Death Comes to the Ballets Russes

1

New Year is the season of hope or despair. For the young, the first day of January brings another chance of true love, the prospect of a new job with new horizons. For the middle-aged, it is the time when people start to look back as well as forward, the time when the first faint lines start to appear on what had been perfect skin, the time funerals start to replace weddings and christenings as the rite of passage. For the old, they know that the aches and pains that have grown into permanent fixtures are never going to go away now; they know that time is not going to run backwards to make them fit and healthy again; they know that each New Year might be the last and, more surely than ever, that death comes at the end.

For the gilded aristocracy of Europe, New Year always begins with a ball. In the perfectly sprung ballrooms of the Habsburgs and the Romanovs, from the Hofburg in Vienna to the Winter Palace in St Petersburg, aristocrats dress up and dance. Like the Roman god Janus, who gave his name to the month of January, the dukes and duchesses, the princes and princesses, the counts and countesses face both ways at once. They look back, secure in the knowledge that their family has left its mark on history across the centuries. They look forward, secure in the knowledge that their family will leave its mark on the centuries to come.

Princess Marie Golitsyn thought she must have the largest collection of jewellery boxes in St Petersburg. All of them, large or small, were open on her dressing table, their contents spilling over the sides and rolling away across the floor. She had jewellery boxes made with different kinds of wood, walnut and rosewood and mahogany. There were silver ones, boxes inlaid with silver or platinum; even a box shaped rather like a heart in the Art Nouveau style. The Princess had gold and silver ornaments, she had rubies and sapphires and emeralds and pearls. She had bracelets and chatelaines and carcanets and a couple of diadems left to her by her favourite aunt. There was a diamond tiara made by Fabergé, a present from her husband a few years before. The Princess discovered later that it was one of a pair. The other one had gone to her husband’s mistress in Moscow.

Princess Marie was one of a vast throng of aristocrats in the Russian capital preparing for a ball at the Winter Palace. She had been at her dressing table for an hour and a half and thought she would be ready quite soon. The carriage was waiting outside in the snow. She could hear her husband pacing up and down the hallway. She knew that if she didn’t finish her toilette soon he would be so drunk that it would be impossible for him to go to the palace at all. She decided on the triple ring of pearls and a dog-collar-style choker necklace. A series of diamonds encircled the top of her ornate dress from Worth in Paris. She added earrings and the Fabergé tiara, bracelets for her wrist and a sapphire star, the most valuable piece she possessed, pinned to her waist. Her fingers shone with the pure gold of a couple of rings believed to have been created in Paris at the end of the seventeenth century for a mistress of the Sun King. Princess Marie Golitsyn rose from the table and swept down the stairs. She left her jewels strewn all across her dressing table and the boxes lying around on the floor. The servants could pick them up later. That was what servants were for.

Ten minutes later she was handing her cloak to one of the attendants outside the Winter Palace. Ahead she could see the white marble staircase that led up to the gigantic galleries, each one as tall as a cathedral. Baskets of orchids lined the walls, flanked by enormous mirrors where the ladies could inspect their adornments and make final adjustments to their décolletage. Cossack Life Guards in scarlet tunics stood to attention every fifty yards. But for Princess Golitsyn and her cousin Tatiana, who lived next door, and for Princess Nathalie, her neighbour on the other side of the Fontanka Quay, the important people that evening were not their husbands or the soldiers or the lovers they would dance with under the glittering chandeliers. The important people were their sons.

The Russian capital St Petersburg had always been blessed with more than its fair share of dissolute and depraved young men, who spent money they did not have in the gambling clubs; young men who bought expensive presents on credit for the stars of the opera and the theatre; young men who spent lavishly on the pretty wives of their contemporaries they thought might be compliant. Most of these young men were bailed out by reluctant fathers and families. But as the New Year Ball of 1912 drew closer, two young men, Prince Alexis Kishkin and Prince Felix Peshkov, officers in the fashionable Preobrazhensky Guards, found that all the doors in front of them were shut. Their fathers and grandparents had closed ranks, refusing any further loans and insisting that the income the young men had inherited on coming of age be used to pay down their debts. The banks were under instruction not to lend the young men a single rouble. This was easier than it might have appeared, as Peshkov’s father owned one bank and had considerable shareholdings in two others.

