Love and Splendor: The Coltrane Saga, Book 5 (14 page)

Yet, Annine was miserable. She felt that such an ostentatious lifestyle was sinful in light of so many starving peasants. Restless, bored, she complained constantly to Dolskoi, who became concerned that her nagging tongue would wag at royal functions, within hearing of his Czar. He begged her to watch what she said and did, not to make statements in public that were critical of the Czar and his government.

Headstrong, willful, Annine did as she pleased. She delighted in shocking those she considered despotic. The years passed slowly. Dolskoi continued to love Annine fiercely, but she turned him from their bed, refusing any intimacy. She swore she would never bear a child to be brought up in such an environment. Eventually, he began having affairs, but they were empty, meaningless, for it was to his precious Annine that he longed to give his love.

Annine, meanwhile, discovered the world of Russian folk dancing. There were few parts for a woman, but she was young, energetic, vivacious, and the village people adored her.

She joined a troupe that traveled rural Russia, much to Dolskoi’s distress, and the gossips wagged voraciously about her gypsy lifestyle, the way she had unofficially abandoned her husband and marriage.

An accident brought her home. During a frenzied dance routine, she had slipped, fallen, and broken her arm. Secretly, Dolskoi was delighted, for he wanted to take advantage of her convalescence at home to attempt to revive their marriage. Despite their problems, she was, to Dolskoi, the most ravishingly beautiful woman he had ever known, and he adored her to a fault.

Annine reluctantly gave in to a single night of lovemaking, more out of boredom than any other reason. She was insanely furious later to discover that she was pregnant!

Dolskoi was delighted. Now his wife would have to stay at home and give up her ridiculous lifestyle of flitting about the country dancing with a band of gypsies. The baby would change everything. They would be a real family, have a real home. There would, no doubt, be other babies, as well, once Annine experienced such a joy.

Annine spent the duration of her pregnancy hating her husband, his Czar, the Imperial Court of Russia, and the baby growing inside her. She would leave, she vowed, and join her beloved friends and say goodbye forever to such a despised patrician lifestyle.

Annine suffered a difficult delivery, however, and was left weakened and ill for over a year afterward. By then, despite her displeasure with her marriage, she grew to love her son, who was christened in the Russian way with three names—his Christian name; the name of his father, with
vich
added, which meant
son of,
and his family name. Thus he was called Drakar Dolskoivich Mikhailonov.

Annine truly endeavored to be a good mother. She was always kind and loving to little Drakar but remained restless and unhappy with her life. She found no joy in the pomp and circumstance of,
the royal circle, had to be cajoled by her husband to attend any function.

Annine attempted to keep Drakar away from the world of the Imperial Court. More and more, she was resenting the Czar, Alexander II, said to be the most liberal of all rulers of Russia. She shared the thoughts of the restless peasants who rebuked the theory that a Czar who did not rule as an undisputed autocrat was shirking his duty to God. Dolskoi accused her of sounding like one of the revolutionaries who were causing so many grumbles and rumbles of late.

When Dolskoi insisted that Drakar be taken to the palace at Gatchina to study with the Czar’s grandson, Nicholas, Annine went into a rage. No matter that there was a difference of six years between the two boys; he wanted his son raised as he had been, close to royalty, to grow into the same coveted position as he had. Further, he wanted to exemplify to his Czar that he did not condone his wife’s increasingly revolutionary leanings.

Annine was beside herself. Dolskoi pointed out that there would be the finest of tutors, and then later, he would study at Oxford, in England.

Infuriated, Annine left her husband. Fired by her hatred for the Czar and his policies, she became a part of the “University Youth”, who were influenced by a variety of socialist ideas taken from Europe but adapted to conditions in Russia. These radical intellectuals saw in the restless peasantry the potential for revolution. They gathered forces and went out into the countryside to stir people up with speeches they did not understand.

