Prince Dolgoruki and the Prussian Von Bonin, meanwhile, were in deep conversation. Then they fixed their decidedly unfriendly gaze upon me.
CHAPTER 3
I received my own unexpected invitation to rendezvous with Czartoryski that midnight in his study at the Winter Palace. This vast edifice is on the embankment of the Neva River in the middle of St. Petersburg, and, as the name implies, the windows are smaller and the fireplaces more numerous than at Catherine’s summer place. It’s so vast that different wings are painted rose, green, and pale blue, as if a single color were insufficient to cover it all. The plaza on the palace’s landward side is big enough to muster an army, and in all directions in this government town of two hundred thousand are monuments such as the Admiralty, the War Ministry, and bulbous cathedrals as intricately painted as Easter eggs.
I walked in the hushed dark to our meeting, the streets frozen, and presented my written invitation to silver-helmeted dragoons. A chamberlain led me up a cavernous marble staircase and down vast paneled corridors, life-sized paintings of stern ancestors giving me the eye. The magnificence was intimidating, and yet I was also proud to have a foothold in this sumptuous world. Apparently I was important. Apparently I was necessary. And the foreign minister was a man who trusted me. Did that mean I could finally trust?
Czartoryski’s office was an imposing but impractical twenty feet high, its fire giving a cone of heat against relentless cold that frosted the windows. Beyond the glass I could see the lanterns of sledges loaded with firewood that skidded on the frozen Neva. St. Petersburg is an arctic Venice built on forty-five islands with three hundred bridges. I turned back toward the fire and Czartoryski offered me a chair, some port, and conspiratorial intimacy as a clock gonged twelve.
“I’ve been a soldier,” the prince began, “a prisoner, an exile, a public servant to the royal family which confiscated my family estates, an ambassador to a Sardinian king without a kingdom, an antiquarian, an art collector, and now foreign minister for the nation that dismembered my own. Our peripatetic careers have something in common, Ethan Gage.”
You’ve also been the Tsarina’s lover, I silently amended, and it was no wonder the empress had succumbed to his charm. Czartoryski’s face was chiseled like a classical statue, with strong chin, regal nose, and gently slanted, liquid dark eyes that could seduce a diplomat or woman in turn. His hair curled magnificently to his shoulders and his body was lithe, just the type to scale Vesuvius or the royal bed. “We’re both curious, too,” I said. “You about America and France, and me about Poland and Russia.”
“Our cozy cabal.”
I glanced about. Czartoryski’s office welcomed visitors like the den of an explorer. There was an enormous globe on which fingers had rubbed Eastern Europe almost bare. More maps were pinned over bookcases, and a long birch table was covered with treaties, reports, newspapers, and pamphlets in several languages. Leather-bound books, wool oriental carpets, and gleaming wood expressed confidence that our planet can be measured and understood.
“Nations are peculiar things,” the minister went on. “Each a distinct individual, with not only a language but a culture. No one would mistake a Prussian for a Frenchman, or a Russian for a Roman.” He gestured to his maps. “You can draw nations out of existence, like my native Poland, and yet the underlying country is as persistent as bedrock. Do you know that Poland was Europe’s largest nation in the 16th Century, when it combined with Lithuania? Tsar Alexander knows how rooted my people are, and yet he needs Prussia against the French, and Prussia will not allow Poland to be reconstituted.”
“I thought Alexander dislikes Prussia as much as his mother favors it.”
“He fears Napoleon more, and German alliance has a long tradition. Alexander’s father Paul was fascinated by Frederick the Great and trained the Russian army like Prussian marionettes. He even put metal braces on soldier’s knees so they’d be forced to goosestep. Paul was his wife’s creature, and thus quite mad.” Such candor was risky, but the foreign minister found release by confiding.
“That’s why America and France got rid of our kings,” I said. “Although now the French have an emperor, which shows how inconsistent people can be. First they cut off the head of Louis, and then they crown Napoleon.”
“He crowned himself, I hear.”
I was sensible enough not to mention my own role in that affair.