The young men relied on secret contributions from their mothers. ‘We couldn’t let Alexis starve.’ In the dying days of 1911, the impoverished young men had hatched a daring scheme to restore their fortunes. The season for great balls in St Petersburg was approaching. The young men had often seen their mothers preparing for these evenings. The most difficult choice was never what clothes to wear, but what jewels should adorn them. Few women in Europe loved their gems like the aristocratic women of St Petersburg. The young men knew that special boxes and caskets would be brought out. Various combinations would be tried. The final decision was usually left to the very last minute.

As the carriages and the sledges sped across the snow to the New Year’s Ball in the Winter Palace, the young men made their move. Characteristically they took one big gamble. They gambled that their mothers would not have put their jewels away. They would still be littered across the dressing tables and the dressing-room floors. They put on their most splendid uniforms and charged into three of the grandest houses on Fontanka Quay, the Belgravia of St Petersburg, home to Princess Marie Golitsyn and her cousin Tatiana and her friend Princess Nathalie. They brought six of their soldiers to act as sentries and lookouts. ‘There’s been a robbery!’ they shouted as the butlers let them in. ‘Tell everyone to stay where they are and not to move!’ The young men sped upstairs and gathered pearls and diamonds, emeralds and sapphires, gold and silver, into three different saddlebags. Then they disappeared into the night.

The following week they took a train to Moscow. They consulted a dealer. He said it would be impossible to sell the jewels in Russia, as the authorities probably had details of every single piece by now. He advised taking them to Antwerp or London and selling them there. Prince Felix Peshkov had a special friend in the corps de ballet in Diaghilev’s company the Ballets Russes. Peshkov knew the ballet was going to London after Monte Carlo and Paris. He knew his friend would take them if he asked her and sell them for a good price. Even regular dancers in the corps de ballet travel with enormous amounts of luggage, costumes, special outfits for particular roles, even scenery for the more exotic offerings. If anybody asked, the girl was going to say the jewels were fake and were needed for her part in The Firebird. Anastasia was a good girl. Prince Felix Peshkov knew she was a good girl. Didn’t she live in a pretty little house he provided? Didn’t she go to fashionable parties in the fashionable clothes he had bought her?

The lights went out very slowly in the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. The stage was dark at first. Balakirev’s music was filled with foreboding, a sad and tragic melody that set the mood for the ballet. As the curtain rose, a great room was revealed, with mauve and purple walls and a green ceiling. There was a fire with a dying glow and on a huge divan lay the sleeping figure of Thamar, Queen of Georgia, stirring uneasily in her sleep.

The date was 12 June 1912, and this was the London premiere of the Ballets Russes’s Thamar, first performed in Paris. The year before, Diaghilev’s company had taken London by storm. They had danced in front of the King and Queen. They had danced on a specially constructed stage at Strawberry Hill and been invited to all the finest society houses. Rupert Brooke had come down from Grantchester fifteen times to see them. A more puritan figure perhaps, Leonard Woolf, former civil servant in Ceylon, had been entranced. Harvey Nichols cleared their windows of the white cream and lilac of summer fashion and replaced them with hangings in the style of Léon Bakst, the artistic director of the company.

At the centre of the Ballets Russes was a pair of lovers. Sergei Diaghilev, thirty-nine years old, broad chested with a homburg hat tilted low over his eyes, a cane always in his hand, was the founder, impresario and inspiration behind the venture. His ballets were set to music by the finest Russian composers, from Tchaikovsky and Rimsky-Korsakov to Stravinsky. His sets and costumes, designed by Léon Bakst, brought an air of the exotic and the erotic Orient to the more restrained capitals of Western Europe. Diaghilev had met Tolstoy and conversed with Oscar Wilde. He, like most of the company, spoke hardly any English. French, the lingua franca of the Russian intelligentsia in St Petersburg, was also the language of the dance. Large, and running to fat because of his love of food, Diaghilev was believed by Osbert Sitwell to have only three words of English, ‘more chocolate cake’.

