Written on the Wind, page 3
What had he done to deserve such a fate? She headed upstairs, then down the corridor to her mother’s private chapel on the second floor. The sanctuary was covered in Russian icons and looked nothing like the rest of the house. She quickly lit a dozen votive candles, then sank onto the kneeler to pray for the man she cared for but did not truly know.
Could he be guilty of the charges? Dimitri was always so melodramatic, bemoaning his misery and discomfort in “the frozen wasteland that is my life.” She always suspected he was a bit of a hypochondriac, for how could a man be “practically on his deathbed,” as he often complained, and then moments later send her messages overflowing with lyrical prose sparkling with humor? He had the soul of a poet as he paid homage to stars that glittered like diamonds on the velvety night sky or the joy at seeing the first violets of spring peeking out of the wet snow to defy the harsh climate. His observations were keen, sharp, and humorous. He wrote better English than most native speakers.
She rested her forehead in her hands. It was impossible to know the circumstances of his dereliction of duty, but she would not be his judge. Dimitri had enough loyalty to his country to accept an appointment in the middle of Siberia for the past three years. He’d once told her he took the dreadful assignment because he wished to prove himself worthy of his title.
For hundreds of years my family has dined on the nectar of privilege. I wish to venture out of our halcyon valley and into the frozen wasteland, building an iron rail to conquer time and distance.
Over the years, Dimitri moved from outpost to outpost, following the newly constructed railway as it tracked toward the Pacific. He negotiated for provisions, kept the supply lines operating, and worked with the local population to ensure rights of way. In recent months, he’d expressed concern over the Boxer Rebellion, which raged across the border in China, where insurgents had turned violent. Dimitri worked less than five miles from the border with China. Could he have gotten caught up in the violent rebellion? It seemed unlikely, but so did his arrest and conviction.
Someday she might learn more, but no matter what happened, she would always consider him a friend. Dimitri was a man born into unimaginable wealth and privilege, and yet he set out for Siberia to prove himself to his czar and his country. And if he balked in the face of battle . . . well, he wouldn’t be the first man to do so.
After saying prayers for Dimitri, Natalia extinguished the candles and retreated to her bedroom, where she set her favorite Brahms record on the turntable of her phonograph. What a miracle of modern technology that the thin disc coated with a layer of wax could contain the majesty of a Brahms symphony. She cranked the handle, set the stylus onto the record, and let the moody music fill her bedroom.
Then she indulged in a unique sort of torture by rereading the telegrams she and Dimitri had exchanged over the years.
Dimitri’s initial messages to her were short and businesslike until the day he alerted her of a slowdown on the construction of a bridge. Natalia asked for a revised timetable and an explanation behind the slowdown.
It should have been a simple question. All she wanted to know was how long the delay would last and if there was anything she could do to get the schedule back on track, but little did she know that she had pricked a sore point that unleashed centuries of ingrained European resentments.
Count Sokolov complained that his German bridge engineer refused to work with French-supplied concrete mix. The engineer insisted on waiting for a costlier mix from Berlin because it was allegedly superior to what the French could produce, which prompted Count Sokolov to rant about German pedantry.
Heaven save us from the German love of rules. The only good thing ever to have come out of Germany is the incomparable music of Johannes Brahms, and this is a verifiable fact.
Natalia telegraphed a one-word reply: Beethoven?
She feared she might have offended the count with her blunt reply. She didn’t know if he had a sense of humor, and communication through a telegraph wire could be so easily misinterpreted. It took a while for his reply to come through, but when it finally arrived, it contained a keen analysis of the difference between Brahms and Beethoven and why he appreciated Brahms’s ability to incorporate the folk traditions of eastern Europe into his symphonies. Of Beethoven, the count was dismissive:
Beethoven’s compositions are generic romanticism. They sound like they could have been composed anywhere: Berlin, London, Paris, or heaven help us all . . . New York.
