The Great War of the Quartet (The Imperial Timeline Book 1) (6 page)

“Maybe we can continue tomorrow,” Olga mumbled, not wanting to break this early, but she didn’t dare argue with the nanny.

Patricia should obey her, but Olga was at a disadvantage with her being so self-conscious about speaking bad English to her when Anthony might hear her. If the roles were reversed and the maid had to speak Russian to Olga rather than Olga having to speak English she was sure that she would be able to shut her up really easy.

“That sounds good, ma’am.”

Olga gave each child a kiss in succession before the women carried all four little children back to the nursery, leaving her still feeling like today’s study session was not quite over. With so much energy left in her, she walked aimlessly a few steps hither, a few steps dither, not really sure what to do with herself. She could just keep reading on her own, but it was better to save it for when the Patricia and Alice weren’t being so disruptive. She was sure that they were really just lazy and didn’t see the point in reading the word of God to the children. Olga had realized that the English were not very Christian in their daily living, and she didn’t want that to rub off on her babies. They had to be good Christians who knew about God and all the saints. Well, as many saints as possible at least. As many saints as their mommy knew.

“What are you doing?” Tony asked, unsettled by the erratic wandering about.

She stopped, looking at him with a confused expression. Despite the passage of time, her face had not aged that much. She was still quite the woman to look at, and Tony was more than a little satisfied that she retained her youth so much better than he did. Of course, she was still only twenty-four, so it wasn’t like she was an old woman. She would probably look quite attractive for about as long as Tony would have it in him to bother noticing, although she was hardly the only beautiful woman in London. He was quite aware of that, and she didn’t look nearly as captivating in her Russian dress as she used to look.

“What do you mean?” she bashfully mumbled.

“You’re walking around,” he pointed out.

“No, I just... not sure what…”

Mostly, she only had a bad accent which was obvious to anyone. However, when she was nervous, she became a lot worse at getting words out, and she imagined that she must seem so stupid, like an idiot from an asylum. If these people only understood how difficult English was and how she forgot it when she wasn’t sure what she wanted to say. Whenever she said things inside her head in English it sounded clean and coherent, but when she tried to verbalize those coherent thoughts it became a big mess.

“I wanted to read more,” she mumbled.

“Uh-huh,” he grunted, returning his attention to the newspaper as he was dutifully combing through every square inch for something he felt obliged to read.

When Anthony’s attention was lost and he continued to read, Olga remembered her talk with Natalya about Christmas. Russian Christmas. It was only a few days away since it followed the traditional calendar, and she still found it peculiar how it was a new year in England so many days before the new year in Russia. It had been quite a surprise to discover that England had a calendar not completely different from her own, but different enough to make her wonder why there would be a need for it. Either way, she had decided that since they went to Windsor for English Christmas, they should have Russian Christmas at home at the start of next week when the holy day was here. It was confusing to have the holiday twice, but she thought that maybe it would do Anthony good to become familiar with the true faith which she wanted to keep by following the Russian calendar.

However, she would need a bit of money for everything to be the way she wanted. She needed to buy some more suitable little gifts for her children for the occasion, but she worried that he would be displeased by the topic of money since he could be very stingy even though she still had some gifts yet to pay for. It wasn’t her fault that she had already run out of January’s teeny-tiny allowance just two days into the year, but after her monthly charities and her Christmas and New Year presents, clothes, and toys had been paid for, she had even had to buy some things on credit.

“Um...”

There wasn’t really anywhere for her to put her hands, and she uncomfortably tugged at her dress as if she needed to adjust it. She had learned to write down all the numbers to keep track of her balance, but she didn’t understand how the money could disappear so fast. She had just over two hundred pounds of cash each month, plus occasional gifts now and then, but somehow the money just evaporated almost as soon as she got it.

“Do you think it would be—be possible… to have money?”

Tony glanced over at her, hardly surprised by the request. He had realized years ago that she was very irresponsible with money, although he knew that his own mother was hardly any better, and if only the Prince of Wales would be more generous, money would be absolutely no concern at all. Sighing heavily, he put aside the newspaper on the table, glaring at her with burning disapproval. She always became rather shy when she wanted money, but he didn’t want to fight her over it since she would become so childish, and that made it harder to be tough on her.

“How much would you need?” he muttered

“Not much,” she eagerly exclaimed, beaming from his positive reaction. “Maybe just around fifty pounds for now.”

