The Property of a Lady (4 page)

“Stop it, you bitch!” the man astride her shouted, staring at her, puzzled, but still she laughed.

After lifting his rifle, Mikoyan aimed it between her lovely pansy-brown eyes.
“Stop it, I say,”
he said with a drunken snarl. But Anouska never heard him, and she didn’t hear the crack of the bullet as it split open her forehead, obliterating her beauty in a mass of splintered bone and remnants of bloody flesh.

Silence fell as the men looked first at Anouska and then back at Mikoyan, still holding the smoking rifle. The man holding Alexei released his grip, but the boy did not run away. He just stood there, staring numbly at what was left of his mother’s face.

“So?” Mikoyan demanded with a shrug. “Whose turn is it now? She’s still warm—and you don’t need a face for what you are going to do.” And with a burst of callous laughter, the next one fell on her.

Missie hid her eyes and prayed. She prayed for Anouska’s soul and for the safety of the small boy, though she wondered if he might not be better off dead than seeing what he was seeing now.

The men were drinking and laughing noisily and didn’t hear the horses approaching, but Missie did and she peered hopefully into the forest. Was Misha coming to save her after all?

The captain in the People’s Revolutionary Army was about thirty years old, clean-shaven and smart in a long blue-gray overcoat and fur cap. The two young men with him wore Cossack uniforms, and their horses were prime, tough combat animals, obviously captured from one of the tsar’s own crack cavalry regiments.

“My God,” the officer whispered, forgetting for a moment that he no longer believed in Him and that his loyalty was only to the new regime and its leader Lenin.
Drawing his pistol and keeping his voice low, he commanded his men to dismount and take aim and then suddenly he noticed Alexei. “Wait,” he whispered urgently. “Hold your fire, there is a child.”

Mikoyan and the other peasants were still sprawled on the snow, shouting obscenities and laughing drunkenly as they watched the next man mount Anouska.

Suddenly the captain ran forward, kicking the nearest lumpen body savagely. “Get up,” he roared. “Hands over your heads.” They staggered to their feet, astonished, as he kicked away the man astride Anouska and the young lieutenants leveled their rifles and took aim.

As if released from a spell, Alexei suddenly took to his heels and ran toward Missie. He flung himself on the ground beside her and took her icy hand in both of his. “Missie, Missie,” he begged, “help me, please help me, Missie, I’m so frightened….”

She shut her eyes tighter, yearning with all her being to take Alexei in her arms, to hold him and comfort him, to try to restore some sanity to the nightmare he was enduring, but she knew these new men were enemies too. They were a different sort, but still enemies. They already had Alexei, and if she tried it meant they would find Xenia too. And she knew only too well what both children’s fate would ultimately be as prisoners of the new regime. She steeled herself, telling herself she could not help him, she
must not
do it. She must at least save Xenia. Alexei’s tears scalded her hands and she prayed silently for strength to ignore him.

“You drunken filthy cretins! You belong in the piggery with the rest of the swine,” the captain roared. “Line them up,” he told his men as they butted the peasants into a straggling line with their rifles.

Then, “Bring the boy here to me,” he commanded.

They brought Alexei to stand in front of him. His face was ashen and his beautiful eyes were still filled with horror as the captain looked him up and down.

“I knew your father,” he said at last. “If I could, I would have spared you what happened tonight. But what is done is done and you must face it like a man. Now I want you to watch something, little boy. I am going to show you how the Army of the People will avenge your mother.” He glanced dispassionately at the straggling line of cowardly peasants, the very people the revolution was supposed to be for. Then he commanded, “Fire.”

Alexei put his hands over his ears to shut out the terrible screams and curses, but he didn’t shut his eyes. He watched their bodies spin and jerk as the bullets raked them, waiting until the final spasms had finished. Then he lifted his head and looked the captain silently in the eye.