Diaghilev was the foremost impresario of his age. His career began in St Petersburg with the launch of a magazine called World of Art. He organized a major exhibition of Russian portrait paintings, travelling across the vast country in search of forgotten artists and lost masterpieces. He had no home of his own. He lived in hotels where he sometimes left without paying the bill. He was neurotic, superstitious, disorganized. Rehearsals were a form of controlled chaos that somehow managed to come right on the night. For several years now he had refused to send letters, preferring the more immediate telephone or cable, which lent themselves better to panic and hysteria. In spite of all this he managed to run the finances, the publicity, the choice of ballets. He teetered permanently on the fringe of bankruptcy.

Diaghilev’s favourite place in the world was Venice. Something about the watery city soothed his troubled spirit. Here, after all, his great hero Richard Wagner had composed the second act of Tristan und Isolde in the Palazzo Giustinian and died in the Ca’ Vendramin Calergi on the Grand Canal. Like Diaghilev, Wagner’s life was characterized by political exile, turbulent love affairs and repeated flights from his creditors.

Diaghilev loved the shimmering waters of the Grand Canal, the palazzos in their Gothic glory, the pompous grandeur and self-importance of the Doge’s Palace, the sense that the entire place was a stage set waiting for one more performance, that opera singers or ballet dancers might suddenly drift out from behind the Hotel Danieli on the waterfront and perform in the great drawing room of St Mark’s Square. His favourite hotel was the Grand Hotel des Bains on the lido, built at the turn of the century for Europe’s rich, in flight from harsher winter climes. Diaghilev was consumed by the desire for artistic perfection. He was supremely Russian but now lived mainly abroad. To his great regret, he had never been able to take his Ballets Russes to St Petersburg. He had problems with the administration of the Imperial Theatre. He had enemies in the Imperial Court.

One of his famous ballerinas was very young when she joined the Ballets Russes and would later say that she always called Diaghilev ‘Sergypops’. Diaghilev’s paramour was the young dancer from the Imperial Ballet, Vaslav Nijinsky. He was already the most famous dancer in the world, apparently able to hang in the air and perform impossible leaps. He drew audiences into theatres like a human magnet.

When Thamar, Queen of Georgia, wakes, she waves a scarf through her window to entice a passing suitor into her castle. When the Prince arrives in his astrakhan cap and huge black cloak, she initially rejects his advances, but fervent dancing follows and the pair kiss. There is a wild Caucasian dance, a kaleidoscope of tossing sleeves and flashing boots where real daggers thud into the floor. The lovers embrace, then they leave the room and the Queen’s followers continue dancing wildly. When the Queen and Prince re-enter, she suddenly stabs him and he falls through a secret panel into the river below. The Queen returns to the window to signal to a new victim with her scarf.

The Covent Garden audience gave the performance a standing ovation. The ballet wasn’t long, but it was like no other ballet the audience had seen before. It was followed by another Diaghilev special, full of Eastern promise, called Scheherazade. When the stars and the corps de ballet came on stage for the final curtain call, there was one notable absentee. Originally it had been Adolph Bolm cast in the role of the Prince in Thamar, but he had been indisposed so an understudy had taken the role instead. The understudy did not appear to take his bow; his body was found below the trapdoor where the Queen had thrown him after she had stabbed him. But this was no mere Russian version of the ancient myth of The King Must Die. The understudy really was dead, stabbed through the heart with one of the daggers used in the dance, as he had been on the stage.

It was hours after the performance before they found the corpse. Sergei Grigoriev, the régisseur who was in charge of all administrative matters, found Diaghilev taking a late supper at the Savoy Hotel with Nijinsky and Tamara Karsavina, the ballerina who had danced the title role in Thamar. They were on the second bottle of champagne.

‘Sergei Pavlovich,’ said Grigoriev, ‘you must come back to the theatre at once! Something terrible has happened.’

‘What is it? Can’t you see I’m having my supper?’ The other diners turned to watch the animated conversation in Russian.

‘It’s Taneyev, the understudy who took Bolm’s place in Thamar this evening.’

‘He’s a promising boy, that Alexander Taneyev,’ said Diaghilev. ‘I promoted him to understudy Bolm myself.’

‘Well, he won’t be doing any more work as an understudy,’ Sergei Grigoriev crossed himself three times as fast as he could, ‘not now, he won’t. He’s dead. Stabbed through the heart with one of the daggers used in the ballet. We found him lying in a pool of his own blood.’

‘My God, this is frightful. What an inconsiderate time to die, right at the beginning of a new season. This could ruin everything. Stupid English policemen tramping round the sets of The Firebird and Le Spectre de la Rose in their great boots. God in heaven, it doesn’t bear thinking about.’

