Lord of All Things by Andreas Eschbach Read Free Book Online

including a sword that belonged to the first emperor.” He smiled. “One always wonders whether those sorts of claims are true. I don’t know how many swords the first emperor owned, but there must have been an awful lot of them for there to be so many left over.”
    The Russian ambassador laughed heartily, his belly wobbling under his smoking jacket. “Ah yes, we have the same trouble with relics in Russia. Some of our saints seem to have had twenty fingers and a hundred teeth.” He looked down at Charlotte. “And you want to see these things?”
    Charlotte nodded. “Yes. I’m hoping my new friend will say he’ll come.”
    The Russian winked at her. “Oh ho, you already have a new friend. And what’s his name?”
    “Hiroshi,” Charlotte told him cheerfully. “His mother works in our laundry, and he, um, found my doll.”
    Help! She really had gotten carried away, so much so that she had nearly let the cat out of the bag. She had only just kept her cool. It was important to be able to do that if you were going to be a fine lady. Maman had taught her that. You had to keep your cool, and above all you had to think carefully about what to say and what not to say.

    Later that evening, when the reception was over and they were standing next to one another in the bathroom, Jean-Arnaud Malroux, ambassador of the French Republic, officer of the Légion d’honneur,and author of several books about France’s role in the world, said to his wife, Cécile Malroux, née the countess of Vaniteuil, “I’m always amazed how quickly our daughter learns foreign languages, how easily they come to her. Did you hear her speaking to the Japanese minister of education? He could hardly stop talking about it as he was saying good-bye.”
    His wife was wiping her makeup from her forehead with a cotton pad. “Charlotte doesn’t learn languages,” she said, “she just breathes them in. I don’t know who she gets it from; certainly not from me.”
    The ambassador was brushing his hair—one of the most sublimely useless things one could do at bedtime, but it had become a habit. “Come now. I don’t believe that it has any mystical significance. Children are simply better at learning languages; it’s only natural. But it nonetheless always surprises me to hear it for myself.” He looked at the brush, plucked a few hairs from it, and put them into the bin beneath the washbasin. “But did you also hear what she told Yegorov? That she’s made a friend here?”
    “I was even there to see it happen, so to speak.”
    “Really? How did it come about?”
    His wife put aside her cotton pad and pulled a tissue from the box. “It was this morning. The boy who brought her doll back. He’s the son of someone on the domestic staff.”
    “You mustn’t let Charlotte get too close to her friends here.” The ambassador picked up his toothbrush and toothpaste. “I could be recalled from this post any day now, quite literally, and then what would happen? You know how she’s still mooning after that girl she spent all her time with in Delhi—what was her name? The little English girl with the strawberry-blond curls.”
    “Brenda,” his wife said. “Brenda Gilliam, and in fact she’s Scottish.”
    “Her father was the professor of medicine?”
    “That’s right.”
    “We mustn’t put her through another separation like that,” the ambassador warned, holding his toothbrush under the warm water that gushed from the tap.
    His wife looked at him in the mirror. “Do you know where we’ll be going next?”
    “Probably South America. They’re assigning some new posts out there at the moment—Chile, Argentina, Guatemala…”
    “Argentina!” his wife repeated enthusiastically. “Argentina would be wonderful.” As a young woman , she had lived in Buenos Aires for a year and a half, dancing the tango, partying through the night, and falling in love with a new, fiery young man every month. It had been the one wild time in her life,