Count Antonov's Heir

by Christina Laffeaty

  Something in her expression must have convinced him, for he let out a long sigh. ‘Oh, dear God,’ he whispered. ‘To be able to love you without guilt—’

  Hungrily, he pulled her into his arms and sought her mouth. It was a brief, hurried kiss, but it expressed all the emotion which she had sensed him banking down for so long.

  He released her. ‘Now I must go.’

  He had turned automatically to the mirror, and was smoothing his hair with his hand. Suddenly she saw him stiffen, and his reflection appeared to take on a gaunt look. He turned, and said in a flat voice:

  ‘We have no time for arguments or explanations. But whoever told you that story about me being a changeling, lied. I don’t know why. I was a fool to let myself be carried away. Nothing has changed.’

  She looked at him in stunned bewilderment. ‘No, Sacha! I promise you, it’s true ’

  ‘I must go, Caroline,’ he interrupted. ‘Look carefully at the Antonov portraits in the picture gallery when I have gone.’

  He closed the door behind him and she moved numbly to the window, staring out at the now familiar sight of porters patrolling the street, of Cossacks herding suspects for questioning. How long would Sacha remain free?

  She saw him slip into the street, and stop for a moment to exchange pleasantries with a Cossack. In a matter of minutes that same Cossack would be among the countless others searching for Sacha.

  And the blame was all hers. Why did she always have to do the wrong thing? She spoke out when she ought to have remained silent, and held her tongue when the time was right for speaking. Even in the matter of telling Sacha that he was a changeling she had blundered. She had chosen a time when it would be impossible to convince him with reasoned arguments.

  She turned. The door had opened and Katya had slipped into the room.

  ‘Caroline, what has happened? Alexander came into the drawing-room, kissed the aunts and myself, and hurried from the house—’

  ‘He is fleeing for his life,’ Caroline said bleakly. ‘I betrayed him to Grigori, who is at this moment undoubtedly reporting him to Uncle Viktor.’

  Katya sank into a chair while Caroline told her about the printing press in the cellars, and how she herself had discovered it and attributed it to Grigori.

  Katya’s face was ashen when Caroline had finished. ‘The Czar will have him hunted without mercy,’ she whispered. ‘He will be shot—’

  ‘Oh, Katya, forgive me!’ Caroline cried. ‘I hadn’t once thought of you in all this! And you are his fiancée—’

  ‘I would have made him forget in time,’ Katya said quietly. ‘I would have made him accept, with his heart as well as his mind, that you are his sister.’

  Caroline hesitated. ‘I am not his sister. I told him so before he left the house. I should have told him a long time ago.’

  ‘Not—his sister?’ Katya echoed faintly.

  Caroline began to recount the story from the beginning. ‘I decided that I had to sacrifice my own happiness,’ she concluded, ‘so that Sacha could retain the position he had been brought up to look upon as his right. And it has all been for nothing. Even when I told him the truth at last,’ she added with a wan smile, ‘I did it so badly, and with such poor timing, that he did not believe me. He told me to look at the Antonov portraits in the picture gallery.’

  Katya gazed at her thoughtfully. ‘And have you done so?’

  ‘Not yet—’

  ‘I shall tell you what you will find when you do look, my dear. Nicholas Ivanovich, Count Antonov, who died over thirty years ago, bears a startling resemblance to Alexander.’

  Caroline shrugged. ‘A matter of bearing and expression, no doubt. But remember that Sacha was brought up as an Antonov. He would have absorbed, unconsciously, the aristocratic bearing of the family.’

  ‘It is far more than that,’ Katya contradicted quietly. ‘Go and see for yourself.’

  A wretched sigh escaped Caroline. She might as well look at the portraits. At least while she filled her mind with other matters she could for a time forget that she had betrayed Sacha, and that he was now a fugitive.

  She left Katya there, and made her way to the gallery where the portraits of the Antonovs hung. A dim, gloomy place, she had never lingered there before, for it had always seemed to her as if the eyes of the long-dead Antonovs were watching her with cruel amusement.

