Darker Jewels (35 page)

With all affectionate love, Sanct’ Germain, with affectionate vexation as well.

By my own hand, Olivia

July 11th, 1584 by the English calendar

8

For three days and nights rain had been falling on Moscovy. Grey streamers of it, like tattered lace, dropped from clouds as heavy and substantial as furniture. The noise from it was as persistent and omnipresent as the sound of bells, a steady drumming that offered no variety or relief.

Rakoczy had just come from the steamroom after spending two hours working with his Russian horses in the covered stable- yard. His damp hair hung in loose curls and his face, freshly shaven and massaged by Rothger, appeared younger than his years. He had wrapped himself in a dark-red scholar’s cassock with a small white ruff at the neck above his black sapphire pectoral. He was sitting in his small library adjoining his laboratory, reading a copy of Torquato Tasso’s
Aminta,
when he heard through the steady drumming of rain the sound of a wagon arriving. Glancing at his Dutch watch, he marked the page in his book and rose, wondering who would be arriving at this hour, when most Russians attended sunset Mass. He was not expecting anyone; it being a Wednesday, Moscovy fasted and there were no entertainments offered that night.

His new footman, a long-faced, lugubrious Russian named Alyoisha, was already at the door, disapproval in every aspect. He blessed the ikons by the door, then opened it, staring out into the downpour.

From his place at the top of the stairs, Rakoczy saw that the wagon was enclosed and curtained, and for the first time he felt alarm. Xenya had gone to the Convent of the Annunciation that morning and was not supposed to return until after sunset Mass, but the arrival of this wagon could mean ... He started down the stairs as the driver of the wagon set a stool on the wooden paving so that the passenger could get out.

It was Xenya, drenched and shivering, a fur rug thrown loosely around her and reclaimed by the wagon-driver before he started his vehicle out of the small courtyard. She stood beyond the shelter of the eaves as if afraid to enter the house.

Paying no heed to the rain, Rakoczy went out to her, lifting her in his arms to carry her inside, calling out as he did, “Alyoisha, tell them to heat a bath for her at once. I will want hot spiced wine for her at once. And send Rothger to me. Have him knock on my wife’s door.” He took the stairs two at a time easily, unaware that Alyoisha was watching him agog.

“You must put me down,” said Xenya distantly. Her face was mottled from tears; her sodden clothes dragged on her leaving a trail of water. “You’ll get wet.”

“It doesn’t matter,” said Rakoczy as he reached her room and knocked the door open with his foot. “You are cold, my dear, and something has distressed you.” He spoke calmly, as he always tried to speak around her. Gently he set her on her feet. “You should get those clothes off.”

“My maids are at Mass,” she said in confusion, and started to reach for the fastenings, working at the knots with cold-stiffened fingers, making little progress. Her face was blank.

Rakoczy stopped her. “If you will permit, I will be your attendant.”

She turned wide eyes on him. “But—”

“Surely a husband—even such a foreign husband as I am— may assist his wife to undress?” He made his tone light but felt an underlying urgency; if he had gained her trust, she would not refuse. “And you will tell me what has happened to upset you so badly.” As he said this, he noticed that the small medallion she usually wore around her neck—an ikon of the Virgin of Tenderness—was missing.

In the last few months she had started to talk with him, and so this suggestion did not fluster her as it might have shortly after their marriage. “It isn’t proper,” she said; it was her only objection.

“You know that propriety does not trouble me.” Rakoczy touched her arm. “You have to get warm, Xenya, and you can’t do it in those.”

She swallowed hard, then said, “Only you and I will know?” Tears welled in her honey-colored eyes.

“If that is what you wish,” said Rakoczy carefully, aware of what a potent phrase that was to her.

“And who would I tell?” she asked a little wildly. “My maids? They would say that it is because you are foreign. It would make them laugh. They would be all that I could tell now—” Then she pressed her knuckles between her teeth, blocking words and sobs at once.

Rakoczy smoothed back the wayward tendrils of her hair, then took her face in his hands. “Xenya Evgeneivna, what is it?”

