The townhouses might have been four hundred years old, but there was nothing ancient about their security systems. Nadia had to disable several alarms before she could park her car in the garage and enter her mother’s house.
No one had been inside for eight days—since her mother had been killed. There was a slight cracking sound as Nadia breached the seal of the door, and a rush of cool air from the interior mixing with the non-air conditioned garage.
The silence of the house startled her. In that space so much larger than her own flat, the complete absence of another human being was strikingly apparent.
And yet there was a presence—the scent of her mother’s perfume.Opiumby Yves Saint Laurent, the one she’d worn all of Nadia’s life.
Nadia had brought a notepad and pen. The main thing she would have to do to start was inventory the items, to begin separating what would have to be donated, what sold, and what items were worth storing. She intended to sell the townhouse itself. She didn’t want to live there—it would be too upsetting. And she knew Maxim would never agree to move to such a quiet neighborhood.
She was grateful that her mother had always been as tidy and organized as Nadia herself. There was a spartan simplicity to the townhouse—the furnishings it contained were rich and elegant, but the rooms were far from crowded, and everything had a place.
Nadia began marking down the various watercolors on the wall, the rare books on the shelves. Perhaps she should keep more of it herself, in memory of her mother, but the cold landscapes and first editions of Proust did not appeal to Nadia in and of themselves, and she couldn’t say that she had any emotional connection to them either, through memory or nostalgia.
However, as she moved upstairs to her mother’s study, she knew there was one thing that absolutely must stay within the family. Or, two things, to be precise.
In her mother’s office, in a heavily alarmed glass case, sat two Faberge eggs. They were part of a set commissioned for the Russian Tsars between 1885 and 1917. Only sixty-nine eggs had ever been made in the original workshop of Peter Carl Faberge, with fifty-seven surviving to the present day.
Samara Turgenev owned the Garden of Eden and the Blue Swan. The original eggs had been given as Easter gifts to the wives and mothers of the Tsars. They always contained a “surprise,” a treasure inside like an elephant automaton, a pendant, a revolving miniature, a portrait, or a jewel.
The first of Samara’s eggs was made of Nephrite, gold, and ivory—its surface a deep, shimmering green, crisscrossed with a network of gold mesh, with diamond studs in the junction points of the net, and a beautiful ivory miniature of a garden on its face.
Its surprise was a minute emerald serpent, with so many joints that you could wrap it round your finger like a ring, with its gleaming diamond eyes looking up at you. Nadia had only actually seen the serpent one time, since her mother had almost never allowed the case to be opened or the eggs to be handled.
The second egg was even more prized within the family, because the surname Lebedev was drawn from the Russian word for “Swan.” Two white birds with their necks bent toward one another formed the Lebedev family crest.
The swan on the egg was actually blue on a cream enameled backdrop. The interior contained a single silver swan that would flap its wings when its mechanism was wound and released.
Nadia knew these eggs were more valuable than the whole of her mother’s house. They had been acquired by her great-grandfather eighty years earlier. Nadia would have to find a secure place to store them, or perhaps loan them to a museum or gallery in Paris.
She supposed she was at liberty to open the cases now and hold the heavy eggs in her hands. No one could stop her. But she wasn’t ready to take that step just yet. Instead, she simply marked the eggs on her list, with a question mark in place of an annotation of where to send them.
With the office surveyed, Nadia moved at last to her mother’s room.
This was the part she had truly been dreading.
There was the bed, neatly made, with a slight indent in the pillow from her mother’s head. There was the novel she’d been reading,Red at the Bone, with a bookmark noting the place where Samara had stopped and would never return. And there was her mother’s closet, full of row upon row of sober professional clothing, in dark, muted tones.
Nadia looked at the endless jackets, blouses, dresses, and shoes. Hardly anything in any color but black, gray, or navy. When had her mother become so stiff and joyless? Where was the girl who dressed up as Marie Antoinette and hid up on the roof with a strange boy in a skeleton suit?
Nadia left the closet as quickly as she’d come in, simply marking on her list:
Clothes, purses, shoes — Donate.
* * *
5
Nadia
By the time Nadia finished surveying her mother’s house, it was much too late to meet Maxim for dinner. But she’d promised to come over, so she dutifully drove to his penthouse apartment in St-Germain-des-Pres.
The concierge waved her in, and she took the elevator up to the top floor. Maxim looked distinctly annoyed when he opened the door, already wearing his robe.
“Oh, there you are,” he said.
“Here I am,” Nadia said in a flat and exhausted tone, dropping her purse heavily onto his dining room table.
She kicked off her shoes as well, her feet sore from long hours of standing and note-taking in the various rooms of her mother’s house.
