JACK OF DIAMONDS, REDUX

EDITED VERSION OF CHAPTER 13

Photo by Tibor Pinter on Unsplash

Marlborough House was the smallest of six Manor houses located in what the locals were now calling Chumley Common—as if renaming it would not only separate the families from their minds, but their lives as well. At one time, the houses were all visible to one another, but two hundred of growth had hidden everything behind a veil of old-growth forest. And while Marlborough House itself only boasted eighteen bedrooms, it was what one might call the senior representative of the six houses—a silent witness of the local history, with its own colourful history going back to 1705. One misleading fact about the house was that it 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 was said to have hosted all the major celebrities of Europe throughout its colourful history: Handel, Mendelssohn, Listz; Christopher Wren, Isaac Newton, Edmund Halley; Pope, Swift and other members of the Scriblerus Club. The anecdotal tales involving the house had gone through as many incarnations as the house had gone through renovations.

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

Finally, in 1907, the house was purchased and renovated once again. This time, by Count Dmitri Alexandrovitch Chernetsov—the scion of a well-connected, as well as influential, Russian family—a man commonly referred to as Prince Igor. He was a Russian businessman rumoured to have ties with the Boyars. While others said he was the Romantic ideal 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. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Chernetsov had been living in Britain since 1906, in Manchester, when he was sent to London to help shore up the family’s business empire. He was thirty-eight and was quick to tell his wife it was the right business decision as far as the family was concerned. Chernetsov had been Oxford educated, graduating in 1892, and had spent his formative years at a boarding school in Kent. He had originally 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.

Seventeen years later—with his oldest child now twenty-seven years old—Chernetsov realized that neither he or his children would see their beloved Russia again. That’s not to say he wasn’t a patriot; he was. There was no one more patriotic, or Russian he liked to say, than Count Dimitri Alexandrovitch Chernetsov. It was a well-kept secret that he actually tried mounting a small force in an attempt to rescue the Russian Royal Family—with the blessings of the Czar’s cousin, George V—but the attempt failed, arriving two days too late. It was that experience that convinced him Lenin and the Revolution had to be stopped, at any cost.

But with the Civil War now over and the Reds declaring victory, the White army—both the monarchist army and their allies—began their withdrawal, leaving behind equipment, supplies, and those who couldn’t keep up, in what proved to be an unorganized march into chaos.

While most of the Boyars and aristos in Russia were labelled as ‘Former People,’ patriots like Chernetsov did what they could to rescue those still trapped and looking to get out of the country. That he was involved in trying to topple the newly established Communist regime there could be no denying; it was the lengths to which he was willing to go that people didn’t fully understand.

Except for people like Aleksandr Antonov, Chernetsov thought as he took a last sip of his whiskey sour. He was looking out over the magnificent garden his wife insisted they plant fifteen years ago, watching his grandchildren at play in the October chill. He knew his daughter-in-law would insist they come in out of the cold, and he smiled to himself, remembering the Russian cold and what it had been like to be a child—until he was sent off to boarding school. That was one thing he promised himself he’d never do to his children. It was a promise he kept.

A tall, thin man of fifty-five, Chernetsov always dressed like a gentleman of the day: elegantly. His hair was neatly combed, and though he’d lost that 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, peppering 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, but together with his hair, they added one more layer to the mystique that surrounded the man like an aura. Women were said to hide behind their fans and all but swoon at the sight of his smouldering eyes.