Written on the Wind (The Blackstone Legacy #2)(25)
Natalia led Dimitri to a shop that sold warm bread and hot soup inside the Ferry Building. He didn’t look like she’d expected. His messages were always so genteel and well-spoken, but the man before her looked like a mangy skeleton wearing filthy rags.
And yet he displayed the exquisite manners of a gentleman. He held a chair out for her at the café and unfolded his napkin with long, elegant fingers before draping it over his lap. The way his eyes widened as the soup was delivered made her suspect he was famished, but he still bowed his head in prayer before eating.
He might not look like Dimitri, but he sounded like her old friend. He praised the chowder as being like ambrosia kissed with sunshine. His observations of traveling in steerage were pure Dimitri.
“What a spectacular horror. They served us rice that tasted like sawdust seasoned with wallpaper paste, but I made friends with a man from Shanghai who shared his sack of gingerroot with me. He ground it into the rice, spoke some sort of spell, and then voila! It was as though kissed by the gods. Life will never again be so grim now that I have discovered the miracle of gingerroot.”
Natalia was grateful for his talkative rambling, since it gave her time to study him. The grubby clothes and shaggy hair couldn’t disguise the strong line of his features. He had high cheekbones and a long blade of a nose. His hair was so grimy that it was hard to know what color it was, but probably some sort of chestnut shade.
He needed a bath, a haircut, and a shave. There were public bathhouses on Market Street, and she could buy him a change of clothes while he bathed. His dingy shirt stank and was smeared with old bloodstains. His shoes were strips of woven birch bark held together by a few pieces of dirty string. All of it should be burned.
When she suggested as much, his hand went to the red sash tied around his middle. “You may burn everything but this,” he said. “This sash is sacred to me, a symbol of enduring friendship and struggle. I will keep it until my dying day. It shall be a part of my funeral shroud.”
“Enough with the Russian fatalism,” she teased. “I didn’t come all the way across the country to plan your funeral.”
“Then, why did you come?” he asked. All trace of humor was gone as he watched her.
She came because she couldn’t stay away. If there was the slightest chance that Dimitri had managed to escape from a Siberian penal colony, she couldn’t twiddle her thumbs in New York while he struggled to survive. She used trouble in the port of Seattle as an excuse to head out to the West Coast.
“I had business in a nearby city called Seattle,” she said. “Our bank is financing a major expansion of their port. It hasn’t been going well. I wanted to meet with the construction manager and report back to my father.”
Dimitri put down his spoon. “Tell me about your manager in Seattle. Is he as interesting as me? As friendly?”
“I’m not going to stroke your ego,” she said. “You’re too conceited as it is.”
He snorted. “I am confident, not conceited. There’s a difference.”
The way he held himself, with perfect posture and a proud gleam in his eyes despite his filthy clothes, made him ridiculously attractive. She knew he was smart and accomplished. That he had a deep love for music and literature. Most especially, she knew he had no difficulty expressing himself in extravagant language that made her laugh from six thousand miles away. She desperately wanted to know what had caused everything to collapse so badly in Russia, leading to that horrible conviction. Most of all, she wanted to know how he managed to free himself from captivity.
“What happened in Siberia?” she asked softly. “I read about the trial. It said that you refused to follow orders, but it didn’t say what those orders were, and I don’t understand.”
He picked up his spoon and went back to his soup. “Not while I’m eating. It’s a long and tedious story, and this soup is getting cold.”
His knuckles were white, and he wouldn’t meet her eyes. She would learn what happened in good time, but for now she needed to get him cleaned up.
When she rose from the table, he immediately shot to his feet and offered his arm to escort her out of the Ferry Building. People looked at them oddly, because women wearing silk gowns tailored in Paris rarely allowed themselves to be escorted by men who looked like vagabonds, but her smile was so wide it hurt. She loved Dimitri’s courtly manners and didn’t give a fig if people gaped at them. As they walked up Market Street, Dimitri craned his neck to look all around the city, commenting on the grandeur of the buildings with typical exaggeration.
“The architect must have been in a joyous mood when he designed that building,” he said, gesturing to the Palace Hotel with its nine stories, colonnaded balconies, and elegant mansard roof.
“We can stay there if you wish, but the doormen won’t let you cross the threshold looking as you do.”
A nearby barbershop boasted of hot baths in the back of the establishment, though it might not be up to Count Sokolov’s typical standards. She’d always known Dimitri was shamelessly vain. Even while stationed in Siberia, he imported special soap from France and rosehip oil from the Caspian Sea to keep his skin smooth.
Dimitri stood in the doorway of the barbershop, gazing with rapt longing at the shelves laden with bottles of ointments and tins of shaving balm. “I have just stepped into paradise.”