She had not felt well that evening and had retired early. In the morning she had been told that she slept through it. But to look at the shambles in which the house had been left, she could not believe it. No, she had not merely slept through it. She suspected she had been drugged. It was no use bringing it up to Zofia, not with what was going on in the forest right now, but she would be on her guard in the future. Imagine that, she thought, having to watch one’s back against a daughter. There was, however, one fuzzy memory of that night that came back to her now. She dreamt she had awakened from a deep sleep to find a man’s face peering into her doorway. The man could have been Walter’s double. Had it been a dream?
“Zofia,” the countess asked, “was Walter at your party the other night?”
“Walter?” Zofia’s expression was at first inscrutable. Then, as she looked from her mother to Anna and back to her mother again, she arranged her face into a mask of light mockery. “Why, Mother, it was a party, for pity’s sake. One does not invite a brother like Walter to a party.”
Morning had broken by the time Jan and his companions entered the forest. It was cool and crisp. Thick morning vapors rose languidly from the forest floor. Jan watched his own frosty breath as he exhaled, glad for the cold that shook him awake. He spoke little.
Józef was the guide. He had been here once before on a similar mission. Jan did not ask how that one turned out.
Soon they came to an area where the undergrowth and overhanging branches were too thick to pass on horseback. “This is where we leave the horses,” Józef announced. “The clearing is maybe three hundred paces or more. It looks as though we’re the first to arrive.”
The three dismounted and secured the horses. They moved off then through the dense foliage, Józef first, then Jan, then Artur, who carried the case with the pair of pistols.
The forest was quiet and the thick mist rendered it eerie as a painting. The three friends fell silent again. Jan thought about the lengths to which Grawlinski had gone to kill Anna and take her land. If it were true, of what else was he capable? Would he even show himself today? If he did, was he prepared to fight honorably? And did fighting honorably mean shooting to kill?
Somewhere in the interior of the forest a cuckoo bird sang its strange lament. Jan thought then of the day in the forest that he and Anna had heard it. He had asked her if she had any coins to jingle so—as the superstition went—all would be well. Neither of them had any coins. Jan was not superstitious, but their lives changed so that day. He found his hand had moved, involuntarily, toward his pocket. He had brought no coins this day, either. And he did not succumb to the temptation to ask his friends if they carried any.
Antoni and his party should have arrived by now. Where were they?
He thought he heard some noise then, like a horse’s hoof crushing a twig. The others heard it, too. They stopped and listened.
All was quiet.
Józef assured him he knew of no good path that would accommodate a rider to the clearing. Artur suggested it was some small forest animal foraging its morning meal.
They began to move on. But Jan’s nerves, already on edge, were sharpened. What if Antoni were taking no chances? What if he had planned an ambush? What if he had hired men to kill him, as he may have done with Anna? His heart caught at the idea. He knew that if such were the case, he had brought two good friends to their deaths. No one would be allowed to live to tell the tale.
The cuckoo moaned again. The bird seemed closer.
Jan knew that his two friends had been put on guard, too. The three fell silent.
As they pushed on, he heard Artur behind him, gently, almost surreptitiously, rattling change in his pocket.
Her polished nails drumming the wooden arms of her chair, Zofia sat watching her mother knit and Anna pretend to read. They were attempting to mask their nervousness. What is there for me to be nervous about? she wondered. And yet she was uneasy. She stood and began to pace.
She knew her mother glanced over at her from time to time in disapproval. The countess still seethed over the party and the condition of the house afterward. Oh, well, Zofia thought, she shall have to get used to the changes around here. She is merely a dowager now. The house is not to be eternally hung in crepe. And if it is all too much for her, she can go back to Halicz. Zofia smiled to herself then, thinking how well the laudanum trick had worked. Charlotte had been right: a little sprinkling of it into her mother’s evening glass of sherry and she was off to her own private party!
