Princess Daisy (10 page)

However, the following March, in 1939, as soon as he read of the German seizure of Czechoslovakia, Stash saw clearly that war was inevitable, and, immediately, he left Bombay for England. On his arrival he went directly to the headquarters of the Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve and made his application for a commission. By June, Flight Officer A. V. Valensky was involved in full-time
training of young pilots at Duxford in Cambridgeshire, most of them young university squadron members.

When Britain and France declared war on Germany on the 3rd of September, 1939, almost a month short of Stash’s twenty-eighth birthday, he had been trained as a fighter pilot and was a member of the 249 Squadron, flying a Hurricane, powered, he saw to his delight, with a Rolls-Royce Merlin engine. But when his squadron was declared operational in July and qualified for night fighting, Stash, to his inutterably violent and bitter rage, was promoted to Flight Lieutenant and ordered to Aston Down where he was doomed to remain for one entire year, teaching young pilots the techniques of fighter flying.

Nothing he had ever experienced in his life of action had prepared him for those twelve maddening months in which men he had trained were sent off in batches, to “clobber bandits” as they cheerfully put it, leaving him behind to teach, not fight. Whenever he could, Stash went down to London to besiege RAF officials in his grim efforts to get posted to a fighter squadron.

“Be reasonable, Valensky,” he was told with cold regularity. “You’re a damn sight more useful to us right where you are than if you were busy getting shot up somewhere—
someone
has to teach the kiddies, after all.”

Filled with pent-up frustration and feeling utterly worthless, Stash drank heavily for the first time in his life. When he met Victoria Woodhill, a WAAF, he put all his pent-up frustration into conquering the rather curt and aloof young woman whose chief attraction was that she was not interested in him. Anything he could batter, beat against and overcome was a target for Stash during those months that saw the Germans push deeper into the body of Europe. They were married in June of 1940 and almost immediately afterward lost sight of each other as Victoria was posted to Scotland.

Officially the Battle of Britain lasted almost four months, from the 10th of July, 1940, through the 31st of October. It was actually a series of battles, fought by six hundred RAF planes against the mighty
Luftwaffe
flying to dominate Britain with its three thousand bombers and twelve hundred fighter planes. Had the RAF lost, England would almost certainly have been invaded.

For Stash, the Battle of Britain lasted only three months, beginning in August 1940, when the powers that decided such things finally reached the last-ditch conclusion
that they could no longer afford the luxury of Training Units, but sent their newly hatched airmen out to operational squadrons to be trained between and during actual combat.

At last Stash was posted to Westhampnett, near Portsmouth, where he arrived on a day which would be known as “Black Thursday,” the day of August 15, 1940, the day on which Goring unleashed his “eagles” from all the flanks under his command in an all-out air assault. A vast armada of Dornier 17s and Junker 88s, escorted by fighter planes, had crossed the coast of England when Stash’s new squadron was scrambled. In the blue English sky his first air battle was a maelstrom of diving, swerving, spinning, firing planes, thrusting and striking even as they died.

By the time the battle was over, Intelligence had confirmed that Valensky had bagged two German bombers and three German fighters. He had never even heard the shouting which filled his earphones as the other pilots warned each other of an attacker or screamed in jubilation when they’d made a hit—the cold, concentrated, lethal rage of his own flying made them inaudible to him. Nor did he realize that each time he shot down an enemy he uttered a harsh war cry which rang in the ears of the other members of his flight. After they’d driven off the Germans, with their tails between their legs, the air was full of comment.

“Christ, what in bloody hell was
that
?”

“The new chap—can’t be anyone else—no one here but us chickens.”

“Well, it sounded like a bloody condor to me!”

It was as Condor Valensky that Stash fought the Battle of Britain; and later, transferred to the Western Desert Air Force, he flew by day and by night in operation “Crusader” to relieve the port of Tobruk in November of 1941. It was as Condor Valensky that he flew a Hurricane “tank-buster” against Rommel at El Alamein; as Condor Valensky that he won the DFC and the DFO and became Squadron Commander in 1942. He was not called Stash again until the war had ended. And been won.