Fifty pounds?!
Did she know that she was receiving a total of around three thousand pounds per annum, counting both her allowance and gifts? On its own, that made for a salary beyond excellent, except that she had no expenses other than her own. All the living expenses and staff were covered by the household overseen by Atkins rather than from any of her private stipend from the Crown Estate. If she had only restrained herself a little she would have had more money than she could possibly spend on clothes, jewelry, and all her other wasteful endeavors. She had hardly understood the concept of money when they had first married, and she still didn’t seem to understand where money came from, giving away something like seventy pounds each month to all sorts of people who asked for it—and then she burned through the rest on clothes and worthless toys the maids ended up putting away in the attic.

Tony’s generous RAF salary was less than 700 pounds per year, and Atkins was paying the older of the two nannies just short of 110 pounds per year and the other 80 from the household funds he received from the Crown Estate. Together with the cook and the maids, the salaries to the private staff added up to less than 600 pounds per year divided between the six women and another 300 or so a year for Atkins himself for his great oversight of the apartment and all the properties Tony owned—including the house on the coast in Kent, the cottage in Scotland, and Olga’s summer house in Chichester. He did not expect Olga to subsist on a pitiful 600 pounds a year; he just expected her to cope with three thousand on nothing but her own selfish expenses—Atkins even managed her little summer retreat in Chichester and kept it maintained through the year with household money rather than ask her to pay a penny for her own bloody summer place. Even if she would manage to waste a thousand pounds each year on her tithes and charities she should still be able to manage not spending more than two thousand pounds each year. Her tailoring accounts alone were obscene, and yet she acted like fifty pounds was just a handful of pennies.

“What would you need the money for?” he exclaimed.

“For Christmas,” she said, coming over to sit down in the chair opposite him, acting like she had absolutely no worries about rejection. “It’ll be wonderful.”

“Wouldn’t it be a bit more Christian to keep a lid on it?” he suggested as he took a cigarette from the box on the table.

Her happy face immediately soured, and he regretted his suggestion.

“What you mean?” she asked. “Christmas is really important,” she added, knowing that Easter was really the most important holiday.

“Nuns don’t buy jewelry and dresses for holidays, do they?” he pointed out before he lit the cigarette with the lighter on the table.

“That’s because they don’t have children,” Olga asserted.

She knew what he meant, but there was no reason she should be ascetic. Her children should be happy and enjoy celebrating Christ’s birthday. It would do Anthony well to mark that day and think about the importance that had for all of mankind. Christ hadn’t just been passing through on a short vacation! He had saved all of humanity, even though wicked humans had murdered him for all his troubles.

Tony sighed tiredly before he took a drag on the cigarette, really not in the mood to fight her over money. However, she couldn’t continue to waste her money so that he would have to give her money.

“We don’t have money for you to waste as you please.”

“I don’t waste,” she muttered, hurt that he would suggest that there was anything wrong in wanting the best for the children.

He only said that because of that stupid airplane. If he could spend eight thousand pounds on a flying machine, then surely a hundred pounds or so for Christmas couldn’t be wasteful. When she had been twelve she had been given a beautiful necklace for Christmas by the empress when the family had traveled to Tsarskoye Selo for the occasion. It was one of the few times she had left the family home outside Tula when she was a child, and it remained an unequivocally happy memory. If the Tsar would be so kind to even someone as distant and unfamiliar as Olga, she was sure that it was not only desirable but even necessary for her to at least be as generous to her own children. She had already ordered a wonderful customized dollhouse with wonderful furniture and adorable tiny dolls of all sorts for the nursery on credit, and she would need something like twelve pounds for that bill. She had received the boxes containing the battalion of tin soldiers she had ordered, making sure that in addition to the ordinary redcoat Foot Guards, Sasha would also have a detachment of dozens of little men modeled after the soldiers she barely remembered seeing in the flesh in Petersburg and Tsarskoye Selo. She was absolutely delighted with the result, particularly the great detail of the small flags with the imperial double-headed eagle of the little Russian guard troop. Even if Sasha was a bit young, she thought that he would have plenty of fun with the beautiful little soldiers, English and Russian alike, and it was easily worth paying a grand total of eight pounds and four shillings for the solid craftsmanship.

“Fine, you can have the money for now, but you have to stop wasting it so quickly,” he sighed.

“It’s not waste,” Olga muttered, hurt that he would use that sort of word.

