Falling Stars by Anita Mills

Author:Anita Mills [Mills, Anita]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Topaz
Published: 1992-12-31T14:00:00+00:00

She stopped, thinking that it sounded as though she complained, but in truth she had nothing to do. And she blamed that on her inability to speak Russian. If she could communicate more, she could direct the servants better and take pride in running at least part of the house. As it was, she felt more the pampered guest than the mistress of Domnya.

Not that she faulted Galena, for Alexei’s sister was exceedingly patient with her poor attempts at the language, always carefully correcting words and grammar. Still, it seemed as though she knew little more than when she’d arrived two and one-half months earlier. It would come with time, Galena insisted, but far too much escaped her, and anything said quickly was utterly unintelligible. Because of her difficulties with Russian, none of the servants sought her out willingly, preferring always to go to Galena. But it didn’t matter—everything at Domnya always ran smoothly without her help.

But she carried Alexei’s child, a child would tie him to her forever. She touched her swelling stomach, recalling how it had felt a scant four weeks before when she’d actually felt the babe move within her. When the birth was over, when she could hold this child they had made, she knew everything would be different. As it was now, whenever Galena was present, Lexy treated Katherine as though she were breakable. And even in the privacy of the bedchamber, he now behaved as though he believed it.

Galena and Lexy had already quarreled over baptismal names, one choosing Mikhail, the other Alexander in honor of the czar. In the end, Katherine had had to intervene, saying she much preferred to name her first son John for her father. They had acquiesced, but he would be Ivan in Russian, which somehow did not seem quite the same. Ivan Alexeievitch Volsky. If the babe should be a girl, everyone agreed she would be Alexandra. Alexandra Ekaterina Alexeievna Volskyaya.

Even Domnya’s priest was pleased, going so far as to ask the prayers be said as far away as Moscow for this heir to Domnya. Katherine’s pregnancy was, he insisted, a sign that God approved the marriage and would have her hasten her conversion to Orthodoxy. A mother, he had pronounced solemnly, must guide her child to right in matters of religion.

She sighed and dipped her pen again, continuing the letter.

Everything is so very different here, dearest brother. It is as though I have stepped back in time to another age, for people are owned here, and even the Orthodox Church condones it. Indeed, the church itself is quite medieval, choosing to follow the czar and the nobility rather than to lead it. And everyone clings to the old ways of doing things. For all that Catherine the Great encouraged Russia to modernize, I think she did not truly want it to do so. Here there are no machines for anything. Sometimes I marvel that I have a water closet.

How homesick I must sound to you. And in

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