The Lost Crown (35 page)

“Where is everybody?” I ask Olga. “I haven’t even seen Joy since we left the train.”

“
Bozhe moi.
Tatiana sent me out first. I didn’t think of taking Joy’s leash. Didn’t anyone else bring him?”

“I had my hands full with Jemmy. Tatiana carried Ortipo.”

“And Nagorny carried Aleksei.”

Our shoulders slump like wilted cabbages. “Maybe one of our people has him. Nagorny, or Isa or someone.”

“I hope so, Shvybs. But who knows where they are?”

Even with so many people missing, it’s like a parade with everyone trooping through our bedroom with compresses, thermometers, and trays of food and tea. I’d like to charge them a toll. In the afternoon Dr. Derevenko appears out of nowhere with Commandant Avdeev trailing behind. My sisters and I cluster around him, eager for news of our people, but the doctor doesn’t even look at us. A gnat would get more notice than we do.

Every time the crowd in the doorway thins, I can see our brother sitting there in Maria’s cot like it’s a striped throne and he’s Tsar Aleksei II. “I bet he hurt his knee on purpose,” I whisper to my sisters.

“If that’s true, I’d like to take him across my own knee,” Olga says.

“Olga!” Tatiana scolds. “How could you?”

“After what we went through for all those weeks because he was too sick to move? It isn’t fair to play with his illness like that.”

“The first time was not on purpose, Olga.”

“I know it. But think of how Mama suffers. It’s selfish of him.”

“Mama doesn’t seem to mind,” I say. “She looks pretty pleased to have someone to fuss over.” Tatiana’s jaw falls open so far her teeth ought to drop out. “And the only good part so far is that Mama’s hovered so much, Aleksei hasn’t had a chance to notice his own dog is missing.”

“Don’t, Nastya,” Maria begs. “Not on our first day all together again.”

I shut my mouth, but what’s the use of being all together again if everybody’s going to set up camp around Aleksei’s cot and never mind the rest of us?

Just then Mama bursts into tears and pushes past us into the dining room. My heart booms and we all four pop up and crane into the corner bedroom, but Aleksei’s just as bewildered as anybody. Papa, the two doctors, and Avdeev shrug at one another.

Tatiana starts after Mama, then marches into Papa and Mama’s room. “What happened?” she asks Dr. Botkin.

“A misunderstanding,” Dr. Botkin says, leading Tatiana back out again. “Dr. Derevenko has been forbidden by the commandant to discuss anything but Aleksei Nikolaevich’s health. When the empress asked about the rest of the people who accompanied you from Tobolsk, Dr. Derevenko drew his finger across his throat to show that he couldn’t speak of them. Her Majesty took it as a signal that they had all been killed.”

“The poor darling,” Tatiana cries. “Please, Evgeni Sergeevich, you stay with Aleksei. I will see to Mama.”

And I’ll sit here, just like always.

“We’re not really supposed to talk with the guards, but nobody cares,” Maria tells me on my first walk in the garden, “especially out here. Well, nobody except for Mama minds. Watch.” Mashka links her elbow through mine and promenades me straight under two sentries’ noses. “Have you met my sister? This is Anastasia Nikolaevna.”

“Chieftain of All Firemen,” I add.

One guard’s Adam’s apple bobs as if he’s swallowed his tongue. “You don’t fool me with your fine words,” the other says with a wink and a voice that sounds like Mr. Gibbes acting in a play. “Move along!”

Mashka tugs me away, giggling like a fiend, until we flop into a hammock. Behind us, the men chuckle together. “What’s so funny?”

“There’s a guard named Sadchikov who really talks like that, but he’s no older than Tatiana, and not even a Bolshevik. Some of the others make fun of him behind his back if none of the Party men are on duty.”

“What’s he doing here if he isn’t a Bolshie?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think even half the guards are Party members.”

I twist onto my belly and let my fingers drag back and forth through the scruffy grass. “What do you
do
all day?” I ask Maria. “I’m bored stiff already.”

“Not much. It was worse before all of you got here. At least I’ve got someone to really talk to now. And don’t tell anyone, but I’m glad Tatiana’s here to take care of Mama again. It was like … like looking after a baby who wouldn’t cry.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Tatiana always makes everything right, even before I know anything’s wrong. I knew Mama was miserable, but she wouldn’t admit it. How do you comfort someone like that? And all the time I knew if Tatiana were here, she’d be bustling and doting like a proper nanny.”

