The Lost Crown (36 page)

37.

TATIANA NIKOLAEVNA

May 1918
Ekaterinburg

“M
ama?” Aleksei calls from his bedroom. “Mama!” I drop a stitch and a sigh. Nearly fourteen years old, he should know better than to shout like that while Mama is finally resting, especially with his
dyadka
on duty. But Aleksei keeps calling until I finish the row and lay my knitting aside.

What do I find in the back bedroom but my brother with his good leg dangling out of his cot and Leonka the kitchen boy holding Mama’s wheelchair at the ready.

“Aleksei Nikolaevich, get back into that bed this instant!” Both of them look up at me, frightened as rabbits. Leonka wipes a cuff along both sides of his long, pale nose as if he has been crying. Maybe I am the bossy one, but even I am not imposing enough to make my brother and his companion so tearful in one sentence. “What is it?” I ask as I help Aleksei ease back into the cot without bumping his bad knee. “And where is Nagorny?”

“Leonka says they’re taking his uncle away, and my
dyadka
, too!”

“What?” I whirl to Leonka. “Who is?”

“Commandant Avdeev. He took Uncle Vanya and sailor Nagorny out through the kitchen and into the duty office. Now they’re both gone.”

Aleksei’s room sways as though a beam has been sawed from under me. Christ have mercy!

“Leonka, go tell the tsar and the empress what is happening, then come right back here and sit with Aleksei Nikolaevich. Aleksei, stay put, and do not move that leg again, do you hear me? We will have this straightened out immediately.”

“Citizens Nagorny and Sednev have been taken to the District Committee for questioning.” The way the commandant leans back in his chair without even the courtesy to stand in Papa’s presence stokes my temper even higher.

“Why?” I demand. “For how long?”

“I cannot say.”

“Cannot or will not?”

Papa puts a gentle hand on my shoulder. His thumb travels back and forth across my shoulder blade, and I know without looking that his other hand is stroking his beard. “And what of the rest of our people?” he asks.

Avdeev shrugs. “I have no news.”

“If the tsarevich cannot have his
dyadka
, you must let one of the others in,” I insist. “Monsieur Gilliard or Mr. Gibbes. His condition requires round-the-clock care.”

“Dr. Botkin is at your disposal twenty-four hours a day. Dr. Derevenko’s visits will also continue daily so long as you follow the regulations. I fail to see how sailor Nagorny’s absence constitutes a lack of medical attention.”

I will not shout, but my throat has tightened so I have to thrust each word out. “Dr. Botkin is the empress’s personal physician. He is not experienced in tending the tsarevich’s condition.”

“Yet these tutors are?” Avdeev interrupts.

“You do not understand!”

“We agree, at last.” Avdeev puts up his hand before I can reply. “I am following the orders of the Ural Regional Soviet. If you take issue with your treatment, you are free to petition the Central Executive Committee.”

“Come, daughter,” Papa says, easing me backward through the doorway.
“Tak i byt.”

Frustration propels me across our bedroom, pacing like Mama before she left Tobolsk. “Petitions! Avdeev wants us to write petitions while Alyosha lies sick without his
dyadka
, Gilliard, Gibbes, or even Kolya, the poor darling. And Leonka! A boy of fourteen, stranded in the Urals without a sliver of family. How can they be so cruel to a pair of youngsters?” My words rush after one another like train carriages. “This must be that hateful Rodionov’s doing. He never liked Nagorny. They think they can humiliate us and wear us down by stealing our people away.” I pause to capture a breath and catch Olga fidgeting. “What is it? Olga, tell me.”

“Look who’s left besides Nyuta and Leonka. The youngest man is Chef Kharitonov, and he’s almost twenty years older than Sednev and Nagorny. Dr. Botkin’s kidneys are turning him into an old man before our eyes. Trupp is another decade beyond that. Out of all the loyal people who followed us, they’ve shaved us down to the five weakest.”

My fury retreats, leaving me motionless. “What do you think they mean to do with us?”

