Francesca pulled away from his lips and, reaching up with both arms, unpinned her chignon so that all her dark hair fell down over her shoulders. She shook it loose impatiently and then, looking full into his eyes, she adroitly managed to unfasten her strapless dress and her crinolines, throwing them as hastily aside as if they were made of hopsacking. Recklessly she flung herself out of her clouds of chiffon plumage only to appear in her resplendent flesh, lying totally naked on a pile of horse blankets, laughing softly as she watched Stash Valensky, momentarily bewildered and taken by surprise, struggle out of his dinner jacket. Soon, very soon, he was as naked as she. He savaged her abandoned flesh with an urgency, almost a cannibalism, he hadn’t known in years. This creature of roses and pearls had become, in a flash of magic, a demanding mortal who begged him, in hungry, hoarse tones, to take her as quickly as possible. She would not let him linger at any point; considerations of her own pleasure melted before her craving to have him inside her; deeply, fully, to possess him. When he mounted her and she opened for him, a queen joyfully squandering all her treasures, it was a primeval act. As he gave himself, shatteringly, to his climax, Francesca looked up at his face in the moonlight, his eyes tightly closed, an expression of intense concentration, almost of agony, furrowing his features, and smiled in a way she had never smiled before. Afterward they clung together under the horse blankets, their bodies radiating a triumphant heat, able now to touch each other with tenderness, to explore rather than plunder, to caress rather than raven. Again they made love and this time Stash would not permit Francesca to set the pace, but brought her with infinite skill to an orgasm so stabbing, so victorious, that it frightened her. They slept awhile and awoke to see the change of light, the unmistakable signs of approaching dawn in that fraction of the sky visible from their corner of the horse box.
“Your friends—my God, what will they think?” said Stash, suddenly remembering the Firestones.
“Matty will be making noises like an outraged father in a Victorian melodrama and Margo will be excited and curious and pleased with herself. Or they went to bed early and don’t even know I’m still out … which would be most unlikely. In two hours Matty will start to think about going to the police, but he won’t because he doesn’t want publicity.”
“I’d better let them know you’re safe.”
“But, it’s too early to phone … look, the sun is just rising.”
“I’ll just go and tell Jean to ring up the hotel and say you’re fine and will be back soon. Don’t move.”
He was back in minutes. “That’s done. Now we’ll make our plans and then we’ll find some breakfast.”
“Plans?”
“The wedding. As soon as possible and no fuss … or all kinds of fuss, if that’s what you’d like. Just so it’s soon.”
Francesca rose halfway out of the pile of blankets in astonishment, her nipples still tender and sore from the assault of his lips and teeth, bits of straw in her wildly disordered hair. She gaped in astonishment at this man who was looking down at her with utter conviction.
“Married?”
“Is there any alternative?” He sat down and took her in his arms, pressing her forehead to the place where the tan of his neck turned into the rosy-white skin of his chest. She lifted her head and asked again, “Married?”
Stash pulled a blanket over her shoulders against the morning damp. His strong hands, accustomed to obedience, grasped the top of her arms and when he spoke his voice, though low, had the ring of a cavalry charge.
“I’m old enough to know that this sort of thing doesn’t happen twice in a lifetime. At my age there’s no such thing as infatuation. It’s love and, damn it, I’m no good at love—I don’t know the right words, I can’t tell you what I feel because I’ve never done it before. I haven’t used the real words, just other words, play-love words, seduction words—”
“But I have used all the real words, the most beautiful ever written—and never been good at love either—so we’re equal,” Francesca replied slowly, realizing a truth she had not said out loud before.
“Have you ever felt like this? Can you imagine feeling like this again?” Stash demanded.
Francesca shook her head. It was easier to turn her back on everything that had made up her life until yesterday than it was to think of life apart from Stash in any way.
“But … shouldn’t we get to know each other?” she said, and then laughed deeply at the conventionality of the question.
“Know each other? Oh, God—we’d just end up in the same place. No, we will tell them we’ve decided to get married and that’s that. Francesca, say yes!”
All of Francesca’s romantic nature rose up within her. She didn’t say yes but she inclined her queen’s head and passionately kissed his hands in a fury of submission and possession. She wept and he kissed her wet eyes.
