And now … what did he do with these feelings? He had never told her how he felt. He had never told her that he had fallen in love with her. But if she died tonight, in this terrible place, away from her home and the people she loved, he did not know how he would bear it.
He had lost all track of time. There was a clock on the wall, but he had no idea if it was 10 A.M. or 10 P.M. There was only one window, down at the end of the hall, and even that one was tinted and permasealed. Meanwhile, the Alaskan daylight was coming later, and growing shorter, all the time. How the Inuit had survived in this intemperate world astonished him still, but they were a hardy lot … and that, in the end, was what he was counting on. Nika’s ancestors had been among the sturdy few to survive the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918, and perhaps that acquired immunity had been passed down to the young woman fighting for her life now.
He unzipped his suit enough to pull the ivory owl through, and then he snapped the cord. He smoothed a spot on her blanket and laid the bilikin down on top of it. He knew that she was in a very dark place, and if the owl could truly prove to be a guide, then now was the time.
Chapter 62
The deacon, not surprisingly, was the first to succumb.
It was he who had first embraced Anastasia on the beach, he who had held her hands—the very hands that had caressed the cheek of the dying Sergei—as he escorted her up the steps chiseled into the cliffs and through the main gates of the colony. The others, maybe three or four dozen in all, were beside themselves with joy when she arrived. She was brought into the church, where a supper had been hastily laid on a table in the nave, and the bell in the church dome was rung over and over. Her safe arrival was considered a harbinger of a bigger, and even better, thing to come. She was the long-anticipated psychopomp, the bird who heralded the return of Rasputin himself.
Anastasia was seated at the head of a long and narrow refectory table, and to her embarrassment an old peasant woman summarily removed the sopping boots from her feet, and soaked her aching, frozen toes in a bucket of warm, salted water. The embarrassment immediately gave way, however, to a tingling sensation, and a not-altogether-pleasant throbbing as the blood once again began to circulate in her feet and ankles. Deacon Stefan offered her a glass of something she imagined to be grog—Nagorny the sailor had described such stuff—as bracing as it was vile. Other women were still bringing hot bread and pots of stew to the table, and Anastasia, though so grief-stricken at the loss of Sergei that she could barely eat, took what she could, and thanked them profusely. All of them—men, women, and a handful of children—stared at her unabashedly, and she could not help but notice how often their eyes went to the emerald cross. Several times she saw the older colonists cross themselves while gazing upon it. They listened, enraptured, as she recounted the journey that she, and the missing Sergei, had undertaken. It was rare enough, Ana surmised, that they saw anyone new here, and rarer still when that newcomer was one of the grand duchesses of the three-hundred-year-old Romanov dynasty.
Here, if nowhere in Russia anymore, that title commanded respect, even reverence.
A cabin was set aside for Ana, but when she saw that it was filled with someone else’s personal belongings—a hand-stitched quilt, an icon of St. Peter, pans and kettles on hooks above a potbellied stove, a dress in the armoire—she tried to decline. “I don’t want to put anyone out of her home,” she said. “I can sleep anywhere—the church would be fine.”
But Deacon Stefan had insisted. “The people vied for the opportunity,” he said. “Vera would be mortified if you didn’t accept her hospitality. She is honored.”