The Romanov Cross: A Novel (56 page)

But the little owl had done its job, she thought … guiding her through the darkness, through the other world that she had just left, and back into the land of the living. She would never forget its help, nor the sacred trust she now knew that it signified.

“I was so afraid,” Frank said. “I thought I might have missed my chance.”

“Your chance?” Nika said, her throat as dry as parchment. Frank looked haggard and drawn, and it was plain that he hadn’t shaved in days.

“To tell you that I love you.”

If Nika had not already been lying down, and drained of all energy, she knew she would have reacted quite differently. All she could do now was squeeze his hand with what strength she had, and say, “That’s a relief.”

Frank, taken aback, straightened up in his chair and laughed. “A relief?”

“I didn’t want to be in this thing alone,” she said.

The next morning, the deacon was not awake to ring the church bell. At dinner, he hadn’t had much of an appetite for the fish he’d caught, and he’d complained of a headache and chills. When Anastasia was shown to his cabin, she warned the others not to enter and went in by herself.

Although it was well past breakfast time, the sun had not yet risen. By the light of the oil lamp flickering beside his bed, Ana could see that the deacon had contracted the flu. His white-blond hair was damp and stringy, spread across his pillow, and his brow was beaded with sweat. His pale eyes were wandering distractedly around the room, and there were gobbets of dried blood on his blanket. She had seen soldiers like this in the hospital wards … and she had heard their bodies, shrouded in sheets, trundling down the grain chute and into the waiting wagons.

Stepping outside, where several of the colonists were waiting apprehensively for word, she called for hot water and broth, extra blankets, firewood, and brandy if they had it. She tried to remember what Dr. Botkin had prescribed and guess what he would have done, but in her heart she knew that it was all in God’s hands already. The Spanish
flu took whomever it wanted—the strongest, first—and most of the time it took them fast.

For the rest of the day, Anastasia stayed by the deacon’s side, administering to him, trying in vain to get him to take some sustenance, mopping his brow and wiping the flecks of blood from his lips after he had been racked by a coughing fit. Occasionally, he muttered the name Father Grigori, and it was clear to Anastasia that he was speaking to him as if he were there. Several times, the conversation seemed so real that Ana turned in her chair, or went to the door and peeked outside, but each time all she saw gathered in the gloom were a handful of colonists, tolling their beads, clutching and kissing holy icons, and murmuring prayers for the deacon’s recovery. So many of them focused on the emerald cross she wore around her neck that she eventually grew self-conscious about it, and tucked it away. Whatever powers they thought it possessed were proving useless against the onslaught of the flu.

Once or twice, she heard muffled coughing among them, which only exacerbated the dread in her heart.

By the following dawn, the deacon was dead.

Anastasia cleaned him as best she could, then took his black cassock, with the sleeves lined in scarlet silk, and put it on him. She crossed his hands across his chest, then sat down at the wooden table that served as his desk. On it, there were writing materials, loose pages from his sermons, and an icon of the Virgin Mary, adorned with three white diamonds. Something so valuable could only have come from the hand of Rasputin himself. Using a scrap of paper from one of his sermons, she wrote a prayer for the soul of Deacon Stefan, curled it up, and slipped it into one of his lifeless hands, then, in the other, she placed the icon. He was as ready to meet his Maker as anyone would ever be.

Not for the first time she longed to make that final journey herself … to see Sergei, her family, her friends, kindly Dr. Botkin, Nagorny, the maid Demidova. Despite what the Russian Orthodox Church might believe, Anastasia was sure that her dog Jemmy would
be waiting for her there, too. In a world so awash in hate, why should love—of any kind—not find a safe haven in the next?

Weary, and famished herself, she blew out the oil lamp, closed the door, and went to the church, in search of company and a communal meal. But unlike before, when dozens of people had drawn up chairs and pews to the sides of the long refectory tables, there were only ten or twelve souls present, and even they shied away when she came through the double doors. Vera fell to her knees in front of the iconostasis screen, crossing herself three times. The man who had been chopping wood bent his head over his soup bowl and barely dared to look up.