Annine joined them, and Dolskoi knew untold shame and humiliation. When Russia declared war on Turkey, he went off to battle, not caring whether he returned or not. Death, he was beginning to feel, was better than life married to a woman he worshipped, who obviously did not return the emotion…and seemed to be doing everything she could to cause him to suffer the vilest of debasements.

Drakar heard the rumors about his mother and was hurt and embarrassed. When she would come to the palace to visit him, he would beg her to keep away from her radical friends, to go home to his father and behave as a wife should. She would merely shake her head sadly and tell him he did not understand. He would persist, and finally she would become angry and leave in a huff.

The Czar, of course, knew of Annine Mikhailonov’s sympathy with the revolutionaries, and his heart went out to his lifelong friend Dolskoi. To reward him for his courageous service in the war with Turkey, and also in an attempt to lift his spirits in general, Czar Alexander II summoned a young goldsmith named Peter Carl Fabergé and commissioned him to design something suitable for presentation.

To Peter Carl Fabergé, gold was never just gold—it could be green or red or white, and he could fashion delightful effects by contrasting the colors. He knew how to transform exquisitely even the humblest pieces of hard stone—agate, chalcedony, and quartz. And when he used glittering precious stones in his stunning creations, he knew how to use them for the decorative quality, and not for their value alone.

The Czar’s only direction to Fabergé was that the piece be exquisite and have something to do with the Alexandrovsky Palace, where he and Dolskoi had shared so many good times.

The result was the creation of the Alexandrovsky Palace Egg. Surmounted by a beautifully cut triangular diamond, the Siberian nephrite egg was decorated with yellow and green gold mounts with a setting of cabochon rubies and diamonds. There were three miniature portraits in a pearl-crusted belt around the egg—one depicted Dolskoi as a boy of twelve, another, Alexander at the same age, and the last was of the two together.

There were also four oyster-enameled roses among foliage, set with rose diamonds and hung with pearl swags.

Concealed within was a colored gold model of the Palace, its roof enameled in pale translucent green, the grounds decorated with bushes of spun green gold wire. The palace sat upon a miniature gold table with five legs.

The Czar gasped aloud when he saw it; his hands trembled when he grasped it. He had pronounced in a voice husky with emotion, “Never have my eyes feasted on anything more beautiful or precious!”

There was an emotional ceremony of presentation to Dolskoi. Drakar, then a student at Oxford University, journeyed from England to attend. He, like his father, tried to ignore the fact that Annine was not present. She had, in the past year, refused to attend any function of state or court.

Meanwhile, the militant party officially organized itself and took the title of Land and Freedom. However, within two years, in 1878, the party had split due to dissension within. One faction advocated assassination of government officials in reprisal for maltreatment of their comrades—hundreds had been sentenced to prison, countless numbers deported to Siberia. Breaking away, the terrorist wing took the name People’s Will.

When Dolskoi heard that his wife had joined the new radical terrorist wing, he went into a rage, forbidding her to have anything to do with her comrades. He threatened to tie her, gag her, lock her in a closet. The Czar was promising severe punishment to anyone found to have ties with the group.

Annine herself exploded and declared she was leaving him permanently, ending their marriage. Further, she admitted to being in love with one of the radical leaders, a painter named Zigmont Koryatovich. Dolskoi had suspected something like that for a long time. But apprehension was one thing—he could hide from that; reality, he could not deal with. He was shattered.

When Annine officially left Dolskoi, ending their marriage, the Czar called him in and berated him for not being able to control his wife. Long ago, he thundered, Dolskoi should have reined her in, taken any measures necessary to stop her. Now it was too late, and the Czar felt that his best friend and confidant had caused him embarrassment.

Dolskoi sank to even lower depths of despair.

The climax came when the assassins of the People’s Will made an attempt on the Czar’s life…and went to extraordinary lengths to do so. In Moscow, they bought a building near the railway track, then dug a tunnel from the building directly under the track, where they planted a mine. The Czar was saved when his train took a different direction upon leaving Moscow. However, some of the would-be assassins were captured, among them, Zigmont Koryatovich…and Annine Mikhailonov!

