The Trojan Icon (Ethan Gage Adventures Book 8) Read Free Page B

France and eight times that of my own United States. The tsar owns everything and a system of
chin,
or rank, has kept the aristocracy in harness since 1649. ‘The tsar will give’ is recited with hope and resignation.
    Von Bonin watched me watching Russia’s ruler. “Alexander could lose a hundred battles and still be the planet’s most powerful counterweight to Bonaparte,” he whispered as we straightened, his blade snicking back into concealment like a naughty trick. “Limitless manpower. Just as England rules the seas, soil is the Russian ocean. And St. Petersburg is a European outpost in what is really an Asian nation. The Mongols dominated Russia for two hundred and forty years.”
    “And Prussia is squeezed between Russia and France.” I put my arm around Astiza’s waist. “A sausage in a vise.”
    “I would call us a walnut, because of our discipline.”
    “Nuts crack.”
    “Forgive my joke with my arm, Ethan Gage. I lost my hand to the French revolutionary armies at Hohenlinden and have experimented with utensils ever since. Some men are tempted to bully a cripple so I give sting to my stump. It makes a statement, does it not?”
    “Was I bullying you, sir?”
    “I merely sought your attention. I’d hate for an American innocent to be caught on the wrong side.”
    “You mean the French and Polish party of Czartoryski, as opposed to the Prussian and English party of Dolgoruki.”
    “The dowager empress favors Prussia,” Von Bonin noted.
    “And the tsarina favors France.”
    “And which, mother or wife, influences Alexander more? It’s only in friendship that I warn you not to get over your head in this Russian ocean.”
    “Unless the tsar looks my way, and not yours.” And I gently pulled Astiza to stand where she’d catch the royal eye.
    “Ethan,” my wife protested quietly.
    “Hush and smile, my brilliant beauty.”
    Alexander was as I remembered him from Austerlitz, a handsome autocrat as stiff as a wedding groom. He wore a snow-white military uniform, boots as glossy as a Chinese lacquer box, his sash blood red, his epaulettes golden, and his collar stiff. Muttonchop whiskers balanced his receding hair. He was by instinct an intellectual who’d translated Smith’s
Wealth of Nations
and founded five universities. Alexander’s head was usually cocked because he was partially deaf in one ear, and he moved diffidently, looking to the throng for redemption after his defeat at Austerlitz.
    Which he got. After the lunacies of his father Paul, this tsar seemed normal. The nobility genuflected and rose as he advanced like the rolling swells of a sea.
    Far grimmer and more forbidding was Alexander’s mother Maria Feodorovna, the dowager empress. She was not so much plump as hard as a ham, mother of nine, her own hair a jeweled tower, her necklace twice the weight of Alexander’s medals, her sash sky blue and her train bigger than a blanket. She steered her son by using his arm as a tiller, and peered shortsightedly but sternly to ensure we displayed respect.
    The habit of putting the tsar’s mother ahead of Tsarina Elizabeth had shocked the court at first, but was the result of brutal political bargain. After Alexander guiltily acceded to the military murder of his balmy father Paul, his mother had tried to claim succession for herself. She agreed to her son’s coronation only if she was retained as the highest-ranking female in Russia.
    Nor would Mama forgive. As a reproach for the assassination she granted her son rare audiences with a coffin placed between them, the box containing her husband’s bloody shirt. She referred to her son’s friend Czartoryski as, “That Pole.”
    So Tsarina Elizabeth not only followed mother and son, but also was sandwiched behind by Princess Maria Naryshkina of Poland, Alexander’s beautiful mistress. This minx leaned on the arm of her openly cuckolded husband, Prince Dmitri, as if he was a convenient mantelpiece. He looked hollowed by humiliation. Maria