Rescued (2 page)

She glanced at Chip, who was frowning.

“He's Leonid,” Maria said sternly. “Le-o-nid. Or Lenka, if you know him well.”

She glared, making it clear that she didn't think Katherine would ever be entitled to call Leonid that.

Katherine darted her gaze back and forth between Chip and Maria.

“I'm doing it again, aren't I?” Katherine asked. “Thinking Leonid would see things the same way as me? Really, Leonid, you can call yourself anything you want when we go to the twenty-first century. You could be Trevor, Josh, Zach . . .”

“Or Leonid,” Chip said, in the manner of someone putting his foot down.

All five of them were quiet for a moment. Or maybe an hour. Then Maria began to sniffle again.

“I'm sorry, but there's nothing to do!” she complained. “And with nothing to do, all I can do is think about . . .”

The dead
, Leonid thought.
The horror we all just escaped.

He was having the same problem. But it was surprising that Maria would be the one on the verge of tears, because she had always seemed the strongest of the four Romanov sisters. She was the one who carried fourteen-year-old Alexei up and down the stairs when he was in too much pain to walk; she was the one who comforted her mother when the woman screamed with headache and backache and pleas to God to deliver her from her agony. Leonid himself could handle the most petulant of Alexei's childish demands, but he'd sooner meet the devil than be in the same room with the tsarina when the tsarina was in pain.

And Maria sits with her mother like that for hours. . . .
Leonid caught his mistake.
She used to do that before her mother died. . . .

“Funny cat videos,” Anastasia said, easing her arm around her sister once again. “Maria, that's what you need. Didn't that JB guy say something about screens? Is there Wi-Fi? Can we watch YouTube? Maria, you'll see when you get to the twenty-first century, funny cat videos are the best way to cheer yourself up. There's this one where the cat plays ‘Chopsticks' on the piano and then . . . well, you have to see it. Chip, Katherine—how do we make that happen?”

Leonid knew what a cat was. He knew what a piano was. Pretty much everything else Anastasia said might as well have been in yet another foreign language, one he'd never heard before. He remembered that Anastasia, like Chip, had somehow lived two lives, in two different times. She'd had one childhood as Anastasia in the early twentieth century and another one as someone named Daniella in the early twenty-first century.

“I don't think that . . . ,” Chip began hesitantly.

“You know YouTube didn't exist in 1918,” Katherine said scornfully. “Remember, JB has the screens set to block out everything after that.”

Anastasia's face fell, showing entirely too much grief for someone simply being denied the chance to see a cat on a piano. Katherine must have noticed, because she continued in a much kinder voice, “But were there movies back in the early 1900s? Funny movies? Anything you laughed at back then that you want us to call up now?”

“Charlie Chaplin!” Anastasia cried. “Oh, Maria, remember the time we pretended we were in a Charlie Chaplin movie? And I put on a fake moustache and did that walk like a wobbling duck . . .”

As she spoke, Chip and Katherine both moved toward one of the walls, feeling around as if they were looking for something—a hidden knob, maybe, or a secret lever. They must have hit some kind of switch, because suddenly an image sprang up on the wall, as immediate as looking out a window. And somehow it showed exactly the moment from the past that Anastasia was describing: Anastasia at perhaps thirteen or fourteen, out in the garden back at Tsarkoe Selo, with the grand columns of the Catherine Palace towering behind her. It had to be spring or early summer, because the roses were in bloom. Anastasia was wearing a lacy white dress with a lovely blue sash—Leonid had forgotten how beautiful all the grand duchesses used to be before the war, before the measles, before the shaved heads, before the worry and fear of Tobolsk and Ekaterinburg and that very last, terrible day and night. It was cruel to think, but Anastasia had always been the shortest and the dumpiest of the sisters; the ongoing debate about which of the four girls was the prettiest always veered between Olga, Tatiana, and Maria. Anastasia was never mentioned.

But now, in the scene before them, Anastasia's grand flag of dark blond hair waved gently behind her in the breeze; her bright blue eyes crinkled with joy and laughter. Nobody else in the world, before or after, could have been as beautiful as Anastasia in that moment.

