The Lost Crown (23 page)

“That depends on who does the writing,” Olga says.

“What’s that supposed to mean? Facts are facts.”

“Think about it, Shvybs. If Mama wrote the chapter on the revolution, it wouldn’t be anything like what someone like Nikolsky would say, would it?”

“Brava, Olga Nikolaevna,” Mr. Gibbes says, and claps.

I flip to the front of the book and look at the author’s name. I’ve never heard of him. Maybe to some people history is just history, but this is my own family. I’d like to know how anyone can write the truth about us if we’ve never met.

In the evenings, when it’s too stinking cold in this house to do anything but clump down the hall in our felt boots and pack ourselves around the tile stove in Mama’s drawing room, Monsieur Gilliard begins reading us long poems by a writer called Nekrasov. The first is “Red-Nosed Frost,” but our favorite is called “Russian Women,” and it’s about two princesses who follow their husbands into exile all the way to Siberia. “It’s like they were written all about people like us,” I say from the very first night.

“Why didn’t anyone ever tell us we had such a wonderful poet?” Olga wants to know. She looks so absolutely scandalized I think she’d thump someone if she had the chance.

“They’re so romantic,” Maria says. Her chin nests in her hand, and her eyes have gone all starry.

“Commissar Pankratov suggested them,” Monsieur Gilliard says.

“May I borrow the book, monsieur?” Olga asks.

Every time I look, Olga’s got her nose crammed into the pages, copying down verses into her poetry notebook. “What’s so great about them?” I want to know.

“Didn’t you like them?”

“
Konechno
, but not over and over again. What’s the use once you know what happens in the end?”

“A poet has more to say than the story he tells, Shvybs. For Maria, it’s about romance, but Mama and Tatiana love the princesses’ faith. For Papa there’s the women’s loyalty to their husbands. You and Aleksei like the adventure best, I’ll bet.”

“What about you?”

“Many things.” Her voice drops. I lean in, hoping for something juicy. “Right now, I think it’s terribly ironic that we all loved a poem about criminals.”

“Criminals?”

“You’d forgotten by the end of the poem, hadn’t you?” She gives me a know-it-all smile. “Troubetzkoy and Volkhonsky were revolutionaries, plotting against Tsar Nicholas I.”

“Fine, but they weren’t like the Bolshies.”

“Weren’t they? They incited three thousand soldiers in St. Petersburg to revolt and tried to overthrow the tsar’s government. Sound familiar?”

My eyes start to roll before she’s finished. “How can you stand seeing everything from seventeen angles all at once?” I demand. But what I’d really like to know is, if I ever do have the chance to get a good look at the world, will I really
see
it?

26.

MARIA NIKOLAEVNA

Christmas 1917
Tobolsk

“A
parcel, a parcel!” Aleksei whoops, dancing around the tea table.

“From Anya,” Mama says, and the five of us children crane and bob up and down like little birds in the nest. There’ve been letters from Anya ever since she was released from prison, but nothing like this.

“On the feast day of the Virgin of Unexpected Joy,” Tatiana points out. She crosses herself and kisses the gold ring Anya gave her the day she was arrested. Mama’s smile reaches all the way across the table at that. I wish I could remember feast dates like my sister.

Papa sets the box in front of Mama, and we lean in so close you could snap a picture and get every one of us in the frame, parcel and all.
Konechno
, it’s been inspected already, but Commissar Pankratov was kind enough to wrap it all back up again so we can pretend to open it ourselves.

Mama unties the dirty string, and Aleksei stuffs it into his pocket. Olga reaches out to trace Anya’s handwriting on the brown paper wrapping.

“Stop petting the thing and open it up,” Anastasia begs.

Mama lifts out a silk bed jacket, blue like Papa’s eyes. My sisters and I all coo, “Oooh!” and stroke the quilted sleeves. Aleksei wrinkles up his nose, wriggles his hand into the box, and comes up with a plump packet of fruit pastilles.

“Candy!”

