by Jane Feather
The royal progression set out on the first stage of the journey in a style that would have amazed Sophie, in the light of her own recent travels along the same route. The sleighs resembled little houses on runners, furnished with cushioned seats, carpets, divans, and tables. Six hundred horses awaited for the change at each relay point. Servants boiled samovars in the snow during afternoon halts and moved among the sleighs with cakes and tea. Prince Potemkin, ever the superlative planner, had bonfires lit across the featureless white landscape to mark the route. There were no post houses for this party. Nightly accommodations were to be found in houses specially furnished for the occasion and prepared by the servants who preceded the imperial party to each resting place.
It still took four weeks to accomplish the distance from St. Petersburg to Kiev, and at the beginning of February the procession entered the city to wait for the ice on the River Dnieper to melt.
The lovers at Berkholzskoye, unaware that their assumptions about winter journeyings were inaccurate, continued in their idyllic isolation. They hunted duck in the freezing dawn, took sleigh rides across the steppe, skated and tobogganed, tumbling in the snow like children. They read aloud before the fire in the evenings, played cards, at which Sophie continued her blatant cheating, and chess and backgammon, at which she could not.
Old Prince Golitskov watched his granddaughter bloom beneath love’s nurturing, and his heart ached for the loss she was sure to suffer. He also saw Adam’s anguish, the darkness that crossed his face sometimes when Sophie was not looking, and the old prince guessed at its cause. Adam Danilevski was an honorable man, and he was loving another man’s wife. To be unable to declare his love openly, unable to stand by that love in the eyes of the world, unable to protect and shelter the object of that love, would destroy such a man eventually. Once this enclosed fairyland was breached, he would have to face these limitations and make the only decision possible. He would return to his regiment, and Sophie…That would depend upon her husband’s next step.
The dream was broken one snowy afternoon in mid-February. Adam stretched his long legs to the fire’s blaze and yawned. “It is very strange, but I have always found restfulness to be one of the most attractive qualities in a woman,” he remarked plaintively. “Why I should now find myself in thrall to the most restless creature on this earth I cannot imagine.”
“I am not restless,” Sophie denied, pausing in her pacing. “It is just that we have not been out all day.” She came over to perch on his knee, cajoling. “Come for a walk.”
“There is a blizzard blowing, Sophie. Or have you not noticed?” He sat back in his deep chair, holding her hips lightly, laughing up at her. “If you wish, we could go upstairs for a little indoor exercise.”
“It is not a blizzard! Just a few snowflakes.”
Adam turned to the window. A white swirling mass was all that was visible. “A few snowflakes,” he mused. “Yes, of course. How foolish of me.”
“Oh, don’t tease! We can wrap up.”
“I did just offer you an alternative.”
“If you come for a walk first.”
“There are some counters with which I will not bargain, Sophia Alexeyevna,” he rasped, shockingly harsh. “You do not agree to make love as some kind of bribe or reward.”
Sophie looked aghast. “I did not mean that.”
“That is how it sounded.” His voice was clipped, his face closed, his knees shifted beneath her in unmistakable rejection.
Sophie stood up, as stunned as if he had struck her. “I will go alone then.”
The door shut softly. A log slipped in the fire. He recalled Eva’s complaining voice, then the note of resignation as he coaxed her, then the hard edge, as, duty done, she demanded some favor. Eva’s body had been her bargaining counter in every dispute. But she had given it freely to someone…. Or had she bought something with it even then?”
The bile of disillusion and betrayal roiled anew in his belly, made more corrosive by remorse. He had let the past touch Sophie—a woman so different from Eva they could almost belong to different species. And he had smirched her with his bitterness. He jumped to his feet, intending to go after her, but as he reached the hall Gregory was closing the front door.
“Has Sophia Alexeyevna gone out, Gregory?”
“Yes, lord,” the watchman replied stolidly. “But she’ll not be out long in that.”
