Read Online Princess Daisy by Judith Krantz - Free Book Online Page A

waving the red flags of the revolution, was seen near the Alexandra Bridge. Opposing them, on the other side of the bridge, stood a regiment of guards, the nemesis of rioters. However, the mob continued to press forward and the guards held their fire. Then, in a moment which was to change the history of the world, the two groups merged. Like two drops of water, the masses and the army became one body. As Alexander climbed back up the shadowy slopes for the last run of the day, as Titiana poured hot water from the samovar and offered a cup of tea to a French count, as Vasily, haggard and sad from his years of involuntary internment in Switzerland, bent over newspapers that were three days old, the Russian Revolution began.
    World War I had been over for almost three years when the decision was made to send Alexander away to school. He was only nine years old, and Titiana might possibly have allowed him to continue in the Davos school where he was the undisputed leader of the gang of village boys, self-willed, taller, rougher, stronger and more ready to take a reckless dare than any of them, but Vasily saw clearly that their son was running wild. He had been born a prince but he was in danger of becoming a peasant. Even in a world in which princes were considered obsolete—particularly Russian princes—if they had managed to survive at all, there was the Valensky tradition to honor, and the Valensky fortune to inherit. He must be educated like the noble gentleman he would become.
    “We’ll send him to Le Rosey,” he told his wife. “I’ve already made inquiries. He can start in the fall, just before his next birthday. Now don’t look sad, my dearest—it’sonly at Rolle, not far from here, and in the winter the whole school moves up to Gstaad. It’s so near that Alexander will have no trouble coming home for holidays.”
    Eventually, Titiana accepted the idea as, with the necessary self-absorption of the chronic invalid, she had accepted the fact that her family was doomed to eternal exile, that the world of her girlhood no longer existed and that her disease never slept for long. Hope, in her soul, had been replaced with endurance.
    Each time Alexander came home for vacations, his parents saw how he was being changed by his new life in the world’s most exclusive and expensive boarding school. They noticed little by little how his manners, in the fashion of his international crowd of schoolmates—young potentates, heirs to dynasties—began to show that he was newly comfortable wherever he found himself. He was at ease in their way, a way which was based on a sense of hauteur that eventually turned into the special, superior kind of lofty amusement which clings to the elite of the Le Rosey students, a secret, inward smile. He even acquired a new name—Stash—to which both his parents objected because it was a Polish, not a Russian, diminutive, but which they had to admit suited him in a way that Alexander never had.

4
    S tash had just turned fourteen when he came home, as usual, for the Christmas vacation of 1925. He had reached that age at which the outlines of the man he would become were unmistakably present to an attentive eye. His nose had been broken for the first time in a brawl with the heir to a French marquisate, his curls had been cut short and although he was still far from reaching his full muscular development, he was close to six feet tall. His lips were red with the turbulent vitality of youth and permanently chapped from outdoor sports. His eyes had exchanged their innocence for a gaze in which a hint of the relentlessness of his later years had already appeared.
    As he always did, after a day of sport, Stash left his ski boots outside the chalet for one of the servants to clean. He put on a pair of after-ski boots and slipped into the salon in search of something to eat. He was an expert at moving among his mother’s coterie with a kind of warding-off politeness which prevented them from