The ancient caravan route connecting the Wild Lands—the savage steppes of the Russian empire—with the west ran from Kiev. Berkholzskoye, the Golitskov estate, bordered the River Dnieper, some fifty versts from Kiev. Sophia Alexeyevna had no memory of a place outside Berkholzskoye; no memory of a guardian other than her grandfather, Prince Golitskov; no knowledge of a world where the great Golitskov family had been once embedded in the fabric of society. The intrigue of the imperial palaces in Moscow or St. Petersburg meant nothing to a girl for whom the haunting, fearsome beauty of the steppes had always been a playground; for whom the romance of the caravan route leading to the civilized glories of Austria and Poland was the material of dreams; for whom the Cossacks, Kirghiz, and Kalmuks, the horsemen of the steppes with their long hair and wild laughter, were the princes of her reveries as the girl became woman.
She was a child of the steppes who, if she ever looked beyond them, looked west, never east into the center of her homeland.
Old Prince Golitskov, from his embittered soul, had taught his granddaughter to keep her eyes turned away from the east and the court of the czarina Catherine. He had taught her that that court and that rule had destroyed her parents, and she should ignore its very existence. And while he taught her these things, he said nothing about his own fears that the heiress to the mighty fortune of the Golitskovs would not be left forever in the obscurity of the Wild Lands that she loved, under the unorthodox guardianship of an irascible old aristocrat who had early eschewed the duties and pleasures of the imperial court.
Such bitter thoughts, such prescient fears, did not plague Sophia Alexeyevna. On her twenty-first birthday, the day she attained her majority, she was told she was heiress to some seventy thousand souls scattered over estates comprising thousands of versts in this vast empire, but she had interest only in Berkholzskoye. Such immense wealth had no meaning for one who saw no need for it. She took for granted the sprawling mansion, the army of serfs, the magnificent horses, the well-stocked library. Her customary dress was a riding habit with a divided skirt, enabling her to ride astride. She had no reason to develop an interest in her wardrobe, since society did not abound in the steppes, and her grandfather was not one to encourage or welcome passing travelers beyond the obligatory courtesies.
Had she been asked, Princess Sophia Alexeyevna Golitskova would have declared herself utterly content with her life; she had horses, books, the companionship of her adored grandfather, and the freedom of the steppes. The vague yearnings that occasionally disturbed the customary tranquillity of her sleep she put down to the extra glass of wine or the second helping of pashka at supper.
The ice on the River Neva was breaking at long last, great cracks resounding in the springlike air as the splits appeared, widened; the separated blocks drifted, growing smaller under the feeble rays of the sun.
The czarina Catherine stood at the window of her study in the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg, looking down at the river. In a week or two, the city would be open once more to shipping; the winter isolation would be over and the outside world could again enter Catherine’s frozen empire.
“It is quite alarming to think she has attained her majority already. How life gallops away with one, mon ami.” She turned back to the room, giving her toothless smile to its other occupant, a giant of a man in his mid-forties, long-haired and one-eyed, no concessionary eye patch over the empty socket—a veritable cyclops dressed as a courtier.
Prince Potemkin returned the smile. “You do not bear the marks of a galloping life, Madame.” It was no obsequious flattery. He did not see a fat, toothless little lady of fifty-seven; he still saw his wonderfully sensual lover of eight years ago, and he saw the vigor, the boundless energy, the vast intelligence of the most powerful and fascinating woman in the civilized world.
Catherine did not question the compliment. Why should she? The young lovers who nightly brought their firm flesh and fresh skin to her bed reinforced her belief in her own sexual attraction.
“The latest report from our agent at Berkholzskoye indicates a somewhat ungovernable young woman,” she said thoughtfully. “From all accounts the old prince has allowed her to run wild. His own misanthropy has kept her from any outside influences.” She moved restlessly around the room, her loose caftan of violet silk swishing with every step. “I should have removed her years ago, placed her in the Smolny Institute, where she would have received the education befitting a girl of her rank.”