All of us, even Papa, put out our hands for a piece. Mine is like summer on my tongue. We stand there grinning for a minute as we suck. Last of all, Mama brings up a darling little pink perfume bottle, all cushioned in tissue paper. She pulls the stopper out, takes a sniff, and her eyes puddle with tears.

“Sunny?” Papa asks. She shakes her head and hands him the bottle. One by one, we all smell it and go quiet, even Anastasia and Aleksei. It’s Anya’s perfume. The scent makes me feel like a ghost has floated into the room—a sweet fat ghost I’d like to wrap my arms around and squeeze like a giant warm dinner roll.

“Don’t smell it too much,” Olga says. “We’ll wear it out.”

“Wear it out?” Anastasia scoffs. “We haven’t touched a drop.”

“If we sniff at it all the time, soon it won’t remind us of Anya anymore. Before long, it’ll only make us think of sitting around a tea table in this house.”

Mama takes the bottle from under Anastasia’s nose and corks it. “We’ll save it until Christmas, darlings. From then on, only when we’re lonely. We won’t waste the Lord’s kindnesses.”

After that, Christmas puts us in a frenzy. How are we supposed to give presents if no one is allowed in or out to buy and deliver them? Even if Commissar Pankratov would let us visit the stores in town, I wouldn’t have the first notion where to go or what anything costs. Back home, merchants from the city used to bring displays of gifts right to the palace for us to choose from.

“We still must have gifts for all our people,” Mama insists. “If we cannot buy anything, I’ll knit and paint their gifts. Every last one of them deserves a token of their loyalty and service, so far from home.” She lifts an eyebrow at us. “And you must keep it secret, my treasures. Christmas is so much nicer with secrets, don’t you think?”

It’s true, but it’s awfully hard to keep our secrets from bumping into one another in this house, especially with the way we bunch together in the evenings to keep the chill and boredom from creeping too close. We all have our orders to keep different members of the household distracted while Mama works on their presents. Olga and Tatiana take turns sleeping late and chattering with Nyuta to slow her down at stripping our beds and putting on fresh sheets every morning. Meanwhile Anastasia and Aleksei and I are supposed to take extra long with our lessons so Mama can knit a little bit every day on the waistcoats for Mr. Gibbes and Monsieur Gilliard.

For once, we argue over who gets to stay inside with Mama during our daily walks in the yard. It’s just about the only time we can snatch to work on our gifts for one another. Poor Tatiana hardly gets five minutes in a row to work on her present for Mama, a blank exercise book to use as a journal, with a purple cover sewn over it and a little swastika, Mama’s lucky symbol, embroidered on the corner. I stroke the smooth yellow threads when she’s finished the first arm of the bent cross.

“It’ll be perfect,” I tell her, “just like always. Like you worked on it for hours at a stretch instead of three stitches at a time.”

Tatiana turns pink around the edges. “
Spasibo
, Mashka.”

Any time she thinks no one’s paying attention, Olga spends ages paging through the little book of Nekrasov’s poems Monsieur Gilliard lent her. “I bet she’s copying out bits of verse for each of us,” I tell Anastasia.

“I hope mine’s not too brainy.” She giggles. “I don’t want to
think
on Christmas.”

“Oh, Nastya.” We may get terrifically bored here, but nothing will make Anastasia any less lazy. She won’t shirk Christmas, though. At least I hope not! The idea of thinking up presents for everyone all by myself makes me cringe. “What are we going to give for gifts?”

“Bookmarks for the Big Pair,” she says as if we’ve arranged all this weeks ago. “Like the ones Mama’s painting for the ladies. Those two always read such fat books.”

The little worries clutching at my shoulders fizz away. “Maybe with prayers copied out on them? I think Olga and Tatiana would like that.”

“All right, but I’ll fill in the prayers,” she decides. “My handwriting’s neater than yours. You paint flowers better than I do, anyway. What about for Mama? We can’t copycat what she’s giving away—she’ll be sick of the sight of bookmarks by Christmas Eve.”

