by Jane Feather
He had read pity for the deceived husband in every face, heard it in every silence. His sisters’ constant inane chatter considerately ensured that the subject was never referred to; his mother had alternately wept with joy at the presence of her only, beloved son, and wrung her hands in silent yet articulate unhappiness at the dismal certainty that he would never again venture into matrimony, and there would be no heir of this line to the Danilevski name and fortune.
Now, burdened with his resurrected Polishness, his mother’s silent reproaches, the vision of a contemptuous compassion for one who could not keep a faithful wife, he was required to journey across this vast plain, lying mute and somber under the spring sun, to winkle out from exiled obscurity a young woman who knew nothing beyond the wilderness, and carry her back to St. Petersburg to become the wife of General, Prince Paul Dmitriev—a man thirty years her senior, who had buried three wives already.
It did not strike Count Danilevski in his present jaundiced frame of mind as appropriate work for a colonel in the Imperial Guard, aide-de-camp to the prospective bridegroom or no. But one did not protest an imperial command, even one presented as a logical request. He could hear the czarina’s smooth, friendly tones explaining how convenient it was that the count desired to visit his home at this time. It was not such a great distance from Kiev, and she was certain he would be able to accomplish such a potentially tricky mission with all the diplomacy for which he was justly admired.
The memory of imperial compliments did little to soften him as he and his party followed the Dnieper to Kiev. From there they turned south, into the long waving grass of the steppes over which so many battles had been fought, so many frontiers won and lost, where man pursued his fellow in the primitive combat of hunter and prey—outlaw struggling with outlaw for the crumbs of existence in a place where stalked the ghosts of Tatar, Cossack, and Turk amid the substantive rivalries of brigand and robber.
Although not one member of this troop of the Imperial Guard would have admitted it, they were all relieved that their destination was but fifty versts from Kiev—thirty-three miles that could be accomplished in one day’s hard riding across the Wild Lands. The reed-thatched houses of the village surrounding the mansion of Berkholzskoye was a welcome sight in the distance as the sun dipped over a horizon that seemed limitless across the silent flatness.
Adam, frowningly contemplating how best to make his approach to Prince Golitskov, at first did not hear the pounding hooves until a wild yell broke the brooding silence of the terrain. One of the troop exclaimed behind him. A sword scraped as it was unsheathed. Bearing down upon them was a magnificent Cossack stallion, astride it a figure with hair streaming in the wind, a flintlock pistol flourished in one upraised hand.
Adam’s first instinct was to reach for his own pistol; then the amazing truth dawned that if this was a brigand attempting a suicidal attack on thirteen armed soldiers it was a female one in flowing skirts. He gave the order to draw rein and waited with some interest for the horsewoman to reach them.
“I beg your pardon for shouting at you like that.” Breathlessly the rider began talking as soon as she was in earshot. “But you are heading toward that gully.” She gestured toward a thick screen of bush and grass in front of them. “You cannot see it yet. There is a rogue wolf holed up in the gully. He has brought down two horses in the last three days, and I suspect he is rabid.”
The woman was speaking in Russian, and Adam used the same language. “Why has it not been shot?” he demanded, struggling to regain his bearings, thrown off course by this extraordinary fellow traveler.
“I am about to do it.” She gestured with the pistol. “The villagers are too frightened of the rabies.” She smiled at him in friendly fashion. “You can skirt the gully by going about half a mile to the east. Or if you prefer, I will deal with the wolf, then you may continue straight through.”
There was a moment of stunned silence while Adam stared at the young woman, absently absorbing the impression of a pair of large, glowing dark eyes set in a suntanned face. No conventional beauty, he thought vaguely, but an arresting countenance. Eyebrows a little too thick and pronounced, nose very straight and definite, teeth white but slightly crooked, giving her smile a rather quizzical twist. A firm chin, with a deep cleft beneath a wide, generous mouth, very dark brown hair tumbling in a windswept tangle around a pair of slim shoulders. Her unorthodox riding costume was shabby and as thick with dust as if she had been riding for hours across the plain; she sat astride her majestic mount as easily as if it were a pony, her carriage erect, the reins held loosely in one hand; and she held the pistol with which she was so kindly offering to clear their path in the manner of an experienced marksman.
