“No,” she said. “I am afraid of myself.” He swept her legs from the floor and laid her on the bed. “I am thirty-five years old,” she said.
“You are a monument to womanhood.” But, kneeling beside her, he could not prevent himself from looking at the two little white lumps that had once been her toes. “Do you find that repulsive?” she asked. In reply, he arched his back to kiss them, then continued to kiss her legs as he moved up to her thighs. “Will you love me forever?” To her surprise, that was suddenly important to her.
He had reached her thighs. “I will love you until the day I die,” he told her.
Of course he knew all about her escape from Irkutsk, but he never asked about it, or even mentioned it. He was every bit as much a gentleman as Alexei. However, he did assume that she had nothing to learn about the sexual act. And he was correct in that; she even found it a pleasure to do whatever he wished, without the slightest feeling —such as she had always had with Alexei — that if she let herself go he might be silently critical of her. For the first time in a very long time she felt sated, as she lay with his head against her breasts, and watched the sky lighten. It was summer, and thus very early. “Would you like to stay to breakfast?” she asked.
He raised his head. “Would you like me to?”
“I think, as this is the first occasion, it would be best if you did not,” Sonia said.
“But you will dine with me again?”
“I should like that.”
He dressed himself, while she put on a dressing gown. “You have made me the happiest man in the world,” he said.
“Then I am pleased.” She led him down the stairs, unlocked the front door. “You have no transport.”
“I will walk to the tram; it is not far.” He kissed her fingers. “Adieu, my dearest Sonia. Adieu.”
She half closed the door to watch him walk up the street. It was not yet five, and there was no one about. She wondered what he would be like as a husband. She made to close the door and was startled by a sound. It came from beside the steps leading down to the pavement, and Sonia hastily slammed the door shut and shot the bolt, leaning against it while she got her nerves under control. Could Alexei be spying on her?
“I must speak with you,” a man said through the door.
“Who are you?”
“A friend of Patricia’s.”
Sonia was so surprised she opened the door again, gazed at a slightly built man with a black goatee beard. He wore wire spectacles and had pinched features; his clothes had clearly not been removed for some time, even for sleeping. “Who are you?”
“Please let me in. I will not harm you. I swear it. I am a Jew like you.”
Sonia opened the door; he certainly looked desperately in need of a square meal. And if he was a friend of Trishka’s...but how could such a fellow be a friend of Trishka’s? She certainly wasn’t Jewish. He came into the house, and himself closed and locked the door behind him. “Was that your lover?” he asked.
There did not seem any point in denying it, if he knew Korsakov had spent the night. “Yes, he is, if it is any business of yours.”
“And now you are alone?”
“No, I am not alone,” Sonia told him. “My maid is sleeping upstairs. She is a large, strong woman, and she will be with me in ten seconds if I cry out.”
“Please do not cry out,” the man begged. “May I have some food? I have not eaten in twenty-four hours. And I am…”
“A Jew,” Sonia said. “I do not know why that should make me help you. I have been repudiated by my people.”
“You mean, you repudiated your people, when you married the Prince of Bolugayen,” the man corrected.
Sonia glared at him. But that was nothing more than the truth. She led the way into the kitchen, placed bread and cheese and a bottle of vodka on the table. “You need a bath,” she remarked.
“I would like that very much,” he agreed. “When I have eaten.”
Sonia raised her eyebrows at his calm assumption that she would let him use her bathroom; but he was not looking at her as he concentrated on the food. “How do you know Mrs Cromb?”
“We were in Moscow together, in 1905. She escaped. I was sent to Siberia.” He raised his head. “You were in Siberia.”
Sonia sat opposite him, across the table. “Patricia told you that?”
“Trishka. That’s what we called her. Trishka. We had no secrets.”
“What is your name?”
“Lev Bronstein. But you may call me Trotsky. Leon Trotsky. That is how I am known, now.” She caught her breath. “Ah! You have heard of me.”
“I have heard the name. Why do you not use your real name?”
“Trotsky is the name I have at the moment.”
