I held it to the light, a memory nagging for a moment before it slipped into place: a White House aide on the mansion’s lawn, telling me the story of President Teddy Roosevelt on a hike, losing a ring near Boulder Bridge forty years ago. Could this be it? I turned it over in my hand. It was a lovely thing, this marker from my final dueling ground. A sign, perhaps. I’d had two husbands, one in law and one in my heart; one who had fallen in Washington’s woods where I’d never walk again, one who had fallen in Sevastopol where I might never walk again either unless it could be wrested out of Nazi hands. I should never have married the first husband, and time had stolen my chance of legally marrying the second.
I wouldn’t make a mistake like either of those again. I wouldn’t miss this third precious chance.
I leaned over Kostia, dozing so lightly, and folded the signet ring into his loose-curled hand. “When we get back to Moscow,” I whispered softly, preparing to go meet with the rest of the delegation and pass on my full account, “marry me.”
Notes by the First Lady
I watch my husband’s chest rise and fall in sleep. He’ll get far less rest than usual tonight—the hullabaloo behind closed doors, after Lyudmila’s exit, was considerable, and there have been confused telephone calls winging back and forth from the Soviet embassy and Franklin’s private line. The picture is far from complete, but one thing is clear: the immediate danger has been taken care of, thanks to the young woman who leaves our shores tomorrow.
Welcoming her to my home, I had no idea the service she would render me and this country. I only thought she might be of interest, another useful female of the type Franklin likes to collect and hone and use—use up, sometimes—in this great work of his.
Franklin’s women. I am sure many books will be written about him someday, but I hope there will also be books about us. The woman who was his wife, his eyes and ears . . . the women who served on his cabinet and at his side in the White House . . . and the woman from a nation halfway around the world, a nation entirely foreign to us and sometimes frightening, who held no oath to him but nevertheless threw down her life in his defense.
I watch his chest rise and fall in the dark for another long moment, smiling. Then I close the door.
There is still much work to be done tonight before I find my bed . . . but a Russian bullet has given me peace and safety to do it.
Chapter 35
It was a long two months more before I found myself back on Soviet soil, disembarking from a four-engine B-24 Liberator bomber after an endless night flight from Glasgow to Vnukovo airfield. Twelve hours in the bomber’s belly, the inside sparkling with frost like the Snow Queen’s bedroom, the entire delegation wrapped in furs to the whites of our eyes and talking of the tour we’d finally, finally completed. But I wasn’t thinking now of the glittering functions we’d attended in Montreal and London, Cambridge and Birmingham, Newcastle and Liverpool—not as we touched down at last in an enormous frosty field ringed by a blue belt of snowy woods. Home, I thought. I was supposed to be gone only one month—it had been four.
A lifetime.
Disembarking, gloved hand linked with Kostia’s—I could feel the hard circle of the gold signet ring on his finger. My heart pounded as I saw shadowy figures breaking away from the waiting crowd, running toward the bomber. Pchelintsev was already embracing his wife, Krasavchenko kissing his father on both cheeks, but I had no thought for them. I could see my mother with her long plait, bundled like a round little owl . . . and breaking away from her, sprinting toward me, a smaller figure.
My hand tore from Kostia’s as I broke into a run. I shed Lady Death behind me, I shed the famous sniper of a thousand photographs, I shed my proud hopes of seeing Allied soldiers in Europe soon to buoy our eastern front—I shed everything but the sight of the child running toward me, ten years old, lanky with growth, his face alight. I flung my arms around him and then my legs buckled underneath me and I crashed to my knees in the snow, holding my son in a hug like steel, weeping unashamedly into his hair.