The Lost Crown (11 page)

“‘I’ve sold the horse to pay for our winter fuel. Please don’t be angry, Petya dear,’” I read to a soldier from the countryside. In neighboring beds, two men gesture at each other and snigger behind their blankets as Mama passes. I raise my voice over their hissing. “‘I’m not sure we could afford his feed much longer. If this war doesn’t end and bring you home by spring, the children and I will drag the plow ourselves.’” Almost all the men’s letters are choked with dismaying news. Even in the city, bread, flour, and fuel are running short, and the people’s tempers aren’t far behind.

When I collect the empty water glasses and day-old papers from the men’s bedsides, I always skim the headlines for a peek at the outside world before tossing them into the dustbin. That night a newspaper covered in childish doodles catches my eye. Funny little people pepper the margins, making faces and sly comments about the stories.
Clever fellow
, I think, and then my smile crumples. Beside a photo of Mama, one of the figures stands pointing with a word far worse than
Nemka
scrawled in the bubble over his head. My hands shake as I stuff the entire stack of papers into the bin. Just the scent of newsprint makes the memory sting.

Mama and Tatiana, busy in the operating rooms with their ether cones and amputees, seem mercifully oblivious— or else they’re keeping secrets too. They speak of nothing but operations and petty annoyances.

“We removed Konstantin Semyonovich’s stitches today,” Tatiana says as we tidy up the common room the next evening. “His incision is healing beautifully,
slava Bogu
. Oh, for pity’s sake.” She stands over the chessboard, her hands on her hips. “The white queen’s bishop has gone missing again. Keep an eye out, will you,
dushka
? This is at least the third time since December. Why is it always that same piece?”

I don’t tell my sister the bishop isn’t missing at all. I found it myself this morning and flushed it straight down the lavatory. Someone had scribbled a shaggy beard on to the white paint, and underneath that the initials “G.R.” for Grigori Rasputin—our
Otets
Grigori—and planted it on the king’s square of the chessboard with a tiny paper crown on top.

The next morning a crisp new bishop stands in its correct place. One of the nurses must be secretly buying new chess pieces to replace the defaced ones and shield us from this small insult, I realize. My gratitude for such a discreet kindness weakens my knees, yet how can we fix a problem we aren’t allowed to see?

Soon enough, my silence doesn’t matter. The capital itself rumbles with unrest. The papers show pictures of students marching in the street, waving red banners. Mama is indignant. “Hooligans!” she calls them. “Boys and girls rushing through the streets shouting about no bread.”

“Some of the nurses have heard talk that the workers are plotting to strike. There are stories of mobs threatening and jeering at police officers and reserve regiments.”

“Malicious gossip,” Mama insists. “The people adore us, darling,” she soothes, patting my cheek. “The real people, that is. Minister Protopopov has ordered fresh supplies. It will all pass soon enough, like the other strikes.”

“But, Mama, how can there be so many stories and none of it true?”

Mama frowns and shakes her head at me, as if to warn,
Now, now, Olga
. “The press can’t fool the true Russians— they can’t even read, most of them.” There is no tender pat this time. She laces her fingers and sets them deliberately in her lap. I run my tongue over my teeth, considering how far to push. When I open my mouth, Mama fixes me with one of her looks. I give up—but she can’t stop my thoughts from swirling.

Even if the peasants can’t read, talk spreads more quickly than headlines. What will the people believe? The only peasant I’ve ever known for more than a few minutes was
Otets
Grigori, and he’s dead. My head aches to think about it. At night, my eyes and ears throb, as if they’re sick of seeing and hearing nothing but bad news.

When Aleksei and I break out in red spots, I have to laugh at the irony of it—“red” is suddenly everywhere, from the streets of Petrograd to the tsar’s own children.

At first Mama sits right alongside us, copying our temperatures into her diary every three hours and reading to us from
Aunt Helen’s Children
. She’s such an angel when we’re ill. All three of our sisters are allowed into our rooms, to read to us and fetch cool cloths when our temperatures begin to climb. Papa wrote that it would be much easier if all of us had measles at the same time so we can be done with it once and for all.

