The men, and woman, growled at him, but they released Priscilla. Even Nordenski, still holding her thighs apart, hesitated. Rotislav grasped her wrist and pulled her to her feet. “Please,” she whispered, hating herself for begging.
“Where are the children?” he asked.
“I don’t know.”
He hit her in the stomach, and she fell to her knees, retching and gasping for breath, while the men and women laughed. Rotislav pulled her up again. “Shall I hit you again?”
Priscilla panted. “They are in the nursery. With Sonia. Please don’t harm them. Please.”
“Little runts,” Rotislav said. “Leave them there for the time being. Find the other women.”
“For sport,” shouted the men, and ran through the door.
“Please,” Priscilla said. Rotislav pulled her across the room towards the bedroom. She tripped and looked down at her grandmother. But Anna was dead, her clothes ripped and slashed, a knife thrust into her chest. That long, turbulent, often shocking but also often glorious, life, had ended, in the most terrible circumstances. Now it was indeed up to her. Rotislav threw her across the bed. She landed on her face, lay there, and felt his hands on her buttocks. She twisted away from him and rolled on her back, drawing up her knees. Everyone had always said she was the spitting image of Grandma as a girl. Now she had to think like Grandma, and act like her too, as well as resemble her. Or die like her.
Rotislav seized her ankles and pulled her down the bed; with his other hand he was releasing his belt. All the while he stared at her; never had she seen such desire in anyone’s eyes. “Listen,” she said. “I know you want me.”
“I am going to have you.”
“I know. But would you not prefer it if I was yours?”
His pants had dropped about his ankles, and he kicked them off. Priscilla kept her eyes on his face. The only naked adult male she had ever seen before was her husband. “I will be good to you,” she said. “I swear it. I will be your woman in all things. I will do anything you command, without question. Only spare my children.” Rotislav half turned his head; the house was a huge thunder of demonic sound, varying from screams of terror and outrage to bellows of obscene laughter. “I swear it,” Priscilla said again.
He grinned at her. “Then be my woman,” he said.
He had promised nothing. But she dared not press her point. She spread her legs and closed her eyes. “I like my women to caress me,” he said. “Hold me. Kiss me.” He knelt above her as she forced herself to obey, having to open her eyes to do so. Nothing in her relations with Alexei had prepared her for this; Alexei had only ever wanted to kiss her. “God, but you are beautiful,” Rotislav muttered, driving her hands into her hair, letting it spill through his fingers as if it were indeed gold. Will it still be gold when this is finished? Priscilla wondered. Or will it have turned white. “Over,” he said, holding her thighs.
She obeyed, grateful not to have to look at him, feeling his fingers groping at her body as he made room for himself. She chewed the sheet, which so terribly still carried Grandma’s scent, to prevent herself from crying out, and felt him inside her, surging back and forth. She was being savaged by a wild animal. But he was the only one of the wild animals to whom she could appeal, who offered any hope of survival. He lay on her and panted, and now that he was finished she could listen to the noises too. There was so much that was beautiful in this house, just waiting to be savaged. “The children,” she whispered.
“Let’s see what has happened to them.” He pushed himself off her. “Up.”
Priscilla pushed herself up in turn, sat on her heels. Alexei had always insisted on a bath after sex. But she did not suppose that idea had ever occurred to Rotislav. “I must get some clothes,” she said.
He grinned. “I like you the way you are. Then those bastards can see what they’re missing. Come.”
Priscilla got out of the bed, pushed hair from her face. At the bedroom door she checked, stomach rolling. “Grandma...”
“She’s past caring. They’ll see to her.” Priscilla stepped over the body, followed him on to the gallery. Her magnificent house was being torn apart. Men and women, and children, were pulling down the drapes, throwing the priceless paintings and ikons on to the floor and down from the gallery; she listened to the sound of shattering glass and knew her crystal was being systematically destroyed. And in the midst of the destruction there was death. She looked down at the footmen and Morgan, and Madame Xenia; all had been stripped naked, and all had been mutilated. In front of her in the gallery, a naked Giselle lay on her face in a pool of blood. As she passed a reception room she heard Mademoiselle Friquet begging for mercy. And beyond them lay Nathalie, grotesque in death; like Giselle her body had been stripped and her breasts cut off — but her face was flawlessly made up. The Dowager Princess of Bolugayen, Priscilla thought, swallowing bile. But there were two more princesses, waiting to be savaged. “It is the vodka,” Rotislav explained. “We gave them much vodka, to make them fight.”
