Winter Palace (11 page)

Jeffrey offered his hand. “Congratulations, Andrew. I'm sure you're going to be a great dad.”

“Wish I shared your confidence, lad. The thought is enough to give me a bad case of the shakes, I'll admit.” His grip on Jeffrey's hand lingered. “I'd thought of asking you to be his godfather.”

“Me?”

“Don't look so shocked. You've got all the right ingredients for a godparent, far as I can see. And in years to come, you'll be able to give the little blighter the kind of gifts he deserves, like a matching suite of Louis XIV furniture.” Andrew sobered momentarily. “Seriously, lad. I'd be ever so glad if you'd accept.”

“I'm honored, Andrew. Really.”

“That's settled, then.” Andrew dropped his hand. “You'd be amazed the things you and the little wife will get involved with when your own time comes. Never knew wallpaper coloring was a national priority.” He motioned to where Magda waved at him. “You're being summoned, lad. Time to rejoin the fray.”

Magda patted the chair next to her as he approached and said, “Allow me the honor of sitting next to the most handsome man in the room for a moment.”

“I am only a complement for your daughter's beauty,” Jeffrey replied, sitting down.

“For this moment, perhaps.” Magda searched out her daughter, responded to her wave with yet another smile. “Yes, it is indeed her day.”

“You have raised a beautiful daughter,” Jeffrey told her.

Magda turned her attention back to him. “And granted her the good sense to choose an excellent man.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Nichols.”

“I was so pleased that my daughter was not artistically inclined.” She sipped from her glass. “I did not wish the Lord to burden her with this passion.”

Jeffrey found her across the crowded room. “She has your passion,” he replied. “It comes out in other ways.”

“I am glad.” Magda inspected his face, asked, “You are worried by this trip to the Ukraine?”

He nodded, no longer surprised by her changes in direction or choices of topic. “Does it show so clearly?”

“No, but I know my daughter. She will have bestowed her own worries upon you. Her life and her heritage has been shaped by one view of the Soviet empire. She sees them as the oppressors. The Bolsheviks. The conquerors. The instruments of Stalin's terror.” She waved the past aside. “But this nation no longer exists. Who knows what you shall find?”

“I think this uncertainty is almost as frightening as what you described.”

“This too is true.” Magda smiled. “Perhaps you are right to be worried after all.”

“Thanks a lot.”

“When do you depart?”

“Tonight we have a suite here at the Grosvenor House, then tomorrow we leave for five days in Monte Carlo. I travel to Cracow two days later.”

“Know that you shall travel with the prayers of at least two women sheltering you.”

“Thank you, Magda. That means a lot.”

“So, enough of the future. Today we must retain the moment's joy, no?” Magda reached beside her chair and came up with a picture frame wrapped in white tissue paper. “I have made something for you.”

“That's wonderful, Magda.” He made to rise. “Wait, let me go get Katya.”

“My daughter has already seen this,” she replied. “She was the one who suggested the quotation.”

Jeffrey accepted the package, folded back the paper, and released a long, slow breath.

The frame was simple and wooden. The matting was of dark-blue velvet. Set upon this cloth was a flat, hand-painted ceramic rectangle.

The picture's background was softest ivory. Upon it was painted a man cresting the peak of an impossibly high mountain. With one hand he clutched for support; the other he stretched heavenward. Above him a lamb, shining as the sun, reached down, offering a pair of wings.

Beneath were scrolled the words, “‘Let us press on to know God,' Hosea 6:4.”

Jeffrey's mother stepped over to where they sat. “May I borrow my son for a moment?”

“Of course.”

“Did you paint that, Magda? Oh, it's beautiful. May I show it to my husband?” She lifted the picture from Jeffrey's grasp and moved off.

Jeffrey stammered, “Magda, I don't know how to thank you.”

She smiled once more. “You shall make a worthy son-in-law, Jeffrey. Of that I have not the slightest doubt.”

“Jeffrey?” His mother reappeared. “I do need to speak to you for a moment.”

“Go,” Magda said quietly. “My blessings upon you both, and upon this wondrous day.”