In half darkness, I sweat in my camp bed while Mama runs between my room and Aleksei’s on the other side of the playroom. His mouth and throat are coated in spots, and his eyes ache terribly. In no time at all, Anya Vyrubova is sick too, moaning and flapping about in a bed on the other side of the palace. Mama drifts in and out, like my thoughts, as my temperature rises. Any little shard of light bites at my eyes, and every sound clumps in my head, as if everything I hear is coated in sour cream. Now and then I taste the cool thermometer in my mouth and know Mama is beside me again. Her voice grows distorted—first sounding too fat, and then too narrow, though I know such thoughts make no sense.

Sounds buzz around me, and I’m sure the painted dragon flies have come loose from the frieze on our walls to flap their wings in my ears, making my skin prickle and crawl as tides of sickness wash me away.

When the first wave of fever breaks, I wake on linens creased with sweat. Beneath my head, the pillow feels as though I’ve melted a hollow in it. Anastasia sits beside me, leafing violently through one of my books.

“It’s about time,” she says, dumping the book onto my nightstand. The glasses and medicine bottles squeezed onto it all rattle together. I wince, but my head no longer echoes and throbs with the sound. “All four of you have been roasting like potatoes in a campfire.”

My voice only cracks when I try to speak. Anastasia hands me a glass of water. “All four of us?”

Anastasia nods across the room. “Don’t you remember? Aleksei was first, and Tatiana’s got it too. Her ears have such bad abcesses she can’t hear properly. But her fever was so high, even I couldn’t tease her about it. Aleksei’s was the highest so far, though. Forty point six,” she says, as if it’s something to be proud of. “And Anya’s here. She got sick right after you.”

“How long has it been?”

“Five days. And Papa still isn’t home.”

I struggle to sit up, but I’m weak as a leaf. Anastasia stuffs another pillow behind me and helps haul me up by the elbow. “Why should Papa be coming home?”

Her gaze drops to the floor. For the first time I notice how weary her eyes have become—just like Papa’s. Everyone remarks on the size of Mashka’s saucers, but Papa and our little imp of a sister both have eyes sweet as cornflowers. “Shvybzik, look at me. What’s wrong?”

“Petrograd’s a mess,” she mumbles. “The people are going mad in the streets. And to top it all off, the water and electricity’s been cut. The servants have to break through the ice on the ponds to get water, the lift won’t run, and Mama’s been climbing up and down the stairs all day long.”

A wave of unease sloshes over me like sickness all over again. “Is she all right?”

“She’s tired,” Anastasia admits. “I think her heart bothers her, but she won’t say so. I’ve been running all over the place for her. Mashka, too. Lili Dehn is coming to help, but Mama’s worried about
her
now. She’s probably had to leave baby Titi in the city with his nanny.”

My heart flops. “Is it that bad in Petrograd, Shvybs?”

“Papa will fix everything,” she says, but her face wavers. “The telephone keeps ringing, and the ministers look so grave when they come to report. And Papa’s train is late. It’s never been so late before. We haven’t even had a telegram since last night.”

Mama’s voice calls out, “Anastasia!” and my little sister jumps from her chair.

“Mashka’s stuck with Anya in the sickroom all the way over in the other wing. We can’t hardly leave her alone, the great big baby. Mama’s with Aleksei.”

“How is he?”

She smirks a little. “His legs are so speckled, he looks like he’s got a leopard under his sheets. But Mama won’t let him scratch. They’ll bleed, you know, if you scratch too much. And he sounds like a bear when he coughs.” She leans over to kiss my forehead.

“You shouldn’t.”

She rolls her pink-rimmed eyes at me. “You’ve all four been coughing and sweating all over the place for days. I’m not sick yet, and I won’t be,” she insists, and runs out of the room toward Mama’s voice.

I fall back on the pillows and try to make my thoughts congeal. What sort of world have I woken to? A city I hardly recognize, and my little Shvybzik acting all grown up.

15.

