Maid of Baikal: A Novel of the Russian Civil War

“You’ve been in Omsk,” she said in a flat voice. “You dined with Anna Vasilyevna and that girl without sending me even a word of your return. What am I to think?”

“I had business to attend to and could not reasonably refuse Anna’s invitation,” Ned answered, involuntarily shifting his weight to his rear foot in case she decided to hit him.

“Couldn’t you have sent me a telegram?” Yulia went on. “Didn’t you think for a moment of me, waiting for you here?”

She awaited his reply with pale cheeks, unblinking eyes, and lips pressed together into a straight line.

“I’m sorry,” Ned replied in a voice drained of feeling. “It was thoughtless of me not to send a message.”

“Yes, of course you’re sorry now, but that’s not the full truth, is it? There is something else, isn’t there? If you don’t have the courage to tell me, it must be terrible indeed.”

Her hands alternately clenched and opened at her sides, as if she could barely resist throttling him.

“There’s nothing else, Yulia. I’m not holding anything back. I thought of you often. And I came back as soon as I could. That’s the plain truth.” Beads of sweat were forming on his forehead and he wondered if Yulia could see them.

“So you deny that you’ve come under the spell of that sorceress from Irkutsk?” she accused, her cheeks now flushed and her eyes flashing with anger.

On impulse, Ned reached out to embrace her but she stepped back and went on talking.

“I spoke to Anna Vasilyevna about the girl. Do you know what she said to me? She said I was being silly, and that a grown woman should have no reason to fear competition from a virgin schoolgirl.”

She spat out the words with the venom of deeply felt humiliation.

“Listen, Yulia,” Ned interrupted. “I didn’t come here to make you miserable. I thought you’d be happy to see me. I’m certainly happy to…”

But Yulia folded her arms across her chest, stiffened, and gazed at the floor.

“All right, Yulia, if that’s how you feel, I don’t blame you one bit for wanting to wash your hands of me,” he offered in a muted voice. “I’ll get my bag now and take it over to the bunkhouse.”

“No, don’t” she replied, raising her head with a sudden jerk.

Ned saw the tears welling in her eyes but the anger had left them now and the firm line of her mouth had softened into a sort of childish pout.

“Even if I could find it within me to be so cruel to you, where could I find the strength to be so pitiless toward myself?”

The pain in her voice was palpable, but Ned failed to gauge its depth, having spent nearly his entire adolescent and adult life among men, with scant experience in affairs of the heart. He felt at a complete loss how to respond and stood before her like a statue.

Slowly at first, and then with quickening steps, Yulia rushed forward to wrap her arms around Ned’s neck and he held her tight while she heaved with barely audible sobs. At last, she relaxed her grip while Ned placed his hands around her slender waist.

“How long will you stay this time?” she asked in a voice barely above a whisper. “I missed you so that I can’t bear the thought of your leaving again.”

“For a while,” he said. “I don’t know. A month, maybe, or perhaps all summer.”

“Take no thought for the morrow, for sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof,” Yulia quoted the Bible, wiping away her tears and flashing a brave smile. “Let us enjoy the summer then, for as long as it lasts.”

In his selfish relief at seeing the end of her tears, Ned was blind to the pain he had caused her and to the rift it had created between them. The next morning at breakfast, as Neilson had predicted, Yulia brought up the need for doubling her monthly rent and for providing a generous termination payment. Later in the day, Ned rode to the American Consulate and withdrew the funds she required from the account set aside for the wireless project. Yulia offered no further complaint. But the damage had been done. Ned had proven that he could not be relied upon. Things would not be the same between them again.

* * *

By the time Zhanna arrived in Uralsk to rejoin her brigade, the greater part of the munitions and supplies they needed to launch their new Volga offensive were waiting on the docks at the Cossack-held port of Guryev. Within a week, Zhanna led her men and a portion of Tolstov’s Ural Cossack cavalry due south, securing the Uralsk-Guryev rail line and blocking any possible threat from Soviet Turkestan to the southeast. Next they drove west along the Caspian to capture the Red-held Caspian port of Astrakhan. And with that prize in hand, and with the Fourth Red Army fully occupied in the struggle to break the AFSR’s siege of Tsaritsyn, Zhanna’s column was free to move up the Volga’s east bank to join AFSR forces outside that strategic city.