“While that is most kind of you…uh—” He looked a question mark.
“Sophia Alexeyevna Golitskova,” she supplied cheerfully. “And pray do not mention it. It will not be above fifteen minutes. I know exactly where he is to be found.”
She turned her horse, and Adam, momentarily taken aback by this fortuitous meeting, returned to his senses. She could not seriously imagine a troop of the Imperial Guard would sit in safety while a slip of a girl faced a rabid wolf. But it seemed that she did. Urgently, he leaned over, seizing her bridle.
“Let go!” Her riding crop flashed, stinging across his hand. “How dare you!” The friendly, smiling young woman had vanished to be replaced by a towering Fury, the eyes no longer soft and glowing but almost black with outrage. She raised the crop again, and instinctively he flung his hand up to catch it as it came down, wrenching it from her grasp.
“Just a minute—,” he began in explanation, but she had turned her horse with the merest nudge of her knees and was galloping in the direction of the gully before he could assemble the words. In stupefaction, he looked at his hand where the weals stood out on the palm and across his knuckles. It had perhaps been a bit high-handed to grab her bridle in that fashion, but what an amazing reaction! He became aware of the men around him, all staring at the flying figure.
“Perhaps we will wait while Princess Sophia removes the wolf from our path,” he said with a calm that did not deceive his companions. Count Danilevski was very put out.
In no more than ten minutes a shot rang out through the gloaming. There was only one shot. The princess clearly knew what she was about when it came to marksmanship, Adam reflected. She did not reappear, so he assumed she had continued on her way through the gully. Since her way was also theirs, he gave the signal to ride toward the gully. They came upon the lean, gray shape of the wolf lying in the long, wavy grass. Curious, Adam dismounted, examining the beast. There was one wound, to the heart. It would have been a clean, instantaneous death.
Thoughtfully, he remounted and they continued on their way to Berkholzskoye. He had not known what to expect of the young woman who was to be his charge for the month it would take them to reach St. Petersburg. He had assumed she would be of the usual kind, simpering and silly, or paralyzed with shyness, either way with no conversation and, inevitably, appallingly countrified. He had expected to be plagued with whining complaints about the length and inevitable discomfort of the journey. He had not expected a fiercely independent, hard-riding, fast-shooting Cossack woman with the devil of a temper. And just how was that contretemps going to affect the task ahead of him? It was by imperial command that he would remove the princess from the guardianship of her grandfather, but he had no desire to enforce the command. He had hoped that charm and diplomacy would achieve success. Now, he was not so sure.
Sophie had reached home before her outrage at that insufferable check on her bridle by a complete stranger had subsided sufficiently for her to wonder what a troop of soldiers was doing in the area.
Leaving her horse in the stable, she strode energetically into the house, her booted feet clicking on the flagged floors, her long divided skirt swishing at her heels. Prince Golitskov was to be found in his library at the rear of the house; it took but one appraising look at his grand
daughter’s flushed cheeks, the angry sparkle in her eyes, to tell him that Princess Sophie was not pleased.
“Did you find the wolf?” he asked.
“He was where I expected him to be, lurking in the long grass beside the path.” She placed the pistol on a side table. “Khan was steady as a rock, even when the wolf reared up in the shadows.”
“And when you fired?” asked the old man, whose interest in the breaking and schooling of horses matched his granddaughter’s.
“He did not flinch.”
“Then what has happened to anger you, Sophie?” He leaned back in his chair, smiling at her. She was one of the few people who could induce a smile from the crusty misanthropist.
Sophie told him in few words, pacing restlessly around the book-lined room with her customary long stride.
“What uniform were they wearing?” Prince Golitskov frowned into the empty hearth. Soldiers in the region of Berkholzskoye did not augur well. They would not be so far from the beaten track by accident.