“I think your decision to leave her with her grandfather while keeping her under surveillance throughout her growing was both wise and humane,” Potemkin said firmly. “The story of her parents’ death and the events leading up to it is well known, and to subject an orphan, torn from the only home and guardian she knows, to the taunts and whispers of the other pupils at the institute would have been cruel. She is a woman now, but still young enough for bad habits to be broken.”
“General Prince Dmitriev does not seem overly concerned about the prospect of acquiring a wife with bad habits,” mused the empress. “But then the prospect of acquiring such a fortune would compensate for much.” She laughed with the easy acceptance predominating at this worldly court. “His loyalty to us over the years has certainly earned him a reward, and if the hand and fortune of the Golitskova is his choice then it will serve our own purposes to perfection. He will make a steadying husband for her. The old prince has apparently seen to her schooling with exemplary attention, even if she has not been taught to accept the burdens and responsibilities of a princess of the house of Golitskov. Prince Dmitriev will be able to teach her that, and she will enter Petersburg society as the wife of a wealthy nobleman of the first rank. The circumstances of her birth and upbringing will be subsumed.”
Potemkin gnawed a fingernail already bitten red and raw to the quick. “It seems curiously fitting that one so closely involved in her parents’ disgrace should take on the responsibility of the innocent’s social redemption.”
“We do not wish to be reminded of that dreadful business.” Catherine was suddenly empress. “It was a tragic waste of two young lives. They had no reason to flee in that manner. If the accusations were mistaken then we would have discovered it. But that was many years ago; the matter is finished.”
Potemkin bowed his acceptance of the imperial wish, while he wondered whether his empress remembered the cold, ruthless ferocity with which she had punished all those connected with the ill-conceived plan to release the deposed Ivan VI from the fortress of Schlusselburg—a plan that had led to the young man’s most convenient assassination by his guards. Many people whispered that Catherine herself had instigated the attempt to release him. Such an attempt ensured that certain imperial secret instructions would be put into effect: the deposed czar was to be killed rather than allowed to escape. To squash any such implication, she had shown no mercy to those who were part of the plan for his deliverance—a plan that was said to have been hatched in the palace of the young Prince and Princess Golitskov.
Smoothly, he returned to the original subject. “It is a pity that General Prince Dmitriev was obliged to return to the Crimea to deal with the insurrection. He could otherwise have gone to Kiev to fetch Sophia Alexeyevna in person.”
Catherine’s smile indicated a happy resolution to the problem. “Count Danilevski has asked for leave to visit his family estates in Mogilev. The journey from there to Kiev is not so very great. I have it in mind to charge him with the escort of Princess Sophia. He is, after all, Prince Dmitriev’s aide-decamp. It seems appropriate enough that he should undertake the task.”
“Adam is not a man to be moved by protests or feminine tears, either,” murmured Potemkin. “Should his charge prove resistant—”
“I do not see why she should,” Catherine interrupted briskly. “She cannot wish to spend her life languishing in the steppes as wife to some drunken minor landlord of mediocre breeding, little education, and no manners.” Her tone managed to convey the impression that a picture such as she had painted was an inconceivable future for a Golitskov. And Prince Potemkin could only agree.
“Of course,” Catherine continued, “the old prince might have some objections; he was always of an awkward turn of mind. But he cannot fail to see the advantages for his granddaughter in such a move. However, you are right. Adam combines a persuasive charm with a resolution of purpose, and he is not in the least susceptible to feminine wiles.”
“Not since that appalling affair with his wife,” agreed Potemkin. “No one seems to know the truth of her death.”
“I was under the impression it was a riding accident,” the czarina said. “But more important, everyone is agreed that she was carrying another man’s child at the time of her death. The count had been campaigning in the Crimea for the previous ten months.”
“The Poles are a proud race,” Potemkin said. “They don’t take kindly to smirched honor. Adam never refers to the woman; it is as if he had never been married. But he makes no attempt to hide his contempt for the weaker sex.”
The czarina, who did not consider herself to be a true member of the weaker sex, took no exception to Potemkin’s use of the term. Women were in general whining, feeble, and frivolous. It was merely inconvenient in her own case that the mind of a conquering male should be housed in a body that had the needs and impulses of a weak woman.
