The Lost Crown (29 page)

Holy Week 1918
Tobolsk

A
t first we have news almost every day. Maria even thinks to send a note back with the man who drove the first leg of the journey:
Travel dreadful, we were terribly shaken on roads barely usable.

It makes me absolutely ill to think of Mama with her weak heart and sciatica in that wretched tarantass. If only I had time before they left to tell Maria how to watch Mama for signs of pain, when to give her drops, and how to comfort her without medicine! But they are all safe,
slava Bogu
, I remind myself.

The next day there are two telegrams from Tyumen, and the day after that a letter from Mama herself. The sight of her handwriting soothes me like a hot glass of tea, but the words themselves send me to my handkerchief again:
My soul has been shaken out.

Then for days, my worries fester as the hours limp by with no news at all. At least Aleksei is a distraction. If I cannot be with Mama, I must make sure her precious Sunbeam gets well.

“Is there a letter from Mama today?” he asks, his teeth clinking against the thermometer.

I put my finger to my lips. “You know better than to talk while I take your temperature. The last thing you need is a mouth full of broken glass.” Aleksei cushions the thermometer with a guilty smile and sinks into his stack of pillows. From his nightstand, he takes the round watch Papa left him and watches the seconds tick by. When the time is up, he points the thermometer at me and raises his eyebrows to ask again. “No, Alyosha. Only a letter to Mama from one of her friends at the lazaret.” His body slumps further, but his knees tent the blankets into uneven pyramids. His hips are still too inflamed to let him relax his legs.

I lower my hand over one of them. “Does it hurt today?”

His face shifts as he tries not to grimace. “Not as much.”

“Would you like to put your feet up to rest your knees?”

Aleksei nods, and with hardly a rustle his
dyadka
unfurls from the corner to help me ease my brother down onto his back and transfer the pillows to brace up his aching joints. Aleksei’s muscles tense under our hands, but he keeps his eyes fixed on the hands of his watch. “Anastasia will have breakfast with you,” I tell him as we work. “Then Olga for luncheon, and dinner with me. If you eat well and your temperature stays steady, I will have Nagorny and Monsieur Gilliard carry your cot into Papa’s study for tea with all of us.
Khorosho
?”

A small smile. “
Spasibo
, Tatya. Will you ask Zhilik to come read to me?”

“Konechno.”
I kiss his forehead and start off to fetch Monsieur Gilliard.

“Tatya?”

“Yes?”

“You’ll tell me if a telegram comes?”

The question snatches my voice. “The very instant, Alyosha,” I choke.

Christ give me strength. There is no reason I should not be able to handle this. Every day I tell myself I have done the right thing by staying behind, yet the responsibility is a heavier weight than the gemstones tugging constantly at my sashes and buttons. I look out our bedroom window at the slush-rutted street. This would be almost bearable if I could only see the sea, even with just one eye.

We have been apart before, and I have Nagorny, Monsieur Gilliard, Mr. Gibbes, Dr. Derevenko, and so many of our people to help me, but managing an entire ward of wounded soldiers would be a comfort compared to having charge of my own sorrowful family. Anastasia smiles and clowns, but she keeps herself rolled up tight as a bandage. It pains me to think of what must be aching behind her brittle grin. And Olga, the poor darling! I do not even know the name for what she needs, but I think only God can give it to her. It is all she can do to write letters to Mama and pray with Aleksei.

Just then Olga emerges from the adjoining doorway to our parents’ bedroom.

“You have not started packing Mama and Papa’s room already?” I ask. “Disturbing their things before we know they have arrived safely is bad luck.”

“
Nyet, konechno.
Not even a button. Sitting at Mama’s desk makes me feel closer to them when I write,” she explains, then peeks across the corridor to Aleksei’s room. Anastasia is putting on a pantomime with the dogs for our brother. Shutting the hallway door, Olga says, “Tatiana, you can talk to me about what’s troubling you.”

I shake my head. “You have enough to worry about,
dushka
.” Her eyes flicker. I think she would be angry with me if she only had the energy. Instead she seems to be using every muscle in her body to stand upright instead of folding into herself like a well-creased letter. Her fingertips have gone ragged from the way she bites and picks at them.

“We all do,” she says. “And that’s why we don’t need to worry about each other. You can’t hide it from me—I can see you’re fretting. Don’t make me imagine what’s causing it, Tatya. It’s too much for me.”