  Now, she looked for the portrait of Nicholas Ivanovich, and stiffened with incredulity and shock. That particular Count Antonov who had borne the title two generations ago, had had the same small inverted triangle of pure white hair growing among the black which was such a distinctive feature of Sacha’s.

  Caroline bit her lip. What on earth could explain the fact that the two men, generations apart and unrelated, shared the same birthmark? For it was a birthmark, she knew; Sacha had once told her that the white triangle in his hair had shown itself as soon as his locks lost their baby-gold.

  There was a possibility, remote and fanciful, that the late Count Antonov had seduced Anna Barovska. But it would be carrying coincidence too far to argue that it just happened to have been their son who was available at the right moment to be exchanged for Euphemia’s dead one.

  Caroline returned slowly to Sacha’s room, where Katya awaited her. ‘I don’t understand it,’ she said.

  Katya spoke gently. ‘My dear, it’s possible that your mother lied to herself as much as to you. By making the son she had abandoned in Russia a changeling—not her own flesh and blood—she could have been easing an otherwise unbearable conscience.’

  Caroline shook her head. ‘That I shall never believe. My mother was without guile. And if Sacha was her own child then nothing on earth would have induced her to leave him behind in Russia. Besides, Anna Barovska confirmed the story my mother told me. She must be able to supply the answer to the birthmark.’

  Katya sighed. ‘Well, it does not seem to be so very important at the moment, with Alexander’s life in danger. I must think how I can best help him ’

  ‘Oh, could you help him?’ Caroline interrupted desperately. ‘Of course, you are a connection of the Czarina’s. Could you possibly use your influence with her?’

  ‘My influence does not extend to the Imperial family.’ Katya hesitated. ‘My dear, I shall entrust you with a secret, for the time may come when your help will be needed. I am a leading member of the Nihilist movement. Oh, not the crazy extremists who attempt regicide and arson! But we have a network of men and women in high places who know which officials can be bribed or blackmailed into helping fugitives.’

  ‘Oh...’ Caroline said faintly.

  Katya nodded. ‘It was one of the things Alexander and I had in common. I shall do what I humanly can for him, which may not be much. But first it will be necessary for me to return to my own home, so that I may summon visitors without exciting comment.’

  On Katya, Caroline had to pin her frail hopes. The two of them were not allowed any more time for private conversation, for Grigori had accomplished his objective and Cossacks had arrived to search the premises and question the occupants.

  The house was in an uproar. Aunt Natalia was weeping quietly while Aunt Maria upbraided Uncle Viktor with fury and contempt.

  ‘Your own flesh and blood!’ she raged at him. ‘He gave you a home when you needed one, and you repay him with perfidy!’

  ‘You had better be careful,’ Uncle Viktor warned, his small eyes glistening dangerously. ‘You may come under suspicion next, for defending a traitor!’

  They were interrupted by the entrance of the Cossack officer in charge of the search party, followed by Grigori.

  ‘Alexander Nikolaievich is not on the premises,’ the officer began.

  ‘Of course not,’ Grigori said venomously. ‘His loving sister alerted him, and gave him the chance to escape!’ And Grigori had allowed her to do so, she realised now, in the hope that it would lead to her being arrested too. But the officer made no comment, and merely said, ‘He is unlikely to remain fr
ee for long.’

  The Cossacks left some time later, taking with them the dismantled printing press and other incriminating evidence. Caroline went up, belatedly, to see Michael, but the little nursery maid whom she had left in charge was in a state of frightened hysterics, and had no idea where the child was.

  Caroline went in search of him, and discovered him sitting inside his ‘secret place’, surrounded by the debris of his treasures and crying.

  ‘They—found it, Marisha,’ he sobbed, burying his tear-stained face in her lap. ‘The Cossacks found my secret place and trampled on my treasures. I hate the Cossacks! I’ll kill them when I grow up!’

  ‘Hush, dear,’ she murmured automatically. The door which had been hidden by shelves had been broken open from inside the cellars, and now hung awry on its hinges. It seemed many years ago now that she had first suspected the presence of a door. Oh, if only she had conquered her curiosity at the time, and resisted the fatal impulse to explore...

