The Property of a Lady - Elizabeth Adler [7]
Anouska had tied the ends with ribbon around Missie’s back, “like a jeweled cummerbund,” she had exclaimed, laughing. Her beautiful eyes had glittered as brightly as the jewels and her corn-gold hair tumbled about her shoulders in disarray, but Missie knew that Anouska Ivanoff walked a strange tightrope suspended between elation and despair. She glanced at her in the darkness, wondering what her thoughts were now.
Anouska was sitting quietly, her six-year-old son Alexei snuggled inside the soft sable cape she had insisted on wearing despite Misha’s protests that for safety, they must dress as peasant women and servants.
“Nonsense, Misha,” she had retorted, taking the bunch of the fragrant violets grown specially for her in Varishnya’s great greenhouses and pinning them at her shoulder. Tilting her chin arrogantly, she had stared at him with that strange, beautiful half smile that always seemed to Missie to be edged with steel. “After all,” she had said, “who would dare harm the wife of the greatest of the Russian princes?”
Wrapping her arms tighter around little Xenia, Missie prayed she was right.
Misha’s mother, the Dowager Princess Sofia, sighed as the ancient troika jolted over an icy rut. Missie glanced at her anxiously, but in the falling snow she could barely make out her face.
Sofia was seventy-five years old but no one ever thought of her as an old lady. Of course her thick black hair was streaked with white, but the beautiful bone structure was still the same. Her skin was still smooth and her luminous dark eyes, inherited from a gypsy ancestor, missed nothing. She had begged her son to let her stay at Varishnya, the beautiful country estate to which she had first come as a bride fifty-five years before, or in St. Petersburg where her beloved husband had been buried in the great cathedral of St. Peter and St. Paul.
“I’m too old to leave now, Misha,” she had pleaded, admitting to her age for the first time. “Let me stay here with you and face whatever is to come.” But he had refused to listen, telling her that he was staying simply to see that Varishnya was not destroyed. He said there was no danger and that he would join them in the Crimea, in the far south of Russia, within a few weeks. Both of them had known he was lying, but she had obeyed her son’s wishes.
The snow was getting heavier, changing the dense blackness to swirling white, but Viktor plunged onward, his long bushy tail waving an arc through the blizzard.
“We must have been traveling for over half an hour,” Sofia said at last. “We can’t be far from the railway at Ivanovsk now.”
Her voice changed to a gasp as a volley of shots suddenly crashed through the night and the sled dogs lunged upward, screaming in agony as the heavy troika slid out of control across the icy track. Missie glimpsed the dogs’ gaping mouths and lolling tongues and then the troika slammed into a tree and she was hurtled into a bank of snow with Xenia beneath her.
Fear filled her mouth with its bitter taste, choking her as she waited for the next volley of shots that would finish them as surely as they had finished the dogs. But there was no sound. Trembling, she raised her head the merest fraction and peered into the blizzard. Anouska lay twenty yards away, and even through the heavily falling snow she could see the blood matting her hair and staining the icy white carpet beneath her head. There was no sign of Alexei and Sofia.
From the forest came the sound of raucous voices raised in argument and the crunch of booted feet on the snow. And then the sudden flare of burning torches held aloft.
A shiver of terror ran the length of Missie’s spine as she peeked at them. They were not soldiers, but