The Lost Crown (15 page)

One day Olga comes rushing back with Tatiana and Anastasia trotting behind. Her face looks like it could melt the snow, she’s so angry. I run to meet them. “Those swine!” Olga points past our sisters to the fence. “I’ve never heard such rude things. I don’t care if he abdicated, he was still their tsar! Even the women shouted at Papa from behind the gates.” Next thing I know she’s crying in my arms. “I don’t understand,” she wails. “What could have made the people turn against him? Children threw sticks at Papa like some beast in a cage.”

I’m overwhelmed as if someone dropped a set of squalling triplets in my lap. All I can do is kiss Olga’s tearstained face and wonder to myself whether these things would sting so badly if all of us didn’t love one another so, so much.

“Maria, you come with us tomorrow,” Tatiana says. “Olga will sit with Mama.” My belly crinkles at the thought, but one look at Olga and I know I have to. Anastasia snugs in close and squeezes my arm. “It doesn’t always happen,” she whispers.

Some do sneer and say rude things, or make gestures I don’t dare ask Tatiana about. Papa never flinches, but the people’s voices feel like shovels digging at my insides, until I see one quiet little girl who looks at Papa with eyes round as Aleksei’s teddy bear’s. Her mouth falls open as she tugs at her sister’s sleeve. “That isn’t a soldier, that’s the tsar himself! What’s he doing with that shovel?”

“You’ve got eyes, haven’t you, Mila?” her sister answers. “He’s clearing the snow from the footpaths.”

“But he’s
working
, and his trousers are all dirty. He can’t be the tsar.”

I listen as her sister tries to explain words like “abdication,” “revolution,” and “house arrest,” but I can tell Mila’s head is swimming just the way mine does when Monsieur Gilliard tries to explain long division. Watching her try to understand gives me the queerest feeling, like I want to hug her and tell her everything will be all right.

After that, I don’t mind the people at the fence so much. But we’re all glad once the snow seeps into the ground and Papa gets permission to ride his bicycle instead of shoveling.

“
Otlichno
, Papa!” Olga calls. I snap a picture of him posing along the muddy gravel path as if he’s astride a thoroughbred instead of an ordinary black bicycle.

As Papa pedals along the path waving to Olga and me, one of the soldiers slings the point of his bayonet into the spokes. Papa flips like a tiddlywink over the handlebars into the frosty mud. Laughter spatters us.

We watch with tears in our throats as Papa brushes off his coat and trousers, then rights the bicycle and walks it away down the path without a word. Papa’s pride bites right through the spring chill to warm my fingers and toes.

“He’s the best man in the world,” I choke, making a trail across the back of my mitten with my sniffles. “But I’m glad Mama and Tatiana didn’t see that.”

Olga nods. “Or Aleksei. They get too angry, and it’s more dangerous to be angry at these men than to be scared of them. Remember that, Mashka.”

Thank goodness, the men aren’t always so awful. One warm day, a very young soldier sits down on Mama’s carpet, right beside her. He begins talking to her as if they’re in the middle of an argument.

“Why do you despise the Russian people?” he demands. “Why didn’t you ever travel the country like a tsaritsa should? What kind of tsaritsa doesn’t even know her own country?”

I shrink down and peek at him through the spokes of her wheelchair. The fellow doesn’t look old enough to shave, much less carry a rifle. Mama edges away just a little. Then she takes a breath and continues sewing on the tapestry in her lap. “My first daughter was born within a year after I became empress,” she explains. “I had four more children and nursed them all myself. So you see, I couldn’t travel.”

The guard blinks at his boots and blushes violently, probably at the thought of Mama’s bosom. I stifle a giggle. Mama gives me a stern look over the arm of her chair, then softens and motions for me to go with my sisters. “I’ll be fine,” she says while the soldier clears his throat and struggles to find his voice.

“Please tell me about your children, Alexandra Feodorovna,” the young man says as I go to find Anastasia and tell her what I saw.

