A little later we set sail for the Island of Dago, where lay the Baron de Sternberg’s principal estates.
All his acquaintances there received me with enthusiasm, and did their best to divert my mind; but with no success until the birth, in the following month, of a third son, whom I called Edward, after his father.
How can I describe what this newly-born son was to me, especially when his first signs of intelligence made me foresee that he would become more and more worthy of my love?
Feeling unable to let him be out of my sight for a moment, I took him with me the first time I went to see his brothers.
I had the comfort of finding them pretty well in health; but alas! it was but too evident to me that perfidious skill had been at work in filling their minds with unjust prejudices against her who had always loved them so tenderly. In spite of their goodness of heart, they could not help showing a certain coolness which greatly grieved me.
I set to work to revive their old love for me, and flatter myself I succeeded.
At the end of a year my husband came to fetch me in one of his own vessels, manned by his own people, in which I lived as in a house of my own.
While in England I had been given several very great curiosities, among others a fan from the East Indies and a magnificent bird-of-paradise feather; I added to these a little piece of work I had made out of the rarest shells then known, and took the liberty of sending the whole to her Majesty the Empress Elizabeth, who most graciously had a delightful and flattering letter written to me, and sent with it a magnificent clasp set with brilliants.
But I will tell nothing more of my return to Russia nor of another journey to England I made. Let us go back to my parents.
My father had written to me of the deaths, one after another, of my second brother, my grandmother and my mother; and he was constantly expressing the most intense wish to embrace me once more before he himself followed them to the grave.