Silver Nights

by Jane Feather

  “When will we have time?” Sophie asked matter-of-factly, aware of her own arousal, enjoying it even as she lamented the impossibility of its satisfaction at this point.

  “It depends what the day brings,” Adam replied, jumping down. “Hurry, now.”

  Smiling, Sophie scrabbled under the covers until she had located her various articles of clothing. Putting them on without exposing herself unduly to the air was a cumbersome procedure, but she succeeded eventually and stood up, buttoning the fur pelisse thankfully over what she knew must be the most crumpled muddle beneath.

  “Adam, if I am going to spend a month in the same clothes, I am not going to be at all nice to know.” She spoke as she emerged into the frigid gray light of the barn, where a fire still burned, Adam squatting in front of it. “We cannot even wash.”

  He stood up from the fire, holding a mug. “Coffee.” He handed her the steaming mug. “I think cleanliness is the least of our problems, Sophie. We cannot afford the luxury of such refined concerns.”

  Sophie sipped her coffee, wondering why she felt as if she had been rebuked. She glanced at him over the rim of the mug and saw that his mouth was drawn, his face set, anxiety in the gray eyes. “What is troubling you?”

  “The weather,” he said shortly. “Boris says he can smell a blizzard, and the sky does not look at all inviting.”

  “Perhaps we should stay here today, then,” she suggested, both practically and hopefully. For all its lack of creature comforts, the barn did provide dry shelter and a measure of warmth.

  Adam shook his head almost impatiently. “If we do not move whenever there is the possibility of ugly weather, we will never get anywhere. We cannot spend forever on this journey, and the weather will not improve before the spring.”

  Sophie shrugged, draining her mug. “Then let us start. There seems little to be gained by standing around fretting.”

  Adam’s laugh cracked in the dry air, chasing the worry from his eyes. “That’s my indomitable Sophie! There’s bread and honey for your breakfast. Eat quickly while Boris and I harness the horses.”

  Sophie munched on bread and honey while ensuring the saddlebags were securely packed, shaking out the furs from the sleigh and replacing them. She refilled the brazier with the last of the fire. It was certainly going to be an improvement on the previous day’s journeying.

  She remembered that cheerful thought later that morning, and the memory brought a hollow laugh. By ten o’clock the sky was as dark as a starless night. Adam’s expression became more grim by the moment as he looked anxiously through the window, rubbing at the dirt with a sleeve as if it would improve the visibility.

  “I don’t think it’s the dirt,” Sophie commented from her cocoon of furs. “Boris has always been able to smell a blizzard.”

  Adam merely grunted, continuing his anxious watch until, abruptly, they were enveloped, blinded by an impenetrable yet constantly moving wall of snow. The temperature dropped even further, and the already feeble warmth emitted by the makeshift brazier ceased to penetrate a cold that was almost solid. Sophie found herself struggling for breath.

  “Get on the floor!” Adam’s voice came, harsh, cracked with effort through the darkness. His hands on her shoulder forced her to the floor. “Pull the furs over your head.”

  “But you—”

  “Don’t argue with me!”

  Sophie decided that perhaps she would not. She huddled on the floor, completely covered by furs. It was easier to breathe the trapped air warmed by her body as she crouched, hugging herself. The sleigh was moving so slowly now that when it came to a stop, at first she barely noticed the cessation of movement.

  “Don’t you move!” Adam’s sharp instruction reached her just as a blast of fearsome cold stabbed into her nest. She realized that he must have opened the door, then it banged closed and she was left with the residue of that rapier thrust.

  In the minute or so since the sleigh had halted, the snow had drifted above the level of the wooden blades. Adam struggled blindly to the horses, making out the great bulk of Boris Mikhailov astride the lead horse. Shielding his mouth with his arm, the count bellowed up at the muzhik.

  Boris’s reply was snatched away in the snow, but Adam had realized the problem for himself. The horse that Boris was not riding was turning to ice as the snow froze on contact with his coat. The animal was wracked with violent spasms as it stood, yielding itself to death.

  Adam mounted it, grabbing the frozen reins. The metal of the bit was so cold it burned like the heart of a furnace. It took every vestige of skill for him to get the beast to move, but at last he took a step. Boris’s mount moved forward also, and the sleigh inched out of the rapidly icing drift around the blades. Adam, as he knew Boris would be, was obsessed with worry for the other horses, tethered to the rear of the sleigh; Khan, in particular. They had to keep moving, however slowly, just so that the blood would not freeze in the animals’ veins.

