Tsarina Page 6

  The tailor’s home smelled like bread and soup, and it was warm, so warm that it almost hurt. I slung an arm under Emilia’s shoulders and helped her limp to a sitting area. There was a thick rug on the floor and chairs that were oversized and comfortable. Emilia sank into one, closed her eyes, began to mumble prayers. I lowered myself to the floor, panting, fighting the urge to scream. I wasn’t sure why the scream had taken till now to rise up, but there it was, demanding to be let out, demanding that I break down. I closed my eyes, tried to slow my breathing, tried to stop shaking. Emilia’s hand grasped mine; I peeked to see her slumped across the chair, sweaty and pale like a sick patient.

  The tailor’s wife moved to the hearth, threw several logs in, and coaxed up a small fire. “I’d make it larger,” she said, nodding to the unpromising flames, “but I worry the Reds will see the smoke. Are they coming this way?”

  “No,” I said, shaking my head. “They’re in Upper Nevsky, mostly, everything around the Winter Palace. Though I suppose they could spread—I don’t know. I don’t think they themselves know, honestly. It was just . . . they were breaking things, burning things, they were everywhere . . .”

  “Damn,” the woman said, wringing her hands together. “They know we fit the officers sometimes . . . Still, surely they won’t spread here. Surely . . .” She didn’t sound convinced.

  “Thank you for giving us shelter,” I said quickly, worried she was having second thoughts now that she knew how bad it was. “I’ll be sure to personally tell the tsarevich about your generosity, Madame . . .”

  The woman frowned, realizing I didn’t know her name, though she didn’t look especially surprised. “Ashund,” she said. “Our name is Ashund.” She walked to the kitchen to pull the curtains shut. I rested my head on the side of Emilia’s chair, dared to look at her bare feet. They were in the early stages of frostbite.

  “Do you have some warm towels?” I asked Madame Ashund. “Her feet—”

  “Lady Kutepova?” a man’s voice said, sounding wonderstruck. “What’s going on? And oh—oh, Countess Boldyreva!”

  The tailor’s face was the opposite of his wife’s: warm and concerned, worried for us. He had a limp and a cane to match it, but still he hurried to my side, extended his hands to guide me to standing. I repeated our story for him, watched as his eyes grew wider, his breath shorter.

  “My God,” the tailor said when I’d finished, shaking his head. He had kind eyes, dark brown and deep. He turned to his wife. “Where are they now? If they’re spreading this way . . .”

  “I’ll go find out,” she said immediately. There was something softer, gentler about her when she spoke to him; all her edges melted down. “You stay and watch them.”

  “No, it’s dangerous—”

  “Everyone knows you work with the military. They won’t care that you’re an Octobrist,” Madame Ashund said, casting me a wary look as she said the last bit. I tried to hide my surprise that someone so close to the nobility wasn’t a White—this was no time to be judgmental. “The Reds are against everyone who wants to negotiate with the tsar. No one knows me. I’ll be able to slip in.” She didn’t mention his limp, the fact that he wouldn’t be able to run from them, but I knew that was the real reason she wanted to go in his stead. I thought of Alexei, how he loathed it when I brought up his sickness, and felt a pang of pity for the tailor. He wanted to argue—I could see it in his face—but his wife had already vanished upstairs. She reappeared a few moments later wearing a day dress and older boots. Madame Ashund walked to her husband, took his hand. Emilia and I looked toward the fire as they embraced.

  “I’ll be back in an hour,” she promised him, voice gentle. “If I’m gone longer, come find me.”

  “Don’t be gone longer,” he said gravely. I heard her kiss his cheek, and then her heavy boots on the floor. The door opened, slammed shut.

  “All right, all right. Let’s see what we can do about this,” the tailor said, motioning toward Emilia’s ripped feet. He wobbled around, loading several dish towels into a cooking pot, which he then placed over the hot coals in the fire. A few moments later, he removed it; the towels were warmed, and when we wrapped them around Emilia’s feet, she cried out.

  “No, no, leave them,” she said when I nearly pulled them away, worried we moved too fast—perhaps we should have given her toes more time to reach the temperature of the room. “They’ll be fine. I’ll be fine,” she assured me, voice wobbly but proud.

