Adam felt the first prickle of foreboding at dawn. Frowning, he tried to rationalize the uncomfortable feeling. He had felt it before where Sophie was concerned, but without cause. Shrugging, he mounted his horse. It had something to do with the fetters of love. They bound so securely that to be apart from her caused these occasional panicky flutters.
They were following wolf spoors, clear in the night frost still lingering on the steppe, when an icy shaft, as powerful as if it had corporeal substance, dug deep into his breast. He gasped as if with pain, and Boris Mikhailov, riding at his side, looked over in sharp-eyed concern.
“What is it, Count?”
“I do not know,” Adam said. A cold sweat bathed his body. “But something is badly amiss, Boris.”
“With Sophia Alexeyevna?” The muzhik asked the question, although he did not need Adam’s affirmative nod.
“Tell me I am being fanciful, if you will, but I feel it,” Adam said slowly.
“I’ll not tell you you’re being fanciful,” Boris replied. “Such knowledge is hard to explain, but it is frequently correct. We can be back at Berkholzskoye in six hours.”
They rode hard, reaching the poplar avenue at noon. Adam had said not a word, his face drawn in grim lines, his mouth set, his eyes looking inward as he urged his mount to yet greater effort. Boris, in the same silence, kept pace with him, their four-man escort trailing.
The silence on the estate was eerie. Not a sound of hammer or saw, not a sight of gardener or stable hand. It was an estate of the dead. The two men, dread made manifest, spurred their flagging mounts.
“In the name of pity!” Adam hauled back on the reins as something caught his eye, fluttering among the thick trees lining the avenue. Hanging by his hands from a low branch was Gregory, the watchman, his back torn by the knout.
Boris was already off his horse, running, knife in hand, to the still figure. He cut him down, laying him gently on the ground, feeling for the carotid artery. “He’s alive, Count. But frozen, as if he’s been out here for hours.”
“Dmitriev,” Adam said.
“It bears his mark.” The giant muzhik hoisted the inert body of the watchman across his shoulder. “Take my horse, Count. I’ll be better on foot.”
Adam nodded, set his horse to the gallop. He arrived on the gravel sweep where the mansion stood, blind and closed, shrouded in desolation. He flung himself from his horse. The front door swung open as he laid his hand upon the knocker. Sick with dread, he stepped into the hall. There was no sound, no sign of life. Lifting his head, he opened his lungs in a bellow that would have raised the dead.
It brought Anna, creeping from the kitchen, ghastly, shrunken, clutching her apron to her face. “Oh, lord, it is you,” she said, and began to weep soundlessly.
“Where is Prince Golitskov?” Adam did not ask where Sophie was. He knew she was not here.
“In his bed, lord. He’s sore wounded. When Gregory tried to stop them…they…”
“Yes, I know,” he said, touching her shoulder. “Boris is bringing Gregory to the house. Please see to his tending, Anna.”
“He is not dead?” A flicker of hope, that indication of life, showed in the old eyes. “We did not know where to find him…after…after they had gone.”
Adam understood the despairing apathy of shock. He nodded. “Boris says he is not dead, but he’ll need much nursing.” Leaving the woman, he took the stairs two at a time, bursting into the prince’s bedchamber. Tanya Feodorovna cried out with fright, springing to her feet from her kneeling position by the bed. Then she saw who it was and fell back to her knees, sobbing.
“Hush now, Tanya.” He lifted her, saw the livid bruise on her temple. “Dmitriev did this?”
She nodded, struggling to regain her composure. “And ran the prince through the shoulder with his sword.”
Adam stepped over to the bed. Golitskov was lying pale and clean and still beneath the sheet, a waxen form with a thick white bandage padding out his nightshirt at the shoulder. He looked too frail to live, Adam thought, but he could see that he did. “How severe is his wound?”
“On a younger man, lord, it would be of less concern,” Tanya said, seeming to recover her competence by the minute. “But with the Holy Mother’s help, if it be God’s will, he will live.”
“And Sophia Alexeyevna?” He could hardly bring himself to ask, so great was his terror of the answer.
