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  Much later, Nikolai abruptly woke from his sleep. The slightest sound was enough to instantly arouse him after many campaigns on the eastern frontiers, where the merest noise could be warning of danger from a stealthy Kirgiz intent on dealing a slashing hallal. Without moving, he slowly opened his eyes and through heavy black lashes swept a glance about the alcove. Tanya was searching through his clothes, which lay discarded on the floor. Looking for roubles, no doubt, he thought, dropping back to sleep. Prince Kuzan was extremely charitable to his light o’loves, showering them with gifts, jewelry, furs, as well as money, with a careless generosity. Greedy little bitch, he later reflected sleepily but not unkindly, for, after all, Tanya had to think of her future; her youthful charms would quickly fade.

  By midafternoon Nikolai’s fractious, irascible temper and pounding head were somewhat subdued; his two cohorts in arms, Major Cernov and Captain Illyich, and his young cousin Aleksei relaxed in the solace of a small clearing in the birchwoods. There they lay warmed by the April sun, calmed by the peacefulness of their surroundings, free from the chattering, volatile young Gypsy girls who had been discourteously dispatched and told to remain out of sight until called for.

  Nikki lay sprawled at ease on the soft green grass, casually attired in superbly fitted cavalry boots, buckskins, and an embroidered moujik shirt open at the throat. His hands were clasped behind his neck as he squinted slightly into the bright sun of a gentle spring day—a poetic, storybook day redolent of bursting buds, fresh turned earth, and fertility.

  Nikolai Mikhailovich Kuzan was a giant of a man. His mother’s long-ago heritage from the Caucasus highlands was proclaimed in his swarthy complexion, heavy dark hair, prominent cheekbones, and aquiline profile. From his father’s White Russian roots he had inherited not only his tremendous physique but also his enchanting tawny, liquid eyes, the pupils so large and dark as to appear black; magnificent, beautiful eyes brooding beneath heavy brows. The same kind of eyes that gazed out from opulent, exotically gorgeous Byzantine icons for eight hundred years; arrestingly splendid eyes that could be piercingly alert, indolently shuttered, or benignly calm. His harsh-featured face was softened by those redeeming eyes and by a sensitive mouth, now pursed in discontent.

  Nikki tensed, stretched his lean frame like a great cat, then relaxed once again; the quiet sounds of the forest washed over him—new young birch leaves rustling in the breeze, a soft whisper from the bubbling stream lapping at the shore near the boundary of the clearing, the unceasing chatter of the birds overhead. The tranquillity of the woodland eased his tired body but failed to more than superficially alleviate the restless dissatisfaction of his spirit. Nikki was bored. Boredom—that constant and irksome companion that trailed him with a dogged persistence. Nikki had been leading the arduous and difficult life of leisure now for many years. Chronic leisure with its deadly, restless tedium was inexorably closing in on him.

  He propped himself up on one elbow and from under slack lids surveyed his companions lounging carelessly around the remains of the repast the servants had brought out from the lodge. The ice had almost melted in the silver wine cooler and the half-empty bottles were sweating in the heat of the spring sun. The remains of the sumptuous déjeuner sur l’herbe lay scattered across the damask cloth and two wolfhounds were diligently eating them. Cernov and Illyich were carelessly tossing dice on a silver tray on the grass between them, while Aleksei was engrossed in a novel by Turgenev.

  Nikki listened with his usual tolerant aloofness to the friendly bickering going on during the dicing.

  “Tonight I want Cecelia; you had her the last two nights and I think it’s my turn,” Cernov said in a faintly bearish tone.

  “Can I help it if she prefers me?” Illyich smiled complacently.

  “I don’t care. It’s my turn tonight,” Cernov insisted.

  “What can possibly be the difference?” Nikki inquired in a low, husky drawl. “The wenches are all agreeable in every way if one does not mind being bored in short order.”

  “Oh, no. I fancy Cecelia’s long legs and slender grace to those more voluptuous charms of Olga,” Cernov responded ardently, recalling Cecelia’s dancing performance the previous night.

  “Come now, Gregor,” Prince Kuzan remarked with the disenchantment of his thirty-three years, “one woman is as good as another.” Then he lay back in the warm sun and shut his eyes.