Natalia had burst into laughter. Count Sokolov did have a sense of humor, and that day changed the nature of their correspondence forever. The count confessed that he was bored and lonely in Siberia, where most of the workers on the railroad spoke Belarusian, Chinese, or any one of a dozen Mongolian dialects he did not understand. There were a few Russian workers, but most of them were convicts. Those men were glad of the opportunity to knock a few years off their sentences by laboring on the railroad, but their goodwill did not extend to befriending the managers of the construction site, whom they instinctively regarded with hostility.
Count Sokolov’s isolation made him wax poetic over his home not far from Saint Petersburg, and his profound love for the estate was endearing.
I long for the comfort I can find only at Mirosa. The creak of the waterwheel, the fragrance of the apple blossoms on the damp morning air, the golden light over the valley on long summer nights when the sun never fully sets. My grandfather planted a ring of birch trees around the estate because in Russian folklore, birch trees protect against evil. I am a Christian, but still believe those trees have protected Mirosa because the valley seems wondrously suspended in time and preserved like a castle in a snow globe.
She loved Dimitri’s lyrical ramblings, even when they veered into politics. Although love for his homeland came through in almost every message, he was concerned about the continuing decay of the Russian economy, which was mired in natural resources rather than pursuing the opportunities of industrialization. Tensions among the classes grew worse by the year, and he feared for the long-term stability of his family’s investments.
I want to invest outside the country. What do you recommend? Your father is universally famous for his business acumen.
Natalia had been reluctant to suggest any single company for Dimitri to invest his savings and simply said she would trust her father’s bank for its diversified investments.
He took her advice, and over the next few months, Count Sokolov’s secretary in Saint Petersburg began transferring huge sums of money to the Blackstone Bank for investment. Eventually, Count Sokolov acquired a four-percent stake in the bank, which Natalia was pleased to see earned a healthy profit with each quarterly dividend.
Their curious friendship made working with Dimitri a joy. Over time they began calling each other by their first names and engaged in good-natured debates. They both had passionate opinions but could rarely sway the other. The perfect example was Dimitri’s insistence that she read War and Peace. The novel did not sit well with her, and she unleashed her feelings on Dimitri.
Why did you make me read War and Peace? I foolishly began to love and care for those characters, but Tolstoy seems to enjoy making them suffer and inflicting miserable deaths upon them. I shall never forgive you.
His response was not long in coming.
Dearest Natalia. The history of Russia is a litany of grief and sorrow woven into the fabric of our nation. A Russian novelist must dip his pen in his own blood to write his story. You may avert your American eyes if you choose, but there is glory and valor in suffering that transcends our paltry physical lives. I practice it daily.
That dreary message prompted her to ship a copy of Little Women to Dimitri, pronouncing it a faithful representation of real life in all its tragedies, but mostly filled with hope and optimism.
That was last month. She didn’t even know if he’d received it, and now she would never learn what her lonely Russian count thought of Little Women.
On the phonograph, the needle had reached the end of the moody Brahms symphony, but the record kept rotating on its turntable, the needle making a rhythmic clicking sound with each rotation. She plodded over to lift off the needle, her spirit heavy. It looked like Dimitri had found his tragic Russian fate, but she could see no glory or valor in it.
4
Dimitri found a sad irony in riding to a penal colony on the same railroad he helped build. The rhythmic clicking of the train wheels had become the background noise of his world as he was transported farther east with each passing day.
At least he was not uncomfortable. Unlike ordinary criminals, political prisoners were afforded a certain amount of respect by the guards, and Dimitri’s title made this especially true. He had been granted the courtesy of “free command,” a status that allowed him to wear his own clothes, move about without shackles, and mingle with whomever he chose. Security was lax because escape meant almost certain death in the vast wilderness.