Tanya shook her head. “He took her, lord…her and the baby, with one of the women from the farm for wet nurse. In carriages they went. Old Peter saw them from the attic window. The princess in one, the baby and the nurse in the other. We were kept locked in the kitchen until they left. No one saw her, lord…not after he took her upstairs…except for Peter from the window. Shut up in a carriage she was, lord. She can’t abide carriages, lord.” The tears flowed in a river, and she buried her head in her apron. “Why would he take the child from her?”
“Why would he not?” Adam asked rhetorically, more to himself than to Tanya. “I shall be gone within the hour. If the prince wakes before then, send for me.” Leaving the chamber, he ran down the stairs, noting on the periphery of his awareness that the house had come to life again, the pall lifted, as if, with his arrival, the energy of hope had vanquished the stunned trance.
Boris was in the hall. “The prince?”
“Tanya is not despairing,” Adam replied, but a shadow hung in his eyes. “He is an old man, Boris, to endure such shock and loss of blood.”
Boris Mikhailov’s face hardened. It was an expression that was not to soften for many days. “I’ve sent two men into the village to discover if they can the direction the general took.”
Adam nodded his approval. “We’ll need fresh horses.”
Prince Golitskov came back to the world fleetingly before they left. His tired eyes looked into the hard, resolute face of a man who had imagined the worst and put it from him. “I was expecting you,” the prince said in a thread of a voice. “I knew you would know. You must free her from him.”
“I will do so,” Adam promised, taking one gnarled hand between his. “And I will bring her back to you…and my son.”
Golitskov’s head moved on the pillow in a faint gesture of acceptance, then his eyes closed again.
“Let me come with you, lord.” Tanya put her hand on Adam’s arm in urgent appeal. “She will need me after…”
“I cannot take you, Tanya,” he said gently, covering her hand with his own. “We must ride hard. You will slow us down.” Tanya bowed her head, turning back to her patient.
Out on the gravel sweep, Boris Mikhailov waited with two fresh, strong mounts. Adam came out, and as he walked over, men appeared from the house, from the trees; men, walking firmly, staves in their hands, some with firearms, some with knives. There must be twenty of them, Adam thought, for a moment bemused. They ranged themselves behind the horses without a word spoken.
“They have known Sophia Alexeyevna since I brought her here, a babe no older than your son,” Boris said softly. “They are come to fight for their lord.”
“Then mount them!” Adam said. “We will take such an army against Dmitriev!”
“I will arm them, also. It will not delay us long.” Boris went amongst the men, who followed him to the stables. Within half an hour Adam looked upon his army and was as satisfied with his motley crew as if they had been an immaculate, highly trained and disciplined regiment of the Imperial Guard. Purpose and determination stood out on every face, and they held themselves erect on the assortment of sturdy mounts Boris had selected. To a man, they evinced the dedication of those who believed in the cause for which they would fight. It was that dedication that made a trustworthy and effective fighting force, as Adam well knew, much more than the harshest of military discipline and the endless drilling so favored by General Dmitriev and his like.
He urged his mount down the avenue, and his small force followed. By concentrating only on the task ahead, the elimination of Dmitriev, Adam was able to keep at bay the nightmare images that would interfere with his planning. There was no point in concerning himself with Sophie’s fate at the moment. She was suffering that fate and would continue to do so until her husband’s tyranny was overthrown in the only way possible.
They took the Kiev road, as instructed by one of the villagers who had seen the dawn cavalcade with its two coaches. They had been traveling fast, the informant told them. Six horses to each carriage and they were driving them hard. For a second, the picture of Sophie tortured by nausea, jolted in the ill-sprung vehicle swaying violently at speed over the rutted road to Kiev, filled his mind. She was not yet recovered from the birth, still bleeding, so much of her strength going into the production of milk for the child. How could she endure?
Boris Mikhailov had no difficulty reading his companion’s mind. “They have an eight-hour start, Count. If they stop for the night, we’ll come up with them soon enough. If they continue, we will catch them by midnight.”
“They will have to change horses,” Adam said. “We will keep track of them through the post houses.”
They fed and watered her as if she were an animal, Sophie thought dully, whenever she troubled to think. She became aware that at some point in the afternoon the carriage in which she was traveling had veered off the Kiev road, separating itself from the main party. There were still four outriders and the coachman with her as they swayed over a miserable cart track across the steppe, and occasionally one of the men would come into the carriage, hold water to her lips, offer her bread and sausage. She turned her head away from the food. The less she had in her belly, the less she was likely to vomit, and even through her hopeless trance, she recognized that that humiliation she could not endure, bound and captive as she was.
