‘Afraid to experience Russia or afraid to be with you?’ She gave a haughty toss of her head. ‘The answer is neither.’ She grabbed her satchel from the floor and slipped around a corner in the tackroom where the grooms changed. She flung a white shirt over the dressing screen, conjuring up images of what she was not wearing. ‘I’m not afraid of you, Nikolay Baklanov.’ The light from the table casting her silhouette in relief behind the thin fabric screen, the curve of her high breast, the slimness of her waist as she put on a blouse and buttoned up a form-fitting jacket.
It was he who should be afraid of her. He’d overplayed his hand this time. He hadn’t scared her off with his dry lessons, with his bold kisses or daring suggestions. Instead, his efforts had drawn her closer, leading her to call his bluff. Stepan would have a fit if he knew what he meant to do—taking a genteel unmarried girl out into public without a chaperon.
Klara stepped around the screen, twisting her hair into a bun at her neck. ‘Will I do?’ Nikolay took in the blue wool habit, plain but well fitted, not too ostentatious for Soho. She would do, but Klara was the sort of woman who would attract attention wherever she went, even if she were dressed in beggar’s rags. The magnitude of that was starting to settle on him in full. If they weren’t careful, if she were recognised, if word got back to her father... Well, suffice it to say, all those scenarios ended in matrimony.
‘No one will miss me,’ she offered, as if reading his thoughts, or perhaps merely trying to convince herself this madness could escape undetected. ‘My father has a dinner in Richmond tonight at our house there. Men only. He won’t be back until tomorrow,’ she added. Nikolay detected some nerves. Good. She should be scared just a little. Not of him certainly, but of the situation.
The stakes were indeed high. But the point of no return had been reached. He had offered. She had accepted and both of them were too stubborn to back down. Nikolay crooked his arm for her. That simple gesture changed everything and she knew it. Despite her bravado, he caught the slightest of hesitations before she slid her hand through the crook of his elbow. He drew a deep breath and reached over to settle his hand atop hers in acknowledgement. There could be no going back now. They were no longer antagonists, no longer teacher and student. Perhaps they were not even Miss Klara Grigorieva, ambassador’s daughter, and Prince Nikolay Baklanov, exiled royal, but something simpler—co-conspirators in a secret dash across town. In doing so, each of them would be exposed to the other in a way they hadn’t been before. Such vulnerability raised a provocative question: what might happen if plain Klara and Nikolay went to Soho without their titles to protect them?
Chapter Eight
This was true freedom! There was no one to answer to except herself, no expectations except the ones she made. Stepping into the cab had been like stepping into a new skin and leaving the old one behind. Klara settled into the musty interior, realising the enormity of what she’d done. She’d left behind the civilised world for an adventure with a man she barely knew; a man, she might add, who had, less than a half-hour ago, pushed her up against a wall and kissed her like sin itself and to whom she had responded in kind a second time. In retrospect, her boldness left her burning with a heat not entirely generated by embarrassment. It was easy to be bold with Nikolay.
The cab jerked into motion, entering the traffic. She stole a glance at Nikolay seated across from her, his jaw set stoically as if he, too, needed a moment to let the realisation set in. What was running through his mind? Regret? Worry over being caught? No one would catch them, of course. Her circles didn’t frequent Soho. ‘Why did you stop me, back there in the stables?’
He didn’t need further clarification. He knew precisely what she meant. ‘Because we were angry with one another. We were competing and that’s not what I would want for your first time,’ Nikolay answered bluntly, bringing a blush to her cheeks with his frankness.
‘How do you know that?’ she said defensively, suddenly ashamed of her virginity, as if it was no match for Nikolay’s superior quantity of experience.
‘If you’ve been raised in privileged English style, you’ll be a virgin on your wedding day.’ How different he was compared to the English gentlemen she knew. She would never talk to them like this, never behave with them as she did with Nikolay.