“We will send for him at once, and set this matter in motion,” the empress declared briskly. “It is past time we executed our responsibilities toward Sophia Alexeyevna. It is time she took her place as a grown woman in the world to which she was born.”
Six weeks later, on a glorious April morning, Count Adam Danilevski set off from his own estates in what had once been part of Poland, before the first partition of that country—the collective rape, as it had been called—by Austria, Russia, and Prussia twelve years earlier. The territory was now known as White Russia, its inhabitants no longer under Polish sovereignty but beneath the imperial yoke of Russia.
He was on his journey to the Golitskov estates outside Kiev, accompanied by the troop of twelve soldiers who had been with him since leaving St. Petersburg; every one of the twelve knew better than to intrude on their colonel’s musings. His face was as stone, the gray eyes hard, the set of his shoulders forbidding.
Visiting his family estates always depressed him, reminding him as it did of his lost nationality, of the humbling of his once proud country. After the partition, he had been taken as a boy of sixteen with other scions of the most important Polish families to St. Petersburg, there to continue his education in the Russian manner as a cornet in the prestigious Preobrazhensky regiment of the Imperial Guard. They were treated with all the honor due such young noblemen, but they were hostages for the good behavior of their annexed homeland. Twelve years of Russian sovereignty had ensured acceptance, and Adam Danilevski often was unable to separate the strands of his Polish self from his Russian self. But when he went back to Mogilev he was Polish, the head of a Polish family, the owner of Polish lands and Polish serfs. And this was the first time he had been back since Eva’s death a year ago.
He had read pity for the deceived husband in every face, heard it in every silence. His sisters’ constant inane chatter considerately ensured that the subject was never referred to; his mother had alternately wept with joy at the presence of her only, beloved son, and wrung her hands in silent yet articulate unhappiness at the dismal certainty that he would never again venture into matrimony, and there would be no heir of this line to the Danilevski name and fortune.
Now, burdened with his resurrected Polishness, his mother’s silent reproaches, the vision of a contemptuous compassion for one who could not keep a faithful wife, he was required to journey across this vast plain, lying mute and somber under the spring sun, to winkle out from exiled obscurity a young woman who knew nothing beyond the wilderness, and carry her back to St. Petersburg to become the wife of General, Prince Paul Dmitriev—a man thirty years her senior, who had buried three wives already.
It did not strike Count Danilevski in his present jaundiced frame of mind as appropriate work for a colonel in the Imperial Guard, aide-de-camp to the prospective bridegroom or no. But one did not protest an imperial command, even one presented as a logical request. He could hear the czarina’s smooth, friendly tones explaining how convenient it was that the count desired to visit his home at this time. It was not such a great distance from Kiev, and she was certain he would be able to accomplish such a potentially tricky mission with all the diplomacy for which he was justly admired.
The memory of imperial compliments did little to soften him as he and his party followed the Dnieper to Kiev. From there they turned south, into the long waving grass of the steppes over which so many battles had been fought, so many frontiers won and lost, where man pursued his fellow in the primitive combat of hunter and prey—outlaw struggling with outlaw for the crumbs of existence in a place where stalked the ghosts of Tatar, Cossack, and Turk amid the substantive rivalries of brigand and robber.
Although not one member of this troop of the Imperial Guard would have admitted it, they were all relieved that their destination was but fifty versts from Kiev—thirty-three miles that could be accomplished in one day’s hard riding across the Wild Lands. The reed-thatched houses of the village surrounding the mansion of Berkholzskoye was a welcome sight in the distance as the sun dipped over a horizon that seemed limitless across the silent flatness.
Adam, frowningly contemplating how best to make his approach to Prince Golitskov, at first did not hear the pounding hooves until a wild yell broke the brooding silence of the terrain. One of the troop exclaimed behind him. A sword scraped as it was unsheathed. Bearing down upon them was a magnificent Cossack stallion, astride it a figure with hair streaming in the wind, a flintlock pistol flourished in one upraised hand.
Adam’s first instinct was to reach for his own pistol; then the amazing truth dawned that if this was a brigand attempting a suicidal attack on thirteen armed soldiers it was a female one in flowing skirts. He gave the order to draw rein and waited with some interest for the horsewoman to reach them.
