I Was Anastasia

by Ariel Lawhon

  Her silence says everything.

  Gleb groans. “What?”

  “She asked that biographer of hers to take a picture of us together before dinner.”

  * * *

  —

  The photo is published several days later. It doesn’t make as many front pages as Maria Rasputin likely hoped for, but it does appear in the society columns of several, and it’s also picked up by the Associated Press. Before the week is out, half of America and much of the world knows that Maria Rasputin has declared Anna to be Grand Duchess Anastasia Romanov. Maria is interviewed at length, gushing about her long-lost friend, brought to tears even as she recalls their childhood memories. Anna burns the papers in disgust.

  “We need those!” Jack yells in horror as the last of them goes up in flames.

  Anna ignores him. She looks at Gleb. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t know she would do something like this.”

  “You couldn’t have.”

  That’s not entirely true, Anna thinks, but she doesn’t admit this to Gleb yet. Instead she asks, “How badly will this hurt the appeal?”

  “No telling. The Rasputins are hated abroad. And for good reason. It depends who reads those articles. And how they’re perceived.”

  “Surely the court won’t think that I’m behind this? That I’m fabricating evidence?”

  “We’ll have to wait and see.”

  Anna takes a deep breath before saying, “Maria mentioned one thing we should discuss.”

  “What’s that?”

  “What I’m going to do when my visa runs out.”

  First sadness and then resignation settle into the fine lines around his eyes. “Don’t worry,” Gleb says. “I have a plan.”

  Anna knows instantly what he has in mind. “No.” She cringes. His plans rarely turn out well.

  “It’s the only way.”

  “I won’t do it.” She lowers her voice to a whisper and casts a dismayed look at Jack Manahan. He sits across the room sorting through a pile of old newspapers.

  Gleb matches her whisper for whisper. “You have to. I can’t do it. Look at me. The doctor says I have a year. Maybe. If I’m lucky. Jack can take good care of you.”

  Anna drops her face into her hands. Here she is, cast once again onto a stranger. Beggared because her only friend has congestive heart failure. But it is her heart that aches at the moment. “If I marry him, I prove that Maria Rasputin was right all along.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “She said it was only a matter of time before I took up with him. She implied that I look to benefactors, that I use people.”

  Gleb growls out a curse. “That woman is a scourge. We won’t let her near you again.”

  “She can’t harm me any more than she already has.”

  Gleb pulls away, confused, and Anna answers the unspoken question in his gaze. “Have I never told you about that? I suppose not. It happened right before I accepted your invitation to come here.”

  “What happened?”

  “The last time that woman showed up at my door unannounced, I ended up in the hospital for three days.”

  · 2 ·

  Anastasia

  REVOLUTION

  1917

  Alexander Palace, Tsarskoe Selo, Russia

  February 28

  The first shots ring out before dawn. I count fifteen—each of them splitting the air with a sound like cracking glaciers—before I go to the window and throw it open. Soldiers, drunk and mutinous, stumble through the park and onto the palace lawn. They shake their fists and fire wantonly at the sky as fear—hard, cold, and tangible—lodges in my throat. But still I watch, oblivious to the fact that any one of them could turn and aim a rifle at me. That any one of them could pull the trigger and pick me off as though I were a sparrow on a branch. I am frozen. Mesmerized by the chaos. Because even here, behind the palace walls and amid the muffling drifts of snow, I can hear rioting in the city and I know that fate has turned against us.

  There is a whimper and rustling behind me, followed by a trembling voice. “Do not to worry, Tsarevitch, the gunfire only sounds so loud and so close because of the frost.”

  I shut the window and yank the curtains tight. I find our lady’s maid bent over my brother, her mouth close to his ear, her fingers pushing hair away from his eyes. “What are you doing?” I ask.

  “He’s afraid,” Dova says, as though this excuses the lie.

  The gunfire is loud and close. But the frost has nothing to do with it. Dova, however, fears upsetting my sickly brother—and therefore my mother—above all else.

