Princess Daisy

by Judith Krantz

  On March 12, 1917, after another long winter during which his father had rarely smiled, Alexander, six years old, and already an audacious skier, had gone to the slopes of spring snow with his school friends. On that day in St. Petersburg, now called Petrograd, and soon to be called Leningrad, a starving mob, waving the red flags of the revolution, was seen near the Alexandra Bridge. Opposing them, on the other side of the bridge, stood a regiment of guards, the nemesis of rioters. However, the mob continued to press forward and the guards held their fire. Then, in a moment which was to change the history of the world, the two groups merged. Like two drops of water, the masses and the army became one body. As Alexander climbed back up the shadowy slopes for the last run of the day, as Titiana poured hot water from the samovar and offered a cup of tea to a French count, as Vasily, haggard and sad from his years of involuntary internment in Switzerland, bent over newspapers that were three days old, the Russian Revolution began.

  World War I had been over for almost three years when the decision was made to send Alexander away to school. He was only nine years old, and Titiana might possibly have allowed him to continue in the Davos school where he was the undisputed leader of the gang of village boys, self-willed, taller, rougher, stronger and more ready to take a reckless dare than any of them, but Vasily saw clearly that their son was running wild. He had been born a prince but he was in danger of becoming a peasant. Even in a world in which princes were considered obsolete—particularly Russian princes—if they had managed to survive at all, there was the Valensky tradition to honor, and the Valensky fortune to inherit. He must be educated like the noble gentleman he would become.

  “We’ll send him to Le Rosey,” he told his wife. “I’ve already made inquiries. He can start in the fall, just before his next birthday. Now don’t look sad, my dearest—it’s only at Rolle, not far from here, and in the winter the whole school moves up to Gstaad. It’s so near that Alexander will have no trouble coming home for holidays.”

  Eventually, Titiana accepted the idea as, with the necessary self-absorption of the chronic invalid, she had accepted the fact that her family was doomed to eternal exile, that the world of her girlhood no longer existed and that her disease never slept for long. Hope, in her soul, had been replaced with endurance.

  Each time Alexander came home for vacations, his parents saw how he was being changed by his new life in the world’s most exclusive and expensive boarding school. They noticed little by little how his manners, in the fashion of his international crowd of schoolmates—young potentates, heirs to dynasties—began to show that he was newly comfortable wherever he found himself. He was at ease in their way, a way which was based on a sense of hauteur that eventually turned into the special, superior kind of lofty amusement which clings to the elite of the Le Rosey students, a secret, inward smile. He even acquired a new name—Stash—to which both his parents objected because it was a Polish, not a Russian, diminutive, but which they had to admit suited him in a way that Alexander never had.

  4

  Stash had just turned fourteen when he came home, as usual, for the Christmas vacation of 1925. He had reached that age at which the outlines of the man he would become were unmistakably present to an attentive eye. His nose had been broken for the first time in a brawl with the heir to a French marquisate, his curls had been cut short and although he was still far from reaching his full muscular development, he was close to six feet tall. His lips were red with the turbulent vitality of youth and permanently chapped from outdoor sports. His eyes had exchanged their innocence for a gaze in which a hint of the relentlessness of his later years had already appeared.

  As he always did, after a day of sport, Stash left his ski boots outside the chalet for one of the servants to clean. He put on a pair of after-ski boots and slipped into the salon in search of something to eat. He was an expert at moving among his mother’s coterie with a kind of warding-off politeness which prevented them from detaining him with unwelcome questions. Privately he thought them all unworthy of his mother, this titled band of tuberculosis patients whose illness alone brought them together. His terror of disease expressed itself as contempt for the invalids themselves. With an arrogance which made an exception only of his mother, he even despised the courage and resignation with which they faced their lives and he told himself that he would rather die cleanly than live with rotted lungs.

  Deftly he helped himself to a big cup of hot chocolate and a plate of pastries, and started to escape to his own room. However, a languid hand raised from a far corner indicated to him that this was one of the days on which his mother had joined her guests, and instantly he turned to cross the room and greet her.

