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Chapter Three<br />
The Winter Palace, St. Petersburg - The Private Rooms of the Orlovs<br />
June 14, 1889<br />
9:20 AM<br />
“There was a disturbance in the theater last night,” Filip said, without looking up from his<br />
plate.<br />
Her pulse quickened, just has he had undoubtedly intended for it to do.<br />
“What sort of disturbance?” Tatiana said, her voice carefully pitched to sound calm, even<br />
slightly disinterested. She had trained herself how to do this throughout the twenty-seven months she<br />
had been married to Filip Orlov. Anxiety made the voice rise, especially on the final syllable of the<br />
last spoken word. It had the effect of turning any statement into an implied question, of indicating<br />
uncertainty, even in the most everyday of matters. Tatiana now automatically lowered her voice as she<br />
finished each sentence and the irony was that this soft growl, which had begun as a survival<br />
technique, was largely cited among her acquaintances as evidence of a flirtatious nature.<br />
Tatiana and Filip were sitting at their breakfast table just as they had for each morning of their<br />
married life. Which would make it – let’s see, what was twenty-seven times thirty? Dear God, over<br />
800 consecutive mornings that the two of them had spent precisely as this one: Filip already in<br />
uniform, already wearing his boots. She in her peignoir, imported at considerable expense and bother<br />
from one of the better ladies’ boutiques of Paris, idly grazing over a bowl of fruit and grain, all the<br />
while sipping her favorite morning concoction. It was pink froth in a wine glass, a mixture of<br />
pomegranate juice and flat champagne, whatever dregs happened to remain from the night before.<br />
Filip ate eggs, but exclusively the yolks, an idiosyncrasy that resulted each morning in a plate of<br />
abandoned egg whites, lying lacy and flat on his blue plate like the dried foam which was left behind<br />
on the beaches of the Crimean Sea. Tatiana and Filip summered there and would be departing for their<br />
villa soon, just after the Tchaikovsky ball. Half their trunks were already packed.<br />
Tatiana did not anticipate the trip.
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