Page 24 of The Tsarina's Favorite
A trail of drops and a large brown blemish stained her pink satin skirt.I wished I had the nerve to do it to someone intentionally.And if so, I would have chosen a better target with two pitchers full of kvass instead of simply overfilling a glass by momentary inattention.
“My apologies, my lady.”
I set the pitcher down on the table and knelt to wipe up the spill with my sleeve, stained by kvass too with many such incidents of cleaning myself up.
She twitched her skirt away from me.“Don’t you dare touch me.”
A paperweight flew over the gathering of ladies and smashed against the wall at the other side of the room.The hideous noise brought the room to silence.
The tsarina did not have to rise from her chair to command the attention of everyone in the room.
“I cannot hear myself think,” she said, staring down everyone who dared make a noise.She noticed me on the floor and raised a brow.“And what are you about, Mikhail?”
“I was cleaning up a spill, ma’am.”
“He did it on purpose,” the countess accused.
I did not defend myself because I didn’t think it would matter.
“In this instance, I highly doubt it,” the tsarina said after brief assessment.“He’s always been more fond of the ladies than he should be.Just let him clean it up.”
“I refuse to let him touch me,” Ekaterina lamented.“He’s disgusting.Just look at him!”
The tsarina took another aloof examination of me and then, as if seeing me for the first time, her eyes widened.She gestured me over, and I obeyed, presenting myself for inspection.
The engineer and his assistant both studied me from the other side of the table too.Wordless glances traveled between them and back to the other men who stood patiently waiting to hear about instruction on the ice palace.
“You are disgusting, aren’t you?I suppose I will have to do something about that,” she gestured to the stained costume, “before our visitor arrives.”She fell into deep thought while staring at me, her mind working over what could be done with me after she had set such a precedent.
“Your Majesty?”the engineer ventured.“The collapsing wall?”
The tsarina tore her gaze away from me and flicked it over to the engineer.“We have our traditional methods of ensuring solid buildings.I don’t know why you bother me with this.”
“That would be murd—” the engineer protested.
“Do whatever you have to.That is the Ilyichian way.Even I do what must be done.You see this?”She gestured to me with her eyes alone.“I had to ruin a favorite to teach everyone a lesson.We all make sacrifices.”
“Are you giving us permission for immurement, ma’am?”
“By any means necessary includes immurement,” the tsarina sighed.“I’m sure someone on the work force has a wife or a daughter or some other poor female relation they won’t mind sacrificing for the greater glory of the country.”She paused and then laughed to herself.“Maybe I should offer Princess Alaina,” she said, her tone a jest but the edge one I knew as a threat.“Since she couldn’t give my nephew children before he died, maybe she could finally do Ilyichia some good after all.”
The ladies laughed.The engineers squirmed.And I pitied the princess who wasn’t here to defend herself but probably knew what they said about her in her absence anyway.
