Baltic Mission (1988)
“‘I understood my brother to be living under a nom de guerre.’ ‘Oh, it isn’t common knowledge, Captain Drinkwater; you need have no fear that more than a few men know about it. Dungarth does, of course, and Prince Vorontzoff, your brother’s employer and a man sympathetic to the alliance with Great Britain, knows him for an Englishman. But I think I am the only other man who knows his identity, excepting yourself, of course.’ ‘But you have not said how you knew.’ ‘It is quite simple. He told me o...nce. He was sent to me from Hamburg. I introduced him to the elder Vorontzoff and, one night, shortly before I left St Petersburg, we got drunk . . . a Russian custom, you see,’ Mackenzie said and Drinkwater thought that Mackenzie had probably ensured Edward’s loose tongue by his own liberality. ‘He had reached a turning-point. A man does not put off the old life overnight and he seemed over-burdened with conscience. He made some thick allusions to drinking water. The joke was too heavy for wit and he was too drunk to jest, yet his persistence made me certain the words had some significance . . . but it was only when I learned your name from Lieutenant . . .’ ‘Quilhampton.’ ‘Just so, that I began to recall Ostroff’s drunken pun.MoreLess
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