“Very well, Mr Trotsky. I believe you possibly did know Mrs Cromb at some time. Thus I have fed you. Now I must ask you to leave.”
“But I must stay here,” he protested.
“You what?”
“I too have escaped from Siberia,” he said proudly. “They are looking for me. You must help me.”
Sonia was aghast. Again to become involved...but when she, in this man’s position, had begged for help, Alexei had given it to her. Because of course he had, even then, wanted her as a woman: he had confessed that to her, later. She certainly did not want this Trotsky as a man. But the principle remained. But...keep him here? That was impossible. “Who sent you to me?” she asked.
“I was given your name, as a possible refuge.”
“By whom?” If Patricia was still involved with these anarchists...
“That is not important. I was given several names. I have tried the others, but they are not available. Only you arc left.” He leaned across the table, reached for her hands, but she withdrew them. “Listen to me,” he said. “You are one of us. You were born one of us, and you will die one of us. I know you tried to escape into the aristocracy. I do not hold that against you. But they betrayed you, as the aristocracy will always betray those not born into their class. You have nothing now, save us. That is why you must help me. And when the Revolution comes, you will be greatly honoured.” His total confidence, both in her and in the future, was amazing. Trotsky stood up. “Now,” he said. “I should like to have that bath.”
*
“The woman Cohen has finally succumbed,” Klinski said. Michaelin raised his eyebrows. “I have just heard from St Petersburg. Korsakov spent the night with her, in her house,” Klinski explained.
Michaelin snorted. “That is going to get us nowhere. Korsakov is not involved in politics. He is a soldier, through and through. And a lover, to be sure. Your man is certain no one else has called there?”
“Well, there was another man. The woman is insatiable.”
Michaelin frowned. “What other man?”
“Our man has never seen him before. But he estimates him to be a Jew.”
Michaelin stroked his chin. “Trotsky is a Jew.”
“You think this man could be Trotsky? But there is no link between the Princess and Trotsky.”
“You are making a mistake, Feodor Petrovich. This woman is no longer a princess. She is an angry and humiliated Jewess. As for links, she was in Siberia. Trotsky was in Siberia. They both escaped from Siberia.”
“Several years apart,” Klinski argued. “Anyway, finding Trotsky is not our business.”
“Finding Trotsky is the business of every policeman in Russia,” Michaelin pointed out. “The man is desperate, and dangerous. And he is an anarchist. How long did he stay with the woman Bolugayevska?”
“As far as I know he is still there. Do you wish me to have the place raided and arrest them?”
Michaelin considered. “No. You would have to obtain authority for that from General Bor-Clemenski, and that would lead to questions as to why we are keeping the former princess under surveillance in the first place, and then the General would take all the credit. I think we will be patient, Klinski. It will all turn out to our advantage, soon
er or later.”
*
“May I ask, madam, how long this, ah, gentleman will be staying with us?” Antonina asked.
“It will not be very long,” Sonia said, sitting in front of her mirror to allow her hair to be dressed for dinner. “He is not actually a relative, is he, madam?”
“We were childhood friends,” Sonia lied.
“I was just wondering what the Captain might say, next time he calls?”
“The Captain, Antonina, has absolutely no say in how I conduct my affairs,” Sonia said.
Yet it was on her mind as well. She did not know how soon Korsakov’s manoeuvres would be over, and she did know that he would give her no advance warning of his intention to call. She should have thrown Leon out long ago. A week was really too long. And yet...it was not merely the implicit power that he held over her: were he to be arrested, and tell the Okhrana why he had sought her out, her past would once again be raked up. Alexei might have promised that it never would be, but that had been upon the reasonable assumption that she would never again break the law. She had done so by admitting Leon into her home.
And it was not even that he was a Jew or that he claimed to be a friend of Patricia’s, or that he had served time in Siberia. It was the man himself. She realised that deep down inside her, partly because of her birth and upbringing, partly because of her experiences, there lurked a hatred of the tsarist regime far more deep than anything ever felt by Patricia. Patricia had dabbled in anarchy and terrorism because she felt guilt at having been born an aristocrat; the thought of actually throwing a bomb which might kill or maim someone had horrified her. Sonia, in her youth, certainly, had been prepared to do anything necessary to bring down the regime.
