The Romanov Cross: A Novel (53 page)

She quickly turned her head to see Frank stirring on the gurney. The covers were still tucked around him, the stocking hat dusted with snow.

“No more … country music.”

His voice came out like a frog, croaking, but it was music to her
ears. He angled his head so that their eyes could meet—deep bruises were already forming all around his sockets, making it look like he’d just been punched—and she fumbled to turn off the radio.

“Are you okay?” she asked, alternating between looking at Frank and watching the road.

“Where are we?”

“On the way to the hospital, in Nome.”

He closed his eyes, as if mulling it over.

“Should I pull over? Do you need my help?”

Opening them again, he said, “What happened, at the bridge?”

Unsure where to begin, she started to describe the patrol car’s blocking the entrance, but he shook his head slightly and said, “That much I remember. I meant the Vanes.”

She swallowed, and said, “The van blew up. It must have been loaded with lots of extra gas. You were thrown clear.”

His gaze traveled around the ambulance, snow drifting around the interior like the white flakes in a snow globe. Plainly, he had noted no other passengers, and Nika didn’t think she needed to say anything more. He put his head back down, staring at the roof of the cabin, and she studied the road again. In a good sign, the surface seemed smoother and more recently plowed, which meant she was getting closer to the city.

Even with the heat on high, she was shivering in her coat, and had to bend forward over the wheel when another bout of coughing hit her.

“How long has that been going on?” Slater asked, as if suddenly on alert again.

Nika waved it off, loosening her face mask to catch some fresh air; fear was making her hyperventilate. Despite the whirling snow and ice, she could see lights up ahead. Not many, but enough. With both gloves, she gripped the wheel like a captain determined to go down with the ship and steered for the lights.

A roadhouse was dimly discernible on her left, and the sign above the seawall on Gold Beach. She was driving along the Norton Sound, the wind thumping at the sides of the ambulance like paddles. The
new hospital wasn’t too far off. On a clear night, she might have been able to see it by now; only four stories high, it was nonetheless the tallest structure in town. The mariners, who had once used the church steeples as their beacons, now looked for the lighted antennae atop the hospital.

When she finally entered the concentrated network of streets that comprised downtown Nome, she felt like a marathoner running on shaky legs toward the finish line. As if to bring the point home, she saw off to her left the wooden archway that marked the end of the Iditarod race … and then the wooden sign festooned with placards showing the distance to places like Miami and Rio. The streetlamps swayed and bobbed, casting a wild yellow glow on the bingo parlors and bars, but not a soul was out on the windy, snow-choked streets.

At the corner of West Fifth Avenue, she turned too sharply, and the ambulance nearly slid into a hydrant before she could straighten it out again.

Take it easy
, she told herself,
you’re almost there
.

Just ahead she could see the lighted sign that read
NORTON SOUND REGIONAL HEALTHCARE
:
EMERGENCY ENTRANCE
, and blowing the horn the whole way, she piloted the car down the ramp, under the covered portico, and into the heated garage.

Several members of the hospital staff came charging out through the sliding glass doors—all duly warned, and garbed in hazmat suits—and while two of them jumped into the back of the old ambulance and started trundling Frank, still on the gurney, into the receiving area, a third yanked open the driver’s side door. Melted snow and slush slopped out, and Nika felt as if she was about to slide out onto the floor, too. A burly male nurse grabbed her, and escorted her inside, a strong arm wrapped around her waist.

“Quarantine,” she said, through her mask. “He needs to be quarantined.”

“They know,” he said, through a plastic face mask of his own. “The Alaska Highway Patrol called ahead.”

She was guided onto the nearest chair, but when she glanced down
at her mask, she could see that there was a pink stain on the gauze. “Me, too,” she said, in a muffled voice.

But she wasn’t sure he’d heard her.

When her gloves were taken off to check for frostbite, she saw in the center of her palm, where the needle had pricked her on St. Peter’s island, a cluster of tiny red lines, radiating outwards like the rays of the sun in a child’s drawing.

