Silver Nights (34 page)

According to the tradition of her earliest childhood, the day was declared a holiday and all members of the estate and the village were invited to the celebration. They would pay their respects to the saint's namesake, filing through the hall, some of them bearing little gifts that they would present to Sophie,
standing at the foot of the stairs to greet them. The feasting that followed would take place in the great barn, with tables spilling out into the courtyard. Beer and vodka would flow unchecked from morning until the last reveler had collapsed. Boar and suckling pig, goat, oxen, and whole sheep were roasted over pits, and Anna, with every woman on the estate, was busy for days beforehand creating the delicacies, the cakes and jellies, pickles and breads that would be piled upon the long, groaning trestle tables.

After breakfast, Adam, smiling mysteriously, disappeared, refusing to answer Sophie's importunate questions as to his destination.

“Is it my present?” she demanded. “Oh, tell me, Adam!”

“Now, what makes you think it could have anything to do with a present?” he mused.

“Oh, you know very well! Because it is my name day, of course. Everyone else has given me a present.”

“Then you cannot possibly need another.”

“Sophie, stop pestering,” Prince Golitskov reproved through his laughter. “You do not
ask
for presents, surely you know that.”

“Was she always like this?” Adam inquired in a tone of mild curiosity.

“Oh, much worse,” Golitskov told him. “Maturity has sobered her considerably.”

“Good God!” Adam cast his eyes heavenward. “You would describe
this
exhibition as maturity?”

“Oh, you are both impossible!” Sophie declared, marching to the dining room door. “You are supposed to be kind to me on my name day. I am going to see how matters are progressing in the kitchen.”

Leaving them both laughing, she went off to immerse herself in the masterminding of the various complexities attendant upon a production of this magnitude. Emerging from the kitchen an hour later, she went into the hall, where an army of serfs was busily hanging decorations, others coming in from the gardens, arms filled with foliage and flowers.

“Oh, no, do not put those there!” Sophie hurried up the stairs
to where a lad, perched on a ladder at the head of the staircase, was arranging a wreath of dark green laurel leaves around a picture. “It looks positively funereal,” she said, beckoning him down. “I will put these instead.” “These” were field poppies with heavy scarlet heads. A drowzy, languorous flower of brilliant hue, it was one of Sophie's favorites.

She was halfway up the ladder, her arms brimming with poppies, when Adam walked through the front door into the hall. The buzz of voices, tapping hammers, laughter, faded into the distance as he saw her poised so precariously at the head of the stairs, her belly pushing against her skirt, scarlet flowing from her arms.

He dropped the saddle of fine tooled leather, inlaid with gold, beaded with ivory: a saddle fit for a Cossack stallion and a Cossack woman on her name day. He flung himself up the stairs, his gray eyes pinpricks of fury in his whitened face. “Get off there! You reckless, mindless fool! What are you trying to do?” He pulled her off the ladder. She staggered slightly, off balance, staring stunned at this outburst. She put out a hand to steady herself against him. Holding her, heedless of the shocked faces drifting in and out of his blurred vision, he shook her. “Are you trying to kill yourself? How dare you behave with such criminal negligence—”

“Adam!” It was Prince Golitskov's voice, cutting sharply through the tirade. Summoned by an alarmed servant, he mounted the stairs rapidly. “Get a grip on yourself, man!”

Sophie was no more than a limp rag under his hands; as his grip slackened, her knees buckled and she slid gasping to the ground, her skirt billowing around her. She looked up at him, incredulous, wounded to the core of her being. “Why?”

Adam took a deep, shuddering breath. “You are nearly nine months pregnant and you climb a ladder that is perched precariously at the head of a flight of stairs,” he articulated slowly. “I have never come across such stupidity!” His eyes filled with pain, and he passed his hand over them as if to wipe out the image…. He had put out his hand and she had fallen, rolled over, her body thudding sickeningly on each step, her cry hoarse in the silent house. He had hurtled after her, but she had tumbled
to the bottom, inert, crooked like a child's discarded doll…and then the bleeding had begun.