  Princess Titiana was sitting deep in conversation with her close friend, the Marquise Claire de Champery. The red-headed Frenchwoman kept her lush body tightly girdled, her bright hair was carefully restrained, but nothing could conceal the feline expression of her sulky, green eyes, her small, pouting avaricious mouth or her malicious half-smile. She used very little make-up and dressed almost entirely in black with an uncompromisingly severe chic. On meeting her, men felt an erotic shock.

  Although the Marquise had lived in Davos for seven years, she had no trace of sickness. She had originally traveled to the Alps with her husband, Pierre de Champery, expecting that a few months of mountain air would cure him of the bothersome cough he had acquired during his distinguished military service. This accomplished and polished Parisienne had never contemplated spending seven years waiting to return to civilization, but she was a prisoner in Davos, linked to a man she had never loved, even before her marriage, by one of the strongest of bonds, that of prospective inheritance. In order to maintain her position in Princess Titiana’s salon, she worked diligently and knowledgeably before her mirror to conceal that flamboyant spoor of her sexuality, to maintain her guise as a lady of the highest class of society.

  Claire de Champery’s husband clung to her with all the determination permitted to a man of wealth who had married a penniless woman twenty years younger than himself. He lived in a sanatorium because he was far too ill to live anywhere else, but he had rented a charming little chalet for his wife. The doctors told her it would not be long … yet they had told her that for years.

  Stash approached the two women, kissed his mother’s hair and bent to brush the air above the Marquise’s hand.

  “So, my little Stash is home from school,” mocked the sleek red-headed woman, sitting with disciplined decorum in an armchair. “Do tell me, my dear child, did you manage finally to do well in your examinations? And are you still a member of that fascinating inner circle you spoke of last summer—the little jumped-up American millionaires and the little British lords with bad teeth and the naughty baby cattle barons from the Argentine, and all the other grandees of your school?”

  Stash tightened his lips in rage. One day last summer, when he was only thirteen, he had made the mistake of describing his best friends to her. She seemed to be taking a genuine interest in his school life. Most of his mother’s intimates, occupied with the myriad intrigues of their hermetically sealed world based on illness and gossip, had learned not to pay attention to the difficult, unfriendly boy, but the Marquise had drawn him out until he allowed her a rare glimpse into his school life.

  “And you, Madame la Marquise,” he shot at her, ignoring her questions, “are you still the notorious femme fatale of this vast and cosmopolitan center? Or have you been replaced by someone whom I have not yet met?”

  “Alexander,” flashed his mother. “That is quite enough! Claire, you must forgive him—he’s just fourteen you know, that impossible age when you think it’s amusing to be impudent. Alexander, apologize at once!”

  “No, Titiana, darling, don’t be silly … I was teasing him and the little one got angry.” Claire de Champery was in the best of humors. She felt the congestion of blood rushing between her primly pressed together thighs, proof positive that she had been right to provoke the boy. From the mo
ment she had seen him coming across the room, she had noticed that the childish beauty she had savored in secret for years had become that of a youth. She saw the faint beginnings of a mustache on his upper lip, she measured with her eyes the new physical development which had given a fourteen-year-old the muscle structure of a youth. No longer a boy, yet not a man—a most delectable, a most tantalizing, a most fleeting age. A moment in a man’s life, she reminded herself, that did not last long. A youth—a pure and perfect youth—that most tasty morsel of all. He knew nothing yet, she was sure of that. Off at a boys’ school all year long, what could he possibly have learned besides the little dirty games they might play with each other? But his fiery reaction to her mockery told her that he was ready to be taught.

  “Claire,” Titiana insisted, “he simply must apologize. I can’t permit him to behave in such a manner.”

  “Let him do a penance instead, Titiana darling. An apology is too easily given. Ah, I have it—he shall take me for a troika ride—that is, if he is old enough to control the horses?”

  “I have been driving the troika for over four years,” Stash said with scorn.

