Written on the Wind (The Blackstone Legacy #2)(29)
“Are you finished?” she asked with a glance at his mostly untouched plate. It seemed a crime to walk away from it. What would Temujin say? It was a shame, but he couldn’t eat any more without becoming ill.
“I’m finished,” he confirmed.
Natalia took him to the city’s largest emporium, where he shopped in the gentleman’s section. They had a six-day train ride ahead of them, so he picked two more ready-made suits, a proper overcoat, and a gold satin vest embroidered with swirls of ivy. Vanity had always been his greatest personal failing, and he was in the mood to indulge it. At the tie counter he practically wept at the feel of the silks on his chapped skin and proceeded to buy patterned cravats, ascots, and bow ties in every imaginable shade. At the jeweler’s counter he purchased garnet cuff links, a timepiece on a fine watch chain, and an opal stickpin. The packages were shipped directly to the train station so he and Natalia remained unencumbered during his voracious quest to keep shopping.
They rode a cable car up Market Street, where he persuaded Natalia to stop at the perfumery so he could buy a bottle of something pretty for her. They laughed while sampling over a dozen bottles, and he persuaded her to buy the most expensive blend of rose and night-blooming jasmine in the store, a charming perfume improbably bottled in Kentucky. Then they sampled cologne for him.
“Any scent other than cedar,” he said as they headed to the gentlemen’s counter. Dimitri could happily live the rest of his life without the scent or taste of cedar nuts. In the end they found a nice sandalwood with a hint of citrus, and Natalia opened her purse to pay for it.
“Once we are in New York and I have access to my funds, I shall repay every dime for this lavish excursion,” he said. “I am not certain, but given my four-percent investment in your family’s bank, I think that I am wealthier than you. True?”
“True,” she laughed, but it was getting tiresome, having her pay for everything, so they visited a bank, where she withdrew an advance from his quarterly payment and gave him a fat roll of bills to sustain him until they reached New York. The bank also had a telegraph office, and he was anxious to send a wire to his mother.
“She will be pleased to learn I am not festering in a Siberian iron mine.”
It was a challenge to find the proper telegraph location code. After Mirosa was seized, his mother had been forced to move in with his sister and her husband in a village south of Saint Petersburg, and he did not know the correct station code. The clerk had to consult a Russian directory of telegraph codes, and it was lunchtime before the message was sent.
Dimitri breathed easier once the message was on its way. His mother would not spend another night fearing for his well-being.
“Worrying about her was one of the worst parts of this ordeal,” he said once he and Natalia were seated at a café on Market Street. “I know she fears for me, and living with my sister probably has not been easy for her. Sometimes mothers and daughters do not live in perfect harmony.”
“I can understand.”
He peered at her in curiosity. Natalia’s love for her mother was the reason she learned so much about Russia, but Galina had died several years ago, and Natalia had a frosty relationship with her father’s new wife.
“I sense you do not care for your stepmother,” he said. “Your messages often praise your father, but you have little good to say about the woman he married.”
Natalia shrugged. “There’s nothing specifically wrong with Poppy, aside from the fact that she’s a terrific snob.”
“What is her best quality?” he asked, and Natalia looked taken aback by the question.
She glanced all around the interior of the restaurant, taking an undue amount of time to come up with an answer. “Poppy is remarkably good at playing golf,” she finally said.
“That’s it? That’s the best thing you can say about this woman your father adores and who has given birth to your only brother? Come. Tell me why you dislike her.”
“I’ll need a fresh cup of coffee for that.”
14
Natalia wasn’t proud of her relationship with her stepmother. Many people thought her disapproval of Poppy was rooted in jealousy over her father’s affections, but it wasn’t.
“My father has an unhealthy dependence on Poppy,” she finally said. “I don’t like it.”
“How so?” Dimitri asked.
Natalia began by describing an attempted assassination that took place seven years earlier, when an anarchist lobbed a bomb at Oscar as he left the bank. The bomb destroyed the fa?ade of the bank and killed three bystanders. Her father was badly injured, losing an eye and the use of one leg, but he survived.
“I think it was the first time he realized he wasn’t invincible,” Natalia said. “My mother was still alive then, but she couldn’t help him. She tried to tidy the bedsheets in his sickroom and bring him meals, but he was so angry. He barked at her to leave him alone, and my mother was too soft-hearted to stand up to him. She always felt inadequate because she hadn’t been able to give him a son, and she tried to make up for it by catering to him, but it just made him feel like an invalid.”
Oscar’s leg refused to heal, and he relied on a wheelchair for years before he met Poppy Galpin, a young, athletic woman whose father managed the country club where Oscar once played golf. Oscar’s days as a sportsman ended after the bombing, but he still visited the dining room at the club for business meetings. When Poppy saw him being wheeled across the lobby of the clubhouse, she boldly approached and asked when he intended to take up golf again. The people accompanying Oscar glared in disapproval, but her father was curious, challenging her to suggest how a half-blind cripple dragging a useless leg could play golf.