The Age of Ice: A Novel Read Online Free PDF

before we are betrothed to each other.”
    My innocent petite comtesse ! Only she could be so trusting, so kind and pure as to not take off running that very moment. She blushed, asking, “A trial ? What kind?”
    And I blushed, answering, “A tryout. Of you and me. Whether we can touch each other.”
    “But we—”
    “As man and wife.”
    “My parents will not—”
    “It’ll have to be in secrecy.” The further I went down that hole, the more I thought that this was the best thing to do. The right thing.
    She was biting her lips in thought. “Is there no other way?” she begged. What was she imagining, as she stood in those pristine gardens, on this August afternoon, amid roses and butterflies? Horror tales of maidens’honor lost, of sinister men and their predations? Greasy beds under scarlet canopies? Or was she just figuring how she could slip from the Maison Tolstoy unnoticed? My loving, devoted Marie, she did not want to bargain—too much—with me. “I just can’t imagine how this could be arranged,” she said.
    “It needn’t be elaborate,” I improvised feverishly. “Just come out at night. Through the kitchen door. At two in the morning. I’ll be waiting. Every night for a week starting tomorrow I’ll be waiting unless I hear from you otherwise. We needn’t much time, we needn’t even go anywhere from your door.”
    Oh, I was flying. Inflated and carried away, as if she’d already agreed.
    “We will . . . right there?” she puzzled, and I was nodding, oh yes ! I needed but little, only a tip of the iceberg that was intercourse. I wished I could say so!
    “Shh,” she said, “my mother is here.”
    The matriarch Countess Tolstoy had run out of flowers to inspect. “Mother”—Marie was all blushing cheeks, wayward eyes, and shrill voice—“Prince Alexander asked me to marry him.”
    “Oh, did he?” The matron feigned surprise. “My dearest children—”
    “—and I told him I’ll give him my answer in a week.” Marie tried so hard to look willful and sophisticated but she lacked the practice; she awed me nonetheless, my dear beloved. She fumbled and fled into the arms of her mother, the latter now surprised in earnest. “Oh, did you?”
    Misplaced like a milepost in an open field, I stood as, safe at her mother’s bosom, Marie turned back to me. “I trust you will wait for my answer,” she said and gave me her—only slightly trembling—fingertips to squeeze in a good-bye.
    Of course! She had to be inviting me to be there, by her kitchen door, every night starting tomorrow! “I will be waiting,” I said.
    She led her mother away, and the moment they turned the corner, my confidence waned. I spent the next twenty-four hours in remorse, doubting Marie’s meaning and questioning the asinine plan that I had conjured on the spur of the moment.
    • • •
    St. Petersburg in the 1760s was much different than it is now. It was a city cut out generously, for growth, and it had not yet filled its own interstitial spaces. It lay like a fanciful appliqué on the burlap of my country’s reality. One could be disturbed by its contrasts if one wasn’t so used tothem: gilded carriages that bounced over rutted dirt roads, baroque palaces that stood amidst empty fields, wolf-hunting that was best just a few miles away from the assiduously manicured Italian Gardens.
    There was a veritable prairie land behind the Admiralty, all the way to the Moika River, where the Tolstoy mansion stood on the east bank, and beyond it. There were timber warehouses facing the mansion over the Moika, and dogs howled there at night. If the wind blew from the west, it smelled of tar from the Admiralty’s shipyard; if from the east, of cowherds. The grass was so tall and coarse next to the Tolstoy stables, it pricked me in the eye, where I sat. Fleas jumped in that grass, mosquitoes buzzed, and vermin scurried about. Well before sunrise, beggars with branded foreheads and ripped-out nostrils gathered