She started to bless herself, then whispered, “They brought me word today, one of Anastasi Sergeivich’s servants brought me word that my mother is dying. God and His angels! She has been carried to the nuns at the Convent of the Mercy of God where the sick are taken for care and prayers, but there is no hope. I was told the side of her face sags and she cannot speak or eat.”

Rakoczy knew there was more to it, and remained silent, his dark, compassionate eyes on hers.

“When they told me, I was with the nuns at the Annunciation. I asked the Superior to permit me to go to her. She agreed at once, and started the Sisters praying for her. The wagoner—the same one who brought me here—took me to the Convent of the Mercy of God. It was difficult getting there because of the mud.” As she spoke she became eerily tranquil. “And when we arrived there, the nuns did not want to let me see her, and advised me to stay away. But I insisted.” Her counterfeit serenity left her.
“I would not listen!
I made them take me to her. They showed me where she was, in the infirmary with the other dying women.” She pulled away from him, unable to accept his gentleness or his strength. “I knelt beside her to pray for her. I said her name, I called her my beloved mother. She looked at me, one eye seeing me, the left eye.” She crossed herself at this recollection of such an ill omen.

“Did she recognize you?” asked Rakoczy. He had seen apoplexy countless times and had learned that it was never quite the same twice. He had been able to help some of its victims when they had been accessible, but most of them were beyond his skills and his blood to mend.

“Yes.” The enormity of that single word held his attention. “She knew who I was.” Xenya crossed herself again, looking away from him. “She knew. She reached for my Virgin. With her left hand. And she grabbed it and flung it away.” Her sobs were deeper, more wrenching than before.

“Oh, Xenya,” said Rakoczy quiedy, and looked around at the soft, double rap at the door.

Rothger held a large pottery mug filled with steaming wine redolent with cloves, cinnamon, and ginger. “Do you require anything more of me, my master?” he asked as he handed the mug to Rakoczy.

“The bath heated; I’ve already ordered it,” said Rakoczy. “Let me know when it is ready.”

“Certainly,” said Rothger, then added, “I am afraid that Alyoi- sha is bragging of your strength to the rest of the staff. He watched you carry your wife upstairs ‘as if she were no more than a fur cap’, or so he says.”

Rakoczy nodded. “I was not paying attention.” His self-condemnation faded to a sardonic half-smile that was gone as quickly as it appeared. “Do what you can to minimize the damage, will you? Or they will be claiming I leaped the whole flight with anvils in my arms before the week is over.”

“No one would believe that,” said Rothger in a speculative tone.

“True enough,” said Rakoczy with a second, more genuine smile. “I leave it to you.”

Rothger bowed slightly and withdrew.

Xenya had dropped to her knees beside her bed, her hands locked together in anguished prayer as she wept. She broke off as Rakoczy approached her, and made herself stop crying. For the first time since she had seen her mother that afternoon she began to feel cold.

He held out his hand to lift her to her feet; once she had risen he gave her the mug. “It will help to warm you, Xenya.”

She accepted the mug as if she had never seen one before, clinging to the handle in white-knuckled tenacity. “She cursed me,” she said at last. “She cursed me. When she ... she took the Virgin.”

“She may have wanted it for herself,” said Rakoczy, searching for some way to ease her pain.

“She cast it aside,” Xenya insisted. “The nuns saw it all, and they understood.” She started to cross herself but could not complete the gesture.

“She may not have known what she was doing, my dear,” said Rakoczy, trying to soften this blow. “Those who suffer her illness do not often understand what has happened, or what they are doing.”

“She saw me,” said Xenya quiedy. “She knew.”

Rakoczy had no answer for that; he waited while Xenya drank a little of the hot spiced wine, then said, “What do you want to wear?”

She blinked, as if realizing where she was at last. “Something warm.”

He had given her a silken night rail for her name day, and now he suggested it. “The silk is heavy enough.”

“Yes,” she said, dismissing the matter. “Whatever is best.” She had another sip, then set the mug aside on the table beside her bed. She stood docilely while he worked to loosen the ties and fastenings of her sarafan and the long rubashkaya beneath it.

“How did you . . .” He was not sure how to ask her why she was so wet.

Xenya was half-naked now, and she seemed removed from herself. “You mean the clothes?”

