looked at it.

  Lev said: “Put it on the bench, facedown.”

  Dewar put the card on the rough wooden workbench.

  Lev took a ruble note from his pocket and placed it on the card. “Now you put a dollar down.” This could be done only with rich visitors.

  Grigori knew that Lev had already switched the playing card. In his hand, concealed by the ruble note, there had been a different card. The skill—which Lev had practised for hours—lay in picking up the first card, and concealing it in the palm of the hand, immediately after putting down the ruble note and the new card.

  “Are you sure you can afford to lose a dollar, Mr. Dewar?” said Lev.

  Dewar smiled, as the marks always did at that point. “I think so,” he said.

  “Do you remember your card?” Lev did not really speak English. He could say these phrases in German, French, and Italian, too.

  “Five of spades,” said Dewar.

  “Wrong.”

  “I’m pretty sure.”

  “Turn it over.”

  Dewar turned over the card. It was the queen of clubs.

  Lev scooped up the dollar bill and his original ruble.

  Grigori held his breath. This was the dangerous moment. Would the American complain that he had been robbed, and accuse Lev?

  Dewar grinned ruefully and said: “You got me.”

  “I know another game,” Lev said.

  It was enough: Lev was about to push his luck. Although he was twenty years old, Grigori still had to protect him. “Don’t play against my brother,” Grigori said to Dewar in Russian. “He always wins.”

  Dewar smiled and replied hesitantly in the same tongue. “That’s good advice.”

  Dewar was the first of a small group of visitors touring the Putilov Machine Works. It was the largest factory in St. Petersburg, employing thirty thousand men, women, and children. Grigori’s job was to show them his own small but important section. The factory made locomotives and other large steel artifacts. Grigori was foreman of the shop that made train wheels.

  Grigori was itching to speak to Dewar about Buffalo. But before he could ask a question the supervisor of the casting section, Kanin, appeared. A qualified engineer, he was tall and thin with receding hair.

  With him was a second visitor. Grigori knew from his cloth
es that this must be the British lord. He was dressed like a Russian nobleman, in a tailcoat and a top hat. Perhaps this was the clothing worn by the ruling class all over the world.

  The lord’s name, Grigori had been told, was Earl Fitzherbert. He was the handsomest man Grigori had ever seen, with black hair and intense green eyes. The women in the wheel shop stared as if at a god.

  Kanin spoke to Fitzherbert in Russian. “We are now producing two new locomotives every week here,” he said proudly.

  “Amazing,” said the English lord.

  Grigori understood why these foreigners were so interested. He read the newspapers, and he went to lectures and discussion groups organized by the St. Petersburg Bolshevik Committee. The locomotives made here were essential to Russia’s ability to defend itself. The visitors might pretend to be idly curious, but they were collecting military intelligence.

  Kanin introduced Grigori. “Peshkov here is the factory’s chess champion.” Kanin was management, but he was all right.

  Fitzherbert was charming. He spoke to Varya, a woman of about fifty with her gray hair in a head scarf. “Very kind of you to show us your workplace,” he said, cheerfully speaking fluent Russian with a heavy accent.

  Varya, a formidable figure, muscular and big-bosomed, giggled like a schoolgirl.

  The demonstration was ready. Grigori had placed steel ingots in the hopper and fired up the furnace, and the metal was now molten. But there was one more visitor to come: the earl’s wife, who was said to be Russian—hence his knowledge of the language, which was unusual in a foreigner.

  Grigori wanted to question Dewar about Buffalo, but before he had a chance, the earl’s wife came into the wheel shop. Her floor-length skirt was like a broom pushing a line of dirt and swarf in front of her. She wore a short coat over her dress, and she was followed by a manservant carrying a fur cloak, a maid with a bag, and one of the directors of the factory, Count Maklakov, a young man dressed like Fitzherbert. Maklakov was obviously very taken with his guest, smiling and talking in a low voice and taking her arm unnecessarily. She was extraordinarily pretty, with fair curls and a coquettish tilt to her head.