The Lost Crown (16 page)

Papa puts down the Bible. “Show him in at once.”

“What could it be, Nicky?” Mama asks, straightening up and pulling her feet from his lap.

Papa fingers his beard. “Perhaps a disturbance in Petro-grad. The Bolsheviks have been expected to demonstrate.”

“Like a parade?” Aleksei asks. Papa doesn’t say so, but I know from the papers that the Bolsheviks will probably be armed when they march on Petrograd.

“A sentry outside saw red and green signal lights coming from this room,” the officer says when he strides in with two soldiers from the First Regiment. “What is going on here?”

My sisters make wondering sounds instead of words. Even Papa doesn’t know what to say. “Shut the curtains,” the officer commands. Nagorny silently moves himself between the men and Aleksei, though our brother peers around his
dyadka
like a fox behind a tree trunk. Anastasia, sitting in the windowsill with her needlework, ducks her head and clutches her embroidery as one of the soldiers snatches the drapes shut above her. He stares at her for a moment while the other men search the room. His look stills the air between them.

“Sir?” the man calls. Anastasia refuses to cower, but I constrict with apprehension as the officer marches to the window.

“Yes, what is it?”

“It’s this one here, sir. See those red and green lamps? She’s bending down to get her threads and things, and it makes the lights look like signals.”

“Very well.” The officer motions for the other soldiers to follow him out. At the door, he turns to Papa and Mama. “Thank you for your cooperation. My apologies for the disturbance.”

For a moment, we don’t know what to do. Then everyone speaks at once and we all laugh. It feels like china breaking.

Not long after that, Papa calls me into his study and closes the door. Behind his desk, the larger-than-life portrait of my
dedushka
, Tsar Alexander III, looms over the room. Looking up at him, it’s hard to imagine a revolution ever happening. Following my gaze, Papa sits down beneath the painting and smokes nearly half his cigarette before speaking. His voice is soft as the hazy air.

“I’ve seen how frightened you are of the soldiers, Olga. I don’t know what to make of them myself sometimes,” he confesses. He sighs and reaches deep into a drawer. “Mr. Kerensky and Colonel Kobylinksy are honest men, but I do not like to see my children frightened.” Down in his lap, his hands turn something over and over. “You are the only one of your sisters I would trust with this, because I know you will do everything under God to avoid using it.”

With that, he lays a tiny pearl-handled pistol on the green felt blotter between us.

A queer thrill creeps through me—a mixture of relief and dread—at the sight of that gun. It looks more like a toy or a piece of jewelry than a weapon.

“Keep it hidden,” Papa says, “and do not even tell your sisters. It will go badly for all of us if the guards find out about this, especially the men of the Second Regiment. Do you understand?”

I touch the gun before answering. “
Konechno
, Papa.” It’s cool and smooth as a paperweight in my palm.

“It should fit inside your boot,” Papa prompts.

I thread the pistol carefully down the inside of my left boot, snugging it against my ankle. When I stand, the soft wrinkles of leather hide the little bulge. “
Spasibo
, Papa.”

“I pray you will never need it, Olenka. But it is worth the risk if it takes some of the worry from your face.” He strokes my cheek and blesses my forehead. “God’s will be done.”

For days, any time a soldier so much as glances my way, guilt slices at me like a bayonet. But the more time passes without anyone noticing, that gun becomes an anchor. Like Papa, I pray I’ll never need to use it, thanking the Lord nonetheless for the small measure of assurance it gives me.

In the middle of it all, our hair begins falling out. Great clumps stick to our brushes and pillows, leaving bare patches on our scalps. Dr. Botkin says it might have been our fevers, or perhaps the antibiotics they gave us. When Maria’s is nearly half gone, Mama decides there’s nothing to do but shave our heads.
Bozhe moi!
Poor Tatiana already had her hair cropped once from typhoid four years ago, and Anastasia is just turning sixteen this month—she’s barely begun wearing her long hair up.

“It isn’t fair,” she mumbles, her back to us and her chin muffled in her elbow.