“Yes,” he said, continuing his task.

A shiver passed through her that might have been from cold. “The nuns saw
her...
saw my mother take my ikon and throw it away; I told you. They made me leave the convent. They could not let me remain after such a curse. And I could not find the wagoner at first. He had to remain outside the walls, and I had to search for him. I did not remember where he was.”

He removed the last of her garments then gathered up all her clothing into a bundle. As soon as he had put this by the door, he took her night rail from the chest at the foot of the bed.

She had turned away from him, her hands crossed in front of her protectively. “Give it to me. I’ll put it on,” she said indistinctly, her face averted and rosy with compunction.

He handed her the night rail.

As she pulled the capacious garment over her head, Rakoczy saw the curve of her breasts—larger than he had guessed—the inward angle of her waist, and the swell of her hips. Although thin by Russian standards, she was ripe-bodied, with skin as rich and flawless as sweet cream. Then the night rail settled around her in deep folds.

For a short while there was only the sound of the relentless rain.

“Will you cast me out?” In the stillness her soft, hesitant words seemed loud. “Now that I have my mother’s curse on me?”

“No,” said Rakoczy. “You could have a hundred curses on you, or a thousand, it would make no difference to me.” He looked at her through the twilight room. “I gave you my word, Xenya, to protect and provide for you as long as you live, and I will do so: believe this.”

“Will you?” she challenged quietly. “Protect me and provide for me?”

“I have said so,” Rakoczy reminded her, stung by her continuing doubt.

“But will you?” Her insistence was despondent instead of defiant, and it touched his heart.

“Yes, Xenya, I will,” he said.

She could not look at him. “When I am nothing to you?”

“You are my wife,” he said with simple conviction.

“Am I?” She could not face him yet, but she lifted her chin. “You do not show it. You have no . . . need of me.”

His smile twitched and was gone. “No need?” Rakoczy sighed, knowing she deserved a candid answer. “When we married I told you I am not as other men.” How many times in the past had he explained himself: it had never been more difficult than now. He paused before he added, “Nothing has changed.”

“Your ways are foreign?” she said, as if hoping for a simple answer.

“More foreign than you realize,” he told her with a slight, ironic smile she could not see; he felt her confusion and attempted to explain. “It is not simply that I am an exile in Russia. There is no place on this earth that my ways are not foreign.” As always, when he admitted this he felt a pang of loneliness that never lessened. The room was nearly dark and the battering of the rain went on steadily, magnifying the silence between them. “There are those who would say
I
am cursed, not you. And all the forgotten gods know there have been times I would agree. But this is not one of those times.” He came a step closer to her. “Those of my blood do not live as other men.”

Her single spurt of laughter was as scornful as it was unexpected. She clapped her hands to her mouth in shame. Unbidden, her mother’s reproaches rose in her mind and she crossed herself.

His low, palliative voice reached her almost as a physical presence. “Xenya, Xenya, can you never trust me?”

“I wish I could,” she said, moving away from him.

Rakoczy remained where he was, sensing that she was balking because of her distress from the past. “Xenya, I will never do to you what you fear I will do.” He wanted to give her what comfort he could, but guessed that she did not know how to accept it from him. It was troubling, being unable to break through her reserve, yet he did not give in to chagrin.

She was unfastening her damp braids, shaking out her hair in sharp, brittle movements, keeping him at bay. “You cannot promise that.”

“But I can,” he said, so openly and easily that he caught her attention as his sympathy had not. “Became I am impotent.”

Turning abruptly, she fixed her gaze on him. “You are a
eunuch?”

Three thousand, even two thousand years ago such a demand would have angered him, but now he answered with a wry chuckle. “No, not that.”

“You were wounded?” Her curiosity increased but not enough to prompt her to get nearer to him.

“In a manner of speaking,” he answered, for death by disemboweling was certainly a wound. “It happened long ago.”

“When you were a boy?” The horror in her question was as much for her own blighted youth as for his.

“When I was younger,” he said.

Her next question was interrupted before it began by a tap on the door and Rothger saying that the bathwater had been heated and turned into the large half-barrel next to the steamroom. “It will cool.”