Killing Eve: Bloodline (14)

The fourteenth episode of a new Killing Eve adventure, published exclusively on Substack

            I stand, make my apologies, and leave the room. Oxana can listen to the rest. The sight and sound of Balice makes me nauseous; her hatred and contempt for me hang in the air like gas. I'm almost as furious with Oxana. I need her full, spoken support, I want her going into battle for me. I'm also worried about Valentin. How has he been affected by last night's events? Is he scared? Angry? Confused? Our job, as I understand it, is to look after him, and I mean to do that. If Oxana reads my concern for him as flirting, then too fucking bad. It's nothing to what I feel when I see her lapping up Balice's bitch-on-heat lust. Does she really not get it?

            Eve knocks on Valentin's bedroom door but gets no reply, and eventually finds him in the kitchen, dressed in a floor-length black silk dressing gown, measuring ground coffee into a percolator.

            'Can we talk?' she asks him, her voice still tremulous with anger. 'In private?'

            'Of course, Eve.' He gives her a pale smile. 'The coffee won't be a minute, then we can go through to the garden. No one will disturb us there.'

            Minutes later they're descending a flight of stone steps to a lawn strewn with fallen leaves. Eve's cup and saucer rattle in her hand and she forces herself to breathe evenly. Valentin gestures Eve towards a garden chair, and they seat themselves at an ornamental stone table. At the edge of the lawn, an overgrown bed of lavender gives off a faint, damp scent.

            'Autumn,' Valentin says, gathering the black dressing gown around his knees. 'Another season closer to death.'

            Eve smiles. 'You're much too young to feel that way. At your age you should behave as if you're going to live forever.'

            He smiles. 'I know all too well I'm not going to.'

---

           

---

'What do you mean?' Eve asks.

            'I was about to tell you last night. My father asked me not to, but I figured you'll find out sooner or later, so-'

            She waits.

            'You asked if I had a weak heart.'

            'Yes,' she says. 'That's what Nikolai told me.'

            'I don't. I have haemophilia. It's a disease of the blood. Inherited, and unfortunately for me, incurable.'

            'I... I know what it is. I was just reading about Prince Alexei, Nicholas and Alexandra's son.'

            He nods. 'Alexei would have died of it if he hadn't been murdered by the Bolsheviks. He had the same strain as me. Haemophilia B.'

            Eve stares at him. She nods, very slowly. 'Of course.'

            'What?'

            'Everything. It all makes sense now.'

            'What makes sense, detka?'

            They look up. Villanelle is standing at the top of the stone steps, eating a bacon sandwich.

            Eve eyes her expressionlessly. 'Haemophilia is passed through the maternal line,' she says. 'Prince Alexei inherited it from his mother.'

            'Correct.' Villanelle takes a bite.

            'Well, so did Valentin.'

            Villanelle frowns, her mouth full.

            'My birth mother passed the disease on to me,' Valentin says. 'She inherited it from her great-grandmother.'

            'Who was?'

            'Tsarina Alexandra of Russia.'

            'That's impossible,' Villanelle says flatly, still chewing. 'Alexandra, Nicholas, and all their children were murdered. There were no direct descendants.'

            'But there were,' Eve says. She looks at Valentin. 'I'm right, aren't I?'

            He nods. 'Yes, you're right. One of Nicholas and Alexandra's children didn't die in Ekaterinburg in 1918.'

            'That's just not true,' Villanelle says. 'It can't be true. We know from DNA testing that Olga, Tatiana, Maria, Anastasia and Alexei were all murdered with their parents. We know this. Everyone knows this. Nikolai confirmed it to us only yesterday.'

            'He was telling the truth,' Valentin says. 'But not the whole truth. What he didn't say was that there was another Romanov daughter, and that she survived. That daughter was my great grandmother.'

            I haven't often - in fact ever - seen Oxana totally flabbergasted. But I see that now. A series of expressions flashes across her face: disbelief, scorn, doubt, incredulity. She looks from me to Valentin, frozen and wide-eyed, then sinks to her haunches on the step and stares down at the stones. I want to go to her and take her in my arms, and I have to remind myself that right now I'm furious with her.

            'Philippe de Lyon?' Villanelle murmurs.

            'Yes. He's at the heart of this.' Eve glances at Valentin. 'I'm right, aren't I?'

           Valentin smiles. 'Can I ask you something?'

            'Shoot,' Eve says.

            'Are you two... together?'

            'Yes,' Eve says. 'Or up to now, anyway.'

            Villanelle flinches, but says nothing.

            'Right,' Valentin says. 'I wasn’t imagining it. Sorry, go on.'

            Eve takes a last, tepid mouthful of coffee. 'I've been reading this book, Igor Trepov's 'Imperial St Petersburg', and it's got quite a lot to say about our friend Philippe. According to Trepov, he arrives in St Petersburg in 1901, soon after the birth of Nicholas and Alexandra’s fourth daughter, Anastasia. By 1902, Alexandra's pregnant again, and Philippe swears that that this time the unborn baby is definitely a boy. But then, at a late stage, Alexandra miscarries. Philippe goes back to France, and it’s not until 1904 that she finally gives birth to Alexei.' She looks at Villanelle and Valentin in turn. 'That's the official story. But suppose it wasn't like that. Suppose the pregnancy went to term. Suppose she gave birth to another girl.'

            Valentin nods. 'The baby is born in 1903, and named Alexandra Nikolaevna, after her mother. But with the Tsarina already very unpopular for failing to produce a male heir, and the Bolsheviks threatening revolution, the royal couple take a terrible, almost unthinkable, decisision. They let it be known that the Tsarina has miscarried, that she's lost the child, and then Philippe smuggles little Alexandra out of Russia and takes her home with him to France.'

            'There's proof of this?' Villanelle asks.

            'Sergei has spent more than twenty years investigating the case,' Valentin says. 'He and Nikolai are in no doubt about it, and neither is the small group of people in whom they've confided. '

            Villanelle sits down on the top step. 'I see now that people have been half-telling me this story since I was in Petersburg. Preparing me, I suppose.' She looks at Eve. 'Preparing us.'

            Eve returns her gaze, but says nothing.

---

 

---

           Villanelle turns to Valentin. 'So la petite Alexandra grows up in France...'

            'In Avignon, with a childless couple. She grows up, marries, and has a daughter, and that daughter has me. I grow up poor, the child of a single mother, in a rough quartier of Marseilles. Additionally, I have a disease, a rare disease, that means I'm in and out of hospital for most of my childhood.'

            'That must have been hard,' Eve says.

            Valentin shrugs. 'It was all I knew. Then, when I was twelve years old, a man appeared at our door, a Russian, with a strange story to tell.'

            'Sergei?' Villanelle asks.

            'Sergei.'

            'And through him, the Dominiks adopted you?'

            'Not formally, but Nikolai took charge of my health and my education, and when my mother died, ten years ago, I moved in here.'

            'So,' Eve asks. 'Is there a plan? What does the future hold?'

            Valentin hesitates, then appears to come to a decision. He looks lost, infinitely sad. 'There is a plan,' he says. 'It's called Sanctify.'