  It was impossible to tell whether they were still on the route. Whirling snow blanked out the landscape so that they moved without direction, without purpose, it seemed. Then Adam became aware of a movement in the veiling whiteness, coming up beside him. Stiffly, he turned his deadened body. A white heat of fury sent the blood shooting through his veins. Sophie, crouched low over Khan’s neck, the two other horses on leading reins to either side, was forcing the beasts through the snow, pushing them to increase their speed. Adam bawled at her to get back inside, but the cold froze his lungs, and she ignored him anyway. He could do nothing without stopping, but to stop even for a second would spell disaster. Seething with fury, fueled by terror, he was obliged to accept her presence, knowing, as his own body succumbed to the disembodied sensation of extreme cold, that she must be in the same condition.

  For a terrifying half hour, the three of them rode side by side through the storm, until Boris, with supreme effort, raised his arm, pointing with his whip into the white darkness. A shape loomed. Roofed, walled, it was the lifeline without which death was a certainty.

  There was a chimney, smoke curling, melting into the snow; outbuildings solidifying, all evidence of a post house. Adam forced himself from his horse; reaching up, he pried Sophie loose from her death grip on Khan’s neck, hauling her to the ground. Boris leaned sideways, grabbed the three reins, and drove the sleigh toward the outbuildings, the three horses obeying blindly.

  The door of the post house crashed open under the force of Adam’s shoulder. He stumbled inside, Sophie, whose legs would not work, held against him. They found themselves in a room warmed by a vast potbellied stove set into the wall and a fire blazing in the hearth. Adam shoved Sophie so close to the fire she was almost inside it, then he took stock. Faces—a whole crowd of faces—stared at him through a smoky haze; children, men, women, two ancients rocking beside the stove. The earthen floor swarmed with dogs, cats, chickens, and a goat. They had fallen upon a post house of the most primitive kind, but its one room, although fetid, was warm.

  He forced his lips to move. “My servant needs help with the horses.” His hand plunged into his pocket, pulling out a leathern pouch. Stiffly, fingers fumbling, he extracted a coin, handing it to a brawny lad. “There’ll be another when the job’s done.”

  The lad touched his forelock, pocketed the coin, and grabbed a wolfskin from a wooden settle by the hearth.

  “’Tis a powerful blizzard, lord.” An elderly man was the first person, apart from Adam, to speak, and there was awe in his voice. “Not fit for man nor beast.”

  “No,” agreed Adam shortly. “Bring me vodka.” He turned to one of the women. “What can you give us in the way of hot food?”

  The woman shook her head in its greasy cap as if trying to dispel hallucination. “Cabbage soup, lord.”

  “Then see to it. I want some privacy around this fire. Have you a screen?”

  The idea seemed extraordinary, but the memory of that pouch of coins, the richness of the travelers’ furs, the authoritative tone could produce
a near miracle. Sophie, thawing painfully, shivering violently as sensation returned to her body, suddenly found herself enclosed in a tent of sheets draped from hooks in the ceiling. The strings of onions and garlic also hanging from the hooks added the strangest decorative touch to a scene so bizarre that she began to laugh weakly.

  “Get out of those clothes!” Adam spoke in French, ensuring that they could not be understood by any curious ears beyond their tent. He held the vodka to her lips. “Never, ever have I seen such a piece of crass, mindless stupidity. Half an hour more and you would have been beyond salvation! What did you hope to achieve with that nonsensical act of martyrdom?” He tipped the bottle vigorously, his hand shaking. Sophie choked, the spirits trickling down her chin.

  “I expected to achieve what I succeeded in achieving,” she replied in the same language, through chattering teeth. “Don’t bawl at me, Adam. You didn’t expect me to leave Khan to suffer?”

  “As it happens, I did,” he said dryly, taking a deep revivifying draught of the vodka. “Foolish of me. Now get out of those clothes. They are frozen stiff.”

  Gradually, the point of the tent penetrated her numbed brain. Sophie stared at him. “Here, in the middle of this room? With all those people…?” She gestured vaguely to the grimy curtains. A chicken, clucking cheerfully, pushed beneath one of the sheets to enter the makeshift chamber.