  “Tant mieux. Then I have nothing to fear. Be at my chalet at three tomorrow afternoon and I’ll be ready to leave. Now, baby, go and eat your pastries … you look as if you’re longing for them.”

  As the Marquise dismissed the sullen youth, she turned back to Titiana and resumed the conversation with the facile charm which had drawn the Princess to her in the first place.

  The day after Stash’s scene with the Marquise de Champery, he arrived on time to take the Frenchwoman for a troika ride, since his mother had continued to insist on it.

  The maid who let him into the chalet told him that her mistress was not quite ready to leave. She took his coat and led the way to a little sitting room just off the Marquise’s bedroom. A fire had been lit and the room was very warm. The maid pointed out a tray of bottles of different liquors and an assortment of boxes of various kinds of cigarettes, and left him. Stash tightened his lips in annoyance. He was not old enough to drink or smoke and he knew that the Marquise was aware of it This was just more of her baiting, another reminder that he was still a child. He was still standing resentfully in the center of the luxurious nest of a room when the Marquise entered. She was dressed in a loose flowing tea gown of black chiffon trimmed with lace.

  “Oh, so you’re not coming driving then,” Stash exclaimed in relief, at the sight of her unsuitable clothes.

  “No, I have merely changed your penance, my boy.”

  “Penance! You mean charade! This whole thing is absurd. I’m not a child to be treated like this. I’m leaving … enough of this!”

  “I think not,” the Marquise said softly. “You spoke to me most rudely and your darling maman is still very angry with you.” The woman knew well that the only influence to which Stash made himself subject was that of his mother.

  “Come sit down on this couch with me and I shall tell you what it is.”

  The boy suppressed a sigh of anger and silently did as he was told.

  “I have been thinking,” she mused. “We’ve known each other a long time … is that not so? You were only seven when I first saw you … a little boy. And now you are almost a man. Do you have any idea how old I am?”

  Stash was startled and deeply gratified at being told he was almost a man. His anger forgotten, he answered shyly. “You’re not as old as my mother … certainly, but I can’t guess women’s ages.”

  “I am twenty-nine,” she said, lying by only three years. “Does that seem very old to you? Of course it must No … don’t protest, don’t be polite, it doesn’t become you. When I was your age, twenty-nine was unimaginably old. So I have decided, as your penance, to teach you a lesson … a lesson in relativity.”

  The Marquise’s small and swollen mouth was fresh as a fruit and she licked her lips thoughtfully. She moved closer to where Stash sat stiffly on the rose satin upholstery she knew was in bad taste but nevertheless permitted herself in private apartments. One of her plump white arms reached out, the black lace falling away from it, and she placed her hand on his head. “I miss your curls,” she said softly, rumpling his thick hair. He sat straight and motionless, his nostrils drinking in the unfamiliar scent of a woman in a low-cut gown. By the light of the fire, out of the corner of his eye, he could see the blue shadow where her breasts began. Her hand left his hair and began to caress his neck with the most neutral of touches, as if she were absent-mindedly stroking a pet. Stash felt, with horrified embarrassment, that his penis had become rigid inside his trousers. He did not notice Claire’s glance at his crotch, her eyebrows lifting only slightly as her practiced eye told her what had happened. Idly, she played with his earlobe, not moving any closer to him.

