The Eleventh Year (9 page)

Paris society had reintegrated the capital. In 1914, faced with losses so serious that all fronts were giving way, the French government had fled to Bordeaux, and the elegant folk had gone to Deauville to gamble and to Biarritz to sunbathe. Now the war seemed sufficiently removed that they had returned, but many of them had been forced to leave their homes, for coal and servants were almost unavailable, and tea rooms had had to be closed. The rich had been forced to move to rented suites at the luxury hotels.

Gabrielle Chanel was the
couturière
of the day, for Paul Poiret had thrown all his energies into clothing the armed forces. Lesley wanted to meet her and to buy her entire fall's wardrobe from her, because, earlier that year, a sketch had appeared of one of her dresses in
Harper's Bazaar.
Entitled “Chanel's charming little chemise dress,” it consisted of a most avant-garde outfit: slim form-fitting sleeves, a plunging V-neck, and…no waistline whatsoever. The hat had neither egrets nor flowers—only a small border of fur around its crown. Simplicity had rendered the design a marvel of good taste and comfort. Lesley had immediately picked it out, adopting it for her slender figure.

So they went to rue Cambon to be fitted for a series of such outfits, and Lesley professed herself delighted. More of the calf showed than in America, where a display of the ankle was still considered mildly risqué. Lesley bought clothes for the fall semester made out of the new material, jersey, invented for Chanel by Rodier. And she admired the dashing, pencil-thin Frenchwoman, who dressed with the flair of a distinguished hermaphrodite. Her clothing always borrowed from the best of male attire, because it was comfortable and useful. Yet on the inside one felt her a true woman, who breathed sexuality.

They saw Cécile Sorel and Sarah Bernhardt on stage. The latter had been on tour in New York, but here, in her own ambiance, she exuded the “something extra” that turned some actresses into legends. Lesley loved Paris but was a bit ashamed of enjoying herself. The shadow of the war hung over the city, and almost no young men remained there. That young men her age were dying—for no reason! Yes, surely President Wilson was right: Peace was worth any price. Peace, and the breath of life. The promise of the future. How could one be young and ignore tomorrow?

But in Paris, everyone was vilifying Wilson and glorifying the
poilus,
the soldiers in the trenches. War was seen as a holy crusade, and the Germans were the
Boche,
the most despicable of infidels. America, safe and hedonistic, seemed like a faraway land of make-believe, where reality was not allowed to enter. Lady Priscilla and her daughter did not remain long in Paris. They sailed for England, under a stormy sky.

Lord Arthur Stephen Aymes, Earl of Brighton, was ill with arthritis in his summer home in Yorkshire. Lesley was bored. The days were monotonous, the guests filled with gloomy outlooks and dire predictions about the conditions in Europe. In the vast stone mansion where Cromwell had dwelled, the young girl missed the elegant boulevards of Paris, the picturesque, green-gray Seine winding around the city like a sensuous, loving arm wrapped in an embrace. One afternoon, looking for a novel to read, she walked into her grandfather's large dark parlor, and there, in front of the fireplace, stood a young man she had never met. She hesitated briefly on the threshold—he seemed so absorbed!—but his beauty caught her. He was tall, slight of build, with fine black hair that curled gently over a thin, oval face. His eyes were dark too, and he might have been Italian: All that was missing was a
moustache en pointe.
He was, she thought, perhaps twenty-three. She touched the pearl comb in her hair and felt her fingers trembling inexplicably.

“Hello,” she said softly. “I'm Lesley Richardson—Lord Brighton's granddaughter.”

“And I'm Justin Reeve—Lord Clearwater. Did I startle you?”

His voice was deep, melodic. It went with his Byronic bearing. He was wearing a dark suit from Savile Row, and a black pearl gleamed from his cravat. She felt stupid, disconnected. “I suppose you did,” she admitted.

“My grandfather was at Balliol with yours. They were great friends. So now that Adele and I are alone, Lord Brighton's been most kind and invites us sometimes for the weekend.”

Adele. Then he was married. She could feel the color rising in her cheeks. An awkward silence followed, and Lesley realized with sudden panic that he was waiting for her to fill it. She cleared her throat. “That's…very nice.” She asked nervously: “Do you ride to the hounds?”

“Of course. My sister and I both do.” He smiled at her.

Lesley's tautness dissolved with absurd relief. She went to him and pretended to become interested in the andirons of the fireplace. “It gets so cold in England,” she said. “In the middle of summer we suffocate in New York.”

“Ah.” Clearly he was not interested in her chatter. She could hardly blame him. She should have excused herself and left him alone, but she could not move. And so, quite gently, totally unexpectedly, he took her hand and brought it to his lips. Amazed, she turned her face to him, her lips parting. Then, casually, he dropped the hand and smiled. “Hello, Lesley Richardson,” he murmured.

She knew her face betrayed her rush of joy, the tingling sensations inside her body when he touched her. Lesley remained speechless, staring at Justin. She was eighteen years old, in a world at war. And her own world, hitherto a crystal fortress, had only just begun to crack.

E
lena's father was
, like her, tall and broad shouldered. The natural stateliness of his bearing was in marked, painful contrast to the nervousness of his hands as he rubbed them together over and over again. He had developed this habit since his exile from Petersburg, and as she watched him, pacing the floor and rubbing his blistered hands against the cold of his Siberian banishment, she wondered suddenly if she possessed the heart to reject him too.

