The Property of a Lady (10 page)

He turned from the window and met Genie Reese’s eyes across the room. Cal Warrender had gone and she was alone. After picking up his brandy, he walked toward her. “Miss Reese,” he said, gesturing to the window, “I see we are both orphans of the storm. I wonder if you would take pity on my loneliness and join me in a drink?”

Taking a deep breath, Genie looked him squarely in the eye. “I would be delighted, Mr. Solovsky,” she said.

Maryland

“Fairlawns” was truly what it claimed: smooth acres of velvet green leading to a silvery lake where, from her window, Missie could watch the mallards busy building their nests in the banks. The sudden cold spell had failed to kill the early cherry blossoms, and the willows drooping over the water were already sheathed in their film of spring green.

“It’s a beautiful day,” Nurse Sara Milgrim told her with a jolly smile. “Perhaps we can go out for a walk later. How d’you feel about that? See the ducks’ nests, we can.”

“Not ducks, mallards,” Missie said firmly. “You can tell by the green head. And I’ve told you a thousand times, Sara, not to talk to me like a child—or a senile old woman. There’s nothing wrong with my brain.” Nurse Milgrim was brushing her hair and she winced. “Except when you pull my hair like that.”

Nurse Milgrim grinned. Missie was in one of her sharp moods this morning. You couldn’t put anything over on her: She always knew when the jolly smile covered up the fact that she’d had a fight with her boyfriend or that she had been on night duty for two weeks and was worn to a frazzle. “You’ve got such beautiful hair, Missie,” she remarked, stroking the brush lovingly through the long silken strands. “The silver surely brings out the color of your eyes. They look like violets.”

“Violets?” Missie said dreamily. “Oh, no, it was Anouska
who wore the violets. If I close my eyes I can smell them now….”

“Anouska, mmm? Well, I bet her hair wasn’t as pretty as yours. You must have been quite something when you were a girl. I’ll bet all the boys were after you.”

“No boys,” Missie said. “They were all men … four of them.” She sighed. “And the only one I didn’t marry was the one I really loved. My first love.”

“They say first love is the truest,” Nurse Milgrim said, staring curiously at her in the mirror. “It’s a pity, then, you didn’t marry him?”

Missie closed her eyes and said, “He died. It happened too long ago to really matter anymore.”

Nurse Milgrim glanced at her as she fastened her hair into her usual chignon. Her eyes were still closed and despite what Missie had just said, she could tell by her face it really did still matter.

“I’m sorry, Missie,” she said quickly. “I’ll tell you what, why don’t I just go and fix you a nice cup of Earl Grey tea? That’s the kind you like, isn’t it? I’ll be right back now.”

Missie heard the door close and once again she was alone with her thoughts. But what was she thinking of, rambling on about Anouska like that? Was she losing her brains after all? She supposed it was just because it was on her mind. She must be more careful, especially after what she had just seen on television. Milgrim might have remembered the name Anouska and put two and two together. And now she was so afraid for Anna. Where was she? Why didn’t she telephone? She sighed deeply. When all this had begun she had not realized it would never end. If Yeventlov had not found them in the forest, she wouldn’t be here today and the Ivanoff treasure would simply have disappeared, just like so many others.

Russia

She had awoken to find herself wallowing in the warm depths of a soft goosedown quilt. She was wearing a clean pink flannel nightgown, and her feet and hands were tingling with fiery pins and needles as blood and life returned to them. Firelight flickered on the wooden walls and there was the soft murmur of voices close by. She stared around her bewilderedly. Sofia was sitting at the table in the center of the room, straight-backed as ever, sipping hot tea from a glass. Viktor was drying off in front of the blazing stove, his long fur smelling like a flock of wet sheep, and little Xenia was chatting gaily in English to five small, sallow children who were staring at her as if she were the ninth wonder of the world. She realized that this must be the stationmaster’s house, and the memories suddenly flooded back. She began to tremble and tears trickled down her cheeks.

“Stay where you are,” Madame Yeventlov said quietly. “You are safe for the moment. My husband found you in the forest and brought you here. I will make you some tea and then later, when you feel better, you shall have some of my good soup.” Her brown eyes held a depth of sympathy and Missie understood she knew what had happened.

She sipped the tea, concentrating on each sweet scalding sip as it slid down her throat without melting the ice that still gripped her heart. She remembered lying in the snow and wanting to die as the captain had ridden off with Alexei.
Solovsky, Solovsky
, she thought, anguished, his name burning itself into her brain. She supposed that shock must have slowed her heartbeat. Her limbs had grown heavy and she had been filled with a deadly lethargy. Her blood was like ice water in her veins, and she remembered little by little relaxing into the stupor that she had known would bring death. She remembered hearing the soft padding sound of the first wolf approaching her and the fetid smell of its breath as it sniffed her
hair, and then she had known she was not to be allowed to die peacefully in the snow: She was to be devoured by wolves.

As the beast had danced uncertainly around her, prodding her with its paw, she dimly recalled Misha telling her that wolves preyed only on dead human flesh and rarely attacked the living, but she could hear more of them, a pack running from the forest toward her. Suddenly there was a terrible screaming and snarling, and she had looked up to see Viktor tear the throat from the first wolf and then turn and rout the pack already feasting on, Anouska’s body. Then he had returned, whimpering, to her side. His liquid-brown eyes had gazed beseechingly at her and blood dripped from a torn ear.

The urge to survive had surged through her like a burst of life-giving heat; she was just eighteen, and despite all the horrors the power of youth made her long for life. And besides, she had a responsibility. She had to save Misha’s daughter. She had tried to sit up then but her legs refused to obey and her heart pounded so fiercely she could scarcely breathe. Then suddenly everything had gone black and she knew no more until she woke and found herself here, in Yeventlov’s house at Ivanovsk.