  “So, what is relativity? Can you tell me? No … I thought not. The lesson in relativity begins with the realization that my hand and your neck have no age at all. They are only flesh meeting flesh. But to appreciate the true meaning of relativity, we must go further … much further.” She allowed her wandering fingers to touch the soft hollow at the base of his throat, exposed in his open-necked shirt, and then she slipped her entire hand into his shirt and found one of his nipples and started to circle it with one finger. Stash groaned aloud and she drank in the sound with gourmandise—that was his first groan as a man, she thought, feeling his nipple harden. Now he would never forget her. “Ah, little man, you are beginning to understand relativity,” she whispered to the boy who still looked ahead, his mind spinning. What was she doing … his mother’s friend … impossible … another mockery. In confusion he thought—but he couldn’t be certain—that her hand, which she had withdrawn from his shirt, had, for an instant, fallen lower, to his crotch, and brushed like a feather over the stiff lump of his penis. But then this same hand, quickly raised, now gently unbuttoned his shirt, revealing his strong youth’s chest down the center of which fine blond hair made a straight, faint shadow. She moved closer to him, threw back his shirt, and ran the fingers of both her hands down his half-naked, already well-muscled arms and murmured to herself, “How very grown-up you are, after all, my Stash.” The boy was stunned into immobility even when she caressed him under his arms, fingering the scant, silky tufts of hair that had so recently sprouted there. The painful tumescence of his penis seemed shameful to him, a confession of weakness before this dominant woman. He knew her, the sly one, she wanted to make him try to touch her and then she would remind him of what a child he was. He gripped the pillows he was sitting on in order not to move, not to give her that satisfaction.

  Then he felt her unbuckle his belt and unbutton his fly. For a moment she seemed to hesitate, her head lowered in the firelight, riveted at the sight of the outline that reared under his restraining undershorts. The size of it seemed to make her decide. She slid to the thick carpet and looked up at him as he sat on the edge of the couch, his teeth biting into his lower lip in a grimace which hardened his face into a look it would not naturally wear for ten more years.

  “Now … now we come to the penance, Stash. You must stand up.” She remained still, waiting patiently, steadily watching him, not repeating her command. Slowly he stood up, his trousers falling to his feet. Controlling her breathing with difficulty the woman looked at the slender youth who stood before her, not daring to meet her eyes. Through the opening of his undershorts the thick, jutting shaft of his penis was clearly visible.

  “Pull down your shorts,” she whispered. He obeyed. His body was marvelously made, pale except where the winter sun had touched his big hands and strong neck. All his joints and tendons were tender-skinned, yet firm and defined. A little blond hair grew on the legs and a deeper shadow of coarser hair curled at the base of his testicles.

  “Step out of your pants and lie down on the sofa,” she ordered. “Don’t touch me, Stash, or I will stop what I’m going to do to you. I am the teacher here and you are doing your penance, so be obedient. If you move, even one little inch
, I’ll stop the lesson. I swear it.” The threat in her voice was real. She pulled at her gown so that it dropped from her shoulders. Her breasts sprang out from the confining lace. She cupped each of them in a hand, leaning over him so that he could see how sumptuously heavy they were, tipped with the light brown nipples of a true redhead. He lay still on the rose satin, not daring to arch his back and thrust his agonizingly hard penis upward. She brushed her nipples tantalizingly over his chapped lips. “Don’t move!” she warned again, adoring the sensation of the roughness of his young open mouth on her flesh. When he moaned in fearful desire and tried to touch them with his tongue, she moved away at once. “Ah! No! I’ve only begun …” Very delicately, with the lightest possible touch, she moved her full, succulent mouth down this body which had just emerged from boyhood, stopping to anoint each of his nipples with her pointed, flicking tongue. Finally she hovered over his penis for a long moment while he held his breath. Her sleek head hung, almost in meditation, as she observed how it strained upward, jerking toward her mouth. But, without even touching it, she passed on and went lower, tonguing the insides of his strong thighs. As she knelt on the sofa she had gradually slipped out of her gown so that her full body, with its rich bounty of lush perfumed flesh, was entirely exposed, but from his position on the sofa, he could not see her nakedness clearly without raising his head. She had not yet touched him with anything but her nipples and her mouth, nor had he touched her at all. He ground his teeth and clenched his fists in frantic frustration and heard her low, satisfied laugh, the laugh of the true gourmet.

  “Oh, yes, indeed, yes, you are making progress. You are beginning to appreciate relativity. You are almost prepared for the end of the lesson.”

  The Marquise’s tongue traveled leisurely from Stash’s thighs back to his testicles. She blew on his pubic hair very lightly, and again, he couldn’t prevent a groan from escaping his dry lips like a line of fire, the tip of her experienced tongue ran up the base of his straining penis and then rested for one whirling moment on its tip.