Silver Nights (36 page)

Dear God, Sophie prayed in silent repetition. Do not let him hurt the child. I do not mind what he does to me, but do not let him harm the child. She fell into her bedchamber under another violent push. He stood looking down at her as she crouched on her knees, one hand supporting herself on the floor, the child cradled against her with the other. He read her terror. Contempt filled his eyes, overlaid with a deep satisfaction.

“Finally, my dear, we come to a reckoning. You are a whore, my adulterous wife.” With a sudden movement, he bent, snatching the baby from her, pushing her backward as he did so, causing her to lose her balance.

“No!” She scrambled to her feet, her eyes wild, her hair swirling around her as she grabbed for the child. Paul struck her with the back of his hand, and she reeled. His signet ring had cut into her lip, but she barely noticed the sticky warmth of blood on her chin. She sprang at him again, and this time the blow brought her back to her knees, sobbing with pain and terror.

“Stay where you are and listen to me,” he said in the same cold tone. The baby in his hands set up a piteous wailing, and Sophie could hear her voice pleading through her own sobs. “Be quiet!” he said, and she fell despairingly silent.

“I will take this bastard as mine.” So cold, so deadly cold, as if snakes' venom ran in his veins. “He will grow up as my heir, but he will abhor the name of his mother. He will suffer through his growing, and he will know to lay that suffering at the door of the whore who gave him life.”

Sophie began to shake uncontrollably as the diabolical words pierced her like a rapier of ice. The child's wails increased in volume, and the milk flooded into her breasts in response.

Dmitriev swore a vile oath. Striding to the door, he bellowed and one of his men came running. “Take the brat!” He almost threw the squawling infant at the man. “Find some woman to act as wet nurse. She will come with us to St. Petersburg.”

“Yes, lord.” The man took the red, screaming, soggy bundle and bore him off.

As her son's wails grew fainter, Sophie huddled over her ach
ing breasts, now spilling nourishment for the child torn from her. She was drained of all strength, muscle and sinew liquified, her mind retreating from this hellish nightmare, as if, by so doing, it would go away and she would wake up.

“Get up!” Seizing her hair again, he yanked her to her feet. Her scalp burned; her face stung from the blows. “Where is Danilevski?”

She shook her head, and he jerked her head back by the hair and hit her again. “Where is he?”

“I do not know,” she croaked between her swollen, bleeding lips. “He went to Mogilev.” She did not know why she lied, except for the vague hope that if Paul could not put Adam definitely on the scene, he would have no evidence that he was the guilty lover. Without evidence, he could not injure him.

“Then I must postpone dealing with him.” Dmitriev shrugged carelessly. “It does not matter, for the moment.” He looked coldly into her face as if he were examining some repellent creature of a different species. “As for you, my faithless wife—”

“Why? Why would you have me to wife?” The question interrupted him. It was the question that had haunted her since their wedding night, when he had made it so mortifyingly clear that she disappointed him and she had not known why. The disappointment had become loathing, and she still had not known what she could have done to inspire such an extremity of distaste. He was looking at her now with that same disgust he had so often evinced in the past. Facing the end of all that meant happiness, she could ask the question with a curious indifference. The answer did not really matter, but she might as well go to her death with the riddle solved. “Why did you woo me and wed me, Paul, when you knew I did not please you?”

His laugh dripped acid. “No, you did not please me from the moment I laid eyes on you—bold, brazen, indecorous, with none of your mother's delicacy and beauty. I had expected to wed Sophia Ivanova's daughter—”

“Why?” she asked again, interest kindling despite her throbbing face, her burning scalp, her bereft soul.

The pale eyes looked at her, yet did not seem to see her. “I wanted your mother, and I would have had her but for you, who
killed her.” His gaze focused on her again. “I thought to have the daughter in her stead.” He jerked back on her hair again. “And look what I possessed!” So vicious was his tone that she flinched in the expectation of another blow. “An unappealing, unfaithful whore!”

“Kill me,” she said. “You have taken my child, what more can you do to me?”