“Me, too,” she repeated, drawing away from him and doubling over as a fit of coughing overwhelmed her. “Quarantine.”

The nurse instinctively jumped back, and when Nika’s breath finally returned, she gasped, “Stay away,” before sliding down out of the chair, limp as a rag doll, and onto the gleaming linoleum floor.

“Let me at least take the tiller!” Anastasia had begged Sergei, more than once, but he had refused every time. His teeth were clenched in determination, his eyes were fixed on the distant prospect of St. Peter’s Island, but Ana feared for his life. He had guarded her, cared for her, loved her, for thousands of miles, and now, just as they were within sight of their destination, his skin was turning blue, and his cough had become rough and constant and alarming.

It had also become familiar.

Anastasia and her sister Tatiana had come down with the flu themselves the winter before, but bad as it had been, they had weathered it. Thousands of others, she knew, did not. In the military hospitals, where the imperial daughters helped to tend to the soldiers wounded in battle with the Germans, Ana often passed by the influenza wards, where she could hear the retching and hacking, the agonized cries and the deathly gurgles of its victims as they drowned in a tide of their own blood and mucus. Once gone, their bodies were hastily wrapped in their own sheets, and rather than being taken through the hospital corridors again, and risking a further spread of the contagion, they were slipped out a window, down a wooden chute requisitioned from a grain silo, and straight onto the back of a waiting wagon. Huge pits,
swimming in quicklime, had been dug on the outskirts of St. Petersburg, and the dead were deposited there with no observance or ceremony of any kind. Who would have lingered in such a place to do so?

She should have known when she first heard the pilot Nevsky coughing at the inn. All the way across the continent, she and Sergei had skirted every danger, from random thieves to Bolshevik soldiers, corrupt officials to marauding Cossacks, but this was the one threat that could not be seen coming. And even if they had, what else could they do? There was no other means of getting as far as they had than to bribe a pilot. She wished an ill fate on Nevsky.

“Sergei,” she warned, in the tone of a grand duchess who would brook no dissent, “I cannot sail this boat alone. For my sake, if not your own, you must rest, just for a bit.”

But he had acted as if he hadn’t even heard her; it was possible he had not. It looked as if the teeth were rattling in his skull, and he had collapsed in another paroxysm of coughing. It had all come on so fast she could hardly believe it … though she had seen such a phenomenon before. Even in the military wards, it had often been the hardiest and most energetic young men who had fallen the fastest. It was one of the great mysteries of the disease. Dr. Botkin, who had cared for Ana and her sister, had suggested it was this very constitution that contributed to the victims’ demise. “Their own strength is their undoing,” he had said, shaking his head as he read their thermometers and ordered more cold compresses to bring down their fevers. “Be glad that you are frail and pampered princesses,” he’d said, and Tatiana had thrown a pillow at him.

Was that truly what had saved them? Or was it, as Rasputin had darkly ordained, that she carried in her blood a proof against the plague, that the deadly blood disease inherited from her mother, and passed on only to the male offspring, offered some immunity from the worst ravages of the Spanish flu? How strange, that her compromised nature might have been her greatest guardian.

She could serve as the messenger of doom, it seemed, but not one of its victims.

A block of ice bumped up against the boat, and a wave of icy blue
water crested the starboard side and sloshed into the bottom, washing up and over her boots. She tried to lift her feet above the water, but she could not maintain her balance on the narrow thwart for very long. Both her feet were nearly frozen, but the left one in particular, wearing the boot specially designed to accommodate its deformity, had no feeling left in it at all. She longed to remove the boot and rub the life back into it, ideally before a roaring fire … but St. Peter’s Island was still far off.

And the closer they got, the less welcoming it appeared.