The sun was up and all the noises of the farm suddenly burst into their consciousness.
“You’d better dress,” Stash grinned like a boy.
“Dress? Have you any idea …?” Francesca pointed to a heap of crumpled chiffon and silk flowers lying on the dirt floor of the stable. “To say nothing of this!” She flourished a white lace undergarment which had worked its way under the horse blankets. It was called a Merry Widow, a corselette which started at a strapless bra, continued to form a fashionably tiny waist and reached halfway down the hips where garters were attached to hold up her stockings.
“I’ll help you—but you got out of it so quickly.”
“There are ways and ways—but getting back in is another story. No, Stash, I just can’t put this all back on,” she implored. “Look, my fingers are shaking.”
They both froze, startled by the whistle of an approaching stable hand.
“I’ll head him off,” Stash whispered, trying not to laugh. “Get back in there.” Francesca dove into the blankets giggling. The transition from high romance to farce was complete, as, with one eye, she could see the pony in the next box stretch his head in her direction and snort as if in shocked indignation, no doubt she thought wildly, trying to alert the entire stable to their carryings on. Before long Stash was back, holding a pile of clothes.
“I made a deal with that boy,” he said, handing her a pair of well-polished old riding boots, a frayed blue shirt, and a pair of shabby riding breeches. “He’s about your size and I think he had a bath this morning—but I don’t guarantee it.”
While Francesca managed to dress in the boy’s clothes, mercifully clean and only two sizes too big for her, Stash brought her evening bag from the car. She peered into the mirror of her compact and saw that no trace of make-up remained on her face. She decided not to bother with repairs. Francesca loved her scraped and reddened skin, her bruised lips, her unfamiliar, excited eyes.
“I need a belt,” she discovered.
Stash inspected the variety of tack hanging on the wall. “Martingale’s too long. The bridle? No, it won’t work, nor the curb chain. I’d give you my bow tie if I could find it, but it’d be too short. Here, this should do.” He handed her a long length of material, doubled over.
“What’s that?”
“Tail bandage—keeps the pony’s tail from catching on the polo stick.”
“Who said romance was dead?” she asked.
“Tell them it was an Act of God.” Francesca laughed at a stupefied Matty.
“You’d have to be pregnant for that!” the agent exploded. “You don’t even have a decent excuse! You’re throwing away a great career to marry some Russian polo player out of nowhere and you’re as fucking light-hearted as ten thousand goddamned angels dancing on the head of a pin.”
Francesca flung clean defiance in the teeth of his logic.
“Matty, how many years does a person have to live at the peak? The sky-rocket years, Matty? The firework years? I’m in love with a real man for the first time, so be happy for me!” She made her demands with an infuriatingly carefree smile. “We want everything, Matty—all—
all there is, and we want it now. Why shouldn’t we have it? Can you give me a single reason that will mean anything—even in ten years?” she challenged him.
“All right, I’m happy, I’m thrilled, I’m overjoyed—my best client, like a daughter to me, is getting married to some bozo she met yesterday—who could ask for a better reason for feeling happy? And what does she say when I ask her why it has to be so sudden, why she can’t go home and just do Robin Hood first and then get married? What does she say when I tell her that nobody wants to stop her from marrying her prince, but maybe she should get to know him better?”
“I said,” Francesca answered dreamily, “that it felt right. I said I’d never been really sure of anything before—that I’d been waiting for him all my life and now that I’d found him I’ll never leave him.”
Margo heard a note in Francesca’s voice that told her that whatever the girl was doing, it could not be delayed nor denied.
Matty threw up his hands. “I give up. I never had a chance anyway. All right, you’re going to do it, so that’s that and I’ll cable the studio. So they’ll sue—they have every right. And they’ll win, too. I knew we shouldn’t have come to Europe. It makes people crazy!”