The guards loved socializing with him. Each night they played poker, drank vodka, and sang bawdy songs. It had always been easy for Dimitri to make friends, and never had that skill been more important than now. He carefully cultivated the image of a bon vivant, carousing with the guards as though indulging in a last great hurrah before his grim imprisonment. The guards peppered him with endless questions. How big was his estate? Had he met the czar? Was the czarina as beautiful as reported? He was able to truthfully report that he’d seen the czar at the Winter Palace. They hadn’t been introduced, but yes, the czarina was as lovely as reported. The guards also wanted to know about Mirosa, Dimitri’s ancestral home.
It was the only topic he was reluctant to discuss. Mirosa was carved on his soul, a two-thousand-acre estate of unspoiled wilderness alive with birch groves, cedar trees, and of course, the apple orchard that perfumed the air. Summers at Mirosa were tragically short, but while they lasted, it was an earthly paradise. As a boy, he used to explore the woods, sometimes stumbling across sunlit clearings where he would lie on the grass to stare up at the cloudless sky and imagine he was speaking directly to God. He only left Mirosa to prove himself by helping build the czar’s ambitious railroad that was supposed to be Russia’s salvation.
Instead, it had been Dimitri’s undoing.
What was it about Siberia that turned minor aristocrats into major revolutionaries? Prince Kropotkin, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and countless others had been transformed into radicals by the vast Russian landscape. Dimitri didn’t want to be a radical. He only wanted to return to Mirosa, where he could be a guardian of the land, the orchards, and the lake.
He could never return to Mirosa, but he would not meet his end in a prison camp. God had sent him to witness that atrocity for a reason, and Dimitri needed to escape so he could proclaim it to the world.
The train would soon turn north, after which the climate would make escape impossible. That meant he needed to make his bid for freedom soon.
He affected a casual pose as he joined a group of guards for poker. They played hand after hand late into the night. Dimitri didn’t have anything to barter with, but the guards didn’t mind. He was good company, and they had a grand time.
By ten o’clock, Dimitri was examining the cards a young guard had tossed on the table before him. Dimitri’s three-of-a-kind beat Mikhail’s two pair, but he tossed his cards facedown and grinned in good-natured defeat.
“You’ve won again, Mikhail,” Dimitri said with a jaunty salute. “Let’s have another round, shall we?”
“Not unless you and Oleg do the Hopak dance,” Mikhail said, and Dimitri groaned.
The Hopak squat dance hurt his knees, and he wasn’t as young as he used to be. The speed and energy required in the classic folk dance was something few men could master, but the guards loved it, and they were drunk enough to want a show. Oleg was ten years younger than Dimitri’s thirty-four years and could trounce him in the fast and furious squat kicks.
It didn’t matter. The more resigned to his fate that Dimitri seemed, the better. He and Oleg stood back-to-back in the aisle. They held their arms straight out for balance, then sank down into a squat. The others stomped and chanted a rousing accompaniment as Dimitri began the rhythmic kicks.
The ache in his thighs turned to a burn, making his legs feel like weights. Dimitri toppled over within a minute, but Oleg kept at it. Dimitri lay where he fell and shouted his support to Oleg. Other men funneled into the aisle to give it a try, and Dimitri staggered back to a bench to look out the window while the others caroused.
The moonlight cast thin illumination over the endless pine forest. It would be good cover for his escape. He grabbed a shot glass of vodka, stood, and raised it over his head.
“Let us eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we may die!”
The guards cheered, stamped their feet, and drank. Dimitri deliberately sloshed his onto the ground, then grabbed a bottle to refill everyone’s glass but his own. The drunker they were, the better his odds.
Tonight was the night, and fear mingled with elation. One way or the other, he would meet his fate soon.
Dimitri waited until everyone in the compartment had fallen into a stupor, but the train kept barreling eastward. He held his breath as he rolled off the bench and studied the guards. Their snoring and wheezing did not alter as he crept to the doorway, holding his hand over the mechanism as he twisted the handle. If anyone caught him, he would claim he needed to relieve himself, but he got through the door with no one stirring.