They unfastened her hands and allowed her to seek privacy behind a bush when the need became imperative, but she was never unbound long enough for sensation to return fully to her arms and hands, although she recognized that they did not tie her as tightly as had Paul. No expression enlivened the flat peasant faces as they performed these tasks. Neither pity nor cruelty showed in their eyes. They were simply serfs obeying the orders of a master who could not be disobeyed.
Darkness fell, and the carriage continued to sway and jolt. They stopped to change horses, but the curtains were pulled across the windows so she could not see out, and, more important perhaps, no one could see in. Obviously, this journey would not stop until her destination was reached. How long she would remain in this limbo she could not begin to guess. Her head pounded with such agony she wept, and tears fell undried because she could not use her hands, and the milk leaked from her spurned, swollen breasts.
Adam rode through the night, through Kiev, and onto the road that led to St. Petersburg. Inquiries at post houses elicited the information that horses had been changed several times for one carriage and a mounted escort of some fifteen men. A description of General Dmitriev brought nods of recognition. Someone said a baby had been heard crying from the carriage.
Adam’s chin sank onto his chest. They were following Dmitriev and the child, and they must continue to do so, but every verst they traveled took them farther from Sophie. They could not discover exactly when one of the carriages had split from the main party, although they knew it had happened before Kiev. That meant that Sophie’s destination lay across the steppes toward Siberia. Dmitriev could not be intending such a barbarous destination! But Adam knew absolutely that he could.
“Count!” Boris’s voice spoke with soft urgency in the dark.
Adam, who had been half asleep in the manner of an experienced campaigner, came to instant awareness. “What is it?”
“They are about three versts ahead of us,” Boris told him. “The scout has just returned.”
Adam frowned, his mind crystal clear as energy surged through him at the prospect of action, the closeness of their quarry. Not wishing to come upon Dmitriev suddenly, he had been sending scouts ahead, riding parallel to the road, screened by trees and bushes, for the last three hours. “How many of them exactly?”
“Sixteen, counting the coachman.”
“How armed?”
“Swords and pistols.”
“Let us all do a little scouting, Boris. I’ve a mind for an ambush,” Adam said thoughtfully. “I think Prince Dmitriev and his band of villains are going to run into a band of even greater brigands.”
Striking out across country so as to be sure they were invisible from the winding road gleaming white in the moonlight, the group rode fast. Once Adam was certain that they would have overtaken their quarry, they took to the road again, searching for a likely spot to stage an ambush.
Finally they came to a stretch where the road dipped between rocky outcrops. The cover was scanty but the best they were going to find, Adam decided. He looked up at the sky. “It will be dawn in an hour, Boris Mikhailov. I’d have this over before the light of day.”
The muzhik nodded. “Don’t want any stray travelers running into us. Not as if the general’s doing anything he shouldn’t.”
Adam gave vent to a short, bleak laugh. “No, the wrong-doing is all on the other side, Boris.”
“In principle,” agreed the other. “But I’ve always favored practice over principle. You going to see to the dispositions?”
Adam could not help a smile at this laconic pragmatism so typical of Boris Mikhailov. He was the most reassuring companion in a crisis. The men were waiting quietly on the road, relaxed and calm, confident in their commander, committed to their cause. They received their orders in intelligent silence and dispersed behind the rocks. The horses were tethered in the trees beyond the ambush site, out of sight of anyone entering the gully. Those men most experienced with firearms were positioned at the entrance to the ambush and its exit. Only one immutable order had been given. No one was to fire upon General Dmitriev.
Dmitriev ignored the knowledge that his men were fatigued almost to the limit of endurance. If he could endure, then so could they. He would allow a halt once the sun was well up, but night travel was too hazardous for rest periods. Besides, while they kept moving, the screams of the brat were less noticeable. The minute they stopped, the dreadful wailing filled the air, unsettling the men with its note of helpless, hopeless, unfocused distress. The woman said the child refused the breast, or if he took it would turn away from it within seconds, howling with frustration. Dmitriev, who knew nothing of these things, wondered acidly if peasant milk had a coarseness to it, noticeably unpleasant to a child who had suckled only a princess’s breast. The reflection did nothing to sweeten his mood.