5

A
s autumn approached, Francesca and Stash, still deep in the first weeks of their honeymoon, began to plan for the future. They discussed the idea of traveling to India toward the end of November, in order to be in Calcutta for the December and January polo season which would be followed by the matches in Delhi in February and March. But, one day in the middle of October, Francesca became certain that she was pregnant.

“It must have happened that first night in the stables,” she told Stash. “I suspected it three weeks after we were married but I wanted to be absolutely sure before I told you.” She was resplendent.

“Then? In the stables? You’re sure?” he demanded, transported by the sudden joy.

“Yes, then. I know it. I don’t know how I know, but I do.”

“And do you also know that it will be a boy? Because that
I
know.”

Francesca merely murmured, “Perhaps.” She knew why Stash wanted a boy so badly. He had a son by his brief first marriage, a boy who was now almost six years old. The boy had been born after Stash and Victoria Woodhill had separated. That hasty marriage, product of Stash’s frustrated warrior spirit, had not lasted long into peacetime. They had waited only until after the child’s birth to get divorced. The boy’s mother had no intention of saddling her son with more foreign a name than the one he had been born with, so he was called George Edward Woodhill Valensky. However, as a baby, she had dubbed
him Ram, because of his habit of butting his head against the side of his crib, and Ram he had remained. He lived with his mother and stepfather in Scotland and only visited Stash on infrequent occasions. Stash’s hope, so strong that it was expressed as a certainty, that Francesca’s baby would be a boy, was a way of ensuring himself another son, one who would not be taken from him.

Francesca had seen photos of Ram, a straight dart of a boy, with brows knitted together as he stared defiantly into the camera with a stern and unchildlike expression on his handsome face. She recognized little of Stash in this son who had an air of aristocratic coldness, a high-strung, almost bitter expression that already indicated that he would never allow himself to relax into the rough and confident stance of his father.

“He’s a regular horseman, even now, even at this age,” Stash said. “Ram’s a perfect physical specimen, brought up like a little soldier—that damned British upper-class tradition.” He looked at the photograph again, shaking his head. “However, he’s intelligent and as tough as they make them. There’s something … closed off … in him … like all his mother’s family. Or perhaps it was the divorce. In any case, it couldn’t be helped.” He shrugged, put away the photos with the gesture of a man who doesn’t intend to look at them again for a long time, and held Francesca close to him. His eyes searched her face and, just for a moment, his predator’s gaze softened and she felt that it was she who was his rock in a stormy sea.

The villa outside Lausanne was so comfortable and spacious that the Valenskys decided to remain there until their child was born. Lausanne itself, with its excellent doctors, was only a short ride away, and, since there was no longer any question of going to India, Stash sent his string of ponies to be put out to grass in England. After the war, he had taken the larger part of his fortune out of Switzerland and invested it in the Rolls-Royce Company. Born in Russia, brought up in the Alps, a nomad of the polo seasons, he found that his nationality was emotional, dedicated not to a country but to an engine, the Rolls-Royce engine that had, to his way of thinking, surely saved England and determined the course of the war.

In the summer of the following year, when the baby would be a few months old, Stash assured Francesca that
they would move to London, buy a house, get properly settled in and make that their home base for the future, but meanwhile they lived those first months of their marriage in a state of such incredulous adoration of each other, such passionate absorption in each other’s body, that neither of them wanted to travel any farther than to Evian, just across Lac Leman, where they went from time to time to gamble at the casino. The trip by lake steamer in the early evening was a dream of pleasure as they stood together at the rail and watched the small boats, their yellow, red and blue sails like huge butterflies, heading for the harbor in the sunset When they took the midnight steamer home to the Ouchy landing stage, they were never sure if they had won or lost at
chemin de fer
, nor did they care.