Adam was not so sure as Gregory, but he returned to the library, reasoning that by the time he had dressed himself for the weather she would have disappeared into the storm and pursuit would be futile.
Sophie, head down, battled against the snow blowing into her face, blinding her, freezing on her eyelashes. It took her no more than five minutes to realize that the impulse had been foolish, yet she kept walking, trying to dissipate against the elements her confused hurt.
Once or twice before, Adam had bitten her head off when she made some flippant remark, but usually it had to do with Dmitriev, and she could understand that, even though it hurt. But what had just happened in the library could not be laid at her husband’s door. It seemed somehow part of that darkness she sensed in Adam’s soul when the shadows crossed his face and he did not think she had noticed. Delicacy had kept her from probing. If he wished her to share those thoughts, he would have confided in her. That was what one did, after all. Everyone had their secrets—both good and bad. He had confessed to bad memories on one occasion in St. Petersburg, but insisted they belonged to an irrelevant past. She could not possibly pry; it was not in her nature. Yet, on this occasion, she had been in some way responsible for that painful misunderstanding. It had been just a misunderstanding, hadn’t it?
Deciding that this walk was impossible, Sophie turned around to retrace her steps. The blasting snow quickly plastered her back, and the force of the gusts almost lifted her off her feet. A horseman, leaning low over the neck of his mount, materialized out of the white blanket as she neared the house. He half fell, half jumped from the horse before the front door. Sophie plowed toward him. “Do you have business at Berkholzskoye?”
“A message from Her Imperial Majesty for Princess Dmitrievna,” he mouthed. The words disappeared into the storm, but not before Sophie had heard them. An icy stillness enveloped her.
“I am Princess Dmitrievna,” she said. “You may give me your message and take your horse to the stables. The serfs there will care for him and show you to the kitchen.”
Relief scudded across the man’s expression at these crisp orders promising deliverance from the storm, fires, vodka, and a full belly. Digging into the leather pouch at his waist, he drew forth a letter. “Here you are, Princess.” He presented it to her with a bow while the snow swirled around them.
“Hurry along now,” she said, taking the letter. “The stables are behind the house. Your horse needs tending.”
Her Highness seemed to show disproportionate concern for his horse, thought the messenger, rapidly leading his mount in the direction of the rear of the mansion.
Sophie went around to the side of the house, where the little door was unlocked. She slipped inside. The letter in her hand seemed to burn with a dreadful menace. The imperial seal pressed against her palm. Why was she receiving missives from the empress in the middle of a blizzard?
Presumably Paul had been obliged to account for her disappearance, which would explain why Catherine assumed she was at Berkholzskoye. But why? She turned the letter over in her hand as if she could divine the contents, much as she had done with the other one, way back at the beginning of time it now seemed. That summons had led to misery. Why should the outcome of this one be any different?
“Sophie!” Adam’s voice pierced her guesswork. “Oh, look at you! You are the most nonsensical creature, sweetheart.”
She realized that she was standing in the hall, snow melting on her eyelashes, running down her cheeks in a freezing stream, pouring off her pelisse to puddle at her feet. “I’ll just go upstairs,” she said vaguely. “Change my
clothes.”
“Sophie.” He took her hands, gripping them fiercely. “Sweet love, I am sorry for what happened. I had no right to snap at you in that fashion.”
All thoughts of that distressing exchange had vanished in the last few minutes, and she looked at him blankly.
Adam could think of no reason for such an expression except that he had wounded her even more deeply than he thought. Guilt and remorse washed through him. He would have to explain it to her, open up those corrosive, shaming memories for another’s eye. It was perhaps time, anyway. “Do not look at me in that fashion, love. I will try to explain—”
“A message has come from the empress,” she said as if she had not heard him.
“What?” Adam looked down at the hands he held and realized she was gripping something. That same icy stillness enveloped him. “What does it say?”
“I do not know yet. I have not opened it. I came across the messenger as he arrived. I sent him to the stables immediately. It seemed best, do you not think? His horse was half frozen.” The staccato sentences emerged in a distant, abstracted voice; her eyes were still blank as if they did not see him.