“Sometimes I think the way Tatiana acts only reminds Mama and Aleksei that they’re sick or unhappy. I hate it when she buzzes over me that way. It’s so …
nosy
. I’d much rather have you or Olga when I’m mopey or ill.”

“Truly?” She blushes like a rose. I missed her so much. The pair of us are like salt and sugar: such different flavors, but so close in every other way you could never sort us apart once we’re together.

“I don’t know how you stood it in this place without us. It’s so dreary with that murky-looking paint smeared across the windows. It’s as much fun as living in a jar with the lid screwed on. I’d have gone crazy all by myself.”

“It was hard after Deputy Ukraintsev left. He was such a nice man. Mama even invited him in for tea and bezique. I don’t understand why they won’t let us have friends anymore.”

“Probably afraid we’d escape. Kobylinsky and the Fourth Regiment would have let us, I’ll bet.”

“What difference would it make if we did? Papa hasn’t been tsar in over a year. Why can’t we just be left alone to live as we please?”

I’m too chicken to admit it even to Mashka, but the minute I saw those blotted-out, nailed-down windows and the padlock on the dining room shutters, I caught myself wondering why they don’t just put us in jail.

That evening there’s some kind of ruckus in the commandant’s office. Maria and I take turns pretending to need the lavatory so we can ring the bell and put our ear to Avdeev’s door on the way past. “I thought I heard Nagorny’s voice, and someone else, too,” Maria says.

“I only heard barking,” I report when I come back.

“Probably that vulgar Moshkin,” Tatiana says.

“No, silly, real barking. I think it was Joy.”

“Joy!”

“Enough guessing,” Tatiana decides, throwing down her mending. “I will find out for myself.”

“Well, tra-la-la. And good luck to her too,” I tell Mashka.

“Avdeev is questioning Nagorny and Trupp,” Tatiana announces when she gets back. “They have been in there for over an hour.”

I stand there like Peter Pan with my hands on my hips. “How do
you
know?”

“I spoke to the sentry in the vestibule,” she says, brushing by me.

“You?”

“You make it sound as if we exchanged vows. I asked a question and he answered. Much more quickly than all your sneaking, too.”

“Did you smile?” I tease, but Tatiana won’t look at me.

“I was no more pleasant than I needed to be.”

Ha! Maybe Mashka’s got competition!

Sure enough, after another hour, Avdeev turns our men loose and Joy comes tearing through the house, straight to Aleksei’s cot. He feeds that dog so many scraps from his supper tray, Joy gets indigestion and stinks up half the house. Avdeev’s face bends at the smell, but he still won’t let us open one of our windows. He just shuts himself into his office to hog his own two whole windows’ worth of fresh air.

Every morning we have prayers and a Bible reading, then Avdeev comes in for inspection. Sometimes other people come with him, and Papa mentions the “inadequate ventilation” to anyone who’ll listen. It’s so close in here, I swear I can smell Papa sweating by his second chin-up of the day.

The most excitement we get those first few days is when Avdeev and his men inspect the rest of our things from Tobolsk. They’re nosy as old ladies, shaking our books by the bindings and fanning through our photograph albums. The way they raise their eyebrows and point at some of the pictures, it makes me glad I burned up my letters and diaries. After all their poking around, only the “necessary trunks” are brought into our quarters. Everything else stays in the storage shed outside. “If there is something you require from your trunks, you may submit a request for a guard to accompany you to the shed,” Avdeev says.

“What makes them think they know what is necessary?” Tatiana wants to know. “
Konechno
, we can do without tablecloths, but there is not enough of the Ipatievs’ silverware to go round.”

The servants volunteered to eat separately, but Papa won’t have it. Everyone who’s come this far will dine as family, he says.

“I’d like to know which photos made them all whispery,” Maria says, turning the pages of her album.

“Easy,” I tell her. “For starters, how about the ones of Papa’s naked backside, from when he’d go skinny-dipping at Livadia?”

“Or the ones of us with Mama and
Otets
Grigori,” Olga says. And that’s the end of
that
conversation.

“Who was that man with Dr. Derevenko?” I ask Tatiana when she comes out of Aleksei’s room.

“The dark one?”

“Who else?” It’s not as if we’ve had visitors breezing through all day.

“His name is Yurovsky. He must have been a doctor.”

