The Property of a Lady - Elizabeth Adler [33]
In the end, though, he had agreed to compromise. They would go to Turkey for the months of May and June, avoiding the worst of the heat, and return later in the autumn. In between they would take up Prince Misha Ivanoff’s long-standing invitation to visit St. Petersburg. When the prince had been reading ancient history at Oxford, the professor had become both his mentor and his friend, and the two had corresponded ever since.
But in Turkey he had sat up night after night, excitedly writing his notes by the light of a flickering oil lamp with never a thought for the marauding mosquitoes. After only three weeks he had been stricken with the severe chills and fevers of malaria. The dig was in a remote area, a hundred miles from the nearest village, and there was no doctor. The quinine and patent medicines Missie had brought along did little to help, and he quickly became dehydrated from the fever. She nursed him anxiously for a week, and then, quite suddenly, he seemed to pick up again. He had told her eagerly that he wanted to get back to his work, but she had thought his eyes looked a little more tired, and his hands had trembled. He had suddenly looked, she remembered with a pang, like an old man.
How she wished she had insisted they return to England, but again she had compromised; they would go to Russia, where her father would recuperate at the palatial Ivanoff villa on the Crimean coast.
The villa had turned out to be more like a marble palace, spacious and cool and with every luxury, including dozens of servants to cater to her every whim. But she barely noticed because the professor immediately fell ill again. Despite the best medical care, Marcus Octavius Byron had died two days later. His last words were “Take care of yourself, Missie. There are big changes ahead of you now.” He had pressed her hand lightly and, without even a sigh, he was gone. Missie had no other living relatives. Without her father, she was alone in the world.
He was buried the next day in the immaculate little Orthodox churchyard on a hill overlooking the indigo-blue sea far below. There was no time for Prince Misha to travel the thousands of miles from St. Petersburg to mourn his old colleague, but when Missie followed her father’s coffin into the cool domed white church, she found it filled with the prince’s own friends who were holidaying at their villas.
They had murmured words of comfort and encouragement as they accompanied her back to the Ivanoff villa, sipping endless glasses of tea and watching her with troubled eyes. “Why does she not cry?” they had whispered to each other worriedly, because they were used to the great outpourings of emotion that were so Russian. “She is so young … only sixteen … and all alone in the world now, Misha Ivanoff says….”
The tears had come the next day, alone in the cushioned comfort of the Ivanoff private train as it took her to St. Petersburg to stay with the prince and his family. And then when she finally got there and met Misha, her whole life had changed, just as her father had said it would.
The big Ivanoff houses were filled with a mixture of relations, ancient maiden aunts and widowed second cousins, who all lived happily amid a flurry of knitting needles, spicy gossip, and a faint odor of peppermint and cologne. An extra person here and there only added to the expansive Russian family hospitality. But Verity Byron was special; the hearts of all the Ivanoffs went out to her in her loneliness and grief, and with no family of her own to go back to, she soon became one of them. And of course, she was hopelessly in love with Misha.
Looking back now, Missie thought the time seemed to have passed too quickly and she longed with all her heart to be able to turn back the clock. If only they hadn’t gone to Turkey her father would still be here … if only she hadn’t fallen in love with Misha Ivanoff and had gone home to Oxford … if only there had been no revolution and things