Czar Alexander, in one last effort to restore some semblance of honor and respectability to the man he had loved as a brother, had Annine and her family brought before him. In front of Dolskoi and Drakar, the Czar informed Annine that if she would renounce her radical, revolutionary beliefs, and her lover, and return home to her husband and family, all would be forgiven. Otherwise, she would be deported to Siberia where Zigmont had already been taken.

Annine spat in his face.

She was taken to Siberia, and, infuriated beyond reason, Alexander demanded that Dolskoi resign from his position in his government. Then, in an attempt to prove to everyone that he wished to completely remove himself from any ties to the Mikhailonov family, he ordered the return of the Alexandrovsky Palace Egg.

Dolskoi, a broken man, said he would comply, but when he went to get the treasured egg, he was horrified to discover that Annine had taken it and given it to Zigmont to be sold to help finance the revolution.

Drakar saw his world blow apart in bits and pieces. Zigmont was hanged, apparently taking his knowledge of the whereabouts of the valuable egg to his grave. His father was killed by one of the Czar’s staunch supporters. Drakar believed his father wanted to die that way. Then, his mother escaped, and he was never to see her again.

Drakar’s friendship with Alexander III deteriorated. The revolutionaries successfully killed the Czar in a bomb blast, and, overcome with grief, Alexander, as the new Czar, called Drakar before him and proclaimed that as far as he and the Russian government were concerned, Annine Mikhailonov was a whore and a traitor. His father was without honor because he refused to return the Alexandrovsky Palace Egg. No one, the new Czar declared, had believed Dolskoi’s story that he could not find the egg.

Czar Alexander III stripped Drakar of his family name, his honor, and banished him from Russia.

Drakar was angry but grateful that although the Czar might have stripped his father of all honor, they could not touch his wealth. With inherited holdings in many countries, Drakar could leave his homeland to make his own life.

But then, only a half year after leaving, he was called back to Russia by divine summons of the Czar. He went, more out of curiosity than any sense of duty.

Alexander told him that because of their own once treasured friendship, he would confide to him a rumor that his mother had, indeed, stolen the egg and given it to her revolutionary lover. There were stories from Siberia that told of Zigmont secretly painting a scene of the Alexandrovsky Palace. Somewhere within the painting was a clue to where the egg was actually hidden. Drakar’s mother was said to have taken the painting away with her when she escaped.

The young Czar further went on to inform Drakar that his mother had died in Paris only a few months before. No one knew the whereabouts of the painting.

The Czar also promised Drakar that no one else would be told, that everything would be kept confidential. If he could find the painting and, ultimately, the coveted Fabergé egg, then his father’s honor would be restored.

“As long as the egg is missing, no one will ever believe that it was not sold to help finance the revolutionaries,” Czar Alexander III tersely informed Drakar. “It must be returned to the Imperial Court, as was the wish of my father.’’

Drakar agreed…and thus his quest began.

Chapter Eleven

By the time Dani returned, Drake was pretending to be browsing about the shop, not wanting to arouse her curiosity by staring at the painting. However, he was still very much in deep thought. He knew it had to be the painting he had been searching for, but he needed closer scrutiny. Zigmont Koryatovich, amateur artist though he might have been, had evidently known what he was doing when he created a mystery on canvas. From what Drake had seen thus far, there was not an inkling of a clue to tell him where the egg might be hidden.

At the sound of Dani entering the shop, he complimented her on her selection of goods.

It was she who mentioned the painting. “Did it make you homesick for your native land?” she inquired pleasantly.

He hesitated before answering, as though he had really not thought about it, then shrugged. “I suppose. It does have a uniqueness about it that I find intriguing.” Then, offhandedly, he said, “I might want to buy it from you.”