A gnarled black rock, swathed in mist and surrounded by jagged rocks sticking up out of the water like spikes, it was the least likely place on earth to have earned the name of sanctuary. But that, she knew, was precisely why it had been chosen. The followers of Father Grigori, who believed, as she did, that he was a prophet, had traveled all the way from Pokrovskoe to take refuge here, to build their church and to await the return of their
starets
. For Ana, his bodily return seemed unlikely—she knew all too well the ravages that had been inflicted upon him before his drowning in the Neva River—but she did not doubt the strength of his spirit. She did not doubt the image she had seen, swirling up out of the gun smoke in that cellar in Ekaterinburg, any more than she doubted the emerald cross, imbued with his powers, that she still wore under her coat and corset.

Sergei had taken his hand from the tiller and was pointing, with one shaking finger, ahead at the island. When she reached out and stroked the side of his face, he drew back in horror, afraid of infecting her, and insisted that she look for the fires. “They will light fires.”

And then, racked with a cough that drenched his own hand in blood, he had let go of the sail and let go of life. Blessing her, he had rolled over the side of the boat, and into the churning waters of the strait.

The last thing she had seen of him, as she lunged to the stern and his body was engulfed by the waves, was a frozen blue cornflower bobbing between the shards of ice. It was, undoubtedly, the one she had first given him by the train tracks in Siberia.

She’d have given every gem in her corset to reclaim it.

And then she had turned to the task of steering the boat through the blinding fog and the heaving waves, steadfastly looking for the fires that Sergei said they lighted on the cliffs every night. “They are the beacons to guide their prophet, lost and wandering in the dark, to their new home,” he had told her. And when she saw them burning like tiny candles at the end of a long and gloomy hallway, her heart had risen in her chest. The boat, as if guided by some miraculous hand, had passed through the rocks and reefs and tide pools, and ground to a halt on a narrow strip of pebbles and sand. When she had sunk to her knees on the beach, soaked to the skin and gasping for breath, she had thanked God for her deliverance. Over the crashing of the surf, she thought she heard the tolling of a church bell.

And in the last light of day—a day that was shorter in this northern part of the world than anywhere else—she had looked up to see her rescuers running down the beach toward her. But the prayer of thanks turned to ashes in her mouth as they closed the distance.

Far from coming to her rescue, these were a pack of black wolves, their eyes shining orange and their white fangs bared. The boat was gone, drifting back out to sea, and even if she had wanted to try to outrun them, there was nowhere to go. Pulling the cross from beneath her clothes, she clutched it tightly, lowered her head in prayer, and prepared to join her massacred family in Heaven. The wolves came on, and at any moment she expected to hear their bloodthirsty panting and feel their sharp teeth at her throat. But just as she braced herself for the attack, she heard a sharp, piercing whistle from the cliffs above, and when she lifted her eyes long enough to look through the veil of her own ice-rimed hair, she saw the wolves drawing up short, nervously pawing the sand, moving in circles around her, whining and barking like dogs at the kitchen door.

What had happened?

The lead wolf, with a white blaze on its muzzle, stepped closer—she could smell his rank breath—and stared at her hands, clutching the emerald cross, with an almost human curiosity.

The whistle came again, and all the wolves turned to look at the cliffside, where a man in a long black cassock was slowly descending
an almost invisible flight of stairs. For a second, Anastasia thought, “My God, it
is
Rasputin!” But as he marched across the frozen beach, she saw that it was someone else—tall as Rasputin and as broad in the shoulder, but with a face that was more benign, less worldly, and unshrouded by a tangled black beard. There was an undeniable ferocity in Father Grigori’s features, but none in this priest’s. He waved one arm, and the wolves, except for their leader, were swept back like dust before a broom.

“Anastasia,” he said, dropping to his knees beside her, “I am Deacon Stefan.”

It was the man Sergei had told her about, the man who had led the pilgrims from his village.

Taking her into his embrace, he said, “We have been waiting a long time for you.”

The hot tears suddenly springing from her eyes warmed her face, and when the wolf with the white nose stepped forward to lick them, the deacon did not intervene.