  “Are they going to kill us?” Alexey asks. His eyes are large with concern and he lies curled around his little brown spaniel. Joy pokes her curly head from beneath the blanket and sniffs at his chin. A smile twitches at the corner of his mouth as she licks him.

  “No.” I perch on the edge of his cot and run my hand along Joy’s soft, floppy ears. “The Imperial Guard surrounds the palace. They will protect us.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Of course. Would you like to see?”

  Dova takes a step forward. “I don’t think—”

  “He will be fine. But you should get some rest. You look exhausted.”

  Dova doesn’t argue, but her mouth snaps open and then closed. She straightens her shoulders and, after a brief hesitation, offers a stiff curtsy and goes to bed.

  I wait until she slips from the room before helping Alexey to his feet and taking him to the window. The arm Alexey hangs around my shoulders is thin as a willow switch, and I can feel his ribs press against my side. Born a hemophiliac, he’s been small and infirm his entire life, but since falling ill with the measles a week earlier, he has diminished to little more than shadow and bone. I want to take from my own soft form—all those places that my sisters poke and tease mercilessly—and pad the sharp points of his body. Ribs. Shoulder blades. Hips. I want to make him well again. To put color in his cheeks and laughter in his voice.

  To his credit, my brother does not flinch when I show him the bright orange bursts of gunfire and the thin ribbon of flame at the horizon. We watch the chaos from a gap in the curtain, mindful not to push it open wide. I am careful with his life at least.

  “What is that burning?” he asks.

  “Tsarskoe Selo.”

  “The entire city?”

  “No. Just the parts closest to us.”

  “Who lit the fires?”

  “The people, most likely.”

  “They must stop,” he says with an imperious sniff. “I do not approve.”

  Alexey has known from birth that he will be tsar. Not just king or ruler, but emperor; sovereign of a dynasty that has ruled for over three hundred years; leader of an empire that grows by fifty-five square miles every day; commander of a military that protects one-sixth of the earth’s surface. He is the recipient of a terrible, divine inheritance and I do not know how to explain that he cannot command this trouble away.

  So I try to phrase it in a way he will understand. “I’m afraid they don’t care about your approval. Or Father’s. They do not want to be ruled any longer.”

  “They don’t get to make that decision,” he says, unconcerned in the way only a child born of utter privilege can be. “They will be sorry for this when Father returns.”

  If he returns. I think this but do not say it aloud. We have not heard from Father in days, nor do we know his current location. His last missive simply ordered us not to evacuate without him. And so we wait as the fires burn ever closer.

  After locating the Imperial Guard in the courtyard, Alexey returns to his cot, wraps himself around Joy once more, and promptly falls asleep. At twelve, my brother hovers somewhere between foolish child and future monarch. He is spoiled and naïve, but I love him completely and irrationally.

  Wh
en Alexey succumbed to measles, I offered the bedroom I share with Maria as an infirmary. It was only days later that Olga, and then Tatiana, joined him in the sick room. I convinced Mother and our beloved Dr. Botkin to let me play nurse and have tended them ever since. Now the three of them lie in their cots, picking at painful, itching rashes as they sleep, while I scrub my hands with harsh lye soap to keep the illness at bay.

  I can see Olga’s pale face in the dark room, her eyes open now, a line of frustration carved between her brows. So she has only been pretending to sleep. Her clavicles protrude with alarming definition as she pushes onto her elbows. “You are a terribly good liar, Schwibsik.”

  I grace my sister with a smile befitting my nickname. Little Imp. “I do not know what you’re talking about.”

  Olga rolls her eyes and places her long, elegant fingers on the blanket beside her. Piano-playing fingers, Mother calls them. “You told Alexey we are safe.”

  “No. I told him that the Guard would protect us.”

  “Semantics.”

  “You can say it, but can you spell it?” I ask. “Or is Master Gilliard right about your hopeless academic prospects?”

