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reason why he would do such a thing.”
    Her smile was back, giving him clear warning that he wasn’t going to like her answer. “There is one. Your betrothed is the daughter of your father’s very dear friend, Baron Rubliov. Even you can remember how often Simeon spoke of the baron, how highly he thought of him. Several months out of every year your father went to Russia to visit him.”
    Vasili did remember, and remembered resenting the time his father had spent away from home. Of course, when he and his friends had had their grand tour, it had included Russia and the Imperial Court, and he had learned firsthand what his father would have found so appealing about Russia. The ladies there, at least the aristocrats, were incredibly bold intheir promiscuity. They didn’t even wait for marriage to take lovers, virginity apparently not being as highly prized there as it was in the rest of the world.
    “I, for one, can imagine your father signing this betrothal contract,” the countess went on. “After all, there was no one here in Cardinia whom he liked half as much as he did Constantin Rubliov. He would have been delighted to have his family joined to Rubliov’s.”
    That word “betrothal” was making Vasili see red, and starting to make him panic. “But Rubliov waits fifteen years to bring it to our attention?”
    Maria shrugged. “From the tone of his letter, I would say he didn’t think he was telling us anything we didn’t already know.”
    “But why wait fifteen years, or—what is the girl, just barely out of the schoolroom? Was he just waiting until she grew up?”
    “He doesn’t mention her age, but it doesn’t sound as if she’s that young, for he does mention that she was in no hurry to marry, which is why he hadn’t written about the betrothal before now. He also says that he was waiting for you to write, but since you haven’t…”
    “Let me see that damn letter.”
    She didn’t have to leave the room to retrieve it. Obviously she had expected the demand, and now pulled the letter out of a pocket in her skirt. Vasili tore it open to peruse the fine French scrawl. He had been hoping it had been written in Russian. His mothercould have misinterpreted Russian, because even though they both spoke it fluently, neither of them could read or write it very well. But just about everyone in the Cardinian court could read and write French, and the letter left nothing for misinterpretation. For all its diplomacy, it was a demand for him to honor a betrothal contract that had promised he would marry one Alexandra Rubliov.
    Vasili crumpled the letter in his fist and threw it across the room. It bounced off a vase of flowers and rolled to the floor. He felt an urge to grind it into the carpeting with the heel of his boot. Instead he went to the bottle of vodka he’d left by his chair and tilted it to his lips, uncaring that his mother would find such swilling the height of crudeness. Her tsk ing proved it, but that didn’t stop him from draining half the bottle before he turned to acknowledge her disapproval with a mocking bow.
    Casually now, as if he weren’t seething inside, he said, “Answer his letter, Mother. You can tell him that I’ve already married. Or tell him I’ve died. I don’t care what you tell him, as long as you make sure he understands I can’t marry his daughter.”
    Her back straightened. Her lips pursed for battle. “You most certainly can.”
    “But I won’t.”
    Before the bottle could reach his lips again, she said, “But you will.”
    “No!”
    He shouted it, surprising them both. Henever raised his voice to her, no matter how irritated he was; at least he never had before. But now he was feeling anger, gut-churning fury, and it stemmed from the sensation of having a trapdoor slam shut on him.
    Softer, though no less emphatically, he added, “When I am ready to marry, I will, but it will be my decision, and my choice.”
    He would have liked that to be the end of it. It