“Yes,” he agreed quietly. “Quite the best thing to do. Now, let us go upstairs and get you out of those wet clothes. We will open the letter when you are warm and dry.” Still holding her hand, he led her to the stairs.
Sophie, her mind wandering through a landscape of dread and the certainty of loss, allowed herself to be delivered to a clucking Tanya, whose scolding went unheard as she undressed, dried, and reclothed her frozen mistress under the concerned eyes of the count.
Adam sat on the long, low window seat, holding the unopened letter. As it had for Sophie, premonition became certainty in his mind. It had been inevitable, he had thought himself armed for it, but foreknowledge provided no shield, no buckler against the pain.
“Open it, Adam.” Sophie spoke in her normal voice; her eyes had returned from the sad internal land they had been viewing. She turned from her mirror, where Tanya had been braiding her hair. “I am prepared now.”
Silently, he complied.
When he had read the contents, he told her in flat tones, “It seems there is to be a state visit to the Crimea. You are appointed lady-in-waiting to Her Imperial Majesty and bidden to Kiev to join the imperial suite.”
Sophie frowned down at her fingernails. “And my husband?”
“According to the empress, he awaits you most eagerly.”
Sophie exhaled through her teeth. “What a consummate actor he must be. It is to be hoped he will be able to hide his surprise at seeing me.”
Adam sprang to his feet, looking at her in horror. “You are not going back to him, Sophie.”
She ignored this statement for the moment. “What of you, Adam?”
He sighed, saying with difficulty, “I must go to Mogilev immediately. It is to be assumed my own orders will be delivered there and I must be there to receive them.”
“We had best find Grandpère and tell him of this.” Sophie went to the door, calm and collected, her carriage as erect as ever, her stride as energetic. She knew what she was going to do; indeed, the decision had made itself. In fact, if she really thought about it, it had been made all along; it was just that she had not wished to contaminate the idyll with thoughts of its ending.
Adam followed her to the library, where, without explanation, she handed Golitskov the imperial summons. “Adam must leave straightway for his home,” she said briskly, once he had read it. “It is to be assumed he will be bidden to join this journey himself if my husband is to be there in an official capacity.”
“You must go into France,” the prince said, tapping the letter against his palm. “The empress will be angered, but it cannot be helped—”
“I am not running away,” Sophie interrupted. “I am going to Kiev to join the czarina’s suite.”
“You most certainly are not!” both Adam and the prince exclaimed in the same breath with equal fervency.
Sophie looked from one to the other, and spoke with quiet determination. “Paul cannot harm me anymore. I have moved beyond his power to hurt. Besides, I shall be a member of the czarina’s retinue. He cannot keep me prisoner in such circumstances, and I shall ensure that I have nothing and no one about me who could be made to suffer in order that I should suffer with them. I daresay I shall hardly see him, except for the formalities.”
“If you believe he cannot hurt you, you do not know him as well as you should,” Adam said. “He will find ways. Maybe not on this journey, but what of later, when you will not be under the empress’s close observation?”
Sophie shrugged. “Later will take care of itself.” She reached for his hands. “Love, listen to me. I cannot bear being away from you. Death would be preferable. I will suffer my husband in order that I may see you sometimes, talk with you sometimes, feel your eyes upon me, be warmed by your smile—”
“Sophie, stop! I cannot endure it!” Adam cried. “You cannot believe that I will be able to tolerate watching you, knowing that night after night you are possessed by that barbarous man, knowing how he is hurting you, unable to touch you, to protect you—”
“But surely a little is better than nothing at all,” Sophie interrupted passionately. “I cannot live with nothing; never to see you again. I cannot!”
“So you would have me without honor, living for the moments when I might look upon another man’s wife? Scurrying around, hugger-mugger, trying to contrive a word, a kiss, a touch in dark corners, a squalid tumble between soiled sheets?” he said, vicious and bitter. “I’ll not play that part, Sophie.” He turned from her, hearing Eva’s laugh again, mocking the outraged cuckold.
