On the table he saw that there was a bud vase with several blue cornflowers in it, and he smiled. “Remember the day you gave me one of those?” He did not tell her that he had it still.
Ana smiled, too, and for several minutes they reminisced about only insignificant things—the flowers in the summer fields as the train had made its way into Siberia, the way Jemmy had loved to jump off the caboose and run in circles whenever they had stopped for coal, Dr. Botkin’s passion for chess (and how frustrated he was whenever young Alexei had brought him to a draw). Like so many of the Russian peasants, Sergei had been filled with a native reverence for the Tsar and his family—a reverence that the Reds had worked tirelessly to undermine and destroy. The bloody toll of the war had sealed the Bolsheviks’ argument.
But once Sergei had been exposed to the family itself, once he had seen the heir to the throne writhing in pain from a minor injury, or the Tsaritsa ceaselessly fretting over him, once he had heard the laughter of the four grand duchesses and watched the melancholy Tsar pace the length of the palisade at the Ipatiev house, he had changed his mind again. Now they were not just iconic figures to him, the bloody puppets that Lenin had made them out to be, but real people … people that the starets of his village, at one time the most famous man in all of Russia, had befriended.
Was Sergei going to listen to a prophet from his own town—a man of God, touched with holy fire—or Lenin, an exiled politician that the Germans had smuggled back into the country in a secret train, purely to foment rebellion?
“How have you stayed safe?” Anastasia asked, and Sergei told her how and where he had been hiding out in the surrounding countryside. In July, it could be done; later in the year, it would not have been so easy.
“And does the world know …” she said, faltering, “about what happened to my family?”
He told her what he’d read in the broadsheet, including its bold lie about the safety of the family, and a flush of fury rose in her cheeks.
“Murderers!” she exclaimed. “And cowards, too—afraid to admit to their crimes!”
Sergei wondered if that was what she had been writing about in her journal.
“I will tell the world! I will shout it from the rooftops, and I will see those murderers hang!”
Sergei was hushing her when he heard what sounded like a broomstick banging on the bottom of the trapdoor. Sister Leonida must have been keeping guard in the kitchen down below.
“Someday,” he said, trying to calm her, “you will do that, and I will help you. But that day is still far off. You have enemies, and you have already seen what they can do. Now is not the time for that, Ana.”
Breathing hard, she subsided. “What is it the time for then? Hiding in this attic like a little mouse?”
“No, not that, either.” This was as good an opportunity as he was likely to get to broach the subject he had been meaning to introduce. “Now is the time to leave, with me, for the place Father Grigori himself prepared as a refuge. It was part of the vision he had before his death.”
Ana remembered well many of Rasputin’s predictions … all of which had so far come true—even, to her sorrow, the most dire.
“It is a colony on an island, and many of the faithful are already there. I remember the day they left Pokrovskoe, led by the Deacon Stefan. You won’t be safe until you are out of the country and hidden in a place where no one can find you.”
She did not appear persuaded, but she was still listening. “Where is this secret place?”
“A long way east of here, across the steppes.”
“And how do you propose we get there?”
Sergei had spent many hours mapping it out in his head, figuring out where they could board, under assumed names, the recently completed Trans-Siberian Railway, and how far they could take it eastward. When it detoured to the south, they would have to disembark and find a way to continue northward. At some point, they would have to find a pilot, with a plane, willing to take them across the Bering Strait. The right price, he had learned, made anything possible, and payment was the one thing he knew would not be an obstacle. Even as he had carried Ana’s limp body through the woods, he had glimpsed the cache of precious jewels sewn into her corset. A bauble or two from that tattered lining and he was confident that he could secure whatever transportation they might need. But instead of outlining the plan in any detail for her now—there would be many weeks to do that—he simply gestured at the emerald cross around her neck and said, “I have read the inscription on the back.”
Anastasia blushed, as if he’d caught her stepping out of the bath.
“His blessing has protected you so far,” Sergei said. “Why would it end now?”
Chapter 49