The Property of a Lady - Elizabeth Adler [11]
Solovsky was an officer in the newly formed “Red” Army. He was a hard man brought up in a hard way, and there was no room in his life for finer feelings. Another life lost, whether it was his own or a child’s, was not important. What mattered to him was the Bolshevik cause, and in his mind that meant the Russian people. Yet the boy’s helpless, terrified face had struck a chord in him. It was the same look he had seen reflected in his own face when he had watched his three young sons die of typhus in the epidemic four years earlier. He, who had been the proud father of four strong boys, who he planned should be part of the new Russia, had been left with only one son. And just now, in that forest, he had simply not been able to leave another boy to die.
The idea had come to him suddenly. He knew it was a risk and that it might cast doubts on his devotion to the revolutionary cause if his secret were ever discovered, but he had studied the workings of the human mind long enough to know the risk was minimal. Solovsky had been in charge of frontline soldiers returning from the horrors of the war with Germany, he had studied prisoners who had suffered severe torture; he knew that these people spoke little and asked no questions. The ones who survived were those who kept their private vision of horror and tragedy locked away in a special vault deep in the brain, never to be opened. Those who remembered went mad.
The next few weeks would decide Prince Alexei Ivanoff’s future. The boy would forget the scene in the forest, forget who he was and his short past life. He would become an orphan of the revolution and the adopted son of Grigori and Natalya Solovsky. Or he would retreat into madness. So be it.
Solovsky was from Siberia where the people were tough and hardy. If they were not, they did not survive. Now his home was in the small provincial town of Polotsk in his wife’s home province of Byelorussia, where life was softer and greener. But on the rare occasions he was home relaxing with his friends over a meal and endless glasses of vodka, he would always remind them of his superiority as a “Siberiusk.” As the potent spirit took hold of him he would haul himself to his feet and repeat an old saying. “In Siberia,” he would thunder, his deep bass voice commanding silence. “In Siberia, forty degrees below is not a frost.” He would pause, glancing around his audience, gathering their attention. “A hundred kilometers is not a distance, a half liter of vodka is not a drink.” He would raise his glass to be filled again before adding with a grin, “And forty years is not a woman.” Then he would toss back the vodka in a single gulp to great roars of appreciation and laughter, but Solovsky believed what he said was the truth.
He remembered the saying now as his tough old cavalry horse struggled through the blizzard. The snow was freezing even as it fell and the animal slid and stumbled, whinnying and rolling its eyes in fright. Solovsky glanced sideways at his men; they were barely recognizable under a layer of snow. Only their eyes, fringed with frozen white lashes, peered ahead into the storm. Solovsky shrugged. He had weathered worse storms than this in his youth. They would press on to Dvorsk.
He wrapped the skirt of his greatcoat tighter around the motionless boy, unsure whether he was alive or dead. And as they rode slowly through the icy night, he thought of his own childhood, and how strange life was that he, the son of generations of peasants, now held the destiny of the son of one of Russia’s greatest princes in his hands.
Grigori had been born just before the turn of the century, the fifteenth child of a peasant whose family had lived in the same village for as long as any of them could remember. The Solovskys were related through intermarriage over many years to everyone else in their village, and his father had married his second—or maybe it was his third—cousin. He had fathered sixteen children in all, five of whom survived childhood, but Grigori’s mother never lived long enough