The Lost Crown (42 page)

“At this hour?” Tatiana answers, appearing just as suddenly from the dining room. “Preparing for bed.”

I check my watch. Only nine thirty. Plenty of times we don’t go to bed until after eleven, but Tatiana never misses a chance to rub a Bolshie’s nose in his own rudeness.

“I must see everyone at once.”

It takes Mama a good fifteen minutes to show her face, while my stomach hops up and down, eager for whatever news Beloborodov has that’s important enough for everybody from Papa to Leonka to hear. But the military commissar only looks over the lot of us like we’re an imperial tea service for twelve, and he expected to find the lid to the sugar bowl missing. Next to me, Mashka shrivels like a burnt sausage when he turns her way.

“Thank you very much. From now on, Comrade Avdeev will conduct such an inspection morning and evening.”

“Why?” Mama wants to know. She frowns like she’ll take this Bolshie whippersnapper over her knee if he doesn’t behave.

His excuse? To make sure we’re all here.

“As if one of us might have hopped the fences or strolled out the front door without them noticing!” I gripe at Maria. “Don’t they know they’ve missed their chance?”

21 June 1918

“This is Comrade Yurovsky,” Commissar Goloshchekin announces, barging in on our lunch. We all put down our forks and look over the new Bolshie. “He will replace Avdeev as commandant. Comrade Nikulin takes the place of Moshkin.” Nobody says why.

As soon as I see his black leather jacket I recognize Yurovsky. He’s the very same man who came weeks ago to examine Aleksei. “I
told
Tatiana he wasn’t a doctor,” I whisper to Mashka.

An hour later Yurovsky is back with an empty box tucked under his elbow. Nikulin follows with a ledger. “I understand there was an unpleasant incident in the house, and that the previous guard stole some of your belongings,” the new commandant says. “I must ask you to remove all your jewelry to avoid unnecessary temptation.” I look at my sisters. Jewels line our underthings like the stripes on a chipmunk’s back. It’s a good thing Mashka’s not wearing any—she’d melt of guilt right on the spot. Only Tatiana looks like the thought hasn’t even crossed her mind.

Nobody says a thing, then Papa takes a gold cigarette case from his pocket, empties out the last of his smokes, and hands it over.

We strip off earrings, necklaces, and brooches. Nikulin writes every piece down in his ledger. Papa’s wedding ring won’t budge from his finger. Mama takes off all but a few gold bangles. Yurovsky points at them with a pen. “Everything, please.”

“I have had these bracelets since I was eleven years old.” She doesn’t even look at him. “They were a gift from my uncle Leopold, the Duke of Albany. Anyway, they’re too tight.”

“I must have everything, Alexandra Feodorovna. Please give me your arm.”

Mama snaps her head around at him like he’s said something dirty.

“Allow me,” Papa says, and starts to waggle the bracelets down Mama’s wrist. Even when she folds her thumb under her fingers, her skin bunches up like an elephant’s ankle as Papa tries to coax the bands over her hand. Mama splutters the whole time.

“Ridiculous. No one is going to steal them if they won’t come off. Ouch!”

Nikulin taps his pen on the ledger, like Monsieur Gilliard used to while I worked a foul math problem.

“All right,” Yurovsky says. “Enough.”

“I would request that my son be allowed to keep his watch,” Papa says. “Otherwise he is bored.”

“Very well.” Yurovsky glances at my sisters and me. We each have a gold bangle bracelet left. Papa and Mama gave them to us when we were little girls. “Too tight?” We all nod. He looks at Tatiana, the thinnest one of us. “Even yours?” She slides the bracelet down her arm, but her thumb juts out into its way. “Never mind. You may keep them.”

“Ox Commandant,” Papa mutters as the duty office door closes.

Later, when we walk outside, Yurovsky’s standing along the fence. If any of the guards speak to us, he shouts at them,
“Nelzya!”
Even when things are different around here, they’re the same.

