The Lost Crown (31 page)

Her tears steal the wind from my lungs. I finger my St. Nicholas medal and try to think like Papa:
Sudba.
“All right, Tatya.”

33.

ANASTASIA NIKOLAEVNA

May 1918
Tobolsk

“T
will not be searched!” Nagorny bellows. The pen drops out of Olga’s hand, splattering her letter to Mama. I’m out of my seat before I know it. I’ve never in my whole life heard Aleksei’s
dyadka
shout like that.

“Shvybs, don’t,” Olga pleads, but I dart to the stairs to see what’s going on.

“Then you will not leave this house,” Rodionov is saying when I peep around the doorway.

Nagorny’s voice sounds as if it’s made of metal. “The tsarevich and his sisters have requested me to take two bunches of radishes and a scrap of a letter three lines long to the Botkin children. There is no cause for this sort of treatment.”

“You forget you are under arrest, sailor,” Rodionov retorts. He circles Nagorny like a dog getting ready to wet on a tree. “A grown man taking orders from a pampered lot of children, yet he has the nerve to defy the commandant. It’s disgraceful.”

Nagorny stares straight ahead. “A grown man taking out a political grudge on three frightened young women and a sick boy is a disgrace to his own conscience.”

I gulp down something that might have turned into a laugh if I couldn’t feel the anger radiating off the both of them like stovepipes. Someone should give Nagorny a medal, the way he stands up to Rodionov.

“Take your vegetables and get out of my sight,” Rodionov growls. “You will submit to a search when you return, or you will not re-enter this house.”

Stinking swine. And it’s not just Nagorny he torments. Every morning, Rodionov makes my sisters and me line up like schoolchildren in the ballroom for roll call. “Are you Anastasia Nikolaevna?” he asks day after day. “Olga Nikolaevna? Tatiana Nikolaevna?” He says my name as if it’s something to be ashamed of. As long as I can remember I’ve mostly tried to ignore being an imperial highness, but this commandant makes me want to drape myself in ermine and diamonds and promenade across the courtyard out of plain old spite.

So the morning after the Radish Incident, I stand proud as a flagpole and answer him, “I am Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaevna.” Olga twitches like I’ve stuck a fork into her, but beside me Tatiana straightens up until she’s an eyebrow taller than Rodionov himself. When it’s her turn she answers like me:

“I am Grand Duchess Tatiana Nikolaevna.”

A swallow bulges down Rodionov’s stubby neck before he slumps out.

“We have to be careful, you two,” Olga says.

“Konechno, dushka,”
Tatiana soothes. “But I will not let him insult us. We may not be imperial highnesses, but Anastasia is right. We are still grand duchesses.”

I feel like I should gloat or something, but as soon as I walk into our bedroom my spirits flump back down again. Our bedroom is so horribly lopsided without Mashka’s cot next to mine. It’s like having a compass with only three directions. When I’m working puzzles with Aleksei or out walking the dogs, I can usually manage to pretend Mashka’s only sewing jewels in the other room or sitting inside with Mama. But in here there’s no getting away from the fact that we’ve been zigzagged apart. It’s all wrong. I don’t care what Ekaterinburg is like. I can’t wait to get out of here.

All day long, I’m like a bicycle wheel spinning and spinning without going anywhere. Olga nurses Aleksei while Tatiana does everything else. I do nothing at all but play with the dogs and tromp circles around the garden. What do I even know
how
to do except saw a log, knit a scarf, or crack a joke? The Big Pair must think being the family clown is great fun, but it’s as boring and depressing and sad as everything else. When does the clown get to laugh, or cry, I’d like to know? Nobody ever thinks about that.

Only flinging myself through the air on the swing seems to help. I pump my legs so fiercely that when I jump off, I fall in a walloping heap on the ground. A laugh shakes out of me, and I roar and cackle until I nearly cry.

“Are you all right?”

“Huh?” I prop myself up on my elbows and find one of the new Red Guards leaning over me, rubbing at the back of his neck.

“May I help you up?”