A woman laying pewter plates on the table asked, “How is the deacon?”

“The deacon has passed away,” Ana replied, and she saw the woman cast a quick look around the room, as if to confirm that everyone had heard. Several people cried out, an old man hurled his pipe at the floor, and there was a general exodus from the church. Some of them nodded solemnly in Ana’s direction as they left, their haggard faces filled with fear and incomprehension … but all of them, without exception, gave her a wide berth.

Standing alone in the nave, she realized that she had not only come to the ends of the earth, but to the end of everything this life had to offer. Already, she had gone from the herald of the prophet Father Grigori, celebrated and welcomed, to the harbinger of doom. And though she still carried the aura and the emblem of Rasputin himself, she had sown confusion in his flock. They no longer knew what to make of her, or how to interpret the trouble she had brought upon their heads. Had they committed some error, they no doubt wondered, in their way of life? Had they failed in their devotion? And was Anastasia an instrument of divine retribution?

Even if they had summoned the courage to ask, these were questions she could never have answered herself.

What followed over the coming days was as inevitable as it was tragic. One by one, the colonists came down with the flu, and one by one the survivors used dynamite and pickaxes to open shallow graves
in the ground and give the dead some semblance of a Christian burial. Ana attended the interments—indeed, the colonists would not have proceeded without her silent presence, such was her prestige as a princess and Rasputin’s chosen one—but after a while it became nearly impossible for her to bear. The graveyard was poised on the cliffs above the Bering Sea, and Ana had to fight an overwhelming impulse to hurl herself off the precipice and into the waiting sea below. All that kept her from doing so was an even greater fear—a fear that the power of the emerald cross was so great she might find herself alive even then, tossing and turning beneath the icy waves for eternity.

Among the last to die was the sexton, and Ana took over his job, dutifully recording the names of the deceased and the dates on which they died. Some of them, in their delirium, had wandered off into the woods, never to be seen again, while others perished on the rocks below the colony, their bodies lying crumpled and still until the tide took them out to sea. For the rest, Ana scrounged among the half-completed headstones and coffin lids that the sexton had left, and provided each of them with as much of a proper burial as could still be managed. The sexton—plainly as industrious as he was fatalistic—had also had the foresight to leave a number of empty graves … more than enough, as it turned out, to accommodate his fellow colonists.

And then, one day, there was no one left to bury, no one left to mourn. There was no one else at all. She had walked to the edge of the cemetery, clutching the emerald cross when she saw a dark figure lying on the beach below, the tails of a sealskin coat spread like a bat’s wings across the pebbles and sand.

She stopped dead, her toes already extending over the precipice, and stared down at it. Could it be? After all this time?

Making her way down to the beach, she approached the body as if it were a trap waiting to spring. She did not believe her own eyes. But as she came closer, she saw that even now, a brown cowlick, frozen stiff, was standing up at the back of his head. She knelt, the freezing sand crackling under her boots, and gently turned the body onto its back. Coated in ice, Sergei looked as if he were made of glass.

“The sea often yields in the end,” the deacon had said. And so it had.

In the cemetery, an empty grave remained; it was the one closest to the cliffs, and Anastasia had wondered if anyone would be left to put her in it one day. Now she could use it to embrace the body of her beloved protector, Sergei, instead—which was precisely what she did.

As he lay there now in his open casket, she reached in under her coat. Lifting out the emerald cross, she read one last time the blessing Rasputin had engraved on its silver frame: “No one can break the chains of love that bind us.” A play on her name, as the breaker of chains. But she wanted the chains broken now. She wanted whatever force it was that tethered her to this earth to be sundered forever.