Confessing my troubles to Olga feels backward, even humbling. My head is knotted with threads of anxiety, but Olga’s worries are always like whole bolts of cloth in comparison. What I say surprises both of us.

“Every time I think of Gleb and Tanya Botkin, all alone without their father, it makes me sick with guilt! Our papa stood before Commissar Yakovlev and refused to leave his family behind. What on earth can it be like for Gleb and Tanya, knowing their papa had a choice, and that he chose to follow the tsar? Such a good, loyal doctor is a treasure, and I thank God every day that he is with Mama now, but Olga?” My fists have clamped together, just the way my sister’s do when she tries to hold in her fears. I unlock my knuckles and let the last thought go. “Can there be such a thing as too much loyalty?”

So much happens on Olga’s face, I cannot read it all. I see only the beginning and the end: the tenderest smile, and then such sadness that it pulls her whole body to the couch. “I don’t know, Tatya.”

My voice pinches tighter and higher. “There is not one single thing I can do for them, corked up in this house like aspirin tablets in a bottle.”

“I wish we could invite them for Easter, but I don’t dare ask Colonel Kobylinsky to press the men to tolerate anything extra.”

“What’s going on in here?” Anastasia asks, popping in from the corridor with Jemmy tucked into her elbow and Ortipo waddling behind. Both dogs have scarves tied over their heads like
babushki
, and Ortipo drags a cape made from an embroidered dinner napkin.

In an instant I shed my distress and step between my sisters to give Olga an extra moment to recover herself. “We are deciding what to do for Gleb and Tanya for Easter,” I tell Anastasia as I scoop up Ortipo and strip the make-believe finery from her. “And you should knock before barging in.”

Anastasia’s fingers tighten over the doorknob. Her face flushes like Mama’s. “
Knock?
It’s my room just as much as yours to barge into, isn’t it? And don’t scowl at Ortipo like that,” she tells me, though she studies Olga as she says so. “That brown butterball may be fat and ugly, but she likes frilling up just as much as you do.” Her voice trails off. Again she looks from me to Olga, still silent on the couch. “Fine. Why don’t I go paint some eggs for the Botkins and you two can go back to your …
chat
?” Off she trounces, yanking the door shut behind her.

“I’m sorry, but I cannot arrange for you to attend Easter services in town,” Colonel Kobylinsky says. “The soldiers’ committee will not allow it.”

Olga and I cry out like a pair of mourning doves. “Easter is the most High Holy Day! We have always been allowed to go to church on High Holy Days.”

“Surely they won’t deprive us?” Olga begs. “It’s too cruel.”

One look at the colonel, and I think he would sit down and cry himself if he could. “I’m sorry,” he says again. “I know what a comfort real Easter services would be to all of you, especially with your parents away. But the men know I don’t have the backing of Lenin’s government. I can’t even pay them regularly anymore. All I have to appeal to them is common decency, and that is in shorter supply than butter and sugar these days. In the interest of your safety I don’t dare press the matter, but you have my word that there will be a priest here to perform the full Divine Liturgy, both for the Paschal Vigil on Holy Saturday and vespers on Easter Sunday.”

Instead of complaining, I should thank God we have such a good man looking after us. “Thank you, Colonel. We will be grateful for whatever arrangements you can make.”

“Easter’s going to be so dreary, stuck in here,” Anastasia mopes. “We don’t even have flowers for the altar.”

My temper shoots past the disappointment lodged in my chest. I could spank my little sister like a baby for bringing up something so petty, but to my surprise, the colonel brightens. “I understand the custom here is to use spruce boughs,” he says. “I will see to it that you have plenty to decorate your altar.” Purposeful once more, he goes away down the corridor with something like a spring back in his step. It makes me smile, but a second later my temper crests again.

“I wish I were a man!”

“What?” Anastasia’s mouth drops open as though I have cut her off in the middle of singing a hymn.

“Look at us, with our cropped hair and patched stockings! Everyone is either gentle or rough with us. Those guards would treat us differently if I were a man in uniform.”

“Some of them do look at us differently, ever since Papa and Mama left,” Olga says, picking at the loose threads in her skirt.