Aleksei sits up in his cot, directing Leonka to set up their next miniature battle formation while I brush my hair at the windowsill.

“Watch every movement from this window,” someone orders the night sentry at the corner of the house.

“Is that the new commandant?” Aleksei asks.

I put down my hairbrush and lean out a little ways to see.

“You there!” The sentry points up at me with his rifle. “Get out of that window.
Nelzya!
”

I don’t even blink, just slink off the sill into a scowly pile on the floor. Being forbidden isn’t even interesting anymore.

“Nastya?” Aleksei asks. “What’s the matter with you?”

I could kick myself square in the teeth for acting like such a milksop. “That’s what I was thinking. Somebody waves a gun at my face and all I do is pout?”

He holds up one of the foil-wrapped party crackers his lead army uses for artillery. “I dare you to pop this over his head. It’s my last one.”

“I may be bored, but I’m not crazy. You want me to get my nose shot off? He hears that and the dummy’ll think we’re firing at him.”

“It’s just a noisemaker. Mama wouldn’t let me pop them indoors if they were real firecrackers.”

“Nyet.”

“Then I dare you to make a face at him.” I pick at my nightdress. “Or aren’t you the Chieftain of All Firemen anymore?” he wheedles.

That
does it.

I brush all my hair forward so it covers my face like a bandit’s mask, then creep to the window on my hands and knees.

Just as my nose clears the sill,
bang!

Gunpowder singes my nostrils. I somersault backward, right into Leonka. And then? Nothing. Leonka only stares sheepishly down at me, a shredded bit of green foil in each hand. A gold paper crown dangles from one end of the spent cracker he popped over
my
head instead of the guard’s. “Alyosha made me.” He presses his wide, skinny lips together so tight, they disappear.

From his cot, Aleksei snorts and squeals with laughter.

I snatch the paper crown and use it to bat every last soldier off his bed tray. “You little swine! If you weren’t sick I’d tip your whole cot over!”

“Nastya, don’t be mad,” he begs as I go blazing out of the room. “It’s just a joke—you’re not bored anymore, are you?”

“Idiot!” Let him think I’m angry. I’m trembling right down to my toenails, but I’d sooner swallow a mouthful of bullets than admit the truth: I’m scared.

For a second, I’d
believed
that sentry took a shot at me.

45.

MARIA NIKOLAEVNA

25 June 1918
Ekaterinburg

I
ring the bell for the lavatory and wait. When the door opens, a guard I’ve never seen before lets me through the vestibule and into the hall. A second unfamiliar face is stationed there. I know Mama’s waiting for me to read to her, but the sight stops me in the doorway. One of them
ahems
.

Finally I remember my manners and say hello.
“Zdorovo, okhrannik.”

No answer.

When I come back out to wash my hands and return to our quarters I want to say
spasibo
like I always do, but a funny flat feeling in my middle tells me I’ve already said more than I’m supposed to.

“They behave like real guards,” I tell Anastasia as soon as she comes in from the morning walk, “like the jailers in
The Count of Monte Cristo
. They look at you like you’re not even there.”

“The ones in the garden, too. I’d almost rather be ogled than that.”

Letts
, Papa calls them. “Mostly Latvians, though Olga recognized one of them outside this morning,” he tells Mama at lunch. “He’d been one of our grenadiers, a man by the name of Kabanov I met once during a review. The Ox Commandant spoke German to order the fellow not to speak to us.”

It sounds almost like the first time I saw Ukraintsev. I look across the table at my sister. Olga only stirs sour cream into her borscht and rubs her thumb along the edge of the table. Why didn’t she tell me anything about Kabanov?

28 June 1918

All kinds of banging and clanking from Papa and Mama’s bedroom brings me running to check on Aleksei. The bars of shadow stretched across his cot stop me before I see the iron ones over the open window. Outside, one workman braces a grate against the plaster while another hammers it into place. Because of me? The way Mama and Olga look at me, I can’t help wondering.