“Just imagine,” he was saying, “how much Nicholas Alexandrovitch is underestimating von Hindenburg and Ludendorff! After Tannenberg, the Second Army will never recover. Ninety thousand prisoners on the eastern front. God knows how many dead….”

“Father,” Elena countered, “there is Galicia that we won from the Austrians.” She was wondering how he could still care, after what the tsar had done to him. She wet her lips, looked away, and asked: “Why not go away?”

His dark eyes widened with sudden anger. “Go away? Elena, you were the one who urged me to stay, in 1908! You were the one telling me what it was like to be a Russian! Could it be possible that you've forgotten—the lecture I received from my eighteen-year-old daughter, as well as the message it contained? Lena—look at me, for God's sake!”

She raised her face, unable to resist when he called her by her child's name of endearment. “Much has happened between then and now,” she said with a rush of blood to her cheeks, a quickening of breath. It wasn't going to be easy at all.

“But we're Russians, more than ever! Our country is at war, and we're needed!”

“Papa, you haven't been needed for five years.”

He blinked, and a shocked silence stood between them. She cried out: “Haven't you any pride left in you? Look at us! We're hardly better than the peasants! Don't you ever see Mama? She's grown into an old woman, and she's not even fifty!”

“Your mother vowed when she married me to go wherever I went.”

“But I didn't.”

She saw the purpling of his cheeks and refused this time to avert her eyes. “What does that mean, Elena?” he asked.

“It means, Father, that I'm twenty-four now, and that I don't want to die an old maid with an empty life behind her. And that I'm not going to marry the first secretary at the British consulate, or the headmaster of the gymnasium. Six years ago you refused to give your daughter to the son of Count Andrei Branilev, because his family had not been part of Tsar Ivan's boyars. You wanted me to fall in love with Grand-Duke Dmitri Pavlovitch! And now? What future do you wish for me?”

He couldn't reply. Tears had filled his eyes, and she thought: If I give in, I'll remain here forever. She made herself stare at the blisters on his hands and made herself think: I am a winner, he is a lost man. She then said softly: “I can't stay, Papa. Tomorrow I'm leaving for Irkutsk, with some new friends. The Adler sisters of Moscow. They're charming women who are making a tour of China.”

The purple was draining from his face, to be replaced by a sick pallor. She took one step, stopped. Her eyes burned from the tears that she was forcing back with sheer willpower. “Papa—I'll be back. Soon.”

“Yes, Lena,” he repeated, like a dumb animal. “Soon…The Adler sisters? Who are
they?”

“They're heiresses from Moscow.”

“Jews.”

She nodded. “It doesn't matter, really, Father. Jews or Christians, it isn't how we worship that counts. You know damn well there isn't any God. If there is, he certainly has let us down, and for no reason that I can understand.”

“So you're going to blaspheme too, Elena.…What's come over you?”

“Reality. I'm not going to allow them to beat me any longer. Not the way they've beaten you and Mama.” She knew how hard she was beating him now, but she refused to let up, refused to give in. “You don't really want me to stay, do you?” she persisted. It was high drama, and she was playing it for all it was worth. “You always wanted me to strike gold, to ride atop the tallest stallion. You made me into what I am, so now you've got to accept your own creation. I'm not like Mama, I'm like you—as I remember you, in Petersburg. You haven't been yourself in a long, long time, Papa, and I can't bear to watch you die as you're still standing. I can't talk to you of the war, and of the tsar, as if nothing had happened!”

His eyes filled with tears. At length he said to her: “Lena, maybe you're right. You were right in 1908, when you told me to stay. But I can't leave now. I'm too old and too broken down. You asked about my pride. I can't remember what it felt like to be an Egorov. It was a past life, not my own past history.”

She came to him then, falling into his arms, and he held her tightly against his chest. Elena began to sob, and her father kissed the thick dark softness of her hair. But all his strength would not keep her with him and reality, at that moment, struck him as viciously as the Germans had hit the Second Army at Tannenberg. And she knew how much she still loved him, and that the rage inside her would never kill the love that remained inside her heart.

P
aul de Varenne
felt a new sense of purpose. Until his meeting with Bertrand de la Paume, he had lived each day in boredom, in a cynical search for pleasure. At twenty he had reached such a point of disillusionment with human nature that nothing seemed worth the effort of being honest. Charlotte had shown him by her own behavior that one took from the weak and the blind in order to succeed. He had never once opened his heart to another being. He had never trusted anyone else, and never trusted himself.

Bertrand de la Paume was not a god, but he was someone who, on occasion, listened. Paul saw in him a man who had made a connection with life. He was a cynic; he took people for what they were, expecting no miracles, yet accepting their foibles. He enjoyed life because it fascinated him. And Paul looked at him and was filled with admiration.

The chevalier loved Beauty first: Whether it lay in a work of art or in the eyes of a handsome woman, he sought it and made it his, until he was no longer absorbed by it. Then he would simply pass it on. Paintings would be sold, women would be gently but firmly removed from starring role to chorus line. But those around him seldom suffered from his rejections. He had ways of making people and possessions seem all the more precious for having once been his. A painting that had hung in his study became a work of greater merit to its next owner; and a woman once adored came to her new lover with the secure backing of the chevalier's good taste.