But now, in the scene before them, Anastasia’s grand flag of dark blond hair waved gently behind her in the breeze; her bright blue eyes crinkled with joy and laughter. Nobody else in the world, before or after, could have been as beautiful as Anastasia in that moment.
Then she crammed a bowler derby on her head and held a fuzzy black caterpillar made of knotted yarn on her upper lip and began to waddle.
Maria appeared beside Anastasia in the scene on the wall. Maria-on-the-wall was screaming with laughter at her sister’s imitation; she was so lost in mirth that she’d given up trying to play whatever character she was supposed to portray.
And then, on the wall, Olga and Tatiana stepped up beside their younger sisters. The two of them glowed as brightly as the sunshine on their white lace dresses; they were royal young ladies right at the age when princes from all across Europe were expected to start coming to court them.
A lot of things had been expected before the war that never came to pass.
“Oh, Anastasia, you are so silly,” Tatiana was saying on the wall, even as she fondly ruffled the younger girl’s hair.
Sitting on the floor in front of the wall, the real Anastasia and Maria began to weep.
“How could they have been so beautiful and alive then, and so dead now?” Anastasia wailed. “How could we have lost them?”
Sobbing was such a messy thing. Leonid had never been able to understand why God created humans with so much snot and so many tears inside them.
Leonid pulled out his handkerchief and timidly handed it to Anastasia, who took it and blew her nose on it with an unladylike snort. Leonid looked pointedly at Chip. If the other boy truly had been a king once upon a time, he shouldn’t need to be reminded of his gentlemanly duty to give his handkerchief to Maria.
Chip gave a helpless shrug.
“Sorry, dude,” he said. “Kids don’t carry handkerchiefs in the twenty-first century.”
“And I don’t have any Kleenex,” Katherine mumbled, patting the pockets of her own pants. She turned to face the wall, where the happy past kept playing out, the four beautiful grand duchesses laughing and hugging and laughing again.
“Would you just stop?” Katherine yelled at the wall. “Can’t you see this isn’t helping?”
Instantly the wall went blank.
On the floor, Anastasia and Maria kept crying, sharing Leonid’s sodden handkerchief between them.
* * *
Hours—or maybe days—later, Leonid went to speak to Chip and Katherine privately, off to the side.
“I don’t want to upset the grand duchesses,” he began. “But there are people I lost too. Er, I don’t know if they’re lost or not. I don’t know what happened to them. There were no letters . . . but then, everyone stopped getting letters. . . .”
He kept his head down. He couldn’t bring himself to look either Chip or Katherine directly in the face. Would they think it forward of him, a mere servant, to wish for anything? Katherine had rescued him from certain death; how could he ask for more than that?
Chip glanced over his shoulder toward Maria and Anastasia, who were still huddled together on the floor. They’d stopped crying, but somehow their dry eyes didn’t make them look any less grief-stricken. Anastasia stroked Maria’s hair; Maria seemed to be whispering a prayer.
Chip put his arm around Leonid in a brotherly fashion, and drew him farther away from the grand duchesses, toward the back wall.
“I understand how you feel,” Chip said. “When I left the 1400s, there were lots of people I wondered about. I looked them up as best I could—”
“You did?” Katherine said. “I didn’t know that.”
Chip shrugged as helplessly as when he lacked a handkerchief.
“There wasn’t much to find,” he said. “Forsooth, it was as though most of them had never lived.”
“He goes all medieval on us sometimes when he’s remembering the past,” Katherine apologized.
Leonid didn’t quite know what the word “medieval” meant, but he could sense a logic in Katherine’s words. Chip seemed more like a boy from the past than from the future right now. He wore his bright blond hair in short, childish curls around his face, and his voice veered between manly depth and boyish squawking. His skin was smooth, nowhere close to needing its first shave.
And yet, for all that, he had an ancient air about him.
“Everyone dies eventually, Leonid,” Chip said, like a priest intoning a solemn truth. “Mayhap it is best not to know what happened in the end to people you remember as young and healthy and alive—so alive.”
“Chip traveled more than five hundred years into the future from his original time,” Katherine told Leonid. “Of course everyone he knew from his original life died. With you, it’s only going to be about a century, but still—”
“I just saw my uncle in May!” Leonid protested. “The Bolsheviks wouldn’t let him stay at the house in Ekaterinburg with everyone else. And then yesterday—I mean, the day before that awful night in the basement—just before dinner the guards told me he’d come for me. That was why they took me away and told me to wait for him in the house across the street….”
Leonid saw Chip and Katherine exchange glances.
“Oh,” Katherine said. “He doesn’t know.”
“Know what?” Leonid asked.
For a long moment, neither of them answered.
“We only heard gossip,” Chip said. “Guards talking . . . Maybe it isn’t even true.”
“What isn’t true?” Leonid asked, so loudly he feared one of the grand duchesses might have heard. But when he glanced back over his shoulder, they were still huddled together, lost in their own grief.
Katherine shook her head, the hair she’d pulled back like a horse’s tail flipping side to side.
