He smiled.
And on that sweet balmy Christmas Day in a shining white palace on the highest hill in Tiflis, they loved each other with exhilaration, joy and passion. Unlike the imperfect world outside their windows, they had found in each other's arms perfect unspoiled love, safe haven and bliss.
Epilogue
Their son, Zekki, was born that spring soon after the peace was signed. And when Stefan resigned his commission shortly after, to the Tsar in person, Alexander II understood.
'Life is too short,' Stefan said. 'I've tempted fate too long.'
As have we all,' Alexander II replied. His words came prophetically to pass when an assassin's bomb claimed his life three years later.
By then Zekki had a sister to share the nursery with, and Stefan and Lisaveta thanked the shamans and benevolent gods for their own good fortune.
Stefan had taken active steps to insure that good fortune, though. Immediately after they'd come back to Tiflis from the Tsar's funeral, he'd begun construction to add more rooms to his mountain lodge.
Alexander Ill was going to be a reactionary emperor, Stefan said. 'We may prefer the mountains more in the years to come,' he declared.
Lisaveta understood. 'For when the troubles come,' she posed, in question and statement both.
'For that,' he said.
And in the following years the White General, the Savior of Mirum, the Victor of Kokand and Kars, tended his vineyards and his polo ponies and his growing family.
He may have missed on occasion the inexplicable exhilaration of the charge or the intoxication of victory gained against enormous odds, but he'd seen his father die a useless death after numberless victories for the Empire and Tsar, and life had taught him in the end to hold dear the precious minutes of each day. And he intended now-with that particular strength of purpose that had taken him victorious across the battlefields of Russia-to defend not the borders of the Empire but the sanctity of his content.
Author's Afterword
Two fascinating men inspired
Prince Alex Bariatinsky was handsome, wealthy, the privileged scion of the only noble family directly related to the Romanovs, a childhood companion of the Tsarevitch and the object of his sister's, the Grand Duchess Olga's, girlish love. By eighteen he was an established figure among
Throughout this time, his amorous personal life was legendary, but at thirty-five the Prince's amours were brought to a standstill by the wife of one of his officers. It was a fatal passion leading eventually to his ruin.
Stefan's childhood and family background are based largely on the events surrounding Alex Bariatinsky's liaison with Princess Elizabeth Orbeliani. Damia was substituted as Elizabeth's name in my story to distinguish her more completely as a Georgian princess. And in contrast to the events in
Which brings us to the inspiration for Stefan.
Michael Skobeleff, the son and grandson of a general, himself won his general's epaulets at thirty.
As a youth at university his eccentricities were so expensive and his debts so enormous that his father refused to aid him anymore. He entered the Guards, but again his extravagances exceeded his father's good nature and he was obliged to leave the capital. He entered the Turkistan army, and the Asiatic frontier became for Skobeleff what the frontier of the Caucasus had been for Bariatinsky a generation earlier: a place to either find himself or lose himself.
His expedition to Khiva, however, where with only three Turkoman guides he reconnoitered three hundred and seventy-eight miles of hostile enemy territory in August heats of one hundred and forty-nine degrees, never knowing where they would find water, made him a sensation. Promotions were rapid for him. Asia was the perfect training ground for audacious young officers, and thanks largely to his superlative tactical and strategic abilities, the Khanates of Khiva and Kokand were annexed to the Russian Empire.
He was rewarded with the Governorship of Kokand.
Skobeleff actually did ride into battle on a white horse, dressed in his white dress uniform, covered in perfume and carrying his sword with the diamond hilt, in order, he said, that he might die with his best clothes on. Less facetiously, he wore white in battle so 'my fellows can see where I am and know, therefore, whither to follow.'
He was called Akh-Pasha by the Turks, meaning the White General, and Osman Pasha, the Turkish commander in the west, predicted that one day Skobeleff would be the Commander-in-Chief of the whole Russian army.
Michael Skobeleff died instead at thirty-seven in a Saint Petersburg brothel under mysterious circumstances.
He had begun to become politically active once the war was successfully concluded, speaking out in Russia and abroad in support of Pan-Slavism. He was perhaps too powerful and too popular to be allowed such exposure and he'd acquired many enemies on his rapid rise to fame, influential people who took issue with his brash style and immense popularity.
I was devastated the first time I read of his death. He was a man of profound courage and abilities: a poet; a linguist (he spoke several languages including many Asiatic dialects and an unaccented English); a scholar of the classics (Horace, Schiller and Byron were his favorites); a kind commander to his humblest soldier; a brilliant general who compared in stature to Alexander the Great and Napoleon. What a waste, I thought.
With literary license I could offer a kinder fate to Stefan. Michael Skobeleff's spirit lives in him.
SUSAN JOHNSON
is a well-known writer of historical romances who has now, with