It wasn’t fair. Why did she have to spend almost half her allowance on things like Irish orphans and Girl Guides and then get abused like this when she needed a bit of money for her own children? All the money she sent to the charities benefitted British people, so really, the Crown Estate should reimburse her for it anyway. She didn’t ask to be made benefactor of charities, and together with the tithes she paid to the Russian congregation it added up to more than a third of her regular income. Obviously she couldn’t tell those greedy nuns in Antrim that she didn’t feel like giving them an even five pounds every month—that would be mean and unchristian. She would have stopped giving money to the Girl Guides, only she had been very moved this past Saint George’s Day when she and Yevdokiya had visited with some of their lot in Sussex when they had gone to stay at the little cottage in Chichester. The Girl Guides had been awfully good hosts and one girl had played
God Save the Tsar
on the piano to Olga’s great delight. Olga found it ever so hard to express gratitude to people in England in any other way than to send money, and that group of Girl Guides in Sussex had made it quite impossible to not add them to her long list of patronages and send a pound or so to them each month. It seemed wrong to not do it.

Chapter
7

The lady was in her mid-thirties, but that did not stop her from looking quite appealing to an unfamiliar eye that had not become acquainted with the woman in greater detail. It was obvious to any red-blooded man that Emily Blythe had once been a quite beautiful young lady, and her transformation into a something shrill and deplorable had come only after Mr. Winston’s tragic and premature death from overdrinking which had freed her to act like a spoiled princess without any restraints whatsoever. He had been the sole inheritor of a well-run textile business down on the Lower East Side which he had left to his widow. She in turn had turned to her uncle—Helen’s father—who had helped her to not only sell off the business but to keep the healthy sum of money invested to yield a healthy income that kept her from having to worry about money. She was all too fortunate to have missed the Second Recession back in ’32 and as far as Frederic knew her small fortune was in good health and looked after by her uncle. Without a man to keep her in check, the only feasible external force was surely her pocketbook, but that seemed to be on her side which allowed her to do what she pleased to the detriment of her environment.

Apart from her overwhelming self-righteousness
she was not an altogether ugly woman. Nature and time had been good on her, and she looked like she might still have been in the market for her first husband. Her son was attending a good boarding school upstate, and she was living with her mother in a large house by Turtle Bay that was out of Frederic’s price range. It was painfully obvious that she was undeservedly wealthy, and there was nothing he could do about that. She tested his firm convictions that markets were inherently moral and rewarded hard labor and thrift and punished unproductive, listless people. That was why dirty, shiftless foreigners were crowding their tenements, reproducing like rabbits, and only being productive if they were marshaled by an effective leader. Emily Winston on the other hand owed her good fortune to a husband who had worked hard and left the fruits of his labor to be enjoyed by this creature.

Frederic would not tell his wife that he had imagined what he would like to do with her cousin
, despite her being older than him. Emily Winston might have been a bit of a hag in terms of behavior, but not in terms of her appearance. Her pink cheeks and emerald eyes gave her a pleasant exterior, and only Frederic’s imagination could begin to put together what she looked underneath her dresses. Oh, what power to be found in human imagination! The last time she had come to visit he had found himself imagining what to do with her, but he was much too cowardly to do anything but to just dream. Someone really ought to do something about her though.

“I had no idea there were so many Germans here,” she said before she took a sip of her tea.

“Oh, there are,” Frederic said while Helen kept to herself after she had checked on the infant.

For some reason Helen
was being awfully quiet, and he had barely heard her say a word since her cousin showed up at the door to begin her tiresome presence in his home. He had assumed that she wanted her cousin to come so that she could talk about lady matters with her, but so far it seemed like Emily Winston was more interested in him. Maybe she had the hots for him? He liked to imagine that he had that kind of influence, and it was exciting to imagine having Helen’s shrill cousin for a mistress.

“I don’t think I have seen more flags in one place before,” she said, continuing to look genuinely amazed by the sight that had become rather m
eaningless to Frederic by now.

As soon as the war
had broken out almost every German around had put up a German flag, and those on some streets who weren’t Germans had put up the Austrian flag which was far more common among the poorer parts of Yorkville where there were many Czechs, Hungarians, and Hebrews from Austria.

“I don’t understand it,” she said in that way she did when she actua
lly didn’t mean what she said.