“Dr. Botkin has had a reply from Kerensky,” Papa says quietly. All six sets of our knives and forks stop their sawing. Nobody’s had the nerve to mention Dr. Botkin’s request to send us to the Crimea in all these weeks. The thought of our white marble palace on the Black Sea is always warm and sweet as a glass of tea, but just now I feel like I’ve swallowed a pot of glue instead.

Papa cuts another bite, chews, and swallows. “Kerensky has written that a transfer to the Crimea is quite impossible at the moment.”

“Impossible” booms so loud in my head, I can hardly snatch at the puff of hope fluttering behind it.
At the moment,
I tell myself. “At the moment” is different from “never.”

Papa looks around the table at our glum faces. “Keep your trust in God, my dears.” He lays down his fork to rest his hand for a minute over Olga’s.
“Tak i byt.”
Olga presses her lips together and nods.

Mama clears her throat. “Speaking of letters,” she says in a voice that sounds stiff and rehearsed, “you should see the letter I received from Isa Buxhoeveden today. I couldn’t help laughing, it was so ridiculous. The return address says ‘Ex-Baroness Buxhoeveden, the Ex-Lady-in-Waiting to the Ex-Empress.’” It feels funny, Mama making a joke just now, but the corners of my mouth hop a little anyway as we chew at our meat.

“This might have been a ham once,” Papa decides after a long swallow, “but now it is only an ex-ham.”

“How about a surprise to cheer us all up?” Papa rubs his hands together and grins. “If we can’t tend our orchards in the Crimea, we’ll practice right here. We have permission to put in a kitchen garden,” he announces.

It’s such fun! I’ve never done work like this in my life. I have my own shovel, and we haul peat and turn the soil behind the palace ourselves until the long rows fill with hundreds of tender little sprouts. Our fingernails turn black and we all smell of earth and sweat every night, but I don’t care. We have a garden bigger than the playroom, bigger even than the Mountain Hall, maybe!

At first I have to rest at the end of every row. While I lean on my spade, Papa sometimes takes a moment to wipe his brow or turn up his cuffs enough to let the tail of his dragon tattoo slither out. When he catches a soldier at the edge of the vegetable bed peeking at the blue scales on his wrist, Papa peels his sleeve to the elbow and offers his forearm for the young man to examine. “A souvenir from my tour of Japan. I must have been about your age. It took seven hours to finish.”

The soldier’s lips turn down, but not in a frown. It’s like Ortipo’s backward bulldog smile. The young man nods with his eyebrows high. Even though he doesn’t say a word, I can tell he wishes he had one just like it.

“Do you have any tattoos, soldier?” I ask him.

“Only a small one,” he admits.

“Can we see it?”

His eyes go awfully wide. “
Nyet.
I’m afraid it’s not as … well, I suppose you could say ‘artful’ as …” He trails off, pointing to Papa’s arm.

“Oh, that doesn’t matter,” I start to say, and then,
“Oh!”
again as I understand. I gulp back a giggle. “In that case, you can show it to Papa when I’ve turned my back.” He looks at me as if I’ve spoken Portuguese, but when I glance over my shoulder from partway down the row, the soldier is buttoning up the neck of his tunic while Papa chuckles at whatever he’s seen.
Men,
I think, and have a little chuckle myself.

In between all the hoeing and watering my sisters and I are happy to smoke and nap in the sun with Jemmy and Ortipo in our laps just like we used to at
Stavka
. On the other side of the palace, the servants have a garden of their own. We help them dig and weed too. Before long the soldiers themselves pitch in to haul water and wheelbarrows.

“Some of them are not so bad after all,” Tatiana admits after an officer of the Fourth Regiment helps her carry a heavy load of peat across to the servants’ garden. She swats the smudges from her skirt, then sits down next to Anastasia in the shade of the small wooden toolshed and claps for Ortipo to join us.

“They probably think you’re a
muzhik
’s wife in those clothes, with your hands all grimy,” Anastasia teases. “I bet they wouldn’t have helped if they knew it was the same haughty Grand Duchess Tatiana under that dirty wool skirt.”

Tatiana ignores her.

“Do you think maybe Papa would let us share our vegetables with the guards this fall?” I ask, looking over the rows of cabbages plumping up like little green bellies against the brown earth. “We couldn’t have kept up such a big garden without them.”

