Death Comes to the Ballets Russes by David Dickinson

wouldn’t otherwise know. They could be like our spies in the Diaghilev camp. I presume you would wait until after the tea party before we start interviewing them?’
    ‘I think it would work better that way, yes.’
    ‘I tell you what, Natasha. It could be a great help if all these important people turn up – the Ambassador and a metropolitan or two. I’ve always worried that Diaghilev will simply instruct all his people to say as little as possible. He has the purse strings. He handsout the contracts. Do you want to spend the summer in Paris or not? You could ask your distinguished visitors to impress on the corps de ballet how important it is in the eyes of God and Mammon that they should cooperate fully with the English authorities. If they don’t they could be stuck here in London for a very long time. They are ambassadors for the good name of the Tsar and Mother Russia, that sort of line. You follow me?’
    ‘I do,’ said Natasha with a smile. ‘By the time you’re through with this case, you’ll be about as devious as Diaghilev, Lord Powerscourt. In fact, I suspect you already are.’ She smiled.
    ‘There is one thing I want to ask you about these interviews, Natasha. Do you think the girls would say more if it was just you doing the talking? If I wasn’t there, in other words?’
    Natasha clapped her hands three times and laughed. ‘Goodness me, Lord Powerscourt, I don’t think that is a good idea at all. For a start I might not ask the right questions. And the other reason is clear as daylight to a woman, but obviously not so clear to a man.’
    ‘What’s that?’
    ‘You are an English milord. You are a member of the aristocracy. You know prime ministers and those sorts of people. These girls may be beautiful dancers but they are very young. Their heads may be turned. Maybe they will dream of becoming the mistress of an English milord. They can come and live in London. You must remember to wear your smartest clothes when you come to meet the girls. If you’ve got a real coronet in your dressing-up box, you’d better bring that too.’

4
    Ballon
    Ballon
means ‘to bounce’, where the dancer can show the lightness of the movement. This is a quality, not the elevation or height, of the jump. Even in small, quick jumps (
petit allegro
), dancers strive to exhibit
ballon
. A dancer exhibiting
ballon
would spring off the floor and appear to pause mid-air before landing.
    George Walker was there. He was a docker. Albert Smith was there. He worked on the railways. The brothers William and Thomas Baker were there. They were porters at Euston Station. Arthur Cooper was there. He drove a bus. Henry Farmer was there. He too worked in the docks. Frederick and Alfred Butcher were there. They were miners from Kent. Joseph Turner was there. He was a schoolteacher. John Jones was there. He too was a docker. Walter Shepherd also worked on the railways. Herbert Thatcher was there. He drove a train.
    These men were the twelve principal disciples of Lenin’s revolutionary movement in London. The Bolsheviks weren’t the only revolutionary group represented at the private meeting room in the Fox and Hounds in Rotherhithe. There were Syndicalists and Social Revolutionaries and Mensheviks, all united by extreme hatred of the capitalism that employed them at what they saw as minimal wages, maximum hours and very little concern for safety. For much of 1911 and 1912 they had been on strike or on the verge of a strike all over the country. Some of them wanted a minimum wage. Others, like the supporters of Lenin, wanted the complete overthrow of the capitalist system, an end to the power of the House of Lords, universal suffrage and the replacement of the monarchy by a Republic. Preferably all at once. Just as Christian Evangelicals believe personal salvation has to be experienced before true entry into the Church, so the Bolsheviks believed that conversion to the thinking of Karl Marx, principal saint in the Bolshevik