AGAINST A CRIMSON SKY

Four Polish aristocrats negotiate the upheavals of the Napoleonic era.

Martin’s second takes up where his first, Push Not the River (2003)—based on the actual diaries of Countess Anna Berezowska—leaves off. Anna’s scheming cousin, Countess Zofia, has saved her life during flight across a bridge from a Warsaw suburb sacked by the Russians. Rescued from drowning by a handsome peasant and nursed back to health, Zofia returns to Warsaw, pregnant, to take up residence in her suitor Count Pawel’s townhouse. Meanwhile, Anna (elevated to Princess by King Stanislaw) has fled to her country estate, Topolostan. She marries true love Jan, who attempts to love her son Jan Michal, product of a rape. Anna gives Jan a son, Tadeusz. Poland has been partitioned among Austria, Prussia and Russia, and King Stanislaw, one of Zofia’s former conquests, is exiled. Zofia, now the mother of Izabel, puts off Pawel’s frequent marriage proposals, hoping to marry into the highest strata of the upper crust. Friendship with Charlotte, an ex-patriot French princess, nets Zofia entrée to all the best parties. Pawel is embroiled in a Masonic plot to groom Tadeusz to be the next Polish king, a plan threatened by a Prussian spy who also has designs on Anna’s estate and person. Jan and Pawel join Napoleon’s Polish allied forces, who hope to be rewarded with Polish independence. In Jan’s absence, Anna gives birth to his daughter, Basia. Napoleon falls into and too quickly out of Zofia’s clutches. With the men perennially at war and her sons in military school, Anna joins Zofia in Warsaw to raise their daughters. Years pass and Napoleon launches his ill-conceived 1812 assault on Moscow. Jan Michal and Tadeusz are soldiers and Anna tends casualties in Warsaw. Poland becomes a Russian Duchy. By the end, Napoleon is on Elba, Anna’s family has survived devastating loss and war wounds and Zofia, whose irrepressible bravado steals the show, gets her just deserts.

Polish history buffs will be riveted, general readers less so.