  At least while his mind was preoccupied with the loss of his treasures, Michael did not question too closely Caroline’s story that his father had had to go away from St Petersburg for a while.

  Of Sacha, there was no news during the days which followed. Caroline breathed a small prayer of thanks each night which followed an uneventful day. If Sacha had been captured or injured, they would surely have heard.

  Uncle Viktor seemed to expand in self-importance and a sense of power with each day that passed. By his order some of the family silver had been sold, and with the proceeds he had had a magnificent uniform made for himself.

  ‘What you have done is no better than stealing!’ Aunt Maria accused him.

  He shrugged. ‘Alexander could never return to resume his title, even in the unlikely event that he should not be caught. And in his absence I am the head of the family.’

  More and more, he was exercising his authority in that capacity, and one evening during dinner Caroline heard him say to Grigori, ‘One day, when you take over from me—’ He stopped, and did not complete his sentence.

  Caroline remembered drearily how she had once vowed that Sacha must never learn the truth about his birth, for it would mean that Uncle Viktor would step into his shoes, with Grigori as heir apparent. Much good her resolution had done.

  The next day St Petersburg, always rife with rumour nowadays, began to throb with yet a new rumour. A daring attempt had been made by Nihilists, it was said, to bomb the Winter Palace. But their evil intentions had rebounded on them, for their bomb had exploded just as they reached the Palace grounds, and every one of them had been killed.

  The rumour seemed to have some basis in fact, for when Caroline took Michael out that morning for a walk she saw that the Palace was more heavily guarded than before, and she overheard two Cossacks discussing new orders for maintaining the guard for twenty-four hours every day.

  But it all seemed remote, with no possible application to her own life. She dismissed the matter, and she did not even give it a thought when Grigori returned home that afternoon in great excitement, bringing with him a Cossack officer whom Caroline recognised as Vassili Sosnovsky, the same officer who had stopped her and Sacha when they returned to St Petersburg from Ivaskara.

  ‘Sosnovsky has news of great moment!’ Grigori announced. ‘But wait—the occasion calls for champagne.’

  Caroline had accepted her own glass of champagne automatically, but she set it down as Vassili Sosnovsky began to speak.

  ‘It was part of my duties, this morning, to search the bodies of the Nihilists who had been killed during an attempt to plant bombs in the grounds of the Winter Palace. One of the bodies was the remains of Alexander, Count Antonov.’

  Caroline had been listening to him through ringing ears. No, she screamed silently. No, I won't believe it!

  Her own instinctive and violent reaction was put into words by Aunt Maria. ‘It cannot be true!’ the old woman said fiercely.

  ‘As to that, ma’am,’ the officer replied, ‘it is a fact that his face was mutilated by the explosion, and also he had dyed his hair red as a disguise. But I recognised him nevertheless as Count Antonov.’

  ‘Take me to see the body!’ Aunt Maria demanded. ‘I shall never accept, otherwise, that it was my nephew!’

  Uncle Viktor interrupted impatiently. ‘Have done, woman. If Sosnovsky’s identification was good enough for the Czar and the authorities, it’s good enough for you and me!’

  Sosnovsky cleared his throat, and addressed Aunt Maria. ‘I am afraid it would not be possible for you to see the body. As soon as all the fatalities had been identified, the Czar ordered that the remains be burned, without ceremony and without mourning rites. However, I did remove this from the finger of the body I identified as Count Antonov’s.’

  He took from his pocket an onyx and gold signet ring which Sacha had habitually worn on his finger.

  ‘I believe that it was given to him by Katya, the Princess Vezenski. No doubt she would like to have it returned to her, so if you will excuse me I shall take it to her now.’

  The room dipped and swam before Caroline’s gaze. She was only half aware that Sosnovsky had left, and that Aunt Maria was weeping. Then she was being urged to her feet by Aunt Natalia, who muttered something about lying down.

  Caroline found herself in her bedroom, with Aunt Natalia talking to her urgently about matters which were making no sense in her own chaotic mind.

  It can’t be true, Caroline told herself over and over again, as if the words were a magic incantation. It can’t possibly be true. Sacha would never have lent himself to something as brutal as attempting to bomb the Palace. It simply was not in character.