Sophie struggled with errant memory. “Dark green tunics with red facings,” she said slowly. “And black sword knots.”
“The Preobrazhensky regiment of the Imperial Guard. Ah…” A bleak look crossed her grandfather’s face. The presence of such an elite could only mean that the imperial eye had been turned in the direction of Berkholzskoye. The czarina could have no interest in an old man of seventy. For a moment his gaze rested sadly on his granddaughter, who seemed to be waiting for an explanation.
He was about to attempt one when the library door opened without ceremony. Old Anna, the housekeeper, stood wringing her hands in the doorway. “Soldiers…at the door….” she stammered. “Here to see Your Highness.” Her rheumy old eyes were filled with fright at such a visitation, and she continued to wring her gnarled, work-roughened hands in alarm.
“Soldiers!” Sophie’s cheeks warmed with a resurgence of annoyance. “The same ones?” She looked at her grandfather, who nodded.
“There cannot be more than one such troop in these parts,” he said dryly. “Show them in, Anna.”
“I will not receive them,” Sophie declared, moving to the door.
The prince sighed. “You must! Remain here!”
The peremptory tone brought her to a stop at the door; she turned back to him in surprise. “Why must I?”
“They are not here to see me,” he told her bluntly. He did not add that he had been expecting this, just had not known when it would happen. But then he had not told her of the imperial secret agents who had visited the estate during the last ten years, sometimes as travelers, sometimes as itinerant workmen. The prince knew the type of old and had little difficulty identifying them. He had not challenged them. What would have been the point?
The pink in her cheeks ebbed, and questions flashed in her dark eyes, but there was no time for them. The crisp voice of earlier in the evening came from the passage, the sharp click of booted feet, the ring of spurs. She stepped away from the door, moving instinctively into the shadow of a wood-paneled corner.
“Prince Golitskov.” Count Danilevski bowed in the door. “Colonel, Count Adam Danilevski of the Imperial Guard at your service.” He spoke in French, the language of the court and the aristocracy.
The old prince rose from his chair. “Are you, indeed?” he murmured in the same language. “At my service? Somehow, I doubt that. Pray come in.” He gestured toward the center of the room. “I imagine you and your men will be my guests for a while.” He looked past the count to where Anna still stood, wringing her hands in the doorway. “There is no cause for alarm, woman,” he said testily, switching to Russian. “You look as if you are about to mount the scaffold. Get about your business and see to the needs of our guests.”
Anna scuttled off, somewhat reassured by her master’s customary irascible tone. Sophie drew farther into the shadows but her grandfather beckoned her forward. “You have met my granddaughter, I understand, Count.”
“Yes, I have had that…uh…pleasure,” replied the count. “I was not able to introduce myself, unfortunately.” He held her riding crop between his hands, and now presented it to her with an ironic bow. “I must ensure that if we ride together in the future, Princess, I am wearing gloves.”
“I cannot imagine such an event,” Sophie countered, taking back her property. “If you will excuse me, Count, there are matters to which I must attend if we are to provide hospitality for thirteen guests.”
A most inauspicious beginning, reflected Adam, uncertain what he could have done to alter the course once it had been set. He became aware of the prince’s eyes upon him. They contained a suspiciously malicious gleam.
“My granddaughter is an unusual young woman, Count.”
“Yes, I have received that impression.” He picked up the flintlock pistol on the side table. “An accomplished shot, in addition to being a remarkable horsewoman.”
“She has grown up on the steppes, not at court,” the prince said gently. “It is not a land to roam freely if one is not able to take care of oneself.”
“It is perhaps not a land for a young woman to be permitted to roam freely,” suggested the count, equally as gently.
Golitskov shrugged. “I fail to see why not.” He walked with rheumatic stiffness to the sideboard. “Vodka, Count?”
“Thank you.”