3
Francesca had lapsed from Catholicism years before, but, like all Catholics she remained familiar with the rites of the church. In contrast to her Berkeley Sunday-school days, the marriage service in the Russian Orthodox Cathedral in Paris seemed like a phantasmagoric Hollywood production, Byzantine and bizarre. She almost expected to hear the director’s voice calling “Cut” as, after an interminable service, she and Stash drank three times from a cup of red wine and were led by the priest three times around the lectern. Clouds of incense billowed around them in the light of hundreds of candles, and the unreality was underscored by the majestic, deep bass notes of the male choir singing without instruments, their only counterpoint the celestial sound of a choir of children. Two of Stash’s friends held golden crowns over their heads as they walked and it seemed to Francesca that the circle of fascinated spectators was a crowd of dress extras.
Although they had tried to keep the date of the service secret and had invited only a small group of friends, word of their intentions had spread and the entire cathedral was jammed with the curious, standing, as was the custom, throughout the wedding and barely keeping order, so great was their desire to catch a glimpse of the ceremony.
Stash, for all his early talk of no fuss, had wanted this service, in all its grandeur and lengthy ritual, remembering the hasty insignificance of his first marriage in wartime London, at a Registry Office. He wanted to see Francesca doubly crowned, first with flowers in her hair, then with the heavy nuptial crown, held in the air over her head. He, who had only spent the first forgotten year of his life in Russia, wanted all the rich symbolism of the noble public service, atavistic, but still fully alive. He had even asked the superbly bearded and solemn priest wearing a silver chasuble and a sacerdotal head dress to link his hand with Francesca’s in a silk handkerchief as he led them around the altar, rather than merely taking their hands in his.
Francesca consented to everything. No detail seemed of the slightest importance to her from the time she had made her decision in the stable. She existed on a plane of sublime indifference to everything but her concentration on Stash and her inner vision of the two of them together forever.
Margo was in her element, making arrangements which no one else could have managed. She gloried in Francesca’s triumphant marriage and she made the most of the occasion, admitting to herself that at heart she thoroughly detested and mistrusted tasteful simplicity.
The wedding reception at the Ritz was certainly the greatest Margo Firestone production ever recorded. Afterward, Prince Stash Valensky and his new princess disappeared. Not even the Firestones knew that they were staying in Stash’s large villa in the countryside outside of Lausanne where, at last, they could begin the never-to-end, not-to-be-rushed exploration of each other. As they rode or walked or lay together they told each other long tales of their childhoods and marveled that, but for the chance remark of a man neither of them knew, in the bar of a Paris hotel, they might never have met.
Francesca often stayed awake at night, although her body, bathed in the halcyon weather of satisfied passion, told her to sleep. She preferred to watch over Stash, brooding over his features in the flickering light of the tiny lamp lit beneath an icon that hung on the far wall of their bedroom. He was the hero, she told herself, of all the stories she had ever read. Bold, gallant, fearless … he was all that and something more. She searched for the word and finally found it. Imperishable.
Had he lived long enough for her to know him, Francesca might have used the same word to describe Stash’s father, Prince Vasily Alexandrovitch Valensky. That man of dauntless presence, high rank and great physical strength had been the veteran of half a hundred affairs with the exquisite ballerinas of the Marinsky Theater, when, at the age of forty, he decided that it was time to take a wife. Quite dispassionately, he had chosen to propose to Princess Titiana Nikolaevna Stargardova because, of all the debutantes of 1909, she was most suited by birth to his own position. Now, incredulously, in the winter of 1910, he realized that in the most unexpected, undignified and irreversible way he had fallen totally in love with his own wife.
Before their engagement, Titiana was alluringly pretty though she had always kept her large blue eyes downcast whenever they met at a party or the opera. She had worn demure, rather high-necked ball gowns and she spoke in the softest voice which nothing more seductive than a pure gaiety was allowed to animate. From her simply dressed blonde hair and her habit of blushing when she spoke to him, Vasily Valensky had expected a wife who would be placid, correct, certainly conservative. And almost surely as boring as the wives of most of his acquaintances. But before their honeymoon was over, Titiana, who was as hot-blooded as she was clever, had utterly captivated her husband and he discovered that he had married an imperious and demanding mistress.
