The Trojan Icon (Ethan Gage Adventures Book 8) by William Dietrich
Authors: William Dietrich
Tags: Historical fiction
Ads: Link
husband.” Clinging to the underside of a bridge, inches from discovery, in a wintry forest, flakes drifting down. “This is our destiny.” And sadly, sweetly, with real love and real regret, she kissed me.
CHAPTER 10
W e eventually arrived as beggars at Jelgava Palace, trudging on foot while swaddled in enough peasant coats to look like tubs of dirty laundry. Our journey had taken us more than four hundred miles southwest of St. Petersburg and thirty miles inland from the Baltic Sea. Our clothes were wet and dirty, our bellies empty, and my face crusted with stubble that Astiza assured me was entirely unflattering. Just as well not to have a mirror. Ethan Gage, ambassador to the powerful and aspiring prince!
I looked across Latvia’s Lielupe River to the island where Jelgava sprawls. Completed in 1772, the edifice is one of those bloated and bland baroque slabs of a mansion that Italian architects churn out for any aristocrat who can afford the vanity. Inherited taste is rare among the rich, so the highborn hire swarms of Romans to choose for them. The result is that one noble’s sumptuous pile looks pretty much like another’s, with coziness and sense sacrificed to grandeur and debt.
Not that I wouldn’t like to have one, if I could afford the wood to heat it.
The island is an easily guarded place where Tsar Alexander granted refuge to the future Bourbon king of France, would-be Louis XVIII. Louis is impatiently waiting for Bonaparte to fall, while Napoleon has asked Louis to renounce all rights to the French throne in return for being allowed to return home. Neither event—Napoleon’s fall or Louis’s renunciation—seems likely to happen very soon. So the brother of the beheaded king spends his days warily looking out on a snowy landscape for French spies, while fantasizing about his own crowning. This was the man Czartoryski told us to rely on.
Our escape from Von Bonin’s henchmen had been deliberately slow, in hopes that further pursuit would overshoot us. They’d galloped off in the direction of Berlin while we left the main highway and trudged on peasant tracks, winding from cabin to farm in a daze of disappointment. Our cautious route took us east of gigantic Lake Peipus and then southwest into wintry Lithuania and Latvia.
We were a world away from relations or friends. Astiza was a refugee from Egypt, I a pilgrim from America, and Harry had been forced to leave his only childhood companion. We knew we’d been betrayed, but didn’t know who, entirely, had done the betraying. We assumed my drowning was likely no longer believed. We had no sleigh, little food, and scant money, and were weary from tension. To be hunted is to never relax. To distrust is to sour every encounter. Hunger initially sharpens the mind with desperation, and then dulls it with exhaustion. The cold bites deeper. Winter nights are endless.
Two things saved us.
The first was rustic Slavic hospitality. We followed snowy tracks through rolling hills and coastal plains to avoid grand estates with their brick-walled gardens. We also cautiously skirted snug villages with their onion dome churches, haze of wood smoke, tantalizing scent of food, and too many people. Instead we called on rural peasants for help, and thankfully Astiza and Harry had the knack of winning over these simple farmers. The men were bearded like shaggy bears, grinning with missing teeth. The bright scarves of the women framed cherry-red cheeks and kindly eyes in chapped faces. I’d no weapon—we kept the swords carefully bundled—and the wary serfs quickly judged us harmless and needy. The poor often show more charity than the rich and so we journeyed from hut to hovel, explaining by signs that we were almost bankrupt and harried. Our hosts nodded in commiseration and shared beet soup, coarse bread, and honey mead without expectation of payment, watching indulgently as Harry gobbled. They even gave us old coats and cloaks.
Our
CHAPTER 10
W e eventually arrived as beggars at Jelgava Palace, trudging on foot while swaddled in enough peasant coats to look like tubs of dirty laundry. Our journey had taken us more than four hundred miles southwest of St. Petersburg and thirty miles inland from the Baltic Sea. Our clothes were wet and dirty, our bellies empty, and my face crusted with stubble that Astiza assured me was entirely unflattering. Just as well not to have a mirror. Ethan Gage, ambassador to the powerful and aspiring prince!
I looked across Latvia’s Lielupe River to the island where Jelgava sprawls. Completed in 1772, the edifice is one of those bloated and bland baroque slabs of a mansion that Italian architects churn out for any aristocrat who can afford the vanity. Inherited taste is rare among the rich, so the highborn hire swarms of Romans to choose for them. The result is that one noble’s sumptuous pile looks pretty much like another’s, with coziness and sense sacrificed to grandeur and debt.
Not that I wouldn’t like to have one, if I could afford the wood to heat it.
The island is an easily guarded place where Tsar Alexander granted refuge to the future Bourbon king of France, would-be Louis XVIII. Louis is impatiently waiting for Bonaparte to fall, while Napoleon has asked Louis to renounce all rights to the French throne in return for being allowed to return home. Neither event—Napoleon’s fall or Louis’s renunciation—seems likely to happen very soon. So the brother of the beheaded king spends his days warily looking out on a snowy landscape for French spies, while fantasizing about his own crowning. This was the man Czartoryski told us to rely on.
Our escape from Von Bonin’s henchmen had been deliberately slow, in hopes that further pursuit would overshoot us. They’d galloped off in the direction of Berlin while we left the main highway and trudged on peasant tracks, winding from cabin to farm in a daze of disappointment. Our cautious route took us east of gigantic Lake Peipus and then southwest into wintry Lithuania and Latvia.
We were a world away from relations or friends. Astiza was a refugee from Egypt, I a pilgrim from America, and Harry had been forced to leave his only childhood companion. We knew we’d been betrayed, but didn’t know who, entirely, had done the betraying. We assumed my drowning was likely no longer believed. We had no sleigh, little food, and scant money, and were weary from tension. To be hunted is to never relax. To distrust is to sour every encounter. Hunger initially sharpens the mind with desperation, and then dulls it with exhaustion. The cold bites deeper. Winter nights are endless.
Two things saved us.
The first was rustic Slavic hospitality. We followed snowy tracks through rolling hills and coastal plains to avoid grand estates with their brick-walled gardens. We also cautiously skirted snug villages with their onion dome churches, haze of wood smoke, tantalizing scent of food, and too many people. Instead we called on rural peasants for help, and thankfully Astiza and Harry had the knack of winning over these simple farmers. The men were bearded like shaggy bears, grinning with missing teeth. The bright scarves of the women framed cherry-red cheeks and kindly eyes in chapped faces. I’d no weapon—we kept the swords carefully bundled—and the wary serfs quickly judged us harmless and needy. The poor often show more charity than the rich and so we journeyed from hut to hovel, explaining by signs that we were almost bankrupt and harried. Our hosts nodded in commiseration and shared beet soup, coarse bread, and honey mead without expectation of payment, watching indulgently as Harry gobbled. They even gave us old coats and cloaks.
Our
Similar Books