“But people swing to emotion as much as reason, and no mob is rational. Napoleon promises order. Strength. Pride. Glory. For the mere price of servitude! Here in St. Petersburg, Alexander’s dislike of Prussia ended at Austerlitz. He needs the Germans. King Frederick-Wilhelm hesitates, but his wife Louisa badgers him for war. Wags call her ‘the only man in Prussia.’”
“But you think resurrecting Poland is a better strategy?”
“With French guarantees. The name of my country is our Slavic word for prairie, and Poland’s rich plains always tempt invaders. My country is a beach, awash with barbarians from the east and tyrants from the west. Yet every handicap has its benefit. Poland is the link, and our learning has made us the Greece that informs Russia’s Rome. We gave the world the astronomer Copernicus, the mathematician Brozek, and the geologist Staszik. Bonaparte views us as civilizers.”
“So Poland is eternally vulnerable, and eternally necessary.”
“Well said! Nothing is simple, including my own birth. Poles have complicated identities.”
“Yes. You have the name of Prince Adam Czartoryski, but—”
“But Stanislaw Poniatowski was made king of Poland after sleeping with Catherine the Great, and so knew the power of the bed. My mother was a sexually adventurous Polish beauty, and Stanislaw persuaded her to sleep with Russian ambassador Nikolai Repnin as a patriotic act. The side result was me.” His expression was wry. “My mother’s husband, the man I am named for, was rewarded for her infidelity with command of Poland’s military academy. This is how things work. Sometimes we sleep with the Russians. Sometimes we fight them. Those same Russians burned my own home palace of Pulawy during Kosciuszko’s Rebellion. So I joined Russian service to recoup our losses.”
“And that was Tadeusz Kosciuszko, who fought with George Washington?”
“Exactly. He helped win your Battle of Saratoga and build the fort at West Point. I’m told Washington so struggled with Polish names that he spelled Kosciuszko eleven different ways, but he loved the general’s reliability.”
“Another Lafayette.”
“Kosciuszko also met your mentor Franklin, as did my mother. Circles within circles.”
“Old Ben seems to have met half the people on the planet.” Which slightly tarnishes my own claim to him.
“And then Kosciuszko,” Czartoryski went on, “brought the revolutionary ideas of the New World back to the Old. He led a ragtag army of Jewish cavalry, burgher gunners, and illiterate peasants against battle-hardened Russians.”
“The Polish Spartacus.”
“But no foreign armies came to his aid. Now Kosciuszko is a crippled old man in Paris, still petitioning Napoleon to liberate Warsaw.”
“Do you trust Napoleon?”
“Of course not. Five thousand Poles fought for Napoleon in Italy in hopes he’d become Poland’s champion, and instead he shipped them to suppress the slave revolution in Haiti. All died or deserted. Napoleon the liberator has always been Napoleon the oppressor. But who is surprised? I don’t trust Napoleon, but Franklin said that if you want to persuade, appeal to interest rather than intellect. Napoleon’s interest and mine coincide.”
“Do you trust me?”
“No, I just told you—we’ve the same interests. You want a title. I want a country. Your advice to Alexander might serve to get both. So I conspire to use you and you conspire to use me, and we Poles conspire to use Bonaparte, as he will conspire to use us. Vesuvius, I warned.”
I like cynics. It seems hon
est, somehow. “And I’m an American who knows Napoleon, Jefferson, Red Indians, and Haitian slave generals, and is now working with a Pole.”
He smiled. “Exactly.”
“Which means I accumulate enemies the way a dog attracts fleas.”
“Sometimes enemies testify to character. Your shifting alliances make you judicious. Most men assume, but you consider.”
“You want me for my wisdom! I thought it was my looks.”
He laughed. “Our friendship does give me a chance to admire your pretty wife and yes, I’ve seen the ladies give you glances. But no, I’m intrigued first because you’re American, and thus have a natural affinity for liberty. Yet that’s not your utility either. There are many freethinkers in Alexander’s court.”
“St. Petersburg has as much heated idealism as the salons of Paris.”
“As much hot air, at least.” Czartoryski’s sense of humor was much like my own. “Russians love to talk of life and death, love and fate. In many ways they’re medieval. Their onion domes represent the shape of divine flames. They believe in religious miracles and the devil. Do you believe in evil, Ethan?”
