“I wouldn’t mind a visit here now and then as long as it didn’t prevent my travels. Caroline could have a pony and I could keep horses. With ninety-six acres there are plenty of trails to explore.”
“But, with Southampton, we’d have two summer places.”
“With Caroline’s lungs—we need this, Henry.”
“I don’t know,” he said, toeing the wood chips.
Henry was selling me, of course. But it was lovely being sold by him.
“You must have imagination, Henry. Given time and money, I suppose we could make that kitchen workable.”
“We can just stay in the city. Who needs the fresh air?”
“If you don’t buy it Henry, I will.”
He smiled at me, his blue eyes bright in the growing darkness. “If you insist. All right then, consider this place ours. We’ll call it ‘The Hay’ after Grandfather’s place in England and I’ll have a pony delivered for my girl, a little gelding with pinto markings. How does that sound?”
He held me out from him. “And don’t worry, you won’t be stuck here. I wasn’t going to tell you until the day of, but I’m arranging a trip—”
“Oh, Henry.”
“I can’t tell you where we’re going, but I know you’ll like it.” He smoothed one hand down my cheek. “I want to go everywhere with you.”
I clasped his forearm. “Please tell, Henry. Via the Orient? We can’t go anywhere near the fighting in Europe, of course. It feels wicked to plan a glorious trip when Sofya is stuck at home in such dire straits.”
“This war will be over soon and she’ll come visit you. If the conflict winds down soon she could even meet us.”
“Is it India, Henry? Sofya would love the Pink City.”
It was all I could do not to shoot through the roof with happiness. How could one person be so lucky? What a picture that trip conjured—Mother, Caroline, all of us, trunks loaded, traveling the world together, Sofya and family, too.
We all piled back into the car that afternoon as darkness descended on The Hay, a new lightness to us all, the feeling one gets when embarking on a momentous purchase, no matter how impractical—the feeling your life is about to be enlarged, profoundly changed, with no going back.
“Well it looks like we’ve found another house,” I said.
“Let’s put the top down,” Henry said. “Celebrate.”
“But—”
He turned and smiled at me in the backseat and lit his cigar, the blue flame turning the tip of his cigar the color of molten lava. “Let’s live a little.”
“Yes, let’s,” Mother said. “It isn’t every day you find a house that needs you this badly.”
Thomas stepped out of the driver’s seat and wrestled the canvas top down, and as we turned out of the gravel driveway the top of the windscreen knocked the branch of a chestnut tree and smooth white blossoms rained into the car.
Mother tilted her face up to meet them. “What a wonderful omen that is,” she said as we headed off toward Manhattan.
CHAPTER
5
Sofya
1916
More than two years after Eliza left us and made her way home to New York, we shuttered our townhouse and fled the city. Once Germany had declared war on Russia, France, and Belgium, things had gradually worsened. At first Russia greeted the news of war with joy, sending soldiers off to cheers and marching bands on Nevsky Prospekt. But after our huge defeat and retreat from Galicia things spiraled downward.
There were no lavish dances those winters. The young men who enjoyed the balls two seasons before never returned and lay fallen in far-off forests. The war ruined our economy and gobbled up precious food. Soldiers deserted and joined sailors and other hungry Russians in the streets shouting for an end to the fighting.
By the autumn of 1916, a rash of terrorist robberies of the treasurer’s carriages had the Finance Ministry worried and Father’s colleagues tapped him to take important documents to the country for safekeeping. Father judged it safer there for the family as well, so we returned to our country house an hour south, near the village of Malinov, two carriages of luggage and attendants in tow. How I yearned for the shelter of that sweet house.
We left at daybreak to attract less attention, but the rabble quickly recognized our escape since we traveled by showy carriage, the Ministry’s motorcars having been requisitioned for the war effort. Agnessa, Father, Luba, two-year-old Max, and I sat in the first carriage, the gaudiest, its gilded doors painted with naked cherubs and dancing nobility, the tsar’s imperial crest painted on every panel. A line of people waiting for cigarettes outside a tobacco shop wound into the street and slowed us, causing unfortunates to swarm the carriage.
