Written on the Wind (The Blackstone Legacy #2)(8)
I want to invest outside the country. What do you recommend? Your father is universally famous for his business acumen.
Natalia had been reluctant to suggest any single company for Dimitri to invest his savings and simply said she would trust her father’s bank for its diversified investments.
He took her advice, and over the next few months, Count Sokolov’s secretary in Saint Petersburg began transferring huge sums of money to the Blackstone Bank for investment. Eventually, Count Sokolov acquired a four-percent stake in the bank, which Natalia was pleased to see earned a healthy profit with each quarterly dividend.
Their curious friendship made working with Dimitri a joy. Over time they began calling each other by their first names and engaged in good-natured debates. They both had passionate opinions but could rarely sway the other. The perfect example was Dimitri’s insistence that she read War and Peace. The novel did not sit well with her, and she unleashed her feelings on Dimitri.
Why did you make me read War and Peace? I foolishly began to love and care for those characters, but Tolstoy seems to enjoy making them suffer and inflicting miserable deaths upon them. I shall never forgive you.
His response was not long in coming.
Dearest Natalia. The history of Russia is a litany of grief and sorrow woven into the fabric of our nation. A Russian novelist must dip his pen in his own blood to write his story. You may avert your American eyes if you choose, but there is glory and valor in suffering that transcends our paltry physical lives. I practice it daily.
That dreary message prompted her to ship a copy of Little Women to Dimitri, pronouncing it a faithful representation of real life in all its tragedies, but mostly filled with hope and optimism.
That was last month. She didn’t even know if he’d received it, and now she would never learn what her lonely Russian count thought of Little Women.
On the phonograph, the needle had reached the end of the moody Brahms symphony, but the record kept rotating on its turntable, the needle making a rhythmic clicking sound with each rotation. She plodded over to lift off the needle, her spirit heavy. It looked like Dimitri had found his tragic Russian fate, but she could see no glory or valor in it.
4
Dimitri found a sad irony in riding to a penal colony on the same railroad he helped build. The rhythmic clicking of the train wheels had become the background noise of his world as he was transported farther east with each passing day.
At least he was not uncomfortable. Unlike ordinary criminals, political prisoners were afforded a certain amount of respect by the guards, and Dimitri’s title made this especially true. He had been granted the courtesy of “free command,” a status that allowed him to wear his own clothes, move about without shackles, and mingle with whomever he chose. Security was lax because escape meant almost certain death in the vast wilderness.
The guards loved socializing with him. Each night they played poker, drank vodka, and sang bawdy songs. It had always been easy for Dimitri to make friends, and never had that skill been more important than now. He carefully cultivated the image of a bon vivant, carousing with the guards as though indulging in a last great hurrah before his grim imprisonment. The guards peppered him with endless questions. How big was his estate? Had he met the czar? Was the czarina as beautiful as reported? He was able to truthfully report that he’d seen the czar at the Winter Palace. They hadn’t been introduced, but yes, the czarina was as lovely as reported. The guards also wanted to know about Mirosa, Dimitri’s ancestral home.
It was the only topic he was reluctant to discuss. Mirosa was carved on his soul, a two-thousand-acre estate of unspoiled wilderness alive with birch groves, cedar trees, and of course, the apple orchard that perfumed the air. Summers at Mirosa were tragically short, but while they lasted, it was an earthly paradise. As a boy, he used to explore the woods, sometimes stumbling across sunlit clearings where he would lie on the grass to stare up at the cloudless sky and imagine he was speaking directly to God. He only left Mirosa to prove himself by helping build the czar’s ambitious railroad that was supposed to be Russia’s salvation.
Instead, it had been Dimitri’s undoing.
What was it about Siberia that turned minor aristocrats into major revolutionaries? Prince Kropotkin, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and countless others had been transformed into radicals by the vast Russian landscape. Dimitri didn’t want to be a radical. He only wanted to return to Mirosa, where he could be a guardian of the land, the orchards, and the lake.
He could never return to Mirosa, but he would not meet his end in a prison camp. God had sent him to witness that atrocity for a reason, and Dimitri needed to escape so he could proclaim it to the world.
The train would soon turn north, after which the climate would make escape impossible. That meant he needed to make his bid for freedom soon.
He affected a casual pose as he joined a group of guards for poker. They played hand after hand late into the night. Dimitri didn’t have anything to barter with, but the guards didn’t mind. He was good company, and they had a grand time.
By ten o’clock, Dimitri was examining the cards a young guard had tossed on the table before him. Dimitri’s three-of-a-kind beat Mikhail’s two pair, but he tossed his cards facedown and grinned in good-natured defeat.
“You’ve won again, Mikhail,” Dimitri said with a jaunty salute. “Let’s have another round, shall we?”