The Shadows of God - J. Gregory Keyes [41]
Painfully, he went forward to where the others were waiting. The passage narrowed, as before, then dipped underwater again.
When he emerged, there was no light, and there ought to be. The entrance should be only a short distance away.
Perhaps night had fallen while he spoke with Mother Dead.
But then his groping hands encountered fresh dirt and clay, and he understood the truth. While he had been beneath, his companions had been busy. They had entombed him in the mound.
“Have the years struck you dumb, Benjamin?” Vasilisa asked, a laugh somehow threaded through the sentence.
She was more beautiful than he remembered. There was silver in her otherwise onyx hair—a streak of it, pulled fetchingly down one side of a face which did not otherwise seem to have aged. It still looked like polished ivory, her eyes gently slanting jewels, her nose small and upturned, like that of a girl in the earliest year of womanhood.
But he knew very well that the slight frame beneath her jade dress was that of a full-grown woman. He had tasted it, loved it, reveled in it, when he himself was barely more than a child.
“What shall I say?” he managed. “Shall I say I am happy to know you are alive? I suppose I am. Shall I say I am pleased to see you? I cannot say that with the same surety. You betrayed me, Vasilisa.”
“Benjamin! I saved your life. Are you so quick to forget that?” She reached for his hand with both of hers, and so paralyzed was he that she managed to catch it. Her skin was warm, her fingers smooth, uncalloused. “I know that it is difficult for you to forgive me. But it was best for you—you must admit it.”
He withdrew his hand. “What are you doing here, Mrs. Karevna? You still serve the Russian tsar, I presume, and so once again, I think we are enemies. Are you with Sterne?”
She smiled somewhat unconvincingly and stood. He realized with a shock how short she was, for when last he had seen her, he had been only fourteen. She looked suddenly vulnerable in a way he had never imagined she could. “Sterne—I never met him until I arrived here. Who I serve has become rather … complicated. Russia is no longer ruled by the tsar, as such. I find myself … confused.”
“You, confused? It is difficult to believe, Mrs. Karevna.”
“Once you called me Vasilisa. You did when we met just now.”
“Once I was a boy with a tender heart. Thanks much to your influence, I am no longer that boy.”
“I never meant to hurt you, Benjamin, that much is true. I think you know it is.” She cocked her head. “Your hand calls you married.”
He touched his wedding band. “Indeed. Some ten years now.”
“I congratulate the woman. She is American?”
“She is Czech, actually.”
Vasilisa smiled broadly. “You seem to have acquired a taste for Slavic women, my dear.”
That brought a blush he didn't think he had left in him. “It is good to know you are alive,” he said, a bit of the bluster leaving his voice. “I thought, once, that I saw you on a Russian ship—”
“When you fell from the sky with the Swedish king and laid waste to the Russian fleet over Venice? Yes, I was there. It was a glad moment for me, to know you were alive—but, as you remember, there was not much time or opportunity for a reunion. But seeing you then is, in part, why I am here in America. I assumed you would gather importance and therefore be easy to find.”
“Not in this colony.”
“My duty brought me to this colony, from quite a different direction as your Pretender and the Russian traitors with him. My heart would have brought me, eventually, to seek you out, to offer my apologies.”
“That, I cannot believe,” Franklin replied, forcing some of the hardness back into his voice. “You were never in love with me.”
“No, but I did love you. And I wronged you. There comes a time when one wants to set things right, to make life over.”
“Is that so?”
“Yes, and there is more. I need your help.”
“Which makes more sense to me.”
Now her smile grew even wider. “Benjamin, you have indeed grown up. You are more cynical than