A slight gleam enlivened the ice-blue stare. “Oh, I have not begun yet. I will have my revenge on the Golitskovs through you. You will live a very long life, I trust.” Another jerk on her hair brought tears flowing from her eyes. “I repudiate you,” he spat. “As is my right with an unfaithful wife, one who has born a bastard. You will enter the Convent of the Assumption as a penitent.” For a second that ghastly gleam in the cold eyes flared with fanatical satisfaction. “You will enter as a penitent whore, with your head shaved, barefoot, and with the stripes of the lash upon your back. These instructions together with details of the crime for which you are repudiated shall be given to the superiors at the convent.” His thin smile flickered. “You will live long to pay for your crime, Sophia Alexeyevna, and for the humiliations visited upon me by your parents. And you will do so in a pitiless climate—the convent has a harsh and unforgiving regime dedicated to the redemption of sinners through prayer and penance.” A poisonous satisfaction laced every carefully articulated word.

Sophie barely heard him. Her fate held no interest for her, not beside the monstrous life he planned for her child. To grow up in that mausoleum, to grow under the hatred borne him by this vicious despot…And there would be no way to stop him. If he declared the child his own, his heir, his generosity would be applauded. He would repudiate the wife, as was his right in the eyes of the Church and of the law, but would care for the innocent child. It was a diabolical vengeance. As she had paid and would continue to pay for the supposed injuries her parents had inflicted upon Paul Dmitriev, so would her son pay for his mother's crimes, and every day she lived she would be tormented by her knowledge of the life her son would be enduring.

Her lack of response to this description of her punishment penetrated his cold dispassion, and a tide of rage swept hotly
through him. “Perhaps you do not fully understand what I am saying.” His eyes darted around the room, fell upon the scissors on the dresser. Dragging her by the hair, he crossed to the dresser. “I will start what the monks will finish, then maybe you will begin to understand.”

Before she could realize what was happening, he began to hack at her hair. She stood staring, disbelieving, into the mirror as the rich, dark locks fell to her shoulders, to the floor in luxuriant, chestnut-tinted profusion. That same fanatical light shone in his eyes as he hacked down to the scalp, pulling agonizingly as he did so. Tears poured down her cheeks, mingling with the blood from her split lip, but her mutilated image was blurred now in the mirror as she seemed to enter some dark world of her own. Her knees buckled, but he held her up by what little hair she had left, before flinging her facedown across the bed. Her hands were wrenched behind her. The roughness of rope bound her wrists so tight she had cried out before she could stifle the sound in the quilt.

The door clicked shut on his departure, the sound of the iron key turning. Sophie lay, trying to gather some strength, just enough to enable her to turn over. But when she did so, the cramping in her arms as she lay upon them was agonizing, and not all the will in the world would force her muscles to make the complicated maneuvers necessary to bring her to her feet without the use of her hands. With a sob, she rolled again onto her belly.

All night she lay, having no idea what was happening in the rest of the house; whether her grandfather lived, whether her child slept in a stranger's arms; whether Tanya had recovered consciousness. The general's army had taken over the house, and all at Berkholzskoye knew that this was the princess's husband, who had the perfect right to remove his wife if he so chose. In the absence of any leadership of their own, they bowed to the invader's rule.

At dawn the door opened again with the same lack of emotion with which it had been closed. “I trust you slept well,” came the cold voice above her. He turned her over, pulling her into a sitting position. “It is time for you to begin your journey. Stand up.”

Sophie did so. She had lost all sensation in her arms, could
feel milk leaking from her breasts, staining her bodice. Her face was stiff with dried tears and blood, aching with bruises.

He looked at her with an expression of ineffable disgust before flinging a cloak around her, pushing her ahead of him out of the room, down the stairs, and out of the house. She saw not one familiar face, only her husband's men, stone-faced, staring ahead. Two carriages stood on the sweep. Beside one she saw a peasant woman wrapped in a black shawl. In her arms was a bundle.

“Sasha!” Sophie stumbled, unbalanced by her bound hands, toward the woman, but her husband pulled her back.

“You have had your last sight of your bastard!” He propelled her toward the other carriage. She was bundled inside to fall crouching upon the floor. The door slammed shut and she dragged herself, slowly, painfully, onto the seat. A whip cracked, and the vehicle moved forward, jolting on the rough road. Soon, the inevitable nausea would come to plague her. But what did it matter?