Diaghilev stopped for a moment to comfort Tamara Karsavina, who was crying quietly into her oysters. ‘Calm down, child, calm down. You mustn’t ruin your looks.’

Even his critics admitted Diaghilev was a good man in a crisis. By now he had lived through so many of them.

‘Have you told anybody about this, Grigoriev?’

‘What do you mean, told anybody about this? It’s a quarter to one in the morning, for God’s sake! There was only Misha, the stagehand, and myself in the opera house looking for Alexander. Everyone else has gone back to their hotels. Misha is waiting for me to come back.’

‘So the authorities at the opera house know nothing about this? The English police have not been informed?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Very well,’ said Diaghilev, taking out his monocle and polishing it on one of the Savoy’s finest napkins. ‘This is the best I can think of for the moment. Go back to the opera house. Find a big trunk — I’ve seen plenty of them lying about at the back of the dressing rooms — and put Alexander in it. Close the lid. Lock it if you can find a key. Take it to that great storeroom in the basement that’s full of bits of old stage sets and other junk. Nobody’s going to find it in there, not for a while, at any rate. Then leave as quietly as you can.’

Grigoriev slipped away into the night. ‘Just one last thing,’ Diaghilev waddled at full speed to catch his colleague by the door.

‘What’s that?’

‘Just this, my friend. Don’t forget to throw away the key.’

Karsavina was still weeping softly at the supper table.

‘What about that poor boy, Sergei Pavlovich? You can’t just leave him in a trunk in that awful basement. What about his burial? What about his parents?’

‘You leave that to me, Tamara. I’ll think of something. Come to think of it, we’ll be out of London in another five weeks. Maybe they won’t find the body until after we’ve gone.’

Diaghilev could well have been right about the body in the trunk not being discovered until after the Ballets Russes had left town. But there was one factor he had overlooked. Alexander Taneyev was not staying with the rest of the junior dancers and the corps de ballet in their hotel. He did have a room there, but he wasn’t spending the nights in the hotel most of the time. He was staying with his uncle, one Richard Wagstaff Gilbert, in a large house guarded by two stone lions next to Barnes Pond and close to the River Thames. Gilbert was a financier with fingers in many of the City of London’s tastiest and most profitable pies. When the young man didn’t come home the first evening, Gilbert presumed he had gone to the hotel with friends and stayed there. At that stage he wasn’t worried at all. Three days later, he moved into action. He sat on a charity committee with the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police. The Commissioner was pressed into service. Gilbert was a trustee of the Royal Opera House and knew one of its principal patrons, Gladys Robinson, Marchioness of Ripon, a formidable society lady who used to move in the fast set around King Edward VII and Mrs Keppel. Oscar Wilde had dedicated his 1893 play A Woman of No Importance to Lady Ripon. By now she was a woman of considerable importance. She was a friend and supporter of Nellie Melba. The day after Richard Gilbert mobilized his forces, twenty policemen were sent to search the Royal Opera House. They found the body just before the doors opened for the evening performance of Carnaval, Thamar and Les Sylphides.

Lady Ripon was in her box as usual. Her chauffeur drove her up to town every evening in her six-cylinder Napier motor car. The journey took about half an hour from her house in Coombe just outside London. No mention was made of the murder of Alexander Taneyev. Alfred Bolm was back dancing the role of the Prince in Thamar. There was no sign of Diaghilev. Lady Ripon had noticed that he was often to be seen during performances, watching from an empty box or peering round the curtain. She only heard about the incident the following afternoon when she received a telephone call from Richard Gilbert. Reports of the Russian’s demise were already circulating in the City of London.

Lady Ripon had Russian blood in her veins. She was descended from the 11th Earl of Pembroke, who married Countess Catherine Semyonovna Vorontsova, on 25 January 1808. Catherine was the daughter of the prominent Russian aristocrat and diplomat Semyon Romanovich Vorontsov. Like many in her circle, Lady Ripon had a great many acquaintances and very few friends. After she heard the news, she invited herself round to the Chelsea house of the one Russian lady she knew in London to tell her the full story. Natasha Shaporova and her husband Mikhail had been based in the capital for a number of years. Natasha was in her mid-twenties and was one of the most beautiful women in London. Mikhail’s father was one of the richest men in Russia. People said he was far wealthier than the Romanovs. Amongst his many financial interests was a large bank with branches all over Europe. Natasha and Mikhail had just returned to London after a two-year spell in Cannes, where Mikhail had opened the Riviera office of the Shaporova Bank to cater for the needs of the wealthy Russian émigrés and their everlasting lust for expensive chips at the Casino in Monte Carlo.