“I beg your pardon for shouting at you like that.” Breathlessly the rider began talking as soon as she was in earshot. “But you are heading toward that gully.” She gestured toward a thick screen of bush and grass in front of them. “You cannot see it yet. There is a rogue wolf holed up in the gully. He has brought down two horses in the last three days, and I suspect he is rabid.”
The woman was speaking in Russian, and Adam used the same language. “Why has it not been shot?” he demanded, struggling to regain his bearings, thrown off course by this extraordinary fellow traveler.
“I am about to do it.” She gestured with the pistol. “The villagers are too frightened of the rabies.” She smiled at him in friendly fashion. “You can skirt the gully by going about half a mile to the east. Or if you prefer, I will deal with the wolf, then you may continue straight through.”
There was a moment of stunned silence while Adam stared at the young woman, absently absorbing the impression of a pair of large, glowing dark eyes set in a suntanned face. No conventional beauty, he thought vaguely, but an arresting countenance. Eyebrows a little too thick and pronounced, nose very straight and definite, teeth white but slightly crooked, giving her smile a rather quizzical twist. A firm chin, with a deep cleft beneath a wide, generous mouth, very dark brown hair tumbling in a windswept tangle around a pair of slim shoulders. Her unorthodox riding costume was shabby and as thick with dust as if she had been riding for hours across the plain; she sat astride her majestic mount as easily as if it were a pony, her carriage erect, the reins held loosely in one hand; and she held the pistol with which she was so kindly offering to clear their path in the manner of an experienced marksman.
“While that is most kind of you…uh—” He looked a question mark.
“Sophia Alexeyevna Golitskova,” she supplied cheerfully. “And pray do not mention it. It will not be above fifteen minutes. I know exactly where he is to be found.”
She turned her horse, and Adam, momentarily taken aback by this fortuitous meeting, returned to his senses. She could not seriously imagine a troop of the Imperial Guard would sit in safety while a slip of a girl faced a rabid wolf. But it seemed that she did. Urgently, he leaned over, seizing her bridle.
“Let go!” Her riding crop flashed, stinging across his hand. “How dare you!” The friendly, smiling young woman had vanished to be replaced by a towering Fury, the eyes no longer soft and glowing but almost black with outrage. She raised the crop again, and instinctively he flung his hand up to catch it as it came down, wrenching it from her grasp.
“Just a minute—,” he began in explanation, but she had turned her horse with the merest nudge of her knees and was galloping in the direction of the gully before he could assemble the words. In stupefaction, he looked at his hand where the weals stood out on the palm and across his knuckles. It had perhaps been a bit high-handed to grab her bridle in that fashion, but what an amazing reaction! He became aware of the men around him, all staring at the flying figure.
“Perhaps we will wait while Princess Sophia removes the wolf from our path,” he said with a calm that did not deceive his companions. Count Danilevski was very put out.
In no more than ten minutes a shot rang out through the gloaming. There was only one shot. The princess clearly knew what she was about when it came to marksmanship, Adam reflected. She did not reappear, so he assumed she had continued on her way through the gully. Since her way was also theirs, he gave the signal to ride toward the gully. They came upon the lean, gray shape of the wolf lying in the long, wavy grass. Curious, Adam dismounted, examining the beast. There was one wound, to the heart. It would have been a clean, instantaneous death.
Thoughtfully, he remounted and they continued on their way to Berkholzskoye. He had not known what to expect of the young woman who was to be his charge for the month it would take them to reach St. Petersburg. He had assumed she would be of the usual kind, simpering and silly, or paralyzed with shyness, either way with no conversation and, inevitably, appallingly countrified. He had expected to be plagued with whining complaints about the length and inevitable discomfort of the journey. He had not expected a fiercely independent, hard-riding, fast-shooting Cossack woman with the devil of a temper. And just how was that contretemps going to affect the task ahead of him? It was by imperial command that he would remove the princess from the guardianship of her grandfather, but he had no desire to enforce the command. He had hoped that charm and diplomacy would achieve success. Now, he was not so sure.
