seat, infant Max sleeping warm in my arms, his breathing labored from a head cold.
How I longed to stay at home with him, but Eliza looked forward to the ball. Plus, it was one of the last events of the season, before the St. Petersburg society that was left would decamp to vacation spots like Crimea and Finland and the city left to janitors and scullery maids.
Russian society seemed more eager than ever to escape the city and tense talk of war. Archduke Ferdinand of Austria had been assassinated by a Serbian, which caused Austria to sever diplomatic ties with Serbia, Russia’s ally, and Austria mobilized for war. This led to endless, nervous speculation about Russia being drawn in as well.
The royal ball invitation requested guests wear Persian dress and my stepmother, Agnessa, called in Nadezhda Lamanova, a former theater costumer and dressmaker to the tsarina. Madame Lamanova, a buxom, dark-haired woman with a permanently bored expression on her doughy face, produced two trunks of exquisite Persian costumes.
Eliza stepped about the dressing room admiring Agnessa’s furnishings. Once Mother’s, it was the largest room in Agnessa’s bedroom suite, with high ceilings, floral wallpaper, and, on the mantel, a Limoges vase sprouting pink gladioli. The blossoms fluttered in the soft breeze and a shudder went through me.
Gladioli. That dreadful flower.
It was yellow gladioli the woman was delivering when the terrible thing happened. Soon after Agnessa married Father she ordered flower deliveries from Paris even in the dead of winter. I opened the front door of the townhouse one January morning after a violent snowstorm, to find a young peasant girl half dead on the doorstep, bamboo basket of gladioli in her arms, snow drifted around her. She lay there, eyes half closed, the flowers in the basket encased in glittering ice.
I helped the pantry boys pull her into the vestibule and pumped her chest until the ambulance came, but it was too late. I arranged her funeral and then kept to my room, unable to shake the thought of her frozen face. How unfair it was, to die so young, just so a spoiled woman from Moscow could have her flowers.
Soon after, Father and I opened Fena’s House for impoverished women and named it after my mother, Agrafena. Her name meant “born feet first,” a perfect name for her, always on the run doing things nonstop.
Madame Lamanova unlatched one trunk, the sound wrenching me out of my thoughts. She pulled with two hands on one side while Eliza took the other, and they pried it open like an oyster shell. The two huddled around the trunk, sorting through the racks of gold brocades and fur-trimmed cloaks.
Madame Lamanova drew out an ivory-colored, sable-trimmed, brocade coat. “For Mrs. Ferriday?”
Eliza slid off her robe, slipped her arms into the coat. “What will you wear, Sofya?”
“I’m going like this.” I had simply augmented my white evening dress with a cashmere shawl from my closet.
Agnessa walked to me. “You must at least try, my dear. People judge you first by how you look and second by what you say.”
How I hated that, her favorite expression. “Please, Agnessa—”
Madame Lamanova offered me a feathered turban and I waved it away.
Agnessa stepped to her jewelry cabinet and returned with a necklace draped across her palm. As she drew closer the emeralds glowed under the electric lights.
“You must wear this tonight.”
Growing up, I’d seen my mother wear that emerald necklace on the most formal occasions. Luba and I would sneak to her jewel box and run our fingers over the humps of cabochon emeralds and two rows of round diamonds. The tsar’s mother had given it to Father for performing some financial wizardry and he’d given it to Mother on their honeymoon in Biarritz. Now Agnessa wore it on occasion.
“Father’s wedding gift to Mother?”
Agnessa’s mouth tightened, as it always did upon mention of Mother.
“What if it falls off?” I asked. At a similar costume ball the tsar’s younger brother had once famously lost one of the crown jewels, a diamond the size of a duck’s egg, never found.
Agnessa fastened it about my neck. “If you won’t wear a Persian costume, this is all you need. The sultans loved their emeralds.”
I touched the heavy platinum and cool stones at my neck. I was no great fan of jewelry, but there was something empowering about that necklace.
Agnessa turned her attention back to the trunks, and then Eliza insisted on making up my face in her version of the Persian way, with kohl-rimmed eyes