Priscilla listened to a tremendous screaming from the guest apartment. That was Sophie, suffering what to her would certainly be a fate worse than death. The nursery door remained locked. Priscilla stood in the midst of a crowd of people, who fondled her body and pulled her hair, slid their hands between her thighs. She hardly knew they were there. Rotislav drew his revolver and fired into the lock, three times. There was a shower of splinters, and one of the bullets ricochetted along the gallery. No one seemed to mind. The door was open. “Go in,” Rotislav invited.
Priscilla was not sure she wanted to; she had no idea what she would find. She drew a long breath and opened the door, gazed at the two children, and Sonia and Grishka. Grishka still held her revolver, and this she brought up, and then slowly lowered it again as she gazed at Priscilla. Rotislav made a mock bow, careful to remain standing behind Priscilla. “Your Highness,” he said to Sonia.
“Priscilla!” Anna said. “You’ve nothing on.”
Little Alexei started to cry. Priscilla ran forward and lifted him into her arms.
“Here’s a present for you, Viktor,” Rotislav called, looking at Sonia, who had remained standing absolutely still, her face expressionless. “She’s no chicken, but there’s meat on those bones.”
Nordenski came into the room, and Grishka brought up the revolver again, face rigid with tension. “You promised you’d not harm them,” Priscilla shouted.
“The children.”
“I meant everyone in the nursery.”
Rotislav glanced at her, and grinned. “Well, it’ll be an experience, lying with two princesses at the same time. And you’ll need a maid. Go find someone else, Viktor.”
“I hate you,” Anna said.
Rotislav ruffled her hair. “When you’ve grown a bit, I’ll lie with you as well.”
The crowd had followed Nordenski back on to the gallery. Only one man had remained, standing in the doorway. “Gleb?” Priscilla whispered.
Gleb would not look at her. “I am to be rewarded,” he reminded Rotislav. “You promised me.”
“Gleb?” Priscilla could not believe it. “You opened those doors? You? You betrayed us?”
Gleb licked his lips. “We could fight no more, Your Highness. Now...”
Rotislav gave a shout of laughter. “Now for your reward. Well, take your pick.” Gleb looked at Grishka; he had known her all his life. Grishka’s lip curled in contempt. Gleb looked at Sonia; he had known her for nearly twenty years. Sonia’s face was stony. But both Sonia and Grishka remained fully dressed. Gleb licked his lips again and looked at the naked body of his mistress.
Bolugayen House burned. As it was a very large house, the smoke had to be visible for miles, Priscilla thought. And the flames, for now it was dark. But it had to burn, to take all its terrible secrets with it. Grandma and Sophie, Mademoiselle Friquet and Giselle, Madame Xenia and gallant Morgan. Even the crucified Patricia had been thrown into the flames. They would disappear without trace, all the hor
ror that had been committed on their bodies vanished from human sight. But not from human memory. While the horror that had been committed on her body still seethed in her mind and between her legs.
She drew the blanket tighter about herself and Alexei. She had been allowed to dress, but only a single garment, and the night was chill. She sat on the grass on the hill above the house, looking down at the inferno. Sonia sat beside her, Anna on her lap. Sonia had said hardly a word since surrendering to Rotislav. When, as he had promised, he had lain with them both, it had been Sonia he had chosen to enter, and she had looked past his shoulder at Priscilla, lying on his other side, with enormous eyes. But the pain and sorrow those eyes had expressed were felt for her, Priscilla had realised. For what she had been forced to suffer, before them all, her children, and Sonia and Grishka. At least, she thought and prayed, little Alexei did not know what had been happening.