Her plucking makes my skin itch under my old blouse. “Everything is so dingy and dull! What I would give for a new dress in layers of fresh pink lawn, and a picture hat with flowers for Easter …” Anastasia and Olga both raise their eyebrows. “Stop your grinning, you two. The Governess can daydream, even if it smacks of vanity. Anyway, I could make do just as well with my Red Cross uniform. That would be some kind of dignity at least.”

“You’d put on your velvet court dress and pearled
kokoshnik
every night for dinner if we let you,” Olga teases.

I smirk at myself. “And you would be happy in a
muzhik
’s smock and felt boots.”

“You’re both crazy,” Anastasia says, rolling her eyes as always.

“Am I the only one who misses the imperial processions?” I ask, turning to Olga. “Remember descending the Red Staircase in Moscow with the music and the crowd cheering? They roared so loudly sometimes, the lace on my hat brim trembled. I was so proud to be Russian then, and a Romanov. I know it sounds stuck-up, but I never felt like their cheers were for me, or any of us, really. At moments like that, we were more than ourselves. It was the pride of the people that thrilled me, their pride in our country.” My voice catches. “We belonged to everyone then.”

Olga nods, and the tears slip from her chin to melt in her collar. When I turn back to Anastasia, she is swiping her cheeks with her fists. “I don’t know why you couldn’t have told us that when I still had a chance to feel it for myself,” she hiccups. “Now we don’t belong to anyone.”

I offer her my arms, and she tucks herself like a sash round my waist. “We still belong to each other,” I tell her.

By the eighteenth of April we still have no news, but Aleksei’s joints have relaxed enough that I ask his
dyadka
to lift him out of bed and into the wheelchair. In the sunshine of the balcony, our brother looks pale and fragile as a Communion wafer.

“Why don’t they write, or send another wire?” Aleksei asks. “They could have been in Moscow days ago.” He holds up his watch, as if he has been marking every minute of our separation.

“The roads are bad, Alyosha. Plenty of villages in Siberia probably do not even have telegraph offices,” I tell him. If I try to be any braver, my face will split in two.
Slava Bogu
, he is not screaming in agony the way he did in Spala, but it troubles me that his questions are harder to manage than his pain. There is nothing I can do to ease his worry, and I never seem to know the right thing to say.

“Yakovlev himself didn’t know where they were going,” Olga assures him. “Maybe no one at all is allowed to know until they get there. That’s the safest way.”

“But aren’t they traveling by train? Don’t stations have telegraphs?”

“Remember when we came here? We couldn’t even look out the windows at the station. They can’t be spreading news all across the telegraph wires if everything is secret.” Our Olga is so smart.

But even Olga doesn’t know what to say when we get a short telegram marked
EKATERINBURG
from one of the officers on Good Friday. “Ekaterinburg?” Anastasia asks. “That isn’t anywhere
near
Moscow.”

“It’s in the Ural Mountains,” Olga says. “Over sixteen hundred miles from Lenin’s capital.”

All these days we have been desperate for news, and now? I cannot even find my thoughts. I want to believe all is well, as the telegram says, but it makes no sense for them to be passing through Ekaterinburg. We all believed Yakovlev was taking Papa to Moscow. Why move us at all if not to the new capital?

True to his word, Colonel Kobylinsky delivers two entire spruce trees for us to decorate our ballroom chapel for Easter. “You may use anything you please in the greenhouse as well,” he tells us, and with the tutors’ help Anastasia carries up armloads of pots from the garden. She takes all afternoon to trim the branches and position them across the altar, taking care not to snag Mama’s handmade cloth, and even convinces Mr. Gibbes to climb up on a stool to suspend two branches over the iconostasis.

“
Otlichno
, Nastya,” I tell her when she finally steps away.

“Maria would say it smells like Christmas.”

The two of us breathe deep lungfuls through our noses. It helps to mask our sniffles at the thought of our Mashka. I wish it were Christmas. Perhaps none of us realized it, but we were content then. Only one thing will resurrect our spirits, and I do not know how much longer any of us can bear waiting.

Finally, two days after Easter, God smiles on us at last. “A letter from Maria, with a note from darling Mamochka!” I pick up my skirts and run straight to Aleksei’s bedside, with my sisters’ heels pounding behind me. Aleksei cheers and kisses the envelope. “It’s addressed to you, Olga,” he says, and hands it over so gallantly. The sight of her name in Mashka’s sloppy writing on the envelope is enough to make Olga glow. I manage only to cross myself before I sink to the floor and weep with relief.