I watch from the doorway without saying a word. When Mama asks me to sit with Aleksei so they can “arrange medicines,” I only nod and take Olga’s chair.

“Papa said the Ox Commandant’s forbidden any more cream deliveries, and there’s only going to be enough meat for soup this week,” Aleksei tells me.

My eyes follow the ladder of stripes across his nightshirt, too ashamed to look at my brother or the window.

He tries again. “I’m going to have a real bath today, my first since Tobolsk. And I can stand up again, except only on one foot.”

That must be why Mama looked so happy before. Before the grate. My heart wants me to smile, but my face hardly follows. “I’m glad, Alyosha. You’re getting heavier to carry now too.” My voice doesn’t sound glad at all. No matter what I try to say these last few days, it comes out sounding like
I’m sorry
.

“It isn’t just you,” Aleksei says after another minute or two. “Everybody’s glum. Papa’s quit writing in his diary every night, and Mama doesn’t even bother to tear the days off the calendar anymore.”

News like this should make me feel something. Scared or unsettled, maybe. Even when he’s sick, Papa asks Mama to fill in his diary for him.

Outside, the sounds of marching men drift over the fence. There’s no way to tell the difference by listening, but I suppose since they’re not storming our gates they must be Reds.

Suddenly Aleksei reaches into his pillowcase and brings out something smaller than one of Mama’s pearl earrings, wrapped in a twist of limp pink paper. “Here.”

The tender smell of it caresses my memory before I realize what I’m looking at. “Oh,” I exhale. “Isn’t this one of the pastilles from Anya’s Christmas parcel?”

He nods. “Papa gave it to me, after Anastasia gave it to him.”

And before all that, it must have been mine. I’m the only one who didn’t eat my share that first day, because I wanted to save them for Anastasia’s Christmas present. “But it’s yours now, Sunbeam. You haven’t had candy in ages.”

He shakes his head. “Take it. If I eat it, it’ll be gone, and no fun to think about anymore. I know it’s the last one, so I can’t. Getting it was more fun than having it.”

Breathing the dusty strawberry sugar, I know just what he means. Maybe there wouldn’t be new guards and bars on the windows if Ivan and I hadn’t gotten caught laughing together over a bite of cake, but I wouldn’t trade that moment for anything. It was so wonderful, talking to someone new, someone who seemed interested, instead of just gawking. Olga’s the thinker, Tatiana’s the beauty, and Anastasia’s the clown, but Ivan picked me instead of any of them.

I turn the pastille over in my hand, smiling to think how one tiny morsel has traveled from pocket to pocket, brightening so many moments. And I started it all.

If such a little button of candy can survive all the way from Petrograd to Siberia and back, why shouldn’t I? Maybe it isn’t too much to want a life with sweetness and even a little spice.

Before the revolution, I was just a little girl dreaming. I wonder, if a Red Guard is willing to bring me a birthday cake, maybe I really can marry an ordinary young man and have masses of children like anyone else. Imagine, one of the men hired to hold us prisoner looked at me and saw a girl he wanted to take home to his mama. Me! Citizen Romanova, with my very own house and family. The thought makes my skin shiver like I’ve been kissed. Auntie Olga divorced a duke, married an everyday captain, and ended up having her little Tikhon right in the middle of all this mess, and she’s as much a grand duchess as I am. Imagine having your very first baby during a revolution! Oh, I wish I could see them.

“It helped, didn’t it?” Aleksei asks, proud of himself in a soft way I’ve never seen before. My heart bulges with so many things, I can’t squeeze a breath past it to answer him. “I knew it would, Mashka.”

I pull him close to me, so glad he’s ours, and hope maybe one day I’ll be lucky enough to have a house full of such gentle boys as my golden-hearted brother.

My sisters think I don’t know about the risks. How could I not? All my life I’ve watched the way Mama suffers over her darling Sunbeam. But to have a family of my own, a family like ours? I don’t even have to think about that.

I know that is worth the risk.

46.

ANASTASIA NIKOLAEVNA