“It would not be like that between us,” she whispered, recoiling both from the picture he had painted and from the idea that Adam could possibly depict their love in such language.
“It is always like that.”
“But…but it has not been. Please…you know it has not been.” Ineffably distressed, she took a step toward him, hand outstretched. “Say it has not been like that, Adam.”
“Can you not see the difference between what we have had here, in our own world, and what will happen at court, under the scheming, prurient eyes of gossips?” The gray gaze was cold as the ocean, hard as a pebble beach. “There is no future, Sophie. God knows, I would that there were; but I cannot leave my responsibilities here, not even for love. If you will go into France, then I may contrive to visit you sometime.”
Sometime…this year, next year, sometime, never. Sophie shook her head at the old adage. “If I leave Russia without the czarina’s permission, there will never be hope for us,” she said. “I would not be able to return, even if something should happen to remove my husband. I will not separate myself from you. You may do as you please, Adam, but I am going to obey the czarina’s summons. Grandpère—” Only when she turned to include her grandfather did she realize that he had left them to a discussion that required no intruder.
“You would put me on the rack,” Adam declared in soft anguish.
“I will put us both on it, but at least in pain one is aware of life,” she replied. “The alternative is the numbness of living death.” The dark eyes held his. “I have the courage to live, Adam. I will live without you as lover, but I will not live without your love and your presence.”
“I do not know whether you talk of the courage of heroes or of martyrs, Sophie,” he said slowly. “But I daresay we shall find out in our pain. Now, I must make my preparations.”
He left her alone in the library, where Prince Golitskov found her a few minutes later. “You are set upon this course, Sophie?”
“It is the only choice that provides any hope,” she replied.
“And Dmitriev?”
She shrugged. “I am armored against him, Grandpère. And I will have the czarina’s protection.”
“For the moment,” he agreed soberly. “But your husband is your lord, Sophie. He may use you as he pleas
es, and the czarina’s eye will not always be upon you.”
“I will take my chance.”
“Very well.” The old prince bowed to the inevitable. Sophia Alexeyevna was a grown woman, entitled to make her own life-defining decisions. He could draw a smidgeon of comfort from the knowledge that she was rarely less than clear-sighted.
But that night, as she lay alone in the bedchamber in the west wing, her last sight of Adam galloping into the snow burned upon her eye, she felt neither grown nor clear-sighted. There had been constraint between them, the farewell abrupt. She knew he was angry at her obstinacy, just as he was fearful for her safety, but underlying those emotions was whatever darkness had caused him to cast that dreadful blemish upon their loving, to use such bitter words. It was the same darkness that had caused him to strike out at her that afternoon, when she had so flippantly insisted upon a walk before lovemaking.
And there had been no time…or was it no inclination…for a last loving. Turning her head into her pillow, Sophie wept tears of loss and bewilderment, railing against an unjust fate.
A week later she arrived in Kiev. The city was thronged with delegates pouring in from every country and representatives from every part of the vast Russian empire to pay their respects to their empress. Despite her depression, Sophie could not take her eyes from the window of the sleigh drawing her through the streets. There were Cossacks and the horsemen of the steppes, Khirgiz and Kalmuks; bearded merchants rubbing shoulders with nobles; officers, splendid in every kind of regimental uniform, parading beside Tatars and Indian dignitaries.
The sleigh drew up in front of the palace housing Catherine and her retinue. Lackeys ran up to assist this clearly noble personage to alight from the elegant, comfortable equipage. Sophie entered the palace, identified herself to a majordomo, and was swept away without further question into the presence of the Grand Mistress.
Countess Shuvalova smiled graciously at the princess. “We have been expecting you daily, Princess Dmitrievna, since the messenger returned from Berkholzskoye. Your apartments will be in this palace,” she said. “As lady-in-waiting, you will be accommodated under the same roof as Her Imperial Majesty throughout the journey.”