Blackwell laughed. “You won’t be able to help but to do so. She swears the best light is in the drawing room until noon and the dining room thereafter, so she has work areas set up in both chambers and forbids anyone to move them.”

They pulled out into the road, and Zivon focused on the street ahead of them. “And on what is she working now?”

“Oh, some classical scene from a myth, I believe. She’s using our younger daughter, Ivy, as her model.”

He made note of the name. “And you have how many children?”

“Two daughters.” Affection saturated the man’s voice. “Lilian—Lily, we call her—is the elder at three and twenty. She’s in the VAD—Voluntary Aid Detachment. They work in the hospitals. Ivy has just turned twenty-one and keeps busy as a teacher in her former school. Her mother required a bit of convincing for that, but with the war on, it was a way she could help. She hadn’t the stomach for nursing.”

Zivon could well imagine Mrs. Blackwell needing to be convinced, though. Society ladies never sullied themselves with such things, in his experience. Though he had the utmost respect for it. “My mother was a teacher—a linguist. It is thanks to her that I knew four languages already when I went to university.”

Blackwell glanced over at him before making a turn. “I’m afraid I know little of your family history. Did you leave anyone behind when you escaped?”

Zivon’s throat closed. He had to count to five before he could convince his muscles to relax, his lungs to keep pumping air in and out of his chest. “No. Batya—my father—was killed in action during the Lake Naroch Offensive in 1916. Matushka in February last year, during the riots on International Women’s Day.”

If only she’d come to stay with him in Moscow after Batya was killed, as he’d begged her to do. But St. Petersburg—he’d never been able to remember to call it Petrograd—had always been her home. Their home. She’d refused to leave. Her house, her students, her neighbors . . . the very people who had trampled her during the riots, when the police fired into the crowd.

If only he’d been there. At her side, there to read the mob and anticipate their movements. He could have pulled her away. Warned her, as he’d done the woman in the path of the bicyclist. If only . . .