His mother pulled him over to another quiet corner. “Katya is as wonderful as you said.”

“You spent a week together and you're just getting around to deciding this?”

She gave him a playful hug. “I've told you that before and you know it.”

He pulled a face. “I don't recall.”

“You don't recall,” she mimicked, rolling the tones. “Listen to my posh son.”

Jeffrey was so completely happy he felt he could have skated
a Fred Astaire dance step across the ceiling. “You know where that word comes from? In the days of colonial India, people with connections and experience chose the cooler side of the boat for their voyages out and back—port out, starboard home. Posh. Very snooty group, from the sounds of it.”

She looked at him with genuine approval. “You're very happy with your life, aren't you.” It was not a question.

He nodded. “Other than the odd crisis now and then, very happy.”

“These bad things come,” she said, her smile never slipping. “If you are strong, and if you're lucky enough to marry a good partner, and if you're wise enough to know a strong faith, the bad things go too.”

“They do at that,” he agreed.

“Well, I didn't pull you away to discuss the lost colonies of the British Empire.”

He played at surprise. “No?”

“Your brother asked me to wait until your wedding day to pass on this momentous news. Don't ask me why. I have long since given up trying to figure out how my sons' minds work.” She took a breath, then said, “Your little brother is thinking of becoming a monk.”

That dropped his jaw. “Charles?”

“Unless you have yet another brother stashed somewhere which I don't know about, that must be the one.”

“Charles a monk?”

“Better than Charles a drunk. His words, not mine. He is very sorry to miss the festivities, by the way. Genuinely sorry. But travel is such a tremendous difficulty for him. We discussed it and decided this was better for all concerned.”

But Jeffrey wasn't ready to let that one go. “Charles is going to be a monk?”

“Not only has he convinced me and your father, but the abbot is taking this most seriously as well.”

“Abbot?”

“The monastery head. Call him chief holy honcho if it
makes it any easier to swallow. Your father does. He's quite a nice man, actually.”

“I can't believe it.”

“A fairly standard reaction. Charles says to tell you that he has finally recognized himself as a man of extremes. A born fanatic. Either he lands in the gutter, or he takes his religion thing all the way.”

“That's what he calls it? His religion thing?”

She smiled, a touch of sadness to her eyes. “My dear son Charles is going to, as he puts it, spend the rest of his life doing a major prayer gig.”

She walked over to the gift-laden table, extracted a long slender package, and returned. “He asked that I give you this on the big day when we're alone. I suppose this is as alone as we're going to be. It's a poem. He wrote it himself and did his own calligraphy. You'll be happy to know his poetry doesn't sound like the way Charles talks.”

Jeffrey unwrapped the box, pulled out the frame, and read:

Tonight I Hear

Tonight I hear the angels sing

With ears that never heard this earth,

A gift of grace long undeserved

From One who longs to grant me wings.

Oh Lord, how long must I remain

Bound to earth and earthly bonds?

Can my home your home become,

Your love my love, my life your aims?

I seek, I seek, and cannot find

A gift which is forever mine,

And in my frantic fury fail

To hear His voice so softly say,

    Be still.

    Be still.

    Be still,

And know that all is here, and thine.

Salvation, grace, and guiding light

I know are mine, yet yearn for heights

Which He himself has called me to,

Far beyond this clinging clime.

Yet perfection shall be never mine;

Only His, and mine when I can die

To Him, and let Him live through me,

And know that here indeed are wings

    That soar.

    That soar.

    That soar,

Beyond earth's stormy shore,

    to Him.

Jeffrey looked back to his mother and managed to say, “Tell Charles I'm proud of him.”

“Jeffrey?” Katya came over, rested a gentle hand on his shoulder.

His mother stood, shared smiles with Katya. “If I had ever tried to dream up an image of the perfect daughter-in-law, it would not have held a candle to you, my dear.”

They exchanged hugs from the heart. His mother turned her attention back to Jeffrey and said, “May the Lord bless you and your wife and your lives together, with love and His presence most of all.”

Then Katya took her place before Jeffrey, and looked up at her new husband with eyes that flooded his heart with their radiance. She whispered for his ears alone, “It is time, my darling.”

