Jamie and Aurelia were returning to their group, and they brought company: Sebastian’s erect figure in a dark austere winter coat was easily spotted, standing out in any crowd. His once wintry blond hair had lightened to the color of snow. The duke’s eldest daughter, Artemis, mother of Josi and Alex, had her hand tucked into the crook of his arm. Next to Artemis was her husband, Lucie’s son Henry, whose auburn hair and tall frame were so like his father’s that Annabelle sometimes had to look twice, thinking she had spotted a young Ballentine. The actual Ballentine, now the Earl of Rochester, was presently in animated discussion with Aurelia. In ten days’ time, their group would be complete at Claremont for a Christmas house party: Jamie’s wife and son would join, the Campbell-Khourys, the Ballentines, the Blackstones and their four redheaded daughters, Peregrin and his wife, old friends like Aoife Byrne and her companion Susan. Charlotte would bring her friend, a pretty physician she had met during her medical studies at London University and with whom she had gone to the front with the medical corps. A sudden pressure swelled in Annabelle’s throat, and she turned away to hide her crumpling expression. It was a miracle that all her loved ones had come home. Some days, it still felt unreal.
While greetings were exchanged behind her back and they obstructed the pavement with their large group, the wind turned, and the drizzle turned to sleet. In the queue of voters moving past St. Margaret’s Church, umbrellas popped up quick like mushrooms.
Hattie appeared by Annabelle’s side, the tip of her upturned nose pink from the cold. “That’s snow, isn’t it?” she asked, and squinted at the gray sky.
Catriona joined them. “Only if one possesses vast quantities of optimism.”
“She has that,” remarked Lucie as she fell in line next to Annabelle.
Annabelle smiled. “And we adore her for it.”
Shoulder to shoulder with her friends, the familiar scents of their perfumes in her nose, she felt the pressure ease behind her eyes. Sebastian’s presence was there, too; warm and gentle like a shielding blanket against her back. The coil of tension in her chest unspooled. Nothing was normal these days, but there was love surrounding her. One could master new shores.
The great clash of empires, over a century in the making, had left once-powerful old institutions across Europe broken beyond repair. The Russian royal family was wiped out, the German monarchy abolished, Austria-Hungary had split, and the Ottoman Empire had fallen. While the United States had begun her rise as a new global power on the other side of the Atlantic, Britain had been badly battered, and even its insulated, glacially slow-moving world of the aristocracy was facing change. Annabelle did not fear change as such; here, it could be a good thing. She was, however, apprehensive about the chaos that so often erupted into the voids of power. Sometimes, of course, something new had long been preparing in the wings, raring to claim its rightful place should the opportunity arise. On the other side of the street, the women moved slowly, patiently, toward the ballot box. The hats in the queue ranged from fashionably large flower-laden ones to the now bygone smaller models of her youth. Her nose stung with tears, after all. She felt Hattie’s hand in hers and clasped it tightly.
“This is a new dawn,” she said.
“It’s rising over ruins, though,” Hattie murmured.
“Yes,” said Annabelle, “but we are looking at the silver lining.”
Author’s Note
Inspiration for Elias’s story
In 2017, the FBI raided the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York to collect a Phoenician marble bull head from Lebanon’s Temple of Eshmun. The sculpture had been stolen from its safekeeping location during Lebanon’s civil war in the 1980s and had ended up in the hands of an American art collector couple. Legal action was required to have the piece returned.
Artifact theft is an old story. In the Victorian era, the rulers of China, Persia, and the Ottoman Empire designed legislation to limit the outflow of local heritage into the hands of foreign collectors. A 2017 Washington Post article （“Indiana Jones and the Big Lie”） highlights reactions to these measures at the time: In the 1870s, an American consul . . . advised Heinrich Schliemann, a German-American tycoon who had smuggled valuable treasures out of the Ottoman Empire, that permitting “any part of them to go into the absurd collection of rubbish which the Turks call their ‘Museum,’ would be worse than throwing them away.”
The history of Lebanon is long, fractured, and complex, and I only capture a small slice of its rich tapestry in this novel. For those interested in reading more on the themes mentioned, I recommend the works of Ussama Samir Makdisi and Akram Fouad Khater. As for Elias, it hurt to make him leave the mountain, but it is representative of the Lebanese experience throughout the centuries—about forty percent of Mount Lebanon’s population left between the 1860s and the end of World War I. Today, more Lebanese people live outside Lebanon than in Lebanon.