He’d followed the pointing fingers with his attention for a moment, of course, but now brought his eyes back down to her. He smiled, but there was nothing carefree about it. Nothing glad.
She wasn’t so selfish a creature to think it had anything to do with her. The sort of sorrow that infected that smile had roots far deeper than a two-day acquaintance. Her fingers were already reaching for her camera, but she curled them into her palm instead. “I didn’t realize the two of you were runners.” There, a nice benign conversation topic.
Marin ducked his head. “We did not realize we both are until yesterday. It seems Clarke nearly qualified for your team in the 1912 Olympics, though.”
“Really?” Ivy must have been listening with half an ear as she chattered about her merit and demerit system. She interrupted herself to turn wide, awestruck eyes on Clarke. “How very impressive!”
Lily pressed her lips against a grin. Another something for Ivy to swoon over later, it seemed. For her own part, she kept her attention on the Russian. How odd it was to hear someone say your team and not be part of it themselves. “And do you compete?”
He looked genuinely taken aback by the question. “No. That is not my purpose.” Before she could ask what his purpose was, he extended an arm toward the sidewalk. “May we see you and your sister home, Miss Blackwell?”
That had probably been what Clarke had suggested to him, the thing that had made him so uncertain. But apparently he was no keener to disappoint his new friend than she was her sister. Lily smiled. “You may, of course. But if it’s too much trouble—”
“This is pleasure. Not trouble.” The words sounded certain, and his returning smile had no new notes of regret in it, so she decided to believe him. Though he cast another look down at his clothes. “Forgive my appearance, if you would. And I hesitate to offer an arm. . . .”
She laughed and turned toward home. “There is nothing to forgive, I assure you. How far did you run? Were you on the mile circuit?”
He nodded and fell into step beside her, though he kept generous distance between them. “Five miles today.” Ivy must have missed one. “We are both, it seems, runners of long distances. Though neither of us has been able to train as much in recent times.”
Yes, war had a way of interrupting such things.
“Do you enjoy any sport?” he asked, hesitating a bit, as if he wasn’t quite sure what he ought to ask her.
Lily grinned up at him. “Not like that. But I play croquet.”
Something flickered in his eyes. A smile whispered over the corners of his lips that seemed absent at least a bit of the sorrow. “I am largely unfamiliar with this game, I confess. You . . . hit a ball, I believe? With a hammer?”
“A mallet, through a wicket.” Her own grin was probably a bit mischievous. She and Ivy had played their guests more than once—and often tromped them soundly. “Weather permitting, we always have a little Easter match. We can teach you how to play—and no doubt Mama will regale you at dinner with the story of our game twelve years ago, when an overexuberant Ivy broke a window.”
She’d thought a hint of a story would bring another easy smile. After all, who didn’t laugh at the thought of a nine-year-old smacking a ball through a window? But instead of amusement, that stillness descended over his countenance again. A complete absence of reaction.
What had she said? She shifted just a bit closer, so that he would look down at her. “I’m sorry. Have I opened a matryoshka doll?”
The reference to their earlier conversation at least earned another fleeting smile. “Forgive me. Talk of Easter brought to mind an article I read in the newspaper this morning. It seems the Germans’ new gun hit a church in Paris yesterday, during Good Friday services. Many were killed. Many more wounded.”
She gasped. Her shift at Charing Cross Hospital had begun early this morning, and she hadn’t had a chance to so much as glance at the headlines yet. “That’s horrible!”
“It was a church I visited once, when my family took a European holiday. Our one grand adventure.” His voice was so perfectly even. Modulated. Careful. “We stayed in that neighborhood, you see. We toured the church. Visited a bookshop.” He swallowed hard. “That was the neighborhood where my brother and I were to meet if we were separated during our escape. He could be there, somewhere near that devastation.”
Her stomach knotted up. “Oh no. I can’t even imagine.” She glanced behind them, to where Ivy and Clarke trailed them by at least ten paces, laughing over something or another. She and her sister had never been apart, not really. Not by more than a few miles, a few days at a time. Never had either of them had to wonder if the other was caught in the midst of a tragedy. “Do you think it likely he was nearby?”
He didn’t shrug. Didn’t glance over at her. Just kept walking at the same measured pace, his movements fluid. Kept his eyes straight ahead. Kept his face clear. “If he is alive, he is there, or trying to get there. But I have heard nothing from him for weeks. Not since our train derailed.”
“I’m so sorry. Such uncertainty must be tormenting.” Her hand settled over her camera. Anchoring her, even though there was nothing she could do with it to make this better for him. “Are you the elder or the younger?”
“Elder.” Now he looked her way, a knowing in his eyes. “Like you, yes?”
She glanced over her shoulder again. But where his brother was missing and perhaps injured, her sister was happy, laughing, and so very present. “I would do anything to protect her. Even though she seldom needs it.”
“Evgeni is arguably the one of us better able to survive an attack. He is a soldier like our father, even before the war. Very strong. Capable. Charming. He will make a way.”
Lily heard the words he didn’t say. He must.
He reached for her elbow then, tugged her a step to the left. Which she found utterly confusing until she became aware of quick steps coming from a path that joined theirs. A dog came bounding along, his leash trailing behind him, followed by a child panting just as hard as the canine. They would have bowled Lily over had Zivon not pulled her out of the way.
Clearly, he’d been paying more attention to their surroundings than she had.
She smiled her thanks. And then returned her mind to the conversation. “Evgeni.” She echoed the name softly, its syllables feeling strange on her tongue. As would Zivon, she knew, if she ever said it aloud. She’d try it later just to see. When she was alone, in her darkroom, film and plates and negatives before her. “I will pray for him. And for you.”
He swallowed hard. “Thank you. He would say he does not need prayers, but he needs them all the more for thinking so.”
“Mama always said something similar about her father. ‘The more you tell me not to pray, the more I know you need me to.’”
He didn’t quite smile in reply. But he looked as though he could at any moment. “You have a lovely family. It is good to see.”
She certainly couldn’t argue with that. She couldn’t quite imagine a world where her sister wasn’t on the other side of her bedroom wall, tapping out secret messages to her; where her mother wasn’t teaching her how to bring beauty to life with pen and paint and pictures; where her father wasn’t prepared to move heaven and earth to see them happy and well.