Grimly, Sophie seized the banister rail, pulling herself to her feet. Her grandfather cupped her elbow, assisting her. She moved her hand in dismissal, her eyes on Adam. She knew that haunted expression. It was the one he bore when he looked upon one of those bad moments in the past. She had thought them exorcised, but obviously this one had escaped the light of day.

“Let us go for a walk in the sunshine,” she said, her voice steadier than her knees, which were still wobbling in the most inconvenient fashion. “Come.” She held out her hand imperatively as she put her foot on the top step.

His eyes snapped into focus. This was Sophie, pale and resolute, hand outstretched. He became aware of Prince Golitskov's grave stare, of the wide-eyed circle of serfs, looking at him with the fearful hostility one might evince toward a mad dog.

“Come,” Sophie repeated, a hint of steel in her voice. “I'll not be shaken like a rat in a terrier's mouth without explanation. Particularly not on my name day. Take my hand, my knees are wobbly.”

Adam looked down the shallow sweep of stairs. The front door stood open, a broad road of yellow sunlight stretching from the door to the bottom of the staircase. He stepped toward her, took her hand. Her fingers closed over his and she remained standing, solid and steady on the top step.

They walked hand in hand down the stairs between phalanxes of questioning eyes, across the hall and out into the sunshine. A whisper rustled behind them, swelled to a babble. Prince Golitskov, leaving his household to the freedom of speculation and the luxury of gossip, returned to his library.

Outside, they walked in silence through the bustle of party preparations until they reached Sophie's rose garden. At the stone sundial, she stopped. “How did Eva die?”

“She fell down the stairs,” Adam replied, looking past Sophie toward the dove cote in the corner of the garden. “I put out my hand…to steady her…I think to steady her.” The words came slowly as if torn from his soul, as, for the first time,
he articulated the fear—the fear that in his anger and the rawness of his wounds, when she had stood laughing at his old-fashioned outrage, her belly swollen with another man's child, the hand he had put out to steady her as she swayed in her laughter at the head of the stairs had pushed instead.

“The child slipped from her body in blood,” he finished on a sob of anguish. “There was nothing anyone could do. It just went on until she was drained.” He gripped the stone sundial with both hands, his knuckles white. “We were in Moscow. The court was at St. Petersburg. It was said only that she died as a result of an accident. The rest was assumed and I could see no reason to enlighten the gossips with the truth.”

“The truth that you murdered your wife in a fit of jealous rage? Or the truth that she slipped and fell?” Sophie laid her hands over his as they continued to grip the stone. “You did not push her, Adam.”

“How can you know that if I do not?”

“Because I know
you
,” she replied with firm conviction. “I know you as I know myself, as I know this child that grows within me. We share parts of each other, and I
know
that however great your anger, however raw your wounds, you could not harm anyone in that way. It would be like…like Boris Mikhailov wantonly destroying a horse! Oh, maybe that sounds an absurd comparison! But it is a question of what is totally foreign to one's nature, of what it is impossible for someone to do, whatever the provocation.” Suddenly seizing his wrist, she tugged him around to face her. “You know you did not do it.”

“But I wanted to,” he said quietly.

Sophie nodded. “It is the guilt of wanting to, not that of the doing, that has tormented you.”

“Will you tell me she deserved it?”

Sophie shook her head. “No, no one deserves to die in such a manner.”

She looked into his face, watching as the hard lines of anguish dissolved, as tears stood out in his eyes. Taking his hand, she drew him down with her to the grass, cradling his head upon her bosom, upon the shelf of her belly, fruitful with his child.

“What do you mean, ‘with child'? Answer me, woman!”

“She is, lord, I swear to it.” Sobbing, sniveling, the petrified Maria fell to her knees before the towering fury of her master. The bearer of evil tidings, she bowed her head before his limitless wrath, knowing that had she kept such information from him, her suffering would have been magnified a hundredfold. Only the truth could provide adequate excuse for the fact that she was no longer in the princess's employ, coldly dismissed in Kiev, sent back to St. Petersburg to report failure to her lord, who did not tolerate failure. Maria was supposed to keep watch on the princess at all times. She was no longer doing so, but the blame must be laid at another's door. “She wouldn't let me serve her after we left the boat, lord, but I knew.”

