The Janissary Tree

[ 77 ]

The Russian ambassador put a monocle to his eye and then let it fall without a sound as his eye expanded in surprise.

“This I do not believe!” he muttered, to no one in particular. A Second Secretary, standing close by, stooped as if to gather up the remark and put it to his ear; however he heard nothing. He raised his head and followed his master’s gaze.

Standing by the entrance with a glass of champagne in one hand and a pair of kid gloves in the other was Stanislaw Palewski, the Polish ambassador. But he was like no Polish ambassador that the Russian had ever seen.

Palewski was dressed in a calf-length, padded riding coat of raw red silk, fantastically embroidered in gold thread, with magnificent ermine trim at the neck and cuffs. His long waistcoat was of yellow velvet: unencumbered by anything so vulgar as buttons it was held at the waist by a splendid sash of red and white silk. Below the sash he wore a pair of baggy trousers of blue velvet, stuffed into flop-topped boots so highly polished that they reflected the chequerboarding of the palace floor.

The boots, Yashim’s tailor had said defiantly, were beyond his help.

But now, thanks to a some judicious polishing of the ambassador’s feet, it was impossible to detect that the boots were holey at all.

“It’s an old trick I read about somewhere,” Palewski had earlier remarked, calmly blacking his toes with a brush. “French officers did it in the late war, whenever Napoleon ordered an honour guard.”