But then she had been shown both the futility of it, where the secret police had infiltrated every aspect of the movement, and the consequences of it, when she had been arrested. Equally had she been shown the sunlit uplands of belonging to the ruling elite. So, as Leon had pointed out on their first meeting, it had been she who had turned her back on her people and her very religion, and looked to what she had wanted to be her future. Most selfishly. Now that future had been ripped up and thrown in the gutter. She would not have been human had hate not returned in full vigour.
But still she had been obsessed by the futility of it all. The Tsar was there. He had been there for hundreds of years. This Tsar’s family alone had been there for three hundred years, all but. He was supported by a huge army and an all-pervading secret police. The foreign press might make a great fuss about assassination attempts and civil disturbances, but the fact was that these were nearly all inspired by the Jews, her people, after some particularly violent piece of repression by the Tsarist agents.
The country as a whole, the vast mass of the peasants, the muzhiks as they were called, might have been shattered at the defeat by Japan, might be ground down by poverty and occasionally even actual starvation, might grumble that their ‘Little Father’ was not doing enough about it. But by no stretch of the imagination would they ever do anything about it. Sonia suspected that they mistrusted the dumas far more than did the Tsar himself. So, resistance, nonacceptance of one’s fate, was an exercise in futility. Until one met someone like Leon Trotsky. His fervour had an almost romantic quality. He believed! He believed that one day tsardom would be brought down, that one day the people would be the masters. He could not put a time span upon his dream, but that did not make him any the less certain. And his belief made her believe. But he was still endangering her life.
“You simply have to go,” she told him at lunch.
He had bathed every day since his arrival, and she had managed to procure for him some changes of clothing by shopping in the ghetto. In that sense they were intimates. But in no other. He slept in the spare bedroom, and he had never attempted to touch her, after that first morning. But he had touched her with his mind! “I know,” he said. “I am leaving tonight.” Sonia’s head jerked. He grinned. “I have surprised you. Now you will ask me to stay.”
“No,” she said. “I shall not ask you to stay, Leon. For both our sakes. But I will be sorry to have you go. Can you understand that?”
“Of course. But I will return, you know. In triumph.”
“Before I am not too old to enjoy your triumph, I hope.”
“It will be our triumph, Sonia. And you will be there, just as beautiful as you are now. Because you will never grow old.”
She raised her head, flushing, and he held out his hand.
*
“Here they are,” Anna said. She was sitting in her favourite summer position, on the upper verandah at Bolugayen, looking out over the garden and the wheatfields and the road curving round from Poltava. Down the road Alexei’s Rolls-Royce was coming, driven by its chauffeur, its course marked by a huge plume of yellow dust rising from its rear wheels. Anna glanced at the Princess Bolugayevska, who had just joined her. “Does she frighten you?”
But she knew it was a rhetorical question; Priscilla was not a woman who was frightened by anything, it seemed. Anna, remembering her granddaughter as a child, and then as a girl on her first visit to Bolugayen, suspected it had something to do with the sinking of the Titanic. One does not look death in the face, slowly and over a time span of several hours, and then survive, without becoming either a permanent nervous wreck, or totally unafraid of anything else life might do to one. Priscilla was definitely not a nervous wreck.
Thus she had ridden with total equanimity the ordeal of suddenly ascending from being a Boston schoolgirl to the Princess of Bolugayen. Anna had noted only one tremor throughout all the ceremonies that had accompanied that elevation; the morning they had knelt before Father Valentin for her to be inducted into the Orthodox Church, and her gloved hand had stolen into her grandmother’s for support. Anna did not know, nor had she dared attempt to find out — although she was desperately curious — how Priscilla enjoyed sharing a bed with Alexei. But the Princess always looked happy enough, and Alexei had spent the past eighteen months walking around looking like the cat who had swallowed the canary — and now she was within three months of her first delivery.