Then she crammed a bowler derby on her head and held a fuzzy black caterpillar made of knotted yarn on her upper lip and began to waddle.

Maria appeared beside Anastasia in the scene on the wall. Maria-on-the-wall was screaming with laughter at her sister's imitation; she was so lost in mirth that she'd given up trying to play whatever character she was supposed to portray.

And then, on the wall, Olga and Tatiana stepped up beside their younger sisters. The two of them glowed as brightly as the sunshine on their white lace dresses; they were royal young ladies right at the age when princes from all across Europe were expected to start coming to court them.

A lot of things had been expected before the war that never came to pass.

“Oh, Anastasia, you are
so
silly,” Tatiana was saying on the wall, even as she fondly ruffled the younger girl's hair.

Sitting on the floor in front of the wall, the real Anastasia and Maria began to weep.

“How could they have been so beautiful and alive then, and so dead now?” Anastasia wailed. “How could we have lost them?”

Sobbing was such a messy thing. Leonid had never been able to understand why God created humans with so much snot and so many tears inside them.

Leonid pulled out his handkerchief and timidly handed it to Anastasia, who took it and blew her nose on it with an unladylike snort. Leonid looked pointedly at Chip. If the other boy truly had been a king once upon a time, he shouldn't need to be reminded of his gentlemanly duty to give his handkerchief to Maria.

Chip gave a helpless shrug.

“Sorry, dude,” he said. “Kids don't carry handkerchiefs in the twenty-first century.”

“And I don't have any Kleenex,” Katherine mumbled, patting the pockets of her own pants. She turned to face the wall, where the happy past kept playing out, the four beautiful grand duchesses laughing and hugging and laughing again.

“Would you just stop?” Katherine yelled at the wall. “Can't you see this isn't helping?”

Instantly the wall went blank.

On the floor, Anastasia and Maria kept crying, sharing Leonid's sodden handkerchief between them.

*    *    *

Hours—or maybe days—later, Leonid went to speak to Chip and Katherine privately, off to the side.

“I don't want to upset the grand duchesses,” he began. “But there are people I lost too. Er, I don't know if they're lost or not. I don't know what happened to them. There were no letters . . . but then, everyone stopped getting letters. . . .”

He kept his head down. He couldn't bring himself to look either Chip or Katherine directly in the face. Would they think it forward of him, a mere servant, to wish for anything? Katherine had rescued him from certain death; how could he ask for more than that?

Chip glanced over his shoulder toward Maria and Anastasia, who were still huddled together on the floor. They'd stopped crying, but somehow their dry eyes didn't make them look any less grief-stricken. Anastasia stroked Maria's hair; Maria seemed to be whispering a prayer.

Chip put his arm around Leonid in a brotherly fashion, and drew him farther away from the grand duchesses, toward the back wall.

“I understand how you feel,” Chip said. “When I left the 1400s, there were lots of people I wondered about. I looked them up as best I could—”

“You did?” Katherine said. “I didn't know that.”

Chip shrugged as helplessly as when he lacked a handkerchief.

“There wasn't much to find,” he said. “Forsooth, it was as though most of them had never lived.”

“He goes all medieval on us sometimes when he's remembering the past,” Katherine apologized.

Leonid didn't quite know what the word “medieval” meant, but he could sense a logic in Katherine's words. Chip seemed more like a boy from the past than from the future right now. He wore his bright blond hair in short, childish curls around his face, and his voice veered between manly depth and boyish squawking. His skin was smooth, nowhere close to needing its first shave.

And yet, for all that, he had an ancient air about him.

“Everyone dies eventually, Leonid,” Chip said, like a priest intoning a solemn truth. “Mayhap it is best not to know what happened in the end to people you remember as young and healthy and alive—so alive.”

“Chip traveled more than five hundred years into the future from his original time,” Katherine told Leonid. “Of course everyone he knew from his original life died. With you, it's only going to be about a century, but still—”

“I just saw my uncle in May!” Leonid protested. “The Bolsheviks wouldn't let him stay at the house in Ekaterinburg with everyone else. And then yesterday—I mean, the day before that awful night in the basement—just before dinner the guards told me he'd come for me. That was why they took me away and told me to wait for him in the house across the street….”