Ahead, the moonlight sparked off quartz-seamed rock on either side of the road. A warning prickle ran down the soldier’s back. For several hundred yards they would be traversing something resembling a gully. The night was quiet, except for the hoot of an owl, the howl of a wolf, the whistle of the ice-tipped wind. It was a well-traveled road, but few would be abroad at night, except perhaps in the summer, when it would be light as day and warm. Late autumn was not the season to encourage brigands in the pursuit of their trade. However, Dmitriev was an experienced soldier who knew the value of caution. He ordered his men to close ranks, to take out their firearms.
They rode into the gully. Dmitriev was instantly aware that something was amiss. His head swiveled from side to side, but he could see nothing, yet he knew eyes were upon them. He gave the order to increase speed, and just as the cavalcade reached the center of the gully all hell broke loose. The night was lit with gunpowder flashes, deafened by pistol reports, as men seemed to pour from the rocks hemming them in behind and ahead.
Confusion reigned as his own men returned the fire. Swords scraped out of sheaths; horses, unaccustomed to battle and alarmed by the cracks and flashes, reared up, unseating riders who found themselves tangled up in flailing hooves. Gunsmoke hung heavy in the air, making identification difficult so that Dmitriev’s men in their confusion found themselves occasionally slashing at each other.
Dmitriev assumed they were under attack from brigands. It was an assumption that died when he recognized a giant muzhik, wielding a mighty sword with grim effect. Men, if they did not fall beneath the sword, fell back before the power and resolution of the swordsman.
“Boris Mikhailov!” Dmitriev whispered savagely, taking careful aim at the large target. Then the gun fell from his hand as a knife pressed into his back.
“Where is she?” Adam Danilevski’s voice rustled in the prince’s ear. The knife pressed deeper, drawing blood.
Dmitriev was no coward, but the sensation of a knife in his back, a knife wielded by a man the general knew from the depths of his soul would use it without compunction, was more terrifying than anything he could imagine. He called “To me!” but all his men were occupied with their own private battles. They were outnumbered, they were trapped, and they had been surprised.
The knife cut and the prince choked. “Where have you sent her, Dmitriev?”
“She is a whore!” the prince spat through his terror, then cried out as the knife cut again, then again, ripping through his coat. He could make no move to defend himself without the knife’s penetrating further. “To me!” he called again.
This time his cry was heard. A man, pistol at the ready, came running. A shot rang out and he fell. Boris Mikhailov slashed his way toward Adam and the prince. “Where have you sent her?” The inexorable question came again. Blood trickled warmly down Dmitriev’s back. At his front stood the giant muzhik, gaze implacable as he placed the blade of his sword flat against the prince’s throat.
“Answer the question, Prince.”
“To the Convent of the Assumption at Orenburg.” The admission came through saliva-flecked lips as Dmitriev struggled with fear, humiliation, and rage. “I will see you hang for this, Danilevski!”
“I don’t think so.” Adam withdrew the knife, wiping the blood upon the prince’s coat. Somehow he managed to keep hidden his surge of nearly uncontrollable rage and terrifying fear at the knowledge of the destination Dmitriev had chosen for Sophie. Images of the barren, tortured existence to which she had been condemned writhed in his mind, and for a few seconds he could not speak. Then he said in an almost bored tone, “Boris Mikhailov has a score to settle, I believe.”
Dmitriev looked into the eyes of the man he had once condemned to cruel death, and he read his own death there.
“There are many reckonings to be met, Prince,” Boris said slowly. “I do not know how you were responsible for the death of my friend and master, the young Prince Golitskov, but I know that you were.” Dmitriev’s pallor grew ghastly. “As you were, in the same way, responsible for the death of Sophia Ivanova. You sent Sophia Alexeyevna away, intending that she should meet her death upon the road. You left Gregory hanging after torture for the cold and the crows. I do not yet know what you have done to Sophia Alexeyevna this time, but I will add it to the reckoning nevertheless. Prince Golitskov lies sore wounded at your hands. Even if I forgive the harm you have done to me, Prince Dmitriev, there is enough there to warrant your execution.”