He looks about as graceful as a stack of firewood, but I let him pull me up anyway.

“
Spasibo.
I don’t know what gets into me sometimes,” I say, brushing myself off. The two of us back away from each other without even thinking about it, like we have to get back to our own sides before anyone sees us being almost nice to each other. It makes me want to jump over the fence. Maybe next time I go swinging I’ll try just that.

While someone sits with Aleksei, the other two of us get stuck sewing jewelry into our clothes. We’ve run out of buttons and hats to disguise them in, so Tatiana figured a way to sandwich rows of stones between two chemises, sealing them up like little tubes. There are so many, even Aleksei has to wear a chemise under his khaki field shirt.

“Boys don’t wear corsets,” he fusses when I take his in to try on.

“It’s not a corset. It’s just a double undershirt. Pretend you’re a machine gunner at the front, and this is your ammunition belt. I bet it feels just like being wrapped up in bullets.”

“I bet ammunition belts don’t have lace all around the edges,” he grumps, but he puts it on.

“I’m sick and tired of ‘arranging medicines,’” I tell Tatiana when I tramp back into Mama’s drawing room. “I feel stiff as a drainpipe every time I put my underwear on. What’s eighteen pounds of stones divided by four people?”

“A sixteen-year-old should be able to figure that out all by herself,” Tatiana teases.

“Bah. You know I never paid any attention to fractions or division. As if I needed to gain any more weight. Our underthings are so worn out, I don’t know how they’ll hold together anyway. I’d rather play on the swing than mess with this.”

“Did you see what one of the new soldiers wrote on our swing?” Tatiana hisses. “No matter how bored I get, I will never sit on such filth.”

“Don’t be such a snob. A few scribbles aren’t going to crawl under your dress. I don’t care what they write on that swing. I think my eyeballs are going to turn square if I have to look at one more hand of
nain jaune
or game of dominoes.”

Tatiana shakes her head. Fine. For once I feel as hopeless as she thinks I am.

“Forgive me, Your Highnesses, but I have a bit of news, and Tatiana Nikolaevna is occupied with the heir,” Trupp says, interrupting our letter to Mama.

Olga perks right up. “A wire from Papa and Mama?”

“No.” He twists his knobby hands tighter than a taffy puller. “I’m afraid Commandant Rodionov has forbidden doors on this floor to be shut or locked at night.”

Olga goes perfectly green.

“Please don’t worry. The men of the suite have worked out a schedule to keep watch outside the bedrooms. We will see that you are not disturbed.”

Olga’s forehead droops into her hands. Her shoulders jerk when the latch catches behind Trupp. Part of me thinks if I touch her, she might break, but she might fizzle down into a pool of nerves if I don’t do something.

“What a stupid, swinish oaf!” I toss my pencil across my exercise book and sneak a glance at Olga. “Does Rodionov think we’ll climb out the windows in the dead of night?”

All she’ll say is, “Locks work two ways.”

I’d like to reach down her throat with a pair of silver salad tongs when she leaves me dangling this way. Trouncing out for Aleksei’s bedroom, I fling the words over my shoulder. “Do you always have to say half of what you mean?”

“Shvybs!” she calls behind me. “I just don’t want you to have to worry the way Tatiana and I do.”

I spin back, the heat under my collar almost choking me. “Well, it doesn’t work! How dumb do you think I am? You two are always whispering with Monsieur Gilliard or Colonel Kobylinsky. Every time you open your mouths you eye each other sideways, and I can almost hear what you’re
not
saying. You’re the one who told me you’d rather know nothing at all than too much. Let me tell you, not enough is just as bad.”

“I’m sorry, Shvybs. You’re right.” Just like that. “What do you want to know?”

I look her dead in the eye. “Are Maria and Papa and Mama all right?”

She gives me a queer stare. “
Konechno.
I promise you know as much as I do about what’s happening in Ekaterinburg. Is that what you’ve been thinking all this time?”

I don’t answer, but relief trickles all the way down to my boots. “So you’re worried about us?”