“It will not be so bad,” Tatiana says, “you wait and see. It grows back. You can put ribbons in it like I did for our 1914 portraits. And we have a few pictures of your hair up from the last few weeks.”

“You’re a fine one to talk,” Anastasia shoots back. “Who cares about ribbons? You were ashamed as anything after you had typhoid, and you weren’t even
bald
. You complained about that itchy bird’s nest of a wig all through the tercentenary celebrations. It looked like a wreath in the formal portraits. And now I’ll be naked as an egg without my fringe,” she says, tugging a lock of it down over her eyebrows. Tatiana bites her lip.

I would smack Anastasia for that if she wasn’t so upset already. She isn’t the only one who has to face the barber. I can’t imagine how Tatiana feels about losing her hair for the second time. She was only fifteen then, and had to wait an extra two years for her hair to grow long enough to put up. Maria sits watching, weaving the last tendrils of her own curls through her fingers. I don’t even want to think about mine. I’ve always loved to watch in the mirror as Nyuta brushes my hair and pins it in place for me.

“At least your head isn’t as big as mine, Shvybs,” I offer. “Remember what Great-Grandmama wrote when I was born?” I reach out to smooth the red-gold cascade running down Anastasia’s back. It’s just the same color as Mama’s. She jerks the length of it over her shoulder and snorts.

“‘A splendid baby, except for her immense head,’” Anastasia quotes in her Queen Victoria voice as she twists her hair around her fist like a skein of yarn. A smudge of red inches up the back of her neck.

“That’s right. I’ll look like a melon on a stick.”

“I don’t care.”

Tatiana tries one more time. “Mama will make sure we have the best tonics and shampoos. Do you remember when you poured Miss Eagar’s English hair tonic all over that dreadful old bald doll of yours?”

“If I wanted to look like ratty old Vera, I’d tell the barber to chop off an arm and an eye while he’s at it.”

I shrug at Tatiana. There’s no talking to Anastasia when she’s in one of her ugly moods. Just then Aleksei appears in the doorway and peers at Anastasia.

“What’s wrong?” he asks.

Tatiana looks queerly at him for a moment while I explain; then she brightens and crouches down beside our cross little sister.

“
Dushka
,” she says to Anastasia, “do you remember when Aleksei left for the front and you said you would cut your hair and wear khaki in an instant if it meant you could go with him?”

“So what?” Anastasia grumbles.

Aleksei cocks his head. “You would have cut your hair off to come with me, Nastya?” he asks.

Anastasia looks up over her folded arms. “
Konechno.
Short enough to fit under a soldier’s cap, at least.”

He looks at all of us, each moping in our own way. “You all have to get your hair cut?”

Suddenly I understand. Clever Governess! I wink at Tatiana. “Shaved,” I tell Aleksei. “It’s coming out at the scalp.”

Aleksei’s grins rises like the sun. “Then I’m getting mine shaved too!”

Mashka giggles. Anastasia’s eyebrows form two peaks. “Mama will be
furious
,” she says, as if the word tastes like chocolate.

Aleksei shrugs. “I don’t care.”

“You’re a pair of
shvybziki
,” I tell them. Already their two heads are bent together, conspiring. I thread my arm around Tatiana’s waist as Maria abandons her armchair and joins the plot. “And you are a wonder,” I whisper to Tatiana.

In spite of my hat and the scarf wrapped around my naked scalp, I’m sure everyone is looking at me when we go outside. Indoors, I’m happy to joke and pose for Monsieur Gilliard’s camera with my sisters and Aleksei, but out here I can’t look anyone in the eye—not even my own reflection in the canal.

A few
sazhens
downstream, two guards from the Second Regiment point and whisper loudly together. My head feels round and red as a peeled beet. I know it only draws attention, but I can’t help reaching to make sure the scarf is still tucked across the tips of my ears.

“They are armed,” I hear one man say, and my shame vanishes. The pistol squeezes like a snake against my ankle, seizing up everything except my heart, which rattles my whole body.

“You there!” they shout. Behind me, Aleksei scrambles across the bridge from the Children’s Island to Mama’s carpet on the grass. I want to run too, but the weight of that small gun rivets my foot to the ground.

