The Property of a Lady - Elizabeth Adler [68]
Leyla breathed a sigh of relief as the Air France 727 roared down the runway and soared into the air. For a few seconds she could see Paris sprawling below, then the clouds closed in, the seat belt sign clicked off, and an anonymous female voice informed them that those who wished might smoke. Above the layer of cloud the sun shone in a clear blue sky and just a few hours away lay Istanbul.
She glanced at the empty seat next to her. Anna’s seat. She had paced the courtyard outside the Louvre this morning, the airline tickets in her purse, but Anna never arrived. After two hours she had hurried back to her apartment hoping she had left a message, but this time no red light was blinking on her answering machine. She had waited until the very last minute before taking a taxi to the airport, where she had called again for her messages, but still no word from Anna, and she was worried sick.
Why had they done it? she asked herself angrily. Why hadn’t Anna just gone to Kazahn Pasha and asked for the money she needed? But she knew why. Michael would have wanted to know what she had done with her inheritance and Anna didn’t want to tell him. It was Anna’s fierce Russian pride that had led to all this. Not that she had ever talked much about her ancestors, but apart from Missie and the Kazahns the past was all she had really ever had.
Leyla remembered the summer in Istanbul when she was eight and Anna was fourteen. They had been sitting on the terrace watching the sun set over the Bosphorus like a great scarlet cut-out pasted onto a gauzy-gold sky. A full moon was rising behind the darkening hills and the faint scent of night-blooming flowers drifted on the air. There were just the four of them: Tariq and Missie, Anna and Leyla, watching silently, each lost in his or her own thoughts as the sun slid quickly behind the horizon, leaving them wrapped in the warm blue-black dusk, soft as velvet.
Leyla was sitting on a silk-covered ottoman at Tariq’s feet, and Anna was leaning against the balustrade, gazing over the dark water. “Missie,” she had said in a quiet voice, “tell me about Varishnya and my grandfather.”
Leyla glanced up at Missie sitting beside Tariq and saw him take her hand in his comfortingly. “Some things are too painful to remember,” he told Anna. “The past is the past, it should be forgotten.”
Missie replied quietly, “But she is right, she should know about her family. She should know the truth, the way it was.”
The silence had seemed endless as they waited for Missie to gather her thoughts and then she had begun.
“The first time I saw Misha Ivanoff,” she said quietly, “I was just sixteen years old and still considered a child; my long hair was tied back in a large floppy bow and I wore a simple white dress with a low, wide sash, white stockings, and little brown button boots. I was all alone in Russia, in the world really, for my father had just died and I had no other living relatives. I had traveled from the Crimean coast to St. Petersburg in the Ivanoff private train that seemed to me like a palace on wheels; in fact, it ran so smoothly even the wheels seemed cushioned. But if I had thought the train luxurious, nothing prepared me for the splendor of the palace on the banks of the Moika Canal.
“A chauffeur in the deep-blue Ivanoff livery met me at the station and drove me to the house in a wonderful de Courmont motor car, and as it drew up in front of a flight of marble steps a huge doorman, looking big as a bear in his blue coat with a blue bandolier studded with