“Not knowing for sure hurts too, doesn’t it?” she asked Leonid. “I’m sorry, but when Chip and Jonah and I were in 1918, we heard the guards say that your uncle was already dead. The story about him coming for you—that was all a lie. A lie to save your life, actually.”
Leonid barely heard that last part. He could make no sense of it. His uncle Ivan dead? Impossible! Ivan had worn such a fine sailor’s uniform when he first came to Leonid’s tiny village of Sverchokova. He was so tall and muscular, and he told such fine stories. He worked for the tsar. He sailed the tsar’s yacht for him in the summertime; he served as valet at one of the tsar’s palaces the rest of the year.
Leonid’s own father had died so long ago Leonid didn’t remember him; Leonid clung to his uncle as only a little boy could. And then Leonid’s mother, seeing this, had begged Ivan to take Leonid back to the palace with him, to put Leonid to work for the royal family too.
Ivan had changed everything about Leonid’s life. Ivan had made Leonid’s life.
How could he be dead?
“Show me,” Leonid demanded. “You can’t just say these things and not—”
Katherine winced, but then she muttered, “Show us what happened to Leonid’s uncle Ivan after the last time they saw each other.”
A scene appeared on the wall again, but Leonid didn’t feel like it was a miracle this time. He was no longer watching beautiful, happy girls in a sunny garden. He was watching his uncle and Nagorny, another of the royal family’s servants, being led from the house in Ekaterinburg. Like Ivan, Nagorny had once been a sailor on the tsar’s yacht; before Ekaterinburg it had also been Nagorny’s job to take care of Alexei.
Leonid could see that both Ivan and Nagorny were trying hard to stand tall and walk fearlessly—to show only disdain for the cluster of Bolshevik guards around them. But Leonid could also see that both men were deeply afraid. It was written in the set of their jaws, in the slight tremor in their strides.
The guards led Ivan and Nagorny through the double set of fences, out to the street. Ivan and Nagorny
were placed in separate carriages, each of them surrounded only by men who hated them.
Now Ivan and Nagorny were entering a prison.
Now Ivan and Nagorny were being shot, crumpling to the ground, dying. . . .
“Stop!” Chip shouted. “No more! Silence!”
Leonid had forgotten Chip was there. Leonid had forgotten everything but that one moment in May 1918, everything but his uncle’s body falling. Quickly Leonid looked behind him—yes, the grand duchesses had heard the gunshots. They were staring at the horrifying scene on the wall, their wide eyes pooling once again with tears.
“Not them, too!” Anastasia exploded. “Must we lose everyone we loved?” She glanced at Leonid and bit her lip. “I didn’t mean—”
“It happened so quickly,” Katherine was apologizing, more to the grand duchesses than to Leonid. “I thought we’d have some warning, and we could get a sense of what was going to happen and then shut it off—”
“Save them!” Maria shrieked from her place on the floor. “You saved me and Anastasia and Alexei and Leonid—go back and save Ivan and Nagorny, too!”
Now it was Katherine whose eyes filled with tears.
“We can’t,” she said. “I’m sorry. It’s too late.”
“I know it’s hard to understand,” Chip said soothingly, sounding like he was trying to be as diplomatic as a king. “But JB said there were only a few windows of opportunity for time travelers to get in and out in 1918. It was such a damaged year. With World War I and all the fighting in Russia . . . it’s a miracle anybody could be saved. We can’t get to Ivan.”
Leonid’s heart throbbed with pain, as if his body had been riddled with bullets too. It hurt so badly that his uncle was gone. But it also hurt that Maria, not Leonid, had been the one to beg for Ivan’s life. What kind of nephew was Leonid that he could only stand there, meekly watching his uncle die?
“He was my uncle,” Leonid said. “Mine. He is my sorrow to grieve.”
But Leonid accidentally spoke in Russian—and not just Russian, but the garbled dialect that he’d used when he’d first gone to the palace from his tiny village. Probably nobody understood him. Probably nobody understood Leonid at all.
* * *
It felt like night—or as much as any time could feel like anything in this nowhere of a no place.
Chip and Katherine were huddled together whispering in one corner of the room, their heads tilted together. Anastasia and Maria were in another corner, their arms linked, Maria’s head on Anastasia’s shoulder. They were so close that locks of their same-color, same-texture hair coiled together into one long curl dangling between them.
Leonid was alone.
He went to the far corner of the room, to the wall where he’d watched his uncle die.
“Is it possible that you could show me something privately, so secretly and quietly that only I will see and hear?” he asked.
He waited, and just at the moment he was ready to give up, the word “Yes” seemed to whisper from the wall.
It was followed by the word “Da.” The wall was willing to speak Russian to him.
“Show me . . . ,” Leonid decided to work up to what he both wanted and feared. “Show me the moment I first met Clothilde.”
It would mean seeing his uncle again, and that would be hard, but Leonid was ready to risk that.