Today, less than a year after his marriage, as Prince Valensky left his marble-columned palace on the Moika Canal, he noted with amusement, barely touched with resignation, that once again everything and everyone in the palace was being turned upside down and inside out as Titiana prepared for another of her balls. She was reveling in her new position as one of the leading hostesses of St Petersburg. Freed by marriage from the splendid, but chaperoned, decorum of the bals Blanc, at which young girls danced a sedate cotillion, the newly vivacious nineteen-year-old princess lost no time in placing herself near the center of the sumptuous society of the Imperial city.
“To Denisov-Uralski’s,” Prince Vasily commanded the bemedaled and uniformed doorman who guarded the entrance to the seething palace. Two footmen closed the heavy doors behind him and he stepped lightly into the back seat of the magnificent sledge, carved from ebony and lined with quilted glove leather.
Boris, the coachman, was wearing his winter uniform, a dark ruby-red velvet coat, completely doubled inside with thick fur and belted in gold, with a matching three-cornered hat. In common with all the coachmen of the nobility, he was an immense bearded man who enjoyed nothing more than driving his team of four huge black horses as fast as if there were no one else on the crowded streets of St. Petersburg. Indeed, Boris, who discounted the Grand Dukes as merely decorative, was convinced that his master, who wore the decorations of the Alexander Nevsky, the Vladimir and the St. Andrew, was next in importance only to the Tsar himself. He prided himself that he had traversed the distance between the palace and the shop of Denisov-Uralski without stopping or even slowing for another sledge. To have done so would have insulted the Prince.
On that December day Vasily Valensky’s errand was to purchase a veritable menagerie. His wife still had a childish love of animal figurines and he had determined to overwhelm her this Christmas—If, he thought to himself with an inward smile of memory, she could ever be satisfied. Within a half-hour he had selected a n
umber of precious animals, two of each so that Titiana would have a Noah’s ark to play with. There were elephants carved from imperial jade with Ceylon sapphire eyes, lions of topaz with ruby eyes and tails of diamonds threaded on gold and giraffes made of amethyst whose eyes were cabochon emeralds with diamond pupils. Next the Prince went on foot to Fabergé and added smaller animals to the collection: turtles fashioned of pink agate with heads, feet and tails of silver and gold, their backs studded with pearls; parrots of white coral; and an entire school of goldfish carved in green, pink, mauve and brown jade, all with eyes of rose-cut diamonds.
This pleasant business done, he directed Boris to drive him to his offices. In the eleven hundred years his family had been noble, their estates had spread over the vastness of Russia and it was only with the aid of a corps of managers, many of them German and Swiss, that Prince Vasily was able to keep his affairs in order. In the Urals his estates produced one quarter of the world’s output of platinum. In Kursk he owned the hundreds of miles of sugar plantations and dozens of sawmills, fed by still another hundred miles of forests. In the Ukraine he was the proprietor of immense tobacco plantations. But it was in the fertile province of Kashin that he had his favorite estate. There, on land blooming with orchards and dotted by dairy farms, he raised his winning race horses and invited parties of a hundred noblemen to shoot his fat deer, his wild boar and his thousands of game birds.
There, too, he and his wife rode together through the forest pathways and, as Prince Vasily was still astonished to remember, there they had made love often last summer, hiding in secret places deep in the woods, just like the peasants. It was hard to reconcile the tumbled, eager girl he took so urgently in the nest they had made of moss and leaves, with the great lady, crowned with his mother’s diamond-and-emerald tiara, who would receive eight hundred guests tonight, all of them noble and all of them dressed to her command in cloth of gold or silver. They would dance to the music of six orchestras and be served a midnight supper from gold and silver dishes presented by a hundred uniformed footmen while they were serenaded by both Colombo’s and Goulesko’s gypsy bands. As he had left the palace, Valensky had seen the heated carts arriving with the flowers Titiana had ordered from the Riviera. Their private train had been dispatched to Nice to be loaded with flowers still in bud. They were sped through the winter of Europe, unloaded at the station in St. Petersburg as they were beginning to flower. Half the blossoms of France, lilacs, roses, hyacinths, daffodils and Parma violets, opened for just one night in this city on the Gulf of Finland where the winters were endless and the winds were damp and freezing.
Princess Daisy Page 4
