Against a Crimson Sky Read online

  “Oh, you needn’t be afraid. You may miss the evening meal at your manor house, but there’s no reason why you shouldn’t be home tonight.”

  “Then you won’t—”

  “Tell our new Russian landlords of your little lie?” He moved toward a window as he spoke. Was he looking out at her carriage? Anna wanted to curse the man but knew to say nothing. He returned to where she stood. “I must write my report, Lady Berezowska-Grawlińska. It may be dangerous for me to write something other than the truth.”

  Anna remained silent, already suspicious of his intent.

  “We Poles survive, do we not, Anna? May I call you that?—Oh, not all of us, of course, but the smart ones do. Come . . . come back to the desk.” He took hold of Anna’s arm to lead her.

  Anna smiled and disengaged herself. Walking back to the desk, she felt the bile rising again and imagined herself running from the room. But where would that lead? Certain arrest? Confinement? She thought she would be ill. When they seated themselves again, she welcomed having the desk between them.

  “Should I choose to clear you to leave, my dear, you would be in my debt.”

  Anna concluded that the man was suggesting a bribe. “I have but little money on my person, but I can request some from Warsaw.”

  He waved his hand in a dismissive gesture. “I hear the mint’s been shut down, despite Stanisław’s pleas to his old lover Catherine.—Oh, I have more money than things to spend it on, my dear.” Elbows on his desk, he placed the tips of his fingers of one hand against those of the other. “I appreciate your concern, but I’m not hinting for money, Anna Berezowska-Grawlińska.”

  Anna looked into his fleshy face. His eyes—like blue stones—confirmed her suspicion. Her heart swung out over an abyss. What was she to do?

  He smiled. “Nonetheless, I am a man who likes to be appreciated.”

  Anna stiffened in her chair. “Your favor to me would be much appreciated, Lord Doliński. But if you are a true Pole and a man of conscience, such a favor might redeem you of a past failing.”

  Surprise spread over Doliński’s face. “Failing, you say?”

  Anna stood. “You were in charge of confining the man who killed my father. Felix Paduch managed to get away under your watch. I should think you would be glad to have the opportunity of doing Samuel Berezowski’s daughter a good turn.”

  “Oh my, you are your father’s daughter!”

  “I take that as a compliment!”

  “Ah! I like a woman with a bit of spirit.” Then, in a harder voice: “Please sit down, Lady Berezowska-Grawlińska.”

  Anna pushed down the rage she feared would spill out in invective. She sat.

  He leaned forward over the desk now. “Your eyes are magnificent, Anna. . . . You see, I can be appreciative, as well.”

  “Tell me, Lord Doliński, do you collect women as you do clocks?”

  Doliński turned crimson and drew back, as if stung. Was he angry? Or did he still have enough of a sense of decorum to be shamed? Before he could do or say anything to reveal himself, the Russian came clumsily into the room.

  “Well?” the lieutenant asked. Doliński coughed and looked down at the paper on which he had scribbled, the nib on his pen long dried up.

  Anna felt faint. This man with the stones for eyes had her life in his keeping. What would he say?

  The Russian glared at Anna, then at Doliński. “Come, come,” he prodded. “I don’t have all day.”

  “I . . . I have yet to finish the interview, lieutenant.”

  “Very well. She’ll have to keep, then. I’ve another for you to question. This one looks more promising . . . but not nearly so pretty.” The Russian winked at Anna.

  When the door closed behind them, Anna heard the lock fall into place.

  Zofia was unaware of how many days or weeks had passed in the pitifully tiny cottage. The fever held on tenaciously. She slept constantly, dreamt deeply, allowing herself to come to the surface of awareness when Danuta sponged her body, helped her to eat broth and bread, or aided in the use of the chamber pot. Occasionally Danuta’s father forced foul-tasting herbal potions upon her. Her son—the boy who had rescued Zofia—was not in evidence.

  For a long while, Zofia thought she would not live—and often prayed that the end would be quick and painless. Her days of parties, balls, and castle intrigue seemed a lifetime ago. But in time, the fever broke, strength seeped back into her bones and flesh, just as spring carries life to a cold and dead land. Although spring was still months away, it was with a start that Zofia realized she would survive.

