Seized by Love (3 page)

Nikki tensed, stretched his
lean frame like a great cat, then relaxed once again; the quiet sounds of the
forest washed over him—new young birch leaves rustling in the breeze, a soft
whisper from the bubbling stream lapping at the shore near the boundary of the
clearing, the unceasing chatter of the birds overhead. The tranquillity of the
woodland eased his tired body but failed to more than superfi-cially alleviate
the restless dissatisfaction of his spirit. Nikki was bored. Boredom—that
constant and irksome companion that trailed him with a dogged persistence.
Nikki had been leading the arduous and difficult life of leisure now for many
years. Chronic leisure with its deadly, restless tedium was inexorably closing
in on him.

He propped himself up on
one elbow and from under slack lids surveyed his companions lounging carelessly
around the remains of the repast the servants had brought out from the lodge.
The ice had almost melted in the silver wine cooler and the half-empty bottles
were sweating in the heat of the spring sun. The remains of the sumptuous
dejeuner
sur I'herbe
lay scattered across the damask cloth and two wolfhounds were
diligently eating them. Cernov and Illyich were carelessly tossing dice on a
silver tray on the grass between them, while Aleksei was engrossed in a novel
by Turgenev.

Nikki listened with his
usual tolerant aloofness to the friendly bickering going on during the dicing.

"Tonight I want
Cecelia; you had her the last two nights and I think it's my turn," Cernov
said in a faintly bearish tone.

"Can I help it if she
prefers me?" Illyich smiled complacently.

"I don't care. It's my
turn tonight," Cernov insisted.

"What can possibly be
the difference?" Nikki inquired in a low, husky drawl. "The wenches
are all agreeable in every way if one does not mind being bored in short
order."

"Oh, no. I fancy
Cecelia's long legs and slender grace to those more voluptuous charms of
Olga," Cernov responded ardently, recalling Cecelia's dancing performance
the previous night.

"Come now,
Gregor," Prince Kuzan remarked with the disenchantment of his thirty-three
years, "one woman is as good as another." Then he lay back in the warm
sun and shut his eyes.

"Speak for yourself,
Nikki. I find Cecelia much more attractive, and I intend to have my turn,"
Cernov stated with a slightly aggressive emphasis.

Nikki's golden eyes fixed a
look of mild contempt on the good-natured but now thoroughly heated Cernov.

"As you wish, of
course, Gregor," Nikki replied soothingly. "Illyich, you understand,
as host, I must attempt to placate all my guests. Perhaps tonight I could
persuade you to take Tanya instead of Cecelia," he suggested politely, as though
he were offering courteously the less blemished of two pears to a dinner guest.

"With pleasure!"
Astrakan Illyich responded avidly. Tanya had been Nikki's mistress for three
months now, and no one dared approach her, but if Nikki were graciously relinquishing
the girl, Illyich would be a fool to refuse the offer.

Nikki calmly continued.
"It is my firmest conviction that in order to survive, it is necessary to
be amused, that one of the requisites in life is to stave off as long as
possible the unpardonable 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 of the day and night in
gambling and copulating, he thought, laughing to himself.

"It doesn't hurt to search
for the truth," Aleksei protested. "It's better than just drinking,
gambling, and whoring, which is all you ever do." He stopped abruptly,
afraid he'd overstepped the bonds of friendship. His adoration of his older
cousin was remarkably close to hero worship.

Nikki didn't take offense,
ever ready to indulge his young cousin's moods, but said softly and
thoughtfully,

"You young people
crave primary colors, crave certainty, must have absolute answers to the
'accursed questions.' When you're older, you'll discover absolutes are often so
elusive, they defy the most optimistic determination. Don't worry about Tanya,
though, I'll not let harm come to her."

Nikki sighed to himself and
marveled at the fresh vitality and naivete of Aleksei's youth. Had he indeed
ever been that young? He knew the sobering answer to that question and tried to
shrug off the depression that always accompanied the contemplation of his past
seventeen idle, world-weary years.

Nikki had never been able
to deal in absolutes, right or wrong. He had, from a very early age, been
plagued by doubts. He saw human beings in the glaring nakedness of their
frailty.

