by Claudia Gray
I wonder why I’m getting all fixed up for a doctor who’s coming to me. So I have no idea what to expect at 11:00 a.m., but whatever it was, it’s not what I get.
“Dr. N” turns out to stand for Dr. Nilsson, and Dr. Nilsson turns out to be female, which has to be unusual for this era. Her thick black hair is swept back into a tight bun, but her heart-shaped face keeps her from looking severe. She’s not mean; she’s not motherly; she is calm personified. Her clothes look like any other woman’s from the street below, though they’re a quiet gray. Instead of the black bag doctors used to carry in the old days, she has only a notebook and pen. And instead of asking how I feel, she takes a seat in one of the chairs nearest the long velvet sofa, takes out her notebook and says, “What shall we talk about today, Your Imperial Highness?”
At first I’m just glad she said it in English. Then it hits me—she’s not a medical doctor. Dr. Nilsson is a psychiatrist.
The grand duchess came to Paris for therapy.
Seems extreme to me, but then again, if social history is evolving more slowly here too, psychology would be very new to this world. There might not even be an analyst in Russia yet. Or maybe the tsar didn’t want anyone knowing his daughter is seeing a shrink.
Slowly I stretch out onto the sofa, again like in movies.
Dr. Nilsson says only, “Your Imperial Highness?”
I venture, “I guess—I guess I’m feeling, uh, conflicted about my father.”
“Which one?”
“Which what?”
“Which father?” Dr. Nilsson keeps taking notes without ever looking up from her pad. Thank God she’s not looking at my face. Instead, she continues, “Or have you given up your fantasy that your tutor is actually your father?”
It hits me so hard I can hardly breathe. She remembered.
The selves we enter during our cross-dimensional travels aren’t supposed to remember anything we do while we’re in charge of their bodies. I’ve seen other versions of Paul and Theo who had absolutely no clue about anything that happened while my Paul and Theo were within them.
But I’m a “perfect traveler.” These voyages are different for me than they are for anyone else. Every single Marguerite I’ve ever visited must have remembered everything I did and said in her life.
Grand Duchess Margarita tried to talk about what she’d experienced, which is why she wound up in therapy. Nobody believed she’d actually been taken over by a visitor from another dimension; they think she’s cracking up.
“Your Imperial Highness,” Dr. Nilsson says. “Do you wish to answer the question?”
“The tsar is my father,” I say in a rush. “But I’m angry with him sometimes, and it’s easy to pretend that somebody else is my father. Someone kind like Professor Caine.”
Did this Marguerite tell the tsar the truth? If so, she might have doomed my father to death by firing squad.
I don’t feel as if I can breathe until Dr. Nilsson says, “So it’s not a secret you were keeping. Only a secret fantasy.”
Dad’s safe. I breathe out in relief. “Yes.”
“Good. You’re better able to face reality now. That’s progress.” Dr. Nilsson keeps taking notes. “Do you miss your father on any level?”
“I miss my brothers and sister more.” That much is the absolute truth. If I could see little Peter and Katya again—talk with Vladimir one more time—that would be a gift.
“And Lieutenant Markov?”
At first I think I must trust Dr. Nilsson a lot—but then I realize, after the scene I made at the army camp after Lieutenant Markov’s death, everyone must have known about us. About them. “He’s dead.”
“You no longer believe he still exists in some . . . shadow world alongside our own?”
I close my eyes. The grand duchess remembered everything. “It doesn’t matter if he is. I can’t reach him there. He’s—he’s very far away from me now.” My voice starts to shake. “The other Paul might not be my Paul. He might not be as loving, or as strong. As good.”
She tilts her head. It’s easy to imagine what she’s writing. Subject retains irrational belief in “shadow worlds” but has begun to say these worlds are cut off from her. She expresses no more desire to visit them. This is a transitional step toward accepting the reality of her lover’s death. “Do you still feel that one of your shadow selves took over your body nearly the entire month of December? That your actions were actually her responsibility?”