“I will not die at the hands of a serf!” He turned his head against the flat blade, outrage at such final degradation mingling with appeal as he looked at Adam, who, an aristocrat himself, would surely understand the impossibility of such an end.
Adam turned on his heel and walked away toward the carriage. Order was emerging gradually from the chaos of the battlefield. Dmitriev’s men, those left standing, were huddled against the rocks, under the steady-eyed guard of two of the Golitskov men. “How many of our own are injured?”
“Just two, lord,” was the answer. “They’re being attended to over by the carriage. No deaths, neither.”
Adam nodded and continued to the carriage. Into the semi-silence came a shrill wailing. He opened the carriage door, peering into the dim interior. A woman moaning in fear sat huddled in the corner. From her arms came the squalls of Adam’s son.
“You’re quite safe,” he said gently to the woman. “Cease your moaning and give me my son.”
“Oh, lord, here he is. Quite unhurt.” The words tumbled anxiously from her as she held out her bundle. “But he will not take the breast, lord. I cannot soothe him.”
“That does not surprise me in the least.” Adam stepped backward into the gray light of dawn, feeling some measure of peace come upon him as he retrieved this precious part of his little family so violently torn asunder. Sasha, as if responding to familiar arms, ceased crying and lay hiccuping in his father’s arms. Adam wondered how he was to feed the child during the desperate ride ahead and placed his face against the drenched, distraught infant’s.
“He’ll take milk on a rag until we reach his mother, Count.” Boris, as usual an accurate reader of Adam’s thoughts, spoke softly. “I did it with his mother on just such a journey when she was younger even than he.”
Adam rested the child against his shoulder, rubbing his back until the hiccups died down. “Is it done, Boris Mikhailov?”
“It is done,” replied the muzhik.
“Then there is nothing to keep us here. Send the woman back to Berkholzskoye with our men.”
“And those?” Boris gestured disdainfully toward the prisoners gazing around the littered gully with morose and fearful incomprehension.
“Turn them loose. As far as they know, they have been the victims of a brigand attack. Their master is dead. With luck, they may strike lucky and find a better one. I don’t see them plodding on to St. Petersburg, somehow.” Adam opened the leather pouch at his belt, drawing out a handful of rubles. “Give them this; let them fight it out among them. I would have more sympathy if I did not know that one of them had used the knout on Gregory.”
“We take the road to Orenburg?”
“Yes, but we will cut across country. I know this area well, Boris. It is coming into the territory of my own home, Mogilev. If we retrace our steps to beyond Kiev and take the Siberian road they would themselves have taken, we will be over a day behind them. If we go across country, it will be rougher riding, but we will join the Siberian road farther along. With luck, we should not then be far behind them. Maybe even ahead of them.” He turned impatiently to his horse. “It is not much traveled, that road. We shall get information of their passing easily enough.” Holding the child tightly, he swung up. Not many people chose to journey into Siberia, particularly at this season. But it was to be presumed that Dmitriev intended her to arrive this time, so adequate preparation would have been made, and they would stop frequently to change the team.
They reached a post house within an hour, and Boris explained their needs with the knowledge acquired so many years ago. The postman’s wife, clucking energetically, produced goat’s milk and a clean rag. Adam, seating himself in front of the fire, squashed his desperate need to continue the journey without respite and set himself patiently to satisfy his infant son’s ferocious appetite.
For some reason, the babe who had rejected the peasant woman’s breast showed no reluctance when held safe in familiar arms to suck upon the rag. The tears dried miraculously, and the pale cheeks pinkened as the rhythmic sucking soothed and satisfied. It seemed to Adam almost as if Sasha grew round and content again before his eyes.
“Poor little mite’s soaking wet,” the postman’s wife declared. “You’d best change his clothes before you go on again, lord.” Whatever she might think of the extraordinary circumstance of a lord mothering a baby in her post house, she said nothing. It was not her place to notice, let alone comment.
Sasha had not been ill-provided for on his journey, and Boris had brought the bundle from the carriage. Fed, washed, and in clean clothes, the baby fell asleep and stayed so, exhausted by his earlier desperation, for nearly six hours, during which they rode, barely talking, pushing their horses over the steppe until they discerned the barely discernible cart track that constituted the road to Siberia.