Grishka sat on her other side, knees drawn up and clasped in her arms. Grishka had not even been raped, yet. Most of the men were incapable, now. And beside Sonia sat Janine Grabowska, her grey hair straggling down her back. She had certainly been raped, and beaten; like Priscilla she wore only a single garment. But unlike Sophie and Nathalie, and as Sonia would have recommended, she had not fought her tormentors, and thus she had lived. As she was a married woman, no doubt she was less traumatised by what had happened to her than had been her lover.
“What is to become of us, Your Highness?” she asked, not specifying to which princess she was speaking. “Do you think we could escape?”
“No,” Sonia said.
“If we could steal horses, Your Highness...” Grishka suggested.
“We would still have nowhere to go,” Sonia pointed out. “Rotislav says that Poltava is in the hands of the Revolution.”
“Do you think Dagmar got away?” Janine asked.
“As far as Poltava, maybe.”
Priscilla hugged Alexei. Whatever she had done, whatever she had accepted, had been for him. She could only pray his father would understand.
Priscilla had had a secret hope, that the soldiers, having helped themselves to everything they could from Bolugayen, would move on, and that most of the villagers would go with them; they had to know there would soon be retribution for their terrible crime. But she was disappointed. It was coming into winter, and to men who had never known anything like it, Bolugayen was a paradise. They were in no hurry to leave this bountiful estate. Well, then, she thought, surely men will come, from Poltava or Kharkov, but no one did. “I thought you said your friend Kerensky was going to civilise the country?” she asked Sonia.
“I don’t think he was my friend,” Sonia said. “And he certainly seems to be a failure.”
“Get on with it,” growled the guard.
They were required to work, with the other women, collecting firewood, cooking, caring for the animals. This was decreed by Rotislav, who had taken command; the soldiers just wanted to lie in bed, debauch the women whenever they felt like it, and drink all the vodka and fine wines they had managed to extract from the cellars when the building had cooled. Priscilla had to feel that she and Sonia were actually the lucky ones, because, having been appropriated by the colonel, as Rotislav called himself, they were not required to service any of the others. But he still made them work, and chopping wood was backbreaking to women who had never done any physical labour before; here again Sonia, with her wealth of experience, her years in Irkutsk as a political exile, was their leader, although she was considerably younger than Janine Grabowska. But Janine, revealing unexpected depths of strength and resolution, worked without complaining.
Wrapped up against the cold, they were indistinguishable from the other women. Priscilla had supposed that the muzhik women would make their life hell, but in fact they were surprisingly friendly. Perhaps it had, as Rotislav had said, been only the vodka had turned them in maenads that day. Or perhaps, deep inside their hearts, the sight of their princesses being exposed and raped had touched a chord of feminine sympathy. Now they laughed and joked, and took turns at holding Alexei and bouncing him on their knees. He enjoyed them thoroughly. Anna was not so forgiving. “Are we going to hang all these people when Papa gets home?” she asked.
“Sssh, sweetheart,” Sonia said. “We’ll talk about that, when your father gets home.” Then she gazed at Priscilla. Who felt an enormous urge to hold her in her arms and hug her and hug her and hug her. They had become utter intimates, and not only in being forced to share the same man. Where once Priscilla had rejected the very thought of Sonia, now she wanted to know everything about her. Because Sonia had endured so much — and she was still alive, so remarkably courageous and self-contained.
Sonia was in fact quite happy to reminisce, although Priscilla felt that her memories were a trifle selective. She would speak of what she had suffered at the hands of the Okhrana, beside which what they had jointly suffered, or were suffering, at the hands of Rotislav, appeared almost gentle. She would speak of her years as Princess of Bolugayen, of the various social and domestic problems which had cropped up. But she would never hear a word against Alexei. Could she really still be in love with him? Priscilla wondered. Sonia would also speak of her life in Petrograd, of the people she had met. She even, now that it was all so firmly in the past, spoke of Rasputin. But she would never speak of Korsakov, and Priscilla also felt that there was someone else from those years of whom she would never speak. But she had no means of finding out.