Anna had not said a word about that night. Zofia had given Charlotte a verbal drubbing afterward, but the damage had been done. Zofia did not want to see Anna needlessly hurt. Indeed, she would see her cousin get anything she wished, barring one thing. Commissioning Paweł to soften her had paid off. There was always someone to take care of untidy things. Today, for instance, provided the supreme proof.
Lutisha bustled in with a coffee tray.
“Coffee?” Zofia sang. “I think we all need a drink!”
“Zofia!” the countess cried. “How can you be ready to drink and be lightheaded about things when others may be dying at this moment?”
Zofia looked to Anna, whose mouth appeared as though it might smile at any moment, but whose eyes seemed set on tears. “I’m sorry,” Zofia said, “I only meant that coffee puts one on edge and you are both already on edge.”
“And I suppose you are not?” her mother retorted.
“No,” Zofia lied.
Anna looked up. “Do you think the duel a foregone conclusion?”
Zofia sat down again. It seemed an objective and sincere question. As if Zofia had the answer to the future. “No, Anna, I suppose not.”
“It is in God’s hands,” the countess said.
“Whatever the outcome,” Anna sighed, “no good can come of it.”
“You’re right, I’m sure, Anna.” Zofia looked at Anna’s distant green eyes and thought something very different. Ah, cousin, your husband or your love, is that it? And I know whom you would choose!
Jan’s uncertainties regarding Antoni Grawlinski were unfounded. He and his attendants arrived only a few minutes after Jan and his men found the clearing. The usual civilities took place: introductions, handshakes, clipped and polite conversation.
Jan found Antoni difficult to read. The gray eyes seemed placid, but something else lurked there, too, a kind of suppressed fire. Was it determination, or fear?
Józef went over the protocol: the signal to begin, the thirty paces, the turn to fire.
The second of each duelist examined the guns of the other. There was talk of reducing the distance to fifteen or twenty paces because of the thick mist. No agreement was struck, so it remained at thirty.
Jan wanted to tell Antoni he would shoot only to wound. He had come to that conclusion only half an hour before. He needed more proof that the man had tried to kill Anna. It wasn’t that he didn’t believe Anna. It was just that he needed proof before taking a life. He could not help but be struck by the painful irony that one might, in certain circumstances, doubt one’s beloved—just as Anna had doubted for a moment at the pond. And he had not understood.
He could not bring himself to say anything. To do so would break with tradition. Today only the seconds and guns were to speak, and he suspected Antoni meant to shoot to kill. But he knew that his own pride, too, kept him from speaking. He wouldn’t have Antoni thinking that he was trying to spare himself by sparing him.
The two men were asked to take their places. They did so, each man selecting his gun. Neither looked the other in the eye now.
They came to stand back to back, ready to walk in opposite directions.
They would be a total of sixty paces apart, Jan thought. Would they even be able to make out each other’s outline in the morning vapor? What good would marksmanship matter then?
If one shot from each did not resolve the duel, protocol called for the second pistols to be used at fifteen paces closer, thirty in all. It would
take some doing to miss at thirty.
The tiniest noise—the rustle of a mouse in the leaves or the flailing of a bat—echoed strangely in the cathedral of the forest. Jan heard a faint drumming that seemed to come from miles away, vibrating along the forest floor and up into his being. Before the signal was given, he realized that it was the beating of his own heart.
“No man knows courage,” his father had told him, “who has not known fear.”
The signal, merely nods from a Stelnicki and a Grawlinski attendant, came and the men parted, moving off as the paces were counted by one of Antoni’s attendants.
One . . . two . . .
Jan tried hard to concentrate. Not to do so meant his death. There would be no working for the democracy. . . . Turn and fire. . . .
Ten . . . eleven . . .
There would be no life within Anna’s sphere, in whatever form it might manifest itself. . . . Turn and fire. . . .
Twenty . . . twenty-one . . .
He tried to call upon all his powers now. He would wound Antoni, wound him and somehow make him give up his claim on Anna. But how? . . . Turn and fire. . . .
