The Queen’s Head was busier than usual for a late Tuesday afternoon. Jan sat alone at his usual table near the window. He was not looking outside. Neither were his eyes focused on the activity in the bar. It had taken two drinks for his nerves to settle.
He was to meet with King Stanisław.
For weeks he had been working closely with his father’s friend, Hugo Kołłataj, who had embraced him like his own son. By now Jan was fully initiated into the Patriot movement. The Constitution of the previous year had laid the groundwork for the real reforms that were only now being proposed and put into effect. Much remained to be done.
Kołłataj had taken upon himself the task of convincing King Stanisław that labor rents be converted to money rents for the peasants. Jan was to go with him and meet the king for the first time. Convincing the monarch of the need for such a basic and far-reaching change was a formidable task, but Jan had total confidence in his new friend. Jan had watched him turn stones—the unconcerned and frivolous—sympathetic to the cause. Kołłataj knew how to present, question, contest, rebut, and convince anyone, even the king himself.
This morning Jan had been summoned to Kołłataj’s apartment. Jan arrived to find him in bed. He was weak and deadly pale.
It was influenza, he told Jan. He would survive it. “As you know,” Kołłataj said, “we are set to meet Stanisław tomorrow.”
“Shall I get it delayed, sir?… Another week?”
“No.” Kołłataj was firm. “Reform has been delayed long enough.”
“What are we to do, sir?”
“You, Jan, are to see the king.”
“I?” Jan’s heart dropped like a weight. He was incredulous. “Alone?”
The man nodded.
“Sir, is he likely to listen to me?”
“Why not? You’re wise past your twenty-five years. You’re a quick study. You’re a man of conviction. I trust you’ll make a good case.”
“But… to the king himself?”
“Yes, to the king himself. He’s just a man and not a particularly strong one at that. You’ve worked more closely with me than anyone else has. You know the proposal, you know the projected numbers, you know the advantages. Just talk straight, Jan.”
“Such a search is a standard procedure of the King’s Guard,” Zofia assured Anna. “The king is a man uncertain of the loyalty of his subjects. I suppose it is the way of most monarchs. If the guards had any real reason for the search, believe me, they would not have confined it to my bedchamber.”
The two cousins stood in Zofia’s room. Zofia had arrived a scant half hour after the guards had left. Anna had had Lutisha hand Zofia the diary so that her cousin would not think that Anna had even opened the red cloisonné cover.
After Lutisha left, Anna explained that she had the maid search the room on the chance that there might be some writings which Zofia would not want the guards to come upon.
“How very clever of you, cousin!” She waved the diary. “This is nothing more than a journal of silly writing and doodling. I got the idea when I saw you keeping a diary, darling. But, just the same, I would die to have it read at court!”
Zofia dropped the diary onto her vanity and clasped Anna’s hands into her own, her black eyes for once serious. “I am very grateful to you, Anna. You are a lifesaver. I shall not forget it.”
Anna attempted a smile. While she was at once proud of her little charade, at the same time she felt a stabbing guilt for having made a habit of violating her cousin’s privacy.
“Look here!” Zofia said, drawing Anna toward the wardrobe. “I have a little compartment in this.” When she touched a hidden spring behind the front leg, a drawer slid open. In it she placed the diary. “I’ll keep it in here from now on.”
Anna’s sense of guilt was sharpened even more by the faith that Zofia was placing in her. She wished that her cousin had not shown her the hiding place. She was not to be delivered from future temptation.
“Why so grim, Anna? The danger is past, thanks to you.” Zofia hugged her cousin. “Come, let’s see what little gifts the guards have left.”
Anna smiled, trying to dispel her mood and silently vowing never again to read from the diary.
Together the cousins explored the room and found the hidden favors. In every drawer, jar, and vase in the room, they found rings, earrings, and brooches. There were even pearl pins placed in one of Zofia’s pompadour wigs.
And on the vanity table, under her jewelry case, they found an envelope with the king’s insignia. “Why I do believe,” Zofia announced, “it’s an invitation to the Royal Castle.”
Jan Stelnicki nervously studied the face of King Stanisław II Augustus. He had made his presentation and waited now on tenterhooks for a reaction.
Under the powdered wig was a simple face. Small, colorless eyes peered out under hooded lids. The nose was narrow, the chin nearly pointed. The handsomeness that must have been there when Catherine had taken him as lover was gone. Jan figured that he must have been twenty-five at the time, his own current age. He must be nearly sixty now.
What had Catherine seen in Stanisław, Jan wondered, that made her send an army to the Polish magnates demanding that they elect him king? He seemed so utterly unprepossessing.
Jan had taken more than an hour of the king’s time. With as much skill and savoir faire as he could muster, he presented his case for replacing labor rents with money rents for the peasants. He had been trembling with apprehension beforehand, but once he met the king and launched into his argument, some unforeseen power flowed into his veins and pulsed with energy, fueling him with words and confidence.
When the king began to question, the discussion led in a logical digression to the need for a national bank and a paper currency. On these issues Jan felt less secure, but—blessedly—the king did not probe too deeply. King Stanisław retreated then into a quiet meditation and the minutes slowed.
Simple man or not, the king took good time in coming to decisions, Jan thought. The silence was daunting.
Jan could endure the quiet no longer, surprising himself by speaking first. “What it comes down to, Sire,” he said, “is the rights of all of our citizens to be paid with a national currency and to trade on a much wider scale in the manner that they please.”
“My dear young Stelnicki,” the king said, “what it comes down to is this: We have passed a constitution as good as that of the United States and better than any in Europe.”
Jan nodded.
The king wagged his forefinger. “But since the Bastille fell, the kind of reform we have undertaken has frightened the jewels out of the crowns of monarchs in Prussia and Austria and Russia. To have Poland in their midst speaking out for the people makes them fear for their autocracies. These countries are not likely to stand idly by.”
Jan wondered where this was leading. Was he going to refuse?
“However,” the king sighed, “reform is the path we chose last year and there is no retreat. This issue of money rents is just one little bridge in the path. Time brings man ever forward, Jan. Remember that. There may be a step backwards after two forward, but the pace of progress is inexorably forward.”
Jan’s excitement was building. “Then I may tell Kołłataj— ?”
“You may tell him to get well. It is a royal order. Oh, and tell him to move ahead on this thing.”
Jan wanted to shout with joy. The pace of his heart quickened, but he fought to hold his enthusiasm in check, struggling against even a hint of a smile. He did not want the king to think him such a novice. “I will, Sire.” Within, however, Jan swelled with a sense of accomplishment. How proud his father would have been!
“You hail from Halicz, do you not, Jan?”
“Yes.”
“Ah, only yesterday I met another young man from Halicz, a Russian mercenary, damn him. He accompanied the Russian Fyodor Kuprin who brought some bold threats from Catherine. Although my Russian is merely adequate, Kuprin’s Polish is pitiful, so this young man served as interpreter.”
“What was his name?”
“His name? Of course, his name.… Gronski, I believe.”
“Walter Gronski?”
“Yes, that’s it.”