Heart of Iron - Ekaterina Sedia [2]
Is it any wonder that I took her words more deeply to heart than my mother’s?
When I turned eighteen, I was judged to be ready for my debut—even Eugenia nodded and conceded there was nothing to be gained by delaying it further. I was not so much excited about the balls and the season as I was about getting to visit St. Petersburg again—even though we had an apartment there, we spent all of our time in Trubetskoye, and visited only rarely. I missed the leaden Neva and the spire of the Admiralty piercing the fat low winter clouds, and I could not wait to walk those broad and impossibly straight streets, blown through by the cold autumn winds.
Despite my mother’s predictions, I had not achieved beauty. Rather, my appearance had become stuck between my aunt’s sharp features and my mother’s dainty ones—neither an ugly duck nor a swan, I could only claim awkwardness as one feature that belonged to me and no one else.
Then there was the matter of a dress; my mother fully intended to fret about it until Eugenia rolled her eyes and hired a village seamstress. “Here,” she told the large, red-handed and rough-knuckled woman as she gave her the money. “Make something not embarrassing.” The woman nodded while I secretly doubted the effectiveness of such low-aiming instruction. But to my surprise, the dress turned out to be foam green, simple, and beautiful in a manner of Grecian shifts (if Grecians were to wear corsets and crinolines under theirs.) Thus accoutered, I was ready for anything fine society was prepared to throw at me.
I confess to some anxiety as Eugenia’s carriage left the familiar backwater of Trubetskoye and clanked along the too-wide ruts toward the capital. Squeezed between my mother’s warm soft shawl and my aunt’s sharp elbow, I had all the time in the world to think and fret, even as Miss Chartwell’s fish eyes watched me from the seat opposite ours where she was losing a silent and undignified battle with hat boxes and suitcases that had not fit on the carriage roof.
I felt an impostor, somehow—as if my papa’s sacrifice and service had expired the day he had died, and now my mother and I were nothing, just poor relations leeching off of my aunt’s kindness; as if my family’s past did not entitle me to a place at the emperor’s season; as if I did not stand to inherit two titles. All of that was no more than dust to me, and the closer we got to the icy, stony beauty of St. Petersburg, the more perturbed I felt.
Fortunately, my mother and Eugenia’s exclamations brought me out of the tar pit of excessive self-reflection.
“It changes every time I come by,” Eugenia said. “Every time.”
“Indeed,” my mother said peering through the window on her side of the carriage. “I guess it is a good thing that the emperor is taking care of the roads.” She smiled at me and leaned back into the cushions to allow me a view out of the window.
The road I remembered as being insubstantial and barely passable in the spring floods was being widened—a crew of freedmen labored next to the road, shattering stone with heavy hammers; another crew collected the resulting gravel and loaded it into long, open carts. I surmised the carts would then be sent to pave the road—it was still dirt at our present location, but noises ahead signaled it was paved not too far from there.
Roads and highways and railroads were the emperor’s latest obsession. Eugenia had shrewdly observed he had to do something with all the freedmen, now that the fields were modernized and required fewer workers than before. My mother approved of the emperor’s actions as she approved of everything he did—he was her connection to my dead papa, his protégé of sorts, even though such an imaginary inversion of power was ridiculous.
To Eugenia, the relentless reformism seemed to signal something beyond imperial magnanimity— I swear she could see farther into the future than any of us with her small beady eyes.