Written on the Wind, page 31
She shook off the memories and loaded another crate of records onto the table.
“Tell me that isn’t who I think it is,” Liam said, squinting into the distance. The annoyance in his face caused her to straighten and peer through the fat clumps of falling snow.
Poppy was marching through the crowd, wearing her finest chinchilla furs, her expression triumphant. The evening had been so pleasant until now.
Poppy cut to the front of the line, ignoring the annoyed glances behind her.
“You’ll never guess,” Poppy gushed. “It baffles and amazes me, and I have no idea what Count Sokolov sees in you, but he showed up on our doorstep, looking like death itself, and claims that he wants to see you.”
Natalia looked around, but Dimitri was nowhere in sight, and nothing made sense. “Poppy, I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
Poppy rolled her eyes. “I think he’s being ridiculous and ought to stay home where I can host a proper celebration for him, but he insisted on coming to the park. That cane he uses makes him so slow, but he should be here any moment.”
If this was a joke, Natalia was going to smash this stack of records over Poppy’s head, but her heart was pounding so hard that she couldn’t think straight. She came out from behind the table, scanning the crowds.
There he was.
Dimitri’s tall, slender form was unmistakable. He looked as gaunt and sickly as he’d been in San Francisco, but he was gorgeously attired in a fine black overcoat with a red scarf wrapped around his neck. He was leaning on a gold-handled cane. Scars marred the side of his face, and he walked gingerly, as if each step hurt. But oh, that smile! It cut straight to her heart.
She closed the distance between them, heart pounding as she arrived to stand before him. “What happened to you?” she asked, taking in his ghastly pallor and a fresh scar running from the corner of his right eye down into his beard.
“A bomb in Saint Petersburg,” he said, and she recoiled in horrified surprise. He was supposed to be in his country dacha, not mingling with crowds and anarchists.
She reached out to lay a hand, gentle as a butterfly, against the side of his face.
“Ouch!” he said and flinched back.
“I’m sorry,” she gasped. “Is it still tender?”
“No, your hands are cold.”
She choked off a laugh and wanted to berate him for being such a crybaby except that it was obvious he’d been through something terrible. Every ounce of longing for her sweet, heroic, and terribly dandified dearest friend came roaring back. She wanted to embrace him but didn’t dare, because he truly did look awful.
“Oh, Dimitri, I’m afraid I’ve missed you terribly.”
“I was hoping so.”
“You did?”
“I’ve come all this way to see you, and it would be a shame if you had not suffered at least a little on my behalf. And now here I am. Half-dead on my feet and nowhere to sit down.”
She would fix that! She glanced over her shoulder at Liam. “Get Poppy to help you sell the records!” she called out. Poppy looked aghast, but it would do her stepmother good to stand on her feet in gainful employment for an hour or two.
Natalia led Dimitri to a bench, and he winced as he lowered himself to sit. The light from a nearby lamppost made the hollows on his face look even worse.
She held his hand as he told her of the explosion in Saint Petersburg, how time felt suspended as he watched the explosion unfold before his eyes, incapable of escaping the bricks and glass that came flying at him. He suffered a concussion from the blast, as well as cuts on his face and elsewhere on his body from the flying shrapnel. He fell sick with a wicked case of pneumonia, and his ankle had been broken during an accident at Mirosa.
“It is mending?” she asked, glancing down at his foot.
“Yes, but look—I have a blister on my palm because of the cane.”
She kissed it.
“I have not had a decent manicure since I left New York.”
“I’ll take care of that,” she assured him, already looking forward to the chance to start pampering him. Once again, he seemed to have suffered terribly over the past few months. He needed someone to look after him, and she desperately wanted to be the person to do it.
“Why did you come back?” she asked.
“I got your letter suggesting you would visit in the spring. It got me to thinking. . . .” The corners of his eyes darkened with grief. “Natalia, I do not think you belong in Russia. It is not the sort of open society where a woman like you can flourish. I came to tell you not to come.”
She swallowed hard. “All right.”
Did that mean they didn’t have a future? If so, he could have told her in a letter.
“I realized that I must decide between you and Russia,” he said. “I will always love Mirosa, but it has changed. Or perhaps it is I who have changed. A peasant from Mirosa emigrated to America, and I found myself envious that he could break away for a new life. A lady I cared for who once lived for nothing but her father’s bank broke away from it to start a new company, and I was envious of her too.”
“Even though she lives in New York City?”
His shoulders sagged, and he looked even more tired. “Even though,” he acknowledged with a reluctant smile. “When I struggled with pneumonia, I feared I was about to die. I had so many regrets, mostly that I had found my dearest friend and the woman I wish to spend the rest of my life with, but I walked away from her because of my love for a family farm. A farm! Natalia, I don’t know what the future holds, but we have conquered greater challenges in the past, correct?”
“You got the czar to recommit to the 1858 treaty,” she said. “You moved a nation.”
“Only because you helped,” he said. “Together we moved a nation.” His hands covered her chilly ones, warming them. “I came here so we can have some of those conversations you mentioned in your letter. I think we are destined to be together, and it must happen here in New York. Perhaps my fate is to be like one of your mundane domestic novels with a predictably happy ending. A shame, but I have survived this long, so perhaps I am not supposed to enjoy a heroic death quite yet. Dearest Natalia, if I stay here, would you be willing to marry me?”
