Authors: Alicia Rasley
Tatiana spread her wet cloak in front of the fire, but knew it had surely been ruined by contact with the gulf. Then, still in her soaked gown, she wandered about the room. "Look, Michael," she called out, stopping at a worktable strewn with scraps of leather and tiny nails. "He must have been a shoemaker."
"I don't suppose he had just finished a pair of boots before he passed off this mortal coil," he said, pulling off his own sopping boots and arranging them in front of the fire next to Tatiana's cloak. The tops drooped sadly and toppled the boots right over onto the floor. With a muttered curse he propped them up against a log. His hair was drying rapidly into springy curls, and he looked charmingly boyish. For some reason, her heart ached to look at him, silhouetted in front of the fire, barefoot and coatless, with his muscular arms shown to perfection under his wet shirt. But she didn't have to admire him long, for he disappeared into the small anteroom, taking a candle with him. She could hear him rummaging around and finally he emerged wearing an open-necked shirt of woven flax. He'd found no breeches, apparently, but had managed to dry up most of the damp on his own with a heavy towel, which he tossed to her. "There's a woman's dress in there, though it looks to be a bit large."
Tatiana frowned at the thought of wearing another woman's dress and made only cursory use of the towel. She was hardly cold at all now, for the fire was burning exuberantly and the little cottage was toasty. She made a circuit of the room, leaving a little puddle wherever she stopped to investigate a cabinet or a set of cobbling tools. The room was furnished with a couple of old horsehair chairs and some rough wooden tables grouped in front of the fire. There was one wall of cupboards, a few dusty windows, and the long, high worktable, but no books, no personal items, no real indication of what kind of man once lived here.
"Do you think he has passed off this mortal coil?" she asked. "Perhaps this is only his summer home."
Michael was emptying the oilcloth bag he had found on the lifeboat. But her speculation made him look up with an exasperated smile. "Always the princess. Do you think ordinary mortals—commoners—have two homes, one for summer and one for winter?"
Now that she thought of it, of course, Tatiana knew that most people were fortunate to have even one home. The palace servants, for example, mostly lived in cramped quarters in a distant area of the palace square. But since her contact with ordinary people was limited to those servants, she could be forgiven, she decided a little righteously, for thinking that an independent businessman like this shoemaker might be luckier. "You needn't imply that I am so rich, Michael, for I am not, for all that I grew up in a palace. After all, I never owned anything, and as far as I know my parents left me nothing but my jewels. I daresay I'm just as poor as this poor man."
"Except for twenty thousand pounds in the Bank of England," Michael replied dryly. "And another twenty thousand, would you say, in jewels? Just that little ring of yours must be worth more than this shoemaker would have earned in twenty lifetimes."
Tatiana gazed with new respect at the emerald ring gracing her hand. "Oh, good. It belonged to Peter the Great's mother, you know. You must tell me the name of a jeweler who will give me that kind of price for it, in case I find myself in dun territory."
"Royalty in dun territory?" he began, but then shrugged. "I suppose even in Russia they had heard of the debts the Prince Regent has run up. But he hasn't started pawning the family jewels yet. Are you entirely unsentimental about your own family heirlooms?"
Tatiana noticed again the signet ring on his finger, about which he must against all odds be sentimental. "I care nothing for things," she said, rather toploftily. "The few trifles I own are just baubles—expensive ones, I hope, but they are only bits of rock and metal."
"You don't see them as symbols of your family?"
She wrinkled her nose in distaste. "Such a family I have, selling me into bondage like Joseph and his colorful coat. And I can remember my mother well enough without these jewels. Don't you think it's just a bit obscene that so much wealth can be worn on a finger, when poor people like our shoemaker—"
"Don't even have a summer house?" he finished for her, looking up from his pile of supplies with a laugh. "Some more of your revolutionary rhetoric, Your Highness? What happened to the divine right of kings? Damn, I hate saltback," he added before she could think up a retort. He pulled a tin out of the bag and set it on the table. "But perhaps we can make some soup if the shoemaker left some dried peas or beans. Check that cupboard."
Glad to be of help, Tatiana opened the cupboard by the hearth and found, along with dishes, a bag of small green pellets she supposed were peas. She watched with admiration as Michael filled a pot with water from the indoor pump and set it to boil over the fire while he carved up the saltback with a pocketknife. "Where did you learn to do that?"