He had h
eard her use that tone before. Then it had been about the lady things, such as her hallowed screeching propagandists of all sorts of causes, like harassing the School of Engineering at Columbia over its admissions policy concerning the other sex. That was how it always went when she would bemoan the people who did not follow one of the preachers she had devoted herself to promote or how she just couldn’t believe this or that obvious fact.

Frederic had never bothered to argue with her when she went on one of her harangues about how it was a national disgrace that the suffrage amendment was passed in 1911
—two generations past negro suffrage!—and how horrified she was to think that a couple of small, less advanced countries in Europe had beaten the United States to changing its federal laws. While he felt that it had been perfectly sensible to let women vote, it was rather obvious that women politicians were not nearly as sensible, and Emily Winston’s bemoaning that there were no ladies in the US Senate was irksome to no end. While the House of Representatives was not as deliberating as the Senate, it was downright impossible to imagine a creature such as Emily Winston having the calm and state of mind to seriously craft and evaluate legislation. And to add to that, if every woman would follow her example and have but one child, then society would extinguish itself in the long run. It would be national suicide.

Even wise women would do well to think about the kinds of things that were in their domain
rather than try their hand in politics. Unless you actually worked in business or law you wouldn’t have the state of mind for politics since legislation was based on business and law. There was a reason why accomplished lawyers and businessmen could become accomplished politicians, and it was impossible to imagine a female Jefferson, Madison, or General Washington. Impossible! Such an uneducated woman like Emily Winston was the worst kind of woman since she had the time and money to devote herself to propagating rule by incompetents. Women were such philistines!

“I hope they won’t tear down Rome if they get that far,” Emily said, already imagining what the Huns would be capable of doing if they overran the spectacular cities of old Italy.

The Evening Post
had its suspicions that the bloodthirsty Germans would destroy the ancient culture of old Rome and France, and in addition to her childish infatuation with women orators, Emily Winston had a romantic attachment to classical Europe. The fact that Greece and Rome were facing the Germanic hordes seemed to be an excellent metaphor for the old spiritual Europe being at war with the cold, industrialized
Deutschland
which represented the modern, ugly godless world. Surely this brain-dead woman knew nothing of Hegel, Nietzsche, or Wagner—modern culture—rather than ancient antiquity which science and philosophy had moved beyond. Besides, the fact that most of the uncivilized parts of Europe were on the side of Italy and France did not seem to bother the inane woman the slightest. Frederic had a hard time sympathizing either with the quarreling Balkan states that had started the war or their big brother, Russia, who had decided to step up and keep Romania, Serbia, Montenegro, and Greece from being taught a lesson by Austria for beating up on their equally backwards sibling, Bulgaria.

But of c
ourse, only pro-German partisans still bothered with Bulgaria as they insisted the war was all about protecting her from her mean neighbors. And when Austria had stepped up to intervene, the chain of alliances had finally finished the long list of combatants when the Chinese had cast their lot in with the Germans almost half a year after Germany had declared war on Russia.

“You could always volunteer for the Red Cross,” Frederic said, amusing himself by imagining what she would look like working as a nurse covered in blood and sweat. It might at least shut her up.

She was clearly surprised by the suggestion, and when she saw that it was not a simple joke she found it hard to quickly answer.

“I’m not sure that would make a difference,” she said, her hesitating weakness making Frederic feel surprisingly good about himself.

Emily had been reading a lot of newspapers lately, but she hadn’t gone to many meetings with her groups. She had become all too inactive, and she worried about that since there might still be time to push for one of the Republican candidates for the United States Senate if enough people would pressure the New York Republican Party into putting her on the ballot this fall rather than just another man. After all, out of the three senators from each state, progressive states like New York should have the wherewithal to have at least one woman. The Democratic states certainly wouldn’t, not unless they would leave the 15th century behind.

“We have to worry about our own troubles first,” she said, knowing that that was perhaps a bit disingenuous, but the world was complicated.

An odious man like Helen’s mean-spirited husband probably thought that Emily was naïve or ignorant, but she really couldn’t tell what to think about the world within New York City, let alone the rest of the country or the world. She couldn’t really do anything about Europeans slaughtering each other, negroes being lynched, or any of the things far beyond her control. As much as she still hoped that the Republicans would field a woman for the Senate, she had even become disconnected from that struggle which she had taken on as a pet cause for the past few years without much success apart from nice get-togethers and hearing good speeches. She had become rather disillusioned with politics lately, and she wasn’t sure why. Maybe it just didn’t matter what she did. Everything was just feeling downright pointless.