  “Shoo!” Adam toed the bird back the way it had come. “Yes, here, Sophie. Now, this minute. You may not realize it, but your clothes are frozen to your body.” He was beginning to unfasten his own pelisse, his fingers tingling painfully as life returned.

  “I can’t stay stark naked,” protested Sophie. Then she became suddenly aware of a puddle at her feet as the fire melted the frozen snow from her clothes. An icy wetness seemed plastered to her skin, and she realized the truth of what Adam had said. Fingers fumbling, she began to strip off her clothes, finally standing in her cold-reddened skin.

  “Come here.” Adam, as naked as she, began to scour her with a harsh scrap of toweling. “I have to say this was not the way I had envisaged my first sight of you,” he murmured, turning her around, scrubbing vigorously the length of her back and legs. “It is just about the least erotic moment imaginable.”

  “You’re scraping all my skin off,” Sophie complained. “I’ll be as raw as a peeled potato!”

  “See what I mean? Not at all erotic,” Adam said, with a mock sigh. “Apart from tuberlike, how does that feel now?”

  “Alive and warm,” she said. “But what now?”

  “Maybe we can beg a blanket.”

  “It’ll be flea-ridden, Adam! I’ll be eaten alive.” She huddled into the hearth, scorching one side of her with the blaze, hugging her arms across her breasts. “I feel so exposed.”

  “Count?” It was Boris Mikhailov from outside the tent. “Thought you might like your cloak-bag.”

  “You thought well, Boris.” Adam stretched a bare arm through a gap in the sheets. “You’d best get out of your own clothes.”

  “Just doing so,” responded the muzhik. “Is Sophia Alexeyevna all right?”

  “Quite well, Boris.” Sophie answered for herself.

  “Don’t deserve to be,” declared Boris. “Such craziness!”

  “I could not permit Khan to freeze!” Agitated in her defense, Sophie stepped away from the blissful scorching heat of the fire, her arms dropping away from her breasts.

  Adam, rummaging through his valise, glanced up and drew in his breath sharply, seeing her now for the first time: clean-limbed, high-breasted, the soft curve of hip, elegant length of leg. She was too thin, but the lithe muscularity he had first noticed appeared little diminished by her imprisonment in St. Petersburg….

  “Adam!” Sophie choked with laughter. “What are you thinking?” Her eyes gazed with unashamed satisfaction at the very obvious physical expression of his thoughts.

  “Put this on, for pity’s sake.” He handed her a brocaded silk dressing gown. “This is the most absurd situation.” He began to dress himself rapidly, conscious of the teeming room beyond the tent.

  “This is the most absurd garment,” Sophie declared, hitching up the skirt into the girdle so it would not drag upon the earth floor. “Silk brocade in this place!”

  “If you prefer your bare skin, the choice is yours,” he retorted, restored to himself in dry britches, shirt, and jacket. “Were the horses well provided for, Boris Mikhailov?” He pushed through the curtains, his tone brisk as he spoke once more in Russian, reassuming the dignified mien of a colonel in the Preobrazhensky regiment of the Imperial Guard.

  Sophie, undeceived, chuckled to herself as she spread out their wet clothes in front of the fire, where they would gently steam until morning. The sheets were taken from the hooks and the room given back once more in its entirety to the postman and his family. Boris Mikhailov, for whom the need for privacy was unfelt, had changed his clothing by the stove under the indifferent eye of an old babushka stirring cabbage soup.

  The soup, heavy black bread, salted cucumbers, and raw onions appeared on the stained plank table. A communal cup of kvass passed around the table, refilled when empty from the beer barrel in the corner of the room. Sophie, who shared Adam’s dislike of the weak beer, settled for the occasional gulp of vodka, but fatigue swooped down upon her like a hawk on an unwary sparrow. One minute she was sitting upright on the long bench, her belly filled with soup and bread, the next her eyes had closed and she had slumped against Adam’s shoulder. Voices, cackling chickens, snapping dogs squabbling over scraps, whining children—she heard none of them. When Adam carried her over to the settle beside the fire, she curled onto the hard wood as if it were the softest feather bed. He covered her with one of the furs from the sleigh, sparing a rueful thought for the denial he had imposed upon them both that morning. Maybe, in future, it would be sensible to take advantage of opportunities when they offered themselves.

