The Romanov Legacy

by Jenni Wiltz

  The Romanov Legacy

  by

  Jenni Wiltz

  Copyright 2012 by Jenni Wiltz

  Cover images and art copyright 2012 by Jenni Wiltz

  All Rights Reserved

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  Chapter Fifty

  Chapter Fifty-One

  Chapter Fifty-Two

  Chapter Fifty-Three

  Chapter Fifty-Four

  Chapter Fifty-Five

  Chapter Fifty-Six

  Chapter Fifty-Seven

  Chapter Fifty-Eight

  Chapter Fifty-Nine

  Chapter Sixty

  Chapter Sixty-One

  Chapter Sixty-Two

  Chapter Sixty-Three

  Chapter Sixty-Four

  Chapter Sixty-Five

  Chapter Sixty-Six

  Chapter Sixty-Seven

  Chapter Sixty-Eight

  Chapter Sixty-Nine

  Chapter Seventy

  Chapter Seventy-One

  Chapter One

  July 1918

  Ekaterinburg, Russia

  The guards shot at anything that moved. Birds, stray dogs, even street vendors who came too close to the whitewashed palisade that shielded the house from public view—no one was safe and there were no warning shots. Target practice, they called it.

  The men “practiced” every day after lunch, calling out the name of a different Romanov and shooting wildly at a tree trunk or a tin of food set on a fence post. They called this place “The House of Special Purpose,” and only the blind would have harbored illusions about what that purpose might be.

  Marie was not blind.

  She watched one of the guards through a crack in the bedroom door, which they were not allowed to close all the way. The rest of the family had gone into the dining room for supper; she stayed behind to wake her sister, Olga, who lay suffering with a headache. “Two minutes,” the guard had said. “Then I will drag you into the dining room by your hair.”

  It was not enough time. Still, they had to try.

  She glanced at Olga, feigning sleep while stiff as a tree trunk. “Olga darling,” Marie said loudly, “it’s time for supper. You must get up.”

  Squinting through the crack, Marie followed the guard’s gaze to the pendulum clock in the hall. He was timing them. She took one deep breath to calm herself then snapped her fingers.

  At her sister’s signal, Olga sprang to life. She reached beneath the mattress and removed a pen and sheet of paper, torn from the frontispiece of Alexei’s diary. Scratching fiercely, she punctured the paper in several places and spattered her white dress with ink.

  “Slow down,” Marie hissed.

  Olga ignored the warning. Her pen flew across the paper, giving shape to the words she’d chosen while lying in bed last night. No one must know what she and her sister were doing: not the guards, not the Cheka, not the Bolshevik censors, and certainly not their father. This letter had to slip past all of them, dismissed as the lovelorn ramblings of a doomed princess. The lovelorn part was not difficult; she would die with Pavel’s name on her lips and the memory of that Crimean autumn in her breast. Yes, she thought. I know how to keep a secret.

  My dear Pavel,

  I miss you more than you can know. We are surviving, so you must not worry too much. Baby’s knee is swollen again, but he lives up to his nickname and we thank God for every moment he is healthy. There is nothing to do here but read, and I have been through every scrap of type six times already. I wish you could send me something new. Just one word would be enough. What was the book we read together in the Crimea? A silly story about a dancing girl who became an empress. If she were a man, it would not have been so scandalous, don’t you think? They would have given him the world. What power there is in a name! Do you suppose anyone will remember mine when it is all over? Like me, it is so very plain. Very fitting for a humble sailor’s wife, which is all I ever wished to be.

  Olga Nikolaevna

  She stared at her signature and wondered why the letters looked so childish. Then she raised her hand from the paper and realized it was shaking. “Your turn,” she whispered.

  Marie flung herself onto the bed and pulled a second sheet of paper from beneath the mattress. But instead of writing, she grabbed Olga’s dress sash and untied it. “What are you doing?” Olga hissed, swatting at her sister’s hands.

  “Leave it,” Marie said. “Just keep watch.” Then she fell to scribbling, leaving her sister no choice. Olga clutched the bedclothes and listened for the soldier’s footsteps in the hallway. He made one more circuit from end to end and stopped in front of the door. “Finish,” Olga whispered. “Now.”

  The guard rapped on the door, pressing hard enough to swing it open. “What’s taking so long?”

  Olga swallowed the peppery lump of fear in her throat. “May we have one more moment, please?”

  The guard’s suspicious eyes flickered over Olga and then Marie, hunched behind her sister. “What’s going on here?”

  “Nothing,” Olga lied.

  “What are those?” he asked, pointing at the ink spots on Olga’s dress. “What have you been doing?”

  Olga’s lips struggled to form words. She could think of no lie he would not see through. It is over, she thought, bowing her head. We are dead.

  “It’s no use,” Marie said, reaching for the ends of Olga’s sash and tying them in a large bow. Olga felt her sister’s nimble fingers slip the folded sheets of paper between the sash and the dress, hiding them from view. “Just tell him.”