Twenty-seven . . . twenty-eight . . .
Something caught his ear now. What was it? The snap of a branch? Where? Nearby? What was it? . . . Turn and fire. . . .
Twenty-nine . . .
What it was suddenly didn’t matter to him. It had been enough to destroy what concentration he had.
Thirty. Turn and fire!
Jan turned, his mind working just the fraction of a second behind. But it was enough of a deficit: Grawlinski got off his shot first.
47
THE THREE WOMEN WAITED. NO one had spoken for what seemed an hour. Anna thought she would scream out of frustration. Why hadn’t she defied custom and gone herself? Why was it women were relegated to sitting in reception rooms waiting while men went about such lethal business?
The painted porcelain clock on the mantle held her captive. Half of an hour remained before the assigned time of ten o’clock. The timepiece ticked away slowly, so slowly Anna thought it was surely running down. She came to realize that she was not the only one to note every tick of the minute hand; her aunt’s and cousin’s eyes swept to and from the mantle at regular intervals, like search lanterns.
What if Jan kills Antoni? she thought. What then? Would her husband not come between her and Jan in death? And if he lives? What will have been solved by this primitive rite of honor?
And what if Jan is killed? Her mind went blank. Life without him was unthinkable. Even if they were never to marry, life without Jan seemed no life at all. She found herself catching her breath at the possibility. She should have gone, she thought, she should have gone.
At ten minutes before ten, the front door knocker sounded. The three women looked up in wonder, each moving her gaze from one to the other. What news could this be? The duel was only now about to take place, and then it might be two hours before they heard the outcome.
In a few minutes Lutisha ushered a man into the room.
Anna looked up to find Baron Michał Kolbi striding toward her. She tried to disguise her astonishment with a smile. She had hardly given him or his patriot friends a thought since arriving back in Warsaw. There had been no time.
She stood to greet him and introduced him to her aunt. Zofia, of course, needed no introduction, and her silent nod to him now indicated that his chilly attitude toward her overtures at the patriot celebration still rankled her.
Beaming, he turned to Anna. “I thought you dead, Countess, despite my measures. Praise God! I am so happy to see you.”
Anna smiled. “It seems I have more lives than a cat, Michał. Will you be seated?” The baron brought up a chair to the women’s circle and they all sat, Anna stealing a look at the clock as she did so. This was a happy distraction, but merely a distraction nonetheless. There were only minutes now.
“What measures?” Zofia asked.
Only now did Anna process what he had said. Despite my measures . . .
“Anna was right in her presentiments about Antoni,” Michał said. “After she left for St. Petersburg, I set to work and it did not take long to unravel the man’s plot.”
“Plot?” the countess asked.
The baron’s gaze shifted to Countess Gronska. “I questioned after those men who had been conscripted to take your niece to St. Petersburg. Her letter to me raised my suspicions. I found a man, a Russian, who had turned down the job because . . .”
Anna suspected that he had shocking news to relate and that he paused now out of deference to the Countess Gronska.
“Yes,” the countess said, “do go on.”
He nodded and drew a breath. “Because Grawlinski had no intention that Anna get to St. Petersburg at all. The carriage was to be taken to Opole, to his family farm, but Anna was not to arrive . . . alive.”
Countess Gronska gasped. “It’s true, then. My God, it’s true!”
“So, Antoni,” Zofia said in a strangely flat manner, “did, indeed, mean to kill Anna.”
Both the countess and Zofia turned to Anna, who seemed to be taking the news with silent equanimity. “And it was,” Anna said, “your men who attempted to take me from the Russians?”
The baron nodded.
“God take their good and brave souls,” Anna said.
“I’ve been scouting out Antoni for weeks, but he’s an elusive devil. I’ve been as far as Opole and Częstochowa and have always come up just a step behind him. I do know he’s now here in Warsaw. I intend to call him out and take a just revenge. I take it he hasn’t shown here as yet?”