  Olga smiles. “Gilliard adores me. You’re the one who should be worried. He’ll force you to study Latin for another year if your attitude in the schoolroom doesn’t improve.”

  “That man is a pestilence, an oozing sore upon my brain.” Pierre Gilliard and I have had an ongoing feud since he began tutoring us several years ago, though we are currently at a stalemate concerning my lessons. But he is the least of my concerns tonight. I set a hand on Olga’s forehead only to find that it is still hot. “Besides,” I say, “we are safe. For now.”

  “Liar,” she says, again, but with a smile this time. “We are under siege.”

  “What would you know of it? Your eyes are swollen shut.”

  “Only the left one. Besides, my ears are in perfect working order.”

  “Your ears,” I counter, “are tuned only to hear flattery.”

  She laughs at this, and I feel as though I have won a small victory. Laughter in the face of fear is no small accomplishment. But Olga’s rally is short-lived. Her smile dissolves and she flops back onto her pillow, depleted. She is asleep in seconds and I mop her damp forehead with a cloth, feeling hollow and exhausted myself. I make one final pass through the room, tucking the covers around Alexey’s shoulders and reapplying cold compresses to the flushed foreheads of my sisters.

  My own dog, Jimmy, is curled beside the fire with Tatiana’s French bulldog, Ortimo. Jimmy watches me cross the room, his ears up and alert, while Ortimo snores like an ugly, drunken sailor, splayed on his back, legs spread and tongue lolling to the side.

  “Come,” I say, and Jimmy immediately lurches to his feet. I am always amazed at how he can move that huge body so quickly. The small black puppy Father gave me years ago has turned into a great lumbering beast half my height and weight. We knew Siberian huskies grew large; we simply didn’t expect him to be this large. “Let us go learn the truth of this siege.”

  * * *

  —

  Four short taps on Mother’s bedroom door let her know which of her children waits outside. I know she will be awake just as I know my sister Maria will be sprawled in her bed, snoring and oblivious, her soft curly hair spread out on the pillow, and her dark lashes fanned across her high cheekbones. Since Olga and Tatiana fell ill, and with Father gone, Maria and I relish our more frequent turns sleeping in Mother’s great canopied bed, and we fight over it in the small, petty ways that only sisters can.

  “Come in, Schwibsik,” Mother says.

  So she is feeling sentimental. A good sign. I take a deep breath and push the door open, with Jimmy trotting at my heals. Mother stands before the window watching revolution spill onto the palace grounds. She is of practical British stock, after all, and it is her people who pioneered a form of battle so orderly that men stand in rows and shoot at one another by turns. Yet upon closer inspection I see that it is disdain, not courage, that is etched into the tight corners of her mouth.

  “Mother?”

  “You should be asleep,” she says, beckoning me to her side.

  “Everyone keeps saying that.”

  “Everyone is right.”

  “I can’t sleep through this.” Out across the grounds, where the manicured lawn rolls down toward the edge of the park, the muzzle flashes are dimmer now against the growing light. “I don’t understand what is happening.”

  “Revolution, it would seem.” She snaps the curtain closed and moves toward a long, padded bench at the foot of her bed. Mother pats the seat and I curl up next to her, my eyes suddenly heavy and dry. “They’ve been threatening it for years,” she says.

  I think of my father and how, when we were little and naughty, he would threaten and threaten until he finally snapped and bent one of us over his knee. Perhaps, like Father, the people have grown tired of threatening.

  “What do we do now?” I ask, my voice tremulous with exhaustion and growing fear. Jimmy, ever sensitive to my moods, presses his cold, wet nose against the back of my hand.

  Mother clutches the amulet at her throat. It was given to her by Grigory Rasputin shortly before his murder last year and is identical to the ones she requires each of us to wear at all times. “We pray,” she says.