“It—it seems like that’s what happened,” I venture. “But she didn’t do anything I hadn’t wanted to do.”
“Do you think she might have come to see you on purpose?” Dr. Nilsson is humoring me now. “To take the actions you were afraid of? To do things otherwise forbidden?”
“I need to think about that some more.”
That wins me a very slight smile. She definitely believes we’re making progress. “Have you had any dreams lately, Your Imperial Highness?”
How would I know? But the words well up anyway, spilling out to the only person I have to tell. “I dreamed that I was captured by armed men.” What’s the closest equivalent to the Russian mob in this dimension? “By soldiers loyal to the Grand Duke Sergei, the ones who rose up against us.”
“What happened during your captivity, in this dream? Were you sexually violated?”
“No.” Um, rude. Then again, I remember studying that the early Freudians believed absolutely everything came back to sex in the end. Dr. Nilsson’s overly personal questions are going to keep coming. “But one of the soldiers turned out to be Paul Markov.”
“What role did Markov play in your dream?”
“I thought he was there to protect me. To rescue me, no matter what.” I swallow hard. “Instead, he turned out to be just like all the rest. Someone else came to save me, and Paul—Paul shot him. The man who tried to save me didn’t die, but there was so much blood, and I thought he might lose his legs.”
Dr. Nilsson nods. “How did this make you feel?”
“Guilty. Sad. Scared. Doctor, what do you think my dream means?”
“Only you can answer that, Your Imperial Highness.”
“I know, but—I just wondered what it looked like to you. Please tell me.”
She puts the notepad in her lap and folds her hands on top of it. Instead of answering right away, she thinks for a moment—trying to give me an honest answer.
Finally she nods, as if agreeing with her own inner assessment. “Someone whom you have always regarded as a loving, protective figure instead, in your mind, became someone who could hurt you. In your dream, you only saw him attack another; this may have been your subconscious softening the blow.”
“But Lieutenant Markov never would have hurt me. I know that. I know it.”
“The dream of him can,” Dr. Nilsson said. “So can the illusion that you might find him again.”
My belief that Paul and I are destined to be together no matter what—that’s the illusion. It shattered along with Theo’s bones in that rain of bullets. And it feels like I’ve been destroyed along with it.
After Dr. Nilsson leaves, I sink back onto the sofa. This enormous room’s grandeur seems to taunt me, because as beautiful as it is it’s empty. I’m alone in ways I thought I never would be again, because I always thought that even when Paul wasn’t with me, he was a part of me.
Before long I have to move on. No matter how unsure I am about Paul at this moment, I will never, ever abandon him to Conley. Yes, Theo has gone to the home office in the Triadverse; by now, Conley should have given him the coordinates for the dimension where the fourth and final splinter of Paul’s soul is hidden. I’ve done Conley’s dirty work. But Conley will never let it go at that. He’d endanger Paul again, if that was what it took to get me out of this universe and back under his thumb. So I can’t remain in Paris for much longer.
What I need to do now is figure out what comes after.
My reverie is interrupted when the maid brings in my luncheon tray. S
he smiles as she delivers it to the dining area—which has a table and chairs so ornate they seem less like something you’d eat at, more like where you’d sit while writing the Constitution. I take a seat, primly as I did back in the Winter Palace, so the illusion of royalty is complete until she lifts the silver cover from the tray.
What awaits me isn’t anything out of the ordinary—some kind of fish soup, I think, plus vegetables—but for some reason, the fishy odor hits me like a blow. Never have I smelled anything so disgusting; the scent seems to seep into my nose and lungs and gut like poison. Everything inside me turns over, tightens.
My stomach wrenches as the nausea turns from figurative to literal.
“I’m going to throw up,” I say. The maid skitters back as I push away from the table and make a run for the nearest bathroom. I make it just in time to barf into the sink.