  “Speak for yourself, Nikki. I find Cecelia much more attractive, and I intend to have my turn,” Cernov stated with a slightly aggressive emphasis.

  Nikki’s golden eyes fixed a look of mild contempt on the good-natured but now thoroughly heated Cernov.

  “As you wish, of course, Gregor,” Nikki replied soothingly. “Illyich, you understand, as host, I must attempt to placate all my guests. Perhaps tonight I could persuade you to take Tanya instead of Cecelia,” he suggested politely, as though he were offering courteously the less blemished of two pears to a dinner guest.

  “With pleasure!” Astrakan Illyich responded avidly. Tanya had been Nikki’s mistress for three months now, and no one dared approach her, but if Nikki were graciously relinquishing the girl, Illyich would be a fool to refuse the offer.

  Nikki calmly continued. “It is my firmest conviction that in order to survive, it is necessary to be amused, that one of the requisites in life is to stave off as long as possible the unpardonable sin—monotony. Tanya has become monotonous, so she’s yours if you wish, Astrakan,” he finished with finality.

  Nikki tolerated a certain amount of boredom, but he had his limits, and Tanya had become tedious. He would give her a suitable parting gift after they returned to Petersburg. Nikki was known to be benevolent to his mistresses and she’d find a new protector soon enough if Illyich didn’t wish to keep her, he assured himself.

  Prince Kuzan was one of those aristocrats who filled their leisure with a dilettante’s interest in literature, art, and even science. He spent the required time in social intercourse, gambling, clubbing, and country sports, but, above all, practiced an adroit venal gallantry as he dallied with the most exquisite of time-killers, amour.

  He deliberately flaunted those principles that supposedly assured the continuance of the patrician order of society and publicly repudiated the cult of Victorian temperance and earnestness that was gripping even the volatile Russian mentality in the seventies.

  In the crème de la crème, the genteel and refined upper reaches of Petersburg society, Nikki had been the despair of all the hopeful and enterprising mamas these fifteen years past, and now, at thirty-three, had been reluctantly abandoned by all but the most tenacious and optimistic matchmakers. The only child of a rich and powerful Prince, young Nikolai was himself rich beyond avarice, too handsome by half, a master of charm if the occasion warranted it and his fickle temperament acquiesced, well-liked and generous to a fault with his friends, doted on by his parents, and consequently marked by the complete absence of moral prejudices. He looked out on the world with the serenity that birth and wealth made possible, a spoiled child of fortune who accurately assessed the world as his pleasure garden, for nothing had yet occurred to disturb this comfortable and perfectly orthodox belief.

  “Nikki! You can’t simply give Tanya away! We no longer have serfs!” young Aleksei responded with the youthful, passionate chivalry of his nineteen years.

  “Don’t fear, Sasha, I don’t intend to brutally turn her out in the cold. Tanya shall be well taken care of,” Nikki said softly to soothe his young cousin.

  Perhaps Aleksei was too young to be exposed to this licentious, whoring life he led, Nikki reflected uncomfortably. Maybe I should send him home. Aleksei’s mother, indulgent in all things to her youngest son, had hesitated at Aleksei’s pleas for an extended holiday with his favorite cousin, Nikki. Perhaps she was right. He himself had been thoroughly schooled in the notorious depravities of life before he was nineteen, but maybe this new generation was different. The rumblings of discontent and revolution, the promise of the industria
l age, were beginning to be felt more insistently throughout the land. Maybe this seriousness of purpose was typical of Aleksei’s generation. Although the revolutions of 1848, which had toppled thrones and melted governments away overnight, had barely touched Russia, and where they had, in outlying provinces, been ruthlessly suppressed, even the autocratic Russian monarchy had found it reasonable and prudent to free the serfs in 1861.

  Nikki had been indulgently raised in an aristocratic society without purpose. Had society changed that much in fifteen years, or was Aleksei by nature simply less quixotic, less reckless? he wondered.

  “Ah, chivalrous youth,” Nikki teased Aleksei, “so quick to come to the defense of some poor damsel in distress, so ready to jump to the obvious generalizations and conclusions, always striving for the whole truth, as your present author so clearly points out.”