There was a chill in the air as the sun rose.
A coatless mother held a wasted infant up to our window. “She’s starving.”
Our eyes met and I looked away, feeling the shame of my own well-fed child on my lap.
Men in ragged military uniforms converged upon our convoy and brought us to a crawl. They craned their necks to see into the carriage and hoisted a red banner: Land and Freedom! How many German spies were there in that crowd spreading propaganda of unrest? A cold wave ran through me. It seemed a vast, hideous dam was about to break.
On leave from military school, where he trained cadets, my husband Afon rode next to us as best he could, his horse skittish as he held his crop above the reach of grasping hands.
A pebble struck Agnessa’s window, causing us all to jump, and a starburst crack spidered through the glass. My son cried out and buried his face in my skirt.
“Ivan,” Agnessa said. “Tell the coachman to turn back. We’ll try another day.”
To Agnessa’s window, someone lifted a brightly kerchiefed old woman no bigger than a child, and the crone waved and smiled to reveal toothless gums. Expecting a kind gesture, Agnessa waved back, whereupon the old woman spat upon the window.
Agnessa turned to me, tight-lipped. “I can’t do this.”
Father adjusted his spectacles, held Luba close with one arm and hugged his green, metal box with the other, gaze fixed on the crowd. “There’s no turning back now, my darling. But they could take this carriage apart in minutes if they chose to.”
All at once the coach lurched to one side and then the other.
Agnessa brought one hand to her throat. “Ivan—”
I leaned toward the window to see soldiers in dirty uniforms, their epaulets ripped off, press their shoulders to the carriage and rock it to and fro. Most brandished sabers and flags, the bayonets of their rifles poking out of the crowd at all angles. A group sang “La Marseillaise,” which had started to replace our Russian anthem.
The carriage tipped and Agnessa slid toward me on the seat, pinning Max between us.
Afon slapped one of the soldiers with his crop. “There are children here.”
The soldier swung around, holding his shoulder as if stung. “Bourgeois pig.”
A voice came from the crowd. “Hold on. That’s Captain Stepanov. From the academy.”
“I’ll be,” said another. “Make way, citizens!” The men pushed their way through the masses shouting, “My good teacher coming through!”
“Why should we?” someone in the crowd called out. “Take them all.”
“Be courteous, comrades. He’s an old friend.”
Soon the crowd gave way and we picked up speed.
“This was a one-time pass,” one of the men called out as we rolled by.
“Don’t expect such special treatment again,” another shouted and we left the rabble behind.
Afon doubled back to free the other carriages and I wiped my palms dry on my skirt. How often Afon’s good reputation had helped us through such situations lately.
Agnessa touched the cracked window. “How can they deface the tsar
’s property?” She reached under her seat and released her little dog Tum-Tum from his canvas carrier. “I worry about the tsarina, alone with the children.”
I smoothed one hand down my son’s back. “Please. This is her fault.”
Father sent me a warning glance, for he seldom allowed criticism of the imperial couple. But how frustrating it was to see the tsarina run beautiful Russia into the ground.
Little Max pulled himself up and stood on the seat next to me, his eyes extra blue with unshed tears, angelic with his mass of baby curls.
As the carriage swayed I held him around his waist and searched for signs of injury, running my fingers along his arms and legs.
He cupped my cheeks in his two hands and turned my face toward him. “Mama?”
“Yes, my love?”
“Un biscuit?”
I pulled a biscuit from the wicker hamper at Agnessa’s feet and he took it in his fist.
Max settled on my lap, burrowing himself into the soft folds of my silk coat and I breathed in the luscious scent of him, of French baby soap and sour milk. What a lucky child he was. If not for an accident of birth he might have been in that crowd.
