Bernie looked around the room at the tense, worried faces, then back at Natasha. She was pale enough that she wouldn’t need the kabuki makeup women wore in Russia in the here and now. Bernie tried for something vague and unthreatening. “That Shuvalov dude seems like a pretty good guy. Do you think he’d let me send a message home?”
He hadn’t thought it was possible, but Natasha went even whiter.
“Don’t try it right now, Bernie,” she said. “Just leave it for a bit.”
“Are you going to tell me what’s wrong, Natasha? I know there’s something I’m missing here. Besides the armed soldiers, of course. And not seeing Boris for weeks. And the fact that everyone is tiptoeing around like ghosts while Cass is acting like Cass Squared.”
“Colonel Shuvalov is a deti boyar, a retainer of the Sheremetev family, Bernie. Rather like Nikita Ivanovich Slavenitsky is to my family.”
“Yeah. He’s pretty polite. Nice guy,” Bernie said. Not getting what this had to do with the price of beets.
“He goes out of his way to be cordial,” Natasha admitted. Her face got pinched. “But stop and think, Bernie. Colonel Shuvalov doesn’t push it, as you would say. But . . . he’s here for more than one purpose. My family, the Gorchakov family, were once independent princes. We retain the titles and are very wealthy. We’re just not as politically well-connected as some of the other great families. At least we hadn’t been. With the Dacha we were starting to become so. So Colonel Shuvalov has been selected . . .”
“He’s after you?” Now Bernie got it and he didn’t like it. He really didn’t like it. This sort of thing was bad enough when applied to some ordinary down-timer but applied to Natasha . . . ?
Somewhere in a part of his mind that he usually tried to avoid, Bernie understood that his feelings for Natasha had gelled in a certain way. Quite a while ago, in fact. But he still had no idea what to do about it, Russian noble society being what it was—and now this just got dumped on him!
“That’s slavery . . . or something. Like something out of a book! One of my sister’s stupid romance novels.”
Natasha laughed bitterly. “Romance has very little to do with it. Through me, my family and its fortune will serve Shuvalov’s ambitions. Our . . . sons . . . will be boyars, great family boyars.”
“That stinks!”
“Calm down, Bernie. Don’t lose your temper,” Natasha said. “As long as we’re quiet and don’t make a fuss, Colonel Shuvalov will remain polite. He would much prefer to have a . . . mutually supportive relationship. But the relationship itself is in no way optional. Not on my part and not really on his. The basic motivation behind the match is to move my family’s wealth into the Sheremetev family’s control. It’s politics, Bernie. International politics as much as internal. Sheremetev is pro-Polish, anti-Swedish. The patriarch was anti-Polish, and so favored the Swede.”
“And Director-General Sheremetev has a reasonable point,” Filip said. “I like the concepts you up-timers bring, but Gustav Adolf is just another would-be emperor of the world. Not that different from Genghis Kahn or your Napoleon or Hitler.”
“Oh, come on. Gustav Adolf isn’t anything like Hitler,” Bernie said.
“And how is Gustav Adolf different from Adolf Hitler, in the up-timer histories?” Misha asked.
“He’s Swedish, not German.” Nikolai laughed.
“Hitler was . . . would have been . . . Austrian, not German. Gustav Adolf made himself emperor of Germany the same way Hitler did in that other history, and is at war with a lot of the same people. France, England, Poland.
“Which is just fine with me.” Nikolai wasn’t laughing now. “Useless Poles! With their false Dmitris, murder and looting. At least we taught them a lesson at Rzhev.”
“And after that?” Misha asked. “How long before Gustav Adolf’s Operation Barbarossa?”
“He’s too canny for that. After all, the histories make it quite clear how it turned out. Besides, the reports are that he’s out of commission because of the wounds he got at that battle last fall.”
Misha shrugged. “He may well recover. And if he doesn’t, we will have to deal with Oxenstierna, who is no better. Hitler was a lousy general and didn’t understand Russian winters. Gustav Adolf and Oxenstierna are very good generals and do understand Russian winters. That makes them more dangerous than Hitler, the way I see it.”
For a while Bernie let the conversation roll over him. He had been paying a bit more attention to politics since the coup, and he was having a lot of trouble making sense of it all. He appreciated that Gustav Adolf had ridden to the rescue of Grantville in the Croat raid, but he didn’t approve of the USE having a king or the New U.S. being reduced to just another state. It seemed like Mike Stearns had given up too much of what America had been up-time. Maybe he had no choice, but that didn’t make Bernie any more loyal to some Swedish king and his German prime minister.