To mark the passage of the weeks, Stash gave Francesca more of the Fabergé rock-crystal vases from his mother’s collection. Each one held a few sprays of flowers or branches of fruit worked in precious stones, diamonds and enamel: flowering quince, cranberry, and raspberries, lily of the valley, daffodils, wild roses and violets, all fashioned with the most imaginative and delicate workmanship, so that the rich materials never overwhelmed the reality of the flower and fruit forms. Soon Francesca had a flowering Fabergé garden growing by her bedside, and, when he learned of the coming child, Stash gave her a Fabergé egg made of lapis lazuli mounted in gold. The egg contained a yolk of deep yellow enamel. When this yolk was opened it activated a mechanism that caused a miniature crown to rise up out of the heart of the egg, a perfect replica of the dome-shaped crown of Catherine the Great, paved with diamonds and topped by a cabochon ruby. Inside the crown still another egg was suspended, formed from a large cabochon ruby, hanging on a tiny gold chain.

“My mother never knew if this was an Imperial Easter egg or not,” Stash told her as she wondered at it. “My father bought it from a refugee after the Revolution who swore that it was one of those presented to the Dowager Tsarina Marie but he couldn’t account for how he happened to have it and my father knew too much to insist … however, it bears the Fabergé mark.”

“I’ve never seen anything so perfect,” Francesca said, holding it on the palm of one hand.

“I have,” Stash answered, running his hands down the
length of her neck until they found her breasts which were growing fuller and riper with each passing day. The egg fell to the carpet as he fastened his lips on her darkening nipples and suckled as demandingly as any child.

In Lausanne, as winter closed in on the great villa, Stash exercised the large bays in his stable during the afternoon, and Francesca napped under a light, mauve silk eiderdown, waking only when she could tell, from the subtle smell of snow that invaded their room, that he had returned.

After tea, if the early evening was not too windy, Stash took Francesca for a horse-drawn sleigh ride, and often, seeing the moon rise as they returned to the huge villa, as welcoming, cheerful and brightly lit as an ocean liner, listening to the snuffling of the horses and tender music of the sleigh bells, warm under the fur-lined lap robe, with the hood of her full-length sable coat drawn up over her chin, Francesca felt tears on her cheeks. Not tears of happiness, but rather tears of that sudden sadness that comes at those rare moments of perfect joy that are fully realized at the exact instant at which they are being experienced. Such knowledge always carries in it a premonition of loss, a premonition which needs no reason or explanation.

Just as Francesca grew expert in the ways of the great silver samovar that occupied its traditional place of honor on a round, lace-covered table in the salon, she became accustomed to the ways of Stash’s crowd of servants who treated Francesca with a mixture of irrepressibly loving concern and overbearing curiosity. She found herself virtually engulfed in—not “staff” she thought, nothing that starchy, not “help,” nothing that casual, certainly not “domestics,” nothing that removed, but rather a tribe of what she could only think of as semi-in-laws.

She had married into a way of life, a life which included Masha, who, as a matter of course, invaded Francesca’s lingerie drawers in order to fold each object with exquisite care, Masha who hung up her bathrobes and then tied the sashes and buttoned the buttons, so that it was no longer possible to put on a robe quickly, Masha who had her own way with scarfs, arranging them according to color rather than according to utility or size, so that old favorites had a way of disappearing into the spectrum, Masha who appeared in Francesca’s bathroom as she got out of her tub,
with an enormous warm towel unfolded and ready to wrap around her.

Within a few weeks Francesca felt entirely comfortable with Masha’s ministrations and allowed her to brush her hair and even help her into her underwear, quite, Masha told her, as she had been allowed to do for Stash’s mother, Princess Titiana, when the Princess’s own maids were unavailable for one reason or another.

“Is that so, Masha,” said Francesca with lazy interest, but as she relaxed and gave herself over to the gentle brushing, she
saw
herself vividly, lying there on the heap of lace-covered pillows in a velvet dressing gown with her hair being tended devotedly. She had only to ask for a luxury in order to have it brought to her immediately—or, in the case of the men who came from Cartier to show Prince Valensky jewels for his wife, she had only to indicate which of the jewels pleased her, to own it. Yes, now when she walked, she walked like a princess, Francesca thought, and didn’t even ask herself what she meant.

The inquiries Stash had made among his friends in Lausanne had indicated that Dr. Henri Allard was the most highly considered specialist in the city. He ran a private clinic which was, in effect, a small, extremely well-run, modern hospital, much favored by wealthy women from all parts of the world.