The question surprised me, since Adam Czartoryski didn’t seem very religious. I was cautious. “Most men are complicated. Greedy, and even cruel, but they justify it to themselves. What’s common is temptation and betrayal. True evil, unfeeling evil, is rare.”
“One hopes so. Yet it still exists in the dark places of the world and emerges at times to seize men’s minds. It abides in foggy mountains, old castles, and deep caves. The Russian peasant knows this and prays. Russia’s mystics and hermits practice self-flagellation, self-castration, and self-burning. Mary is their God-bearer, a goddess herself, and their holy trinity isn’t Rome’s, it’s reason, feeling, and revelation. The haughtiest intellectual believes the witch Baba Yaga, Old Mother Boney Shanks, might live in the dell next-door. It’s night in Russia for half the year. Morana, the ancient goddess of darkness, reigns here.”
I felt a chill. “You don’t sound like a man of the Enlightenment.”
“I am. But I’m also a man of Eastern Europe, where Chernobog is the god of evil and the dead.”
Odd to have this educated minister—a student in inquisitive England, and an ambassador in sunny Italy—talk like this. There was hope in him but sadness too, and his idealism was tempered by disillusion. “Russia is beautiful in its own way,” I offered, warding off his somberness as if making the sign of the cross. “All this snow. And endless light in summer, I’m told.”
“Have you heard of the upyr?”
“The what?”
“A Tartar word for a malevolent spirit—a witch, or a vampire. Even today, graves are opened after seven years to make sure the dead are truly dead.”
That sounded ghoulish, but I went along. “In the West, many fear being buried alive because doctors can diagnose death too eagerly. Corpses have woken from a coma and pounded to get out of their coffins. Sometimes the dying insist they be buried with picks so they can dig their way back to the surface.”
“That’s not what I’m talking about. Here, people sometimes don’t die at all. Possessed people. Evil people. Heads are severed from corpses and their mouths stuffed with rocks or garlic to ensure they don’t arise. By lore the upyr still exist, and retain strange powers and ancient possessions. My Polish mother told me many tales when thunder rolled.”
“Which surely you didn’t believe.”
“You haven’t wandered the trackless taiga, Ethan, or the crags of the Carpathian Mountains. The Russian serf believes the forest is both haunted and blessed, and healers are called tree-teachers. Morana is a seductress who captivates men to lead them astray. Wolves are the devil incarnate, and saintly relics are a shield. Do you know the story behind the great church being built near your apartment?”
“The Cathedral of Kazan?”
“Its central icon is a religious painting claimed to have repelled a Mongol army at the city of Kazan in eastern Russia. It hardly mattered if the assertion by a possessed child was true. Russian troops believed it true, and victory resulted, just like Joan of Arc. Franklin sought to link lightning to electricity to explain the world. Russians observe lightning to experience the next world, because fire is a window to the divine. And tonight you straddle those worlds, Ethan, the West and East, the rational and the mystical, and in that way too we’re alike.”
“So that’s why we’ve formed our cozy cabal?”
“Not exactly.” He took a heavy book down from a shelf. “Yes. And no. My motive is very practical. I know you’re a thief of the sacred, Ethan. Don’t deny it, I’ve heard too many stories of the wayward American prying into tombs and seeking lost oracles. You’re the perfect man for Poland, and the perfect man for our times. You’ll advise the tsar, who is well meaning but inconsistent. We’ll make peace with Napoleon, reconstitute Poland, and I’ll persuade Alexander to make you a prince as a reward.”
“A prince!” I couldn’t help grinning. I’d denigrated Dolgoruki’s title to my wife but I too would puff if someone gave me that name. Prince Gage! It was absurd, but then wasn’t life? Hadn’t I met men and women in ridiculous positions of wealth and power because of wild twists of fate? Why not me?
“Or a count, at least.” Everyone hedges.
“But you want me to commit a crime?” I remembered Elizabeth’s word.
“Not a crime, but a recovery. Not a theft, but a liberation.”
“The rightful owner is you?”