There was a moment of silence as the drink of hospitality was swallowed in one gulp. Then, the formalities out of the way, the prince refilled their glasses and said, “So, Her Imperial Majesty has decided to reinstate my son’s family and name.”
Adam was conscious of relief. The old man at least was not going to prove difficult. “General, Prince Paul Dmitriev has asked for your granddaughter’s hand. I am here as emissary.”
A sardonic smile flickered over the hereditary sculpted lips of the Golitskov. “Emissary?”
“And escort,” Adam said, dispensing with euphemism. There was clearly no point in the niceties of diplomacy with this blunt old man.
“I have not been at court for forty years,” Golitskov now said. “I know the family, of course. Quite unexceptionable. But I am not acquainted with Prince Paul.”
Thankfully, Adam drew from his pocket a document under the imperial seal. He would not be required to give his own opinion of Paul Dmitriev, or describe the prince’s somewhat checkered marital history. Catherine in her own hand had written warmly to Prince Golitskov, endorsing Dmitriev’s suit in glowing terms and promising her close personal attention to the welfare of Sophia Alexeyevna.
Prince Golitskov perused the document in silence. He was under no illusions that his sovereign’s easy missive was the request it purported to be. Sophia Alexeyevna was ordered to St. Petersburg, where she would wed this mature paragon of health and good nature, a general in the army with a catalog of military deeds to his credit, who would ensure that she was established in her rightful place in court society. Golitskov wondered cynically what particular service the general had performed for his empress in order to be rewarded with such an heiress. Presumably it had not been in the bedchamber, since Her Imperial Majesty’s tastes and appetites required the rejuvenating freshness and boundless energy of the young.
There was little point in such speculation. The empress’s power over her subjects was as complete as that of a man over his serfs—the human chattel who guaranteed his prosperity. The master of serfs, unlike the czarina, did not have the legal power to inflict the death sentence on his property, but he could marry them to whom he pleased, sell them, flog them, send them into battle; and the Empress of all the Russias could demand of any subject, be they free or serf, anything she wished for whatever reason, and their obedience must be unquestioning.
He looked across at Count Danilevski, the malicious gleam in his eye growing more pronounced. “I suggest you broach the issue with the princess after supper, Count…. A stroll in the garden will provide the perfect opportunity for you to accomplish your emissary’s task.”
Adam p
ermitted not a flicker of annoyance or dismay to cross his expression. The old man was playing with him. He knew perfectly well it was up to himself to present the situation, demand—and enforce, if necessary—his granddaughter’s obedience. The count’s task as escort would be arduous enough with a willing charge; with such a one as Sophia Alexeyevna in recalcitrant mood it would be pure hell.
“I have need of your assistance, Prince,” he said smoothly, as if Golitskov did not know this. “Would it be too painful for you to explain the situation to the princess yourself? I would be most happy to be in attendance, to provide any further information that Sophia Alexeyevna might require. But I cannot help feeling that the initial approach should come from one whom she knows and trusts.” His eye drifted to the pistol on the side table, and the weals on his hand throbbed anew.
The gleam in Golitskov’s eye became full-fledged. “Yes,” he said with due consideration. “I think perhaps you will have need of my assistance.”
Chapter 2
Sophie left the library, fighting the urge to run to the stables, saddle up, and take to the steppes in search of the calm that would come from the elemental wilderness and her place within it. Ever since she was little, such an escape had soothed her nerves, calmed her temper, cleared her head. And she was now in more need of soothing, calming, and clarification than she could remember being for a very long time. But for some reason she was certain that if she disappeared at this time her grandfather would be very angry. She had not experienced his anger on many occasions, but it was a painful ordeal, not one she had any desire to repeat.
What were the count and his soldiers doing here? What had her grandfather meant by saying that they had not come to see him? The questions tumbled unresolved in her head as she consulted with Anna as to the disposition of thirteen guests and the supper that must be put before them. The count would obviously share his host’s table. Could his soldiers eat with the household in the kitchen? Probably not, she decided. They must be given their own quarters.