JACK OF DIAMONDS, REDUX

proposed edits of chapter 13

CHAPTER 13

Marlborough was the smallest of the six Manor houses located in what the locals were now calling Chumley Glen. It boasted eighteen bedrooms. It was what one might label the senior representative of the six; the arbiter of local history, Its its own colourful history went going back to 1705. and t The house had been through as many renovations as it had owners. Some claimed it was haunted; others said that the walls were simply too tight. It had hosted all the major celebrities of Europe throughout its colourful history: Handel, Mendelssohn, Listz; Christopher Wren, Isaac Newton, Edmund Halley; Pope, Swift and the other members of the Scriblerus Club—the anecdotal tales about the house had gone through as many incarnations as it had renovations.

After a while, ownership was a guess, at best.

Finally, in 1907, the house was purchased and renovated once again, by Dmitri Alexandrovitch Chernetsov—the scion of a well-connected, as well as influential, Russian family—and commonly referred to as Prince Igor. He was a Russian businessman said to be tied to the Boyars; others said that he was the romantic encapsulation of what an aristocrat in exile should be; some believed his to be a self-imposed exile; a few even suggested he was an exile of love.

Chernetsov had been living in Britain since 1910, when he was sent to London as part of the family’s business empire. He was forty-two at the time. It was a good decision on the family’s part. Chernetsov had been educated at Oxford, graduating in 1892, spending his formative years at a boarding school in Kent. He bought Marlborough House as an investment, and then decided it was the perfect home for his growing family. He had three boys and two girls, seven years apart.

Thirteen years later, when his oldest was twenty-seven and years old, Chernetsov knew he would never see his beloved Russia again. That’s not to say he wasn’t patriotic. He was. There was no one more patriotic, or Russian, than Dimitri Alexandrovitch Chernetsov. He’d actually tried mounting a small force to rescue the Russian Royal Family, but failed in his attempt, arriving two days too late. It was that experience which convinced him Lenin and the Revolution had to be stopped, at any cost.

But W with the Civil War over and the Reds declaring victory, the White army—both the monarchist armies and allies alike—began withdrawing with as much organized chaos as possible. While most of the Boyars and aristos in Russia were looked upon as ‘Former People’, loyalists like Chernetsov did what they could to help rescue those loyalists still trapped and looking to get out. That he was involved in trying to topple the newly established Communist regime there could be was no denying; it was the lengths to which he was willing to go that people didn’t fully understand.

People like Aleksandr Antonov, he Chernetsov thought as he took a slow sip of his whiskey sour, looking out over the magnificent garden his wife insisted they plant fifteen years ago. He watched his grandchildren were outside playing in the October chill, and while he knew his daughter-in-law would often insist they come in out of the cold, he smiled, reminded of remembering what it had been like to be a child—until he was sent off to boarding school.

A tall, thin man of fifty-five, Chernetsov always dressed as befit a gentleman of the day, elegantly. His hair was always maintained, neatly combed, and though it had lost the once upon a time sheen of his youth, the grey somehow added to the image he projected. The grey came in light at the temples, and peppered his thin beard and sculpted goatee, giving him what could only be described as a cavalier appearance. His eyes were dark brown, his thin brows grey, and but together with the his hair, added one more layer to the mystique that seemed to surrounded the man as if like an aura. Women were said to hide behind their fans and all but swoon at the sight of him.