  As her physical condition improved, so did her spirit. She began to wonder about Anna. Had she made it safely across the bridge? Had she survived?—And Jan? Had he survived the Russian deluge? Most of the time, however, she worried how she would be able to return to Warsaw . . . and what she would find there.

  Wearing a cotton shift, she was sitting in a crude and cushionless chair one day when she heard someone enter the dwelling. Danuta and her father had left for the village not long before, so she was immediately put on guard.

  “Mother?” came a gentle voice.

  Zofia saw a face appear around the corner, then disappear. “Come in, come in,” she called.

  Slowly a figure came into the doorway.

  “Your mother’s gone out. You must be Jerzy.”

  He nodded uncertainly.

  “You fetched me from the river,” Zofia said, marveling at his resemblance to another.

  He nodded again.

  “Come in. A few days ago I would have scolded you for not letting the river do its work. But today I am able to thank you.”

  The boy dared to take two paces. He seemed confused.

  “How old are you, Jerzy?”

  He cleared his throat. “Sixteen, milady.”

  “I see. I think your mother has sent you out of the house, no?” Zofia nodded toward the bed. “Is this yours?” When he colored slightly, she asked where he had been sleeping and eating.

  “In the barn, milady.” The boy shifted from one foot to the other. “It’s not so bad.”

  “With the chickens and that damn rooster I hear?”

  “Yes, milady.”

  “And with the goats that go on braying the livelong day?”

  “Bleating. It is donkeys that bray.”

  Zofia laughed. “You have those, too?”

  “No, milady.”

  “Sheep?”

  “A few.” Jerzy shrugged. “They stay outside except in blizzards or hard rains.”

  “And then?”

  The boy lifted his blue eyes to the ceiling. “There’s an attic above.”

  “Above?—Above me, you mean?”

  He nodded. “We have a ramp to the rear of the house.”

  “You do?” Zofia asked, imagining a little Noah’s ark overhead. “Hardly a petit palais, to be certain,” Zofia said with a smile, confident he would not understand. She offered her hand. “Thank you, Jerzy.”

  The boy stepped forward, unsure what was expected of him. He looked at his own hands, filthy from the morning’s work, then dropped them. It was an awkward moment, and Zofia tried to stifle the giggle that tickled upwards in her throat—to no avail. Of course, he had never kissed a lady’s hand. What was she thinking? He was blushing now.

  She dropped her hand and attempted small talk while she studied Jerzy more closely. His clothes were those of a peasant farmer, scarcely more than filthy rags, the boots well-worn and caked with mud. But he was already tall and nicely built. The dusty blonde hair framed a face more aristocratic than peasant. He was a striking boy, with his deep blue eyes, and he would be a handsome man. Here amidst stark poverty and ugliness was this golden child favored by the gods.

  Zofia knew she was making him uneasy—as much with her talk as with her eyes. Oddly, the sight of him squirming in discomfort gave her pleasure.

  “I must go now,” Jerzy said at last, turning for the door.

  “If you must, Jer
zy . . . but come visit again, will you?”

  The boy’s blush deepened and he disappeared.

  Zofia laughed aloud when she was alone. It felt good to laugh. As if she had only just started to live again. It felt good, too, to enjoy handsome male company. Even one as young as Jerzy.

  She returned to her bed with its straw mattress, scarcely believing how the short interchange had sapped her strength. She lay back against the lumpy pillow. The little burst of energy had come and gone. The weakness made her worry that it would still be some time before she could hope to leave this place. How long?

  Zofia allowed herself now to reflect on the realization that had come upon her the moment the young boy walked in. A sweet nostalgia filled her as her mind allowed a decade to fall away. She remembered the many trips from her parents’ house at Halicz to the neighboring Stelnicki estate at Uście-Zeilone where an aristocratic replica of Jerzy had welcomed her. Dog’s Blood!—Jerzy was the very image of Jan Stelnicki!