  “You’ve read Turgenev?” Aleksei asked incredulously, holding up the book, having never seen his older cousin so much as page through a magazine in his presence.

  “Yes, I have, young sprout. I can read, you know.” Nikki’s leisure offered considerable free time. After all, one can spend only so many hours of the day and night in gambling and copulating, he thought, laughing to himself.

  “It doesn’t hurt to search for the truth,” Aleksei protested. “It’s better than just drinking, gambling, and whoring, which is all you ever do.” He stopped abruptly, afraid he’d overstepped the bonds of friendship. His adoration of his older cousin was remarkably close to hero worship.

  Nikki didn’t take offense, ever ready to indulge his young cousin’s moods, but said softly and thoughtfully, “You young people crave primary colors, crave certainty, must have absolute answers to the ‘accursed questions.’ When you’re older, you’ll discover absolutes are often so elusive, they defy the most optimistic determination. Don’t worry about Tanya, though, I’ll not let harm come to her.”

  Nikki sighed to himself and marveled at the fresh vitality and naïveté of Aleksei’s youth. Had he indeed ever been that young? He knew the sobering answer to that question and tried to shrug off the depression that always accompanied the contemplation of his past seventeen idle, worldweary years.

  Nikki had never been able to deal in absolutes, right or wrong. He had, from a very early age, been plagued by doubts. He saw human beings in the glaring nakedness of their frailty.

  The excellence of his education could be blamed, at least partially, for this slough of harsh reality. The diverse succession of scholars lured to “Le Repose” to instill in the only child and heir the fruits of their learned disciplines had found ready and fertile soil in the mind of the precocious young Prince. The monumental amount of knowledge of past civilizations he’d absorbed early on had reinforced his pernicious inclination to see each generation’s touted achievements as puny human efforts in the ongoing scheme of things.

  This lack of illusion left Nikki at times feeling helpless, if not, in fact, cynically melancholy. He often chose to dispel these bouts of depression by engaging in drunken, mindless orgies of pleasure. These week-long escapes into inebriated madness would for the brief interval anesthetize the worm of discontent. But his discontent was never explained, only assuaged or suppressed by the frenzied activity, the bottle of wine, a woman’s touch.

  Illyich broke into this morbid reverie with his usual jovial bonhomie.

  “Aleksei, rest easy. I’ll take excellent care of the beautiful Tanya,” he assured the young boy.

  “If she doesn’t take care of you first,” Nikki observed sardonically, raising one mocking eyebrow. “I hope you can afford to mount her. Like all women she’s never satisfied, although, in contrast to the rapacious Countess Amalienborg, the price for Tanya’s pleasure is cheap,” remarked Nikki, remembering Sophie’s insatiable demands for jewelry and furs.

  “Have you no romance in that black soul of yours, Nikki?” Cernov inquired.

  “Very little,” Nikki replied dryly. His was a cynicism born of disenchantment, born of a constant struggle to keep a deepening melancholy at bay. “Most of the women in my reprehensible and checkered experience are ultimately vastly more interested in my considerable fortune than my romantic inclinations. And rich or poor, young or old, they are all willing—too willing. I’ve been whoring up and down this country for years and done my share of tasting the debauchery Europe has to offer as well, and I have yet to discover a woman who is any different. They are all yielding, all willing, all delightful, but inevitably all boring.” To Nikki there was a deadly sameness to the affairs that all began so promisingly and then became so monotonous.

  “Daily living is becoming so damnably dull, I’m beginning to consider the life of an ascetic as an alternative to this routine,” Nikki complained.

  Cernov clucked his tongue sympathetically and laughed. “My heart really bleeds for people like you, Nikki. If you do, you’ll leave many unhappy and unfulfilled women behind in Petersburg. There have been allusions to your giving the Duc du Richelieu’s reputation a run for the money in the boudoirs, as well as pressing the Elector of Saxony’s record in the nursery.1 Maybe Illyich and I could attempt to console those languishing doves in your absence.”

  “If we waited a fortnight or so, the ladies would be extremely eager for our—ah—solicitous ministrations, I should think,” Illyich concluded playfully.

