Heart of Iron - Ekaterina Sedia [39]
“You’ll have to speak to your imprisoned friend,” Eugenia said. “And as God is my witness, I won’t leave this city until I help you with that. Then we will see what we can do to convince the emperor that China is his friend, not the British Empire.”
It would be a lie to say I didn’t feel intimidated by the enormousness of these events. Two women, sitting in a tiny apartment disentangling a complicated standoff between three empires—four, if you counted the Ottomans, and Eugenia assured me that if Russia were to show any weakness, the Turks would surely make a grab for Crimea and the Russian shores of the Black Sea. They may already have made an alliance with the British, making it even more urgent that Russia and China stand shoulder to shoulder—no one would dare to defy such a show of power.
I tried to force my mind to think on such a scale and it recoiled. My thoughts were like lumbering boulders, impossible to shift by mere human will, and I felt defeated by the very act of contemplation.
I would have gone mad if not for Eugenia’s presence. She spoke of politics until Anastasia, who had returned from the shops, walked smack into the middle of our plotting. She fell asleep at the kitchen table, a cheek resting on round freckled arms still folded around the bag of fragrant roots and potions she’d fetched.
Eugenia filled in more of my lacking understanding of foreign politics and made more tea, raspberry and chamomile. She made me drink the valerian root seeped in hot water. It made me warm and drowsy.
It was almost morning when I had been calmed enough—with Eugenia’s talk and no small amount of valerian tea—to go to bed. My aunt did the same.
I did not ask for this, I whispered to myself as I fell asleep. I did not need this, not on top of my classes and the constantly smirking Professor Ipatiev, not with friends in jail or missing, or a suitor who robbed people and leapt from one building to the next. It all seemed excessive for one person, and I would never have dreamed of taking on additional burdens if my aunt had not been with me. But since she was, efficient and severe as always in her black dress, sleeping in the bedroom next to mine, it didn’t seem all that impossible.
Really, it was mostly because of my aunt that I rose in the morning, determined and ready. As Anastasia snored peacefully in her little room and I made tea, I made the decision that was to alter the course of my life forever: I had decided that if there was a war brewing, it was my job to stop it. My first step was to convince Jack Bartram to come to my side.
Chapter 7
Thwarting the impending war turned out to be more complicated than I imagined. While Eugenia was getting nowhere with her petitions and being irritably sent from one waiting room to another and then back again, I suffered under the uncompromising instruction of Professors Ipatiev, Zhmurkin, and several of their assorted colleagues. Physics caught up with me rather unexpectedly, and I realized that to pass the exams I would have to study more than previously. And of course I was not going to abandon my studies, so the entirety of my campaign would have to be confined to my winter recess. Or so I thought.
Jack presented another problem—after his passionate confession, he seemed to consider the matter closed, and we returned to our amiable walks after philosophy class, with an occasional outing to a concert of chamber music, of which Jack was inordinately fond, or an engineering exhibit. I felt uneasy about those, even when they featured something as innocuous as the piano-playing automaton. I could never forget he was there to observe closely and report.
He too seemed to be aware of the awkwardness—at least, he never made any further incursions into romantic territory, to both my small relief and greater disappointment. A man in love was easier to manipulate, and I was prepared to feel only a modicum of guilt about it.
Because of him, I had also gained access to the Northern Star—the English favored it, and I discovered that even