Sophie had reached home before her outrage at that insufferable check on her bridle by a complete stranger had subsided sufficiently for her to wonder what a troop of soldiers was doing in the area.
Leaving her horse in the stable, she strode energetically into the house, her booted feet clicking on the flagged floors, her long divided skirt swishing at her heels. Prince Golitskov was to be found in his library at the rear of the house; it took but one appraising look at his granddaughter’s flushed cheeks, the angry sparkle in her eyes, to tell him that Princess Sophie was not pleased.
“Did you find the wolf?” he asked.
“He was where I expected him to be, lurking in the long grass beside the path.” She placed the pistol on a side table. “Khan was steady as a rock, even when the wolf reared up in the shadows.”
“And when you fired?” asked the old man, whose interest in the breaking and schooling of horses matched his granddaughter’s.
“He did not flinch.”
“Then what has happened to anger you, Sophie?” He leaned back in his chair, smiling at her. She was one of the few people who could induce a smile from the crusty misanthropist.
Sophie told him in few words, pacing restlessly around the book-lined room with her customary long stride.
“What uniform were they wearing?” Prince Golitskov frowned into the empty hearth. Soldiers in the region of Berkholzskoye did not augur well. They would not be so far from the beaten track by accident.
Sophie struggled with errant memory. “Dark green tunics with red facings,” she said slowly. “And black sword knots.”
“The Preobrazhensky regiment of the Imperial Guard. Ah…” A bleak look crossed her grandfather’s face. The presence of such an elite could only mean that the imperial eye had been turned in the direction of Berkholzskoye. The czarina could have no interest in an old man of seventy. For a moment his gaze rested sadly on his granddaughter, who seemed to be waiting for an explanation.
He was about to attempt one when the library door opened without ceremony. Old Anna, the housekeeper, stood wringing her hands in the doorway. “Soldiers…at the door….” she stammered. “Here to see Your Highness.” Her rheumy old eyes were filled with fright at such a visitation, and she continued to wring her gnarled, work-roughened hands in alarm.
“Soldiers!” Sophie’s cheeks warmed with a resurgence of annoyance. “The same ones?” She looked at her grandfather, who nodded.
“There cannot be more than one such troop in these parts,” he said dryly. “Show them in, Anna.”
“I will not receive them,” Sophie declared, moving to the door.
The prince sighed. “You must! Remain here!”
The peremptory tone brought her to a stop at the door; she turned back to him in surprise. “Why must I?”
“They are not here to see me,” he told her bluntly. He did not add that he had been expecting this, just had not known when it would happen. But then he had not told her of the imperial secret agents who had visited the estate during the last ten years, sometimes as travelers, sometimes as itinerant workmen. The prince knew the type of old and had little difficulty identifying them. He had not challenged them. What would have been the point?
The pink in her cheeks ebbed, and questions flashed in her dark eyes, but there was no time for them. The crisp voice of earlier in the evening came from the passage, the sharp click of booted feet, the ring of spurs. She stepped away from the door, moving instinctively into the shadow of a wood-paneled corner.
“Prince Golitskov.” Count Danilevski bowed in the door. “Colonel, Count Adam Danilevski of the Imperial Guard at your service.” He spoke in French, the language of the court and the aristocracy.
The old prince rose from his chair. “Are you, indeed?” he murmured in the same language. “At my service? Somehow, I doubt that. Pray come in.” He gestured toward the center of the room. “I imagine you and your men will be my guests for a while.” He looked past the count to where Anna still stood, wringing her hands in the doorway. “There is no cause for alarm, woman,” he said testily, switching to Russian. “You look as if you are about to mount the scaffold. Get about your business and see to the needs of our guests.”
Anna scuttled off, somewhat reassured by her master’s customary irascible tone. Sophie drew farther into the shadows but her grandfather beckoned her forward. “You have met my granddaughter, I understand, Count.”
“Yes, I have had that…uh…pleasure,” replied the count. “I was not able to introduce myself, unfortunately.” He held her riding crop between his hands, and now presented it to her with an ironic bow. “I must ensure that if we ride together in the future, Princess, I am wearing gloves.”