ANASTASIA NIKOLAEVNA

27–28 February 1917
Tsarskoe Selo

“F
or once Olga doesn’t know the worst of it,” I grumble to myself as the train pulls into the station. The whole world feels like it’s tilting and trembling under my feet, and it doesn’t stop with the locomotive. I thrust my hand into Maria’s coat pocket, pretending to hunt for a candy, and stick close beside her as we search the passengers for Lili. She’ll be expecting Mama to meet her, not the two of us all by ourselves.

Lili takes one look at us standing there and for a second her face ripples up as if she might cry. Mashka and I eye each other. We don’t look sick, but there’s no missing that “poor darlings” expression on Lili’s face. Something’s up.

“What are you going to do, Lili?” Mama says when we bring Lili into the lilac boudoir. “Titi is in Petrograd. Hadn’t you better return to him this evening?”

Mashka and I stand there gaping like two idiots. If the capital’s so dangerous, why didn’t Lili bring the baby with her? Our guard is the most loyal in all Russia. We know every man by name. Maria probably knows their wives’ and mamas’ and sisters’ and dogs’ and cats’ names too. I watch Lili look at Mama for a long time. Surely Lili will go back to Titi in Petrograd. But that strange, sad look comes into her face again. “Permit me to remain with you, Madame,” she says. Mama only stares at her.

They’re so quiet for so long, I want to stamp my foot and shout at them. I know they aren’t just not talking. Both of them are working hard not to say something in front of Mashka and me. Mama reaches for Lili and catches her up in a hug. “I cannot ask you to do this,” she says, kissing Lili’s cheeks as if she’s one of my sisters.

“But I must, Madame. Please, please let me stay.”

All of a sudden, Mama’s expression changes to her Empress Face. “I’ve tried to phone the emperor,” she says, “and I cannot get through. But I have wired him, asking him to return immediately. He’ll be here on Wednesday morning.” She nods a smart little
that’s that
nod, even though we haven’t heard a peep out of Papa yet. “Come, let’s go see the girls upstairs.”

While they go in to see the Big Pair, Mashka and I scuttle around our own room, gathering things to make Lili comfortable for the night. In the Crimson Drawing Room, Mashka and I wrestle with sheets and cushions to make Lili a bed on one of the couches. I lay one of our nightdresses over the coverlet while Mashka finds a lamp and an icon. Together, we dig through our photo albums until we find a picture we took at Anya’s house of Mama holding Lili’s little Titi. Even though we pry it from the page speck by speck, we manage to rip one whole corner. I sneak into the Big Pair’s bedroom and pinch one of Tatiana’s enameled frames from her desk. When we slide Titi’s picture into it, the torn part hardly shows at all.

Lili’s so pleased when she sees the room that for another awful moment I think she wants to cry. Then Mama bustles Maria off to the sickrooms and leaves Lili with me while she goes to see Count So-and-So about whatever it is they won’t talk about in front of us children. With nothing to say, Lili and I sit down on the red carpet and work over a jigsaw puzzle.

Mama comes back looking awful, all pale and pasty. I knot up like day-old hair ribbons, thinking about her heart with all this running around, receiving people downstairs and seeing to Anya and Aleksei and the Big Pair upstairs. But when I try to ask Mama how she is, she gives me a thin smile and a kiss and sends me off to bed.

My room feels like a cave. I hate sleeping alone. I’m sure I can hear the Big Pair and Aleksei coughing in their cots, and Lili tossing on the couch. The thought of Mashka, cozied up in Papa’s brass bed downstairs with icons all around and Mama beside her, makes me almost jealous enough to forget how worried I am.
Almost,
I think as I scrunch down close to Jemmy and screw my eyes shut.

Mama and Mashka and Lili are in my room by eight thirty the next morning, and we have café au lait together. “I’ve wired the emperor repeatedly,” Mama says, “but there’s been no reply.” My stomach somersaults. Papa always answers our telegrams within a few hours. “Count Benckendorff suggested the Garde Equipage should stay in the palace, and I’ve agreed.”

Mashka’s face lights up like a flashbulb. “It’ll be just like being on the
Standart
again,” she squeals. Even I feel a little twinge of excitement. It will be almost like our yachting trips, having all the officers’ familiar faces around us … except no
Standart
, no Papa, and no sea.