The Property of a Lady Read Online Free PDF

bodies to the wolves,” he told his men carelessly as they rode off into the forest. “I doubt they will last the night.”

Grigori Konstantinov Solovsky held the boy safely in front of him on the long slow ride through the storm, all the way to Dvorsk, thirty kilometers to the south. He took the treacherous, almost invisible road past the halt at Ivanovsk where the railway lines were buried beneath the snow and only the signalbox and smoke from the railwayman’s hut marked the Ivanoff family’s tiny private station. And every step of the way, he told himself he was a fool.
    Solovsky was an officer in the newly formed “Red” Army. He was a hard man brought up in a hard way, and there was no room in his life for finer feelings. Another life lost, whether it was his own or a child’s, was not important. What mattered to him was the Bolshevik cause, and in his mind that meant the Russian people. Yet the boy’s helpless, terrified face had struck a chord in him. It was the same look he had seen reflected in his own face when he had watched his three young sons die of typhus in the epidemic four years earlier. He, who had been the proud father of four strong boys, who he planned should be part of the new Russia, had been left with only one son. And just now, in that forest, he had simply not been able to leave another boy to die.
    The idea had come to him suddenly. He knew it was a risk and that it might cast doubts on his devotion to the revolutionary cause if his secret were ever discovered, but he had studied the workings of the human mind longenough to know the risk was minimal. Solovsky had been in charge of frontline soldiers returning from the horrors of the war with Germany, he had studied prisoners who had suffered severe torture; he knew that these people spoke little and asked no questions. The ones who survived were those who kept their private vision of horror and tragedy locked away in a special vault deep in the brain, never to be opened. Those who remembered went mad.
    The next few weeks would decide Prince Alexei Ivanoff’s future. The boy would forget the scene in the forest, forget who he was and his short past life. He would become an orphan of the revolution and the adopted son of Grigori and Natalya Solovsky. Or he would retreat into madness. So be it.
    Solovsky was from Siberia where the people were tough and hardy. If they were not, they did not survive. Now his home was in the small provincial town of Polotsk in his wife’s home province of Byelorussia, where life was softer and greener. But on the rare occasions he was home relaxing with his friends over a meal and endless glasses of vodka, he would always remind them of his superiority as a “Siberiusk.” As the potent spirit took hold of him he would haul himself to his feet and repeat an old saying.
“In Siberia,”
he would thunder, his deep bass voice commanding silence.
“In Siberia, forty degrees below is not a frost
.” He would pause, glancing around his audience, gathering their attention.
“A hundred kilometers is not a distance, a half liter of vodka is not a drink.”
He would raise his glass to be filled again before adding with a grin,
“And forty years is not a woman
.” Then he would toss back the vodka in a single gulp to great roars of appreciation and laughter, but Solovsky believed what he said was the truth.
    He remembered the saying now as his tough old cavalry horse struggled through the blizzard. The snow was freezing even as it fell and the animal slid and stumbled,whinnying and rolling its eyes in fright. Solovsky glanced sideways at his men; they were barely recognizable under a layer of snow. Only their eyes, fringed with frozen white lashes, peered ahead into the storm. Solovsky shrugged. He had weathered worse storms than this in his youth. They would press on to Dvorsk.
    He wrapped the skirt of his greatcoat tighter around the motionless boy, unsure whether he was alive or dead. And as they rode slowly