Svetlana carefully closed the door and walked off. Hopefully John would take the hint and remove himself before she returned. She shook herself. How could she have been so foolish as to make love to John, a virtual stranger? She'd been distraught, but surely not that distraught? Unfortunate memories of the previous evening flashed past her eyes. Someone she didn't know had thrown herself at John, and he had taken advantage of her distraught state. Svetlana nodded. Yes, it was all John Trelli's fault.
July 1635, Grantville
Sveta swung her head to see how the new hairstyle moved. Not sure what she thought about what she was seeing in the mirror, she turned to the three girls who'd dragged her to the beauty salon. "What do you think?"
"Katy's done a great job," Janie Abodeely said, referring to the beautician who'd been working on Sveta's face and hair for most of the morning. "You look absolutely scrumptious." Julia O'Reilly and Diana Cheng nodded their agreement.
Sveta badly wanted to believe her friends, but the way she'd been brought up, without a woman's influence, meant she'd never learned how to be a woman. In the mirror, she compared her appearance against her friends. She decided that she looked quite passable. She wasn't as beautiful as Julia, who was an acknowledged beauty, but she was at least as good-looking as Janie and Diana. She sighed. She'd love to be exotic looking like Diana, or at least have hair that same beautiful raven-black color, instead of the sort-of-pale-honey color she was cursed with.
She leaned closer to the mirror, to better inspect Katy's handiwork. The eyebrow plucking had been painful, but nowhere near as painful as having her body waxed had been. However, she couldn't complain about the results. She reached out for Katy and hugged the tiny-at least compared to her-beautician. "Thank you, Katy."
"It was fun," Katy said.
"Like exploring uncharted territory," Diana suggested.
Katy giggled. "Now remember, Sveta, you need to take proper care of your skin and hair."
Sveta sighed. This new look was going to be expensive to maintain. Maybe she could . . .
"Don't even think about it," Julia said. "Just pay the nice lady so we can find you some clothes to match your new look."
The "nice lady" was Frau Trelli, the owner of Carole’s Beauty Salon. It had been Frau Trelli, John Trelli's aunt, who'd first introduced Sveta to his cousins Julia and Janie. Sveta couldn't understand why Frau Trelli was being so nice to her. If there was anybody who knew that the supposed relationship between her and her nephew was nothing more than a face-saving exercise, it was Frau Trelli. She had barely had anything to do with John since Jabe McDougal's wedding to Prudentia Gentileschi. For moment-a very brief moment-Sveta felt guilty about that. John had been the perfect camouflage for her distress when the man she loved married That Female. But it was only a brief moment. Then the memory of how he'd taken advantage of her when, distraught that Jabe was forever denied her, she threw herself at him surfaced, and she was able to firmly suppress the guilt.
"I bet she's thinking about Puss," Julia said.
Sveta looked at her friend. Why was Julia thinking that she'd waste a moment thinking about John Trelli? She knew there was nothing going on between them.
"Okay, okay, George then," Julia said, holding her hands up defensively.
The reminder that she'd jokingly said her pet name for John would be "George" lifted her spirits. She wondered how he was enjoying that nickname.
Magdeburg
"You got yourself your own pet, George?"
Puss looked away from his horse, who was thoroughly enjoying his dust bath, to the source of the comment. The speaker was another sergeant in his platoon, and the smirk on his face told Puss that the story had made its way to Magdeburg. Not that he was surprised. It had been too good to expect his family to keep it to themselves.
His Aunt Carole had delegated him to act as the absolutely gorgeous, as opposed to merely sensationally beautiful, Corporal Svetlana Anderovna's escort to a wedding, and she'd objected to using his nickname. Instead, she'd insisted that her pet name for him would be George. That wouldn't have been a problem. He'd been called worse things. However, her comment-some might even call it a joke, but in his experience, Corporal Anderovna didn't do jokes-neatly paraphrased the Abominable Snowman character from the Bugs Bunny video she'd just been watching with Aunt Carole's daughters. Anybody familiar with the video, and his cousins had made sure plenty of people were made familiar with it, could easily make the connection between Corporal Anderovna's throwaway comment and the Abominable Snowman's speech. That had been the source of a lot of male envy. Most guys would be happy to have Corporal Anderovna pet and hug them.
What most of them probably wouldn't know was the source material for that cartoon was John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men, and any pet falling into the character Lenie's hands tended to be petted and hugged to death. He hadn't bothered to bring that up, because he knew the response would have been "but what a way to go."
For a brief moment the memory of the wedding night surfaced. That had been great. Waking up alone in Svetlana's bed the next morning hadn't been. Not that he'd been surprised that she'd left. She'd probably been too embarrassed to talk to him. She'd certainly done her best to avoid being alone with him for the rest of his leave. Ah, well, he'd never really believed such a gorgeous girl could really be interested in him.
August 1635, Grantville
Sveta lay on her bed in her tiny room in the woman's quarters and waited for the nausea to fade. When it did, she carefully slid off her bed. She was supposed to be meeting her friends after work, but the way she felt, she'd rather not. Unfortunately, if she didn't turn up they'd come looking for her. Even a locked door wouldn't stop them-Diana had demonstrated how insecure her room was just last week by picking the lock in less than a minute.
When she joined her friends, Julia swept Sveta into her arms and hugged here. "You look like death warmed up," Julia said.
"Julia," Janie protested.
Sveta savored the comfort of the hug, something else that had been lacking in her life until . . . okay, she admitted it to herself, until she met John Trelli and his family. She gently pushed Julia away so she could greet Janie and Diana. "I almost didn't come, I felt so sick after work."
"You really don't look too good," Janie said.
Julia pouted. "That's what I said."
"Have you vomited at all?" Diana asked.
Diana was on the medical program, training to eventually become a doctor, so Sveta forgave her the technical language. "No, I haven't puked. I just don't feel well. It's probably something I ate."
"I guess that means no night on the town, so how about coffee and a roll at Cora's?" Julia asked.
Sveta was all for that. "I'm sorry I'm such a party poofter."
"Pooper," Janie corrected. "It's party pooper, and you aren't. You can't help it if you don't feel well."
Sveta let Julia drag her back for another hug before they joined Janie and Diana on the short walk to Cora's.
She managed one step into Cora's before the smell hit her. Diana guided her into an alleyway where she puked up her guts.
"Is she all right?" a breathless Julia asked.
"It depends on what you mean by all right," Janie said. "What was it, Sveta, the smell of the coffee?"
"Coffee with milk," Sveta said. Even the memory of the smell had her trying to puke again.
"What's the matter with Sveta," Julia demanded.
"This is purely a guess mind you," Diana said, "but, I suspect Sveta is suffering NVP."