The Lost Crown (10 page)

“Stop making eyes at that camera and behave yourselves,” Tatiana hisses at Maria and me from behind Aleksei’s shoulder. “This film is for Russia, not our home movies.”

“It doesn’t matter what you do, just as long as you move,” Aleksei announces. “They took films of me running with Joy and pelting Monsieur Gilliard with snowballs and never complained. And you don’t have to whisper,” he informs Tatiana. “You know it can’t record the sound.”

Mama would shush us all anyway, but she’s resting in the train. Papa only stands stout and proud as anything in his uniform with the red dolman and tall astrakhan hat and Aleksei like a matching toy soldier beside him.

“How do you think we looked?” I ask my sisters that night on the train.

“Otlichno,”
says Tatiana, petting her fur collar while Ortipo pouts in the corner. “It has been so long since we had new coats. I only wish the film could be in color.”

It isn’t what I mean, but I don’t know how to say it the right way. “Who’s in charge of the army when Papa comes cruising the river with us?” I ask instead.

“Papa is,” Tatiana answers. “Why should anyone else take over? No one took charge of Russia when we had our holidays on
Standart
or in Livadia.”

But this is
war
, not a quiet summer. And if he can leave like that, what does it really mean to be in charge of the army?

Olga looks at me as if she can hear the thoughts linking up inside my head, like a verse to a song we both know. I’m not about to say anything more in front of Tatiana, though.

What would the soldiers at the front think if they knew Papa walks away for a day to picnic with his family and snore in haystacks? Papa and Aleksei sleep in the governor’s mansion in Mogilev, while the troops spend their nights camped out in trenches and fields. Has Papa even seen the war, or is it just like always, with everything scrubbed and painted especially for his arrival? I don’t know what anyone could do to polish up the front, but I’ll bet none of the soldiers scratch or spit or swear while Papa’s around. They probably aren’t allowed to look tired or discouraged, either.

If we’re all of us—Papa, the army, and even my sisters and me—pretending for one another, what good is that to anyone?

13.

TATIANA NIKOLAEVNA

December 1916
Tsarskoe Selo

“M
adame,” Anya gasps, limping into the lilac boudoir on her two canes. “I’ve had a call from Father Grigori’s daughter. She saw him get into a motorcar last night at midnight, and he hasn’t come back.” She gives Mama and me no time to answer before rushing on. “It must have been the Yusupov chauffeur. Father Grigori told me himself he was invited to meet Princess Irina late last night.” She flops down into Mama’s armchair and sighs as if all her energy has flown straight out of her mouth.

“Irina is in the Crimea, darling.” Mama does not even look up from winding her yarn. “There must be some mistake.”

Anya sighs again. “He told me him
self
,” she insists. She sounds so like our Anastasia, I cannot help smiling to myself.

The telephone rings, and we all three look at one another, pretending none of us jumped in our chairs at the jangle of its bell. Mama listens with a grave face until the wool draped around my hands begins to itch.

“The minister of the interior,” she tells us when she hangs up. “He says there was a commotion at the Yusupov palace last night, but I don’t believe a word of it. Vladimir Purishkevich answered the door when the policeman rang.”

“That dreadful radical from the Duma?” Anya asks.

Mama stares across the room. “Purishkevich told the policeman it was nothing, only that they had just killed Rasputin. He was quite drunk.” With such long pauses between her sentences, I know she is dazed by the news, whether she believes it or not. “Purishkevich was drunk,” she says again.

I hardly know whether I believe it myself. Purishkevich hates
Otets
Grigori. He denounced Our Friend in front of the whole parliament.
Otets
Grigori never would have gone to the Yusupov palace if he knew Purishkevich would be there, even if our cousin Irina is the most beautiful woman in Russia. Besides, Mama is right; Irina is in the Crimea. Nothing makes sense.

“Father Grigori was very odd yesterday,” Anya muses. “I was getting ready to leave, and he looked at me and said, ‘What more do you want? Already you have received all.’ I didn’t have the first notion what he meant. I hadn’t asked him for anything at all.”

“Anya dear,” Mama interrupts, “go and fetch Lili Dehn from the city, will you, please?”

Anya lurches up onto her crutches and hobbles off.

“Now, perhaps we can think,” Mama says. “I can hardly string two thoughts together with her gabbing.”

I stifle a giggle behind my hand in spite of myself. “Mama, you made her go all that way on crutches just to shut her up?”

“Of course not,” she says, but the way she smiles and keeps her eyes fixed on her ball of yarn tells me otherwise. “Lili will help us sort through all this.” I nod. Mama always knows what to do.

By the time Lili arrives, all my sisters have drifted into the lilac boudoir. The dogs run straight to her, as if they hope she can explain what is wrong with us. Anya cries on a cushioned stool at Mama’s feet. Even Anastasia is subdued. Mama is pale but composed, absently soothing Anya as she talks with Lili.

“You will sleep at Anya’s house tonight,” Mama tells Lili. She lowers her voice. “There have been threats,” she adds.

Cousin Irina’s husband Felix has called, and Cousin Dmitri, too, but Mama refused to see either of them. While she talks with Lili and Anya, I nudge my sisters into the cozy-corner. “One of us must sleep in Mama’s room tonight. She should not be alone until
Otets
Grigori is found.”

“You’d hardly think anything was wrong from looking at her,” Maria says. Her fingers wander in and out of Mama’s candy dish. “Poor Anya is a wreck.”

