Chapter 3: The Bachelor's Farewell
The Crimson Fox Tavern had never known silence, and tonight was no exception. The establishment breathed with a life of its own—a great, heaving beast of laughter and clinking glass, of tobacco smoke curling toward the low wooden beams like prayers ascending to a drunken god. Leonid sat at the center of the long table near the back, surrounded by the men who had known him since boyhood, and he was performing.
"To Dmitri!" Nicholas roared, lifting his tankard high enough to slosh ale onto the sawdust floor. "The last of the bachelors to fall! May his chains be gilded and his leash comfortable!"
The table erupted in laughter, a dozen voices joining the toast. Leonid raised his own tankard, the heavy pewter cool against his palm, and drank deeply. The ale was bitter and dark, brewed with something that tasted faintly of oak and smoke. It was good. It was not enough.
Dmitri Orlov—their cousin, though the connection was distant enough to require diagramming—grinned from his place at Leonid's right. He was a ruddy-faced young man of twenty-three, already flushed with wine and anticipation. His betrothed was the daughter of a minor baron, a girl of seventeen with a substantial dowry and, if rumor held, a substantial appetite for the marital bed. Dmitri had spoken of little else all evening.
"I tell you, cousins," Dmitri said, leaning back in his chair with the expansive confidence of a man who had not yet learned the weight of his vows, "the moment I saw Anastasia's face in the candlelight, I knew I was done for. Those eyes. That smile. A man could lose himself in such a woman."
"A man could lose more than himself," his friend Pyotr observed, a married man of five years. "He could lose his freedom, his peace of mind, and the last of his coin if she has expensive taste."
"And yet you wear your chains with pride," Leonid observed, his tone light, practiced. "You speak of your wife as though she were a burden, and yet you hurry home to her every night."
Pyotr's grin was wolfish. "A man can curse the chains while loving the captive. My Katya is a wildfire, and I am happy to burn." He winked at Leonid. "But you would know nothing of that, eh, Manoban? Your Jennie is ice and marble. Beautiful to look at, but a man would freeze before he felt her warmth."
The table laughed. Leonid's smile did not waver, but his hand tightened around his tankard, the metal creaking faintly beneath his grip.
"Come now," he said, his voice smooth as silk over steel. "You speak of my wife as though you have personal knowledge of her. I would caution you against such assumptions, cousin."
Pyotr held up his hands in mock surrender, still grinning. "No offense intended, Leonid. We all know she is a prize. The Kim family's only daughter, and a beauty to rival the Tsarina herself. You did well in your match."
"I did," Leonid agreed, and the words tasted like ash. "I did well indeed."
The conversation moved on, as conversations do when they tread on dangerous ground. Someone ordered another round. The tavern keeper's daughter, a plump redhead with a knowing smile, delivered the drinks with a wink at the youngest man at the table. The fire crackled and spat. The night wore on.
But Leonid had stopped participating.
He drank, because drinking was expected. He nodded when the conversation called for agreement, laughed when it called for mirth. But his mind had drifted, as it always did, to the image of his wife's face across the dinner table. That perfect composition of features, that careful blankness that gave nothing away. He had thought, when he first saw her at their wedding, that he was the luckiest man in the world. She had been so beautiful, so poised, so utterly untouchable in her white silk and pearls. He had vowed to make her smile, to see beneath that mask to the woman beneath.
He had failed.
"Leonid." Nicholas's voice broke through his reverie, low and amused. "You are brooding again. It is unseemly at a celebration."
"I am not brooding," Leonid said. "I am contemplating the nature of happiness. It is a pursuit suited to philosophical minds."
"You are brooding," Nicholas repeated. "And your tankard is empty. Brooding is acceptable if accompanied by drink, but it is unconscionable when sober."
Leonid looked down at his tankard, then back at his brother. Nicholas's dark eyes held a knowing glint that Leonid found suddenly unbearable.
"I will get more wine," Leonid said, rising from his seat before anyone could protest. "The ale grows thin. I require something with more substance."
He made his way to the bar, weaving through the crowd of revelers. The Crimson Fox was packed tonight, a cacophony of voices and bodies pressing close. Pipe smoke curled through the candlelight, thick enough to taste. Somewhere in the corner, a musician was playing a lute, the melody half-drowned by the roar of conversation.
The bar itself was a long stretch of polished mahogany, scarred by decades of tankards and knives. Behind it, shelves of bottles caught the light, amber and ruby and deep green. Leonid leaned against the counter, signaling the barkeep.
"Your finest brandy," he said. "And keep the bottle coming."
The barkeep, a grizzled man with a nose that bore the map of a thousand broken blood vessels, raised an eyebrow. "Trouble, my lord?"
"No trouble," Leonid said. "Merely thirst."
The brandy arrived, and Leonid drank it more quickly than was seemly. It burned going down, a welcome fire against the cold that had taken root in his chest. He poured another measure and drank again.