“Well, well, soldier, what might I do for you?” A deep but musical voice pulled Michał into the present. General Józef Sowiński entered the room with a decided limp. “I don’t have a lot of time to spare, you know.”
Michał stood and saluted at once. He suddenly became flustered. What had given him the nerve to request a meeting with the Minister of War? “I . . . appreciate any time you can spare, General.”
“Your father is Jan Stelnicki, yes?” The general was taking measure of Michał.
“Yes.” That the general knew his father bolstered his self-confidence.
“How is he? Good God, so few come back from Siberia! That was some news.” The general painstakingly moved around his desk and sat.
“Truth to be told, it was an unexpected miracle, General. And he’s good enough to have reenlisted.”
“I’m not surprised. He’ll make the Ruski regret their uncharacteristic clemency. Sit down, soldier. You’re not here about him, are you?”
Michał sat. “No, I’m here about my younger brother.”
The general stared silently, his fingers drumming the desk.
Michał suddenly felt nervous. Had this been the right thing to do? “Well, you see, General Sowiński, he’s with Piotr Wysocki’s battalion in Siedlce, and . . .
and I was hoping you would use your influence . . .
The general sat stone-faced.
“That is, I would like to request that he be reassigned to Wielka Wola, here at your command.”
“He’s hurt? Has be been wounded?”
“No, sir, not that I know of.”
“Well then, what reason have you for what I have to say is a highly unorthodox request? One I am unlikely to grant, I can tell you.”
“It’s for his safety, sir, and for the well-being of his—my mother. She’s already lost one son.”
The general’s eyes narrowed in appraisal. “There are mothers, Michał, who have given Poland their only sons, plenty of them, and there are mothers who have given all of their sons.”
“I know that, General. But Mother still cherishes great hopes for Józef. You see, he plays piano and composes. He’s good, too, and has a future. I’m no expert but Fryderyk Chopin’s own father says so.”
The general harrumphed. “The other son—?”
“Tadek.”
“How did he die?”
“He and I were in the retreat from Moscow. What with the Russians, angry citizens, and the Cossocks, it was hell. In a skirmish he took shot to his leg and we couldn’t get to a proper doctor before poison set in. He was buried in the snowy ice-hard ground of the Eastern steppes.”
“Nasty business, that. The whole Napoleon affair. I know—I was there. I had a little problem with a leg, too. Russia—1812.” The general took a letter opener and tapped his leg with it.
Michał realized it was his wooden leg. He had for the moment forgotten the general’s well-known disability. Now he could find no words.
General Sowiński let out a long sigh. “You know Marzanna can come for him here, too. “
“Yes, sir,” Michał said, the image of Goddess Death as clear in his mind as when he was a child imagining the folk deity in her white dress coming for him, her scythe moving in a wide arc. “It’s just that Wysocki is a bit of a . . . a—”
“A hothead?”
Michał nodded. “General, I realize my brother could die here as easily as in Siedlce, or anywhere. But if he meets his fate here, at least his mother could see him buried. Something she could not do for Tadek.”
“And what is this brother’s name?”
“Józef, after Józef Poniatowski.”
“A fine name Józef,” the general said with a laugh. “Now had you said I was his namesake, I might do something for the boy.”
Michał gave a little laugh, too, a nervous one. Words failed him. The general stared at Michał a long time. The moment hung fire.
Then, suddenly, the general rose and came around from behind the desk to Michał, his wooden leg dragging slightly.
Michał stood.
“Very well, Stelnicki, I will give your request every consideration.”
Every consideration, Michał thought as he rode back toward the city’s center and Piwna Street. He supposed it was the best answer he could have expected; generals were loath to immediately yield to a subordinate’s request. Would the general ultimately grant the request? If so, would Józef despise him for interfering? That is, if he somehow were to find out. Prince Czartoryski had described Piotr Wysocki as a firebrand, one who had doubly burnished that title with the cadets’ rising and more recently by seeing to it that the first shot fired between Poland and Russia came from his battalion at Siedlce. Michał recalled now how his mother spoke of a gypsy who had predicted that Józef would one day bait the Russian bear. Blood of vipers! The woman who had assisted at his brother’s birth had not been far off from the truth. Józef had been present both at the heart of the attempted abduction of the Grand Duke and on the field when the first shot was fired on the Russian army.
To give Piotr Wysocki his due, however, the Siedlce action prevented—for the time being—Russian General Grigorij from crossing the River Liviec, the single obstacle that could impede his army’s progress toward Praga.
Michał had to admit that General Sowiński was correct in saying Death could come for Józef or any soldier, no matter his assignment. And yet, Michał thought, close quarters with Piotr Wysocki would only increase the risk. No, he did not regret interfering by requesting that Józef be transferred.
Her mind preoccupied, Barbara Anna left the Gronska town house and made her way up the street. She, along with her mother and Iza, had joined a society under the presidency of Madame Hoffman-Tanska, renowned for her literary productions but more respected now for organizing women of all ranks—genteel or not, city or country—whose focus was the care of the ill and wounded. She walked unaccompanied now. Anna and Iza had left earlier that morning for Gniński Palace on the escarpment above the Vistula. For a decade the palace had served as a military field hospital. As of late Barbara had taken to accompanying her mother and Iza to the palace where they visited the sick and prepared an abundance of bandages for the battles that seemed certain to wend their noisy, bloody ways to Warsaw. Today, however, one of the twins, little Dimitri, had become choleric with a cold and so Barbara had stayed behind until he fell asleep.