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen a doctor in a black leather coat,” I press, keeping my eye on Olga. She’s my best thermometer for trouble. “Black coat, black hair, black beard. But no black
bag
.” That makes Olga’s high forehead crinkle. Tatiana doesn’t even blink. Or answer. “Last time a dark gentleman like that arrived, we got split up like a loaf of black bread,” I insist.

“He examined Aleksei’s leg very carefully.” Tatiana says the last two words like they’re sentences all by themselves. “Why do you ask if my answers never suit you?”

I stretch out my neck and make my voice as haughty as hers. “If anyone would let me into the room, I would not. Have. To. Ask.”

“What use would you have been? You are not a nurse, and there is no need for a crowd round Aleksei’s cot.”

I flop onto Mama’s wicker wheelchair and spin myself in circles until Tatiana leaves. I can just about hear her throwing her hands in the air.

How should I know what use I’d be? I never have a chance to do anything except play up. Court jester, that’s me. Too bad nothing feels funny anymore. This place already makes me edgy, like all my bounce and spring’s been scraped away. I know perfectly well I’m an obnoxious little pig when I act like this, but I can’t help it. Every time Tatiana tries to pull me her way, I wrench everything up like a bockety wheel.

“No one could mistake our Tatiana for anything but the daughter of a tsar,” Olga says. A smirk leaks through my pout. Olga’s knack for saying more than the words mean isn’t always so irritating—as long as she’s aiming at someone else.

“She’s about as much fun as a nun,” I grouse, kicking at the footrests.

“You shouldn’t say that, Shvybs. Auntie Ella is a nun. Think of all the eggs and milk the nuns in Tobolsk brought us. The sisters everywhere have been nothing but a comfort to us.”

Olga hardly ever sounds like a rule book, so her voice doesn’t jab at me the way Tatiana’s does, even when she’s giving me a talking-to. I know Olga’s right, but that doesn’t stop me from thinking it’d be nice if
my
sisters were always such a comfort.

“Eighty-seven rubles,” a man called Beloborodov announces at morning inspection. The number doesn’t mean a thing to me, but he holds the receipt as if it’s jumping with fleas. “The charges have been high before, but with six extra people, the Ural Regional Soviet has declared this week’s laundry bill astronomical.” He turns to my sisters and me. “If you insist on changing your sheets each and every morning, I suggest you busy yourselves with helping the maid wash your linens. Only clothing may be sent out from now on. After all, a little work never hurt anybody.”

He should talk! Doesn’t this Beloborodov know Avdeev’s the one who won’t let us saw wood in the yard like we did in Tobolsk, or allow our tutors in for lessons, or even use our cameras? The lunk took our gramophone, too, and looked the other way after Moshkin pushed the piano into the duty office. What does Belo-whoever think we should be doing all day long, turning Aleksei’s toy soldiers into shells for the Red Army? The oily way he remarks about working, like we four still sleep in cradles lined with satin, I bet he’d love to think he’s forcing us to sleep on bug-bitten sheets rather than do a bit of common labor.

“We can do our linens as well as anybody,” I announce. He may be the chairman of the Ural Regional Soviet, but he’s hardly much older than Olga. I’d like to tell him maybe Papa’s monogrammed underwear will stop disappearing if we do our own wash, but Tatiana’s hand around my wrist stops me.

“We will need instructions, please,” she informs the chairman. “Our Nyuta is a lady’s maid, not a laundress.”

Ha! That stumps Avdeev for days. He goes to the public library, the bookshops, and even the local labor union looking for instructions and can’t find a thing. And what does he end up bringing us instead of books? A man! “This is Andreev, Comrade Laundry Teacher to the House of Special Purpose.” And they turn up their nose at our titles? Honestly!

“We should have told Commandant Avdeev that Monsieur Gilliard knows how to wash clothes,” Maria says. “Maybe they would have let him in.”

“But they wouldn’t have let him talk about anything but soap and towels,” I retort.

Laundry is damp, steamy work, but I don’t mind it. Maria’s hopeless with the washing—she can’t carry a load of sheets to the kitchen without tripping over them. But she keeps at it. At least she’s strong enough to help lug the big pots and masses of dripping linens around. “When I have a family of my own, I’ll have to know how to wash clothes,” she says.

At least with the laundry, I know there’ll be something for me to do every day. Maybe I
will
be able to stand it here. Just barely.