Zofia was bored to distraction. She paced from room to room, waiting for Count Henryk Literski. What was keeping him?
She walked to the window of the reception room and pulled back the lace curtains. Dusk was settling its violet shadows on the Vistula. Still no sign of Henryk. She swung around in irritation. The house was so quiet, so damnably quiet.
She missed Anna. The realization surprised her. Without Anna and the French children, the house was a crypt. There had been no word from her, either. Zofia smiled, thinking of her poor cousin saddled with those foreign brats. One of my more clever maneuvers, she thought.
Anna’s going to St. Petersburg was for the best. She would be reconciled to her husband in the end, of course. She had no choice. That was the way of it, Zofia decided, women who were too slow to choose for themselves would always have their choices made by others.
Zofia heard a door close nearby. She was certain it was her mother, floating about the house like a quiet specter. Oh, she had seemed to return to normal, to her daughter’s surprise, but she spoke only to the servants. She could not resign herself to the life Zofia had forged. Now, the dowager countess was no doubt secluding herself in her sewing room as she characteristically did these days after supper. She seldom sewed, however. Her current interests were exclusively political. Zofia would hear her musing to herself or anyone who would listen. What might Catherine do? What would Austria and Prussia try next? How was Poland to protect herself? Would Stanisław stand firm with the Constitution? Zofia wanted to scream when she found her mother knee deep in Monitors and preoccupied with one political move or another. And it was not only her mother: Warsaw was awash in nothing but political talk and rumors. She hated it.
Baron Michał Kolbi had spoken politics, too, one day when he came calling, asking for Anna. He asked question after question about her welfare and seemed quite concerned that they had had no word. But why should he be so concerned? Zofia could make nothing of it. Did Anna have a power over men? Zofia had not forgiven Kolbi for failing to respond to her flirtation at Anna’s little party, and so she answered his questions in the most perfunctory manner, wishing to herself that she actually had some information about Anna to suppress from the pompous ass.
For every little failure like Kolbi, however, Zofia could produce a ledger of successes. She could juggle flirtations with three men in one night, intimating to each that she was ripe for the picking. Sometimes she was. Inevitably, she chose to pursue the most challenging of the lot. If he were married, fine. If he were married and had a mistress, even better. There was even one who had a wife, a mistress, and a male lover. Oh, the delight in upsetting that little menagerie! She had learned that with the right precautions against conception she did not have to deny herself to anyone she found attractive. But she was finding fewer and fewer attractive in recent weeks. The sexual aspect of the liaisons seemed to actually bore her now; no one man held her interest for long.
There was but one chase, one challenge, that had not abated: Jan Stelnicki. Why couldn’t she get him out of her mind? No other man had ever so dominated her thoughts. She smiled to herself. Perhaps it was merely that he had been denied to her.
Jan lived in the city now. And with Anna gone, she thought, there must be a way to entice him. Jan became for her the Golden Fleece.
Her answer to this self-imposed quest had come in the form of Count Henryk Literski. Zofia found the young man repulsive: ugly, classless, hopelessly simple. But he was smitten with her, worshipped her. What could she do but take advantage of him?
Henryk, a landless noble with neither occupation nor interest, lived on the profits of a modest trust. He became a willing spy for Zofia, daily observing the comings and goings of Count Jan Stelnicki. He recorded everything in a little yellow journal and reported regularly to her. If he had an inkling that it was some inner passion for Jan that drove Zofia to such measures, he didn’t show it. Zofia occasionally hinted at some vague political motive. He asked few questions. When she appeared satisfied with some bit of information, his thin, pockmarked face beamed. This was enough for him, this and the vague, unspoken promise that one day he might expect more than a light brushing of her lips against his pitted cheek.
From Henryk, Zofia learned that Jan’s world was relatively small. Any excitement in it was political excitement, an oxymoron in her view. All of his friends were connected to the government and king in some way. Many of them seemed old enough to be contemporaries of his father. They were all male; he did not seek out the companionship of women. When not giving speeches at political functions, he was writing them at the small townhome he had rented. There, he was served by a middle-aged woman named Wanda.
Often, he went down to the riverfront and sat brooding in a tavern called Queen’s Head, one Henryk called a hellhole. From there, Zofia surmised, he could see the white Gronski townhome across the river.
She turned back to the window now, again drawing back the curtains. Her gaze searched the modest shop fronts across the Vistula. She could imagine him there in the weeks before her cousin’s departure staring across the river, hoping for a glimpse of Anna.
Zofia felt her face flushing hot with jealousy. How had Anna won that kind of allegiance from a man such as Jan? How had she lost it? Where had she gone wrong?
How was she to read his current Spartan behavior? Was he adjusting to life without Anna? To life without hope of Anna? Was he facing up to reality?
Here at least was a chance, she thought. Her heart quickened at the challenge. She fantasized herself seducing him, even marrying him. Thoughts of missing Anna were suddenly dispelled by the old anger at her for foiling the plans for Jan. She thought of a dozen ways to tell Anna that Jan was now her conquest. She would triumph in the end.
Zofia had written to him, a letter that skirted an apology and hinted at her interest. He failed to rise to the bait, however. Henryk found its burned remains in an ashtray at the tavern.
Zofia was not surprised. She assumed it was his pride that kept him from responding. She was not to be discouraged. His reticence merely piqued what was becoming for her an obsession.
She would resort to more pointed measures. The opportunity would come, and if she could not win him, she would at least avenge herself in full measure against him and against Anna, whose appearance in her life would have ruined everything, were it not for her own ingenuity. They would both pay.
Henryk arrived at last. Had he known, Zofia would later muse, that the news he brought her this day could have bought for him an afternoon of delights in Zofia’s bedchamber, he would have played it to his advantage. But his simple mind was too thickened by her beauty.
The information came after Henryk produced the most recent litany of Count Stelnicki’s activities. Henryk spilled it out without an inflection or blink of the eyes: “Oh, and in a fortnight Count Stelnicki is to attend the ball of Countess Lubomirska.”
“What?” Zofia gasped. It was so unlike Jan, who didn’t go to purely social events. “How do you know?”
“I was at the next table. I heard everything. He doesn’t want to go, but his friends convinced him. They seemed to imply that this would be the last of the great parties for some time.” Henryk looked puzzled. “Do you know why that is, Zofia?”
“No, I don’t. And I don’t care. Tell me about this ball, Henryk, before I turn you upside down and shake the words out of you. You took your sweet time to get to this news.”
Henryk appeared startled and confused by Zofia’s sudden zeal. “It’s to be held in a fortnight.”
“Yes, yes, you said that.”
“It’s to be a masquerade.”
“What?”
“A masquerade,” he repeated, “You know, Zofia, when the guests all come in—”
“Idiot! I know what a masquerade is. Did you learn anything else?”
Henryk looked hurt. “Only that the count is to go as Emperor Justinian.”
This is too good to be true, Zofia thought. Her chance had come. If she couldn’t fish an invitation, she would go anyway. Masquerades were incredibly easy to infiltrate. She had done just that a half dozen times. It was always the most marvelous fun.
While Henryk droned on about some insipid costume ball he had attended once, Zofia began to plot: the invitation, the costume, the pleasurable snare that would at once bring down Jan and Anna.
“Zofia,” Henryk was saying, “just who is this Justinian? Is he emperor of some tiny continental nation?”
“Why, Henryk, you are a fool,” Zofia laughed. “Justinian ruled the Byzantine Empire in the sixth century!”
“Oh.”
Poor oaf, Zofia thought. Henryk was incapable of discerning the meanness in her laugh.