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e born for many months.”
“If you had a patient who was an expectant mother…” Ella said vaguely.
“If you were my patient, you mean,” Tom said. It was bad form to interrupt royalty but this was
no time to stand on ceremony.
“Precisely,” said Ella. “If I were your patient would you advise me to escape the dangers of
the city and spend my confinement in the country? By the sea, perhaps?”
“Yes I most certainly would,” Tom said. It was perhaps the only completely honest statement
which had been uttered in the room since they entered. “Cities are full of contagion as a matter of
course and I would imagine that St. Petersburg, which was built on marshland, is worse than most.
Especially in the summer. When I was walking in the gardens just this morning I thought I saw a
hummingbird which, on closer inspection, turned out to be a mosquito.”
Tatiana not only relaxed at this statement but looked almost amused. Ella, however, bristled at
this slight to her adopted city.
“We were never meant to summer here,” she said icily. “We have remained overlong this year
because of the Tchaikovsky ball.”
“I’m aware of that,” Tom said, his own tone nearly as icy. He was once again verging on the
edge of rudeness to a woman of rank, but he couldn’t see Ella running to tattle to her husband or her
granny about anything he said in the course of this particular conversation. He had always found it an
affectation when people used the words “summer” and “winter” as verbs, and he wondered if Ella,
who was accustomed to decamping to the sea with the first heat of June, had ever bothered to
consider all the citizens of the city, pregnant or not, who were forced to endure the risk of cholera and
malaria year round. But just as it was not his job to tell Ella that her plan was mad, nor was it his job
to lecture her on her marital family’s responsibilities to their people.
“I believe,” he said in a more conciliatory tone, “the question before us is whether or not a
doctor would advise an expectant mother to go to the country rather than remain in the city, and the
answer is yes. The purity of ocean air is most palliative, especially when temperatures climb.”
“And you would say this to my grandmother? As general advice, that is?”
“Of course. But I will not lie to my monarch. I will not tell your grandmother I have found you
pregnant when I have not.”