The Lost Crown (24 page)

Inside the wrapping I find a watercolor painting of a baby pasted in a cardboard frame. The little cherub has a tuft of blond hair, a round forehead almost as broad as Olga’s, and teardrop-shaped eyes like Tatiana’s set wide apart in his flat face.

“What a darling picture!”

“It’s Tikhon,” Anastasia says, more to my knees than my face. “Or anyway, what I think Auntie’s baby might look like.”

My breath blooms up from my chest. “Oh, Nastya—” But I can’t say a single thing more. Instead I clamp my sister in a hug that leaves her toes sweeping the floor until we’re both gasping.

I wipe at my eyes, careful not to smudge Tikhon’s portrait. “I can’t give you your present now,” I tell her, almost wailing like a baby myself. “It’s just too stupid.”

“Hand it over.”

It’s my turn to look at the floor as I take the tissue-wrapped packet out of my pocket. “It’s only my share of the pastilles from Anya’s package, and a few extras I begged from the others.”

“You saved them all for me?” I nod, and she grins. “That’s like Olga giving away every last one of her books!” Happiness warms me to my toes, and we don’t let go of each other’s hands until we have to cross ourselves at prayers.

Christmas morning, we’re allowed to go to church in the town! It’s been so long—since we took Holy Communion in October. Guards line both sides of the path through the public garden to the church. Behind them, the local people bow and doff their caps. Some even kneel in the snow. Clouds of their breath slip between the soldiers’ shoulders, like hands reaching out to greet us. Papa and Mama and the Big Pair are so happy, their faces shine like icons of the baby Jesus, and I’m lighthearted as a swallow, being outside that dull fence with new faces clustered all around me. I don’t care how old I am, I’d like to skip and run all the way to the church. I don’t dare peek at Anastasia and Aleksei, though. One look at my face and they’d whoop and run right along with me, and then we’d be in a vat of trouble.

Inside, the church is practically empty except for some soldiers who follow us in. Our private chapel at home was always empty too, but now that I’ve seen all those people outside, I wonder why they can’t come in to worship with us. It’s terribly cold out, and it’s Christmas.

As soon as the priest and deacon begin the Great Litany, I forget about the world outside. Everything about
Obednya
in a church is better than our ballroom
Obednitsa
and prayer services back at the governor’s house. Here the light is gentle and golden, and I can smell the wax and smoke of hundreds of candles, the incense in the censers and the rose oil in the icon lamps. Our voices ring off the stone walls and domed ceiling just the way they’re supposed to. It sounds so much holier this way. Everything, the words and the songs and the prayers, are just like they’ve been since I was a little girl. I wish I could drink the air right out of this place, or bottle it up and carry it back with us. Church always feels like home, more than any other place.

When the service ends and we file back across the square through the bright morning, everyone looks so awfully sober, I can’t understand it. Even Olga, who usually leaves church as contented as if she’s swallowed the sun, looks like something’s burning her from the inside.

“What’s wrong with everyone?” I whisper to Anastasia.

She squints at me. “Didn’t you hear? The priest used our titles in the Liturgy. He sang the
mnogoletie
prayer for the long life of the House of Romanov and called Papa ‘His Imperial Majesty’ right in front of all those soldiers. The Second Regiment’s going to throw a fit.”

My stomach shrivels like a dried-out mushroom. I can’t help feeling like maybe it was all my fault for daydreaming about how everything used to be. No wonder I didn’t notice the mistake.

“The poor priest! He’s been saying Liturgy the same way his whole life. Even on Christmas Day, with all of us standing right there in front of him, they can’t excuse an honest slip?” Suddenly my head is so full of unchristian thoughts I can’t look at the soldiers lining our path or swallow past the burn in my throat.

27.

OLGA NIKOLAEVNA

January 1918
Tobolsk

“C
itizen Romanov, you and your son will remove the epaulets from your uniforms immediately if you know what’s good for you,” Commissar Nikolsky announces. The glint in his eye matches the shine on his boots. He works his mouth as though he’s savoring Papa’s reaction.