‘Well, Natasha,’ Lady Ripon asked as she finished her story. ‘What do you make of it, this death at the Ballets Russes? I expect the news will be all over town tomorrow morning.’

‘I’m not an expert in these matters, Lady Ripon. Even Russians don’t usually go round murdering each other at the end of the ballet. Do you think there will be a scandal?’

Natasha smiled a rather wicked smile as she brought up the subject of scandal. It looked as though she would rather enjoy it.

‘Scandal? A scandal?’ Lady Ripon was horrified at the thought that she might be caught up in such a thing. It might not be well received in Society.

‘I tell you what the really interesting question is,’ said Natasha, who was a devotee of the works of Conan Doyle.

‘What’s that, my dear?’

‘It’s this. Did the murderer intend to kill the understudy Alexander Taneyev? Or was the victim meant to be Alfred Bolm, who was on the programme to take the role? I don’t suppose we know when Bolm cried off, do we?’

‘God bless my soul! I’d never have thought of that. I have no idea what the answer might be. That’ll be something the police will have to find out, I expect.’

Natasha started to giggle. Lady Ripon frowned. Aristocratic young women weren’t meant to giggle like schoolgirls.

‘Forgive me, Lady Ripon. I’ve just thought of something. The police are going to have a terrible time. Diaghilev doesn’t know a word of English. He speaks Russian or French. The top people in the Ballets Russes like Fokine and Bakst all speak French but not English. The make-up artists and the technical people they bring with them from St Petersburg don’t speak French. They only know Russian. I met that lovely ballerina Tamara Karsavina when they were here last year. She doesn’t speak English either — she and her friends always carried a note with Premier Hotel, Russell Square, Bloomsbury written on it to show the taxi driver where to take them. It’s going to be chaos, pure chaos.’

‘What am I going to do?’ Lady Ripon was horrified at the prospect of her Royal Opera House and her Ballets Russes, as she always referred to them, turning into a Tower of Babel in the middle of Covent Garden. ‘I feel so responsible, you know.’

Natasha Shaporova suddenly remembered a hotel in St Petersburg where she had danced with a handsome investigator from London some years earlier when she was still Natasha Bobrinsky. The investigator was at the end of a difficult case involving an English diplomat found dead on the Nevskii Prospekt and was returning to London the next day. Natasha recalled asking him where the most romantic place in the world to get married was. She never forgot his reply: ‘There’s only one answer,’ he said, smiling at Natasha and feeling at least seventy years old. ‘Venice. You get married in the Basilica of St Mark or, if you can’t manage that, San Giorgio Maggiore across the water. You have your reception in the Doge’s Palace. If that’s not possible, I’m sure you could rent a whole palazzo on the Grand Canal. It would be wonderful. Mikhail’s father and yours might have to throw quite a lot of money about, but the Venetians have been taking bribes for centuries. Anyway, you should all feel at home there.’

‘Should we?’ asked Natasha.

‘Of course you should, whole bloody city’s built on the water. Just like here.’

She had married Mikhail in the marble church of Santa Maria dei Miracoli in the heart of Venice. The investigator and his wife were among the guests at the reception in the Ca’ d’Oro on the Grand Canal.

‘I know what you should do,’ cried Natasha. ‘I know exactly what you should do!’

‘What should I do, Natasha?’

‘I’ve just remembered. I know just the man for you. I met him in St Petersburg years ago when he was investigating a murder. As far as I know he doesn’t speak Russian but he speaks perfect French. At least he’d be able to talk to Diaghilev and Fokine and Bakst and that rather frightening-looking composer person — Stravinsky, I think he’s called. My friend is one of the most distinguished investigators in the country.’

‘And what is his name, my dear?’

‘Why, he lives just round the corner in Markham Square, Lady Ripon. His name is Powerscourt, Lord Francis Powerscourt.’