The Ice King (19 page)

“I can't imagine 'anyone' being able to do what you did!" Tanya protested, surprised at the casual way he dismissed the incident.

“A silly piece of unnecessary flamboyance," the Prince replied flatly. "I could have stopped them just as well without getting on one of them. Changing horses at a gallop is a Cossack trick which my father made me learn. It's never been the slightest use to me before." He suddenly looked at Tanya with a rueful, uncertain half-smile, like a schoolboy caught making a fool of himself. "I'm afraid I was showing off to impress you!"

“But you might have fallen!" Tanya said faintly, gazing at him with a mixture of horror and incredulity.

“In which case, presumably you would not have been impressed after all," he said sardonically, then changed the subject by asking, "Where does your Great-Aunt's cousin live?"

“Near Taganrog," Tanya replied absently, still digesting the information that he had wanted to impress her.

“Good heavens!" exclaimed the Prince. "I'd no idea . . . I thought it was somewhere reasonably near, where your friends might visit you. I didn't realise that it was as far away as that!”

Tanya was jerked back from the dream-world where handsome princes rescued damsels in distress, to the harsh realities of poverty, distance and hopelessness.

“It's a thousand miles away," she said sadly. "I went there for a while after the General died. It's a big, square house, miles from anywhere, no garden, no trees or flowers, no neighbours, no village, nothing. The house is bare and ugly, and the old lady never goes out. There are no pictures or books, nothing to do, nothing to see." She began to twist her fingers together, a faint note of hysteria entering her voice. She had been badly frightened by the afternoon's adventure, and the reaction was breaking through her efforts to remain calm. "I'll be shut up there for the rest of my life, and I'll never see you again!”

Only now did she realise how horrifyingly imminent was the total loss of everything which had suddenly become so vitally important to her. It had been bad enough when she had only visualised the house at Taganrog as a place without books or pictures, but now it had also become a place without friends, without beauty, and, above all, without Prince Nikolai. She burst into tears.

The Prince set down his cup with a bang and moved to her side so swiftly that she had hardly drawn breath after her first sob. He gathered her into his arms, setting her head comfortably against his shoulder. "Please don't cry, Tanya!" he begged in agitated tones. "You can't possibly go to Taganrog! It's much too far away! I won't hear of it!"

“I've nowhere else to go!" she sobbed.

“Nonsense! Leave it to me — I'll arrange it all, one way or another.”

She lifted her head to look at him, and even with her vision blurred by tears, there was no mistaking the concern and tenderness in his expression.

`He really understands how I dread going there!' she thought. 'Even if he doesn't know why. He only thinks of it as somewhere too far away for my
friends
to visit me, not where
he
could not easily come! At least he cares about me being unhappy, but what could he do?'

“H-how?" she asked.

“Leave it to me," he repeated. "I've one or two ideas — if one won't serve, perhaps another may.”

She sat up, feeling ashamed of her emotional outburst, for tears had been very much discouraged in the General's household, even when she was a child. She felt in her reticule for her handkerchief, then dried her eyes with a quick, half-furtive movement which Prince Nikolai remembered from his own childhood as
a
method of trying to pretend that one had not really been crying at all. His lips twisted in
a
bitter little grimace, which Tanya saw and misinterpreted.

“I'm sorry to be so silly," she said in a tight, defensive tone. "I expect it was the fright. I'm not given to weeping all over people."

“It's better to cry sometimes," he replied gently. "I'd rather you wept all over me than tried to pretend there was nothing wrong."

“Do you really think that you might be able to find a way for me to stay in Petersburg?" she asked, doubt struggling with hope.

“Yes, quite easily," he replied, with the beginnings of
a
smile.

“You're so very good and considerate, and — yes, I will say it —
kind!"

“
Not really," he replied soberly. "My life contains an accumulation of wreckage from the results of my ungood, inconsiderate and unkind actions. Even in this, my motives are mainly selfish. I don't wish to be deprived of my dancing-partner, you see.”