It was on Avenue Krakowśkie Przedmieście that she became aware of footsteps close behind. Thoughts of her children vanished and she was instantly alerted to—what? Danger? Except for today, she had made it a rule not take to the streets alone anymore; she went out in the company of others and certainly did not allow the twins to tag along, not since . . . but this wide, well travelled thoroughfare was safe, she told herself.
“Basia!”
Hearing her diminutive sent a chill up her back and nearly halted her in her tracks, but she put aside the temptation to stop and turn around. She increased her speed. Surely her name was common enough and there were enough people on the street this mid-morning—
“Basia!” The voice was louder, more insistent—and recognizable.
She turned about to face him. It was useless to run. “What do you want, Viktor?”
He was dressed in the most unassuming greatcoat of dark wool. Underneath his fur hat—a beaver one, not his ostentatiously tall spotted leopard one—his pale blue eyes were trying to assess her. He smiled, still confident in his ability to charm. “To speak to you, Basia.”
They stood near the Holy Cross Church, and he reached out his hand to hers in order to draw her to the side of the building, away from footpath traffic. She withdrew her hand immediately but followed him. There was no use in postponing their meeting.
“I’ve missed you, Basia. The boys, too.”
“You may be my husband, Viktor, and you are the father of my boys, but I don’t know you any longer.” She avoided his eye contact. “I don’t want to know you at all.”<
br />
Viktor drew in a long breath. “Do you know this church has a lower church down in the vaults? The architecture is extraordinary.”
“I am not sightseeing today, Viktor.”
“We can talk there.”
Barbara shook her head. “I have another
destination.”
“The hospital, yes? Whatever you women do there can wait.”
It came home to her now that Viktor was well apprised of her movements when she ventured outside the house. She felt a kind of compression at her heart. He—or his minions—had been spying on her, stalking her.
“Listen to me, Barbara Anna,” he was saying, “we can reconcile our differences.”
“Can we? I think not. You were less than forthcoming. You were not just some bureaucrat in the Imperial Commissioner’s office. Viktor, you were, in effect, the head of the Secret Police and answerable only to Novosiltsev.”
“How do you know these things? Your brother
Michał?”
“What does it matter? I know what the Third Department has done to people. I know what you’ve done to people. . . . I know what you’ve done to my father!”
Viktor turned white as the limestone of the church façade behind him. “Who told you that?”
Barbara did not reply. Were not the subject so dark and her heart so rent, she might have taken pleasure in playing turnabout at his game of espionage.
“Barbara Anna, I regret that. I could not have known at the time that I would marry his daughter.”
“Is that how you became aware of me? Through my father’s trial and exile? And all those happenstance meetings—they were hardly serendipitous, were they, Viktor?”
Viktor’s back stiffened. “No, of course not! Basia, I arranged them. You see, I loved you from the first.”
“You mean to say you wanted to possess me. You were dishonest from the first.”
“We can get past this. This insurrection will be over soon—”
“Do you think so?” Barbara interrupted. “And you expect your fellow countrymen to return triumphantly and that life will return to what it was? Ha! You’ll go on plaguing us Poles.”
“It won’t be like that, I promise. I won’t deny whatever your father told you about me—”
“My father is too good a man to have shed light on your dark deeds, Viktor Baklanov. Too good a man!”
Once again the color drained from Viktor’s face. His eyes widened. “Then, who? Who?”
“Someone to whom you have no doubt been dishonest, as well. Tell me, Viktor, has she been your mistress all this time?”
“Larissa?” It was scarcely more than a breath. Then in full voice: “God damn her! She came to you?”
“With your file. You Russians are meticulous record keepers.”
“I was not unfaithful to you. I ended things with Larissa after I met you. You must know that, Basia. We were happy—you, me, and the boys. You would have felt it had it been otherwise.”
Barbara paused assessing this, accepting it as the probable truth. “It doesn’t matter now, Viktor. Our lives are moving in different directions. It’s too late.”
“No, when order is restored—”
“By order, you mean Russian order?”
“Yes, of course. Let me speak, Basia. Things will get very bad here for those who partook in this. Things will be bad for your family. Your parents will lose their Sochaczew estate as surely as Zofia will lose her holdings. And Siberia—”
“Siberia!” The thought ripped through Barbara like a knife.
“Your family will be on shifting, dangerous ground. But I will be in a position to make things safe for them and their homes. I’m certain of it.”
Barbara thought she would be ill right there at the church’s foundation. Siberia! Was that a possibility? Oh, she could not be certain of a Polish victory. Who could? They were so out-manned and out-gunned.