But Sonia was a constant pillar of support, in a way that Janine, for all her steadfast determination, and Grishka, for all her steadfast loyalty, could never be. Priscilla felt that without her support she might have gone mad. For the future was unthinkable.
The onset of winter was grim, even if they were given shelter in the house Rotislav had appropriated as his own. It had belonged to Father Valentin and was almost a palace compared with most of the houses in the village. Had her people always lived like this? Priscilla wondered, and realised that she had never entered any one of their homes before. She had become quite familiar with them now, with the single huge room built around the central chimney rising out of its iron stove, on which the samovar constantly bubbled, and around which the muzhiks ate and slept, with their animals, in an atmosphere thick enough to be cut with a knife.
But they were alive, and in a singularly Russian fashion, seemed from time to time to be happy. That was more than could be said for Valentin, who had been hanged before his own altar. Once Priscilla had supposed that their deep-seated religious views would be the salvation of these people, and therefore of her. Now she had come to understand that while they might still be as superstitiously religious as ever in the past, they had regarded Valentin as a representative of the social system they had been encouraged to hate. As had been Boscowski. He had been shot on that very first day, when he had attempted to do his duty and restore his people to theirs. With him had died his wife and two small children. Madame Boscowski had been placed naked in a barrel studded on the inside with nails, and rolled up and down the hill. Priscilla could still hear her screams. Geller still lived; they needed him.
Then why was she, the greatest symbol of that dead past, still living? With her son and stepdaughter? Simply because Rotislav had decreed it. Thus, she owed Rotislav her life, and could not yet afford to dream of his death, if she would continue to live. But what did the future hold? The news filtered through soon after Christmas. Kerensky had fled and the Bolsheviks had taken power. Lenin now ruled Russia, with his henchmen, Trotsky and Stalin. Russia was in the hands of the terrorists. Priscilla thought it was a grim irony that Patricia’s friendship with Lenin might have ensured their salvation. She mentioned this to Rotislav, as it was his friends who had murdered Patricia. “No one will ever know that,” he had said.
Sonia took the news with some consideration. “Lenin was your friend,” Priscilla reminded her.
“The Lenins and I were exiled to Irkutsk together. With Patricia. After that...one doe
s not become the Princess Bolugayevska and remain the friend of a man like Lenin.”
“Oh. You mean he would not help us?”
“I doubt he even knows we are alive,” Sonia said. “Or cares.”
“Did you know any of the others?”
“Yes. I knew one of the others,” Sonia said. “But he would not help us either, now.”
So there is no hope for us, Priscilla thought. We are doomed to remain the sexual slaves of a monster. She, more than any of the others, because she was very much the youngest. But there was far more than herself to worry about. Anna was growing up; she might only be nine years old, but she was a most lovely child. Priscilla knew that Sonia worried about the little girl as well, and not only sexually. As the winter fastened its grip on the community they began to run out of food and fuel. Sonia’s only solace was that their situation had brought her daughter back to her. But Priscilla’s fears for Alexei were even greater. He was three years old and a sturdy little boy, and Rotislav was never cruel to him, although he did insist on giving him vodka to drink. But he too was not getting the right diet, or enough of what he did eat, and although he was still a small child Priscilla could not help but wonder how much he was taking in of their surroundings, so different to anything he had known before — or how much he was capable of understanding her relationship with Rotislav. In any event, he would soon have to become aware of it.
Sometimes Priscilla considered suicide. But it was not in her nature. She could not believe that God had allowed her to survive the tragedy of the Titanic in order to have her kill herself because she was being raped on a daily basis. Besides, life had been so good before, she had to believe it would one day be that good again. In any event, she could not possibly abandon little Alexei, or take him with her into the dark corridors of eternity before he had had a chance to live. Even these sane reflections did not stop her from feeling she was going mad, despite Sonia’s company. “Aren’t you interested in this new government in Petrograd?” she asked Rotislav.
The Red Tide Page 31