“How?” The word cut through the drear air in the mausoleum that was the Dmitriev palace in St. Petersburg.

Maria trembled violently, almost unable to speak. Would her negligence be held the cause for the princess's infidelity? “There were signs, lord, on the boat. The princess wasn't always well, sickly…” She hung her head, playing with her apron. “Also, lord, since she arrived in Kiev, she did not have…have…her time did not come upon her,” she finished wretchedly. “Then she would not let me launder her clothes…so I would not remark…but I talked to the laundry maid of Countess Lomonsova, who did the princess's washing, lord. She said there were no…no signs of…”

“I understand you quite well!” interrupted the prince, directing a vicious kick at the kneeling figure. “Your orders were to keep the princess under your eye and report to me anything…
anything
, you hear me…that struck you as out of the ordinary. Why did you not tell me of your suspicions earlier?” He kicked her again, and Maria cringed, moaning with fear.

“Please, lord, I did not think anything of it until she sent me away at Kiev and went off with the count—”

“Count? What count?”

“Why…why the Polish count, lord, the one who used to come here so much—”

Adam Danilevski! Dmitriev wheeled away from the kneeling, whimpering Maria, who remained, still whimpering, still kneeling, in the middle of the carpet.

“The count was her escort,” Maria said. “The empress sent him with her to her grandfather.”

“Did you ever remark any closeness between the count and your mistress?”

“No, lord.” Maria confessed to this further dereliction miserably. “Perhaps it is not him—”

“Idiot!” the prince shouted, swinging back at her. “How would you know whether it was or not? Who did the princess spend time with?”

“Countess Lomonsova—” She fell forward, clutching her ear, sobbing under a backhanded clout.

“Not women!”

“The French count, lord, the Prussian prince, lord—”

“Who else?” Dmitriev knew full well that his wife would not have been indulging in a liaison with either of the ambassadors. The czarina would never have permitted it. But she had permitted this. The appalling humiliation of the truth engulfed him. He had been duped by the empress, laughed at behind his back, sent away so that
his
wife could paddle palms with some…could conceive a bastard! Not his rightful heir, but a bastard! His barren wife had conceived…. Rage more ferocious than any he had experienced before swept him in waves, each one more violent than the last. The
Golitskovs had defeated him, routed him utterly with this final, ultimate humiliation.

Maria was still blubbering at his feet as she tried to find an acceptable answer to the question, but Sophia Alexeyevna had never been seen in any man's particular company.

“Oh, get out of here!” He kicked at her once more. “Don't let me see your face again if you want to keep the skin on your back!” The serf stumbled to her feet and fled the room.

The identity of the lover could wait. The scalding human fury vanished, leaving in its wake an inhuman iciness. He would be revenged upon his faithless wife in the traditional fashion. The severity of the vengeance might be deplored, but it could not be denied him, not even by the czarina, not when the evidence of adultery was there for all to see. Sophia Alexeyevna would suffer every minute of the rest of her hopefully long life; and his own life would be daily enriched by the knowledge of her suffering.

It was the end of September when Prince Dmitriev set off with a sizable armed force of his own serfs. Unencumbered, on horseback, they would accomplish the journey to Berkholzskoye in three weeks.

 

Sophie slipped out of bed in the darkness, padding barefoot to the window. It was the night of the fourteenth of October. A winter-promising wind came howling from the steppes. The night sky was for once overcast, its star-brilliance doused.

“What is it?” Adam spoke sleepily from the bed, frowning at the white shadow by the window. “Can you not sleep, love?”

She turned, smiling slightly. “I do not know what it is…strange sensations…a surging energy as if I must be up and out, striding the steppe.” She shrugged. “It's nothing. Go back to sleep.”