The blank wall seemed to melt away, and Leonid could see a younger version of himself walking beside his uncle, the man just as tall and muscular and invincible-looking as ever. Leonid was perhaps eleven or twelve. The two of them had just arrived at Tsarkoe Selo from Leonid’s village, and Leonid’s mouth was agape with wonder at his first glimpses of palaces and Fabergé eggs and luxury. Really, at that point he would have been awed by anything beyond ramshackle wooden huts, but Tsarkoe Selo was the pinnacle of the glories of three hundred years of Romanov rule. The soaring ceilings, the gleaming parquet dance floors, the meticulously tended gardens . . . No wonder Leonid’s eyes seemed perpetually on the verge of popping out of his head.
Young Leonid and his uncle Ivan stepped into a drawing room—though of course Leonid wouldn’t have known to call it a drawing room then. Across the room, a young girl in a sleek black dress and a frilly apron looked up and smiled.
“Is that . . . is that one of the grand duchesses?” young Leonid whispered to his uncle.
Ivan seemed to be doing his best to hide a smile.
“No, just one of the maids,” he whispered back. “See her feather duster?”
Leonid had not. Not exactly. As much as he’d noticed the feathery thing in Clothilde’s hand, he’d thought it was yet another adornment, an oversize bracelet perhaps—some luxurious fashion that had not yet reached his village.
And, indeed, no one used feather dusters there.
“Even maids at the palace are that beautiful?” young Leonid asked, his eyes widening with amazement.
Ivan laughed.
“This one is,” he said.
Clothilde was beautiful; it wasn’t just Leonid’s memory playing tricks on him. Against her crisp black dress, her long, dark hair glistened in the sunlight coming through the perfectly polished window. Her green eyes were warm with laughter, because of course she’d heard Ivan and Leonid’s whispers. Her smile was more for Ivan than for Leonid—Leonid hadn’t seen that then, but he did now. It didn’t matter. Her eyes stayed kind when they alighted on Leonid in all his gawky, gaping awkwardness.
She walked toward Ivan and Leonid, and gave an exaggerated curtsy. Then she reached over and boldly brushed the hair from Leonid’s forehead.
“Fresh from the countryside, I see,” she said. “I’m Clothilde. Pleased to meet you.”
“Fresh from France?” Ivan ventured to guess.
Clothilde laughed, in a way Leonid hadn’t understood back then. There was an edge to it.
“That is what the tsarina—and I—would like everyone to believe,” she said.
Leonid would learn later that Clothilde had once been an ordinary Russian Masha, but it was more convenient to take on a French name and accent. French maids made more money; they were less likely to be fired, no matter how bad they were at dusting or pouring tea.
Back then, fresh from the countryside, Leonid could never have imagined trying to be anyone but himself. He never would have imagined that he could be anyone but himself: an ordinary peasant boy.
Leonid got lost in his thoughts—he missed whatever Ivan said back to Clothilde. He’d probably missed half the conversation the first time around too.
But he still remembered what Clothilde had said to him next.
On the wall, she was turning toward the impossibly young, naïve peasant Leonid. She was about to speak. . . .
“Be careful here, little country boy,” she said. “Don’t go falling for every pretty girl you see. I saw you first.”
Leonid could remember how that had made him feel when he first heard those words. He felt claimed. He felt like Clothilde was really saying, I’ve fallen in love with you just as much as you’ve fallen in love with me. This is my promise: We’ll be together forever. We were fated for this moment. We were fated to be as one.
Now Leonid saw how completely Clothilde had been teasing him. It had been cruel, really, to flirt so outrageously with such an innocent.
But what if we were fated? Leonid wondered. What if Clothilde somehow sensed it, even then?
Could they still be fated now? Could they have been meant to share something that transcended even Leonid being yanked out of time?
“Stop,” Leonid told the wall, because he remembered that he’d stumbled over his own feet walking away from Clothilde that first day, and he didn’t need to watch that. Also, he needed to do something before he lost his nerve. “Show me where Clothilde is right now.”
“There isn’t any such thing as ‘now’ in a time h
ollow,” the wall whispered back to him.
“I mean in 1918,” Leonid corrected himself. “In July. The day I . . . left.”
The scene on the wall changed. The palace drawing room disappeared; a cramped, dirty hovel appeared in its place.
It took Leonid a moment to recognize Clothilde. She wore a ragged dress now, her hair held back with a tattered ribbon. She stood by a pot hung over an open flame, and even without being able to see into the pot, Leonid was pretty sure it would contain nothing but watery soup. Clothilde was so thin Leonid could see the outline of her ribs through her dress when she bent over the pot. She had hollows in her cheeks that seemed deep enough to drink from.
Quick death by gunfire or slow death by starvation . . . were those the only choices for the tsar’s servants after the tsar lost power? Leonid wondered.
No—there was also what had happened to Leonid.
* * *
It turned out it was possible to talk with Alexei and the other injured boy, Jonah, even though they were recovering from their bullet wounds in a hospital in the far-distant future, and Leonid and the others were outside of time entirely.
Everyone crowded together in front of the center section of the wall, where they were going to see the two boys. The three girls jostled their way closest to the screen; Chip and Leonid held back.
“They’re all concerned about their brothers,” Chip said with a shrug. At Leonid’s blank look, he added, “Oh—didn’t you know that Katherine is Jonah’s sister?”
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