CLASSIFIED: S76/47

Dear John,

Once again, greetings from Reval. I hope you can forgive my lack of enthusiasm; it's godforsaken cold here in January. I thought I knew what winter was (Moscow in winter is enough to teach anyone a grudging respect for Jack Frost) but this is absolutely unspeakable. There are few railways in Estonia, and those which remain after the armistice are under military control, to deter any passing fancy that might occur to Comrade Trotsky in his spare time. (I am sure we shall not be invaded again, at least before he has finished pacifying Siberia, but one can hardly blame Mr. Piip for his caution.)

I have a most unexpected cause to write to you—a gift horse just presented its head at my transom window! Such a gift horse was this that it would be insane not to look it in the mouth, but I have inspected its back teeth and I assure you that the mare is, although middle-aged, by no means anything other than that which it appears to be: namely, the bereaved mother of the Prodigal we were discussing in our earlier correspondence.

It seems that my sympathetic questioning made more of an impression on Madame Hoyningen-Huene than I imagined. There was a brief thaw in the bitter cold we have lately been experiencing, and being of a mind to visit the capital for a few weeks she took advantage of it. She is even now ensconced in our parlor, where Evgenia is entertaining her.

And the Prodigal son's fossil collection?

"Take them!" she cried. "Oskar told me how they caught your fancy; perhaps you know of a curator in London who will put them to some better use? Vile things, I don't want to remember my son by them!" Her man, who was burdened with the heavy box all the way from Rapla to Reval, can only have wholeheartedly agreed. And so they are even now in a shipping trunk, awaiting more clement weather before I dispatch them to you by sea.

Madame Hoyningen-Huene is a sensitive soul, and her life has been blighted by domestic tragedy, from her first husband's breakdown and incarceration to the deaths of two baby daughters, and now to the fate that has overtaken her son (however much he might have deserved it). She takes little interest in politics, and is transparently what she is: the daughter of Baron Von Wimpffen of Hesse, wife of Baron Oskar Von Hoyningen-Huene, a devoted family lady. Quite why her life has circled this vortex of unspeakable tragedy eludes her entirely, as does the nature of her privileged upbringing and the precarious status of the Prussian aristocracy in the Baltic states—but she is near to sixty, a child of the previous century, and simply unable to adapt to the chill winds of change sweeping the globe.

"He wrote to me often of his fears and uncertainties," she said, showing me a sheaf of letters. I think she needed to share her pain, that of a mother for her son, the last love and succor of any man, however much of a brute he may be. "You see, he was by inclination deeply religious, but unfortunately it brought him much pain. I hold the shamanic eastern mystics responsible—vile orientals! And the Jews." Her aristocratic nostrils flared. "If they hadn't fomented this disgraceful revolution he would not have thought to rise up against the government." (Such sentiments are common among the aristocracy here; they have an unhealthy identification with the late Tsar.)

"What did he believe?" I asked. "As a matter of curiosity . . ."

"Ohh—he took it into his head to convert to a vile farrago of oriental superstitions! Nothing as honest and Aryan as Theosophy. He picked these filthy beliefs up in Mongolia, nearly ten years ago, when visiting. He met a witch doctor by all accounts, a man called the Bogd Khan—" She rattled on at some length about this.

"Would you mind if I read his letters on religion?" I asked her, and to cut a long story short, she acceded. I now have not only Ungern Sternberg's fossil collection, inherited from his father, but his surviving letters—those he sent to his mother. And they are very interesting indeed.

I attach my (admittedly imperfect) translation of selected extracts of his letters from 1920; I will forward the originals by separate cover from the fossils. Meanwhile, I strongly recommend that you should motivate your fellows in the Order to start searching for the missing Teapot.

Your obedient friend,

Arthur Ransome