“Come,” the captain said, holding out his hand, “we must leave now.” But instead, Alexei ran to his mother’s side. Kneeling, he wrapped the beautiful dark sable cape tenderly across her bloody, naked body. After taking her poor, icy hand in both his, he smothered it with kisses. Then he hurled himself to the ground, burying his head in the softness of the fur at her breast, breathing in the familiar scent of the violets she always wore. By her side, like a droplet of fresh blood on the snow, lay a ruby ring. His hand closed over it instinctively.

From the distance came the sound of a huge explosion, and the sky above the tall fir trees filled with an orange glow. “They’ve dynamited Varishnya!” the young lieutenant shouted.

“The fools!” Captain Solovsky exclaimed angrily. “There is no control over peasant rabble. They must be stopped now, if we are ever to achieve our aims.”

Alexei stared silently at the glowing sky. His face was expressionless, closed to all emotion. He put his hand in his pocket and dropped the ring in there.

“Come,” Captain Solovsky said again. “You must forget all this.” Alexei met his eyes. “There is a new life ahead of you,” he said more harshly, “and who knows, maybe
you
will help to make the new Russia the great country it will
become.” He laughed at the irony. “Yes, maybe
you
will be a new breed of revolutionary.”

Alexei followed obediently as they walked to the horses, and Captain Solovsky lifted him onto the saddle in front of him. “Leave the bodies to the wolves,” he told his men carelessly as they rode off into the forest. “I doubt they will last the night.”

Grigori Konstantinov Solovsky held the boy safely in front of him on the long slow ride through the storm, all the way to Dvorsk, thirty kilometers to the south. He took the treacherous, almost invisible road past the halt at Ivanovsk where the railway lines were buried beneath the snow and only the signalbox and smoke from the railwayman’s hut marked the Ivanoff family’s tiny private station. And every step of the way, he told himself he was a fool.

Solovsky was an officer in the newly formed “Red” Army. He was a hard man brought up in a hard way, and there was no room in his life for finer feelings. Another life lost, whether it was his own or a child’s, was not important. What mattered to him was the Bolshevik cause, and in his mind that meant the Russian people. Yet the boy’s helpless, terrified face had struck a chord in him. It was the same look he had seen reflected in his own face when he had watched his three young sons die of typhus in the epidemic four years earlier. He, who had been the proud father of four strong boys, who he planned should be part of the new Russia, had been left with only one son. And just now, in that forest, he had simply not been able to leave another boy to die.

The idea had come to him suddenly. He knew it was a risk and that it might cast doubts on his devotion to the revolutionary cause if his secret were ever discovered, but he had studied the workings of the human mind long
enough to know the risk was minimal. Solovsky had been in charge of frontline soldiers returning from the horrors of the war with Germany, he had studied prisoners who had suffered severe torture; he knew that these people spoke little and asked no questions. The ones who survived were those who kept their private vision of horror and tragedy locked away in a special vault deep in the brain, never to be opened. Those who remembered went mad.

The next few weeks would decide Prince Alexei Ivanoff’s future. The boy would forget the scene in the forest, forget who he was and his short past life. He would become an orphan of the revolution and the adopted son of Grigori and Natalya Solovsky. Or he would retreat into madness. So be it.

Solovsky was from Siberia where the people were tough and hardy. If they were not, they did not survive. Now his home was in the small provincial town of Polotsk in his wife’s home province of Byelorussia, where life was softer and greener. But on the rare occasions he was home relaxing with his friends over a meal and endless glasses of vodka, he would always remind them of his superiority as a “Siberiusk.” As the potent spirit took hold of him he would haul himself to his feet and repeat an old saying.
“In Siberia,”
he would thunder, his deep bass voice commanding silence.
“In Siberia, forty degrees below is not a frost
.” He would pause, glancing around his audience, gathering their attention.
“A hundred kilometers is not a distance, a half liter of vodka is not a drink.”
He would raise his glass to be filled again before adding with a grin,
“And forty years is not a woman
.” Then he would toss back the vodka in a single gulp to great roars of appreciation and laughter, but Solovsky believed what he said was the truth.