  “Do you care about anything at all, Nikki?” Astrakan asked, half jesting, half seriously.

  “Not a damn thing to care about, seems to me.” The Prince yawned.

  “Not even women?” Cernov asked.

  “Least of all women, Gregor,” the lazy drawl avowed. “On a scale of one to ten, I would be forced to reply—is there a number lower than zero?”

  “Admit it, Nikki,” Illyich continued more earnestly, “you’d be more bored after a week without women than you are this way. At least there’s a variety to the boredom.”

  “You’re right, of course,” Nikki agreed reluctantly. “If only they weren’t all so yielding; it takes away the piquancy of the chase. There’s simply no challenge anymore. I can have any woman I please.” The Prince closed his eyes.

  “Oh-ho! Such illusions, such a lack of modesty.” Cernov laughed.

  “Three to one you can’t,” Illyich interjected quickly, the obsessive gambler in his nature unable to pass up an opportunity for a wager. He would quite happily lay odds even on his mother’s demise.

  “Can’t what?” Nikki asked, not altogether sure what Illyich was betting against, but always ready to gamble too. His eyes sparkled with interest.

  “Can’t have any woman you want.”

  The Prince sat up. “You’re on. But kindly soul that I am, I’ll give you even odds. And let’s say fifty thousand roubles just to make it amusing.”

  “Done!” Illyich laughed with pleasure. “A limit on the time allowed, say, three days. That should be enough time, and I choose the woman, of course.”

  “Of course,” Nikki replied affably. A small flutter of anticipation coursed through him, and a glint of amusement lit up his eyes as thoughts of the chase ran through his mind. Anything—any brief bagatelle to release him from this glazed lassitude. Yes, a seduction would be more interesting than hunting four-legged game. And in the case of a woman, the chase wasn’t everything; one was always assured of additional delights upon completion of the hunt.

  One can excuse Nikki, perhaps, for his lack of scruples, his indifference to others’ feelings, his selfishness, when one considers that in the society in which he lived, his opportunities for observing noble thoughts and deeds were scarce in comparison with his opportunities for observing the utterly selfish ruthlessness with which pleasure was pursued.

  “You’re sure it matters not who my choice is?” Illyich inquired. He thought for a few moments, then a faint smile warmed his cheerful countenance as his eyes strayed across the river, over a picturesque but small meadow to a figure of a woman sitting near a grove of birch trees engrossed in her sketchbook and watercolor
s.

  “It makes absolutely no difference,” Nikki replied arrogantly. Then he hesitated, rising up on one shoulder. “You wouldn’t be thinking of some old dowager, would you? I categorically draw the line at age fifty,” he said suspiciously, scrutinizing Illyich.

  “No, no,” Illyich assured him. “Have no fear, she’s suitably ripe.”

  Nikki sighed, his momentary pang of dismay dispelled.

  “Ripe, you say. I look forward to the game,” he said as he stretched supine once more on the green grass, conscious for the first time in weeks of a tangible excitement in his loins. With Illyich’s money riding on the wager, it wasn’t going to be child’s play. Illyich bet to win, but Nikki was equally confident of success. He believed in his ability to overcome any woman’s reservations, and Illyich’s choice of a difficult, wary victim would make the predator’s reward that much sweeter.

  “Feel free to begin anytime,” Illyich remarked as he smirked at Cernov and indicated the object of the wager with a nod of his head in the direction of the river.

  Nikki’s reverie was interrupted by these words. What did Illyich mean? Surely there was no one in these secluded acres except Gypsy or peasant girls, and neither of those would present him more than a second’s hesitation before rolling in the hay. Was Illyich drunk this early in the afternoon?

  As he slowly rose from his position of comfort under a flowering wild plum bush, Nikki stretched his long arms and flexed the muscles of his powerful shoulders to shake off some of the torpor of the lazy afternoon. His muscles rippled under the fine linen of his embroidered peasant shirt as he lifted both hands to run his fingers through his long black hair. He wore no beard, as per regulations for the Imperial Guard requiring a clean chin, nor chose to cultivate a mustache; his only concession to the hirsute fashionableness of the day was the growth of sideburns that extended several inches down his jawline.