Olga peers at me strangely, like I’m a silly little bird twittering away.

“What?” I ask her.

She smiles. “Nothing, Mashka. You’re sweet, that’s all.” She looks aside and pats Jemmy, who’s wriggled in between her and Anastasia. “Fall is a long way off.”

She sounds sad again, and I can’t see why. Things are almost back to normal. Anastasia and Aleksei and I have lessons like always, except that Papa and Mama teach Russian history and religion alongside Monsieur Gilliard to make up for the tutors who aren’t allowed through the gates. We’re outside all the time now because of our kitchen garden. There are no more ministers interrupting us at all hours of the day, and Papa has no piles of
dokladi
to read. There are the guards, but like Anastasia says, what’s another set of guards? My sisters and I have never been able to come and go as we please. In so many ways, we’re freer now than we’ve ever been.

I could live this way forever.

19.

OLGA NIKOLAEVNA

June 1917
Tsarskoe Selo

F
or most of the spring, we live in our own private world, just as we’ve always done. We sleep in our own beds, walk in our park, and row in our canals. The memory of Anya and Lili’s arrest still throbs, but many of our best people have stayed on—people like our loyal Dr. Botkin, Aleksei’s Nagorny, Gilliard, and Dr. Derevenko, and our household servants Nyuta, Trupp, Sednev, and Chef Kharitonov. Meanwhile, the world outside our gates goes about its business. For a while, no one even seems to wonder what will come next.

Something has to come next, of course. The Provisional Government can’t keep us forever like this, moving about as if we’re figures in a dollhouse with its roof peeled off for everyone to see. Before long, the daily crowd behind the fence dwindles. It’s as if we’ve disappointed them somehow. Perhaps they expected us to be more interesting, or at least more imperial. Even the Second Regiment’s rudeness mellows into indifference as we all grow used to one another.

The news, when it comes at all, keeps changing, yet we tend our garden as if we’ll be at Tsarskoe Selo forever—as if we can’t be uprooted as easily as a row of cabbages. It’s been months since I’ve written in my diary, but I’ve begun gathering blossoms and leaves from the park to press between the blank pages. Even a sprig from the potted lilacs in Mama’s boudoir.

Papa still hopes to go to the Crimea and grow flowers, even though Babushka and Auntie Ksenia and Auntie Olga— pregnant with her first baby—are already under house arrest there. If Kerensky won’t transfer us, the Crimeans must not be eager for more Romanov refugees. Papa and Mama’s cousin Georgie, the king of England, doesn’t want us either, which brings as much relief as disappointment—not one of us wants to leave Russia.

Much as we all crave being out in the fresh air, the evenings, with the guards confined to the corridors, have become my favorite time. Tucked into the Crimson Drawing Room upstairs, my sisters and I knit with Mama while Aleksei toys with his lead soldiers and Papa reads to us. Aleksei and the Little Pair like detective stories best, but Mama, Tatiana, and I all prefer the Bible, especially Psalms.

Alone together, we can be playful and chuckle at the ridiculous things the soldiers do. Papa can be as mischievous as Shvybzik when the mood strikes him. “Give the Provisional Government thy judgments, O God,” Papa reads solemnly from Psalm 72, “and thy righteousness unto the Provisional Government’s son.”

Tatiana interrupts first. “Papa, what are you reading? It makes no sense.”

Glancing up with a twinkle in his eye, Papa says, “‘King’ has gone so out of fashion these days, I thought I should put in ‘Provisional Government’ instead.”

Even Mama can’t pretend that isn’t funny, and we seven spend the rest of the night searching for the most ridiculous passages to revolutionize.

The next night it’s so stuffy, the joke already feels stale when Shvybs asks Papa to read from 1 Provisional Governments. Too dull-edged to huff, she drifts like a mote of dust over to the windowsill with her sewing. Papa’s voice has just barely begun to ease us when old Trupp bursts into the Crimson Drawing Room, trembling all over.

“Your Majesty, the officer on duty requests an immediate interview,” he says. The news sends a spurt of cold from my ankles to my toes.