Luba rode next to Father, their backs to the coachman above. She was a perfect, scaled-down, female echo of Father, with his wide brow, oval face, and keen eyes that missed nothing. Almost twelve years old, Mother’s “late in life” child, Luba sat coatless, the yellow scarf the tsarina herself had given her for her name day looped about her neck, a black smudge of ink staining the left cuff of her dress sleeve. She tucked a tangled lock of hair behind one ear, aimed Father’s old sextant out the window, and squinted through the eyepiece.
“Do put that thing away,” Agnessa said in Russian, which she only spoke when she was cross with us or to the servants since her own mother had only allowed French spoken in their Moscow home. She unearthed a cotton wool–wrapped orange from among the tinned delicacies in the lunch basket. “No man will marry a girl so fixed on the stars, Luba.”
“Well that’s good, Agnessa, since she’s twelve,” I said. “Trying to marry her off like a peasant girl?”
Agnessa lifted the orange to her nose and inhaled its sweet perfume. With its vivid color and pebbled skin, it looked like a thing dropped from another planet.
“Marriage stifles creativity,” Luba said, adjusting the sextant mirror. “I’m more interested in determining latitude.”
“Dear God,” Agnessa said. “Mind the paneling.”
The tsar himself had loaned us the carriages and we five rode in the first. I brushed two fingers along the red velvet–upholstered seat and shuddered. The whole coach interior was covered in it, tufted, like the inside of a nobleman’s casket. I was happy Agnessa kept the windows closed, still jumpy from the mob scene in the city.
“This coach belonged to Catherine the Great,” Agnessa said.
Luba squinted at the ledger in which she wrote her celestial calculations. “It would be greater if it had a lamp—” We hit a pothole and all bounced up off our seats. “And better springs.”
The second coach, plainer but completely serviceable, held five household maids and Max’s Swiss nanny Justine who sobbed most of the day from homesickness and jumped at the smallest sound, expecting the Germans to be at our doorstep any minute. The third, an ordinary transport coach, held the luggage: Agnessa’s six seal fur–covered trunks, one packed tight with tissue-wrapped family silver and six wood-painted icon panels of her favorite saints, and a box containing her dog Tum-Tum’s canopy bed. Our three small valises and a crate of Mr. Gardener’s Katharina Zeimet roses, which had been flourishing in the Ministry’s hothouse, fit in between it all, tight as a Chinese puzzle.
I relaxed a bit as Afon rode up next to us on his favorite brown gelding. Would he be able to protect us there in the woods, until his service orders came? From a distinguished military family, Afon Afonovich Stepanov was tired of teaching at the academy and eager for battle.
How had he come to love me, this handsome man? It would have been lovely to ride in that second carriage, alone with Afon and our baby—to talk about his impending departure and have little Maxwell all to ourselves.
But soon I’d be free to walk about the grounds with our son. To ride with Afon in the woods and maybe find a mossy bower where we could—
Agnessa slung the curtain back from the oval window behind our seat. “The last carriage is lagging….”
Father slid his metal box under the seat and then opened his newspaper. “Perhaps the horses suffered strokes from hauling the contents of your sitting room.”
“You’d prefer to sit on sacks stuffed with hay?” Agnessa asked.
What did Father see in Agnessa, so unlike my carefree mother in every way? Had he wanted a model replacement mother for his daughters, to teach them the ways of court? If so, his plan backfired, for my one goal was to live a simple country life as my mother had.
Father turned his attention to the newspaper, as his felt bowler hat, gray and soft as a mole’s underbelly, sat on the seat next to him, hopping about as if alive with each bump of the carriage.
I pulled a stack of letters from my hamper. Just seeing Eliza’s fine handwriting on the envelopes calmed me. I opened one and read aloud as Max batted the rest about.
