The Trojan Icon (Ethan Gage Adventures Book 8) Read Online Free Page A

I was just becoming respectable. By thunder, had the girl even winked?
    “First let us spend time as spies together,” she said brightly to my wife. “Shall we say tomorrow at ten? I’ll have an officer call at your apartment. We’ll make it a picnic.”
    “Certainly, tsarina,” said Astiza, who was not certain at all.
    “Elizabeth!” boomed the cello-deep voice of Alexander’s mother. “We’re neglecting our other guests!” The royal party pushed deeper into the crowd. Elizabeth’s silken gown swirled as she moved to rejoin them, her husband’s mistress now closer to the tsar than she was. Nobles parted to let the tsarina through and then closed around her like water.
    Prince Dolgoruki and the Prussian Von Bonin, meanwhile, were in deep conversation. Then they fixed their decidedly unfriendly gaze upon me.

 
     
    CHAPTER 3
     
     
     
     
     
    I received my own unexpected invitation to rendezvous with Czartoryski that midnight in his study at the Winter Palace. This vast edifice is on the embankment of the Neva River in the middle of St. Petersburg, and, as the name implies, the windows are smaller and the fireplaces more numerous than at Catherine’s summer place. It’s so vast that different wings are painted rose, green, and pale blue, as if a single color were insufficient to cover it all. The plaza on the palace’s landward side is big enough to muster an army, and in all directions in this government town of two hundred thousand are monuments such as the Admiralty, the War Ministry, and bulbous cathedrals as intricately painted as Easter eggs.
    I walked in the hushed dark to our meeting, the streets frozen, and presented my written invitation to silver-helmeted dragoons. A chamberlain led me up a cavernous marble staircase and down vast paneled corridors, life-sized paintings of stern ancestors giving me the eye. The magnificence was intimidating, and yet I was also proud to have a foothold in this sumptuous world. Apparently I was important. Apparently I was necessary. And the foreign minister was a man who trusted me. Did that mean I could finally trust?
    Czartoryski’s office was an imposing but impractical twenty feet high, its fire giving a cone of heat against relentless cold that frosted the windows. Beyond the glass I could see the lanterns of sledges loaded with firewood that skidded on the frozen Neva. St. Petersburg is an arctic Venice built on forty-five islands with three hundred bridges. I turned back toward the fire and Czartoryski offered me a chair, some port, and conspiratorial intimacy as a clock gonged twelve.
    “I’ve been a soldier,” the prince began, “a prisoner, an exile, a public servant to the royal family which confiscated my family estates, an ambassador to a Sardinian king without a kingdom, an antiquarian, an art collector, and now foreign minister for the nation that dismembered my own. Our peripatetic careers have something in common, Ethan Gage.”
    You’ve also been the Tsarina’s lover,
I silently amended, and it was no wonder the empress had succumbed to his charm. Czartoryski’s face was chiseled like a classical statue, with strong chin, regal nose, and gently slanted, liquid dark eyes that could seduce a diplomat or woman in turn. His hair curled magnificently to his shoulders and his body was lithe, just the type to scale Vesuvius or the royal bed. “We’re both curious, too,” I said. “You about America and France, and me about Poland and Russia.”
    “Our cozy cabal.”
    I glanced about. Czartoryski’s office welcomed visitors like the den of an explorer. There was an enormous globe on which fingers had rubbed Eastern Europe almost bare. More maps were pinned over bookcases, and a long birch table was covered with treaties, reports, newspapers, and pamphlets in several languages. Leather-bound books, wool oriental carpets, and gleaming wood expressed confidence that our planet can be measured and understood.
    “Nations are peculiar