  ‘Are you listening to me, Caroline?’ Aunt Natalia’s voice penetrated her thoughts briefly.

  ‘Yes...’

  But again, a small voice inside her head argued,

  Sacha might have been forced into helping the bombers. As a fugitive, with almost every man’s hand against him, he might have had no alternative but to throw in his lot with the most extreme Nihilists...

  ‘Oh, it’s no use!’ Aunt Natalia was saying with a kind of desperate exasperation. ‘I shall have to send for Katya...’

  She left Caroline sat on the edge of her bed, staring stupidly in front of her. It couldn’t all have ended like this, with Sacha’s body burnt unceremoniously as though he had been a plague-carrying animal...

  She was still sitting there what seemed an eternity later, when Katya came into the room. She had been crying, and had made no attempt to disguise the evidence of her tears. She had removed all the rings from her fingers and was wearing only the onyx and gold one which she had given to Sacha.

  ‘Caroline,’ Katya said sharply, ‘have you told Michael yet?’

  ‘Told him—?’

  ‘That his father is dead.’

  Caroline fixed her eyes on Katya’s face. ‘It may not be true ’

  ‘It is true,’ Katya said brutally. ‘You must accept that. And you must tell Michael. It is necessary for him to know.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I’ll explain later.’ Katya laid her hand on Caroline’s shoulder. ‘Come, I’ll go with you. Tell him now.’

  Numbly, Caroline climbed the stairs with Katya. Michael was romping with the young maid in the nursery, and reluctantly left his game when Caroline called him.

  ‘Michael, love,’ she began, and stopped.

  Katya took over for her. ‘Your Papasha is dead, Michael,’ she said.

  His eyes widened. ‘For ever and ever?’

  ‘I’m afraid so.’

  ‘And we’ll never see him again?’

  Katya swallowed. ‘No.’

  He began to cry. ‘I want my Papasha to come alive again!’

  ‘Michael,’ Caroline heard Katya say, ‘you must try to be brave. Your Papasha would have wanted that. You are now Count Antonov—’

  ‘No,’ Caroline said involuntarily.

  ‘You are Count Antonov,’ Katya repeated firmly, ‘
and you must try to behave like a man. Sometimes, in future, you will be asked to do things which you do not care for. You must do them, because it will be your duty as Count Antonov, and your Papasha would have wanted it. Do you understand?’

  He nodded, and Katya called the nursery maid to comfort him. She herself took Caroline’s arm and steered her from the nursery.

  Once they were back in Caroline’s room again, Katya said, ‘Aunt Natalia sent for me. Do you know why she sent for me?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘She tried to speak to you, but you seemed to take nothing in. You must give me your attention, my dear. This is very important.’

  ‘I am listening,’ Caroline said.

  ‘Aunt Natalia,’ Katya began, ‘must be in the best position to know how the minds of Uncle Viktor and Grigori work. They are her husband and her son, and it must have cost her a great deal to confide in me as she did. Now that Alexander is dead, Caroline, Aunt Natalia fears for Michael’s life. She is convinced that either Uncle Viktor or Grigori will make an attempt on it.’

  ‘What?’ Caroline stared at her, shocked into full concentration.

  Katya nodded grimly. ‘Who stands between them and the family fortune and the tide? A four-year-old boy!’

  Caroline remembered, suddenly, how Uncle Viktor had once said to Grigori—‘One day, when you take over from me—’ And she had failed to absorb the significance of what he had started to say, simply because she never thought of either Sacha or Michael as being Antonovs.

  ‘It would be so easy,’ Katya continued. ‘A child of that age is extremely vulnerable. A well-planned accident, perhaps; something introduced into his food. And in the atmosphere of violence we are presently living in, who would pay much attention to the death of a small boy, however suspicious the circumstances? Particularly if he also happens to have been the son of a traitor. Do you understand?’

  ‘Yes...’

  ‘You must get him away from this house,’ Katya went on. ‘And the sooner the better. That was why I spoke to Michael as I did. You will need his cooperation and his obedience, and he is more likely to give those if he is made to believe that he is doing his duty as his Papasha would have wanted him to.’