Seized by Love Read Free Page B

sin—monotony. Tanya has become monotonous, so she's
yours if you wish, Astrakan," he finished with finality.
    Nikki tolerated a certain
amount of boredom, but he had his limits, and Tanya had become tedious. He
would give her a suitable parting gift after they returned to Petersburg. Nikki
was known to be benevolent to his mistresses and she'd find a new protector
soon enough if Illyich didn't wish to keep her, he assured himself.
    Prince Kuzan was one of
those aristocrats who filled their leisure with a dilettante's interest in
literature, art, and even science. He spent the required time in social
intercourse, gambling, clubbing, and country sports, but, above all, practiced
an adroit venal gallantry as he dallied with the most exquisite of time-killers,
amour.
    He deliberately flaunted
those principles that supposedly assured the continuance of the patrician order
of society and publicly repudiated the cult of Victorian temperance and
earnestness that was gripping even the volatile Russian mentality in the
seventies.
    In the creme de la creme,
the genteel and refined upper reaches of Petersburg society, Nikki had been the
despair of all the hopeful and enterprising mamas these fifteen years past, and
now, at thirty-three, had been reluctantly abandoned by all but the most
tenacious and optimistic matchmakers. The only child of a rich and powerful
Prince, young Nikolai was himself rich beyond avarice, too handsome by half, a
master of charm if the occasion warranted it and his fickle temperament
acquiesced, well-liked and generous to a fault with his friends, doted on by
his parents, and consequently marked by the complete absence of moral
prejudices. He looked out on the world with the serenity that birth and wealth
made possible, a spoiled child of fortune who accurately assessed the world as
his pleasure garden, for nothing had yet occurred to disturb this comfortable
and perfectly orthodox belief.
    "Nikki! You can't
simply give Tanya away! We no longer have serfs!" young Aleksei responded
with the youthful, passionate chivalry of his nineteen years.
    "Don't fear, Sasha, I
don't intend to brutally turn her out in the cold. Tanya shall be well taken
care of," Nikki said softly to soothe his young cousin.
    Perhaps Aleksei was too
young to be exposed to this licentious, whoring life he led, Nikki reflected
uncomfortably. Maybe I should send him home. Aleksei's mother, indulgent in all
things to her youngest son, had hesitated at Aleksei's pleas for an extended
holiday with his favorite cousin, Nikki. Perhaps she was right. He himself had
been thoroughly schooled in the notorious depravities of life before he was
nineteen, but maybe this new generation was different. The rumblings of
discontent and revolution, the promise of the industrial age, were beginning to
be felt more insistently throughout the land. Maybe this seriousness of purpose
was typical of Aleksei's generation. Although the revolutions of 1848, which
had toppled thrones and melted governments away overnight, had barely touched
Russia, and where they had, in outlying provinces, been ruthlessly suppressed,
even the autocratic Russian monarchy had found it reasonable and prudent to
free the serfs in 1861.
    Nikki had been indulgently
raised in an aristocratic society without purpose. Had society changed that
much in fifteen years, or was Aleksei by nature simply less quixotic, less
reckless? he wondered.
    "Ah, chivalrous
youth," Nikki teased Aleksei, "so quick to come to the defense of
some poor damsel in distress, so ready to jump to the obvious generalizations
and conclusions, always striving for the whole truth, as your present author so
clearly points out."
    "You've read
Turgenev?" Aleksei asked incredulously, holding up the book, having never
seen his older cousin so much as page through a magazine in his presence.
    "Yes, I have, young
sprout. I can read, you know." Nikki's leisure offered considerable free
time. After all, one can spend only so many hours