During the long reaches of the night she had accepted her fate. In her weakness, acceptance came readily. It offered some kind of comfort, for to fight would bring only renewed agony of the mind and the body. There was no hope of rescue. Her destination would be known to no one. By the time Adam returned to Berkholzskoye, she would be long gone. The wife's seducer could hardly demand explanation or satisfaction from the husband whose actions were entirely legitimate. And he would be able to do nothing for his son. He could not claim him as his son, and Paul would keep the boy immured, far from the eyes of the world, as he wreaked his vengeance.

She had nothing left. Paul had stripped her of the last vestiges of human dignity, and she felt herself no longer human, just some befouled and tattered piece of flotsam that had for a while held her head up upon the earth. She had enjoyed the sun; she had loved; she had given birth. Her eyes closed as she slipped into the peaceful world of memory.

Adam felt the first prickle of foreboding at dawn. Frowning, he tried to rationalize the uncomfortable feeling. He had felt it before where Sophie was concerned, but without cause. Shrugging, he mounted his horse. It had something to do with the fetters of love. They bound so securely that to be apart from her caused these occasional panicky flutters.

They were following wolf spoors, clear in the night frost still lingering on the steppe, when an icy shaft, as powerful as if it had corporeal substance, dug deep into his breast. He gasped as if with pain, and Boris Mikhailov, riding at his side, looked over in sharp-eyed concern.

“What is it, Count?”

“I do not know,” Adam said. A cold sweat bathed his body. “But something is badly amiss, Boris.”

“With Sophia Alexeyevna?” The muzhik asked the question, although he did not need Adam's affirmative nod.

“Tell me I am being fanciful, if you will, but I feel it,” Adam said slowly.

“I'll not tell you you're being fanciful,” Boris replied. “Such knowledge is hard to explain, but it is frequently correct. We can be back at Berkholzskoye in six hours.”

They rode hard, reaching the poplar avenue at noon. Adam had said not a word, his face drawn in grim lines, his mouth set, his eyes looking inward as he urged his mount to yet greater effort. Boris, in the same silence, kept pace with him, their four-man escort trailing.

The silence on the estate was eerie. Not a sound of ham
mer or saw, not a sight of gardener or stable hand. It was an estate of the dead. The two men, dread made manifest, spurred their flagging mounts.

“In the name of pity!” Adam hauled back on the reins as something caught his eye, fluttering among the thick trees lining the avenue. Hanging by his hands from a low branch was Gregory, the watchman, his back torn by the knout.

Boris was already off his horse, running, knife in hand, to the still figure. He cut him down, laying him gently on the ground, feeling for the carotid artery. “He's alive, Count. But frozen, as if he's been out here for hours.”

“Dmitriev,” Adam said.

“It bears his mark.” The giant muzhik hoisted the inert body of the watchman across his shoulder. “Take my horse, Count. I'll be better on foot.”

Adam nodded, set his horse to the gallop. He arrived on the gravel sweep where the mansion stood, blind and closed, shrouded in desolation. He flung himself from his horse. The front door swung open as he laid his hand upon the knocker. Sick with dread, he stepped into the hall. There was no sound, no sign of life. Lifting his head, he opened his lungs in a bellow that would have raised the dead.

It brought Anna, creeping from the kitchen, ghastly, shrunken, clutching her apron to her face. “Oh, lord, it is you,” she said, and began to weep soundlessly.

“Where is Prince Golitskov?” Adam did not ask where Sophie was. He knew she was not here.

“In his bed, lord. He's sore wounded. When Gregory tried to stop them…they…”

“Yes, I know,” he said, touching her shoulder. “Boris is bringing Gregory to the house. Please see to his tending, Anna.”

“He is not dead?” A flicker of hope, that indication of life, showed in the old eyes. “We did not know where to find him…after…after they had gone.”

Adam understood the despairing apathy of shock. He nodded. “Boris says he is not dead, but he'll need much nursing.” Leaving the woman, he took the stairs two at a time, bursting into the prince's bedchamber. Tanya Feodorovna
cried out with fright, springing to her feet from her kneeling position by the bed. Then she saw who it was and fell back to her knees, sobbing.

“Hush now, Tanya.” He lifted her, saw the livid bruise on her temple. “Dmitriev did this?”

She nodded, struggling to regain her composure. “And ran the prince through the shoulder with his sword.”

