Paullina Simons: Tatiana and Alexander

PAULLINA SIMONS

TATIANA AND ALEXANDER

Map

COPYRIGHT

Harper

An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by Flamingo an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers 2003 and also under the title The Bridge to Holy Cross

Copyright © Paullina Simons 2003

Paullina Simons asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

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Source ISBN: 9780007118892

Ebook Edition © FEBRUARY 2015 ISBN: 9780007370078

Version: 2015-03-09

DEDICATION

Once again for my grandfather and grandmother, ninety-eight and ninety-four, who still plant cucumbers and grow flowers and live happily ever after,

and

for our good friend Anatoly Studenkov, still as ever left behind in Russia, who does not.

EPIGRAPH

And in the moonlight’s pallid glamour

Rides high upon the charging brute

Head held high ’mid echoing clamour

The Bronze Horseman in pursuit.

And all through that long night no matter

What road the frantic wretch might take

There would pound with ponderous clatter

The Bronze Horseman in his wake.

—Aleksandr Pushkin

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Map

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Prologue

BOOK ONE

The Second America

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

BOOK TWO

The Bridge to Holy Cross

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

CHAPTER THIRTY

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

BOOK THREE

Alexander

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

CHAPTER FORTY

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

Keep Reading

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Also by the Author

About the Publisher

PROLOGUE

Boston, December 1930

ALEXANDER BARRINGTON STOOD IN front of the mirror and adjusted his red Cub Scout tie. Rather, he was attempting to adjust his Cub Scout tie, because he couldn’t take his eyes off his face, a face uncharacteristically glum. His mouth was turned down. His hands were fidgeting with the gray-and-white tie, unable to do a good job, today of all days.

Stepping away from the mirror, he looked around the small room and sighed. It wasn’t much, a wood floor, drab brown-branch wallpaper, a bed, a nightstand.

It didn’t matter about the room. It wasn’t his room. It was a rented room, a furnished rented room and all the furniture belonged to the landlady downstairs. His real room was not in Boston but back in Barrington, and he had really liked his old room and hadn’t felt the same way about any other room he had lived in since. And he had lived in six different rooms since two years ago when his father sold their house and took Alexander out of Barrington.

Now they were leaving this room, too. It didn’t matter.

Rather, that’s not what mattered.

Alexander looked in the mirror again. He came up flush to the mirror, stuck his face against the glass and breathed out deeply. “Alexander,” he whispered. “What now?”

His best friend Teddy thought it was the most exciting thing in the world, Alexander’s leaving the country.

Alexander couldn’t have disagreed more.

Through his partly open door, he heard his mother and father arguing. He ignored them. They tended to argue through stress. Presently the door opened and his father, Harold Barrington, came in.

“Son, are you ready? The car is waiting for us downstairs. And your friends are downstairs, too, waiting to say goodbye. Teddy asked me if I would take him instead of you.” Harold smiled. “I told him I just might. What do you think, Alexander? You want to trade places with Teddy? Live with his crazy mother and crazier father?”

“Yes, because my own parents are so sane,” said Alexander. Harold was thin and of medium height. His one distinguishing feature was a resolutely set chin on a broad, square-jawed face. At the age of forty-eight his light-brown, graying hair was still thick upon his head, and his eyes were intense and blue. Alexander liked it when his father was in a good mood because then the eyes lost some of their seriousness.

Pushing Harold out of the way, his mother, Jane Barrington, strolled in, wearing her best silk dress and white pillbox hat, and said, “Harry, leave the boy alone. You can see he’s trying to get ready. The car will wait. And so will Teddy and Belinda.” She smoothed out her thick, long dark hair arranged under the hat. Jane’s voice still carried traces of the lilting rounded Italian accent that she had not been able to lose since coming to America at seventeen. She lowered her voice. “I never liked that Belinda, you know.”

“I know, Mom,” said Alexander. “That’s why we’re leaving the country, isn’t it?” He watched them in the mirror. He looked most like his mother. In personality he hoped he was more like his father. He didn’t know. His mother amused him, his father confounded him. “I’m ready, Dad,” he said.

Harold came over and put his arm on Alexander’s shoulder. “And you thought Cub Scouts was an adventure.”

Cub Scouts was plenty for me. “Dad?” he asked, looking not at his father but at his own reflection. “If it doesn’t work out … we can come back, right? We can come back to—” He stopped. He didn’t want his father to hear his voice crack. Taking a steadying breath, he finished, “To America ?”

When Harold didn’t reply, Jane came up to Alexander, who now stood between his parents, his mother in small heels three inches taller than his father, who was a good foot and a half taller than Alexander. “Tell the boy the truth, Harold. He deserves to know. Tell him. He is old enough.”