The Great War of the Quartet (The Imperial Timeline Book 1) (26 page)

The dining room was not nearly as pleasant on the eyes as the
comparable room in the palace back in Sofia. It was wooden and rustic, and it looked like something out of an idealized house from a fairytale in a picture book rather than the sort of dining rooms she was used to with the big halls with high ceilings. An imposing bear was standing in the corner of the room, shot years ago by Nadia’s uncle the crown prince and mounted alongside heads of animals shot by family and friends. Well, not just family and friends. All sorts of people had come to visit and shoot things, including more than one Russian prince, the current Duke of Bremen-Verden, and even the evil King of Romania. The crown prince occasionally hunted, but Nadia’s father was not the sort of man who enjoyed guns. She didn’t care much for hunting either, and she had never been at the lodge before her mother brought her to live here, yet now she had become so used to seeing all the trophies that she paid them no mind at all.

Since her brothers would be leaving soon
to get back to the capital she had to take the opportunity to explore what things were like in the city. She had started to forget what home was like from her isolation up on the mountain, and she missed it badly. The garden, the people, and just knowing that the city was outside her window. There were so many things to miss, and she hoped to get back there soon enough. Eager to satisfy her curiosity, she turned to her oldest little brother.

“How’s everything back home?” she asked, thinking that her brother might have something interesting to say
, but a little shy about asking a longer question.

Although Boris was her brother, she did not know him very well
, and he was more like a cousin than a brother to her. Ever since she was a little girl—even farther back than she could remember—she had never had much of a relationship with either of her two younger brothers. Boris and Alexander had been raised quite distantly from their mother and the women under whose watchful eyes and careful instruction she had been growing up together with her little sister. Indeed, Boris and Alexander wore simple, rather unadorned uniforms that highlighted their differences to their sisters, although Alexander’s uniform was just the uniform from an exclusive boarding school rather than a real military uniform like Boris’s.

“Fine
,” Boris answered absentmindedly, not really having anything other to say to Borislava’s rather badly-formed question.

How stupid was Borislava
? What did she expect him to say? He had no idea what things were like “at home” since unlike this spoiled, ugly girl, he was actually doing something more than just mindlessly breathing for a living. There was something of value to his life, not just doing nothing good at all. His older sister was very plain, and as far as Boris could tell, she was as uninteresting as she was plain. She was almost inhumanly plain and boring. He had become increasingly curious about women, but that interest did not cover his sister—or at least not his older sister. Evgenia was cute, and he couldn’t help but be curious about what she looked like…

Nadia felt like she had shot herself in the foot
with her much too generic question. Even before he began to answer she had realized that she should have asked something specific. Such a wide question couldn’t get an interesting answer, and the look from her mother forced her to not pursue a topic she did not want her to discuss. It was so tedious that Mother didn’t want Nadia and Evgenia to be a part of the world around them, but she did not wish to defy her mother since she could be more than just tedious if she would become cross with her.

The table had less than
a dozen people eating, and Nadia really hated the austere atmosphere in the lodge—although today was a bit unusual with the guests from the capital rather than just the female residents. She felt guilty for being resentful towards her mother, but the recurring sight of
Fräulein
Schwalb reminded her of the agonizing lessons she was still subjected to from time to time. Nadia was a woman by any measurement, but her mother still wanted her to spend time with Miss Schwalb. The middle-aged woman was her mother’s closest companion, and she was just so annoying. When Nadia had been younger she had preferred the company of Doctor Phillips, Professor Leibholtz, Professor Vladimirov, or any of her other, serious tutors to Miss Schwalb. She was perhaps a good friend of her mother, but she was not a pleasant person to deal with compared to her tutors. She hadn’t had a nanny or a governess in years, and her most recent tutoring had been from Professor Vladimirov, a senior professor of philology at King Frants University. Unlike her brother Boris, Nadia had no formal education and had been exclusively tutored together with her sister while their brothers went to school. Her and Evgenia’s schooling seemed odd since her cousins had gone to schools rather than be solely taught by tutors, but Mother said that it was better this way, and her mother was so clingy and would hardly let Nadia out of her sight. For some reason, her mother just thought it would be better for her and Evgenia to be raised pretty much in the absence of people.

Julia Schwalb’s round face was not easy to like, and Nadia thought it was hardly surprising that she was still a spinster at her age. She was a little older than Nadia’s mother, closer to fifty than to forty
and seemed to have no other purpose to her existence than to be a companion to her mother and a governess to Evgenia. As was the case with her mother, Nadia had never heard Miss Schwalb speak Bulgarian and she wasn’t sure that she even knew it at all. She always spoke German or French, although Nadia only ever heard her speak French when she was supposed to practice with her. Because of her mother’s fidelity to her native language, Nadia was left linguistically confused with her siblings. With Evgenia she spoke German, but she wasn’t sure how to address her brothers. When she had wasted her question on Boris, she had used the language she had heard him speak with Alexander, the same language she used when she spoke to Elena; the language their mother wouldn’t pollute her mouth with because she disliked it so.

In her head, Nadia
had compartmentalized two separate sets of thoughts and words. When she thought bad thoughts about Miss Schwalb, she did so in Bulgarian. If she was writing a letter to Professor Leibholtz, she would think through everything in German with just as much ease. Professor Leibholtz and Doctor Phillips were her two most serious correspondents, but when she wrote Doctor Phillips she still translated from German to English rather than just formulate the letters in English directly the way she wrote her German letters to Professor Leibholtz. She still had a great deal of respect for her tutors, although her teenage infatuation with Doctor Phillips had passed into a mature friendship. He was not as great a scholar as Professor Leibholtz and Professor Vladimirov who were respected within academia, but he was a learned and well-read man who could discuss most subjects that she would expect to be able to discuss with men, and he was far more interested in German 19th century philosophy than Professor Vladimirov. As much as she respected Professor Vladimirov, she thought that Bulgarian history was nowhere near as interesting as German thinking from around the time of Kant and up through to when nihilists and degenerate thinkers showed up—exemplified most forcefully in the person of Friedrich Nietzsche and a host of modern Nietzschean apostles. For that kind of discussion Doctor Phillips and to some degree Elena were her best friends since Professor Vladimirov was such a Slavophile and Professor Leibholtz a hardnosed rationalist who thought most philosophy just “metaphysical speculation” and “nonsense.” She respected all her tutors greatly, but Doctor Phillips was a very special man, and she hoped that he might return to Bulgaria in the future or perhaps she could visit him the next time she would go to England.

