The Lost Crown (5 page)

Autumn 1914
Tsarskoe Selo

“H
er Imperial Highness the Grand Duchess Tatiana Nikolaevna,” Dr. Gedroiz announces, presenting my official Red Cross nursing certificate. The scarlet seal stamped beside my name makes me so proud, I do not even blush to hear her read my title in front of so many people. I like to think we are all sisters now, Sisters of Mercy, no matter our rank or station, though I know no reporters or photographers would be at this graduation ceremony if Dr. Gedroiz herself were not a princess, and Mama, Olga, and I among her pupils.

For weeks, my eagerness to get to the lazaret has made me the first of my family to wake and dress each morning. They tease me sometimes for the way I roll the sleeves of my uniform so tightly above my elbows, but I want to be ready to work at a moment’s notice. As long as I have my starched nurse’s uniform, I can manage not to mind the plain blouses and wartime woolens my sisters and I wear instead of our usual cambrics, linens, and silk-lined cheviots with Orenburg shawls from Tailor Kitaev.

Each night Olga and I write down in our diaries the name, regiment, and wound of every man we bandage.

“How do you keep yourself so composed when you uncover a wound?” she asks. “I can’t help bracing myself—I never know what kind of gruesome thing I’ll find under the gauze.”

“Never look at the whole wound at once,” I tell her. “At first I could not look at them any more than you. I had to focus on dressing and sanitizing one stitch at a time. Bit by bit, I learned to work my way through each one.”

By the time we graduate to assisting with bone splinters, shrapnel, and bullets, I have trained myself to keep my eyes on the doctor’s hands, or the instruments, and no more else than I need to. Olga still stiffens each time an instrument touches a man’s skin, but I hold tight to my poise, right down to the moment of an amputation. After the cut is made, I have to turn aside or risk fainting.

“Tatiana Nikolaevna?” Dr. Gedroiz prompted only once, a gangrenous toe pinched in midair between a pair of forceps. My knees had locked. It was all I could do to open my mouth and breathe, much less take it from her. No one but Mama has a stomach strong enough to let her remove the severed digits and limbs from the operating table without going woozy.

Not three weeks after receiving our Red Cross certificates, we see a man die for the first time. At the end of an operation for a terrible chest wound, the blood wells up quickly as a crimson parasol unfurling. It happens so softly I only realize he is gone when Dr. Gedroiz throws down her instruments and crosses herself.

Olga has already backed away. More blood is pooled round the soldier’s lung than either of us has seen in our lives. Even Aleksei has never bled so much. The look of it makes me feel as though my stomach has disappeared completely.

“What happened?”

Dr. Gedroiz shakes her head. “I’ve performed this operation a thousand times and never lost a patient.”

Each time a man dies, Olga and I both ask why, but the answers I crave never satisfy my sister. “You want to understand how it happens, not why,” she tries to explain as I pore over my notes from Dr. Gedroiz’s lectures. I cannot deny it. While I plunge myself into study of the operation or disease, looking for what we might have done differently, Olga broods and storms over the senselessness of war itself. What is the use? Halting this war is not within our power, but learning from our mistakes in the lazaret could save the next man’s life.

As seriously as we take ourselves, many of the soldiers still think of us almost as pets. There is no ignoring the way they cluster round us for snapshots and beg us to sign the photographs. But that, too, is a kind of medicine for them, so I forbid myself from complaining. Sometimes Mama lets Aleksei visit the wards for the same reason.
“Nash naslednik,”
they cry when he arrives.
Our heir.

“Tell me a battle story!” he demands, bouncing on the nearest soldier’s bed, and the men are so charmed by our brother’s enthusiasm that they never seem to notice his rudeness. Like boys themselves, they stage great conflicts across the hills and valleys of their bedclothes with Aleksei’s lead soldiers.

The other nurses sometimes tense when Aleksei arrives, for he can make trouble they are helpless to correct. When one of them, Varvara Afanaseva, caught him in our storeroom looking over the neatly packed rows of cut and rolled bandages, Aleksei asked, “You did all that yourself?”