Nikolay gave her a warm smile devoid of condescension. ‘Feminine virginity is nothing to be ashamed of, Klara, any more than a woman should be ashamed of her naturally passionate nature.’ He was absolving her, even approving of her boldness. Yet he had halted for the sake of whose honour? His or hers? Competition implied a winner and a loser. Had he feared losing? Had he halted her because she’d gained the upper hand? To a man like Nikolay, control was everything; on horseback, at the dinner table, or in the bedroom, he’d want control in all aspects of his life. She remembered the feel of his grip shackling her wrists, the pressure of his mouth, a rough but not unpleasant exposition of that control, so unlike the control exhibited by Amesbury in their last conversation after dinner. Then, she’d felt vulnerable, threatened. But although Nikolay had been more physical, she had not felt afraid once.
‘How is it that you know so much about virginity?’ Klara asked with a coy smile.
‘That’s a fairly leading question,’ Nikolay answered her with a grin of his own. He crossed a leg over his knee, starting to relax. It was a question she feared he would laugh off with a drawing-room response. He did not. Perhaps he sensed her need for a deeper truth. ‘Kuban is not much different than England in that regard. Our noble women are prized in marriage for their extreme purity.’
She heard the tension beneath his answer. ‘You don’t approve?’ She furrowed her brow, his undertones at odds with his earlier remarks.
His dark eyes held hers, ‘I don’t approve of stealing choices from people. Self-imposed virginity is fine, self-selected marriage is fine. I have nothing against either institution. However...’ He paused and her breath caught, her intuition signalling she was on the brink of a secret. Understanding this was elemental to understanding him.
‘When young girls are locked up in convents that are more like prisons and denied the right to look upon a male until they’re brought to court or pledged in marriage to men they’ve never met until the altar, that’s a crime against the individual. I cannot support such behaviour. Nor can I support the marriage regulations placed on noble-born men. Those regulations are different, certainly, but no less paralysing. Kuban requires all noble men to take their place at court by the age of thirty. That place is usually accompanied by a prearranged, politically beneficial marriage.’ He fell silent, the full force of his gaze on her. ‘Have I shocked you, Klara? Was that not the type of thing you wished to learn about Kuban?’
He had been truthful with her and she would respond in kind. She was careful not to look away. ‘No, it is not what I expected to learn about your Tsardom. But, no, I am not shocked.’ She ventured the hypothesis that had been forming as he spoke. ‘Is that why you left? Because you would not allow yourself to be sold in marriage?’
Nikolay gave wry, harsh laugh. ‘I’m a soldier. I’m not a marrying man. I did not fear such a marriage for myself. However, that’s no reason for me not to fight against such injustices for others. A man cannot limit his sense of justice to only the causes he champions for himself. That would be the ultimate hypocrisy.’
Her immediate thought was that he’d all but called Amesbury a hypocrite. What he had defined as justice was the opposite of all the Duke stood for. Her next thought was that here sat a man of principle, a man who would fight for those who could not fight for themselves. If her father knew what Nikolay had just revealed, he would never let Nikolay go. This passionate devotion was what her father was looking for. He’d want to harness that passion to his own cause. She pushed the thought away. Tonight was not about the game. It was about her and Nikolay. Just the two of them. The cab pulled to a stop and Nikolay looked out the d
ingy window. ‘We’re here. Ready?’
More than ready. Klara stepped out into the misty Soho evening. Whatever was said and done here would matter not at all to the real world. It was the unspoken rule of the evening, the reason they had come. Nikolay held the door to a small eatery open for her and she stepped inside the warm space, immediately overwhelmed by the smell of hot food cooking and the loud sounds of a crowded room eating dinner.
‘Nikolay!’ A robust man with a dark beard and wearing a large white apron hurried over to them. He said something in Russian, too fast and too far beyond her repertoire of words. Nikolay seemed to protest, modest in the wake of the man’s effusiveness, but in the end, he let the man lead them to a table for two by the fire. There were no menus, but shortly after they sat the man bustled back with two steaming bowls of rich-smelling stew and a loaf of black bread.