He remembered the saying now as his tough old cavalry horse struggled through the blizzard. The snow was freezing even as it fell and the animal slid and stumbled,
whinnying and rolling its eyes in fright. Solovsky glanced sideways at his men; they were barely recognizable under a layer of snow. Only their eyes, fringed with frozen white lashes, peered ahead into the storm. Solovsky shrugged. He had weathered worse storms than this in his youth. They would press on to Dvorsk.

He wrapped the skirt of his greatcoat tighter around the motionless boy, unsure whether he was alive or dead. And as they rode slowly through the icy night, he thought of his own childhood, and how strange life was that he, the son of generations of peasants, now held the destiny of the son of one of Russia’s greatest princes in his hands.

Grigori had been born just before the turn of the century, the fifteenth child of a peasant whose family had lived in the same village for as long as any of them could remember. The Solovskys were related through intermarriage over many years to everyone else in their village, and his father had married his second—or maybe it was his third—cousin. He had fathered sixteen children in all, five of whom survived childhood, but Grigori’s mother never lived long enough to become a
babushka
, a grandmother. She was married at sixteen and dead at only thirty-five, though she had looked like an old woman.

The family lived in a hut built by his father for his bride and made of logs floated down the river from the lumber camps in the vast, endless forests of the north. The nearest town, Novosibirsk, consisted of a huddle of wooden huts on the banks of the river Ob, and the only reason for its existence was that the newly completed Trans-Siberian Railway bridged the river at that point.

One of Grigori’s first memories was of being taken by his father to the railway halt to watch a slender, bearded man as he stepped from the train. The man’s pallor had matched the gray skies as he surveyed the bleak landscape and the few poor peasants watching him. His glance fell on the young boy and they stared at each other somberly for a moment. A sad smile lighted the man’s
face and he said, “You, boy, are the future of Russia. Never forget that.” As he climbed back on board and the train pulled away, his father told him that the man was Vladimir Ilyich Lenin on his way to exile in the depths of Siberia. Many years later, when he was a student, Grigori had read what Lenin had written about Siberia that day. “It is,” he had said, “a barren wilderness with no habitations and no towns.” And Grigori knew he was right because the desolate landscape seemed to merge with eternity and nothingness.

Grigori’s elder sisters both married loggers and went off to live in the far north. He never saw them again. His two brothers married their cousins and settled in the growing town of Novosibirsk, working on the railway, and as far as eight-year-old Grigori could see, they were no better off than his father had been.

Although he had no chance to observe a life any different from his own, something told him that there was more than just this same peasant existence. Sometimes he would stand by the great railway bridge spanning the Ob, wondering how it was built and who had the knowledge to construct such an edifice without it falling down and how they came by that knowledge. He would watch the rare train as it wound its way across the river on its slow journey from Moscow, waving until it faded into oblivion, leaving him wondering about the passengers whose faces he had glimpsed briefly before they disappeared into another world. Those people came from places he had barely heard of, they rode on trains that came from great cities. Grigori didn’t even know what “a city” looked like. He would lie awake at night, listening to the distant hoot of the train whistle sounding mournfully across the flat Siberian plains, and, when he finally slept, it haunted his dreams. The train and its passengers were a mystery, and it was one a poor boy like him could never solve because he was as ignorant and illiterate as his peasant forebears.

As was the tradition, at the age of six he had already been sent to mind the cows along with the other young boys in the village, and at eight he had advanced to looking after the horses. When he attained the age of sixteen, he would be admitted to the
skhod
, the assembly of the heads of the families, and considered an adult. It was different for the girls of the village. They were given the more menial domestic tasks, fetching water from the river and collecting wood, and generally helping their mothers about the house. There had never been a school in his remote village, but one had been built in Novosibirsk for the children of the local railway administrators and supervisors.