Countess Stella Gronska felt as if she had been drawn through the eye of a needle into some dark place, but somehow had come to escape. She was feeling much more like the woman she had been in the days before her husband’s death.
Oh, she was aware that Zofia and Anna thought her eccentric and peculiar. It was strange, but some part of her, too, was cognizant of the cloud that had attached itself to her. Sometimes she felt as if she were a prisoner in her own body watching herself do and say the most outlandish things. She talked to herself, knitted shapeless garments, tore them apart and started again. She snapped at the servants with little provocation.
Still, her ordeal had led to a kind of self-discovery. She had been born and raised to be a noblewoman. This, in effect, meant being a nobleman’s wife. Her relationship to her father was the same as her mother’s to her husband: both listened to and obeyed their mates without question, often with little or no investigation into the reasoning of a decision or opinion. She had not learned to truly think.
Stella had been taught always to rely on a man. The transition from relying on her father to relying on her new husband in an arranged marriage had been carefully prepared for and seamlessly executed. It was not, she had been instructed, for her to question her place in the family, or for that matter, in the world.
She had been lucky. Leo had been a good mate. He had never mistreated her, and they had come to love one another. There were sometimes heavy drinking incidents and occasional violence against their adopted son Walter, but she had learned how to exert a quiet influence on her husband that helped to neutralize such behavior.
Stella had not been prepared for life without a man. She had not been prepared for the sudden violence of his death, the decisions regarding Anna, or the behavior of her two children. The sum of these things accounted for her downward spiral—but what precipitated her return? She thought it was, in part, her concern for Anna. She regretted now letting her go to Russia, to Antoni Grawlinski, who—she had come to realize—was a poor facsimile of a husband. The Minka episode was proof enough of that. What danger had she sent her niece into this time? The recurring thought that Anna Maria was indeed in danger raised goose flesh on her arms.
Stella also gave credit for her recovery to prayer. Through these past months she had not abandoned her faith. Prayer had allowed her to endure and survive. It was a Pole’s best friend.
She sat now in her sewing room, absorbed in a special issue of The Monitor. It was good news. In only two days the word had come back from sejmiks across the Commonwealth of Poland and Lithuania: The Third of May Constitution was to stand! The vote, though still not officially tallied, was overwhelmingly in favor of democratic reform.
As she read now, the countess hummed to the music and joyful noise she heard coming from the streets of Praga and Warsaw. It was a happy day. Poland was the first country in Europe to adopt such a progressive document. Despite the ruffled feathers of some of the magnates, the Constitution was vindicated. She felt very proud.
Her pride had to do with herself, too. Before Leo’s death, she had accepted his political views without question. In these past weeks, however, she had become politically inquisitive and aware. Hours once devoted to knitting useless garments were now spent reading about Kościuszko and his cause. She came to see how wrong it was to keep whole classes of people from attaining a decent quality of life. All men should be able to live to their full potential, as Thomas Paine suggested in his Rights of Man. This simple philosophy she discovered and embraced. She was thinking for herself, and a new, quiet dignity settled over her.
In celebration, some men were setting off pistols across the Vistula, jarring the countess into a more fearful train of thought. She remembered the Partition of 1772. She had been thirty-nine. Even then Poland’s long push toward democracy had begun. King Stanisław, a young man, supported it then, as now. Unfortunately, this current quest was coming at the very time Poland’s three neighbors were putting together the most powerful autocracies Europe had witnessed in a millennium. The Hapsburgs in Austria, the Hohenzollerns in Prussia, and the Romanovs in Russia were creating their empires at the expense of common citizens and the peasants. Ninety-five per-cent of Russians, it was said, lived their lives as serfs in abject misery. In the city there was a saying that defined the contrast between Poland and Russia: In Russia as one must; in Poland as one will.
The countess remembered how, with that partition, Austria, Prussia, and Russia—afraid that Poland’s more humane and democratic nature would encourage the hunger for reform in their own peoples—conspired to divide up portions of Poland among themselves. Polish lands and people were traded off like livestock and were not returned.
By God, she thought, the Constitution is to stand! Only now, after the countess’ personal rediscovery, could she fully understand this vote, its importance, its history, its potential.
But the countess could see its danger, too. If anything, those three countries were stronger than ever these twenty years later. Were they going to stand by and allow the rose of democracy to flower in their midst? They would see only thorns.
She shivered, as if overcome by a chill. She knew they would not stand idly by. They would act.
How might Poland respond to their aggression?
True to its peaceful nature, the Commonwealth had no standing army. The treasury paid for some 18,000 troops, a small enough force. But rumor had it that a corrupt military and political system inflated that number for personal profit and that the true number probably did not exceed 11,000.
The countess worried as the happy explosions continued. What could 11,000 troops do to allay the advance of three powerful autocracies?
She prayed that she would never bear witness to the sounds of enemy gunfire in Warsaw.