  “You’re being terribly brave,” the tailor said, nodding at her. He sat back. “I’m going to go change into clothes more appropriate for the company of young ladies,” he said, motioning to his dressing robe. “If you’d like something to eat, please help yourself. By the time I’m back down and have made us all a cup of tea, I wager this whole ordeal will be over.”

  The tailor vanished upstairs; I climbed next to Emilia in the chair. She leaned against me, closed her eyes.

  “This can’t really be happening, can it?” she asked. “I was supposed to be fitting for a Christmas dress tomorrow, and now . . . the house. The city . . . the war is supposed to be with Germany, not with us.”

  “It’s only for the night,” I said, sounding more confident than I felt. “Can you imagine what our fathers will do to the Reds? What Tsar Nicholas will do? This is it. The entire movement will be finished.”

  Emilia looked down, spoke quietly. “Do you suppose the Romanovs are safe in the Alexander Palace?”

  “Of course,” I said immediately, shrilly. I dropped my voice. “Besides. They have the Constellation Egg. They’re safe no matter where they are.” This sounded practiced, careful on my tongue. The truth was, all I could think of was what the Babushka said—that the egg would be disrupted. How even strong magic couldn’t stop a perfectly aimed bullet. My stomach lurched and I had to close my eyes. You don’t need to worry. You and Alexei will be together—it’s fate, and fate can’t be changed. He can’t die.

  The tailor came back downstairs, offered Emilia one of his wife’s coats so she wasn’t sitting around in a summer dress. We discussed a myriad of silly things—when the next party might be, whether or not my father would need a new jacket soon, if the nobles who had gone to Paris would find the tailors there to be insufficient compared to Mr. Ashund. We filled time desperately, waiting to hear the sound of chanting, of singing growing closer, finding it impossible to relax even after three cups of hot tea. It had only been forty minutes, but I could tell the tailor was growing anxious about his wife.

  Finally, footsteps—the door swung open, crashed into the back wall. I leapt up, Emilia screamed, but it was just Madame Ashund. Her face was pale, her hair soaked with sweat, and she was panting. The tailor rushed to her, shut the door, and pulled her coat off as she shivered her way to the fire.

  “What’s happened?” he asked her frantically. “Is it over? Have the Whites stopped them?”

  “No,” Madame Ashund said, and I realized she was shivering from far more than the cold. “No one can stop them. There are so many, Gustav. They’ve filled the streets in Upper Nevsky and have spread down to the Tsarskoye Selo station.”

  “What of the White Army?” I asked.

  “They’ve been driven back,” she said. “I’m not sure where. But listen. The family—the Romanovs. They’ve been captured by the Reds and taken someplace secret—no one seems to know where.”

  “What?”

  “The Romanovs—”

  She repeated herself, but it didn’t matter. I knew what she said. I knew, and I was falling, falling, and falling.

  They’ve been captured by the Reds.

  CHAPTER SIX

  “Did I want it too badly?” I sniffed to Emilia. We were in the tailor’s guest bedroom, which seemed to be mostly a storage area for thick bolts of fabric. I spotted a navy blue material among them that I recognized from military jackets, which only sharpened the edges of my
heart. I lay at the end of a bed, curled into a ball, hair sticking to my face.

  “Want what too badly?” Emilia asked. She looked pale, her eyes sunken, though her feet were finally normal again save a few burns from the cold. She sat at the top of the bed, back against the headboard and legs folded beneath her. Her refinement was back— her posture, her carefully held lips. I, on the other hand, felt like I’d been crumpled up and tossed into this room. I played with a loose thread on the quilt absently.

  “To be tsarina,” I finally whispered. Saying it aloud felt so wrong, like I was betraying a secret.

  Emilia answered my question now, her voice gentle. “Who wouldn’t want to be tsarina, Natalya? But we all know you love Alexei, not just his crown.”

