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returned, clutching tight to her body the basket of fruit and other foods she had gone out to buy. She was astonishing. Her large eyes sloped slightly upwards away from her nose and her rich lips were pressed tightly shut against the wind-blown snow through which she struggled.
    I felt I had seen her before. Suddenly, it dawned on me.
    'She looks like Marie-Louise.'
    'Who?' snorted Dmitry.
    'The new empress of France,' explained Maks.
    'The new Madame Bonaparte,' was my description.
    'Ah! The old Austrian whore,' was Dmitry's.
    All of our comments were to a reasonable degree true. In 1810, Bonaparte had divorced his first wife, Josephine, and wed Marie-Louise, the daughter of the Austrian emperor, Francis the Second. Josephine had been unable to provide Bonaparte with children and the emperor needed an heir. How quickly the French had forgotten what they did to their last Austrian queen.
    'She looks a bit like her, but not much,' said Maks.
    'Who knows?' I replied. 'I've only ever seen one picture, but they are similar.'
    The picture I had seen enchanted me. It was just a print based on a portrait of her, but she seemed to me truly beautiful – much better than Josephine. But then, they said Bonaparte loved Josephine. That's why they had stayed together even without children.
    'Better have him bed some Austrian harlot than touch the tsar's sister,' said Dmitry. 'She was too young. Very wise of Tsar Aleksandr to tell Napoleon to wait until she was eighteen.'
    Dmitry raised his arm. I looked up and noticed that he had made a snowball, which he was preparing to throw at the girl as she trudged her way back to the door of the brothel. However minor it was, it seemed so needlessly cruel that I shoved at his arm with my own as he threw. He was an excellent shot and, even with my hindrance, the snowball hit the wall just inches in front of her face.
    She glanced towards us and, because my arm was raised, assumed that I had been the thrower. The look she gave had such a combination of anger and pride, of asking why I presumed to treat her in such a way, that I felt almost compelled to go and apologize, not just to tell her that it hadn't been me, but to explain why I hadn't tried harder to prevent it, to be forgiven for even knowing the man who had thrown the snowball.
    Dmitry chuckled to himself. 'Did you hear what she said to him on their wedding night?'
    'Who?' I asked.
    'Marie-Louise. To Bonaparte,' replied Dmitry, revealing a greater knowledge of French royal marriages than he had previously shown. 'After he'd screwed her for the first time, she liked it so much she said, "Do it again."'
    I joined in Dmitry's raucous laughter, even though I'd heard the story before. Maksim didn't laugh. At the time, I'd presumed that he simply didn't get it.
    'You know what she'd say?' continued Dmitry through his laughter, indicating the young 'lady' whose resemblance to Marie-Louise had started the whole conversation. 'She'd say "Do it again – second time is half price."'
    This time both Dmitry and Maks laughed, but I didn't. It's one thing to insult a French empress, another to insult a Russian whore.
    As it turned out, she charged by the hour.

CHAPTER II
    T WO HOURS LATER I HAD BEEN LYING ON HER BED, WATCHING her from behind as she sat at the dressing table, brushing her long dark hair. Her name was Dominique.
    'So, why did you throw the snowball at me?'
    'I didn't,' I replied with a self-assurance that I couldn't have expressed to her before. 'My friend did. I was trying to stop him. I wanted to apologize.'
    'That was an odd way to apologize. You seemed to enjoy it. You must love confession.'
    I went over to her and kissed her shoulder. 'It's good for the soul.'
    She pushed me away with a polite, professional firmness. 'And why did you care if I got hit by a snowball?'
    'I don't like winter.' It was a simple answer, but the truth went much deeper, back to the cracked ice of Lake Satschan and the winter of 1805.
    'Can't be much fun living