I walked out of Kempton’s Shoe Repair with my boot again tucked under my arm and a debt discharged. It galled me that I’d had to meet with them in secret. In fact, it made me angry.
I realized I was walking pretty fast. I had to remind myself to slow down. One, no one else was hurrying. Two, did I really want to be back in that hotel room, mad and confused?
But what else could I do? I passed the hotel, too restless to check in with Eli.
I went to the telegraph office to see if I’d had a reply to the message I’d sent Jake’s lover.
“We were just about to deliver this to the hotel,” the middle-aged man at the counter said. “You didn’t need to come walking over here, Mrs. Savarov.”
Just now, being called Mrs. Savarov was awful irritating. But that wasn’t this man’s fault. “Thank you,” I said, accepting the message.
In touch with funeral home shipping body home have talked to Charlies wife do not know employer. Burke Printer
Brief and to the point. I hadn’t really thought he’d know who our employer was, but it would have been handy.
I couldn’t face another trip to the hospital just now, with the big echoing rooms and the pain and Nurse Mayhew. I went back to the hotel. Not exactly to my surprise, Eli was waiting for me on the porch.
“Let’s go to the park,” he said, and off we set. He was wearing a white linen shirt and tan slacks, but no grigori vest. (His shirt pockets did look real bulgy.) He’d rebraided his hair with care. He looked nice, and he blended in as much as he ever would. (Not at all.)
I hadn’t seen the park. It was right across the street from the courthouse. It was green and neat, full of big old trees, a Confederate cannon, two water fountains (one for white people and one for black people, the signs said), and quite a few wooden benches in good repair. Eli picked one on the shadowed side of the big war memorial, and we sat down under a tree. It was a pleasant afternoon when the breeze sprung up. The sun was shining but we were in the shade. The town was a few steps closer to normal after the train wreck, looked like.
There weren’t many other people around: a woman pushing a baby carriage, two men talking seriously as they walked, and a groundskeeper picking up trash with a spike on the other side of the park.
We were side by side in body, but not in mind. I spoke first. “We got to be honest with each other. Since you hired me, am I not an…” I couldn’t think how to end the sentence.
“An extension of me?” Eli looked thoughtful. “That is a good way to think of it. How can you help, if you don’t know what I want to do? I can tell you a few things.” He looked around us for anyone close. This was the land of listening-in, all its people seemed to think. The groundskeeper was wandering out of the park, maybe to pick up trash somewhere else.
Eli said very quietly, “I got assigned this job, one no one else wanted, because of my father’s treachery. I have to hand the crate’s contents over to certain people here in Sally. If I’m successful, I’ll change the course of events here in Dixie forever. If I’m not, I’ll probably be killed. My brother Peter will be expelled from his school, half-trained. My two sisters will not be able to marry.”
I let all that settle in my head. “Can’t your sisters do anything for themselves?” I asked.
“Young women in Russian aristocratic families are not taught how to do anything but run a household,” Eli said. “And usually that means directing the servants.”
I thought if you watched a servant work you could learn to do the servant’s job, if you had a little grit. I kept that to myself. “Can your sisters shoot?”
“They’ve never held a gun.”
He expected me to be shocked, but I wasn’t. My neighbor Chrissie had never carried a gun, because it would be crazy to give her one. “Your sisters, they don’t want to be grigoris like you and Peter?”
“They don’t have the slightest affinity that I can discern,” Eli said. “Which is a real pity. It’s an honorable profession.”
I thought of Paulina and her ability to kill people in exotic ways. I remembered the terrifying Klementina. That little old woman had bowed to no man, and she hadn’t suffered fools gladly. She had died like a hero. I could feel the corner of my mouth lift in a smile, remembering. Full of pepper and vinegar, she’d been.
“Your older brothers won’t take care of ’em?”
Eli’s two older brothers were also sons of the now-deceased Prince Vladimir Savarov, who had backed the wrong horse (Grand Prince something) when he believed Tsar Alexei would die of his bleeding disease without leaving an heir—or if he had a boy child and died, that child should not inherit the throne because Alexei’s wife (his second) was very unpopular.
“They have said they’ll be responsible for finding the girls suitable matches.” It was easy to see Eli didn’t trust his older brothers, at least not entirely. “Though how that’s to be done, since the girls are the daughters of a traitor, and I doubt my brothers would give them much money…” His voice trailed off.
“So their only hope is for you to be back in favor? That’s the way you see it?”
Eli nodded.
“What about Peter?” Peter had made an attempt to kill his father. Unfortunately, it had taken place at the exact same time I was trying to kill his father much more efficiently. I would not have gotten shot if Peter hadn’t stuck his oar in.
“My little brother is more in favor since he tracked my father to Texoma. Some say Peter killed him.” Eli rolled his eyes toward me and smiled. “He’s back in school, and has determined he has an affinity for air.” There was a list of elements or talents. Each grigori was better at spells involving one of them, Paulina had told me. “Peter is also in love,” Eli said, and looked at me like I should know what he was talking about.
“With who?” I felt like I was walking into a trap, but I had no idea where he was going.
“With a beautiful young black-haired woman who saved his life in a hotel in Segundo Mexia.”
I tried to remember such a person being present that day. Then I winced. “You can’t be serious,” I said.
“Peter has asked a hundred questions about the girl who got shot for him,” Eli said.
“He sure did his best to screw everything up.”
“He’s smitten,” Eli said. “When everything else in the family was going so wrong, I didn’t have the heart to tell him.”
“Tell him what?” I was blundering through this conversation.
“That you are spoken for.”
This was making me very nervous. “Eli, for God’s sake!” I threw up my hands, and a woman on the sidewalk glanced at us curiously.
Eli could tell I was all out of plumb. “After all,” he said teasingly, “we are married.”
Teasing, I could handle. “Yes, thanks for the fancy ring,” I said, making sure I sounded tart. More like my normal self. I held my hand in front of him like he’d never seen the thin gold band.
“Oh, you’d like a gemstone? What kind?”
I didn’t know anything about gemstones. “Now you’re talking silly,” I said. I was tired of sitting in this park, and tired of talking. “What do we need to do next? You’ve told me you’re looking for the chest, and there’s some man involved, and you have to get this right or your family is doomed. We better get cracking.”