  “It’s Alexei who loves his crown. His country,” I said quietly. If the Reds had the Romanovs, did it mean the Whites were through? The Constellation Egg was supposed to keep them in power, but I didn’t see how that was possible if the Romanovs were imprisoned. And even if the egg kept them alive, saw them released . . . while I would love Alexei without his crown, I wasn’t sure he’d love himself without it.

  And admittedly, I would miss it. I’d miss the jewels and parties and dances. I’d never imagined my life without those things; it felt impossible to do so. I hated myself—how petty, how vain was I, to think such things at a time like this? The thoughts lodged in my brain, thick and black and evil, seeping into my sorrow.

  I exhaled, trying to breathe the darkness out of me, and tilted my head to look out the window. The idea of dawn was on the horizon, pale blue light silhouetting the tops of buildings. I could see the domes of the Smolny Convent bell towers in the distance, bright white, though their edges were blurred by the smoke that lingered over Saint Petersburg. Usually, on a cold morning like this, you could see for miles; right now, the world seemed to end just beyond the bell towers.

  Emilia moved and lay down beside me. I could smell her perfume, like it was so deeply lodged in her skin that even tonight’s chaos couldn’t uproot it. The oil lamp burning on the nightstand was nearly spent, though I didn’t see how the dark could be any worse than the light.

  Emilia said, “Perhaps this will all just blow over. But either way, I say we get on a train bound for Paris and leave this bog behind. Alexei and his family can meet us there, and your father, and everyone from court, and it’ll be just like it was before only, well, in France, not Russia.”

  “Not Russia,” I repeated.

  “Exactly,” Emilia said warmly, assuming I was agreeing with her. I wasn’t—not at all. Not Russia. Not my country, my home. “Let’s go to sleep and stop thinking about it,” she continued. “There’s no use dwelling. There’s nothing we can do now but save ourselves.”

  We didn’t sleep, of course. We stared at the ceiling, listened to the tailor and his wife talking under their breath in the next room, taking some small comfort in the fact that we weren’t the only ones lying awake. As dawn broke, I finally hovered in the space between awake and my dreams, my thoughts circling what Emilia had said—that there was nothing we could do but save ourselves.

  How could a city so full of people feel so void of souls? Emilia and I didn’t dare go out while the mob had dispersed, packs of Reds roamed the streets like wolves. They broke into stores, destroyed everything in their path, tipped carriages and stole horses. They were a swarm of locusts with a never-ending hunger for destruction and the tireless chant for land, peace, bread. Land, peace, bread. Land, peace, bread. The words were beaten into my brain so hard that they hardly sounded like words at all anymore.

  But we had a plan: for the two of us to take the train to Paris immediately. Emilia was excited, and talked quickly about her grandmother’s estate, about the dressage horses and pastry chef that lived on the premises. She spoke of warm days and fine wines, comfortable beds and silk robes.

  Not Russia.

  “You’ll love it, Natalya. You’ll wonder why you stayed here so long,” Emilia said. I could tell she was working thoughts of Paris into a daydream large enough to blot out what happened last night. I could hardly blame her.

  I wanted to go, and hated myself for that. How could I leave Russia, my home, especially at a time like this? When Alexei needed me, when my tsar needed me, when my country needed . . . well.

  My country needed saving, though I wasn’t entirely convinced it needed me. Like Emilia said last night—there was little we could do but save ourselves. Being dead, I knew, didn’t do me, Alexei, or Russia any good. Still, as I nodded along to Emilia babbling about French cheeses, I couldn’t escape the shame of feeling treasonous.

  “I’m sending for my nephew to drive you to the train station,” Mr. Ashund said near lunchtime. He’d spent the morning out, trying to gather information but finding few people who knew anything for certain; the city was a web of stories. “Though I fear you might not be able to catch the four o’clock train . . .”

  “Why is that?” Emilia asked, folding her hands in her lap as if this were a perfectly normal teatime discussion. She was still wearing her summer dress, a pretty white-and-blue smock with butterfly brocade along the edges. After last night, it was rather ripped and torn, and she clung to the fire to keep warm, and yet she somehow managed to look polished regardless. She continued, “If the tickets are sold out, I’m sure we can pay for a private carriage to Germany, then go to Paris from there, given the circumstances.” Madame Ashund looked a little affronted by this—I suspected private carriages were a luxury she could not afford. Emilia didn’t seem to notice.