“Yes,” Varvara answered.

He poked the tip of his tongue between his teeth. I held my breath, afraid of what would come next.

“And what if I destroyed it?” he asked, eyeing the shelves again.

Varvara blanched for an instant, then regarded him calmly. “It would remain as our memory of your visit.”

Aleksei grimaced, then turned on his heel and marched out of the room.

I let out a sigh. “If you had told him it was forbidden, he would certainly have destroyed it,” I told Varvara, and hurried after him.

But if a patient suddenly cries out in pain, our brother abandons his games and silently appears at the man’s side, offering his small hand to grip. He has a golden heart, our Aleksei, from knowing so much pain himself.

Often I’ve seen Olga do the same. As squeamish as she is before an open wound, Olga never shrinks from a patient’s suffering. She has a way about her that sometimes calms a man when the skill of Dr. Gedroiz’s hands or the power of morphine can no longer reach him, but the effort costs my sister, turning her as pale and drawn as if she is lending our patients the strength from her own body. Each day she sets off early to walk to the Feodorovsky
Sobor
, to pray alone before beginning her work. I miss the mornings when we used to swim or cycle together through the park while the tame deer nibble the grass.

One evening I find her hunched in the chair at the end of her cot, her face buried in her Red Cross apron. When I touch her shoulder, it shakes beneath my hand. “Olya,
dorogaya
?” I whisper, kneeling down beside her. She does not answer, so I take her hands in mine and pull them gently to her lap. Her face is dry. “
Dushka
, what is it? The infection in our grenadier’s wound has not spread, has it?”

“I’m just tired, Tatya,” she says. “Please don’t tell Mama. She’ll only worry.”

Beneath my fingers, her pulse is regular. I feel no sign of fever, but the rasp in her voice frightens me. “You should go to bed, Olya. I will have Nyuta bring our supper in.” She nods and begins slowly to undress. “Mashka can sleep with Mama tonight instead of me,” I decide. “I will stay here with you.”

Her hands hesitate, poised over her wimple. “No, Tatya. Please. It’s good for me to be alone.” She turns away, but I study her a moment longer. Her fingers tremble over the pins.

“I’ll be all right, Governess,” she says when she feels me watching. “I promise I’ll take a warm bath and go straight to bed with a book. Maria and Anastasia are right next door, and if you take Ortipo downstairs I won’t have to listen to her snoring like a frog at the end of your cot.”

Teasing about my fat French bulldog makes her look less pale all at once, and not so small. “All right,” I say. “Let me run the bath for you right now, and set out your tea rose perfume.”

“
Spasibo
, Tatya.” But her voice does not lift one note, leaving me feeling as though I am doing myself a favor, and not the other way round.

6.

MARIA NIKOLAEVNA

Winter 1914
Tsarskoe Selo

W
aking up every day and remembering Papa’s gone to the front is like biting into a bonbon with nothing in the center. I miss the puffs of cigarettes he shares with my sisters and me on our morning walks through the park, and even the sight of Trupp carrying Papa’s glasses of milk down the corridor. When Anastasia and I have our dancing lessons upstairs, my feet blunder more clumsily than ever, knowing Papa isn’t downstairs listening to our steps on the ceiling in his study.

While Mama and the Big Pair are at the lazaret, Anastasia takes every chance she has to be a
shvybzik
. She cranks up the gramophone loud enough to shake the picture frames, then dances to ragtime and jazz.

“It’s no fun when nobody’s down there,” she pants.

Mama’s always said it’s cheerful to hear our footsteps pattering over her head when she sits reading or sewing in her lilac boudoir, but Anastasia loves even more to dance in our bedroom or the playroom, so guests in the formal rooms below will think Aleksei’s elephant has got loose over their heads.

Darling little Jemmy barks and yips and tears around Anastasia’s ankles so fast I’m afraid she’ll be squashed flatter than
blini
. I scoop her up and press her silky ears against my cheek.

“I wish Mama would let us learn ragtime on the piano,” Anastasia grumps when the gramophone runs down.

“Can you imagine Tatiana playing music like this?”