“I don’t know. Maybe just wear us down, like you said, but I don’t like the feel of this place, Tatya. Tobolsk was never like this, even at the end with Rodionov. Why did they paint the windows over when they’d already built a fence too high to see past? Why won’t they let Dr. Derevenko speak to us about anything but Aleksei’s leg, even in Russian?”

I shake my head. Trying to comprehend why they do these things only makes them loom larger in my mind.

“… for at a loss for any defense, this prayer do we sinners offer Thee as Master; have mercy on—”

A
pop
sounds from the street below, then a
chock
rattles the windowpane, halting our evening devotions. Our eyes fly open all at once. Beside me, Olga’s hand hovers over her breastbone, frozen in the middle of crossing herself.

“Nicky, what was that?”

“It sounded like a rifle,” Papa says. “Keep away from the window,” he orders the Little Pair, already scrambling up from their knees to investigate.

A few moments later Avdeev puts his head through the door. “Did you hear anything?” he asks. “Is everyone well?”

“We heard a shot,” Papa answers.

“One of the sentries outside fired his rifle into the window frame,” Avdeev admits. “He claims he saw movement.” Movement! With six of us on our knees and Aleksei in his cot? As if to prove the point, not one of us budges. “I apologize for the disturbance,” Avdeev says, and slinks out.

“Clumsy lout!” I spit. “How could he see anything through those fogged-up panes?”

“Probably just fooling about with his rifle,” Papa says, patting Mama and Olga at the same time. “All sentries do.”

The next day thirty new men join the detachment guarding us.

“They’re mostly from the Zlokazov factory in town,” Maria says. “It’s where Avdeev worked.”

“How do you know?”

Maria shrugs. “I asked one of them. He said he’d rather be here than at the front, and it pays better than the iron-works. Four hundred rubles a month, plus board.”

Anastasia snorts. “I’d like to make four hundred rubles a month just by leaning on a rifle and smoking cigarettes.”

“I don’t want to think about thirty more factory men fooling with their weapons,” Olga says. “I’m going to sit with Aleksei.”

“Dr. Derevenko is with him now, putting a plaster of Paris splint on his knee.”

“All the more reason to distract Aleksei.”

“But what will you say in front of Avdeev?”

For an instant, a hint of our merry Olga surfaces. “Don’t worry, Governess. I won’t speak any foreign languages—just read good Russian stories.”

Restless, I wind idly through the house. Before the front windows, I let my hands drift across the panes, trying to cast a shadow on the carpet. As the clouds break and gather the glass glows and dims, but no light ever seems to penetrate the whitewash. Blacked-out windows would have been more bearable than this teasing, weakhearted sunlight.

“Tatiana Nikolaevna? Is there something you need?” Behind me, Dr. Botkin looks up from the desk in the study, straightening his tie and glasses all at once.

“
Nyet, spasibo
, Evgeni Sergeevich.” My empty hands seem conspicuous, so I flatten them at my sides. “Is there … is there anything I may help you with?”

“Thank you, but I’m only writing a petition to the Central Executive Committee to allow Monsieur Gilliard or Mr. Gibbes into the house in place of Nagorny.”

“A petition?” With a tingle, my pulse wakens my fingertips. “Will you show me how to write one? I would like to make a request as well.”

He stands and offers me the chair.
“Konechno.”

Day by day Aleksei’s swelling goes down while the palisade separating us from the street sprouts higher, turning our rooms murkier yet. “It looks perfectly horrid out there,” I tell Mama and Aleksei after my walk in the garden. “The planks are ragged as railroad ties. Even if we could look out the windows, I doubt we would be able to see the cathedral’s crosses anymore.” I crouch down alongside the arm of Mama’s chair. “Mama, I wish you would come out into the garden with us.”

Her smile pulls down the corners of her eyes as if it pains her. “My rubbery old heart. And those stairs are no good for my sciatica. With Nagorny gone someone must stay in with Baby.”

“I could do that. I worry about you, staying cooped up indoors for so long.”

She pets my cheek with the back of her fingers. “I know, darling. I wish I could be like other mothers. But this is God’s cross, and we all must bear it.”

Pressing back a sigh, I nod and kiss her hand before joining my sisters in the drawing room. I have half a mind to ask Anastasia to put on one of her canine pantomimes for me, but the moment I sit down the Little Pair pop up and head toward the duty office.

