looked innocent enough: a golden sheaf of wheat, the silver-bladed scythe resting at its base. But nothing good ever came from that card.
“What about the rest?” the countess asked.
Mamka waved the countess away. “I can see no more.”
“But when will all this happen?”
Mamka turned her gaze to the candle in my hands, her eyes wide. “I’ve told all I know. Please go.”
The countess gathered herself, stood, and strode to the door. “Well, this was a most unsatisfactory trip,” she said in Russian. “Can’t say you deserve five kopecks.”
She nodded to the servant in the green jacket who tossed a coin onto the bed and they hastened out.
As the troika rumbled off I took Mamka’s hand. She was shaking, her face toadstool white.
“Are you tired, Mamka?”
Taras burst from his room, dressed in his bearskin coat, and Mamka tightened her grip on my hand. He bounded to the bedside in four steps, the earflaps on his ushanka flapping like the ears of a dog. His shadow on the wall loomed over us.
Taras snatched the coin. “One kopeck? Parasite.”
I hid my disappointed face from Mamka. One kopeck would not buy a piece of bread.
Mamka laid back, head on her pillow, staring ahead.
“What is it, Mamka? You did a good reading.”
“No. I couldn’t tell her.”
“It was fine—”
“No. I saw it all, Inka. You don’t know—”
Taras pocketed the coin. “It serves that pig right. I’ll see her die a painful death.”
CHAPTER
7
Eliza
1916
Once Henry bought The Hay, he made a few small repairs but became too busy with work to travel up there more than a few times. I put it out of my mind completely and focused on city life and my other two favorite things: my correspondence with Sofya and our trip abroad. Sofya wrote every weekday without fail and I sat in the same spot on the sofa in the living room of our Manhattan apartment waiting for the mail. The second Peg handed me the letter that day I slid my opener through the envelope.
Dear Eliza,
You won’t believe what a terrible time we had of it getting out of the city for the country yesterday, like something out of a novel, really. We’d taken a carriage and were besieged by a savage mob, filled with the saddest cases, mothers and wasted babies, deserted soldiers. We are lucky we lived to tell of it. Poor Justine is in nervous fits and I’m afraid we will have to send her home, leaving us with no nursemaid for Max….
She closed her letter with an elaborate signature and a photograph of little Max in Luba’s arms, now a handsome toddler with a halo of light curls. How lovely to hear from her, as usual, but when would they take a savage mob seriously?
I turned my attention to our upcoming trip. The arrangements seemed endless, since the war in Europe made planning difficult, but that fall there were rumors of a cease-fire daily so I hoped for the best and threw myself into preparations. There were trunks to pack, and with Henry’s mysteriousness about the destination I kept our dressmaker busy fashioning clothes for every climate.
It was a cool autumn afternoon, the threat of rain heavy in the air, as Peg and I threw all the clothing I owned about the enormous living room in our apartment. Peg, whose given name was Julia Smith, was a slender, doe-eyed Irish rose, often in need of tending. She had alabaster skin and an unruly headful of brown hair, which never knew its place, no matter the number of hairpins employed.
That apartment was a high-ceilinged place at 31 East Fiftieth Street in Manhattan, too big for the three of us really, with five bedrooms, maids’ quarters, and a lovely library. I left the spacious living room untouched by a professional decorator’s hand and evoked a dramatic Parisian scheme myself, furnishing it with a great many Louis XV sofas and chairs, etchings of French scenes, and Grandmother’s soaring trumeau mirror over a gilt console table. A chinoiserie foldout bar stocked with liquors of the right sort and Father’s Sarouk carpet added just enough flavor of the East.
Among it all Peg arranged our luggage in a circle about the room, a Stonehenge of Mother’s Goyard wardrobe trunks, vanity cases, and hat trunks, each fixed with its own plaque: Malles Goyard 233 Rue St-Honoré Paris—Monte-Carlo—Biarritz.
The very sight of the trunks, heaved from the luggage room at Gin Lane, evoked all that is good about adventure. With their black-chevroned linen and cotton fabric linings, orange