Adam sat up. “Shall I fetch Tanya?”

“Good heavens, no! It is nothing, I told you. Just a peculiar feeling.”

“I will fetch her.” He swung his legs to the floor, but Sophie forestalled him.

“Let her sleep, Adam. It is not time yet.”

He stared at her face, pale in the gloom. “But it soon will be?”

She shrugged again, touching her mounded stomach. “Perhaps.” She came toward him. “Go back to bed. I will just sit on the window seat until I feel sleepy again.”

“How can I sleep when you are keeping vigil?” But he did as she asked, sensing that it was what she really wanted. Much to his later chagrin, sleep returned to him almost instantaneously. Soon his deep, rhythmic breathing was the only sound in the bedchamber, lulling Sophie as she sat, her forehead pressed to the cool casement, staring out at the shadows, the scudding clouds, the occasional glimmer of a star momentarily revealed.

She was still sitting there when the first pale streaks of dawn showed in the east. Adam, waking, got quietly out of bed, coming over to the window. “You are chilled, sweet,” he said. “Come back to bed now, just until you get warm.”

He had the sense that she was in some way withdrawing from her surroundings. It frightened him, yet it awed him, too. Something was happening to her in which he could have no part. But she allowed him to lead her back to bed, to hold her close until she was warmed again. He felt her first sudden, sharp indrawing of breath and was out of bed, pulling on his robe before Sophie realized.

“Where are you going?”

“To fetch Tanya. The baby is coming.”

Sophie laughed gently. “It is too soon to fetch her, Adam love. Nothing is going to happen for hours yet.”

He looked at her, bewildered. “How can you know?”

“I just do.”

“But I felt you—”

“It was just a twinge,” she broke in. “If you are going to be in such a state until this is over, you will be a wreck.” She was still laughing at him, and he began to feel as if he
had strayed into a world where the landscape was uncharted territory and the customs were known only to the few.

“I am still fetching her,” he declared, as if to assert his right to an independent judgment.

He returned in five minutes with a clucking Tanya, nightcap askew on her sleep-tumbled hair, shuffling in her slippers. “By all the saints!” she declared, seeing Sophie quite calm in bed. “I expected to find you delivered already!” She shook her head at Adam. “First babies are never in a hurry, lord.” Bending over Sophie, she pulled aside the covers, laying her hand on her mistress's abdomen. “How bad are the pains?”

“Just an occasional twinge,” Sophie said. “I told him not to wake you.”

Tanya tut-tutted reassuringly. “I was awake, dear. It's always hard for the men, particularly the first time.”

“Well,
I
am going to get up,” Sophie announced. “I see no reason to lie here counting twinges.”

“But she can't get up! Tanya Feodorovna, will you please establish some order!” exclaimed Adam.

“Let her do what feels best, lord,” Tanya said soothingly. “She's the best judge of that. You go off in your dressing room and stop fretting.”

Sophie chuckled at Adam's expression of rebellious discomfiture. “Oh, do go,” she said. “You are making me nervous.”

That drove him from the room, and she stood up, watched closely by Tanya. Suddenly, she put out a hand to grasp the bedpost. “Perhaps I won't get dressed just yet, Tanya.”

“I'll fetch you up some breakfast. You'll need your strength.” The woman bustled out, leaving Sophie still holding the bedpost. She let go tentatively, wondering how afraid she really was. Her mother had died going through this; there was the woman in the village whose baby had been pulled from her in pieces; there was…No! She forced herself to close out the images. Thousands of women had yearly pregnancies and came unscathed through childbirth, many of them
without the skilled care and experienced attention Sophie would have.

“What can I do?” Adam spoke from the door to his dressing room. He was dressed, but his expression was haggard.

“Love, there is nothing anybody can do at the moment.” She came over to him, putting her arms around his neck. “Just knowing that you are here is enough.”

“You go off downstairs and keep the prince company,” Tanya ordered, coming in again with a breakfast tray. “I'll call you if you're needed. Eat hearty and keep your strength up.”