Next thing I know, the soldiers stride past me without a glance. They plant their toes on the fringe of Mama’s carpet and bark at Aleksei, “Hand over the weapon.” Bewilderment melts into relief. It’s only my brother’s miniature rifle they’ve seen. He still wears his army khakis and medal of St. George every day, and loves to prowl through the shrubbery like a private at the front lines. Aleksei’s eyes go big as silver rubles. He clutches the little rifle and shakes his head.

Quick as a breath of wind, Monsieur Gilliard appears. “Fellows,” he says in a voice smooth and pleasant as ice cream, “it’s only a toy.”

“We will not have the prisoners carrying weapons.”

“Be reasonable,” Gilliard insists. “That little gun couldn’t kill a rabbit. He doesn’t even have cartridges anymore.”

“Hand it over,” the dark-haired one demands. Aleksei looks helplessly between Mama and Gilliard. Mama closes her eyes and nods. The soldier snatches the rifle from my brother’s hands and swaggers off without a glance at the tears spilling over Aleksei’s cheeks. In an instant my fear snaps apart and I’m angry enough to imagine my finger on the trigger. Those are the first tears I’ve seen from our brother—our brother who should have been the next tsar!— in the whole time since Papa abdicated.

Aleksei mourns that little gun for days, looking pale and stricken as if they’d taken two pints of his blood away with it. Putting aside my own self-pity, I do my best to comfort him with stories, card games, and endless parades of lead soldiers. At last, one morning I hear him marching back and forth across the playroom just the way he used to. I freeze in the doorway when I see him, strutting between lines of toy soldiers with his rifle slung over his shoulder.

“Aleksei!” I cry, sick with dread at the thought of what the Second Regiment will do if they catch him. “How did you get that gun?”

He grins like the Cheshire cat and waves me in. “Shhhh!” he says, leaping over the lead battalions to shut the door before handing me the gun. I turn it over and over, making sure it is indeed the same rifle. “Colonel Kobylinsky smuggled it back, one piece at a time,” my brother explains. “He said I could keep it as long as I only played with it in my rooms.” I shake my head in wonderment. The whirl of kindness and cruelty makes me dizzy.

20.

ANASTASIA NIKOLAEVNA

July 1917
Tsarskoe Selo

O
ut in the kitchen garden, Monsieur Gilliard comes upon the four of us all lined up like paper dolls and raises his camera. With a sweep of her hand, Olga pulls her hat off her bald head and shoots him a more daring grin than even I can manage. Tatiana, Maria, and I follow suit like dominoes.

“Your Highnesses,” Gilliard sputters. “Surely I cannot. What will your parents say?”

“Konechno,”
Olga insists. “Of course you can. What our parents will say is precisely the point.”

After that we abandon our hats and scarves and quit skittering about like plucked ducks. I wish we could see that Olga more often. She hasn’t been the same since Colonel Kobylinsky started laying hints about the Provisional Government sending us away.

“‘Transferred.’ So that’s what the Provisional Government calls it when they force a family out of its home on four days’ notice,” Olga says glumly. The colonel clears his throat and shifts in his boots.

“Where are we going?” Mama demands.

“The Crimea?” Maria asks, practically climbing up Kobylinsky’s arm. “I know I could bear leaving home if it meant we could go to the Crimea.”

“I have not been told,” the colonel admits, looking at Papa instead of Mama. “My orders are to request you to prepare for a journey of three to four days.”

“Will this be a permanent transfer?” Papa asks. It takes me a second to hear what Papa’s asking with his big formal words: Are we ever coming back? I look hard at Kobylinsky, the way Tatiana does, as if the third eyelash on your right eye will tell her everything she wants to know, no matter what comes out of your mouth.

“I’m sorry, Your Majesty, I don’t have that information either. Kerensky is somewhat optimistic—perhaps by November—but he makes no promises. A train has been ordered for midnight on the first of August.” My arms and legs turn heavy as raw sausages. Four more days and we’ll be gone.