Free The Four Winds of Heaven by Monique Raphel High Page B

he, as snobbish, and as petty in her envies and social exhibitionism. But at heart she was a German Frau, protective of her family and always ready to advance their personal cause. They had a single daughter, Tatiana, a year younger than Sonia. No one ever understood how the little wren Rosa had produced such an exquisite porcelain doll with hair as fair as that of Rapunzel. Sasha and his wife found her the loveliest child in St. Petersburg. Few disagreed.
    This, then, was the family that awaited the return of Mathilde and her four children to the capital. The children had only met their aunt and their cousin once, in Europe, and they did not quite remember either one. They were rather afraid of their paternal grandfather, for he was not gay and charming like Grandfather Yuri, his flamboyant brother in Paris, who told them incredible stories and made them laugh. But Mathilde had said to them: “How we feel is unimportant. Family is family. You, Sonia, will be good and kind to your cousin Tania.”
    Mathilde was enchanted with the house David had purchased on Vassilievsky Island, and which he had furnished so carefully. She was surprised, and touched. As they walked up the marble steps to the apartment on the top story, she noted with pleasure that enormous potted palms stood on each landing, and that a reproduction by David’s friend, the sculptor Antokolsky, of his best work, the Mephistopheles, adorned the lowest landing. Antokolsky had been commissioned to make marble busts of Tzar Nicholas II and his wife and mother.
    They had been greeted at the door by two familiar figures who had served the family when David and Mathilde had resided in Horace’s own mansion. Stepan, tall, dignified, and well-dressed, was the maître d’hôtel. Alexei Fliederbaum, small and quick, had once been David’s orderly in the Uhlans in Lomzha. Later he had served Sasha too in that regiment, until David had taken him out of the ranks and trained him as his bookkeeper and librarian. Their presence had made Mathilde smile through her exhaustion, and had enhanced her pleasure in the apartment. But the children had reacted with awe and suspended breath, for after the overwhelming spectacle of the spires and the Neva River, and the furious windswept drive across the bridge, they had been unprepared for so much magnificence inside their own home. And Stepan dwarfed even Papa, who was almost as tall as Uncle Sasha.
    David had awaited his family’s arrival with near-childlike exultation. He had been alone so long in this city, dining with sympathetic friends whose wives treated him with somewhat overt compassion, or poring over his work into the wee hours of the morning. He had frankly missed Mathilde in his bed. Now, for their first supper in his new home, she chose a gown of mint-green silk trimmed with ermine, and he was moved, knowing that this was her tacit signal of approval of the pale green bedroom. He had perhaps dreamed of greater effusion, but then Mathilde had never been effusive, not even on their wedding day. No, he considered, she is content, and she is glad to be here, with me. His pale blue eyes shone across the table, encountering hers.
    His children were around him. Anna, her eyes rimmed with red after a long session with the curling irons; Ossip, quietly observant; and little Sonia, who appeared smaller even than Sasha’s Tania, her little face rosy and ringed with bright black waves of hair. Between the two girls sat the new governess, Mademoiselle de Mey. David knit his brow, tasting his Madeira. He felt uneasy about Mademoiselle de Mey.
    There she sat, erect and graceful, in a peach-colored gown, her golden hair glimmering beneath the chandelier. David had known many women in his life, some grand, like his wife, serenely beautiful in magnificent understatement. They were good listeners, they were kindhearted, they were true ladies. They did not shine by their wit, nor overwhelm by their jewels.