The smell of my own vomit almost makes me sick again. And in the bathroom there’s the scent of cleanser, and perfumed soap that for some reason now seems repulsive—I can’t stand it. Weakly I stumble out of there, and the maid gets me back to my bedroom. “I’ll leave your luncheon under the tray. If you want another later, ring,” she says as she backs out and closes the door behind her.
I flop onto my bed, now too queasy to be miserable about anything else.
It would serve me right, if after everything else I put the grand duchess through, I had to endure her bout of the flu. Groaning, I roll onto my stomach—but my breasts are tender, and I wince.
My eyes open wide.
The grand duchess has gained weight. Mom and I have the same problem: we almost can’t gain weight. Don’t even give me that crap about boo hoo hoo that’s not a real problem eat a sandwich. Easy to say when you’re not slightly wired all the time by your crazy metabolism. My body simply burns too many calories, too fast.
But here I am in a body that’s heavier. Some of that weight is in my breasts, which must be a cup size larger. My sense of smell has turned sharp, and I’m vomiting for no reason at all.
Three months after Lieutenant Markov and I slept together.
Oh God. I’m pregnant.
20
I CAN’T BE HAVING A BABY. I CAN’T.
I sit on my bed, hands on either side of my head, trying to talk myself out of it. Maybe you’re premenstrual. That would explain the boobs, plus my belly could be water weight. But my body never reacted like that to PMS before. Mostly I just break out, and start crying at the least little thing. You could have the stomach flu. That would explain why you’re throwing up. People don’t usually gain weight when they have stomach flu, do they?
All my denials fail. The truth is unmistakable on some level that goes beyond logic or even emotion; my body is telling me something that outweighs anything my brain could say. I’m pregnant, for real.
Slowly I reach down to splay my hand across my belly. No, it doesn’t yet look like I have a “baby bump,” but the weight I’ve gained there has a certain . . . solidity. A firmness that fat doesn’t have. I don’t feel the baby moving, but maybe I wouldn’t yet.
Does anyone know I’m having a baby? No—they can’t. Dr. Nilsson would have asked me how I felt about it. The tsar? I shudder at the thought. He probably would’ve locked me in a convent, if not a prison cell.
I’m horrified because this isn’t my body. I did this to the Grand Duchess Margarita. I made the decision, I slept with Paul, and now—
How smug I was, telling Theo how hard we tried to do right by the other selves we visit. I’m so full of it. I took more than this Marguerite’s only night with the man she loved; I took away her choices.
As bad as it would be for me to be pregnant at eighteen, for the grand duchess it’s about ten thousand times worse. This society believes in virginity until marriage—for women, anyway, because they’ve got all the nineteenth-century hypocrisy to go with the nineteenth-century tech. And the tsar wanted to marry me off to the Prince of Wales! I’m pretty sure showing up with an illegitimate child wasn’t part of that deal.
I have already endangered you, Lieutenant Markov whispered to me that night as we lay together in bed. He understood this society; he knew the risks. And he had the sense to fear the consequences.
No, I was the careless one. And these are the consequences.
I flop back onto the bed, and close my eyes tightly as if I’m holding back tears. But the remorse goes too deep for me to cry about it. There’s nothing I can do to help her. Nothing. I have to assume she doesn’t want to terminate the pregnancy, because surely she’d have done it by now if she could.
This must be why the grand duchess came to Paris. She knew she was in trouble, so she ran all the way across Europe. Obviously she needed to get out of Russia before her pregnancy began to show, before the tsar or any of the court nobles could guess the truth. Once the king of England learned that the grand duchess was not exactly sane—the engagement would be called off long before the truth could be revealed, and that would buy her more time.
The grand duchess might be smarter than I am.
I put my hand back over my belly, still trying to convince myself that there’s an actual baby in there. Paul’s baby. Paul’s and mine, together.