Papa sets down his glass of tea. “Our epaulets? Why?”

My heart feels like it’s beating sideways as Aleksei reaches up to finger the narrow colored strips on his own shoulders where Papa’s initials are embroidered. What harm can there be in epaulets? Do they even mean anything, now that the army answers to Lenin?

“My apologies, Nikolai Alexandrovich,” Pankratov adds, “but the men of the rifle detachment have voted one hundred to eighty-five in favor of the guards and officers removing imperial epaulets from their uniforms. We request that you and your suite do so as well to avoid provocation. It’s for your own safety. We fear insults and attacks in the town.”

Nikolsky stalks off, his face curled up as if this whiff of courtesy makes him ill.

“This is absurd,” Papa says. “We aren’t even allowed into town.”

“My apologies,” Pankratov says again, and excuses himself.

“Incomprehensible,” Papa says, sipping his tea. “This little man thinks he can order us about?”

“Papa,” Aleksei asks, “are we going to do it?”

Papa takes another swallow of his tea, considering. I don’t breathe until he answers. “
Nyet, konechno
, son. Pankratov may be in charge of this house, but he is not an enlisted man, and I will not take such orders from a civilian.”

Pride and anxiety storm hot and cold inside me. In ten months under arrest we have never defied our captors.

“Such childishness,” Mama sputters over her sewing. All the others have gone outside for their afternoon walk. I wish I were with them—I’d trade my whole poetry notebook for one of Papa’s cigarettes right now. “It’s all that horrid Nikolsky’s doing, filling the men’s heads with Bolshevik nonsense. They’re testing us. Your papa won’t stand for this kind of disrespect.”

Her words needle at me, drawing questions through my mind like an itchy woolen thread. Part of me wants to laugh at myself for worrying so over shoulder boards, but I know what epaulets mean to Papa. One look at the shoulders of his uniform and anyone can see he’s honorary colonel-in-chief of the Fourth Guards Rifle Regiment, and was adjutant to tsars Alexander II and Alexander III. His epaulets are like no one else’s in all of Russia, and he wears them buttoned on every military shirt and coat he owns. They’re as much a part of my papa as his beard and cigarettes.

“Maybe Lenin’s government will issue new epaulets,” I offer. As soon as I say it, I know it’s a stupid idea. Papa would never wear Bolshevik insignia, and Lenin certainly won’t commission a set of epaulets for the ex-tsar. It doesn’t matter, though—Mama hasn’t even heard me.

“Russia needs authority, not equality. How do they expect to lead a country if every soldier is on equal footing?” She sighs, making it sound as if expelling air is an irksome chore. “It’s such a trial, being the mother of an undisciplined country. They have no sense of perspective. Isa Buxhoeveden arrived at the Kornilov house over a week ago, and they still refuse to let her in. What threat is a lady’s maid, I’d like to know? Everything is the same to them.”

My fingers knot around my own mending. That’s exactly what I’m afraid of, that something as small as strips of cardboard will set them off. God help us if the soldiers are as agitated as I am—my nerves have flared so, I could light a candle from my own fingertips. As I watch Mama serenely darning Papa’s socks, I wish for a moment that I had the same unchallenging faith that comforts her, and Tatiana, too. Leaving me with Mama on a day like this is like trying to dowse a grease fire with water.

“But Mama, what will they do if Papa and Aleksei don’t take off their epaulets?”

Her answer bounces back so quickly, I’m sure the possibilities haven’t pricked her consciousness. “Do? Their duty is to protect us, darling. And if they don’t, God will.”

Even as I cross myself, I’m thinking that may have been true before, especially back in Petrograd, but it isn’t so now. Something has shifted since Lenin seized power, and I don’t have the energy anymore to be angry with Mama for not seeing it.

“Papa, why do they do such things to us?”

“The Lord gives us our crosses to bear, Olga. It is not our place to question His will.
Sudba
.”