Adam stepped over to the bed. Golitskov was lying pale and clean and still beneath the sheet, a waxen form with a thick white bandage padding out his nightshirt at the shoulder. He looked too frail to live, Adam thought, but he could see that he did. “How severe is his wound?”

“On a younger man, lord, it would be of less concern,” Tanya said, seeming to recover her competence by the minute. “But with the Holy Mother's help, if it be God's will, he will live.”

“And Sophia Alexeyevna?” He could hardly bring himself to ask, so great was his terror of the answer.

Tanya shook her head. “He took her, lord…her and the baby, with one of the women from the farm for wet nurse. In carriages they went. Old Peter saw them from the attic window. The princess in one, the baby and the nurse in the other. We were kept locked in the kitchen until they left. No one saw her, lord…not after he took her upstairs…except for Peter from the window. Shut up in a carriage she was, lord. She can't abide carriages, lord.” The tears flowed in a river, and she buried her head in her apron. “Why would he take the child from her?”

“Why would he not?” Adam asked rhetorically, more to himself than to Tanya. “I shall be gone within the hour. If the prince wakes before then, send for me.” Leaving the chamber, he ran down the stairs, noting on the periphery of his awareness that the house had come to life again, the pall lifted, as if, with his arrival, the energy of hope had vanquished the stunned trance.

Boris was in the hall. “The prince?”

“Tanya is not despairing,” Adam replied, but a shadow
hung in his eyes. “He is an old man, Boris, to endure such shock and loss of blood.”

Boris Mikhailov's face hardened. It was an expression that was not to soften for many days. “I've sent two men into the village to discover if they can the direction the general took.”

Adam nodded his approval. “We'll need fresh horses.”

 

Prince Golitskov came back to the world fleetingly before they left. His tired eyes looked into the hard, resolute face of a man who had imagined the worst and put it from him. “I was expecting you,” the prince said in a thread of a voice. “I knew you would know. You must free her from him.”

“I will do so,” Adam promised, taking one gnarled hand between his. “And I will bring her back to you…and my son.”

Golitskov's head moved on the pillow in a faint gesture of acceptance, then his eyes closed again.

“Let me come with you, lord.” Tanya put her hand on Adam's arm in urgent appeal. “She will need me after…”

“I cannot take you, Tanya,” he said gently, covering her hand with his own. “We must ride hard. You will slow us down.” Tanya bowed her head, turning back to her patient.

Out on the gravel sweep, Boris Mikhailov waited with two fresh, strong mounts. Adam came out, and as he walked over, men appeared from the house, from the trees; men, walking firmly, staves in their hands, some with firearms, some with knives. There must be twenty of them, Adam thought, for a moment bemused. They ranged themselves behind the horses without a word spoken.

“They have known Sophia Alexeyevna since I brought her here, a babe no older than your son,” Boris said softly. “They are come to fight for their lord.”

“Then mount them!” Adam said. “We will take such an army against Dmitriev!”

“I will arm them, also. It will not delay us long.” Boris went amongst the men, who followed him to the stables. Within half an hour Adam looked upon his army and was as satisfied with his motley crew as if they had been an immac
ulate, highly trained and disciplined regiment of the Imperial Guard. Purpose and determination stood out on every face, and they held themselves erect on the assortment of sturdy mounts Boris had selected. To a man, they evinced the dedication of those who believed in the cause for which they would fight. It was that dedication that made a trustworthy and effective fighting force, as Adam well knew, much more than the harshest of military discipline and the endless drilling so favored by General Dmitriev and his like.

He urged his mount down the avenue, and his small force followed. By concentrating only on the task ahead, the elimination of Dmitriev, Adam was able to keep at bay the nightmare images that would interfere with his planning. There was no point in concerning himself with Sophie's fate at the moment. She was suffering that fate and would continue to do so until her husband's tyranny was overthrown in the only way possible.

They took the Kiev road, as instructed by one of the villagers who had seen the dawn cavalcade with its two coaches. They had been traveling fast, the informant told them. Six horses to each carriage and they were driving them hard. For a second, the picture of Sophie tortured by nausea, jolted in the ill-sprung vehicle swaying violently at speed over the rutted road to Kiev, filled his mind. She was not yet recovered from the birth, still bleeding, so much of her strength going into the production of milk for the child. How could she endure?