  Count Jan Stelnicki. The nostalgia drained away almost at once, memories quickly turning bitter. She had counted on—plotted—an alliance with Jan to avoid a marriage betrothal to another made by her parents when she was a mere baby. But that was before the arrival of Anna at Halicz. Little Anna Maria with her reddish-brown braids and wide green eyes! How had her cousin won his affection? How had she lost it? The mystery still irked her. Well, she had had the satisfaction of foisting off on Anna the man to whom she had been engaged, Antoni Grawlinski. She could not help but smile to herself. What a crafty piece of work that had been!

  The smile disappeared. How could she have known the tragic end that marriage would come to? . . . Well, better her than me, Zofia thought. And yet a little truth that she had always held below the surface rose up now—before Anna came on the scene, Zofia had been interested in Jan mainly as a way of avoiding an arranged marriage, but after Anna seemed to win his affection, her own interest in Jan increased to a white heat. She had been jealous of Anna.

  Still, she loved her cousin. A little mystery, that.—Had Anna survived the Russians? Zofia had done what she could to get her safely across the bridge. She hoped—and somehow instinctively felt—that Anna had indeed survived. Zofia had told her to go to Paweł’s Warsaw town house. Is that where she was? The Russians would not harm her, for Zofia had affixed their names to the Confederacy of Targowica.

  And Jan. Had he survived? This seemed less likely. He was the foolishly courageous type, willing to go at professional killers with a handsaw. But if both Anna and he survived, how long would it be before they found each other? The thought took hold of her, provoking a kind of panic. She wrestled with the counterpane and turned to the wall. When would she be well enough to return to Warsaw? How was she to get there? How far down river had the current taken her?

  And what would she find in the capital? Her thoughts and the helplessness of lying in a sick bed day after day were more than she could bear.

  Why must life be so complicated? Her mind came back to Jerzy. How simple life would be if only she were sixteen and a pretty village maid being courted by him. She allowed the pleasurable daydream to play out in her head. She would tend a cottage garden, cultivating rue and rosemary for her bridal wreath and lavender to freshen the linens in her dowry chest. On her wedding night he would remove her wedding cap and take her into his strong, sun-burnished arms. . . .

  But a peasant? Zofia thought again. She looked about the bleak little room, pictured Danuta and her father in their pitiful clothes going about their tedious and grueling tasks. She thought of herself as part of their household, kneading dough, keeping the bigos pot at low heat for hours on end, feeding and killing chickens. And producing children like Lutisha turned out strings of sausages. She laughed aloud. Not in this life, she thought. The old attraction she had for the city, fine clothes, jewels, money, men—and power—sprouted up again, like a plant with intractable roots.

  Still, at Jerzy’s image she felt a tickling sort of warmth spreading through her. She stopped laughing. Surely there was some way she could repay the boy.

  Jan paced the length of the reception room, fraught with worry. Each time he passed the window he looked out into the bluish night, down the long, curving avenue, high with snow and bordered by parallel rows of poplars and twin ponds.

  Midnight had come and gone without a carriage from Warsaw. Had the departure date changed in the time that had passed since the letter came from Paweł? Had Anna been delayed? Turned back by the Russians? Or worse?

  By the time most of the candles in the reception room had guttered, he sat in semi-darkness, his body tense with worry. With the homecoming celebration suspended, he had sent the Szrabers home to their cottage for the night. From the rear of the house came the worried whispers of Marta and her daughters. Of course, they loved Anna, but Marta’s mother, Lutisha, was the beloved matriarch of the little family, and their concern for her was great.

  Jan Michał had refused to go to bed at midnight when hopes for his mother’s arrival faded. It had been a mistake to tell the boy his mother was expected home, but who could have known? “No bed!” he told a frustrated Emma when she tried to coax him upstairs, “No bed!”

  Jan had had to intercede. “Aren’t you a little soldier?” he asked, lifting the brown-eyed youngster into the air.

  “Oh, yes!” Jan Michał cried, thrilled by the motion.

  “Well, soldiers must go to bed!” Jan said, setting him down. “They need their rest so they can do the king’s work. You don’t want to disappoint the king, do you?”

  The boy’s face clouded. “No.”

  “Then you’ll let Emma bring you up to bed?”

  The boy thought. “You bring me, Jan!”

