“You’re all right now,” he said, though somehow she knew that already. “You’re going to be all right.”
He lifted her hand off the blanket and pressed his lips against it, and she could tell that she was holding something tight. When she opened her palm, she saw the ivory bilikin that she had once given him. It seemed like ages ago.
But the little owl had done its job, she thought … guiding her through the darkness, through the other world that she had just left, and back into the land of the living. She would never forget its help, nor the sacred trust she now knew that it signified.
“I was so afraid,” Frank said. “I thought I might have missed my chance.”
“Your chance?” Nika said, her throat as dry as parchment. Frank looked haggard and drawn, and it was plain that he hadn’t shaved in days.
“To tell you that I love you.”
If Nika had not already been lying down, and drained of all energy, she knew she would have reacted quite differently. All she could do now was squeeze his hand with what strength she had, and say, “That’s a relief.”
Frank, taken aback, straightened up in his chair and laughed. “A relief?”
“I didn’t want to be in this thing alone,” she said.
Chapter 64
The next morning, the deacon was not awake to ring the church bell. At dinner, he hadn’t had much of an appetite for the fish he’d caught, and he’d complained of a headache and chills. When Anastasia was shown to his cabin, she warned the others not to enter and went in by herself.
Although it was well past breakfast time, the sun had not yet risen. By the light of the oil lamp flickering beside his bed, Ana could see that the deacon had contracted the flu. His white-blond hair was damp and stringy, spread across his pillow, and his brow was beaded with sweat. His pale eyes were wandering distractedly around the room, and there were gobbets of dried blood on his blanket. She had seen soldiers like this in the hospital wards … and she had heard their bodies, shrouded in sheets, trundling down the grain chute and into the waiting wagons.
Stepping outside, where several of the colonists were waiting apprehensively for word, she called for hot water and broth, extra blankets, firewood, and brandy if they had it. She tried to remember what Dr. Botkin had prescribed and guess what he would have done, but in her heart she knew that it was all in God’s hands already. The Spanish flu took whomever it wanted—the strongest, first—and most of the time it took them fast.
For the rest of the day, Anastasia stayed by the deacon’s side, administering to him, trying in vain to get him to take some sustenance, mopping his brow and wiping the flecks of blood from his lips after he had been racked by a coughing fit. Occasionally, he muttered the name Father Grigori, and it was clear to Anastasia that he was speaking to him as if he were there. Several times, the conversation seemed so real that Ana turned in her chair, or went to the door and peeked outside, but each time all she saw gathered in the gloom were a handful of colonists, tolling their beads, clutching and kissing holy icons, and murmuring prayers for the deacon’s recovery. So many of them focused on the emerald cross she wore around her neck that she eventually grew self-conscious about it, and tucked it away. Whatever powers they thought it possessed were proving useless against the onslaught of the flu.
Once or twice, she heard muffled coughing among them, which only exacerbated the dread in her heart.
By the following dawn, the deacon was dead.
Anastasia cleaned him as best she could, then took his black cassock, with the sleeves lined in scarlet silk, and put it on him. She crossed his hands across his chest, then sat down at the wooden table that served as his desk. On it, there were writing materials, loose pages from his sermons, and an icon of the Virgin Mary, adorned with three white diamonds. Something so valuable could only have come from the hand of Rasputin himself. Using a scrap of paper from one of his sermons, she wrote a prayer for the soul of Deacon Stefan, curled it up, and slipped it into one of his lifeless hands, then, in the other, she placed the icon. He was as ready to meet his Maker as anyone would ever be.