On the night my parents were such bad role models about Paul and me getting together, my mother wound up saying to me that the real reason he and I shouldn’t have a baby together yet didn’t have anything to do with our education or our careers, as important as those things are. She said, When you have a child with someone, you’re bound to them forever. That can be beautiful and miraculous, and yet a burden, too—the knowledge that your life is intertwined with another’s, for all time. It transforms your relationship in ways I can’t begin to describe.
Before you take that step with someone, you must be ready to accept the destruction of the life you had together beforehand—and have faith that what you two create afterward can be even greater.
There is no “afterward” for the grand duchess and Lieutenant Markov. That night in the dacha was all they ever had.
I remember the way he held me, and whispered against my temple, calling me his little dove. Even though that Paul is dead, something of him lives on. He’ll have a son or a daughter, someone who might have his gray eyes and his good mind. When I imagine holding that baby in my arms, I know—beyond any doubt—that the grand duchess wants this child.
But I now know something she doesn’t: Paul Markov is more than the shy, devoted lieutenant I fell in love with in St. Petersburg. He can be cold, cruel. He could be a murderer.
On the train to Moscow, when the uprising began, Lieutenant Markov shot a guard who would have killed me and Katya. Since then I’ve remembered that moment as proof of how protective he is, how he would do anything to keep me safe. Now I remember how he never even looked down at the man he’d shot, bleeding to death at his feet.
The afternoon passes in a kind of daze. It feels like hours before I even move from my bed, and I do that only when I realize I’ll be more nauseated if I don’t eat than if I do. Every action I could possibly take—even something as inconsequential as sitting at the window to look out at the Place Vendôme—seems as if it could backfire disastrously. This is ridiculous, of course; watching the Paris scene is a lot less risky than having unprotected sex. But after screwing up this badly, I don’t trust myself right now. Guilt paralyzes me.
As the pale sunlight begins to dim at dusk, the maid arrives to prepare me “for dinner.” I remember the line in my planner—tonight I’m dining at the home of someone called Maxim. I wish I could tell the maid to go away, burrow back under the silk coverlet, and try to shut out the reality I’m in, the one I created for the grand duchess.
But I’ve screwed up her plans enough for one lifetime. The least I can do is keep her appointments.
I submit to the maid’s ministrations. While she’s not the equal of the attendants I had in St. Petersburg, she shares their knack for making the most out of my few good features. My curly hair is tam
ed into a soft cloud by ornate gold combs, enameled with cobalt-blue lotuses that seem vaguely Egyptian. The dress she gives me is a darker shade of blue, beaded with jet, and while it fits snugly around my newly acquired bustline, it flows down beneath that in loose folds. Even the closest observer wouldn’t be able to spot the slight thickness at my middle.
I watch the maid carefully, wondering if her eyes will linger at my waist. Whether she knows. If so, she’s too smart to give any sign.
She’s not one of the women who attended me in St. Petersburg, I remind myself. I don’t know how long I’ve been in Paris, but I almost certainly wouldn’t have left until after I was sure of my pregnancy, so no more than a month to six weeks. The maid doesn’t realize my body doesn’t always look like this.
That buys me time, but how much? Another month, at most—
For jewelry, the maid chooses heavy, screw-on earrings of black pearls and a ruby ring so enormous it dwarfs my skinny fingers. (The Firebird remains around my neck, all but hidden under the dark gauze at the dress’s neckline, unnoticed by the maid.) Then dark slippers are slid onto my feet, an elaborately beaded bag is put in my hands, and a heavy wrap of burgundy velvet and black fur is draped around my shoulders.
Turns out I’m staying in the “Suite Imperial,” but the rest of the Ritz is nearly as swanky as my rooms. Red carpet, gilded ceilings—the splendor doesn’t quite reach the levels of the Winter Palace, but it comes pretty close.
The doors that separate my area of the hotel from the rest swing open to reveal two large, stern men dressed in black. Instantly I realize they’re my personal guard. I remember Lieutenant Markov, always standing at my door, always protecting me, his gray eyes searching mine every time we dared look at each other.