After dinner Nadia, Evgenia, and Elena were accompanied to the “girls
’ quarters” by Miss Schwalb on Mother’s instructions. Since Evgenia had a lot of trouble with her English, the women wanted Nadia to help her. She had always found languages easier to learn than her sister who was actually not at all happy about practicing French and English—although the weird girl loved to study Ancient Greek and Church Slavonic. Sure, she was supposed to be humble about it, but Nadia was quite capable of speaking French and English and she could understand Hungarian and Italian fairly well. However, she suspected that Evgenia’s real problem was that she just didn’t feel like learning English and French.

Back when Nadia was sixteen she
had spent months living with relatives in England, and Mother had taken her and Evgenia to Germany and Austria many times where she had had opportunity to speak with relatives and friends. She obviously didn’t actually speak that much, but being around people who spoke another language was good practice. That was how she had picked up Hungarian from the times she had visited Uncle Stefan in Debrecen in Hungary, and she had become acquainted with Italian through her father’s cousin Miriana who lived with her husband on his estate in Venetia in Austria.

Nadia didn’t like Miriana, so she missed the family in Debrecen more than her family in Venetia
—even though Uncle Stefan and Aunt Carola weren’t even blood relatives while Miriana was. However, Venice was said to be not just Austria’s most beautiful city but the most beautiful city in all of Europe. She had last been there in the summer of 1933, almost six months before the war had begun. She hadn’t left Bulgaria once since it started, and she missed seeing particularly her English friend Pippa Carruthers and her Prussian and Mecklenburgian cousins—especially one of her mother’s nieces in Schwerin. She continued to write to them all, but it was not the same to speak through written correspondence as it was to speak and socialize in person—especially not since Mother insisted that she read all of Nadia’s letters these days. She was happy to hear that Pippa was doing fine, but she missed her a great deal. During Nadia’s stay in England there was nobody who had been nicer to her than Pippa—except maybe either Vicki from Saxony or Olga from Russia. Olga was closer to her own age than Vicki, and she was probably Nadia’s favorite English princess—even though she was from Russia.

Pippa wasn’t technically royal. She was just a lady of some sort since it was her mother who was the younger sister of Hugh and Anthony, two relatively distant cousins to the Prince of Wales. But that was fine; just like Elena, Pippa was a good friend regardless of her exact pedigree. Besides, Pippa was actually of royal descent while Elena’s grandfather had been a complete nobody. After all, Pippa’s maternal aunts-in-law were both Russian princesses, and her uncles English princes, and she was a matrilineal descendant of earlier Brandenburg kings of England. It was a bit stingy that girls didn’t get to share their titles, but that was just the way it was. Whoever Nadia would marry would be the one who would pass on titles to the next generation, and it was Nadia’s brothers and cousins who would continue the royal titles to another generation—Nadia wasn’t Borislava of the House of Mecklenburg-Schwerin, she was Borislava of the House of Hanover-Bulgarsky.

It was getting late when Miss Schwalb left after she had supervised Nadia trying to help the uncooperative Evgenia with her English, and Nadia took the opportunity to pull Elena along to the large lounge to see what her brothers and their two companions were up to down there. Apparently Mother had retired for the night, and the four men were left to their own devices with the drinks, cigars, and pool table.

Boris had been accompanied by a handsome man her age, and she had seen plenty of men like him in Sofia, but here on the mountain there were few men other than servants and the small guard detail.
Not exactly the most fertile ground for inconsequential flirtations, although some of the guardsmen were very nice.

Nadia had been gifted with
a good memory for names, and she remembered that the tall officer was Lieutenant Vladislav Petrov Mogilov, a son of Duke Petar Petrov Mogilov. His thin face had a very expressionless natural state, but when she had seen him smile while talking to Boris, she could see that he had a very nice smile. She wasn’t sure if he was handsome or whether her judgment had become much more liberal because of the short supply of men to gauge. Sofia was full of men of all kinds, but up here she only knew like four or five men by their names, the others were just nameless servants or guards.

Her two brothers were also accompanied by
Count Dimitri Dimitrov Sokolsky. The count was an old man, and he had been something of a mentor for both boys, and in particular for Alexander. He had been a tutor for their father when it came to understanding the capital’s aristocratic men, and he was something of a friend of the family as the son of one of Nadia’s great-grandfather’s most loyal partisans during the chaotic times when he became ruler of the nation. Although it was nice to think of history as a very neat and divinely-guided process, there had been a lot of nasty, base politics that had allowed the second son of the last King of Hanover to successfully become Grand Prince of Bulgaria. That process had included an awful lot of local partisans as well as Russia backing her great-grandfather over the other prospective candidates, and through coercion and persuasion he had been elected unanimously as the first Grand Prince of the Autonomous Principality of Bulgaria before immediately setting down on the path to create a formally sovereign nation by expelling the Turks and ending their suzerainty of Bulgaria forever. Her good old great-granddad had sure been a soldier king—even setting out on a final war against the Turks which her grandfather had had to finish when Nadia had been a small child just a few years old.