“Yes.” Olga speaks slowly, but I think it’s because this time she’s trying to decide
how
to tell me, instead of how much. “I don’t trust Rodionov or his men. It isn’t good for three young women to be left alone in times like this.”

“Even with Nagorny, and Monsieur Gilliard, and all the rest of them?”

“Yes. Even so. They’re good men, but they have no real power.” Her eyes drape over me from top to bottom like a measuring tape. I try my best to look strong and brave. “Do you remember after the abdication, how the soldiers at Tsarskoe Selo shot the tame deer in the park before Papa came back home?” I nod. I’d almost been sick when I saw them. “I’m afraid we’re not so different from those deer anymore.” She looks at me like it hurts her. “Do you feel better?”

“Not exactly.” But I don’t think I feel worse.

Olga may not treat me like a dunce so much, but as usual, Tatiana still doesn’t tell me anything about anything until she’s decided it’s more bother
not
to tell me. So when she says, “You should start packing your things, and Maria’s, too,” I end up being the one who sounds like an
idiotka
.

“For what?”

“For our transfer to Ekaterinburg. We leave in three days. What did you think the servants and I have been arranging all this time?”

Of course I knew, but the way she says it, why bother explaining the difference between arranging and
going
? Aleksei still can’t walk, but he can move around a little without oozing like an egg yolk. Apparently that’s good enough for Dr. Derevenko.

Our people haul more trunks up from the storage sheds, and for a while it’s just about possible to forget Maria’s missing cot with the luggage strewn all over the place. Usually packing is like digging a hole—there’s always more to go back in than what came out—but this time there’s space left in almost every bag and suitcase. There are no diaries or letters, and most of our notepaper and film’s been used up. Our dresses and underclothes have gotten thin and tired as the tissue paper we packed them in. When I take the shawls and pictures down from our side of the room, it looks like Mashka and I never lived here at all. I can’t decide if that’s better or worse.

“Do you think anything good can come out of all this?” I ask Tatiana.

“
Konechno.
We never know what the Lord has in store for us. Think of Auntie Ella. When that Red terrorist blew up Uncle Sergei, she founded her own convent. She and the sisters have done so much good for the sick and poor of Moscow. With God all things are possible.”

I’d like to know what Uncle Sergei would think about that, but I know better than to ask Tatiana.

She pulls her head out of a trunk and eyes me. “Are you packed?”

“No.”

“Then what are you doing in that windowsill? It is almost three o’clock.”

“Watching for Maria’s window-family.” I should have thought of it sooner. Mashka wouldn’t forget to tell them good-bye. “Look, it’s Gleb!”

Dr. Botkin’s son stands in the street waving up at me. I grin and salute like a Mishkoslavian bear-soldier. He takes off his cap and bows low. Like a whip crack, Rodionov is out in the street shouting, “Nobody is allowed to look in the windows of this house! Pass on, pass on!” He turns to the sentries. “Comrades, shoot everybody who so much as looks in this direction. Shoot to kill.”

Of course that’s just when the lady in the blue coat finally turns up with her boys. The look on their faces makes me wish I could sizzle that Rodionov with one glare. Hateful insect!

That night we have our last supper in Tobolsk. There are still two bottles of wine left, and we might as well drink them up. It’s almost like a party, with the four of us and our tutors and everyone else. Tatiana fusses so much about every last thing—it is bad luck to hold the bottle from the bottom, or fill a glass being held in the air—that I don’t know how we’ll have time to drink a drop, much less two whole bottles. I couldn’t care less, though. I don’t even need the wine to feel tipsy at the thought of seeing Mashka and Papa and Mama again.

“What’s that noise?” Olga asks.

“It sounds like a rat creeping down the hall.”

“Anastasia Nikolaevna! Do you always have to be so crude?” Tatiana, of course.

“Well it does.” I scritch my fingers over the tablecloth toward her. “Don’t you remember how those nasty rats on the
Standart
used to scrabble in the corridors until we threw our shoes at them?”

“We don’t have a shoe big enough for this rat,” Olga whispers. “I think it’s Rodionov.”