Daring Bride by Jane Peart

Author:Jane Peart
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook
Publisher: Zondervan

She had folded the piece of paper and tucked it into her handbag. Dru, tired from shopping, accepted Evalee’s explanation that she wanted to walk in the park and would see her mother back at the hotel later.

Evalee’s heart had pounded as she waited near the fountain. She had never done anything like this before in her life. It felt daring and exciting. Was it foolish? She knew nothing about this…this waiter! Maybe she should leave. But just as she wavered in indecision, she saw Andre hurrying toward her. He was wearing a sweater and baggy corduroy pants. Without his waiter’s jacket, he looked like any other casually dressed student. He saw her and quickened his pace. There was such lightness in his step, such happiness glowing in his dark eyes, that Evalee felt as though she were meeting someone she had always known. More to the point, someone she’d been waiting for all her life.

They had spent the rest of the afternoon together. Sitting on one of the benches, unable to take their eyes off one another, they talked. Andre told her all about himself. As he spoke, she felt something unfold within her, something warm, sweet, and very tender, something she had never felt before.

Andre told her he had lived in Paris since he was six years old. He told her of his Russian childhood, describing summers at the seashore and holidays at the family’s country estate. Then there had come a night, he said, that changed everything he had known before.

It had been winter, and he had been awakened from his bed by his nurse, hastily dressed, and taken down to where his parents stood in the hallway, talking in low, urgent voices. His mother had on a long, hooded cape trimmed with silver fox fur. To his surprise, his father was dressed in the rough smock, full pants, cap, and boots of a peasant. Outside their carriage waited. Andre was rushed out and placed in it. His mother followed, weeping, and his father kissed him, hugged him hard, then slammed the carriage door. They rode off through the night, his mother holding him so tightly that he could feel the pumping of her heart, and the tears that rolled down her cheeks onto his.

They had never seen his father again. Andre and his mother had joined relatives in Paris and waited—in vain. No word of what had happened had come to them until long after the war. Even then news out of what had become Communist Russia came very slowly and could not always be counted on to be true.

Before they had escaped, his mother had sewn jewels into her corset, into the lining of her cloak, the hem of her dress. They lived for years by selling them, one by one, reluctantly and only out of dire necessity. His mother would not, however, give up her tiara, which was her symbol of having been a countess, or the pearls that had passed down through the family since the time of Catherine the Great.

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