Corpses piled up in the streets. Every so often, the wagon from the potter’s field would stop; then two men jumped down and picked up one body after another. The first man took the corpse by the hands, the second grabbed the feet, and together they swung it onto the growing heap. When they’d collected all they could, they drove the bodies to a pit, dropped them in, poured on the quicklime, and went back to the streets for more. It looked as if St. Petersburg was dying as she had been born, thousands of unknown and uncounted workers dumped in communal graves.
“How strange and claustrophobic it must be for the dead who haven’t a private grave or even a coffin. I’m sure such things are as important to the dead as to the living.”
“What peculiar things you say, Masha.”
“I can’t not think of them, poor things, all heaped together on top of one another, having to molder next to strangers, the dust of one life mingling with that of another. And very lonely, as no one can come calling on a person without a headstone.”
“There’s no point in thinking of them at all, as they are dead and you didn’t know them.”
“I know you consider yourself very clever, your highness, but not all thoughts are undertaken with a purpose. They just arrive, that’s all.”
“I wish you wouldn’t say that.”
“What?”
“‘Your highness.’”
“I’m sorry, Alyosha,” I said, and I begged his pardon, as I’d had to do on several occasions since the day we were left in the schoolroom to get to know each other, an introduction postponed by my falling ill with quite the worst flu I’ve ever had. My head was aching when I left the tsarina in her boudoir, my eyes dry and hot. As soon as I was delivered to my room, I crawled under the counterpane in my street clothes and fell into a restless sleep from which I woke before dawn, worrying over Father’s body, which the coroner had promised to release by noon, and his burial, for which arrangements had yet to be made.
There was no point trying to rest. I bathed, dressed, and secured permission to return to the capital, and by the time I made my way back to bed, I’d missed another and another night’s rest and, thoroughly spent, succumbed to a fever that climbed and broke, climbed and broke, a hundred times it seemed, before I was well enough to sit up against my pillows with a tray on my lap.
“You’d better eat something,” Varya observed from the chair by the window, where she was buffing her fingernails in the wan winter light. “You look like a ghost.”
I felt like one too, when I made my way to the water closet, my head spinning with the effort of walking a few yards. Too faint to stand and put my hair to rights before the mirror, I took the brush back to bed with me, where I found I wasn’t any more equal to the effort of sitting up for as long as it would take to untangle so many snarls.
“What are you staring at like that?” Varya asked.
“Nothing. I was just trying to sort out the date.” And to separate the nightmares I’d dreamed from the one I was living.
“The ninth.”
“Of January? That’s impossible.”
“Ask Doctor Botkin. He should know—he’s been in to see you every day.”
“The admiral? The one with the gold buttons?”
“He’s not an admiral. He’s a physician.”
He looked like an admiral, though, with a navy-blue military coat trimmed with enough gold braid to inspire nautical fever dreams, and he wore so much cologne it made me sneeze, which he interpreted as evidence of continued infection, keeping me to my bed for a full week more and quarantined to my room for another one after that. It was February before I made the tsarevich’s acquaintance, stepping into our friendship on a more querulous note than I might have had the tsarina not saddled me with a responsibility I knew I couldn’t meet.
“You have the reputation of being a rather difficult person,” I said, aborting a curtsy and offering him my hand. I didn’t mean to say it—the words just popped out of my mouth.
“Really?” he said, squeezing my fingers hard, as if to assert his station. “Who told you that?”
“I don’t know. Someone must have, but I don’t remember who.”
“It wasn’t your father, was it?”
“No,” I said. “A girl at school, most likely. Father never criticized.” Alyosha said nothing. He was more handsome a boy than I’d gathered from photographs, with dark hair and gray eyes. “Do you know why I’m here?” I asked, finding myself annoyed by his good looks and by his height, which allowed him to look down his straight nose at me. “Here at Tsarskoe Selo?”
“Because my father wished it.”
“Yes, I suppose that is true, in that nothing happens outside your father’s wishes.” I wondered suddenly—but only after the words left my mouth—if the tsarina had meant me to keep our conversation in confidence. “My understanding is that Father believed Varya and I would be safer here than anywhere else he might send us in his absence. Your mother imagines I will be able to do for you what he did,” I said. “That I can cure you.”
“Does she?” the tsarevich said. He studied me from where he was standing, leaning against one of the schoolroom desks. There were five, one for each of the Romanov children.
“She told me she did. She seems to believe Father bequeathed me to your family for the purpose of preserving your health.”
The tsarevich nodded. “That sounds like Mother.”
“You seem quite well to me,” I observed.
“I am at the moment,” he said. “It won’t last though. It never does.” His expression was one of resignation, but he didn’t feel sorry for himself. I could see that much.
“Well, then,” I said, “I suppose I will be tested when the time comes, and we will discover if I’m of any use to you.”
Alyosha smiled, his eyes on my face.
“What are you looking at?” I asked him.
“Nothing. Your father called you his ‘little magpie.’ I was wondering why.”
“A pet name, that’s all.” One inspired by my talking too much when excited. “Like a bird in a tree,” Father used to say. But I didn’t explain this to the tsarevich. I was still holding tight to whatever I could that was left of my father, guarding it jealously and keeping it for my own. It wasn’t fair to blame Alyosha, and I didn’t. Still, I had to push the thought away: if it weren’t for his everlasting illness, my father would never have been murdered.
“You’ll have to …” he said, “I mean, I hope you will forgive my mother. She is … I’m afraid she can be a little unreasonable. I’ve caused her so much worry, you see. It’s made her nervous. And she … she believes …” Spots of color appeared on his cheeks.
“What does she believe?”
“In the grace of God,” he said after a moment.