The women exchanged glances, suddenly remembering where Antoni and Jan were at that moment and what they were about. Before Anna could even shift her eyes to glance at the clock, it struck ten.
Antoni Grawlinski’s shot whipped past Jan’s left ear. He had meant to kill, Jan realized. He had aimed for the head. But he had missed.
Jan took in a mouthful of air now and aimed his own pistol. He felt confident that he could kill him—the heart was a more sensible target than the head—and yet, without solid evidence that damned him as Anna’s would-be murderer . . .
He took his aim now, moving away from the heart, and fired.
Antoni was struck in the upper right shoulder. He remained standing. His left hand went protectively to the wound. There was blood on his hand when he withdrew it, a small amount. He looked up at Jan and smiled, as if to say, You may have come off the better today, but not by much.
I’ve had my chance, Jan thought, and I may regret not having taken it. He may yet be a threat to Anna.
At that moment an explosion rang out. Another pistol shot! In the blur of a few seconds Jan saw Antoni’s chest open up and spill out a geyser of blood. His eyes enlarged in surprise and pain, and he crumpled to the ground.
“There! There!” Józef screamed, pointing to where a cloud of smoke hovered near a large oak. “It came from there!”
One of Antoni’s friends ran to his aid. Jan and the others rushed to the spot where the foliage had concealed the sniper. Jan remembered hearing a noise from that direction, the noise that had put off his concentration. He took his extra pistol from Artur as they ran. But they heard the horse’s hooves before they could get a clear line of vision. There had been a path of sorts, after all, and with all their horses many yards behind them, the man’s getaway was a near certainty.
Still, Jan quickly aimed his loaded pistol and took his shot, its sound reverberating loudly through the forest. Its mark, however, already well out of range, cleanly escaped.
They returned to Antoni Grawlinski’s lifeless form.
48
“HE IS DEAD AND THAT’S that!” Zofia said. “Who cares who did it, Anna?”
“A man like that,” Michał offered, “does have his share of enemies.” The baron had stayed to wait for news of the duel, news that reached Praga with the arrival of Jan just short of two hours after the event.
Anna had
looked up to see Jan in the doorway, and her soul opened at the vision, filling with warmth and light. She had prepared herself for the worst. After all, if her father could desert her through death . . .
Jan was solemnly subdued. This was no surprise to Anna. He had seen death that day and in the most disturbing circumstances. Meeting the baron now for the first time, he listened to the case against Antoni with no little interest. Anna sensed that he shared Zofia’s opinion: that what mattered now was that Anna could live her life without fear of her husband. The opportunity for them to speak privately did not arise before he took his leave.
In the days that followed, Anna wondered as much about Jan’s reaction to Antoni’s death as she did investigate her own . . . as honestly as she could. She wished no one dead, but she knew that she and her child would live now, thanks to some nameless assassin. Who was it? Feliks Paduch? Michał had solved one riddle, but now there was another, perhaps equally as worrisome.
She initiated no service for her husband, though she felt compelled to dress in mourning. She sent his body back to his mother in St. Petersburg with a formal letter giving up any claim to the Grawlinski title and fortune. Let his parents keep everything, she thought. She wanted nothing to do with them. While the baron was old and probably harmless, Michał had seemed quite convinced that the Baroness Grawlinska knew very well what her son had been up to. Who knew of what the mother of a man like that might be capable herself? Anna wanted all ties to that family severed.
The third week of April found winter but a memory. The virgin rains and vapors of the new spring swept through the grateful kingdom, carrying off the sediments of the harsh months.
Anna heard nothing from Jan for some days, and she wondered if Zofia’s interdict against him were the reason. Some of Anna’s patriot friends visited her, lifting the impatient discomfort of the final months of her term. Because many of them were commoners, she was careful to keep such meetings from her cousin and aunt.
Push Not the River Page 35