Boris Mikhailov had no difficulty reading his companion's mind. “They have an eight-hour start, Count. If they stop for the night, we'll come up with them soon enough. If they continue, we will catch them by midnight.”

“They will have to change horses,” Adam said. “We will keep track of them through the post houses.”

 

They fed and watered her as if she were an animal, Sophie thought dully, whenever she troubled to think. She became aware that at some point in the afternoon the carriage in which she was traveling had veered off the Kiev road, separating itself from the main party. There were still four outriders and the coachman with her as they swayed over a
miserable cart track across the steppe, and occasionally one of the men would come into the carriage, hold water to her lips, offer her bread and sausage. She turned her head away from the food. The less she had in her belly, the less she was likely to vomit, and even through her hopeless trance, she recognized that that humiliation she could not endure, bound and captive as she was.

They unfastened her hands and allowed her to seek privacy behind a bush when the need became imperative, but she was never unbound long enough for sensation to return fully to her arms and hands, although she recognized that they did not tie her as tightly as had Paul. No expression enlivened the flat peasant faces as they performed these tasks. Neither pity nor cruelty showed in their eyes. They were simply serfs obeying the orders of a master who could not be disobeyed.

Darkness fell, and the carriage continued to sway and jolt. They stopped to change horses, but the curtains were pulled across the windows so she could not see out, and, more important perhaps, no one could see in. Obviously, this journey would not stop until her destination was reached. How long she would remain in this limbo she could not begin to guess. Her head pounded with such agony she wept, and tears fell undried because she could not use her hands, and the milk leaked from her spurned, swollen breasts.

 

Adam rode through the night, through Kiev, and onto the road that led to St. Petersburg. Inquiries at post houses elicited the information that horses had been changed several times for one carriage and a mounted escort of some fifteen men. A description of General Dmitriev brought nods of recognition. Someone said a baby had been heard crying from the carriage.

Adam's chin sank onto his chest. They were following Dmitriev and the child, and they must continue to do so, but every verst they traveled took them farther from Sophie. They could not discover exactly when one of the carriages had split from the main party, although they knew it had happened before Kiev. That meant that Sophie's destination lay across the steppes to
ward Siberia. Dmitriev could not be intending such a barbarous destination! But Adam knew absolutely that he could.

“Count!” Boris's voice spoke with soft urgency in the dark.

Adam, who had been half asleep in the manner of an experienced campaigner, came to instant awareness. “What is it?”

“They are about three versts ahead of us,” Boris told him. “The scout has just returned.”

Adam frowned, his mind crystal clear as energy surged through him at the prospect of action, the closeness of their quarry. Not wishing to come upon Dmitriev suddenly, he had been sending scouts ahead, riding parallel to the road, screened by trees and bushes, for the last three hours. “How many of them exactly?”

“Sixteen, counting the coachman.”

“How armed?”

“Swords and pistols.”

“Let us all do a little scouting, Boris. I've a mind for an ambush,” Adam said thoughtfully. “I think Prince Dmitriev and his band of villains are going to run into a band of even greater brigands.”

Striking out across country so as to be sure they were invisible from the winding road gleaming white in the moonlight, the group rode fast. Once Adam was certain that they would have overtaken their quarry, they took to the road again, searching for a likely spot to stage an ambush.

Finally they came to a stretch where the road dipped between rocky outcrops. The cover was scanty but the best they were going to find, Adam decided. He looked up at the sky. “It will be dawn in an hour, Boris Mikhailov. I'd have this over before the light of day.”

The muzhik nodded. “Don't want any stray travelers running into us. Not as if the general's doing anything he shouldn't.”

Adam gave vent to a short, bleak laugh. “No, the wrong-doing is all on the other side, Boris.”

“In principle,” agreed the other. “But I've always favored practice over principle. You going to see to the dispositions?”

Adam could not help a smile at this laconic pragmatism so
typical of Boris Mikhailov. He was the most reassuring companion in a crisis. The men were waiting quietly on the road, relaxed and calm, confident in their commander, committed to their cause. They received their orders in intelligent silence and dispersed behind the rocks. The horses were tethered in the trees beyond the ambush site, out of sight of anyone entering the gully. Those men most experienced with firearms were positioned at the entrance to the ambush and its exit. Only one immutable order had been given. No one was to fire upon General Dmitriev.