The Romanov Rescue

Interlude

Tatiana: Olga is indisposed

Olga woke late into the next day, disoriented and confused. I had brought up her meals and helped her bathe and change while Maria helped Madame Hendrikova take care of Mama, and Anastasia helped Madame Schneider with Alexei.

My sister stared at the bruises on her wrists as if she didn’t know how they got there. Her hands were shaking too badly when she tried, so I had to button up the sleeves for her. For a moment I thought she would break into tears but she didn’t.

I mixed some of Mama’s medicine into her tea, made her drink it, and tucked her back into bed. She nodded and closed her eyes.

And so it went for the next few days. I did her chores, giving her apologies to Mama and Papa who came to see her, but thankfully she was asleep both times.

Mama returned to painting little icons on paper to send as thank you notes to the people of Tobolsk who had sent us food, while my father received a guest. An old staff member, a monarchist from Petrograd arrived. He brought books and tea and also delivered clothes that Mama’s best friend, Anna Vyrubova, had sent.

I wasn’t supposed to know, but a gift of twenty-five thousand rubles also arrived. Papa used the money to pay the servants who had stayed on without pay. He meant for them to use it to pay for their way back home out of Tobolsk and gave the money to Prince Dolgorukov to distribute in secret. I overheard him say that it wouldn’t be enough, but that he’d see it done.

After dinner while Papa read from a book that Madame Tolstay had sent us, I slipped out to find Chekov. He was standing outside the guard house smoking a cigarette. I gave him a look and he frowned back at me, but put out the cigarette and followed me into the kitchen.

He looked over his shoulder as he took his cap off. As always he kept as far away from me as possible.

I reached into the pocket of my apron and pulled out a strand of pearls. Mama had a matching set made for each of us girls.

“See what you can get for this, please.”

I thrust my hand out at him but he didn’t move. He just stared at me, at my hand, at the pearls.

Finally I set them down on the table between us.

He approached with enough caution to make me think he wasn’t seeing a necklace at all, but perhaps a snake.

Chekov picked the pearls up and ran a dirty thumb across them. It was almost obscene, the way he caressed them, but when he looked up I didn’t see greed.

“You’d trust me with these?” he asked.

Didn’t he realize how much power he already had over our lives?

I gave him a nod. What else could I do?

“There’s something I want to tell you,” I said to him. “Something I need to tell you.

“You’ve always treated me as if I were very innocent. Oh, yes, surely, I am. But I think you have no idea just how innocent we all are.

“Once, when Olga and I were serving as nurses for the wounded—oh, yes, we did, and Mama, too—we decided to go into a store when our shift was over. We’d never been in a store in our lives, you see, not even once, either of us. So we went in and looked and, oh, it was wonderful. The choices people could make, choices neither of us had ever been able to.

“But then we realized it took money to make those choices and, not only didn’t we have any with us, we’d never even used money in our lives. Neither of us had the first, tiniest clue of how money even worked.

“In that moment I realized that, wherever we lived, however we lived, in this one way, at least, we were poorer than the poorest citizens of the empire. We were simply so ignorant.”