“Poland. When Catherine the Great dismembered my country she tried to take our soul. Prussia and Russia agreed in 1797 to even remove the name ‘Poland’ from common usage. They also took our symbols of nationhood. Berlin stole our Six Sacred Crowns. Even more precious relics were spirited away to St. Petersburg. Now they’re about to be even further lost.”
“Destroyed?”
“Given away to German brutes in return for alliance against Napoleon. Lothar Von Bonin was sent from Prussia to bring my Polish heritage back to Berlin as trophies, to seal Prussia’s pact with the tsar. The man is a lizard, and you and I must stop him.” He gripped my shoulders. “A night of daring can change history, rescue Poland, ensure peace, and make us both rich.” He leaned forward as if to share a great confidence. “All you have to do, my American friend, is risk life, freedom, and your eternal soul.”
CHAPTER 4
Astiza’s Story
My husband apologizes for the dangerous task we’ve agreed to, but it’s rekindled our energy. I’ve locked away my worry and kept the Tarot cards unturned. I’m wary of ambition, but Ethan says—or hopes, promises, yearns—that our luck has finally changed. We all needed rest after reaching St. Petersburg from the terrors of Bohemia, but now we’re enlisted in a gamble that might set us up for life. As a result, Ethan’s mood is feverish. Sketches litter our apartment. Our servant Gregor has been sent for odd supplies. My husband has scouted his objective with a telescope, taking Harry to allay suspicion. His enthusiasm infects my own. Men are easiest to live with when employed, brightest when challenged, and bravest when dared. Our mission is quite mad, which means it’s exactly the sort of thing that fits our eccentric family. Our child Horus helps. Czartoryski is inquiring for a suitable corpse. I work with rubber, silk, and thread.
It was my visit to St. Petersburg’s island fortress that set our plan in motion. I was surprised by the invitation of the pretty tsarina, but Elizabeth has retained a close relationship with Adam Czartoryski who befriended us. All sense opportunity in our era’s tumult. Napoleon’s royalist foes call their nemesis “the torrent” because he’s flooded the world with change, and everyone hopes to ride the current to their advantage.
I rose early and in the local fashion scrubbed my face with ice, on the Russian theory that this trial makes a woman’s cheeks rosy. Honey and ash are used to brush teeth. When a lieutenant of the tsarina’s guar
d called at our apartment at ten, my husband had already left to take Horus to the sled ramps of St. Petersburg. These are elaborately roofed and decorated platforms eighty feet high, with stairs at one end and a long ramp on the other that is sprayed to make ice. Sleds whiz down at terrifying speeds. I won’t try it, but Horus isn’t afraid to ride in Ethan’s lap. Our boy is thrilled that winter is embraced here. The Russians enjoy skating in line, snapping the snake to accelerate the endmost skater. Their winter sleigh rides are swifter than summer carriages, because river ice is smoother than any road. The inhabitants throw snowballs, build snowmen, hunt, fish through the ice, and warm themselves in saunas and steam baths.
Horus also begs to see the pit fights between bears and dogs, but I told my husband to forbid this barbarism and he promised to obey. I never entirely trust those two—what sensible wife and mother would?—but their sledding was a welcome recess from watching my boy.
“This is an unannounced outing,” the escorting officer instructed as I put on my coat. “Her majesty’s sleigh is waiting nearby in an enclosed courtyard.”
Our boots squeaked in the snow as we trudged, St. Petersburg’s winter oddly reminding me of the Egyptian desert. The dry powder is like sand. The canals and rivers are frozen as hard as ancient pavers. The cold is sharp as the sun. In both places, breath burns the lungs.
We went through a gate. The door of a covered sleigh opened. Elizabeth lifted a polar bear pelt and beckoned me beside her, a finger to her lips. As I sat, she snugged the fur around our hips. With the crack of a whip and song of sleigh-bells our team trotted into a street, down a ramp, and onto a frozen canal, our shoulders jostling as the sleigh swerved. Lace on the glass windows worked with frost to hide the tsarina’s face from the public. She turned to face me, still pretty as porcelain at twenty-seven years old.
The Trojan Icon (Ethan Gage Adventures Book 8) Page 3