“Where are you two going?”

“Shift change,” Anastasia says, pointing her wristwatch toward me. “We’re going to go see who’s on duty at the top of the stairs. You can come if you want.” Anastasia keeps her face flat as a canvas while Maria giggles.

“No, thank you,” I tell them, smiling a little in spite of myself as they scurry off.

“How is she?” Olga asks, nodding toward Mama’s room.

“The same.”

“I’ll sit awhile with her.”

My mind calls out,
Sit with me!
Instead I tell Olga, “You might try reading
Stories for the Convalescent
. Averchenko’s stories always make her laugh. And her heart drops are on the nightstand.”

Left only with my darning for company, my emotions fray until my throat turns hot and small, and I have to rip my stitches out one after another. I never meant to make Mama think I wish she were different. I only want her to be healthy, and this house is no place for that.

Back home, Mama’s lilac boudoir almost always had the windows thrown wide open to the imperial park. I could have stood on Papa’s shoulders and still not reached the top of those windows. Even when she spent days at a time on her chaise behind a silk screen, wide planters full of palms, lilacs, and roses freshened the room. Sealed up in this house, the air itself tastes dingy. She is thinner than in Tobolsk too, and hardly eats anything the women bring from the soviet soup kitchen in town. When Kharitonov or Leonka boil vermicelli for her on the alcohol stove, Mama only picks at that. Just the smell of the warming food makes her blanch. No matter how I explain the situation to Commandant Avdeev, he refuses to unseal the kitchen window one centimeter.

The next day Mama has a sick headache and cannot leave her room, much less go outdoors. All day long she lies in bed with her eyes closed, even when I ask Kharitonov and Trupp to carry Aleksei’s cot into her bedroom for company. Outside, the workmen hammer at the fence, drowning out the sound of my reading until I grow fed up enough to march to the duty office myself.

“Must they hammer all day long?” I ask Avdeev. “The empress is unwell with a headache and cannot rest.”

Avdeev exhales through his nose and lays his pen across his stationery as if it is a great effort. In the space where a monogram should be, it reads
HOUSE OF SPECIAL PURPOSE
in red lettering. He glances at the sofa, where one of his aides lounges with a newspaper. The man’s boots look suspiciously like a pair of Papa’s. “You complain that the rooms are too stuffy, and you complain when we take measures to allow you to open a window. Do you or don’t you want fresh air?”

My heart begins to pound harder than the workmen’s tools, but I hold my voice steady. “We have requested many times that a window be opened. A single
fortochka
is not enough ventilation.”

“Well then, you will have to put up with the hammering. Not one window will be unsealed until the fence has been properly extended.”

If I were not the second eldest daughter of an emperor, I would stamp my foot. “When will our people be returned to us?” I ask instead.

Avdeev turns back to his desk. “I have no news.”

“Thank you, Mr. Commissar.” Only a grunt in return.

While my temper calms, I stand in the doorway between our room and Mama’s, watching her agitated breaths and the way her eyelids flutter under the compress. I wish I knew whether Mama is truly ailing, or worn down with worry like Olga. She is so sensitive, perhaps my pleading yesterday made her ill.

Mama is so brave and capable in a crisis, yet so fragile without a cause to demand her strength. It amazes me, and God forgive me, but it frustrates me too, the way her aches and pains evaporate in the presence of anyone suffering worse than she is. A crisis with Aleksei, a charity bazaar, nursing in the lazaret, all of it can carry her above her own pain. Sometimes I think she can be healthy for anyone but herself.

But if that were true, she would be strong for me, too. Mama’s love is as constant as the baptismal cross round my neck, yet I can hardly remember a time without wishing I could also be worthy of her strength.

When I was a little girl, I sent Mama notes nearly every day she was too ill to leave her sofa. Each time, I wrote to her how I prayed to Christ for her health, and how much I wished we could be together, even just for tea, but it was never enough. When one of us is sick, she devotes whole days and nights to tending us, but by the time we are well again it is Mama who needs weeks to recover. It only makes it harder to get well, knowing what our comfort costs her.