  The guard narrowed his eyes. “Tell me what?”

  “She’s too embarrassed to tell you herself,” Marie said. “But she laid down on a pen. Can you believe how clumsy she is?”

  Olga felt her sister’s warm hands push her up from the bed. “You see?” Marie said, holding up the pen. “Her headache was so bad she collapsed without noticing it.”

  The guard held out his hand. “Come here,” he said to her.

  Olga looked down at his open palm, its threaded crevices stained with something dark. Her throat swelled with fear. I do not want to die, she thought. She knew she would only anger him further by ref
using his summons, but no force in the world could make her step forward.

  “Come here,” he said again.

  Olga shook her head slowly.

  The guard ripped his revolver from his belt and aimed it at her forehead. “You are nothing! You are less than dirt!” Then he gathered a mouthful of spit and flung it on her. “Don’t you know there is no more tsar?”

  Olga felt the spittle pelt her cheeks and bit her lip to keep from screaming. Yes, there is a tsar! she thought. He is my father and he sits in this very house. You will be sorry when the ghost of Great Peter rises up within him to defend all of Russia from the likes of you! But she knew it was a lie. Her father was weak; no shade of Great Peter lived within him. Her eyes filled with tears and blood trickled over her tongue, leaking from the puncture marks made by her teeth.

  Sensing her submission, the guard stepped closer. He grasped a handful of her skirt and twisted it to pull her near. Up close, she could see the mosaic of pores and stubble on his cheeks—they reminded her of the patterned tiles on the floor of the Hermitage. We will never see Petersburg again, she thought.

  “Is it true?” he asked. “Did you lay on the pen?”

  “Yes.” She swallowed thickly, a mouthful of blood and bile burning her throat.

  The guard frisked his hand up her thigh and across her side, dangerously close to the bow of her sash. “Most women notice what is in their bed before they lie in it. Are you not so picky, princess?”

  Olga twisted her body to keep the letters out of his reach. “I had a headache. You needn’t suggest more than that.”

  He slapped her hard enough to make her stumble. “You will never again tell anyone what to do! Do you understand?”

  Olga’s cheeks blossomed with the sting of a thousand Crimean bees. We will never leave this house, she thought. Their hatred will strip the flesh from our bones.

  “Hush, now,” Marie said, squeezing herself between them. She smiled brightly at the guard, blue eyes wide and lashes fluttering in a pattern Olga recognized. Marie had learned at an early age how to soften a father’s punishment or warm a wounded soldier’s heart.

  No, Olga thought. He is not worth your care. She put a hand on her sister’s arm but Marie shrugged it off. “Olga, go into the kitchen,” she said softly. “You know Kharitonov hates to be kept waiting.”

  Olga’s knees wobbled as she stumbled past the guard. When she turned around, she saw her sister’s seraphic gaze locked on the guard’s pockmarked face. “You may search our room, if you like,” Marie said. “I promise we have done nothing wrong.”

  The blood and bile in Olga’s throat nearly choked her as she crept into the parlor and spotted the basket used by the Novo-Tikhvinsky nuns to deliver bread and eggs. Behind her, Marie’s soft voice echoed in the hallway. “Shall I show you our diaries? Our prayer books? Is there anything else you might like to see?”

  Olga imagined Marie’s fingers touching the man’s hand, trailing up his arm, promising a favor that would banish all thought of their possible transgressions: a kiss or perhaps an embrace. Her stomach clenched and she fought a pang of revulsion for the sister who was capable of such deception.

  Olga pulled the letters from her sash and held them to her lips. This is the only way, she thought. The only way I can tell him I still love him. She had given up all hope that either recipient would be able to mount a rescue. Neither she nor Marie knew if their first letters had even made it through; if they hadn’t, the secret would die in this house and these second letters would be just a benediction from the dead. Still, it would be enough to know that Pavel touched the same piece of paper she had kissed with her still-breathing lips.

  “Go with God,” she whispered, placing the letters between the layers of cloth folded in the nuns’ basket. “May He have mercy on our souls.”

  Chapter Two

  June 2012

  Daly City, California

  The old man rolled his head to the side and looked longingly at the carafe of water on his nightstand. He had spoken for nearly an hour and it still hadn’t been enough to make his grandson understand what he must do. If only he hadn’t waited until he was so tired…he should have known his breath would fail him when he needed it most.

  “Yuri,” he said, lifting a withered arm and reaching for the carafe. His grandson came around the side of the bed. Grigori watched him fill the glass to the rim, something the nurses never did. They knew, as Yuri did not, that a full glass of water was too heavy for many patients to lift.

  “Dedushka,” Yuri said softly. “Who else knows about this?”

  Grigori ignored the question, reaching for the glass and holding it to his lips. Was it too late, he wondered, to take back what he had just said? He thought of the quick flash he’d seen in Yuri’s eyes and knew he had just made a terrible mistake.

