The Eleventh Year by Monique Raphel High Read Free Book Online Page B

mystery to no one, least of all to his elder son.
    The family honor was at stake, centuries of Varenne blood, spilled now so wretchedly, yet once spilled in the great cause of the Christian Crusades. Adrien had died, and Robert-Achille was better off dead. Now the only Marquis de Varenne was a twelve-year-old boy called Alexandre.
    As for Charlotte, she had new calling cards printed, which read: “Marquise de Varenne.” As a widow she no longer needed her husband’s first names as marks of identification. She shed them gracefully, as easily as she shed her widow’s weeds the following year. Of that fact, some men were sorry, for never before had a woman shown such elegance in mourning. But Charlotte was at last free, and rich in her own right.

Chapter 2
    S he was tall , statuesque like Minerva, with thick black hair that fell straight down her back, uncurled by the Marcel wave. Her high white brow, her full lips over strong white teeth, the prominent cheekbones tinged with red from the Siberian cold, all were characteristics of a Tatar maiden, willing to take all risks and laugh defeat in the face. Or so people said in the small Siberian village when first they laid eyes upon Princess Elena Sergeievna Egorova. She was nineteen years old, and it was 1909.
    It had not always been this way. Tears of anger burned on the edge of her eyelids when she remembered the Nevsky Prospect, the balls, the Mariinsky and Alexandrinsky theaters: St. Petersburg. She, the only daughter of Prince Sergei Egorov, had been treated like a young queen then. He was the chief aide and confidant to Peter Stolypin. In 1904 Stolypin had been Minister of the Interior, but in ‘06 the tsar, Nicholas II, had appointed him premier. Prince Sergei had been his closest friend and associate. Elena could recall so well every article in the study where the two men would confer, and where she alone was allowed to enter, bearing the tea tray. She listened, and she never forgot. She had been, even then, a young woman of rare mettle.
    Elena had gone to Paris with her family for a visit, to add to her wardrobe for the coming winter season. At eighteen, she had recently made her debut in the elegant society of the Russian capital and had been ready to conquer the Parisian capital too, much to the distress of her paid companion, Fräulein Borchner. Elena was so much taller, so much more striking than other girls her age, and when men turned around in the street to watch her, she would smile widely and tilt her head charmingly to one side. It was deliciously brazen. She was easily bored, courtly life became dull after a few dances. She wished, more than anything, that she’d been born a man. How she envied her father! He played with continents and moved soldiers around the map like pawns on a chessboard. But she’d been born a woman, and a beautiful one at that. And so she thought: Let them love me. Let them work for me without knowing they are.
    Upon their return to St. Petersburg, the Egorovs were informed that revolutionary anarchists had set a bomb to Stolypin’s villa on the suburban isle of Elaghin. All had perished, but their friend had not been in his home. Elena’s mother, the fragile Princess Ekaterina, wanted to leave the country for good. The prince hesitated, profoundly shaken. Elena convinced them to stay. She cried out, her eyes wide with outraged pride: “We are Russians! We cannot also be cowards!”
    But the bomb had been merely the beginning. It was followed by a series of unexpected government shakeups, and then, all at once—disaster. Her father was seized in the middle of the night and thrown into the Fortress of Peter and Paul, the strictest of all Russian prisons. Suddenly the telephone no longer rang. Elena was not invited to cotillions, she was snubbed in the street. “High treason!” people whispered. Elena heard everything, yet kept her elegant head high. She was angry and she was