I think of Anya’s sweet little parcel and Mama’s favorite pillow stuffed with rose leaves, and an idea comes at me like a breath of air. “We could make her a set of sachets and scent them with our perfume, one for each of us! Tea roses for Olga, jasmine for Tatiana …”

“We’ll maybe have to sneak it. The Big Pair doesn’t have much perfume left.”

“I’ll take care of that,” I promise her. “They’ll give up a few drops for Mama. What about Papa and Aleksei?”

That leaves us with our chins in our hands for ages.

“Nastya,” I ask, perking up, “you’re the best sneak of all of us, aren’t you?”

“
Konechno.
Why?”

“Aleksei’s lead soldiers have gotten so dull and chipped. What if we snitched them a few at a time and brightened up their uniforms with our paints?”

“I bet if we asked Papa or Monsieur Gilliard to teach Aleksei a new card game or something to distract him, it might work.”

For Papa, we decide to make a little photo album. All five of us work together on it. I develop pictures of my sisters and Aleksei on the swing, of Papa chopping wood with Monsieur Gilliard, of Olga and Anastasia in the yard, and the six of us perched up on the roof of the greenhouse. There’s even one of Papa and Aleksei feeding the flock of turkeys. It’s funny to think we’ve been here long enough that these photos bring back memories.

Olga pastes them all onto squares of cardboard without smearing a drop of glue, and Anastasia decorates the borders with her paints. After Tatiana sews all the pages together, Aleksei draws a double-headed eagle for the cover.

“It’s not as good as the crest on our big leather albums,” Aleksei worries.

“He’ll love it,” I promise.

We have the most heavenly tree in Mama’s drawing room. Pankratov says it’s called a balsam fir, and when it isn’t too cold, the scent reaches all the way into our bedroom at the corner of the house. By the time we get it all decorated with candles and snowflakes, it looks bright and jolly as a snowman.

On Christmas Eve we walk into the ballroom, and there’s a priest for vespers! Monsieur Gilliard is there, and Mr. Gibbes, doctors Botkin and Derevenko, Nyuta, Colonel Kobylinsky, Trupp, Chef Kharitonov with his black hair slicked back, and Sednev and his nephew Leonka from the kitchen. I wish the Botkin children, Gleb and Tanya, and Isa Buxhoeveden could be here too, but it’s still almost like a party. It doesn’t feel like home, but it still feels like Christmas, and it gives me the queerest feeling, like I want to dance and cry all at once. Mama lets us children pass out the gifts just as we always do, making me wish I could give something to my window-friend Natalya and her boys.

Anastasia and I both have new wooden pencil boxes from the Big Pair, all decorated with flower patterns burnt into the lids, and a verse of Nekrasov tucked inside. On mine, Olga changed the first line and wrote in my name instead:

“Dear Mashka, our love and our youth will prevail,

Don’t cry,” I implored as I kissed her.

“Our destinies link us together from now,

To both of us Fate was deceiving,

The tides which your happiness wrecked in their flow

Have swept away mine past retrieving.

We’ll walk hand in hand through this desert, my dear,

As once through green fields we went straying,

Our crosses we’ll lift and courageously bear,

Each strength to the other conveying.”

“It’s perfect,” I tell them, but I look at Olga when I say it. Her smile is so soft, I think she knows I mean the poem most of all.

“Papa helped me build the boxes,” Tatiana explains, “and Olga did everything else while I had lessons.”

“In Papa’s study,” Olga adds, “so his cigarettes covered the smell of the wood scorching. And when did the two of you find time to paint?”

Anastasia claps her hands and bounces on her toes like one of the dogs begging for a scrap. “While you thought
we
were having lessons! Mr. Gibbes and Monsieur Gilliard let us dodge a little every day.”

“Why, they were playing double agents.” Tatiana laughs. “Monsieur Gilliard let me off early to help Olga with your presents.”

The Big Pair scurry off to tease our tutors for fooling all four of us, but Anastasia holds me back. “Here,” she says, shoving a flat package tied up with gold embroidery floss at me. “Open it.” Anyone else might think she was angry if they heard her barking orders this way, but I know my Nastya better than that, and pull carefully at the tissue.