  * * *

  —

  Most of the servants flee that first night. They slip quietly from the palace in groups of three and four. Some go out to smoke their hand-rolled cigarettes with trembling fingers and don’t return, not for their friends and not for their coats. Others finish their work and walk boldly through the servants’ entrance and into the night, toward Tsarskoe Selo and the burning horizon. Some take silverware and candlesticks, knowing they will never receive their final wages. A few cry, but most never look back as they tromp through the snow with their heads down and their collars turned up against the wind.

  Cook tells me this in the morning when I wander into the kitchen, bleary-eyed, in search of the chambermaid and our missing breakfast.

  “I watched them go. Every damn one,” he says. “Sat right here and they didn’t so much as lift an arm in farewell. That maid of yours was the last to sneak away. She left the door open in her haste.”

  He stands in front of a great, sweltering woodstove, boiling eggs and coffee. I drift closer, drawn by the warmth and smell of breakfast, until I am dwarfed by his bulk. Cook is a giant of a man. Arms like posts and legs like pillars. Voice like the boom of a cannon. His jaw is as square and strong as a granite cornerstone. It is his back that commands attention, however. It is twice the width of a normal man and corded with muscle. I’ve heard the maids whisper that normal men can’t grow a back like that unless they’re under duress. I’ve heard them say he must have been sentenced to man the oars in a prison ship. Or hew stone in a gulag. All ridiculous, unfounded rumors that Cook never bothers to dispel. He likes the mystery, I think. Likes it when the servants scurry from his path. But to me he is simply Cook. Baker of bread. Maker of coffee. Teacher of profanity. Not that I would ever admit this last part to my parents. I like the man too much to see him dismissed.

  “I can’t let you carry that yourself.” Cook scowls at a silver platter now holding a steaming carafe and a plate of warm French rolls fresh from the oven. “Where is Dova?”

  “Sleeping.”

  He grunts, as though this is a moral failure.

  “I can take it upstairs. I’m strong enough.”

  “That’s not the point. Your mother would have my head.” He looks around the kitchen, as though to grab the first person who passes, but we are quite alone. Everyone else has fled.

  There are few men who can make cursing sound like poetry, but Cook is one of them. I don’t blush and he doesn’t apologize when the diatribe is complete. Instead he carefully lifts the tray and stomps from the kit
chen with me in tow.

  Dova meets us upstairs on the landing looking somewhat abashed but eager to see breakfast. She murmurs thanks, and Cook gently relinquishes the tray into her waiting hands before he retreats to safer, more familiar territory downstairs. As Dova leads me back to my chambers I tell her what I’ve learned about our missing chambermaid and the other servants.

  “Cowards,” she hisses, and pours me a cup of coffee. It is warm between my hands, comforting, and we settle beside the fire, listening to the popping, hissing sounds as we sip the dark, fragrant brew. Coffee is an art form to Cook and we are his devoted patrons.

  It doesn’t take long for Mother to join us, still wearing her dressing gown. Maria, I assume, is still asleep. Undeterred by the missing chambermaid, she waves Dova aside and goes straight to the coffee and fills a cup, then drowns it in cream and sugar. I have never seen Mother pour her own coffee before, and I marvel that she is familiar with such a small domestic task. It is so unlike an empress. She drinks the entire thing with her eyes closed before imparting her news.

  “The telephone lines have been cut,” she says. “The electricity has been turned off. So has the water. You know about the servants, of course. Most of them are gone. They left because they are afraid. I don’t blame them, I suppose, but I would be lying if I said I don’t hate them a little for it.” Her voice is steady but her hand trembles as she lifts her cup to her lips.

  “What about the guards?” I ask.

  “They’re still here. For now.”

  “And Father?”

  “God only knows.”

  By midafternoon, the palace is flooded with reports of brawls and bombings, of shootings in Tsarskoe Selo and men lying dead in the streets. Things are, according to Cook, apparently no better in Petrograd, thirty kilometers away. Here at the palace all that remains between us and mutiny is the Imperial Guard and the protective circle they maintain. It is a feeble shield—no thicker than an eggshell—and even they keep a wary eye turned toward the billowing line of smoke at the horizon.