Fall of Giants

“We can’t help Andrei!” Fitz said. He shifted his grip and slung his sister-in-law over his shoulder, easing the pressure on his leg. As he did so a bullet passed close enough for him to feel its wind. He glanced back and saw a grinning soldier in uniform aiming a pistol.

He heard a second shot, and sensed an impact. He thought for a moment that he had been hit, but there was no pain, and he dashed for the communicating door that led to the dining room.

He heard the soldier shout: “She’s getting away!”

Fitz burst through the door as another bullet hit the woodwork. Ordinary soldiers were not trained with pistols and sometimes did not realize how much less accurate they were than rifles. Moving at a limping run, he went past the table elaborately laid with silver and crystal ready for four wealthy aristocrats to have dinner. Behind him he heard several pursuers. At the far end of the room a door led to the kitchen area. He passed into a narrow corridor and from there to the kitchen. A cook and several kitchen maids had stopped work and were standing around looking terrified.

Fitz’s pursuers were too close behind him. As soon as they got a clear shot he would be killed. He had to do something to slow them down.

He set Valeriya on her feet. She swayed, and he saw blood on her dress. She had been hit by a bullet, but she was alive and conscious. He sat her in a chair, then turned to the corridor. The grinning soldier was running toward him, firing wildly, followed by several more in single file in the narrow space. Behind them, in the dining room and drawing room, Fitz saw flames.

He drew his Webley. It was a double-action gun so it did not need to be cocked. Shifting all his weight to his good leg, he aimed carefully at the belly of the soldier running at him. He squeezed the trigger, the gun banged, and the man fell on the stone floor in front of him. In the kitchen, Fitz heard women screaming in terror.

Fitz immediately fired again at the next man, who also went down. He fired a third time at a third man, with the same result. The fourth man ducked back into the dining room.

Fitz slammed the kitchen door. The pursuers would now hesitate, wondering how they could check whether he was lying in wait for them, and that might just give him the time he needed.

He picked up Valeriya, who seemed to be losing consciousness. He had never been in the kitchens of this house, but he moved toward the back. Another corridor took him past storerooms and laundries. At last he opened a door that led to the outside.

Stepping out, panting, his bad leg hurting like the very devil, he saw the carriage waiting, with Jenkins in the driver’s seat and Bea inside with Nina, who was sobbing uncontrollably. A frightened-looking stable boy was holding the horses.

He manhandled the unconscious Valeriya into the carriage, climbed in after her, and shouted at Jenkins: “Go! Go!”

Jenkins whipped the horses, the stable boy leaped out of the way, and the carriage moved off.

Fitz said to Bea: “Are you all right?”

“No, but I’m alive and unhurt. You…?”

“No damage. But I fear for your brother’s life.” In reality he was quite sure Andrei was dead by now, but he did not want to say that to her.

Bea looked at the princess. “What happened?”

“She must have been hit by a bullet.” Fitz looked more closely. Valeriya’s face was white and still. “Oh, dear God,” he said.

“She’s dead, isn’t she?” Bea said.

“You must be brave.”

“I will be brave.” Bea took her sister-in-law’s lifeless hand. “Poor Valeriya.”

The carriage raced down the drive and past the small dowager house where Bea’s mother had lived after Bea’s father died. Fitz looked back at the big house. There was a small crowd of frustrated pursuers outside the kitchen door. One of them was aiming a rifle, and Fitz pushed Bea’s head down and ducked himself.

When next he looked they were out of range. Peasants and the staff were pouring out of the house by all its doors. The windows were strangely bright, and Fitz realized that the place was on fire. As he looked, smoke drifted from the front door, and an orange flame licked up from an open window and set fire to the creeper growing up the wall.

Then the carriage topped a rise and rattled downhill, and the old house disappeared from view.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT – October and November 1917

Walter said angrily: “Admiral von Holtzendorff promised us the British would starve in five months. That was nine months ago.”

“He made a mistake,” said his father.

Walter suppressed a scornful retort.

They were in Otto’s room at the Foreign Office in Berlin. Otto sat in a carved chair behind a big desk. On the wall behind him hung a painting of Kaiser Wilhelm I, grandfather of the present monarch, being proclaimed German emperor in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles.