The Property of a Lady - Elizabeth Adler [28]
After the television program was over he suggested they take a stroll, and they crossed the road into Dzerzhinsky Park, walking silently through the Botanic Gardens, past the beautiful grove of hundred-year-old oak trees, toward the arboretum.
“What I have to tell you is extremely difficult,” Sergei said at last. “I thought that my secret would die with me, as it did with your grandfather.”
Valentin glanced at him in surprise.
“I know sometimes you have wondered at the difference between your uncle Boris and myself,” Sergei began. “Now I can tell you. It is because I was adopted by Grigori Solovsky when I was six years old.”
“Adopted?” Valentin cried, stopping dead in his tracks and staring, shocked, at his father. “It is not important,” he added hurriedly. “It doesn’t matter to me who you were. You are Grigori Solovsky’s son. You are my father.”
“It matters to Boris,” his father replied calmly. “He was a slow, clumsy boy and he always knew I was different. Even at six I spoke French and English like the aristocrats, not just a Russian dialect like him. I was clever and a better horseman. I learned quickly and did well in school. He was jealous—and I was terrified of him. Boris was cruel, insane with jealousy. Today he would be called a psychopath.” He turned to face Valentin. “I want you to understand that Boris is your enemy as well as mine.” Sergei shrugged. “Black is black and white is white to a man like that. There is no middle road of gray. Those he wants removed, he kills.”
They walked on in silence for a while and then Sergei said, “The thing that most disturbed Boris was that Grigori never told his family who I was. He simply told them that I was an orphan of the revolution. But Boris always suspected I was an aristocrat and as soon as he was able, he set about trying to discover who I really was. When he found out, he intended to destroy me.” He sighed wearily. “All my life I’ve been walking a tightrope between two identities—the person I knew I was and the person I had become. And two loyalties; the one I had adopted, and the one I belonged to by birth. And always there, waiting to trap me, was Boris. For that reason I decided to live my life alone. I decided it wasn’t fair to marry because any day my true identity might be found out and I would be arrested and killed. But then, many years later, I met your mother and fell in love. I was older; I told myself selfishly that if Boris hadn’t found out by then, he never would.
“Boris was all smiles the day he came to my wedding. He kissed the bride and laughed and joked. I had never seen him so happy. As we were leaving for our honeymoon, he handed me an envelope.
“‘A little surprise for you, Sergei,’ he said with the same malevolent gleam in his eyes I remembered as a boy. And then he added, Or should I say Alexei?’
“I’ll never forget his laugh as he drove off. He sounded like the madman I knew he was.” Sergei’s voice shook as he said, “Inside the envelope was a photograph of my real father.”
Sergei fell silent and as they strode through the park Valentin wondered, puzzled, why his real father’s photograph should be so important.
“Of course I realized Boris knew the truth,” Sergei said at last, “and on my honeymoon I waited for him to act. I waited for days, for weeks, then months. I was like a man on the scaffold waiting for the ax to fall. Until I realized that though Boris knew, he had no real proof. The fact that I resembled the man in the photograph, as you do, Valentin, was not enough to convince the powers that one of their top men was not who he claimed to be. It could be a mere coincidence, and in accusing me Boris would risk his own career. He still needs that proof. But all these years he has carried a duplicate of that photograph in his wallet. He knows that I know and that he