I know better. Mama will be fine only as long as she has someone in worse shape than herself to take care of. As soon as Anya gets hold of herself, Mama will have nothing but her own fears for company. “Did you see how badly her pen quivered when she wrote the news to Papa? She had to give up and finish in pencil.”

“I wish I could stay with Varvara and Marochka Grigorievna,” Maria says, putting the last of Mama’s chocolates into her mouth. “The poor darlings must be sick with worrying about their papa.” Anastasia glances fearfully at Maria and shakes her head. She will never admit it, but I know the idea of sleeping alone in their room tonight frightens her. I am a little frightened myself. I have heard enough of Mama’s phone calls to know serious trouble is brewing, even outside our walls. The minister of the interior warned Mama of terrible rumors. Plots to murder her, and Anya too, are circulating, God forbid. I cannot begin to imagine why. The very idea makes me queasy.

“I’ll stay with Mama,” Olga offers.

“Are you sure,
dushka
?” I ask her.

“
Konechno
, I’ll sleep in Papa’s bed.”

That should settle me, but alone in my room, new worries invade. If
Otets
Grigori has truly been killed, the consequences for us will be almost past bearing. Aleksei has not been seriously ill since his nosebleed at
Stavka
a year ago, but that hardly matters. Hemophilia is not a disease that simply vanishes.
Otets
Grigori once told Mama that Aleksei’s health would improve after he turned twelve, but what will become of Mama? She depends so much on
Otets
Grigori, I fear for her most of all. The thought torments me until I steal downstairs and curl up with Ortipo on the couch in Mama’s room.

When the truth comes at last, it strikes us all numb. One of
Otets
Grigori’s galoshes surfaced on the crusted ice of the river Neva. When the police searched the water, they discovered
Otets
Grigori’s body bound in ropes and punctured with bullet holes. Our own cousins, Felix and Dmitri, murdered our dear friend with the help of horrid Purishkevich, then dumped his body into the river. His frozen hand was raised with his thumb and two fingers clenched together, as though his last thought had been to make the sign of the cross.

Olga takes the news so strangely. “It’s been brewing for a long time,” she says, “though I never thought it would be so brutal. The soldiers aren’t always careful with their newspapers, and the servants talk in the halls, you know. The papers have been full of stories about
Otets
Grigori. I’ve heard there were even dirty cartoons circulating in Petrograd.”

My mouth falls open as she tells me some of the rumors. Anastasia’s eyes grow nearly as round as Mashka’s saucers. If I had known what she was about to say, I would have stopped up the Little Pair’s ears with cotton. “Those are filthy lies!”

“Probably,” Olga admits. “But it doesn’t matter whether they’re true. How do you think it looks, having a man like that coming into the palace?”

Across the room, Anya is awash with grief. Olga rubs at her temples as Anya wails. “Mama has ordered Anya to move in with us,” I tell my sisters. “Her mail today was full of death threats, God protect her.” I shiver.

“Do you get the feeling,” Olga begins, then stops with a glance at our younger sisters.

I know what she means, though. Nothing in the room has changed, yet somehow I feel the way I so often did when
Otets
Grigori was with us. It reminds me of sitting at my desk, writing in my diary with my back to the room. Sometimes I sense something more than furniture and picture frames near me, and look up to find a swallow perched in the windowsill, or that Ortipo has waddled in without a sound.

Right behind it, another thought creeps up the back of my neck. “Have any of you seen a bird at the window?”

“There are always swallows outside our windows,” Olga says.

“Chase them away,” I demand. “If a bird taps on the window or flies into the glass, it becomes an omen of death. Maybe if I had—”

“Tatya, sweetheart, you couldn’t have saved
Otets
Grigori, no matter if a flock of birds came tapping.” The steadiness of Olga’s fingertips against my elbow startles me; this time, I am the one quivering. “Even with all the rumors I’d heard, I would have thought of Mama, Aleksei, or one of our wounded first. You couldn’t have known,” she says again.

I nod and force a watery swallow down the pinhole of my throat. “
Konechno
. But with
Otets
Grigori gone, we cannot take chances.”

14.

OLGA NIKOLAEVNA

January-February 1917
Tsarskoe Selo

S
ince
Otets
Grigori’s murder, I’ve hardly known how to feel. Mama is nearly crushed with heartbreak, but secretly I wonder if things will begin to improve without
Otets
Grigori stirring up gossip about our family. The few rumors I’d heard about Our Friend were enough to make me blush redder than the cross on my nurse’s uniform. So many scandals! And that was what had leaked through the cloistered cracks of our imperial lazaret. The gossip on the streets must have been ten times more poisonous.

But it is said in Russia that a truth is found between two lies, and so I can’t help wondering. I’ve smelled the liquor on
Otets
Grigori myself more than once. My sisters scoff like Mama, but I’ve told them only a few tidbits about the wine and the gypsy women. They don’t know the whispers of stories I’ve heard circulating about what Our Friend did with Anya, our own mama, and his grip on the government itself. I even remember one of our nursemaids being dismissed in a flurry of whispers, and suddenly I think I can guess the reason why.

Still, it isn’t right, what Cousin Felix and those other men did to
Otets
Grigori. Even in all the ugly fragments of stories I’ve managed to sweep together, it never seemed that he’d hurt anyone. Drunkenness and lewd rumors are no justification for murder.

It’s as if all of Russia is turning its back to us. At the war front, Aleksei writes me, the grand dukes and commanding officers have stopped lunching with Papa. In the lazaret, I don’t have to guess anymore which of the new arrivals believe the rumors about
Otets
Grigori.