Sophie laughed. “That is Tanya's prescription for all ills.” She broke off, a spasm crossing her face.

Tanya pushed Adam to the door. “Just you go downstairs and have your breakfast with the prince, lord.”

Adam obeyed reluctantly, but he could not see what alternative he had. He was clearly not wanted. In the dining room, he found Prince Golitskov, always an early riser.

“So it's begun,” he greeted Adam without preamble. “Anna's in such a state of excitement she overboiled the eggs and scalded the milk for coffee. But I daresay we'll have to put up with it. If I tell her to do it again, the results will be the same. Well, sit down, man…sit down…. You're not the one having the baby.”

“I only wish I were,” Adam said dismally, pouring coffee. “They sent me away as if I were some grubby schoolboy interfering in adult affairs.”

Golitskov laughed. “We'll go riding after breakfast.”

Adam looked horrified at the suggestion. “I could not possibly leave the house.”

Golitskov shrugged. “Please yourself. Let's hope it's over before dinner, else we'll be on short commons, I fear. Nothing's going to get done today.”

Adam wondered if this grumbling indifference was a front to conceal the prince's real anxiety and to diffuse Adam's own. He sent a searching glance across the table at his companion. The prince looked up. “Dammit, Adam! I cannot bear to think of her enduring this.”

“Her mother—” Adam began, expressing the core of his dread.

“Sophia Ivanova was a different kind of woman,” Golitskov said with instant comprehension. “An ethereal creature, made more of air than of flesh and blood. No, that should not concern you.”

“I think, perhaps, I will go upstairs again.” Adam tossed his napkin down beside his plate of uneaten food.

The bedchamber was filled with women, stripping the bed, drawing back the hangings, placing cauldrons of water on the newly kindled fire. One of them was knotting a bedsheet to the bedpost at the foot of the bed and chills ran down his spine. Sophie was walking up and down the room, her face pale but calm.

“Sophie, surely you should be lying down.” He took her hand.

“I prefer to walk.” She let her hand lie in his. “Will you read to me while I walk?”

“Sweet heaven, anything.” He was overwhelmed with relief at the idea that he might be of service.

“Montaigne,” she said. “I always find him tranquil.”

For two hours Adam read aloud from Montaigne's essays as Sophie paced steadily around the room. He tried to continue reading, to keep his voice even, whenever she stopped and held on to whatever piece of furniture was handy, but there came the time when a soft moan escaped her, and his voice faltered.

Tanya, who had been sitting quietly sewing, moved swiftly toward her. “Hold tight,” she said, rubbing her back as she hunched forward.

“It's over.” Sophie straightened. “Go on, Adam.”

He started again, but after a couple of sentences he realized she was no longer concentrating on the words. Her face was drawn tight, her features etched in stark relief, the dark eyes filled with pain.

“You'd best leave now, lord.” Tanya took Sophie's arm. “Let's put you to bed, dearie.”

Adam watched helplessly as Sophie crept into bed. Her
moan became a cry. Tanya pushed the knotted bedsheet into her hands and Adam fled, unable to bear the prospect of her pain.

All afternoon it went on. Women ran up and down the stairs in the hushed house. Men spoke in whispers as they went about their business, and every now and again a scream would shiver through the house and everyone would stop, breath suspended. In the library, Adam and the prince drank vodka, but it brought not even a spurious ease.

“Something must be wrong,” Adam gasped in the middle of the afternoon. “It cannot be continuing for all this time!” He ran from the library, up the stairs, entering the birthing chamber. “What is wrong?”

Tanya straightened from the bed, a lavender-soaked cloth in her hand, and spoke soothingly to him. “Why, nothing's wrong, lord. Whatever makes you think such a thing?”

He came over to the bed, staring aghast at the face on the pillow. Her eyes were closed and he wondered for a dreadful minute if she were already dead, so deathly pale was her sweat-beaded face, so limp and dank with sweat the hair on the pillow. Then her eyes opened. Amazingly, she smiled. “It does seem to take an unconscionably long time.”