The noonday sun was bright, warming the air a little. They stopped to rest the horses, feed and change the now-fretful baby, and eat the food provided by the postman’s wife. Adam looked along the track. “The question is, Boris, are we ahead of them or behind them?”
“Behind,” Boris said with confidence. On receiving a raised, questioning eyebrow, he said, “They had orders to drive day and night, changing the team whenever they could so they were always fresh. There are four of them, and the coachman.”
“You gleaned this valuable information from one of Dmitriev’s men?”
Boris nodded and said nothing more. He would not tell the count that Sophia Alexeyevna was cruelly bound, that her escort had orders that she was to remain so until they reached their destination. The escort were also under orders to ensure that she reached the convent alive, although her condition was immaterial.
“Then let us go. We will change the horses at the next farm.”
They rode through the afternoon, exchanging their own exhausted mounts for two nags who were at least fresh. The farmer who cheerfully provided the exchange informed them that a coach and outriders had passed some three hours earlier. Generous payment ensured good care for their horses until their return and bought more milk for Sasha, and black bread, cheese, and beer for themselves.
With the certain knowledge that he was now within a hand’s grasp of Sophie, Adam curbed his hideous imaginings, forced himself to eat and to tend the baby patiently, experience having taught him that any attempt to hurry over his care for the child produced wails and restlessness, which in turn led to what Boris diagnosed sagely as an attack of wind.
On the road again, though, Adam could not conceal his agitation. No less anxious, Boris kept his own counsel. A few wispy clouds became massed cumulus crowding the sun, then obscuring it. The first drops of rain plopped, huge and wet upon the track ahead. Adam swore, drawing his cloak more tightly over the baby. The track twisted, turned, and ahead of them moved a coach with four outriders, cloaks turned up against the dash of raindrops.
Adam drew in his breath, exhaled on a deep sigh. “Shall we join forces with our fellow travelers, Boris?”
“I am sure they will be glad of our company,” returned his companion. “It might be best to leave the babe, though.”
Adam searched the roadside. “If Moses could be hidden in the bullrushes, I see no reason why Sasha should not find a temporary cradle beneath a blackberry bush.” He dismounted, carried the well-wrapped, sleeping child to the shelter of a flourishing bramble, and gently laid him down.
“Let us make an end of this business.” He remounted, his voice curt, edged now with the fear of what he would find in the carriage. Dmitriev could have done anything to her during the long hours of that night at Berkholzskoye.
“How do you want to do this, Count?”
“I think we simply ride up with them. Exchange a few civilities. They will not be expecting pursuit, how should they? I would avoid further bloodshed if we can.”
Boris nodded. They caught up with the carriage and horsemen, and found their easy greetings returned monosyllabically. Chatty inquiries as to destination produced grunts, mutters.
Adam casually moved his mount sideways so he flanked the riders. Boris did the same on the other side. Both drew their pistols simultaneously, aiming at the head of the near-side rider on either side.
“I suggest we stop here,” Adam said politely. “You will come to no harm. My interest is with your prisoner.”
The four men looked stunned. They had not been prepared for this—a courteous aristocrat on the Siberian road intent on rescue of that silent woman who already looked as if she was no longer of this world. Brigands they knew to look out for…but these two were not brigands.
“What do you want with us, lord?” The lead rider stammered, his hand creeping to his pistol. A shot singed his cuff and his hand fell back. He stared in disbelief at the scorch on his sleeve.
“Just that you throw your weapons down and move to the side of the track, where my companion here will keep a friendly eye upon you,” Adam said, wondering how long he could keep this iron curb upon his muscles, straining toward the carriage. Why had she not heard his voice? Why had she not looked out, showing at least minimal interest in the fact that the carriage had halted?
But he could not drop his own guard until he was sure that Boris had them all in charge. The coachman came off the box, the escorts off their horses under the threatening muzzle of a pistol, and they were all herded to the side of the road, where Boris deftly tied them together with a rope that had been coiled on his saddle. It wasn’t so much the count’s pistols that ensured quivering obedience from the five men; it was the look in the giant’s eye.
