Perhaps.
At the sound of a door falling shut nearby, Zivon opened his eyes again and smiled over at Captain Blackwell. “Thank you,” he felt the necessity to say. “For your intervention in there.”
The captain laughed and motioned him toward an auto parked along the curb. “Blinker—assuming it was he who referred you to this bank—ought to have remembered to provide a reference when he did so. Standard practice when one is opening a new account, I’m afraid.”
“Had I known this, I would have asked explicitly for one.”
Blackwell waved that away. “Not your fault.” He chuckled. “They ought to show you references—I say, you do have a point!”
Zivon felt his lips pull up. He hadn’t had much cause to smile in the last few months, but it was good to know his mouth remembered how it was done. “Perhaps. Even so, had you not been there, I suspect my observation would have earned me an escort out the door.”
“Well, we can be thankful I was. You got your account, and I got a story to tell.” Blackwell opened the passenger-side door and motioned for Zivon to slide in.
A familiar fragrance, scarcely discernible, teased his nose. Lavender? No . . . lily of the valley. It must be a remnant from the captain’s wife. Once his host was settled behind the steering wheel, Zivon gave him the direction to his flat and then asked, “Will you tell me of your family, sir? I am afraid I know little.”
Blackwell’s face creased into lines worn by smiling, smoothing out a few of the ones that must be from worry. “My wife is Euphemia Blackwell—a rather celebrated artist, I’m proud to say. You may not have heard of her work as far away as Russia, but she’s gained quite a lot of acclaim here in England, and into America and the Continent as well. Oils.”
Though Zivon nodded, her name didn’t sound familiar. “I am afraid the world of art has never been one with which I am accustomed. Though if any of her work is in your home, I will be most honored to view it.”
Blackwell laughed. “You won’t be able to help but to do so. She swears the best light is in the drawing room until noon and the dining room thereafter, so she has work areas set up in both chambers and forbids anyone to move them.”
They pulled out into the road, and Zivon focused on the street ahead of them. “And on what is she working now?”
“Oh, some classical scene from a myth, I believe. She’s using our younger daughter, Ivy, as her model.”
He made note of the name. “And you have how many children?”
“Two daughters.” Affection saturated the man’s voice. “Lilian—Lily, we call her—is the elder at three and twenty. She’s in the VAD—Voluntary Aid Detachment. They work in the hospitals. Ivy has just turned twenty-one and keeps busy as a teacher in her former school. Her mother required a bit of convincing for that, but with the war on, it was a way she could help. She hadn’t the stomach for nursing.”
Zivon could well imagine Mrs. Blackwell needing to be convinced, though. Society ladies never sullied themselves with such things, in his experience. Though he had the utmost respect for it. “My mother was a teacher—a linguist. It is thanks to her that I knew four languages already when I went to university.”
Blackwell glanced over at him before making a turn. “I’m afraid I know little of your family history. Did you leave anyone behind when you escaped?”
Zivon’s throat closed. He had to count to five before he could convince his muscles to relax, his lungs to keep pumping air in and out of his chest. “No. Batya—my father—was killed in action during the Lake Naroch Offensive in 1916. Matushka in February last year, during the riots on International Women’s Day.”
If only she’d come to stay with him in Moscow after Batya was killed, as he’d begged her to do. But St. Petersburg—he’d never been able to remember to call it Petrograd—had always been her home. Their home. She’d refused to leave. Her house, her students, her neighbors . . . the very people who had trampled her during the riots, when the police fired into the crowd.
If only he’d been there. At her side, there to read the mob and anticipate their movements. He could have pulled her away. Warned her, as he’d done the woman in the path of the bicyclist. If only . . .
Zivon cleared his throat. “I have a brother. Evgeni. He fled with me, but we were separated when our train derailed in France. We had set up a place to rendezvous in Paris, but he did not show up. Not yet.” Zivon hadn’t been able to wait there longer. With the loss of his bag, he’d had no money beyond the few bills in his pocket. And the French cryptography department had never responded. He’d had no choice but to continue to London, leaving a note for his brother at the bookshop they’d favored on their one European holiday when they were boys. It was the only place they’d known to set as a meeting spot. “He will find me when he is able. Of this I am certain.”
The captain braked to a gradual halt in front of Zivon’s building. “I will be praying your brother finds you soon. That he is well.”
Zivon curled his fingers tightly around the handle of his briefcase. Perhaps the captain’s prayers would have some effect his own hadn’t. “I thank you. And I will be but a few minutes. You are welcome to come up, of course, if you like.” He had nothing in his flat to allow for hospitality—no newspaper to offer him to read, no books collected with care, nothing to eat or drink aside from tap water and the few rations he’d been granted.
Blackwell’s smile looked unconcerned. “If it’s all the same, I think I’ll take a stroll down the street while you’re tidying up, old boy. I could use a stretch of my legs, and I certainly won’t get it once I’m home.”
With a bit of luck, his host wouldn’t see the relief in his nod.
Zivon hurried inside, up the stairs, and to the spartan flat Admiral Hall had provided him. He barely spared it a glance as he let himself in. There was none of him here, not yet. Just borrowed furniture. Borrowed curtains. A borrowed life.
He’d forge his own, as soon as he could. For now, though, it was a change into the closest thing he had to suitable dinner attire and a quick wash of his face, and he was positioning his spectacles on his nose again, pocketing his keys, and hurrying back down.
The captain was strolling his way when he emerged. They both climbed into the car and were soon talking of normal, unimportant things for the ten-minute ride. The weather. The rations. The news.
“Here we are.” Blackwell pointed to a proud-looking stone house near the end of Curzon Street. Not exactly the grandest home in Mayfair, but not exactly modest. Befitting this family’s standing, Zivon supposed. A generation or two removed from nobility, but still of good society. They would have noble connections. Titled cousins, or perhaps Blackwell even had a brother with a country estate or ancestral holdings to his name.
Zivon drew in a breath as they drove a little farther, to the carriage house that would serve many of the homes on the street. This wasn’t the world he’d been born to. But it was the world he’d found himself a part of with his advancement in the czar’s codebreaking division. He knew how to get along in it.
Blackwell checked his watch as they walked back up the street, nodding at whatever time it told him. “We’ll have arrived a bit before our other guests for the evening. Hall and his wife will be joining us, as will Lieutenant Clarke. Have you met him yet? He’s on my floor, one above you OB40 lads.”