Henry has plunged into agriculture, bought a decrepit country house, and is planning to inhabit it, as if there is no war on at all. How I hate the word “neutral.” If I could spur this country to the aid of Europe and Russia, too, I would. The kaiser is a common thug and the thought of France falling to him is almost as terrible as him barreling into Petrograd harming you and darling Max! I have a terrible feeling Germany will stop at nothing….
“I can’t get used to hearing St. Petersburg called Petrograd,” Luba said. “Seems ridiculous to change a city’s name just to make it less German-sounding.”
Agnessa looked out the window. “I’m tired of the war.”
“Eliza is entirely correct about the kaiser,” Father said. “Says right here Germany is using poison gas at Verdun.”
Agnessa batted the thought away. “That paper reports the most hideous things.”
“Should they only report news you are happy with?” Luba asked.
“Yes, actually. They say now the ladies-in-waiting give the tsarina only good news.”
“The ostrich puts its head in the sand at its peril,” Father said.
The fighting had grown worse every day for Russia, as Germany and Hungary stomped over the tsar’s troops and our allies Belgium and France. Would Afon be sent to France? How good it would be to have Eliza there next to me, to help make sense of it all and keep our spirits high.
Luba pulled Father’s handkerchief from his pocket and dabbed at his brow.
“This is a war without end,” he said. “We need to start living more modestly.”
Agnessa sulked. She looked beautiful even when cross, which was much of the time. “In London, their sitting rooms are never under-equipped; Paris, too. If only we could be in Tsarskoe Selo with the tsar and the rest of good society. It will be a long winter out here.”
I slid Eliza’s letters back in the hamper. “We’ll make do. And you can be there in half an hour by carriage from Malinov.”
How often we’d visited the royal family at Tsarskoe Selo, “Tsar’s Village,” a lavish compound of palaces and parks, fifteen miles south of St. Petersburg. It was home to Alexander Palace, the royal family’s favorite summer retreat, and the lavish Catherine Palace, the walls inlaid with lapis lazuli or amber.
“Alexei has a real motorcar there at Alexander Palace,” Luba said. “Rides it through the halls.”
“When you are heir to the throne, you can have a motorcar,” Agnessa said.
“Perhaps the tsarina will call on you here,” Father said.
Agnessa smiled at that and settled b
ack into the red velvet. “The tsarina? In Malinov? No. They all prefer the seaside. Perhaps I’ll lure them with a visit to the fortune seer—”
“That poor woman in the woods?” I asked.
“You’ll have callers,” Father said.
“From the village? No one suitable.”
Agnessa’s little dog roused and squinted as if seeing us for the first time. The phenomenon of dog and owner resembling each other was never stronger than with my stepmother and her Russian Toy, Tum-Tum; the slight frame, the amethyst collars tight around their necks, the auburn sable coats, the wet brown eyes, and alert expression. Having birthed no human children of her own, it was as if the dog were a product of her own womb. The size of a plump quail, Tum-Tum would provide no protection.
“There’s town!” Luba called out as we passed the turnoff to the village.
Malinov resembled every other good-sized village in northern Russia, with one main dirt street down the middle bisecting two high rows of simple log homes known as izbas and small shops, the imposing white, onion-domed church in the center of it all.
Just past the village turnoff we passed the old imperial rope factory, a square, brick building, which Father had bought and converted into a linen factory. He’d convinced the tsar to electrify the old place so villagers could work two shifts weaving flax imported from other villages into linen, and he split the proceeds with the tsar. Father smiled as we passed. That factory saved so many peasants from backbreaking days working the fields.
Father craned his neck as we passed. “There are crates stacked up in the yard. I’ll stop by tomorrow and see they’re taken away.”
“Those peasants,” Agnessa said. “They practically live at church but it’s you they should worship.”
Father went back to his paper. “They deserve every kindness.”
Max burrowed into the crook of my arm and slept as I dozed, half alert for bandits. I woke as we drew closer to home, the trees closing in on the road splashed with autumn colors. Luba opened the carriage window and slapped the leaves with her hand.
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