The King's Commisar

Extract from the diaries of the late Capt. J. R. A, Walters, DSC, RN, Captain (1917-21) of HMS

Airedale. Entry for April 19,1918:

During the night the man came up on my bridge and asked permission to remain a while. The sea was high that night, for we were bucking into a strong nor’easter. For two hours or so he stood quietly by the bridge wing door, watching Airedale's bow lift and fall, half a smile on his lips and an odd look on his face. He was a handsome fellow, too - what one could see of him behind the black whiskers, for he had a full set - and I judged from his stance and bearing he must be Royal Navy, and twenty-six years of age or thereabouts. He stood easily on the canting deck, back straight as a gun barrel. A sailor, beyond a doubt.

The man who must have been Walters's passenger was born in 1892, and he lived to be seventy-eight, but that is the only description of him in youth anyone was able to find, though his history was later investigated with great vigour by squads of Treasury men. So many of his tracks had been covered by time or by events or, more often, with intent, that hardly anything remained. The foregoing passage of Captain Walter's diary entry is also not without interest: Ordered aboard flagship and went, all a-tremble, wondering what offence I had committed, only to be greeted, on saluting the quarter-deck, by Beatty's glossy flag lieutenant in person!. Given orders: Airedale to be made ready at once for sea. She would be temporarily detached from the fleet and would await, with steam up, the arrival of an unnamed man who would be brought to her in Admiral Beatty's own barge. When the man was aboard, Airedale was to sail at once. Only after clearing Scapa was I to open the sealed envelope containing sailing orders. And there was more of this, all said in a low and mysterious tone: our passenger was not to be engaged in conversation by myself or anyone else! How our masters love their mysteries!

Well, the fellow arrived and with him came a goodish amount of baggage for a man alone. I gave him Number One's cabin, which didn't please Porky much . . .

The diary entry concluded:

Put him off at Bergen in Norway, where he was met at the quayside, and then without waste of time I put back to Scapa to rejoin the Fleet.

Captain Walters's daughter, who now owns the diaries, said her father had wondered to the end of his life about the identity of his passenger and that there had been an occasion, some time in the late 1920s, when Walters, introduced to Admiral Beatty at a fleet reunion, had asked Beatty direct about the incident. Ten years had gone by, after all, and it could hardly still be a great secret. Walters afterwards told his daughter that Beatty only gave his celebrated grin and said he could recall nothing of the incident. One final picture of the man from life was unearthed in Sainte-Maxime in the south of France. The last housekeeper, Anne-Marie Frey, a Frenchwoman by now in her ninetieth year, was able to furnish a word picture of sorts, of him as an old man. He was bald. He wore spectacles. He had a white beard and a white moustache. He sounded, and probably looked, like thousands of other elderly gentlemen. She remembered him well but said there was so little to describe. He had no particular interests, or close friends.

He was just an old man who lived alone. But there was one thing. He slept always with a photograph on the table by his bed.

Alas, m'sieu, destroyed with his other trifles; there was so little and his instructions were perfectly clear. This photograph - was it of a man or of a woman?

Oh, a woman, m'sieu!

Do you know her name?

I cannot be certain though I believe so. The photograph was destroyed before I could compare. Compare?

With a picture I saw in a book, later.

Of the same person?

Oui.

The name?

It is a great sadness, m'sieu, if I am right. She was a princess, the daughter of the Russian Tsar. I see her picture in a book and at once I recognize her. She was Maria, but they called her Marie. . .