Anastasia snorts. “Yes. I bet she could play every note perfectly. But Tatiana’d manage to turn it into sit-down-and-listen music instead of get-up-and-dance music. I don’t know how she does it.”

Anastasia always makes me laugh, but she can’t make me stop missing Papa. Mama calls Aleksei our Sunbeam, and Papa calls Mama his Sunny, but no one shines brighter for me than my Papa himself.

At least I never feel lonely on the days we visit our own lazaret. My sisters and even our parents will never give up teasing me about my eye for the soldiers. Of course I love seeing all those sweet young men lined up in long rows, but I do more than just look at them. Lots of them are younger than our big sisters, and the poor darlings are so homesick! Anastasia and I go from bed to bed, speaking to each man so they won’t be bored or lonesome. I know from his letters how Papa suffers at the front, playing dominoes at night with nothing but a glass of milk for company, and he’s not even wounded like our boys at the lazaret.

At first they were awfully shy. Some even pulled their blankets up to their chins when they saw us coming. Anastasia laughed and teased them by hiding behind her hat while I coaxed them out with pastilles and butterscotch toffees from my pockets. One red-haired fellow gasped, “Your Imperial Highness,” the first time I sat down at the foot of his bed. I blushed and Anastasia smirked.

“That’s just Mashka,” she told him, bouncing onto the blankets so close beside him that he blushed darker than the Crimson Drawing Room. “But I am Anastasia Nikolaevna, Chieftain of all Firemen!” The poor man only blinked his pale blue eyes back at her as she grinned wickedly and pinched a sugared Japanese cherry from his nightstand.

“She only says that because she doesn’t have her own regiment yet,” I whispered to him as Anastasia turned to badger the man in the next bed. “She’s only thirteen, and the officers on our yacht tease her about it all the time.”

“And you, Grand Duchess? Do you have a regiment?”

“The Ninth Kazansky Dragoons. I’m honorary colonel-in-chief. What regiment are you from?” And simple as that, we were friends.

Now the men gather around us like flocks of seagulls before we can reach the end of a ward. Six or eight of them at a time crowd over and around a single bed for snapshots. Maybe Anastasia and I are too little to be proper nurses, but I know we’re doing good, and I love it. There are always new soldiers to win over, though.

One day I hear a new patient ask another man, “Is it true the
Nemka
herself works here?” The others glare at him and make shushing sounds as Anastasia and I come nearer. When I stop at the foot of his bed, he only nods without looking at us, and won’t speak. It makes my toes turn toward each other, hesitating. I always make sure to say something to every soldier, but he seems so impatient for us to go, I feel like a disagreeable relative he’d like to shoo off his doorstep.

At supper that night with my sisters, I ask Olga, “Who is the
Nemka
?”

Olga and Tatiana both look as if I’ve slapped them. “Where did you hear that?” Tatiana asks.

“In the lazaret.”

Olga puts down her knife and pushes her plate away. My belly seems to be slinking down to my bottom. “What’s wrong?” I ask.

“Do not let Mama hear you say that word,” Tatiana says. “Not ever, Maria. Do you understand?”

I nod quickly, even though I don’t understand at all. Anastasia’s eyes bounce between us like two tennis balls.

“It’s an awful name for a German woman,” Olga says, looking at the table.

My eyes suddenly swim with tears. “But Mama is Russian now! Isn’t she?”

“Of course she is!” Tatiana leans over to wrap her arm around my shoulders and kiss my temple. “She has been Russian longer than some of those boys have been alive. Besides, she was born in Hesse, not Prussia like that beastly kaiser.”

“Uncle Henry is Prussian,” Olga says to the tines of her fork.

“What has that to do with anything? Uncle Henry did not start the war.” Tatiana sighs and squeezes my hand as if to say,
Never mind
. “So it does not matter where a person was born.”

“It does matter,” Olga says, “if that’s all they know about Mama. St. Petersburg had to change its name, and it’s been the capital for over two centuries. There’s even talk about banning Christmas trees. Why should Mama be immune after only twenty years in Russia?”