She raised Sergei’s head and draped the chain around it, the emerald cross resting on his chest. Then she lifted the lid of the coffin—an elaborately carved piece with an image of St. Peter himself on it—and fitted it into place. Something, she thought, had told her to preserve this coffin until now. Then, driving home the traditional four nails, she shoveled as much dirt and snow as she could loosen into the grave. One of the black wolves that haunted the island appeared at the gates to the cemetery, the gates where she had obsessively whittled her pleas for forgiveness, and raising its head, let out a mournful howl. But Ana wasn’t afraid. These creatures, she knew, were only souls as lost and bereft as she was … sentenced to the same kind of purgatory. They, too, were trapped in a world not of their own making, as unable to transcend it as they were to find peace. From the moment the black wolf had licked the tears from her face on the beach, she had recognized that their fate and hers were conjoined—weren’t they all Rasputin’s faithful children?—and she had known that they would only end their unhappy journey when hers, too, had come to an end.

As soon as Slater saw Nika wheeled to the ambulance, protesting all the way—“I can walk, you know! I don’t need a wheelchair!”—he was sure she was back to being herself. Hospital protocols, however, dictated that she leave the Nome Regional Health Center in a chair, and prudence dictated that an ambulance convey her all the way back to her home in Port Orlov.

“I’ll see you there in no time,” Slater said, leaning down for one last kiss, as the orderly pushing the chair politely looked away.

“The work on the totem pole should be done by now,” she said.

Indeed, it was almost the first order she had given once the fever had broken and she had become fully conscious again. Although he had never asked, Slater knew that something had happened to her while she hovered in that land between life and death, something that compelled her to restore the totem pole in Port Orlov to its former glory and prominence.

“The unveiling is going to be a pretty big celebration for a town like ours.”

“Sounds like a party I can’t miss.”

“Then don’t.”

She was allowed to sit up front with the ambulance driver, and
once they had pulled away, Slater crossed the snowy parking lot to the waiting Coast Guard helicopter. This time, he was alone in the passenger compartment, and the pilot, starting the engine, ordered him to buckle in immediately. “We’re on a very tight schedule,” he said, showing him none of the respect that had been shown back in the day when he was Major Frank Slater, or even the Dr. Slater in charge of the St. Peter’s Island operation. Now he was just some civilian taking up government resources.

But far from being irritated, Slater felt like a weight had been taken off his shoulders. His life was his own now—and he had made some definite plans for it.

The chopper headed straight for the sea and followed the coastline north. Slater leaned his head back and stared out the window. He was still weak from the ordeal and needed to put on a few more pounds, but he’d come to grips with what had happened and made a kind of peace with himself. Maybe he couldn’t save the world anymore; maybe it was better just to save a little piece of it. He couldn’t wait for the right time to tell Nika.

In the weak afternoon light, he could see on the horizon the familiar plateaus of Big and Little Diomede, and the icy blue channel between them that marked the meeting point of the United States and Russia. The sky was clear—a pale gray the color of a pigeon’s wing—but as they neared the island, he could see that the wind, the never-ending wind, was busy as usual, stirring the fog around its rocky shores.

Hard to believe that such a short time had passed since he had first made this approach. It felt like ages.

As the helicopter came closer, he noted that there were two or three Coast Guard vessels lying offshore, and that the colony itself was far more extensively lighted, fenced, and occupied than when he had left it. To accommodate the chopper, there was even a circular helipad, marked with reflectors, slapped down between the old well in front of the church and the green tents that Slater’s own crew had erected.

“Hang on,” the pilot announced over the headphones, as the chopper,
slowing down to make its landing, was buffeted by the gusts off the Bering Strait and the whole aircraft wobbled. Slater held on to the straps, and no sooner had the wheels touched down and the engines been cut, the rotors spinning to a stop, than he saw Professor Kozak and Sergeant Groves running to open the hatchway door.

“It is so good to see you,” Kozak said, slapping him on the back, as Groves clasped his hand in a firm grip.

“A lot’s changed around here,” Groves added, shepherding them all out from under the chopper’s blades.

“I could see that from the air,” Slater replied. Indeed, as he looked around now, he could see that several walkways had been laid down, running between extra tents and aluminum Quonset huts. Aerials were poking up everywhere, and an additional battery of generators was humming away under a covered port. Several Coast Guardsmen were scurrying among the various structures.