The excellence of his
education could be blamed, at least partially, for this slough of harsh
reality. The diverse succession of scholars lured to "Le Repose" to
instill in the only child and heir the fruits of their learned disciplines had
found ready and fertile soil in the mind of the precocious young Prince. The
monumental amount of knowledge of past civilizations he'd absorbed early on had
reinforced his pernicious inclination to see each generation's touted
achievements as puny human efforts in the ongoing scheme of things.

This lack of illusion left
Nikki at times feeling helpless, if not, in fact, cynically melancholy. He
often chose to dispel these bouts of depression by engaging in drunken,
mindless orgies of pleasure. These week-long escapes into inebriated madness
would for the brief interval anesthetize the worm of discontent. But his
discontent was never explained, only assuaged or suppressed by the frenzied
activity, the bottle of wine, a woman's touch.

lllyich broke into this
morbid reverie with his usual jovial bonhomie.

"Aleksei, rest easy.
I'll take excellent care of the beautiful Tanya," he assured the young
boy.

"If she doesn't take
care of you first," Nikki observed sardonically, raising one mocking
eyebrow. "I hope you can afford to mount her. Like all women she's never
satisfied, although, in contrast to the rapacious Countess Amalien-borg, the
price for Tanya's pleasure is cheap," remarked Nikki, remembering Sophie's
insatiable demands for jewelry and furs.

"Have you no romance
in that black soul of yours, Nikki?" Cernov inquired.

"Very little,"
Nikki replied dryly. His was a cynicism born of disenchantment, born of a
constant struggle to keep a deepening melancholy at bay. "Most of the
women in my reprehensible and checkered experience are ultimately vastly more
interested in my considerable fortune than my romantic inclinations. And rich
or poor, young or old, they are all willing—too willing. I've been whoring up
and down this country for years and done my share of tasting the debauchery
Europe has to offer as well, and I have yet to discover a woman who is any
different. They are all yielding, all willing, all delightful, but inevitably
all boring." To Nikki there was a deadly sameness to the affairs that all
began so promisingly and then became so monotonous.

"Daily living is
becoming so damnably dull, I'm beginning to consider the life of an ascetic as
an alternative to this routine," Nikki complained.

Cernov clucked his tongue
sympathetically and laughed. "My heart really bleeds for people like you,
Nikki. If you do, you'll leave many unhappy and unfulfilled women behind in
Petersburg. There have been allusions to your giving the Due du Richelieu's
reputation a run for the money in the boudoirs, as well as pressing the Elector
of Saxony's record in the nursery.
¹
Maybe Illyich and I could
attempt to console those languishing doves in your absence."

"If we waited a fortnight
or so, the ladies would be extremely eager for our—ah—solicitous ministrations,
I should think," Illyich concluded playfully.

"Do you care about
anything at all, Nikki?" Astrakan asked, half jesting, half seriously.

"Not a damn thing to
care about, seems to me." The Prince yawned.

"Not even women?"
Cernov asked.

"Least of all women,
Gregor," the lazy drawl avowed. "On a scale of one to ten, I would be
forced to reply—is there a number lower than zero?"

"Admit it,
Nikki," Illyich continued more earnestly, "you'd be more bored after
a week without women than you are this way. At least there's a variety to the
boredom."

"You're right, of
course," Nikki agreed reluctantly. "If only they weren't all so
yielding; it takes away the piquancy of the chase. There's simply no challenge
anymore. I can have any woman I please." The Prince closed his eyes.

"Oh-ho! Such
illusions, such a lack of modesty." Cernov laughed.

"Three to one you
can't," Illyich interjected quickly, the obsessive gambler in his nature
unable to pass up an opportunity for a wager. He would quite happily lay odds
even on his mother's demise.

"Can't what?"
Nikki asked, not altogether sure what Illyich was betting against, but always
ready to gamble too. His eyes sparkled with interest.

"Can't have any woman
you want."

The Prince sat up.
"You're on. But kindly soul that I am, I'll give you even odds. And let's
say fifty thousand roubles just to make it amusing."

"Done!" Illyich
laughed with pleasure. "A limit on the time allowed, say, three days. That
should be enough time, and I choose the woman, of course."