'I wired the headmaster of St. Paul's List night. William has been admitted for September, 19 Anne said nothing. Richard had so obviously started planning William's career.
'Well, my dear, are you fully recovered today?' he went on to inquire, never'having spent a day in hospital during his thirty - thru - years.
'Yes - no - I think so,' responded his wife timidly, suppressing a rising tearfulness that she knew would only displease her husband. The answer was not of the sort that Richard could hope to understand. He kissed his wife on the cheek and returned in the hansom carriage to the Red House on Louisburg Square, their family home. With staff, servants, the new baby and his nurse, there would now be nine mouths to feed. Richard did not give the problem a second thought.
William Lowell Kane received the Church's blessing and the names his father had apportioned him before birth at the Protestant Episcopal Church of St. Paul's, in the presence of everybody in Boston who mattered and a few who didn't. Ancient Bishop Lawrence officiated, J. P. Morgan.
and Alan Lloyd, bankers of impeccable standing, along with Milly Preston, Anne's closest friend, were the chosen godparents. His Grace sprinkled the Holy Water on Wil~ liam's head; the boy didn't murmur. Ile was already learning the Brahmin approach to life. Anne thanked God for the safe birth of her son and Richard thanked God, whom he regarded as an external bookkeeper whose function was to record the deeds of the Kane family from generation to generation, that he had a son to whom he could leave his fortune. Still, he thought, perhaps he had better be certain and have a second boy. From his kneeling position he glanced sideways at his wife, well pleased with her.
Book Two
5
Wladek Koskiewicz grew slowly. It became apparent to his foster mother that the boy's health would always be a problem. He caught all the illnesses and diseases that growing children normally catch and many that they don't, and he passed them on indiscriminately to the rest of the Koskiewicz family. Helena treated him as any other of her brood and always vigorously defended him when Jasio began tD blame the devil rather than God for Wladek's presence in their tiny cottage. Florentyna, on the other hand, took care of Wladek as if he were her own child. She loved him from the first moment she had set eyes on him with an intensity that grew from a fear that no one would ever want to marry her, the penniless daughter of a trapper. She must, therefore, be childless. Wladek was her child.
The eldest brother, the hunter, who had found Wladek, treated him like a plaything but was too afraid of his father to admit that he liked the frail infant who was growing into a sturdy toddler. In any case, next January the hunter was to leave school and start work on the Baron's estate, and children were a woman's problem, so his father had told him.
The three youziger brothers, Stefan, Josef and Jan, showed little interest in Wladek and the remaining member of the family, Sophia, was happy enough just to cuddle him.
What neither parent had been prepared for was a charac, ter and mind so different from those of their own children, No one could dismiss the physical or intellectual difference. The Koskiewiczes were all tall, large - boned with fair hair and grey eyes. Wladek was short and round, with dark hair and intensely blue eyes. The Koskiewiczes bad minimal I I pretensions to scholarship and were removed from the village school as soon as age or discretion allowed. Wladek, on the other hand, though he was late in walking, spoke at eighteen months. Read at three, but was still unable to dress himself. Wrote at five, but continued to wet his bed. He became the despair of his father and the pride of his mother. His first foux years on this earth were memor - able only as a continual physical attempt through illness to try to depart from it, and for the sustained efforts of Helena and Florentyna to insure that he did not succeed. He ran around the little wooden cottage barefoot, dressed in his harlequin outfit, a yard or so behind his mother. When Florentyna returned from school, he would transfer his allegiance, never leaving her side until she put him to bed. In her division of the food by nine, Florentyna often sacrificed half of her own share to Wladek or, if he were ill, the entire portion. Wladek wore the clothes she made for him, sang the songs she taught him and shared with her the few toys and presents she had been given.
Because Florr - ntyna was away at school most of the day, Wladek wanted from a young age to go with her. As soon as he was allowed to (holding firmly on to Florentyna's hand until they reached the village school), he walked the eighteen wiorsta, some nine miles, through the woods of moss - covered birches and cypresses and the orchards of Ifine and cherry to Slonim to begin his education.