“I cannot imagine such an event,” Sophie countered, taking back her property. “If you will excuse me, Count, there are matters to which I must attend if we are to provide hospitality for thirteen guests.”
A most inauspicious beginning, reflected Adam, uncertain what he could have done to alter the course once it had been set. He became aware of the prince’s eyes upon him. They contained a suspiciously malicious gleam.
“My granddaughter is an unusual young woman, Count.”
“Yes, I have received that impression.” He picked up the flintlock pistol on the side table. “An accomplished shot, in addition to being a remarkable horsewoman.”
“She has grown up on the steppes, not at court,” the prince said gently. “It is not a land to roam freely if one is not able to take care of oneself.”
“It is perhaps not a land for a young woman to be permitted to roam freely,” suggested the count, equally as gently.
Golitskov shrugged. “I fail to see why not.” He walked with rheumatic stiffness to the sideboard. “Vodka, Count?”
“Thank you.”
There was a moment of silence as the drink of hospitality was swallowed in one gulp. Then, the formalities out of the way, the prince refilled their glasses and said, “So, Her Imperial Majesty has decided to reinstate my son’s family and name.”
Adam was conscious of relief. The old man at least was not going to prove difficult. “General, Prince Paul Dmitriev has asked for your granddaughter’s hand. I am here as emissary.”
A sardonic smile flickered over the hereditary sculpted lips of the Golitskov. “Emissary?”
“And escort,” Adam said, dispensing with euphemism. There was clearly no point in the niceties of diplomacy with this blunt old man.
“I have not been at court for forty years,” Golitskov now said. “I know the family, of course. Quite unexceptionable. But I am not acquainted with Prince Paul.”
Thankfully, Adam drew from his pocket a document under the imperial seal. He would not be required to give his own opinion of Paul Dmitriev, or describe the prince’s somewhat checkered marital history. Catherine in her own hand had written warmly to Prince Golitskov, endorsing Dmitriev’s suit in glowing terms and promising her close personal attention to the welfare of Sophia Alexeyevna.
Prince Golitskov perused the document in silence. He was under no illusions that his sovereign’s easy missive was the request it purported to be. Sophia Alexeyevna was ordered to St. Petersburg, where she would wed this mature paragon of health and good nature, a general in the army with a catalog of military deeds to his credit, who would ensure that she was established in her rightful place in court society. Golitskov wondered cynically what particular service the general had performed for his empress in order to be rewarded with such an heiress. Presumably it had not been in the bedchamber, since Her Imperial Majesty’s tastes and appetites required the rejuvenating freshness and boundless energy of the young.
There was little point in such speculation. The empress’s power over her subjects was as complete as that of a man over his serfs—the human chattel who guaranteed his prosperity. The master of serfs, unlike the czarina, did not have the legal power to inflict the death sentence on his property, but he could marry them to whom he pleased, sell them, flog them, send them into battle; and the Empress of all the Russias could demand of any subject, be they free or serf, anything she wished for whatever reason, and their obedience must be unquestioning.
He looked across at Count Danilevski, the malicious gleam in his eye growing more pronounced. “I suggest you broach the issue with the princess after supper, Count…. A stroll in the garden will provide the perfect opportunity for you to accomplish your emissary’s task.”
Adam permitted not a flicker of annoyance or dismay to cross his expression. The old man was playing with him. He knew perfectly well it was up to himself to present the situation, demand—and enforce, if necessary—his granddaughter’s obedience. The count’s task as escort would be arduous enough with a willing charge; with such a one as Sophia Alexeyevna in recalcitrant mood it would be pure hell.
“I have need of your assistance, Prince,” he said smoothly, as if Golitskov did not know this. “Would it be too painful for you to explain the situation to the princess yourself? I would be most happy to be in attendance, to provide any further information that Sophia Alexeyevna might require. But I cannot help feeling that the initial approach should come from one whom she knows and trusts.” His eye drifted to the pistol on the side table, and the weals on his hand throbbed anew.
The gleam in Golitskov’s eye became full-fledged. “Yes,” he said with due consideration. “I think perhaps you will have need of my assistance.”