"Oh, I have finally impressed you, have I? Well, Your Highness, when I was an army scout, I learned to contrive with few materials. We'd be away from the encampment for days at a time, and had to forage for our sustenance. Often my meager cuisine was better than what we were existing on at Torres Vedras. How fortunate now that I can fill in for your absent personal chef."
"I didn't have a personal chef," she snapped, annoyed at his constant suggestions that she had been pampered beyond earthly means. "Buntin and I took our meals in our suite, and they were the same meals everyone else in the wing received from the kitchens. I never lived extravagantly. Why, I never had any money at all. If I wanted something, a dress or a hat, a vendor had to come in and bring it to me, for I never went out to a shop."
"Who paid for it?" Michael inquired with only a hint of merriment.
Tatiana shrugged as if it were of no consequence. "They sent the bill to the palace, I suppose. My point is, I couldn't have bought a cup of chocolate with my own funds."
"Poor little princess," he murmured with mock sympathy, dumping the plateful of saltback and a couple of handfuls of peas into the boiling pot. Tatiana was surprised to find that she was a little hungry, but then she'd never missed a meal before, except when she decided to starve herself when the court wouldn't allow her to go into exile with her parents. She sat down on the floor, spreading the wet wool of her skirt out to the fire and regarding the pot hopefully.
"Have you never heard that a watched pot never boils?" Michael asked, and she looked up at him with some consternation.
"It's already boiling, isn't it? Isn't that when the bubbles break? And I am watching it, so that must be wrong."
"Only an aphorism, and a singularly foolish one, I'll admit. And I'll also admit that, for a princess, you have lived a benighted life."
She mistrusted his amused tone and turned the tables on him. "And you, I suppose, my lord viscount, grew up in dire poverty, without a penny to call your own."
"As a matter of fact," he replied calmly, stirring the soup with a wooden spoon, "I did, near enough."
He never lied, she knew that, but this was hard to credit. Eventually, grudgingly, she asked, "What do you mean?"
"My father was a gambler, you see. Terrible vice, gaming. Did you see any salt or herbs or anything else in that cupboard? This soup's entirely lacking in flavor."
Obediently she foraged deeper into the cabinet and found a packet of dried herbs and a box of salt, hardened now from the damp, and, triumphantly, a dusty bottle of vin ordinaire. As he added the spices and splashed a bit of wine into the soup, her curiosity won out. "Did he lose a great deal?"
"Everything. How old are the shoemaker's victuals, do you think? We'll probably be poisoned and die here in agony before morning. I spent a year in debtor's prison," he added. "My father was the debtor of course, but there was nothing to do but take me along."
"How awful," Tatiana whispered, thinking of the massive iron gates of the prison where Alexander sent dissidents. On her infrequent drives into Petersburg, she'd never been able to pass those gates without a shiver. But, as usual, Michael surprised her.
"It wasn't, really. At least the creditors had to stop harassing him, and there were occasional meals. There were several boys my age, and we ran in a pack. We were allowed out of the prison, for we hadn't been convicted of anything save for having improvident parents. We used to go down to the docks and carry luggage of the incoming passengers for tuppence. I thought I might pay down my father's debt." He frowned, whether at the memory or at the pallid taste of the soup he had spooned up she couldn't tell. "Of course, it would have taken a thousand years that way, but it gave me some purpose in life."
Tatiana felt very sad, thinking of Michael as a boy in ragged clothes carrying heavy baggage in exchange for pennies. But the story explained so much of the enigma that was Michael. After such a chaotic childhood—his mother and sister's deaths, his father's dissoluteness, his imprisonment and poverty—he could hardly be blamed for wanting to be in total control of his life. And, knowing that, she could hardly blame him for his antipathy toward her, for she supposed from the very first she had sent his life spinning into chaos.
But he seemed resigned to it now. He ladled some soup into a couple of bowls and set them on the low table. Then he poured wine into mugs and arranged one precisely on the upper right of each spoon.
"Bon appetit
."