  He found himself a corner of the room where everyone slept in a higgledy-piggledy confusion of cradles, cots, and mattresses, the oldest and youngest closest to the sources of heat. Fleas hopped, chickens pecked, dogs scratched. Adam finally slept.

  Sophie awoke at daybreak. She awoke with a surge of vitality, unlike anything she had felt since she first arrived in St. Petersburg. Pushing aside the fur, she sat up on her hard bed, swinging her legs to the floor. A cat twined itself around her calves; something tugged at the hem of Adam’s dressing gown. A pair of solemn brown eyes peered up at her from a dirt-encrusted face. Smiling, she bent to scoop up the soggy baby who hungrily stuck his fist into his mouth. Around them, bodies began to stir, making reluctant waking noises. Holding the babe on one hip, she went to the tiny, snow-encrusted window. It was impossible to see out, so she stepped over animals and still-recumbent bodies to the door, gingerly lifting the crossbar.

  Outside, the sun sprang off the snow with blinding brightness. All traces of the storm had vanished, although it was still bitterly cold. She closed the door swiftly. A child was feeding kindling into the sinking fire; another was doing the same for the potbellied stove. The babushka yawned toothlessly and took the baby from Sophie, thrusting a milk-soaked rag into the roundly opened mouth. Dogs were sent outside with the encouragement of booted feet; Boris Mikhailov opened up the saddlebags, and soon the aroma of coffee filled the hovel.

  Sophie brushed at the wet patch on the silken robe at her hip where the babe had been perched. Looking up, she saw Adam smiling sleepily at her from his corner. Crossing the room, she held out her hands to him. He grasped them firmly and pulled himself upright.

  “Good morrow, sweetheart.” He kissed the tip of her nose. “What’s the weather doing?”

  “It’s beautiful. Freezing, but bright sunshine. I have to go to the outhouse, but I must get dressed first.” She gestured expressively around the busy room.

  “Quite frankly, I don’t think anyone is going to show the slightest interest,” Adam said. “Unless it be an inquisitive babe or a chi
cken.” Retrieving her dried, warmed clothes from the fireplace, he brought them back to the corner. “The less fuss you make, the less anyone’s going to notice.” He planted himself, foursquare, across the corner.

  Her crooked, quizzical smile quirked before she turned her back on the tumbling scene, pulling on stockings and pantalettes beneath the robe. Modesty beyond that stage seemed singularly pointless. Dropping the robe, she scrambled into the rest of her clothing behind the screen of Adam’s back. The satin gown was a sad sight, water-stained, crumpled, a seam split from yesterday’s ride. Her hair, uncombed for over two days, hung bedraggled to her shoulders. Dirt clung beneath her fingernails. The image of General, Prince Paul Dmitriev rose unbidden, unwanted, in her mind’s eye. Quite suddenly, she burst out laughing.

  Adam swung around. “Whatever has amused you, love?”

  “I was thinking of Paul,” she said, then saw his face close. “Only in terms of what a spectacle I must present and how he would react,” she explained, hesitant, tentative beneath his abruptly forbidding countenance.

  “He tried to kill you,” Adam said flatly. “I do not find anything amusing in that thought, or in any other to do with your husband.” He turned from her, striding across the room to the door. It swung open, letting in an ice-tipped finger of air, a brilliant shaft of sunlight, then closed.

  Adam marched to the stable. How could Sophie possibly be amused by thoughts of her husband? Had she no understanding of the situation in which she…they found themselves? Her husband was eventually going to find out that against all odds she had survived this journey, but he must not discover Adam Danilevski’s part in it. Boris Mikhailov could have made an opportune reappearance to explain her safety. At Berkholzskoye, the muzhik would be beyond Dmitriev’s vengeful hand. The thoughts, plans, explanations ran through his head as he checked on the horses. The one thought he could not evade was that Sophia Alexeyevna was another man’s wife and would remain so until death broke the contract. And he, Adam Danilevski, a man of stern moral rectitude, one who had sworn never to become entangled with a woman again, was playing a part in the same sort of triangle that had destroyed his own marriage—except that this time he was playing the guilty role.