Summary
In the twilight of Imperial Russia, a governess named Lisza Tapenko ascends from candle-lit nurseries to the gilded chambers of Prince Arbassoff, slipping into the dead princess’s corset and psyche with the stealth of a serpent gliding across ermine. Court telescopes compress her ambition into a single, lethal point: she will be consort or nothing. The prince, shackled by heraldic prejudice, offers silk sheets without a crown; scorned, Lisza heeds the sulphur whispers of Vassya, her old fire-brand lover, and flees to Geneva’s revolutionary hive where exiled poets sharpen iambic pentameters into bayonets. Yet bloodlines call back: the heir, a boy who still smells of her bedtime stories, begs for the only mother he remembers. A chastened prince dispatches jeweled envoys; Lisza returns, now legally Princess Arbassoff, but smuggles dynamite beneath her ball-gowns. Each murdered minister receives a carmine rose—an autograph in petals—until the high command demands the ultimate signature: her husband’s extinction. On a night of blizzard and brass-band, she uncorks the underworld, detonating the palace and herself in one crimson sigh, turning love, revolution and royalty into smoke that still smells of gunpowder and rose-water.
Synopsis
After the death of Princess Arbassoff, Lisza Tapenko, a governess in the household of Prince Arbassoff, fills her place in everything but name. When the prince refuses to marry her because of the difference in their social positions, Lisza's former lover, Vassya, urges her to join the cause of the revolution. Smarting under the prince's refusal, she does so and leaves for Switzerland, the headquarters of the revolutionaries. The prince eventually yields to his son's pleas for Lisza's return and agrees to make her his wife. As Princess Arbassoff, Lisza still continues her activities with the revolutionaries, assassinating government officials and leaving a red rose on each of her victims. Torn between her love for the prince and her love of Russia when the revolutionaries order her to slay her husband, Lisza's devotion to the cause triumphs and she dynamites her house, meeting her death along with the prince's.