All before she was twenty! But she would actually be twenty before the child was born, as her birthday fell during this very month of June. Hence Sophie and the dreadful Janine. They had been here for the wedding, of course, and had come last summer as well: they clearly found the new Princess more acceptable than her predecessor. They had fawned upon the lovely young girl who was so inexorably climbing on to the pedastal as female head of the family. Anna had suspected they even meant to seduce her, and had bristled to interfere. And had then realised that Priscilla did not need protecting, either from others or from her own desires. Now she asked, “Shall I go down?”
“No, no,” Anna said. “They will come up.”
“Because I am the Princess, or because I am pregnant, Grandmama?”
“Because you are the Princess. People must come to you, unless they are your superior in rank, and there are only a few of those, the Grand Duchesses, the Tsaritsa Dowager, and the Tsaritsa herself, in this entire land.”
Priscilla seated herself beside her grandmother and watched the car disappear beneath them into the shadow of the porch overhang. Even if she knew Sophie and her lover were condemned by the rest of the family, she looked forward to their visits, which had become yearly events. She enjoyed them for their very difference; she could not possibly imagine a pair like that openly living together in Boston. But then, she enjoyed everything about Bolugayen, and even more, everything about being the Princess Bolugayevska, because it was so different to anything she had ever suspected to exist. She still occasionally had to pinch herself. When she remembered how enormous it had all seemed...but then, it was enormous. Pa had been a reasonably wealthy man, and Mom, as a shareholder in Cromb Shipping Lines, had been a reasonably wealthy woman, in her own right. Uncle Charlie was a millionaire. As, presumably, was Grandmama, as she was principal shareholder in the Line.
But none of them had the slightest idea of what it was like to be Mistress of Bolugayen. Except of course Grandmama, who in many ways still was Mistress of Bolugayen. But Grandmama never interfered in any way in Priscilla’s handling of her position, save to encourage her to be more assertive, where necessary.
It actually was not necessary to be assertive at all. Priscilla remembered how she had been terrified at the thought of having to order this huge household, but it was not necessary for her to have anything to do with that at all, either. Gleb and Madame Xenia were most efficient managers, Xenia of the household and Gleb of the food and drink. Priscilla had read often enough of young brides being taken advantage of by old family retainers, and Gleb and Xenia were certainly those, both in their fifties and both having been born and bred into the service of the Bolugayevskis. They knew secrets, such as the mysterious appearance out of the snow of Aunt Patricia and the ex-Princess Sonia which had led to Alexei’s first marriage, which she did not think even Grandmama had truly penetrated. She had never tried. If she felt guilt about anything it was the woman Sonia Cohen, who had had all this, and then lost it all — to her. But she had never even laid eyes on the woman, and she certainly did not wish to think about her or discover anything about her. So she merely dabbled in household management. When she had first come here to live she had felt obliged to pay a visit to the kitchens, and had been appalled at the amount of food consumed every day. But Alexei had accepted that as normal, and she had never commented again. Equally had she been appalled at the waste of glass, the family habit of never having more than one drink from the same goblet. But she had very soon become used to that as well.
Just as she had become used to the outlandish clothes she was required to wear, certainly on public appearances or visits to Poltava or even the village, heavy brocade gowns which weighed a ton, more underclothing than she would have supposed it was possible to fit on a single body, thick stockings and boots so vast she was sometimes not sure her feet were actually in there. Or to spending an hour every day having her hair dressed, loose for around the house, piled on the top of her head for evening, arranged in a smart snood for riding. Often as not, in the evenings, her hair would be surmounted by a diamond tiara, but this was only a small part of the quite fabulous jewellery which was now hers to wear, rings of every variety, sparkling with diamonds and rubies and sapphires, gold necklaces, amethyst pendants, and huge, heavy gold bangles. Fortunately, there was a ritual connected with the jewellery as well, a special piece to be worn for every occasion, or she would never have been able to make up her mind.
The Red Tide Page 13