Tanya regarded him with wide, questioning eyes, the word `wreckage' reminding her of that porcelain figurine slipping from his hand to smash on the floor, and she wondered again if that figure had reminded him of
a
victim of some unkind or selfish action of his. She could still not believe that he would ever hurt someone deliberately — perhaps it had been inadvertent, an accident.

Then she realised what his last sentence implied
—he
didn't want her to leave! The gold flecks in her eyes suddenly lit up, and as if he had read her thoughts, Prince Nikolai's grave face relaxed and he leaned forward and kissed her, his arms sliding round her and tightening, his body pressing her painfully against the arm of the sofa. It was a very deep and passionate kiss, and the startling effects of that first kiss in the Dmitrievs' winter-garden paled into insignificance beside the sensations aroused in her now, but also provided her with enough of a forewarning to prevent her flying into
a
panic. After a few moments, when she realised that she was not going to faint or explode, she was able to respond in a perfectly natural, though hesitant fashion, which told Prince Nikolai a great deal about the warmth of the nature behind her obvious inexperience.

They did not hear the carriage draw up in the street below, or its passengers enter the house, but when someone came running up the stairs, calling Tanya's name, they both jerked back into consciousness. Prince Nikolai left the sofa as swiftly as he had come, and when the door burst open and Countess Maria swept in, he was standing by the fireplace, breathing a little hard and very pale in the face. The Countess did not notice, for she went straight to Tanya, exclaiming, "Oh, my dear! Are you hurt? You must have been terrified! What a dreadful thing to happen!"

“I'm quite all right," Tanya assured her. "Not hurt at all, only a little frightened and shaken.”

The rest of the family came in and surrounded her, questioning, full of concern and sympathy, and the coachman appeared in the doorway with Nikita clucking disapprovingly at his large, damp boots, and he, too, had to be comforted and reassured that it was not his fault. Tanya gave him her hand, which he kissed and wept over, the whole thing showing every sign of developing rapidly into a dramatic and very Russian scene of great sentiment and emotion.

In the confusion and uproar, Prince Nikolai slipped quietly from the room and went down to the entrance-hall, where Pyotr was waiting. The servant took one look at his master's white face, commandeered the Kirovs' carriage again and took him home, where he dosed him with laudanum and put him to bed.

The Kirovs realised that he had gone too late to speak to him, and it was left to Nikita to tell them what had become of him. They were very concerned, realising how much he must have hurt himself from Tanya's description of his exploit in stopping the runaways, and Count Alexei was about to send a footman to enquire after him when Prince Nikolai's coachman brought their carriage back and told them that his master was safely in bed.

Countess Maria, thinking that Tanya looked very fagged after her adventure, suggested that she might like to lie down for a while, and she gratefully went to her own room and sat quietly by the stove, thinking over the events of the afternoon. The crash of the
feu de joie
echoed in her mind, and she recalled the sight of the carriage horses rearing up and the sudden jerk as the vehicle began to move, the way it had lurched and swayed.

What if it had overturned? What if the horses had slipped on the icy
pave?
She would have been thrown out, or perhaps crushed under the carriage – killed, or, worse still, maimed. . . . What if Nikolai's horse had stumbled, or if he had mistimed that movement from one animal to the other? She had a vivid mental image of him falling under the carriage-wheels, and stumbled across to her
prie-dieu
to give thanks for his safety and her own in a murmured prayer much broken by sobs.

After that she felt much better, and returned to her chair to dream and puzzle over everything Nikolai had said to her afterwards, telling herself rather severely that she must not start building great hopes that stood little chance of being fulfilled. Obviously he would have gone after the runaway carriage whoever had been in it, just as both Fedor and Pyotr had done, and it would be very foolish to allow herself to think that he had done it because she was the passenger! On the other hand, he had half-jokingly said that he only did it in that particular way to impress her! (Half-jokingly! Not long ago it would have been quite impossible to imagine Prince Nikolai making even half a joke!) What means could he possibly find to allow her to stay in Petersburg? One extremely wild, glorious, incredible way naturally occurred to her, but it was so far from her nature to expect anything miraculous to occur in her life that she immediately dismissed it as an impossibility, too foolish even to speculate about. Except that . . . She shivered uncontrollably, remembering the feel of his lips against hers and the extraordinary sensation of being totally alive in every fibre of her body.