‘It’s solyanka,’ Nikolay explained after the man had gone. ‘It’s a sweet and sour stew.’ Nikolay cut them each a slice of bread. ‘This is peasant food,’ he warned. ‘This is not food from the Tsar’s table.’
‘It’s delicious, is what it is.’ Klara took a bite of the stew, catching a potato with her spoon. ‘I like it.’ He was testing her, wanting to know how badly she wanted to engage her Russian heritage. She had not forgotten what had started this venture into Soho. ‘If you’re trying to scare me off, you’ve gone about it the absolutely wrong way. I’ll want to come here every night.’ She nodded in the direction of the man who’d seated them. ‘What did the man say to you? I couldn’t keep up.’
‘He was just glad to see me.’ Nikolay dismissed the comment, but she was certain it was more than that.
‘He knew you from before. Do you come here often?’ She would if she had such freedom. She’d never felt trapped until she’d met Nikolay. True, she had the privilege of her birth, but that privilege was also a prison. She was suddenly jealous of men, for being able to go where they wanted, when they wanted.
‘A penny for your thoughts.’ Nikolay leaned across the table with a grin. ‘Where did you go just now, Klara?’
‘I was thinking of the women you told me about in the cab, how my life isn’t so different from theirs,’ Klara said quietly. ‘I don’t live in a convent, of course. I don’t mean to make light of that repression, but I never understood until I met you how illusory my freedom was.’ The words came out slowly, each one chosen carefully, so new was the thought. Perhaps she had not even realised it until this very minute.
‘You wear riding breeches, Klara,’ Nikolay pointed out, but he wasn’t debating her assumptions. He was probing, almost as if he wanted her to come to certain realisations.
‘I do. I suppose to many people I look free on the outside. I know there are men like Amesbury who think I run wild, but I’m on a leash, just a rather long one. At some point that leash will run out and yank me back. I ride my horses. I wear breeches. I have any thing I want. But there is a price for that. That price will be marriage to a man of my father’s choosing, at my father’s time.’ Why hadn’t she seen it before? She shrugged, trying to hide how much the realisation shook her. ‘All the more reason to enjoy tonight, I suppose.’ She reached for her mug. ‘Teach me a Russian toast.’
Nikolay favoured her with another smile. ‘We might say budem zdorovy...to your health.’
‘Budem zdorovy, then.’ She smiled, clinking her mug against his. When they had taken a drink, she fixed him with a look. ‘Tell me, why do you come here?’
‘I come here when I miss home,’ Nikolay said sincerely.
‘Is that often?’ she asked softly. Intimacy settled about them, the noisy room receding into the background as she waited for him to say more. This revelation was different than what they’d talked about in the carriage; it was entirely personal, entirely private.
‘More often than I thought it would be.’ Nikolay reached for the pitcher and poured for them. ‘Here I’m not alone.’ Klara nodded. All around them people spoke Russian, ate Russian food. They might all be from different parts of Russia, but in this tiny café they all had a few vital things in common and that was enough to recreate home.
‘You are very brave. I think it must take a strong person to leave their home, their family, in order to make a new life.’ The enormity of what Nikolay had done was overwhelming. He tried to hide it, of course, behind the flirtation, behind the swagger and the bold words. ‘You are a prince who’s become a riding instructor.’ The thought emerged in halting sentences as she put the idea together. She gave the room a furtive scan. ‘I wonder how many other such men are gathered here?’ How many men had traded the status and wealth of one life to start another in the hopes of more? Had they found it? How did they measure it?
Nikolay directed her attention to two men deep in conversation by the door. ‘They used to be officers in the palace guard in St Petersburg. They were caught up in the 1821 revolt. Do you know it?’
She stopped eating, the solyanka now heavy in her stomach. ‘Yes.’ It was a revolt like the one her father planned.
‘They come in and drink and talk about the old days. They relive the revolt, over and over.’ He nodded to another group of men in the corner. ‘They came to England because they suffered persecution. They refused to bow to the Tsar’s laws.’ These men were older, all of them in their fifties. ‘They’ve been in England for twenty years. They’ve got older, but their memories haven’t. So, yes, there are men here who will not rise to the status they once had.’