  The bargain was struck Jan carried the boy upstairs. “Will Matka be here when I wake up?” Jan Michał asked before Jan could snuff the candle.

  Jan kissed him on the forehead. “We will hope so . . . goodnight.”

  But his mother had yet to arrive. Jan sat now, despondent and frustrated. What should he do? What could he possibly do? He could not just ride off in the direction of Warsaw. He had no papers to travel, and his service under Kościuszko made him no friend of the interlopers. He looked at the bottle of good Gdańsk vodka that was to have supplied many a toast that night. He vowed not to touch it until Anna was safely home.

  Jan struggled to stay awake, but the preparations for Anna’s homecoming had exhausted him so that by two in the morning sleep had overtaken him in the chair where he sat.

  The clock was striking three when Jan came awake with a start.

  Someone’s hand was on his shoulder. He opened his eyes to find Walek’s face staring down at him. The fire in the grate had gone out, and the room was dark and cold. “What?” Jan asked, asked. “What is it, Walek? News?”

  “Yes, milord.”

  Jan reared up in his chair, fear taking hold. “For God’s sake, man, tell me!”

  “Lady Anna’s carriage has arrived.”

  Jan was on his feet in an instant. “Arrived? She’s here?” Pulling on his frock coat, he broke for the front door.

  “Wait, milord!”

  “What? What is it?”

  “The carriage has already been unloaded, milord. Passengers and baggage.”

  “Unloaded! Then where . . . ?

  Walek allowed himself a smile now. “Lady Anna and Lutisha are in the kitchen with my wife and children.”

  Jan felt suddenly lightheaded. And shamed that he had fallen asleep, that he was not the first to greet Anna. “What kept them?”

  Walek shrugged. “That, Lady Anna can tell you herself.”

  Jan started for the kitchen, his heart beating erratically. He could hear the animated talk now.

  He saw the back of her head first, the reddish tint of the brown tresses highlighted by the huge kitchen hearth at full heat. Lutisha, sitting across from her, saw him enter. She looked up and grinned. Her daughter and grandchildren fell silent. Anna turned in her chair to s
ee him approaching and stood immediately to greet him. Her dress was gray and creased from traveling. The strain Jan saw in Anna’s face lasted only seconds. She smiled widely. “Jan!” she cried, forgetting any formality.

  Speechless, Jan moved forward and swept her into his arms. He was kissing her even before her face could fall into focus. It had been more than two years since he had seen her, two years that fell away in a single embrace. The formality of kisses on either cheek was jettisoned aside as he held her, his mouth hard upon hers. She held tight to him, giving herself over. Forgetting present company, he drew back only to give her space for breath—and then kissed her again.

  Pulling back at last, he saw her emerald eyes filling with tears. His heart waxed full. It was only then that they realized how forward their behavior was in the company of servants—and that they held the rapt attention of everyone in the room. Anna’s face flushed red.

  “You must forgive us,” Jan said, noticing that Lutisha and Marta were blushing, as well. Marta and Walek’s two girls and young son were trying to suppress their giggles.

  It was Lutisha’s turn to surprise the group now. “God be blessed,” she said, “that is the way every Pole should greet his love!”

  Everyone laughed and gave assent, diffusing Jan and Anna’s embarrassment.

  “I told them not to wake you,” Anna said, looking pointedly at Walek.

  “Beggin’ your pardon, milady, we figured he wouldn’t have it that way.”

  “Indeed!” Jan cried. “Indeed!” It was all he could manage for fear his own tears would start. He suspected she had wanted their reunion more private.

  “I’m sorry, Lord Stelnicki,” Marta offered, “I should have awakened you as soon as Walek went out to direct the carriage into the stable, but I—I was too anxious to see my mother, and I forgot. We all rushed outside.”

  “I understand, Marta,” Jan said, dividing his smile between her and Lutisha. “Don’t give it a second thought!”

  Chairs were brought in, and everyone sat as if they were all of one family, one clan. The occasion seemed to call for it, and no one appeared to mind. Anna told them of the journey home. “The delay at the starosta’s office was tedious and uncomfortable, but Lutisha had the worst of it, having to stay in the cold carriage. Thank God for her strength and patience!”