“Ancestral portraits darkened the walls of the vast paneled room. Otherwise, it was not unlike the headmaster’s study at St. Bart’s School, on the Atlantic seaboard, some three thousand miles west of the imagined Palace. A copious spring shower kept lashing at the french windows, beyond which young greenery, all eyes, shivered and streamed. Nothing but this sheet of rain seemed to separate and protect the Palace from the revolution that for several days had been rocking the city.… Actually, Vict...or’s father was a cranky refugee doctor, whom the lad had never much liked and had not seen now for almost two years. The King, his more plausible father, had decided not to abdicate. No newspapers were coming out. The Orient Express was stranded, with all its transient passengers, at a suburban station, on the platform of which, reflected in puddles, picturesque peasants stood and gaped at the curtained windows of the long, mysterious cars. The Palace, and its terraced gardens, and the city below the palatial hill, and the main city square, where decapitations and folk dances had already started, despite the weather—all this was at the heart of a cross whose arms terminated in Trieste, Graz, Budapest, and Zagreb, as designated in Rand McNally’s Ready Reference Atlas of the World.MoreLessRead More Read Less
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