Sofia came to sit beside her. Taking her hand, she said, “Thank God you are all right, Missie. If it weren’t for you, my granddaughter would have perished along with the others. My only consolation from this dreadful night is that Misha did not live to find out how his wife and his son died.”

Missie’s heart felt as if it were being wrenched from her body. She stared at Sofia, and the old lady nodded sadly. “Oh, yes,” she whispered, “I am sure Misha is dead. I feel it here.” She struck her heart with a clenched fist. “Why? I ask. My son was a good man. Like his father and his grandfather before him, he was an exemplary landowner. He cared for his people with proper fatherly Russian tenderness. He fought for their rights in the
Duma
, the Parliament.
So why, Missie?
Why
did they kill such a good man? Who else will care for them as Misha did?” Her dark eyes were filled with anguish as she whispered, “And how could they do what they did to Anouska?”

She turned away, staring tearlessly into the blazing stove. “Yeventlov could not find Alexei’s body,” she said at last. “He said the wolves must have already devoured it.”

“Oh, but—” Missie began, then she stopped herself suddenly. There was no point in hurting Sofia even more by telling her about Alexei. She had enough to bear. And anyhow, she knew there was no hope for him. Turning her face to the wall, she drifted into unconsciousness. When she awoke again, the shutters were still tightly closed and only Madame Yeventlov was awake, busy kneading a coarse black rye dough at the table. Sofia lay on a straw mattress by the stove with Xenia in the crook of her outflung arm. The dog lay close by them, but there was no sign of the others and Missie guessed they were sleeping in the other room.

Madame Yeventlov nodded to her, smiling. “So, you are awake at last,” she said quietly. “Now you will be ready for that soup. Oh, yes,” she added, stifling Missie’s protests with an uplifted hand, “God knows you will need your strength as well as your wits about you if you are to survive.”

Sitting in a hard wooden chair at a pine table scrubbed to whiteness from years of Madame Yeventlov’s good housewifely attentions, Missie listened as she told her their plan.

Yeventlov said the trains were unpredictable. The only thing that was certain was that everything was running late. The depots had run out of coal for the steam engines and were now using pine logs that burned at a great rate, often leaving the trains stranded without fuel in the middle of the snowbound countryside. Yeventlov had to wait until he got a signal from the big station north of Ivanovsk
telling him that a train had left and then wait again for it to arrive.

“How long will it be?” she asked.

Madame Yeventlov shrugged. Nobody knew. A journey that took four hours in normal times might now take four days, or even more. She told her they must disguise themselves well. The soldiers would be sure to be on the lookout for traitors like herself.

Missie stared at the bowl of soup, wondering how she, the daughter of an eminent Oxford professor, had come to be regarded as a traitor to a country that was not even her own.

It had all started out so gaily a little more than a year ago, just she and her father setting out on another of his jaunts around the world, this time to inspect the latest archaeological excavations in Turkey.

Professor Marcus Octavius Byron had been over fifty years old when he had married lovely young long-legged Alice Lee James, and he was astonished when, three years later, she had presented him with a baby girl they named Verity, but somehow, she had always been called just “Missie.” Alice Lee had died tragically of a chill that turned into pneumonia when Missie was only eight, and after that she and her father had become very close. There were no other living relatives. He was all the family she had left, and he adored her. He took her everywhere with him. By the time she was fourteen she had been on archaeological digs in Greece, inspected excavations in India, and helped uncover ancient tombs in Egypt. But home had always been the tall, shabby house on the quiet tree-lined street just around the corner from Trinity College in Oxford.

Her father always told her she was pretty, but she thought he was biased because she looked like her mother. She had Alice Lee’s deep violet-blue eyes, pale creamy skin, and sleek seal-brown hair, but Missie had always thought herself unfashionably skinny. Her cheekbones
stuck out, her nose, though straight, was positive, and her mouth too generous. Besides, her long legs made her taller than most of the boys she knew.

In the Yeventlovs’ hut the soup lay untouched on the table as she closed her eyes, conjuring up her father’s familiar, comforting image. He was a tall, thin man, stooped from too many years hunched over the fine print of old history books. He had a gray beard and faded blue eyes, and he wore a tweed jacket, turning green with age, that when she snuggled close to him gave off a faint aroma of good cigars and fine old port.

Missie fought back the tears as she remembered how she would tap on his study door, listening for his usual grunted Latin
“Intra
. “He always smiled and put down his book to give her his full attention, but sometimes she would come bounding in from school to find him lost in the past and he would stare at her with such astonishment that she could swear he had forgotten all about her.

But the professor didn’t forget her schooling. After telling her she would be as well educated as any boy, he sent her off to a famous Oxford prep school where she was the only girl. It was only because of her father’s eminence as a scholar that she had been accepted, but she was used to a masculine environment and fitted in as easily as if she really were “one of the boys.” When she arrived home one day and announced that she intended to play rugger, even the professor had realized that perhaps it was time to send her to a school for young ladies. But he liked the fact that the boys’ school had given her “spirit.” She was afraid of nothing.

She sighed, opening her eyes and staring bewilderedly at the tiny shuttered room and the Russian woman baking bread. Suddenly childhood and Oxford seemed so very far away.

The professor had been planning their summer trip to Turkey for a whole year; there were important excavations taking place north of Ephesus with exciting new discoveries
dating back to the fifth millennium. Despite her protests that in summer it would be searingly hot, that the mosquitoes would be swarming, that water would be scarce and their rations, so far from any town, would be basic, her father had acted like a child promised a new toy—nothing would prevent him from having it
now
.