A lump swelled in her throat. All her dreams were coming true at the same time, but it hurt because Dimitri was giving up Mirosa and so many other things he loved. She would spend her life making sure he did not regret it.
“I would be willing to marry you,” she said. She reached up to cradle his face in her palms, touching her forehead to his. “I hope we will have mundane domestic bliss, but who knows?”
They lived in a world of corporate titans, scheming politicians, and a burgeoning music industry. None of it sounded like mundane domesticity to Natalia, but Dimitri’s measuring stick had always been a little different than hers. It was one of the reasons she adored him, and together they would step out into this bold new world side by side.
Epilogue
Dimitri leaned over a lilac bush, frowning at the brown splotches on the underside of the leaves. Their entire garden was a glorious, overgrown tangle of clematis, wisteria, and climbing roses. The Blackstones thought he was demented for refusing to trim the profusion, but this was how a proper dacha was supposed to look. He had bought the property next to Maxim Tachenko’s land, and now their dachas shared a ridiculously overgrown garden.
“Natalia! The spots on my lilacs are back!” The windows were open, but he had to shout because she had the phonograph playing.
She eventually came outside in the red-and-yellow sarafan he had bought for her during their honeymoon. “Didn’t you use the formula Gwen recommended?” she asked.
“Yes, but it’s not working. Gwendolyn needs to come out and inspect these in person.”
“She’s not going to do that,” Natalia said.
Gwen was in the city finishing her doctorate and had her hands full with a toddler. She rarely came out to the lake house. Likewise, Tachenko had gone overseas for a European tour, so it was up to Dimitri and Natalia to keep an eye on all three lake houses.
“We can take her a clipping when we are in town next month to record the Chopin sonata,” Natalia said.
He quirked a brow at her. “Will I be allowed to accompany you?”
“Of course! Just please don’t adopt another child while I’m not around.”
They now had two children. Shortly after they adopted four-month-old Anna, he and Natalia were in town to commission another Brahms duet. While Natalia was at the studio, he went to the orphanage with no purpose other than to be sure the facility was well provided with everything they needed. That was his intention, but his heart was swiftly captured by three-year-old Mischa, a little boy who’d recently been orphaned and spoke only Russian. How abandoned and lonely he looked! None of the nurses could understand the toddler, and Mischa clung to Dimitri’s leg while looking up at him with huge, soulful brown eyes. In that instant Dimitri knew this boy was destined to become his son.
He brought Mischa home to Natalia the same day. They had not expected to adopt again so soon, but how could he leave his son overnight at an orphanage where no one could understand him? Natalia had been taken aback but quickly agreed that Mischa belonged with them. They’d decided to hold off on adopting more children for at least two years, and for now their family was the perfect size.
“Let’s take the children to the city so they may play with your little brother,” he said impulsively, and Natalia flashed him a blinding smile.
He preferred their country home, but Natalia was always keen for a visit to town. He still mistrusted the city, but he liked indulging Natalia, so they went often. Besides, it would be another six years before the apple trees he planted would bear fruit. By then the mill Ilya Komarov was building him would be operational, and he would try to recreate a bit of the pastoral bliss he once had in Russia.
His homesickness wasn’t as bad as he once feared. It still descended upon him occasionally, but Natalia could usually spot the signs and knew how to cure the ache in his soul. She’d beckon him inside, then make him a cup of spiced cider and rub his feet, begging for stories of the vast Russian steppe, or the palaces of Saint Petersburg, or of Temujin and their dangerous trek through the wilderness. Somehow, in recounting the stories for her, his memories of that faraway land became a shared recollection they both treasured, and that helped ease the wistful ache.
Someday he would take Natalia and their children to Russia so they could see the endless fields of autumn wheat, the wooden churches in the countryside, and the land where Natalia’s mother had been raised. He would show Natalia the ring of birch trees that surrounded Mirosa and the creaking waterwheel where he almost died. Beneath the immense sky they would share the cider grown on his ancestral land and raise a toast to their shared heritage.
And then they would return to America, where they all belonged.
Historical Note
The Trans-Siberian Railway was completed in 1904. The railroad’s chief proponent was Count Sergei Witte, who believed it was the key to transforming the Russian economy by gaining access to the rich natural resources of Siberia. Construction was challenging because the railroad crossed hundreds of rivers, swamps, forests, and permafrost. Extreme temperatures constantly interfered with the schedule, but the railway was completed on time and under budget.
The Boxer Rebellion (1899–1901) affected construction of the railroad when the uprising spread to the Russian border. When Chinese insurgents shelled the Russian town of Blagoveshchensk, the Russians used the incident to assert greater control over the region by expelling ethnic Chinese villagers. The expulsions took place at numerous towns along the Amur River, resulting in thousands of deaths from drowning, shooting, and stampedes. Estimates of the deaths range between three and nine thousand people. The name for this series of pogroms in rural Russia is not standardized but is generally referred to as either the Blagoveshchensk Massacre or the Sixty-Four Villages East of the River Massacre.
