Written on the Wind (The Blackstone Legacy #2)(15)

Panic raced through him, and he managed to get an eye open. A small campfire was only a few yards away.

He was alone in the forest except for a lone figure on the other side of the fire. It was the man with the topknot, and he wore Dimitri’s coat. With its epaulets and gold braid, it looked strange on the man with long hair and dark eyes that glinted in the firelight.

“Are you awake?” the topknotted man asked in Russian. Good Russian too.

“Awake,” Dimitri croaked.

The topknotted man held a lump of meat over the fire with a skewer, and the tantalizing aroma of hot, seared meat made Dimitri dizzy. The tiny carcass looked like a squirrel, but he’d never craved anything so desperately as that chunk of meat.

“We found eight gold coins in this coat,” the man said casually. “Do you have anything else on you?”

Dimitri rolled onto his elbow and took stock of his situation. The only items of clothing he had left were his trousers, socks, and broadcloth shirt. A blanket was draped over his shoulders. There was no sign of his boots. The diamonds hidden in them were gone.

“Nothing,” he said. “Where are my boots?”

The other man shrugged. “Everything you had got split up. My share was the coat and a gold coin. Someone else got your boots.” He casually tossed a pair of filthy moccasins toward Dimitri. “You can wear those.”

Dimitri sagged. “Those shoes are completely inadequate.”

“That’s what the guy who was wearing them thought. Be grateful he left them for you.”

Dimitri wasn’t grateful for anything at his point. The campsite was abandoned except for the topknotted man, who sat with a rifle across his lap as he watched Dimitri.

“Where is everyone else?” Dimitri asked.

“Gone. We were getting too big to feed. They are headed for Abakan, but I need to go farther east.”

Abakan sounded good to Dimitri. It was still in Russia but remote enough that nobody would be looking for Count Sokolov there.

“What’s wrong with Abakan?” he asked.

“I am a wanted man in Abakan,” the other said. “Horse theft. I need more distance before I settle somewhere, and I’ll move faster without them. The two of us can help each other.”

Everything hurt as Dimitri pushed himself into a sitting position. “You’ve stolen my coat and one of my gold coins. You attacked me. Why should I help you?”

“Because I have half a squirrel and a cup of water. I am willing to share. Are you interested?”

Dimitri’s mouth salivated. Were he able, he’d be willing to kill for that squirrel and cup of water. All he could manage was a weak nod.

“My name is Temujin,” the man said as he extended the skewer with the lump of squirrel meat on it, and Dimitri had never been so grateful for a mouthful of food in his life.





8





Natalia moved into her new townhouse in mid-November. It was only three blocks from the bank and four blocks from the New York Stock Exchange. She was in the heart of the Financial District, so she could walk to work each morning instead of spending half an hour in a lumbering carriage on jammed city streets.

Why hadn’t she done this years ago? She loved this compact townhouse even though it lacked electricity and the plumbing was rudimentary. It was hers. The kitchen was inadequate, but there was an Italian delicatessen on the street corner and plenty of pushcart venders offering a huge array of hot pasties, sausages, and sandwiches.

She bought a sofa, a wingback chair, and two bookshelves, which filled most of the parlor. The flaring bell of her phonograph stuck out from its corner table, and she purchased a special rack for her records. Instead of crystal, she bought charming stoneware mugs and plates. This part of the city had peddlers selling flowers on almost every street corner, and she treated herself to a bouquet at least once a week. She loved nothing more than walking home from work, buying her own flowers, and arranging them in one of her new stoneware jugs.

Each evening she slipped into a sarafan like her mother used to wear. The loose gowns with their wild tribal patterns were a staple of the Russian countryside, and there was no garment on earth that made Natalia feel more feminine. Poppy always mocked Natalia’s sarafans, calling them peasant garb, but Natalia was now her own woman and could wear whatever she pleased.

Despite the joy she took in her new home, it wasn’t without difficulty. Her first attempt at making a hard-boiled egg resulted in a rubbery mess with bits of shell stuck to the whites, prompting her to buy a cookbook to learn the trick for slipping the shell from a cooled hard-boiled egg. It only took a few tries, but she beamed with pride as she enjoyed her first hard-boiled egg made on her tiny stove. She sprinkled it with salt and pepper and felt like a genuine chef.

Washing her hair was a challenge, but she soon figured out a system. Heating and lugging water was tedious, but she played the phonograph loud enough to be heard throughout the house, and she loved the charm of Mozart while performing the humble chore.

Her only truly disastrous mistake came when she tried to light her first fire. She’d never laid a fire before, but she’d seen servants do it, and she knelt before the compact fireplace in the parlor, mimicking the way she’d seen servants lay the wood with plenty of open space for air circulation, then set some smaller kindling at the bottom. She did everything right . . . except she forgot to open the damper before lighting the fire, and billowing clouds of smoke poured into the parlor. She flung a bucket of water on the fire, which splattered wet bits of charred ash all over the hearth and her gown. Clearing the stench of smoke from the room took forever, since the windows were so old that they’d been painted shut long ago.