Klara saw the pity, the anger in his gaze, maybe even contempt for those men trapped in the past, unable to move past their choices. She heard the fear that he was not that different, that he would become them in time. ‘That will not be you,’ she offered. He was too alive, too vibrant of a man. But put in the context he presented, it provoked the old question: what caused a man to leave all he had, both material and immaterial, for a land that would not allow him to rise? Where he would be limited by language and a hundred other barriers?
‘Why did you come, Nikolay, if you did not come to escape an unwanted marriage?’ she asked, letting her hand rest on his on the table.
‘I came for the same reasons they came. I had no choice.’ He gave a snort. ‘It’s ironic, all these men are here because they wanted things to change and now they are the ones who cannot change.’
She could read a revolution in that statement as she formed other hypotheses. Had Nikolay, too, wanted change? She thought of the men by the door, the former officers. Perhaps men like Nikolay. Had he attempted to create change and then been forced to flee? Forced was the right word here. One did not simply leave one’s whole life behind because they merely wanted something. The man in the apron was back before she could pursue that line of thought further. He cleared away their bowls.
‘Will you stay for the dancing? And the vodka?’ he asked in broken English, his accent heavy. Around them, people were already pushing tables to the sides and stacking chairs. An accordion and a guitar materialised. Nikolay looked at her, raising his eyebrows in challenge. He was daring her, again. She would answer that challenge.
‘Da, we’ll stay.’ She was not ready to go home, her discoveries were too new. She might never pass this way again. There was no way she was leaving now. She flashed Nikolay a look. ‘And we’ll dance.’
Chapter Nine
She’d never danced like this—quite literally. Klara laughed out loud as Nikolay spun her across the floor in a fast polka. She was sweaty and hot, and happy. They’d danced two hours straight. The dancing had been full of new experiences. There had been ring dances, khorovods, and line dances with people touching. These were not the staid dances of Mayfair ballrooms with the polite, metred steps of the English aristocracy. This was dancing as it was meant to be; flying without leaving the ground. For all her sophistication, it was shocking to note how small her world was. Miniscule indeed, considering all the ‘nevers’ she had crossed off
her list tonight and just a few streets from home. Soho was surprisingly close to Mayfair when one considered the distance. Streets away, worlds apart. The dance ended and the band took a break. Thank goodness. She hadn’t wanted to stop dancing, but she was breathless.
‘Thirsty?’ Nikolay offered. His hand hadn’t left her back the entire evening since the dancing started. That was another plus to dancing here. There was no two-dance limit. She’d danced with him all night. She felt alive, here in this nameless café, whirling to a two-man band in Nikolay’s arms. Nikolay handed her a small glass of clear liquid. ‘Vodka,’ he warned. ‘Drink it down in a single shot.’
‘I am familiar with vodka.’ She laughed, watching him toss his head back, the strong muscles of his neck exposed as he swallowed. His coat had come off, his jacket, too. He danced in his shirt, his sleeves rolled up. He might be any man in this room, a working man instead of a gentleman. Her coat, too, had been discarded. She might be any woman in the room, in a plain blue skirt with a white blouse. How tempting it would be to be Nikolay and Klara, to have no secrets between them. Some of those walls had come down tonight, while making her more acutely aware than ever of the walls that remained. The temptation had been replaced by a nascent fantasy born of her realisations tonight: what would it be like to have a different life? A life outside her gilded cage? A life filled with nights in this café instead of London ballrooms? A life with Nikolay the riding instructor? Fantasy indeed if she was imagining her future with a man she’d only met a few weeks ago. It was dangerous to think of falling in love with Nikolay Baklanov. He was by his own admission not a marrying man. Better to think of the vodka.
‘Budem zdorovy.’ She lifted her glass and swallowed. The vodka went down smoothly. She was used to it in viche pitia, but it tasted extraordinarily delicious tonight. ‘Another, please.’ She was thirstier than she realised.
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