As if reading her thoughts, Viktor said, “Tsar Nicholas is no friend of the Poles. He is not like his father, Aleksander. And he is no Konstantin, either, dithering about whether to take back what he had. He is a vindictive tyrant and he will take down Warsaw to its foundation, and any gentry foolish enough to stay around will find themselves in the ground or in Siberia wishing they were in the ground.”
Barbara took this in, then drew herself up. “I’m a Pole and will remain so. Neither I nor my family will accept help from you, Viktor Baklanov. Whatever may come.” Barbara started to turn away.
“Your children—our children—are half Russian.”
Barbara paused for a moment, her heart beating hard, her eyes averted. She lifted her head, then met his gaze. “We Poles have lived with bigger and heavier crosses.”
Viktor’s arm shot out in an effort to stop her, but she was too quick in her pivot and made her way to the street.
Michał lay on his cot, restless as the ticking clock nearby, his thoughts on Józef.
News of a key operation at Dobre, just 30 miles east of Warsaw came with a joyful jolt to Michał’s camp at Modlin Fortress. Under General Skyzynecki, eight thousand Poles resisted an arm of the Russian army—Rosen’s—four times its number. Many of the Poles performed their first service in arms, enthusiastically driving back the enemy at the point of the bayonet. Estimated Russian losses were 6000 men killed, wounded, or captured; Polish losses did not exceed 800. Michał heard of the celebrations in Warsaw, enlivened no doubt by the word of prisoners that Grand Duke Konstantin had been there in the flesh to witness the humiliation, but he knew that in the end Skyzynecki would have to yield the ground they had held so bravely, allowing Russians a little bit closer to Warsaw, Poland’s heart.
The Russian master plan seemed clear. Various commanders under Field Marshal Hans Karl von Diebitsch had already crossed into Poland at four different points, covering an expanse of 96 miles. In a Napoleonic-like strategy, Diebitsch would come at the center of Polish forces, at Siedlce while his other commanders outflank the defenders, allowing the combined Russian forces to march directly to Warsaw, ending the war in one fell swoop.
Word among the Old Guard was that the Poles would slowly retire toward the Warsaw suburb of Praga. There on the eastern side of the River Vistula the various corps would remain parallel to one another, taking on the Russians in skirmishes rather than allowing Diebitsch’s plan for an immediate frontal assault on the capital. Oh, there would be a major decisive battle, but it would be waged only after the Russians had been incrementally weakened.
Michał wondered if Sowiński had transferred Józef, wondered if he should have interfered. Like his father, he was not much for formal prayers, but sometimes in the matter of war there was little else upon which to grasp. If in making its web, a spider could hurl out into space its flimsy filaments and find the attempt rewarded, might prayers, too—for Józef, their father, and Jerzy—be answered?
Where were these three in this game of war that men played? And then, just before sleep, his thoughts settled upon Iza and the memory of the night he had returned to her after meeting with Sowiński. He remembered most her face, pale as the pillow and a contrast to the crown of her black hair, and her dancing, loving eyes of blue, cornflower blue.
If nothing else, they—he and Iza—had had that night.
22
15 February 1831, Warsaw
AT THE TOP FLOOR OF the Gronska town house, Anna stood at the window facing east. Thunderous booms of distant cannonades from towns as far off as Milosna and Okuniew could be heard in Warsaw as fighting inched closer. Movement of the conflict was encroaching on the environs of Praga, where only the River Vistula separated that suburb from the walled capital of Warsaw. For two days currents of fear and tension had been running through the capital and its citizens like a thousand lightning strikes.
It was merely dusk now, but the guns that usually continued to the point of full darkness had ceased. Peculiar, Anna thought. What did it portend? She looked down at the street. Those few people present moved along in sm
all groups, their voices hushed, as if in tune with her eerie presentiment that something significant had happened—or was about to happen.
Within a few minutes a crier came running up the center of the bricked street, signaling something of immediate import. What was it? Anna struggled to open the casement window that had not been opened all winter, but when it finally gave way, she heard merely muffled shouts on the chilled air. The crier had already passed out of sight and hearing. People were flocking out of their houses amidst a tumult of noise and confusion. They were heading in one direction: toward Castle Square.
Barbara Anna entered the room now after a quick knock.
“Basia—where is everyone going?”
“Across the bridge to Praga—that’s where. Mother, you must make ready! There’s been a short term armistice.”
“An armistice?” The idea seemed inconceivable. She took a moment to take it in. “Does this mean our men are in rout?”
“No, a three-hour truce has been called to bury the dead.”
Barbara’s statement was a knife with two edges. Three hours. Bury the dead. But there was no time for questions. No time to think of the dead. It was for the living that Madame Hoffman-Tanska had formed her group of women. Plans for such a situation as this had been formulated in great detail. Within half of an hour her army of women and the hospital wagons laden with food and medical supplies would be filling the streets, moving toward the bridge to Praga.
Anna quickly dressed in the prescribed dark blue and met Barbara and Iza on the little portico. Within minutes they sighted a hospital wagon led by a single white horse. They worked their way through the crush of people, gave greeting to the driver and woman in the pilot seat, placed their right hands upon the side of the wagon, and fell into the slow movement of the masses. “It’s like a great exodus!” Iza called out above the din.
The Warsaw Conspiracy Page 29