Could a man kiss like that if he didn't feel anything more than kindness or pity? If only she knew more about such matters, she thought. Perhaps Maria. . . ? No, she couldn't possibly say anything to anyone about it. It was too precious and fragile to speak about.

She shifted in her chair, vaguely aware of some physical discomfort, and pressed a hand to her waist. It was surprisingly tender, as if she had been bruised. Then she recalled the arm of the sofa pressing so unyieldingly into her back, and that led her to think of the pain poor Nikolai must have been suffering in his injured side all the time he was talking to her in the carriage and in the sitting-room.

“I should have realised!" she thought. "I did at first, when he looked so white and tired, but then I forgot! I love him so much, but I just forgot that he must be in pain!”

It seemed such a terrible betrayal of all that she owed him and felt for him, that all her other problems, doubts and fears faded into nothing in comparison. She could only try to comfort herself with the thought that at least Pyotr had not forgotten, but had been at hand to help his master and take him safely home, where he could be properly cared for by people who knew what to do.

Natasha came before long to help her to change for dinner, and there were guests for the meal. After it, quite a number of callers dropped in on the way to somewhere else, or simply to stay for a while, all wishing to enquire if she was safe and unhurt, for the news of her mishap had travelled round the city and lost nothing in its journey.

Vladimir Karachev arrived a little before eight o'clock, coming straight from the dinner which had followed the military parade. "I've come to apologise," he said to Tanya.

“It wasn't your fault," she replied with a smile. "It was the
feu de joie
which startled the horses, and as you neither fired a musket nor gave the order, how can you be to blame?"

“Well, I have a vague feeling of responsibility about it," he said, sitting down beside her. "After all, I invited you to the parade. I gather that Nikolai stopped the horses. What did he do?”

Tanya told him, and his moustache twitched several times as she did so.

“Capital!" he said when she finished. "It must have been quite spectacular! The great idiot," he added reflectively, a broad grin making an unseemly appearance for a few seconds before he could reduce it to a gravity more suited to the occasion, "I expect he hurt himself, though."

“I'm afraid so," Tanya replied.

They were sitting in the salon, and a stir of interest among the other guests drew their attention to the doors, where Boris had just come in, looking unusually flushed and selfconscious and carrying an enormous, unwieldy bouquet of carnations and lilies.

“Good lord! The lad's taken leave of his senses!" Vladimir remarked as Boris advanced towards them, trying to see round the bouquet and avoid knocking it into anyone who might be in the way. He arrived in front of Tanya and stood there awkwardly, shifting the flowers from one arm to the other, and finally laying them at her feet.

“For you, Tanya Ivanovna," he said apologetically. "From the Emperor!”

A murmur of surprise and interest ran round the circle of faces turned towards Tanya.

“Oh!" she said, quite overcome. "Oh, dear!”

Boris rummaged among the blooms and ribbons and unearthed a note, which he handed to her. It said:

“I trust that you are safe and unharmed, and thank God that the mishap was no worse. My deepest apologies that my Army should have been the cause of such an unfortunate occurrence." It was signed "Alexander".

Tanya read it with a sensation of unreality and bewilderment, and looked helplessly at the mass of flowers at her feet, wondering what on earth to do with them. "How very kind," she said inadequately.

Nikita and a couple of footmen advanced on the bouquet and managed to whisk it away out of the room with remarkably little fuss, and distributed it among a couple of dozen vases in the dining-room, where it made quite an impressive display.

“He would send it," Boris said morosely, drawing up a chair and sitting down by Tanya. "He wanted Nikolai to bring it, but he didn't come to the Palace and his people sent a message that he was ill, so Alexander Pavlovich gave me the task. I've had an awful time with it — it wouldn't go in through the door of my carriage, so I had to have the hoods put down and carry it like that, and it kept getting snowed on. it's always the same with him — he gets an idea into his head, and somehow it all turns into
a
farce, or a disaster."