And so she had accepted. She did not even remember saying goodnight to the deacon. The second she had sat down on the straw-filled mattress, she had been overwhelmed by fatigue and fallen into not so much a sleep as a stupor. She had a vague recollection of the old woman who had bathed her feet coming into the room and removing her other damp clothes. The quilt was thrown over her, tucked tight to her chin, and a bearskin was thrown over that. Ana did not move a muscle; she felt she couldn’t even if she tried. For many hours—she never knew exactly—she lay there, half-asleep and half-aware of everything and everyone. Her mind traveled back over the endless journey that had brought her to the island at last, combing over every detail, revisiting every scene, from the attic room at Novo-Tikhvin to the cramped compartment on the Trans-Siberian Railway (where a conductor had become so inordinately curious about Ana that Sergei had made them disembark in the dead of night at the next fueling station).
Sergei. One more name to add to the list of the dead and beloved in her life. The list was already so long, and she was barely eighteen. How long would it become? Forgive me, she prayed. Forgive me for the suffering my family and I have brought upon so many. She felt herself both blessed—she alone had survived the slaughter in the house with the whitewashed windows—and at the same time accursed. No one else would have to live on, knowing exactly what had happened there, reliving it in dreams … and nightmares.
Late the next day, when she arose, the few hours of sunlight had nearly passed. She ventured out of the tiny cabin and into a frostbitten twilight. All around her rose a stockade wall, and within it a small but tidy colony had been erected. Apart from the church, which stood at one end and appeared to serve also as a meeting house and dining hall, there were cabins and livestock pens, vegetable gardens, a blacksmith shop and apothecary, even a common outhouse, with separate doors for men and women. However bleak the surroundings, it was a world unto itself.
A man splitting logs looked up from his chores and touched the brim of his fur cap. Then he returned to his work. A woman in a long peasant skirt, with a woolen shawl drawn over her head and around her shoulders, carried a bushel basket of roots and mushrooms into one of the cabins; a pale and dismal light crept across the threshold before the door was closed again with a creak and a thump. A cold wind whistled between the timbers of the stockade, and Ana was inevitably reminded of the palisade that had been built around the Ipatiev house. Yurovsky had said it was for the protection of the imperial family as they took the air, but no one had been fooled by that. It might just as well have been iron bars.
“So you’re awake?” she heard, as Deacon Stefan strode through the main gates; he was carrying a fishing pole over one shoulder and a couple of halibut on a line. “I looked in on you earlier. You were sleeping like a log.”
He wasn’t wearing his cassock anymore but a thick fur coat that fell to his ankles. Long strands of his hair, so blond as to be almost white, spilled from under his Cossack-style hat. “Are you feeling well?”
“Yes,” she said, “I think so.” She hadn’t even considered the question, there was so much else to absorb and take in.
“The man you mentioned at dinner—Sergei,” he said, his blue eyes cast downward, “there has been no sign of him. I have searched the shoreline.”
Anastasia nodded.
“But the sea often yields in the end,” he said. “We will keep looking.”
Ana thanked him, but he brushed it aside.
“We will say a mass for him every day until he has been returned to us.”
And then he coughed, just once, into the back of his clenched hand, and Ana felt her spine stiffen.
“You’ve been out fishing in this cold?” she said. “I hope you haven’t caught a chill.” She had not mentioned Sergei’s illness. She had only said he was thrown from the boat during the crossing.
“It’s nothing,” he said, but coughing again. “No one ever recommended this place for its weather.”
“No, I don’t imagine that they do.”
“Let me get these fish into a frying pan,” he said. “We all eat together in the church, as soon as it is dark.”
“What can I do to help?” Anastasia said. Although a grand duchess by birth, she had been brought up to treat the common people with respect and to share their burdens when possible. It was why their father had made them sleep for years in ordinary cots in plainly decorated bedrooms, and their mother had ferried them to the Army hospitals to tend to the wounded. It was a puzzle Anastasia would never solve, how the peasants and workmen and soldiers of Russia had been convinced by a heartless revolutionary named Lenin that her family had not cared for and loved—yes, “loved” was not too strong a word for it—all of them.
Needless to say, she no longer felt that way at all, and she wondered what Father Grigori would say if she were able to tell him so.
“Never fear,” the deacon said in answer to her last question. “There’s no shortage of things that need to be done in the colony. You’ll fit right in, Your Highness.”
He threw her a half smile over his shoulder as he marched on with the fish swinging on the line over his shoulder. She tried to return the smile, but her face smarted, and she wasn’t sure if it was due to the cutting wind or the fact that she was so unaccustomed to the expression.
Chapter 63