Bred By the Tsar (Bred By The Royals #5)

Konstantin

My mother has hired a stranger to live in my home, and she did it without asking me.

The dossier sits on the desk where her secretary left it.

One page. A photograph clipped to the corner — a girl, American, nineteen, squinting into a sun that isn't this country's.

Hazel. No family is listed in the box where the family info should go.

Educated by the state, the way orphans are educated everywhere, which is to say, barely and then not at all.

Nineteen.

I slide the page back into the folder without reading the rest. It doesn't matter what the rest says.

My mother has decided the children need a softer hand than the last three women provided, and rather than bring me the matter, she has simply solved it, because she is the Dowager Tsaritsa and solving things is the only love she knows how to give.

Snow comes down past the window, like it intends to bury us all by spring and is in no hurry about it. The study is warm. The icon in the corner catches the lamplight, Saint Nikolai with his two fingers raised, and I look at him to say I make sure he is still there, and then I ignore him.

The girl arrives tomorrow. I will dismiss her by the end of the week. The children do not need softness. The children need to learn what I learned, which is that the world is cold and the wise build their houses accordingly.

I would know. I built mine out of ice, and it has never once let the weather in.

My children are motherless. It was a good marriage. I have said this to a great many people and most of them believed me, because it was true.

Tatiana came to me the way a treaty comes, with seals and signatures and two old families breathing out at once.

She was clever and well-mannered, and she did not flinch at what I am, which is more than most could manage.

We were fond of one another. I want that written somewhere, in case I am the only one who remembers it: we were fond.

I brought her tea in the mornings. She laughed at the few things I said that were meant to be funny.

When Lena was born, she gripped my hand and called me by my name — Konstantin, just the name, no title — and for a moment I thought perhaps the thing the poets ruin themselves over would arrive in me late, as some men go grey late, and I waited for it.

It never came.

I was fond of my wife, but I was not in love with her, and I made my peace with that, the way I've come to terms with every other thing I cannot change. Our marriage was an agreement, not the stuff of fairy tales.

Then, the cough that wasn't just a cough. The scans. The word. The doctors said the word “cancer” quietly, as though saying it gently would make it a gentle thing. She was eleven weeks along with our second child when they told her the only treatment that might save her would kill what she carried.

She didn't hesitate. I have balked at smaller things than my own death, and she did not balk at all.

No, she said, with her hand flat on a belly that wasn't even round yet, and that was the end of the discussion.

I let it be the end because, God forgive me, because I did not love her enough to convince her to fight for her life.

Misha was born in the spring. Tatiana lived nine days past him.

Long enough to hold him. Long enough to name him.

Long enough to look at me from the bed with everything drained out of her but the clear-eyed patience she'd always had, and to say you'll manage, which was not a question, and was the last thing my wife ever said to me.

She died for our son. She gave the one thing I have never given anyone — all of it, the whole of herself, without flinching — and I stood at the foot of the bed and felt grief, real grief, clean and cold and correct.

But not the other thing. Never the other thing.

So I know what I am now, with a certainty I find almost restful. A woman died for me and I could not love her. Whatever lets a man fall in love, I was simply born without it, the way some are born without sight. There's no use grieving a sense you've never had.

It makes things simple. The court wants me to marry again, for the bloodline, for the spare they whisper about as though Misha were already a faded photograph.

They send me daughters of good houses at dinners and name days, and I am unfailingly polite.

I will choose one eventually, the way I'd choose a horse, on her merits, and she will understand the arrangement because women of those houses always do.

Love is for men who can afford to lose their footing. I rule. I cannot afford it. I closed that door three years ago, and I had the great mercy of knowing it was already painted shut.

I turn off the lamp. Saint Nikolai goes dark with the rest of the room.

Tomorrow, some American woman my mother found in a file will move her single suitcase into the east wing and begin teaching my children their letters. I know that within the week, I will thank her for her trouble and send her home with a generous severance and never think of her again.

Nothing reaches me anymore, I think, with the satisfaction of a man checking a lock he knows is sound.