  “It’s not that,” Mr. Ashund said, perhaps more accustomed to being around nobility than his wife was. “They’re saying the transit workers have left their posts—that many were in the riot. There may not be anyone to operate the train.”

  “Well,” Emilia said firmly, though I saw her eyes waver. “We’ll just hire a carriage then.”

  “Let’s hope for the train,” Mr. Ashund answered. I wondered if Emilia knew what the tailor and I so clearly did—that she and I would make for excellent ransoms: a countess and the tsarevich’s girl. Finding a driver who could be trusted when such a thing was on the line was unlikely, as was making it all the way from Saint Petersburg to Germany in the middle of both a revolution and a worldwide war. I prayed for a working train as Emilia and I went downstairs to help Madame Ashund prepare afternoon tea.

  “Can we assist?” I asked pleasantly, ducking the low beam at the end of the staircase. I took the kettle from Madame Ashund’s hands and filled it with water while Emilia prepared the cream and sugar containers. Madame Ashund watched us warily, namely Emilia, who had probably never prepared tea before—the Boldyrev household staff was too large to warrant that. She sloshed quite a bit of water out onto the table and overfilled the cups. Madame Ashund sat between Emilia and I, and the three of us struggled to make conversation. Despite years of training on polite tea discussion, it simply seemed ridiculous to discuss the weather when our lives were being upended. I was relieved when an hour later there was a swift knock at the door. It opened before Madame Ashund could answer.

  Emilia and I waited cautiously in the parlor until we heard Madame Ashund’s voice go cheerful—her nephew. We rose as she escorted her nephew back to greet us.

  “Lady Kutpova, Countess Boldyreva, this is my nephew, Leo Uspensky,” Madame Ashund said fondly, turning to gesture to him.

  Leo Uspensky was young, broad shouldered with a thick jaw and square face. He looked strong, though I’m not sure how I could tell, as he was still bundled up in a dark coat spotted with snowflakes. He nodded his head at Emilia and me; we curtseyed in response. Something in the gray of his eyes, the curve of his brows was familiar, but I couldn’t place him. He pulled off his coat, draped it across his arm.

  “I already know them, actually,” he said kindly as he unwound his scarf, though he didn’t smile. He didn’t seem unfriendly, but rather like his
face simply didn’t make cheerful expressions. It was all hard lines, carved and smooth, like anyone who hit him would walk away with a shattered fist.

  “Oh? I’m so sorry, I’m rather clumsy with names,” Emilia said swiftly, practiced. “Though you do look familiar.”

  “I wrestle down at the theater, occasionally,” he said thoughtfully, “but you might know me from the Winter Palace? I worked there as a waiter, sometimes a page, sometimes everything in between. Regardless, we would never have been formally introduced.” His voice had a thick accent, unapologetically Russian—it was strange to hear, as most everyone I knew affected a French one.

  “Well, it’s a pleasure now, Mr. Uspensky,” I said. “Thank you very much for offering to take us to the station.”

  “Certainly. Though I suggest we don’t leave until the last possible minute. No need to be out in those crowds longer than necessary.”

  “So you think they can make the four o’clock train for Paris, then?” Madame Ashund asked.

  Leo nodded. “Likely. Most of the trains are still running—it’s really the streetcar drivers who have walked out.” Emilia and I exhaled together in relief, and he continued, “Don’t worry, ladies. You’ll be on your way to Paris today, I’m sure.”

  Emilia grinned broadly, reached over to squeeze my hand. “That’s wonderful to hear, Mr. Uspensky. In the meantime, will you join us for the end of tea?”

  “Call me Leo, please—I’m not so fancy as to go by my last name,” he said.

  “Well, Leo—tea?”

  “Of course,” he said, though he sounded uneasy about the invitation, like we might be playing a trick on him—it wasn’t normal for girls of our station to invite someone of his to tea. But then, these were not normal times. I smoothed my hair, checked the pins were still tight.