Leonid saw Chip and Katherine exchange glances.

“Oh,” Katherine said. “He doesn't know.”

“Know what?” Leonid asked.

For a long moment, neither of them answered.

“We only heard gossip,” Chip said. “Guards talking . . . Maybe it isn't even true.”

“
What
isn't true?” Leonid asked, so loudly he feared one of the grand duchesses might have heard. But when he glanced back over his shoulder, they were still huddled together, lost in their own grief.

Katherine shook her head, the hair she'd pulled back like a horse's tail flipping side to side.

“Not knowing for sure hurts too, doesn't it?” she asked Leonid. “I'm sorry, but when Chip and Jonah and I were in 1918, we heard the guards say that your uncle was already dead. The story about him coming for you—that was all a lie. A lie to save your life, actually.”

Leonid barely heard that last part. He could make no sense of it. His uncle Ivan dead? Impossible! Ivan had worn such a fine sailor's uniform when he first came to Leonid's tiny village of Sverchokova. He was so tall and muscular, and he told such fine stories. He worked for the tsar. He sailed the tsar's yacht for him in the summertime; he served as valet at one of the tsar's palaces the rest of the year.

Leonid's own father had died so long ago Leonid didn't remember him; Leonid clung to his uncle as only a little boy could. And then Leonid's mother, seeing this, had begged Ivan to take Leonid back to the palace with him, to put Leonid to work for the royal family too.

Ivan had changed everything about Leonid's life. Ivan had
made
Leonid's life.

How could he be dead?

“Show me,” Leonid demanded. “You can't just say these things and not—”

Katherine winced, but then she muttered, “Show us what happened to Leonid's uncle Ivan after the last time they saw each other.”

A scene appeared on the wall again, but Leonid didn't feel like it was a miracle this time. He was no longer watching beautiful, happy girls in a sunny garden. He was watching his uncle and Nagorny, another of the royal family's servants, being led from the house in Ekaterinburg. Like Ivan, Nagorny had once been a sailor on the tsar's yacht; before Ekaterinburg it had also been Nagorny's job to take care of Alexei.

Leonid could see that both Ivan and Nagorny were trying hard to stand tall and walk fearlessly—to show only disdain for the cluster of Bolshevik guards around them. But Leonid could also see that both men were deeply afraid. It was written in the set of their jaws, in the slight tremor in their strides.

The guards led Ivan and Nagorny through the double set of fences, out to the street. Ivan and Nagorny were placed in separate carriages, each of them surrounded only by men who hated them.

Now Ivan and Nagorny were entering a prison.

Now Ivan and Nagorny were being shot, crumpling to the ground, dying. . . .

“Stop!” Chip shouted. “No more! Silence!”

Leonid had forgotten Chip was there. Leonid had forgotten everything but that one moment in May 1918, everything but his uncle's body falling. Quickly Leonid looked behind him—yes, the grand duchesses had heard the gunshots. They were staring at the horrifying scene on the wall, their wide eyes pooling once again with tears.

“Not them, too!” Anastasia exploded. “Must we lose everyone we loved?” She glanced at Leonid and bit her lip. “I didn't mean—”

“It happened so quickly,” Katherine was apologizing, more to the grand duchesses than to Leonid. “I thought we'd have some warning, and we could get a sense of what was going to happen and then shut it off—”

“Save them!” Maria shrieked from her place on the floor. “You saved me and Anastasia and Alexei and Leonid—go back and save Ivan and Nagorny, too!”

Now it was Katherine whose eyes filled with tears.

“We can't,” she said. “I'm sorry. It's too late.”

“I know it's hard to understand,” Chip said soothingly, sounding like he was trying to be as diplomatic as a king. “But JB said there were only a few windows of opportunity for time travelers to get in and out in 1918. It was such a damaged year. With World War I and all the fighting in Russia . . . it's a miracle anybody could be saved. We can't get to Ivan.”

Leonid's heart throbbed with pain, as if his body had been riddled with bullets too. It hurt so badly that his uncle was gone. But it also hurt that Maria, not Leonid, had been the one to beg for Ivan's life. What kind of nephew was Leonid that he could only stand there, meekly watching his uncle die?