Wind tugged his hair as he stood on the open-air platform between the railcars. The train moved at only thirty miles an hour, but the railroad bed was covered with stones, and it would be a hard landing. Would this be the end? The weeks and months ahead were going to be hard, but it was time to act.
Dearest God above, you know what I saw. You know that it can happen again if someone does not put a stop to it. Let me be that man. Let me escape and find my way to freedom. In your name I pray.
He crossed himself, drew a deep breath, and leapt into the darkness.
He landed on his heels but toppled forward, smashing his face against the gravel. But there was no time to waste. He scrambled down the gravel embankment and into the cover of the spindly trees ahead. Pain throbbed in the side of his head, and blood trickled down his face.
The next hours were nothing but a blur of fear as he staggered through the forest, twigs and saplings whipping at his face. Guilt gnawed at him. The guards had been decent men, but once he was discovered missing, things would be hard for them.
He couldn’t afford to worry about them. He was hungry, thirsty, and had four thousand miles to travel before he reached the safety of the Pacific Ocean.
Four thousand miles.
If he obsessed over the magnitude of the journey ahead, he would never make it. With each step he was a tiny bit closer to Port Arthur and salvation. He had nothing in the world but the clothes on his back, a tin cup he’d stolen from the guards, a bit of flint, and the will to survive. There were gold coins sewn into his coat, three diamonds hidden in his shoe, and the single diamond buried in his scalp. They were useless in the middle of the forest, but he would pass villages along the way. Eventually he would reach Port Arthur, board a ship, and seek out his only friend and last remaining asset in the world. Both were in New York. Natalia Blackstone would help him.
Natalia! Had there ever been a more beautiful name? He repeated her name like a talisman as he trekked through the hideous wilderness. Natalia held the keys to the one investment the czar had not been able to seize: a four-percent share in the Blackstone Bank.
It was worth millions. If he could get to New York, he could use that money to shine a spotlight on the atrocity he’d witnessed, but first he had to evade pursuit and survive the immensity of the Russian taiga, the seemingly endless expanse of cedar, spruce, and hemlock trees.
It was October. His breath wasn’t coming out in white puffs, so the temperature wasn’t freezing yet, but that would change as winter deepened. Could he get to Mongolia before the weather made it impossible? The pain from the wounds on his face was savage but wouldn’t kill him. Neither would the stitch in his side or the blisters forming on his feet.
But the cold could kill him, so he had to get to Mongolia ahead of the winter. From there he could use his assets to ride on river barges or buy a horse to take him to Port Arthur.
It felt like forever before the first hint of dawn cut through the forest. Only tiny patches of sky were visible through the canopy of pine needles above him. It was time to find a place to hide while he tried to sleep, but everything looked the same in all directions. There wasn’t any place to hide. Just tall, spindly tree trunks that left him exposed to the sight of any man or beast wandering in the wood.
The best he could do was make a bed of pine needles. He dragged a smattering of broken tree limbs to his makeshift bed to screen him from prying eyes. Dry bark scratched his face and the needles itched. Cold, clawing fear tensed his muscles, but he closed his eyes and tried to pray.
Dear Lord, please let me live long enough to reach Natalia Blackstone.
5
It was the middle of October before Natalia made good on her promise to tour a steel mill with Liam. She had been prepared for the heat. She had been prepared for the harsh orange glare of molten metal. But she hadn’t been prepared for the wall of noise that hit her the moment she stepped inside the mill. The deafening roar of machines and motors was nonstop. Chains clanked, boilers hissed, and hammers forged liquefied metal into finished steel. By the end of the tour, her eyes hurt from the glare, and her clothes were damp with sweat.
Liam had been right about the need to see the workforce in action instead of trying to learn about their working conditions from an industry report. She hadn’t even been doing any manual labor and she felt limp from the heat as she followed Liam outside. They sat at a picnic table in the blessed cool of the mill yard while Liam explained how the newly invented arc furnace meant the workers deserved a pay raise.