She was so distracted she could barely taste the soup, which was just as well for there was precious little taste to the thin broth. Michael sat cross-legged on the floor across from her, remarkably handsome in his rustic shirt, the open neck showing a glimpse of bronzed skin and a spray of dark hair, his eyes glinting silver in the firelight. "Did you father pay off his debts?"
"No, he died in prison. Imagine if we had a crusty loaf and a crock of butter, how much better this would taste. Let's remember to pick a better stocked cottage next time, shall we?"
"Michael, tell me what happened to you," she said with exasperation, "after your father died."
"Oh, nothing gothic. The estate had to be let. It was entailed on me, of course, but the creditors had a better solicitor than I did, in fact I hadn't one at all, being only ten. So they leased the estate to a nabob just back from India, and the sum paid off most of the debts. There was a bit left over, so I went off to Eton—that's a school, or so the dungeon masters there like to pretend."
Tatiana thought of her life after the death of her own irresponsible father, the isolation, the shame. No wonder Michael had accepted her revelations without revulsion—he had suffered in the same way. "Are you still poor?"
He leaned back against the hearth and smiled lazily at her. Really, she thought suddenly, how comfortable he is. A week ago, she could not have imagined him talking so easily about his past, even turning it into an amusing tale for dinner conversation. She wondered if her kiss had loosened his tongue as well as his morals.
"No, you'll be relieved to hear, I am not still poor. I won back what my father had lost."
"With gambling? Why, Michael, I never would have thought it of you! Especially with the example of your father before you."
"I didn't gamble as he did," Michael replied with hauteur. "He was a gambler. I was a mathematician. I knew enough about the games to play the best odds. And when I began to lose, or when I'd won enough, I quit for the night. My father—another Nicholas, by the way—do you think there is something in the name that encourages irresponsibility?"
Before she had the chance to protest that her father Nicholas was merely a victim, he went on, "My father never learned to cut his losses, or to quit while he was ahead. So finally I had enough to evict the nabob from the estate. He left it bare, of course, and I still haven't furnished it, haven't had the time. But Devlyn Keep is mine again."
"Did you stop gaming then?"
"Once I'd got enough of the ready to buy back my London townhouse and some stocks on the exchange, I did. I purchased my commission in the 16th then and gave up gambling as a profession." He picked up his spoon again. "I still play faro and hazard and piquet occasionally, but gaming isn't a game for me even now, but a job. Counting cards and calculating odds don't make for the best evening's entertainment."
The best evening's entertainment, Tatiana thought mistily, was just this: sitting near a fire, drinking wine and eating soup with a very good friend. With a very good friend, she repeated to herself. And friendship was so much better than—than whatever they had tried out there in the rain. There was no danger in this, nothing to anger Michael and alienate him, nothing to force her into unsolvable debates about her future. How sturdy was friendship, how trustworthy, how comfortably limited.
She stole a look at Michael from under her lashes, wondering if he was also thinking about that hazardous embrace in the storm. Was he thinking of his hands skimming her body, his fierce kisses, the heat of his skin against hers? But as he returned her gaze, she dropped her eyes back to her mug and dissembled. "Well, I must say I am losing respect for French vineyards. This wine is nothing like we had at the palace. But I suppose the shoemaker hasn't the wine cellar that Alexander did. Napoleon sent wagonloads of his favorite vintage to the court when he was trying to take a Russian bride. Why, when we came back from Versailles, there was hardly enough room for us princesses left, for Napoleon had filled our coaches full of bottles."
She had succeeded in diverting Michael's attention, and her own, from that dangerous memory. He took a meditative sip of his wine and asked, "How is it, if you were such an outcast at the palace, that you managed to join this caravan to Versailles?"
"Oh, that was my best lark." Tatiana's melancholy vanished. "I wasn't invited, of course. But I just packed up my trunk and had it delivered to the coach the morning of the departure. Hardly anyone at court knows me, so no one knew that I wasn't Princess Olga of Bashkir as I said when I got in the coach. Bashkir is quite far away, and there are several Olgas, so I was simply accepted as a legitimate passenger. I had a wonderful time on the journey and in France. I did have a few frightening moments, however, when the emperor paid special attention to me and I thought he might demand Princess Olga's hand. What would I have done then, not being Princess Olga at all? So I had to say something that annoyed him—"