get to see Sofya’s baby born, I would finally tour St. Petersburg—the bejeweled Church of the Savior on Spilled Blood, its interior covered entirely with jeweled mosaic, and the Rembrandts at the tsar’s Winter Palace. Best of all I could visit with my dearest friend every day.
I pulled Sofya by the arm to the dining room, a room big enough to fit an enormous mahogany table loaded with platters of hors d’oeuvres and desserts and a rose damask sofa.
“Thank you for getting me away from them. Agnessa is terrified the baby will emerge any moment.”
“This is the heir, after all. You know how mothers are.”
“Stepmothers. And Afon is a wreck—becoming a child himself as birth nears.”
“I’m thrilled we’re leaving tomorrow, darling. They’ll worry less at home.”
She reached across the table and held up one of Mother’s cookies. “What’s the name of this?”
I loved the sound of Sofya’s soothing voice. Her Russian-accented English had few hard edges and often caused people to stop what they were doing, lean in, and listen.
“A butterscotch crisp, a Civil War recipe.” I’d asked the kitchen to prepare Grandmother Woolsey’s family recipes. Fried apples. Teacake cookies and blackberry cordial.
Sofya finished the crisp in three bites. “Wish I could stay here forever and live on butterscotch crisps. The trip home will be terribly long—”
“Sail to France and train to St. Petersburg? Sounds heavenly. I love having a reason to leave New York in the summer.”
Sofya reached for another butterscotch crisp. “How can you say that? Back home, half of Russia is on strike. You don’t appreciate what you have here. The beach and Manhattan…”
“Either stuck out here in a wet bathing costume or holed up in a hot apartment in the city? Trips abroad are the only cure.”
“There’s always service work.”
“And join the society do-gooders, braying about their milk funds and church sociables? Not Mother, of course, but most of them incite little real change and certainly don’t expand their horizons.”
“You sail…”
“Only at gunpoint. The boats I’m interested in are steamers due east. And besides, I miss Luba.”
“I do as well. If only Agnessa hadn’t convinced Father she needed to study for her—”
Sofya placed one hand on her belly and winced.
“The baby?” I asked, a bit dizzy at the thought. It was too soon.
“It’s nothing.”
Guests congregated about the table, inspecting the offerings. Unfazed by the battling doctors, Mother sailed past us, her strong Woolsey chin high. She left an oddly pleasant mélange of salt air, Jicky perfume, and mothballs in her wake. As usual, her way of dealing with trouble was to smile and ignore it, ride it out like a sudden squall.
I felt the cold, velvety softness unique to sheared beaver brush my arm and turned to find our neighbor Electra Whitney leaning across the table for a canapé, her face like the weathered side of a barn. Electra lived in a grim sarcophagus of a mansion several houses down from us on Gin Lane, every door attended by liveried footmen. She was alone that day, not flanked as usual by her fellow members of the Pink and Green Garden Society.
Electra helped herself to smoked salmon and lingered. Eavesdropping?
Our gardener, aptly named Mr. Gardener, stepped into the room, two hands supporting a silver Revere bowl filled with his signature antique roses, from creamy white to a deep fuchsia.
Sofya gasped, one hand to her swollen bodice.
“We thought you’d like them,” I said. Sofya had once been on the path to becoming an accomplished botanist and still pursued the study of plants for pleasure. When not walking the dunes in search of beach roses she spent hours in Mother’s greenhouse grafting orchids.
Mr. Gardener placed the bowl on the polished dining room table, the felted bottom quiet on the mahogany, smoothed his hands down the front of his white coveralls and turned to leave. Mr. Gardener’s people had known Mother’s for two generations. He was infinitely kind and a fine-looking young gentleman: tall, with a plowman’s physique, and dark as the loamy earth he worked.
Sofya caught him by the elbow. “You are just a genius with roses, Mr. Gardener.”
Electra edged closer to the table and looked Mr. Gardener up and down. Her gaze slid to the roses.
Each blossom was lovelier than the next: a William Lobb moss rose in ballet pink, with spiky, mosslike growth on her sepals, a deliciously scented, flesh-colored Madame Bosanquet.
Sofya breathed in their essence. “I’ve never seen anything like these. The fragrance is remarkable. Just in from China?”