Written on the Wind (The Blackstone Legacy #2)(16)
Minor disasters aside, she was learning how to be independent, and her relationship with her father had never been better. Now that he no longer had to perform peacekeeping duties between his feuding wife and daughter, they hummed along in perfect harmony at the bank. Her third-quarter report on the profitability of the Trans-Siberian Railway almost had him levitating.
“Are these numbers right?” he asked as he stood in the open doorway of her office.
She nodded. “Enough of the railroad has been completed that it can now be used for transporting supplies, which has slashed our transportation costs to one third what they were before.”
Her father still scrutinized the report. “Very good, but that still can’t account for this level of profit.”
“We’re also charging the British and the Germans to use the line,” she said with pride. “Anyone who wants to do business in central Russia is now paying us a surcharge.”
Oscar straightened, his face still expressionless, but his voice vibrated with pride. “That’s my girl,” he said before leaving her office.
The interchange took less than sixty seconds, but it filled her with satisfaction. Half the robber barons in New York lived in fear of Oscar Blackstone. He never gave praise without cause, and she had just exceeded their third-quarter expectations. The railroad would ultimately belong to Russia, but until the bank’s loan had been repaid, a portion of the profits went directly into the Blackstone coffers.
That night she hurried home a little early because the weather was taking a turn for the worse. Tiny bits of sleet pricked her face by the time she arrived home. It was early for a cold snap like this, but Liam had already taught her how to use the cast-iron radiator on each floor. She turned them on, but it seemed to take forever for the steam to build up and begin heating the house.
By nightfall, snow had crusted along the panes of the windows, and chilly drafts snaked through the rooms. She made a pot of hot apple tea, wrapped a heavy shawl around her shoulders, and leaned against her bedroom window to watch the snow flurries fly.
Did an early winter in New York mean an early winter in Russia too? She doubted Dimitri had access to a radiator or hot tea. By now he was probably becoming used to a gloomy prison camp in the middle of nowhere. All the money in the world could not buy him a warm blanket or a bowl of hot, nourishing soup. She had no understanding of what he’d done to earn such a harsh punishment, but she ached for him.
A chill rushed through her at the thought of what his life had become. She snuggled deeper into her shawl and said a prayer on behalf of the friend she would probably never hear from again.
Dimitri never expected to develop a genuine friendship with the Mongolian horse thief he met in the middle of the Russian taiga, but something about mutually saving each other’s lives tended to bring men together. Temujin once shot a wolf that had been creeping up on Dimitri while he’d been hunkered over an icy stream to fill the waterskin jug. Another time Dimitri woke to find a lone bandit about to slit Temujin’s throat. The bandit had been frightened away by Dimitri’s well-thrown rock. Over the following weeks, Dimitri and Temujin leaned on each other while foraging for nuts or tramping through the woods at night.
Their journey through the taiga of south-central Siberia took almost a month, but Temujin had the ability to blend in during the rare times they came to a village. He was a Buryat who didn’t know if he’d been born in Russia or Mongolia but moved easily in both. No one looked askance at Temujin as he haggled for rides on the back of a wagon, and once he bartered for a ten-day journey on a river barge, which transported them nine hundred miles.
Over time, they learned each other’s life stories. Temujin had once been a nomadic herder who moved with the seasons and lived in a yurt made of animal hides stretched over a lightweight frame. That came to an end after he married.
“Tania wanted a real house made of wood,” Temujin said, and he had built her one with his own hands. It was only a single room, but it had a real wooden floor and a doorway through which they watched their goats grazing on the land. They had lived happily for three years before Tania died giving birth to a stillborn son, and that was when Temujin, by his own admission, “went a little crazy.”
“I couldn’t live in the place that had been built for a woman no longer on this earth. I left and never looked back.”
He embarked on a life of stealing horses. He was eventually caught and condemned to a penal colony near Iskitim. For the next two years, he mined copper before escaping and joining the gang of outlaws.
“I am a nomad again,” Temujin said one night as they trudged through the first dusting of snow. “I was foolish to try to be otherwise.”
“Will you go back to stealing horses once we make it out of the forest?”
Temujin shrugged, but Dimitri had learned to see the good in this thief.
“I don’t believe God would have sent you a good woman like Tania and then taken her away for no reason. She proved you can be more than a thief.”
He expected Temujin to scoff, but he merely stared into the distance in speculation. “You have often spoken of this god who comes in three parts,” he said. “The Father, and the Son, and the one I still don’t understand.”
“The Holy Spirit,” Dimitri said. “Out here in the wilderness I feel the Holy Spirit everywhere. Whispering in my ear, urging me to survive long enough to deliver my message. It was the Holy Spirit that gave me the courage to leap from the train. Somehow, I believe we are both going to survive, Temujin.”