Konechno.
It’s what I knew he would say, and there’s a measure of comfort in that. Papa at least doesn’t dismiss the danger—
sudba
is about submitting to fate, not ignoring it. “If this is God’s cross to bear, why do you still wear your epaulets?” It’s the closest I can come to asking him why he’s willing to risk the soldiers’ anger. He’s been meek as a lamb in every other way.

“Being born on the feast day of St. Job the Sufferer means I must bear the insult, but for dignity’s sake I will not bow to their demands. Aleksei wears my initials on his epaulets, as I wear my father’s and grandfather’s. The Bolsheviks have no right to erase our heritage.”

Papa’s convictions douse me with humility, but my worries still moil like the steam rising from my tea. “It’s nothing but spite, evil spite.” I run my finger round and round the hot rim of my glass. “I’d like to show them how it feels to be pried from their homes and subjected to these petty insults.”

Papa reaches across his desk to still my hand. “The evil in the world now will be stronger still before this is all over, my Olga,” he says. “But remember, it is not evil that conquers evil, but love.”

He’s lost so much already, and borne it with the patience of Job. Weaker men would have crumbled. I don’t have the heart to ask him to give up one more thing, no matter how small.
Tak i byt
.

“
Izvinite
. May I have a moment?” The sight of Colonel Kobylinsky wearing a suit and tie instead of his uniform pulls my stomach taut. What can it mean if the colonel would rather wear civilian clothes before Papa than wear his epaulets in front of the very men he commands? Without a cap, the colonel’s streak of white hair stands out like a flag of surrender. His eyes skitter over Papa and Aleksei’s epaulets, and he holds his hands so still at his sides I think he must be quaking inside.

“Your Majesty.” Each word is a carefully mapped step. “Power is slipping out of my hands. They’ve taken away our epaulets. I can no longer be of any use to you. With your permission, I would like to leave. My nerves are completely shot. I can’t take it anymore.”

There must be more going on inside the guardhouse than debate about epaulets. The thought shrinks my skin like a coat of paint.

Papa puts his arm around the colonel’s shoulders. Suddenly I can barely swallow—I’ve never seen Papa embrace anyone outside our own family this way. “Evgeni Stepanovich,” he says in his gentle way, “on my own behalf, and on behalf of my wife and children, I beg you to stay. You see how we’re all forced to endure this. You, too, will have to endure.”

Bozhe moi.
I will never leave my family or my country, but what it would be like, even for an instant, to have to ponder the choice to stay or go? I’m not sure I envy the colonel, standing alone with seven pairs of eyes appealing to him. Our choice was so much easier.

Tears rise in Kobylinsky’s eyes. He nods just as my own sight blurs.

After that, nothing but sawing and chopping wood in the garden calms my nerves. Inside the house my heart rushes like a stream of water, but driving the ax forces it to pump with vigor and purpose. As long as my muscles tingle with exertion, my mind rests.

Out in the pale sunshine, we climb to Papa’s homemade platform on the greenhouse roof to sit with our backs to the warm boards and our feet dangling over the glass. It’s almost like the way we used to lie in the haystacks at
Stavka
. But when the sun glints off the gold braid on Papa and Aleksei’s epaulets, my fears slosh loose all over again. What must the soldiers and the people in the streets think of us, sitting up here like vain little eagles with our imperial plumage out for all to see?

“Gentlemen, please sit,” Papa calls from the card table. “Your tea will take a chill. Do you prefer bezique or bridge this evening?”

We seven have settled in our usual spots for teatime, but Dr. Botkin and Monsieur Gilliard stand in the doorway of Mama’s sitting room, looking as apprehensive as if they’ve been struck with stage fright.

“I had hoped, Your Majesty, that we might have a chat instead.”

Papa lays aside the worn deck of cards. “As you wish, monsieur.”

“May we speak frankly, Your Majesty?”

“Certainly. You are among friends.”

The way the doctor and the tutor look frantically at each other, I have the feeling they’ve plotted out a script, yet forgotten to discuss who will take the first line. Silence stretches tight between them and Papa. When Monsieur and the doctor both clear their throats, it startles all nine of us so, we chuckle sheepishly together.