  Grigori cradled the empty cup against his chest. “No one.”

  “Are you sure it’s still there?”

  “I have told you all I know,” he lied.

  A hard lump formed at the back of his throat. He still did not understand why their family had been chosen to carry this burden. His father, Filipp, said the Tsar’s daughter had touched his hand. The Tsar was God’s representative on earth, holy and anointed and divine. Surely anything his daughter touched would become holy, too. He believed that when he saw his father in Heaven, Filipp’s right hand would glow with the same golden halo painted around the heads of Orthodox saints.

  “All this time,” Yuri breathed, moving from the bed to the window. He pinched open the blinds and flickered his eyes across the terraced hills, stacked with low-slung houses in faded yellow and green. “It’s been there waiting for me.”

  “No,” Grigori said. “It is not yours.”

  “It will be,” Yuri snapped, lower lip jutting out like it had when he was a boy, refused a foil-wrapped sweet before dinner.

  “My father…he should never have kept it.”

  “But he did,” Yuri said, “and now they’re all dead. Why shouldn’t I have what they left behind?”

  It is as I feared, Grigori thought. He will sell the soul of an entire country and destroy what ninety years of revolution and war could not. “Yuri, do you not see? The gulags, the partnership with England during the war, the incursion into Korea…what do you think the Soviets were looking for? Your great-grandfather and I only survived because we did not reveal their secret. Death has followed them everywhere. If you break our silence, it will come for you, too.”

  His grandson turned from the blinds with a half-moon smile. “You always believed that horseshit, didn’t you?”

  Grigori released the muscles in his neck, allowing his head to sag onto the pillow. He could not bear to watch the greed devour his grandson before his very eyes. The names may change, he thought, but evil never dies. “I am afraid for you, Yuri.”

  “Don’t be,” Yuri said. “I’ll take care of everything.”

  Dim fog light filtered through the plastic blinds, washing the sterile room in lifeless gray. Grigori closed his eyes to block it out. Forgive me, he prayed to the soul of his father, for what I have just unleashed upon the world.

  Chapter Three

  July 2012

  San Francisco, California

  Natalie Brandon pulled the flask out of her jacket pocket and looked for a place to pour the contents. Her sister’s office was devoid of any useful drinkware, so she emptied the pencil cup over the trash and filled it with a generous helping of bourbon. She looked down into the cup, where wooden shavings and broken pencil tips floated like bits of shipwreck in an amber sea. “Ahoy, matey,” she said.

  The sour mash swirled over her tongue and she held it there, letting the alcohol soak into the skin of her mouth—it worked faster that way. When she swallowed, she looked up at the clock. Beth was late.

  She slapped a bundle of index cards onto the desk, next to a framed photo of two little girls in sundresses. The taller girl, a blonde, smiled brightly to reveal an enormous gap
where her two front teeth used to be. The smaller girl, a brunette, held her hand up to the camera with a face vacant of all expression. On her palm sat a fat, furry spider with one leg raised in greeting. “Medusa,” Natalie whispered.

  She stared at the pale smear meant to represent her face. Her eyes never photographed well; they were too light, without enough contrast against her skin. Combined with her long, dark hair, they made her look like a ghost.

  In the photo, she wore a pink Strawberry Shortcake dress. The photographer had cut her off at the waist, but she knew exactly what else she’d worn that day: red tights and Buster Brown shoes. She could still remember the Kix she’d eaten that morning, the cream cheese sandwiches her mother served for lunch, and every word of dialogue from that night’s episode of The Muppet Show.

  It seemed so harmless at first—a little girl who could recite Shakespeare from memory and calculate the grocery bill to the penny before the cart reached a register. But everything changed in fourth grade. One minute she was standing at the chalkboard in Mrs. Bradley’s class, diagramming a sentence. The next, a searing pain ripped through her brain. She felt something moving beneath her skull, something with a human form and enormous, feather-covered wings.

  The creature struggled to unfold itself, pressing its wings against her occipital lobe until she thought it would split open. When the creature realized her skull was the obstacle, it raised its head and looked at her from behind her own face. “I have things I need to show you, but I have to open my wings to do it. Will you let me?”

  She nodded. Her body fell in a faint at the chalkboard and the next thing she knew, she and the creature floated side by side above it. “My name is Belial,” he said. “I live inside you now.”

  “Are you an angel?” she asked.

  “Look around you and then tell me what you think I am.” He waved his arm and suddenly they were in a place where strange gray snow fell from the sky. A chimney spewed black smoke and men trudged past her wearing their pajamas. They were tired and they asked to stop, but another man in black whipped them until they moved again. One of them fell down and the man in black whipped him until the pajamas fell away and something red came out of his mouth. Then the man in black turned around and looked straight at her. She screamed in terror and woke up in a hospital bed, choking on the taste of flesh and ashes.