Adam flung open the carriage door. For a moment his heart stilled in his breast. Then, as if he were some other person, someone not bound by the fetters of indissoluble love to the inert, beaten woman huddled in the corner, he climbed into the vehicle, closing the door behind him. Sitting on the padded seat beside her, he lifted her upright. He saw her wrists, but the words he hurled at God and the devil never broke from his lips. Instead, very, very gently he drew his knife from his belt and with the utmost care severed the rope that bit deep into the swollen flesh.
The rage in his heart was great enough to feed the fires of hell as he lifted her onto his knee, cradling her, looking down at her bruised, battered face, stroking her mutilated scalp. “Sophie,” he whispered. “Wake up now, sweetheart.”
She was neither asleep nor unconscious, merely inhabiting a world where spiritual and physical agony could not touch her. For a while she fought the return demanded by the familiar voice of love. Why should she trust in chimera?
“Sophie.” He kissed her mouth, a feather touch that could not exacerbate her hurts. “It is safe to wake up, sweetheart.”
“Sasha?” she said, quite clearly.
“He is here, love, safe and sound. Open your eyes.”
The dark eyes opened in response to the plea. She tried to smile and winced. But he saw the awareness return to her, the life reentering her eyes. “Is my husband dead?”
“Yes.”
Her eyes closed again, but this time not in retreat. When she opened them again, Sophia Alexeyevna was in full possession of her senses. “I hurt so,” she said. “Except for my arms and hands.” She looked down at her hands where they lay in her lap as if they did not belong to her. “I cannot feel them.”
“You will,” he said confidently. “You were not bound in that manner long enough to lose the use of them.” But by the time they reached the convent in Siberia she would have been crippled for life. He put that thought from him forever. “I am going to take you to Mogilev now. We are closer to there than to Berkholzskoye.” He was massaging her hands as he talked. “My mother is perhaps a poor substitute for Tanya Feodorovna, but she is kind and skilled at nursing.”
“Grandpère…?”
“He will live,” Adam said, continuing with his chafing. “The wound has weakened him, but he did not look willing to give up the ghost yet a while.” It was the hardest thing imaginable to smile, but he managed it.
There was a rap on the door and Boris’s head appeared in the carriage window. Without losing his hold on Sophie, Adam leaned sideways to open the door. “Thought the princess might be glad of the child,” Boris said. “Seems to be hungry again.”
Adam took the baby, placing him in Sophie’s lap. Her face was transfigured with joyous relief. “I have ached to feed him,” she said softly. “Unbutton my gown, Adam. I cannot quite make my hands move properly yet.”
He did so, then lifted the baby, who gave a little sobbing gurgle as he found what he had been missing. Adam placed Sophie’s arms around the child, and she nodded. “I can hold him now.” A deep silence of renewal filled the narrow space. Adam held them both, willing the vengefulness from him. It was over now, and to dwell upon the images of what might have been could only destroy the peace to which they now had a right.
“Whatever will your mother think?” Sophie asked suddenly, moving the baby to her other breast. It was a fumbling movement, but she managed it without assistance. “How can you possibly appear without warning with such…such extraordinary appendages? I do not need a looking glass to know what I must look like.”
“I cannot imagine what she will think,” he said, and this time the smile was easier. “Thinking is not one of her great strengths. But she is not given to judging, either. She is a serene and accepting woman who will welcome the woman who is to be my wife from the vast well of loving warmth with which she is blessed.”
“Boris must go to Grandpère—”
“He will do so, and as soon as your grandfather is fit to travel, then he will come to Mogilev for the wedding.”
“But should we not be married from Berkholzskoye?”
Adam groaned. “Sweetheart, I really think the place is immaterial.”
“I daresay you are right. And I should meet your mother. It would be most discourteous, otherwise.”
Yes,” he agreed solemnly. “And I am very sorry for the indignity, sweetheart, but you are going to have to ride before me to Mogilev.”
“Is there not a spare horse?” The dark eyes looked aghast.
“No,” he said placidly. “And even if there were, you are not strong enough.”
“I can think of worse excuses for being cuddled.” Sophie capitulated with a miraculous lightheartedness. When one had been given back one’s life and one’s love, everything else paled beside such gifts.