Chapter 12

Monte Carlo crowned a rocky promontory that descended in steep stages from the Maritime Alps to the Mediterranean Sea. The road running along the coast, the one that linked the tiny principality with such other Riviera resorts as Cannes and Antibes and Cap Ferrat, was called the Corniche. It was bounded on the Mediterranean side by a hand-wrought stone balustrade that gave way first to rocky beaches, then to a sea whose aching blue was matched only by the cloudless sky.

At the heart of Monte Carlo rested its famous port, the waters dotted with the ivory-colored yachts of the international jet set. The surrounding houses crowded tightly against one another, grudgingly permitting only the smallest of spaces for tiny, cobblestone streets. The architecture spanned the years from
La Belle
É
poque
to ultramodern. Yet somehow it all fit, if perhaps only because of the sun and the sea and the romantic eyes with which Jeffrey and Katya blessed all they saw.

Just off the port rose the gracious and stately Casino. Even surrounded as it was by such chrome and glass apparitions as the Loew's hotel, the Casino remained a regal crown harking back to Monte Carlo's glory days. Facing it across the stately Place du Casino was the wedding-cake structure of the Hotel de Paris, the most prestigious hotel in the kingdom.

The exterior was all honey-colored stone and liveried footmen and wide, red-carpeted stairs and grand towers. The interior was all gilt and marble and Persian carpets and crystal chandeliers. The suite Alexander had arranged for them had a view up over the rooftops to the port and the sea beyond.

It was a magical time, a sharing of happiness that knew no earthly bounds. Nights were too precious to allow for a willing descent into slumber. Exhaustion would creep upon them while one spoke and the other tried to listen, and suddenly
it would be dawn. And they would still be together, opening their eyes to another day of shared joy.

They spoke of the serious, the future, the infinite. They dwelled long and joyfully upon the meaningless, the unimportant, and gave it eternal significance with their love.

“I know it's a little late to be worrying about such things,” he said the fourth morning, the day of their visit to Prince Markov. “But I've got to ask. Can you cook?”

As was their newfound custom, they took breakfast in their room. They found it all too new, this beginning of their days together, to share it with others. Within minutes of their call, room-service waiters in starched white uniforms rolled in a linen-clad table bearing flaky croissants, fresh fruit, silver pots containing thick black morning coffee and frothy hot milk, and always a rose in a vase. Katya kept the flowers in a water glass on her bedside table.

Katya nodded emphatically. “I make the best gooshy-gasha on earth.”

He made a face. “Sounds divine.”

“It takes lots of practice. I started when I was, oh, I think maybe two and a half or three years old.”

He marveled at the graceful slant to her almond-shaped eyes. “Have I ever told you how beautiful you are?”

She nodded happily. “You take a shiny new kitchen bake-pan and carry it out to the backyard. Then you mix in different things from the garden.”

“For taste,” he said.

She shook her head, making the dark strands shiver. “For color. Green grass, brown dirt, some water to hold it together, and as many different petals as you could find. Petals are a key ingredient of gooshy-gasha. We had a dozen fruit trees in our backyard. I remember going from tree to tree, picking handfuls of petals off the ground. I called them springtime snow, I can still remember that. It was different from wintertime snow because you could hold it in your hand and it wouldn't melt.”

“When you talk like that your face gets like a little girl's,” Jeffrey mused, and felt his heart twist at the thought of a child with her face.
Their
child.

But she was still caught in the fun of remembering and sharing. “Gooshy-gasha. I haven't thought about that in years. When it was thick enough you could turn the pan upside down and make what I called a
babeczka;
that means a little cake.”

“A garden variety cupcake.”

“A baby fruit cake,” she corrected him, “with grass and petals instead of fruit and nuts. It was mostly brown, with little bits of green and pink sticking out. I'd serve it to my dolls and our pet bunnies and maybe the neighbor's dog, if I could get him to sit still long enough to put a bib on him. He was such a messy eater.” She gazed with eyes so happy they rested on him with a joyous pain. “You're much neater than he was.”