Count Arthur Cassini was the Russian ambassador to the United States from 1898–1905. He was as brilliant as described in the novel but is perhaps best known today for his famous relatives. His daughter, Countess Marguerite Cassini, was best friends with Alice Roosevelt, and the two teenaged girls were notorious for scandalizing Washington society. Fifty years after the events in this novel, Marguerite wrote of her relationship with Alice in her memoir, Never a Dull Moment: “Our friendship had the violence of a bomb. We were two badly spoiled girls set only on [our] own pleasure.” By her own admission, she and Alice inflicted “a veritable reign of terror” on Washington society. Their friendship imploded when Alice’s future husband became infatuated with Marguerite, who ultimately married and divorced a Russian count, moved to Italy, and founded a fashion house. Her son, Oleg Cassini, was Jacqueline Kennedy’s favorite designer, and her seventeenth-century ancestor, Giovanni Cassini, was the astronomer for whom the Cassini spacecraft was named.
Today, the Trans-Siberian Railway remains the world’s longest passenger railroad at 5,772 miles. Riding the Trans-Siberian from Moscow to Vladivostock takes seven days, crosses eight time zones, and is routinely cited as an adventure of a lifetime.
Discussion Questions
Dimitri reflects on his difficult years while working on the railroad in Siberia with the following: “Sometimes our best memories are born during our harshest trials. They become happy only in hindsight.” What did he mean by this?
During a weekend party at Mirosa, the wealthy landowners debate whether it was dishonest for Ilya Komarov to charge people different amounts for the same pint of applejack. What do you think?
Dimitri asks Natalia to say something positive about Poppy, which forces her to reassess Poppy’s contribution in restoring Oscar’s health. How might focusing on an admirable trait help you view an otherwise frustrating person in a more positive light?
Liam splits with Darla because she spoke disrespectfully about him to her friends. Is he too hasty in walking away from her?
Is Dimitri really a hypochondriac? Why do you think he dwells on his various aches and pains?
Oscar is willing to sue Silas Conner for his libel of Natalia, but she dissuades him. She reflects: Punishing him might deliver a quick rush of satisfaction, but it would never bring her the lasting peace that forgiveness could provide. Is it possible to truly forgive someone if they have not expressed remorse?
Neither Dimitri nor Natalia needs to work for money, but they both undertake difficult jobs in order to prove themselves. Why do they do so?
Liam dislikes his job but does not feel he is able to quit, even though he does not personally need the money. Is he right to stick with a job he hates?
Much of Natalia’s fascination with Russia comes from the stories her mother shared. Have you inherited a similar fascination for a different culture, profession, or experience from your own relatives? Have you tried to share something of your own culture or experiences with the younger people in your family?
Natalia believes an unhappy ending to a novel ruins the story, while Dimitri loves such endings. What do you think?
NEW YORK CITY
JULY 1902
The prospect of apologizing to the only enemy Liam Blackstone had in the world was galling, but he had to do it to keep Fletcher’s respect. Liam strode down the street alongside his mentor, listening to all the reasons he should apologize to Charles Morse, possibly the biggest scoundrel in the city.
“The point of yesterday’s outing was to have a cordial afternoon sailing in the harbor so you and Charles could bury the hatchet, not to stir up new resentments,” Fletcher said. “Kicking him off your yacht opened up a whole new front in the war between the two of you.”
“He struck a seventeen-year-old deckhand,” Liam bit out.
“Yes, and that was appalling, but there were better ways to handle it than letting your temper fly off the handle.”
Yesterday’s fight had been a doozy. The afternoon sail on Liam’s private yacht had collapsed quickly after Morse slapped a deckhand, a sweet kid named Caleb. Caleb was a little slow, but once he understood a task, he carried it out doggedly and never tired. The problem was that Caleb couldn’t adjust. Any change to his routine got Caleb flustered, which was what happened when Morse started banging out orders yesterday.
They had been two miles out at sea when Morse slapped Caleb. As tempting as it had been to retaliate in kind, Liam ordered Morse to be rowed ashore, and the incident cast a pall over the rest of the afternoon. Several of the other businessmen on board privately commended Liam for the way he protected the deckhand, but no one approved of what he’d done in throwing Morse off the yacht.
Now Fletcher was dragging Liam to Morse’s home like a disobedient child to apologize. The Morse estate squatted on a large plot on the richest part of Fifth Avenue. It was where robber barons flaunted their wealth in grandiose palaces towering five stories high with molded entablatures, spires, and turrets. So different than the slum where Liam grew up.
“I understand that you are still new in the world of Wall Street,” Fletcher said. “Everyone appreciates the fresh perspective you have brought to the board of directors. You are the only one among us who has actually worked inside a steel mill or made anything with your own two hands. Against all odds, you persuaded the board of directors to authorize a huge pay raise for the men in the steel mills—”
“Against Morse’s objections.”
“Yes! Charles Morse is the shrewdest man on Wall Street, and you got the better of him. Be proud of that. You won. Why can’t you simply get along with him?”
