Not for the first time she longed to make that final journey herself … to see Sergei, her family, her friends, kindly Dr. Botkin, Nagorny, the maid Demidova. Despite what the Russian Orthodox Church might believe, Anastasia was sure that her dog Jemmy would be waiting for her there, too. In a world so awash in hate, why should love—of any kind—not find a safe haven in the next?
Weary, and famished herself, she blew out the oil lamp, closed the door, and went to the church, in search of company and a communal meal. But unlike before, when dozens of people had drawn up chairs and pews to the sides of the long refectory tables, there were only ten or twelve souls present, and even they shied away when she came through the double doors. Vera fell to her knees in front of the iconostasis screen, crossing herself three times. The man who had been chopping wood bent his head over his soup bowl and barely dared to look up.
A woman laying pewter plates on the table asked, “How is the deacon?”
“The deacon has passed away,” Ana replied, and she saw the woman cast a quick look around the room, as if to confirm that everyone had heard. Several people cried out, an old man hurled his pipe at the floor, and there was a general exodus from the church. Some of them nodded solemnly in Ana’s direction as they left, their haggard faces filled with fear and incomprehension … but all of them, without exception, gave her a wide berth.
Standing alone in the nave, she realized that she had not only come to the ends of the earth, but to the end of everything this life had to offer. Already, she had gone from the herald of the prophet Father Grigori, celebrated and welcomed, to the harbinger of doom. And though she still carried the aura and the emblem of Rasputin himself, she had sown confusion in his flock. They no longer knew what to make of her, or how to interpret the trouble she had brought upon their heads. Had they committed some error, they no doubt wondered, in their way of life? Had they failed in their devotion? And was Anastasia an instrument of divine retribution?
Even if they had summoned the courage to ask, these were questions she could never have answered herself.
What followed over the coming days was as inevitable as it was tragic. One by one, the colonists came down with the flu, and one by one the survivors used dynamite and pickaxes to open shallow graves in the ground and give the dead some semblance of a Christian burial. Ana attended the interments—indeed, the colonists would not have proceeded without her silent presence, such was her prestige as a princess and Rasputin’s chosen one—but after a while it became nearly impossible for her to bear. The graveyard was poised on the cliffs above the Bering Sea, and Ana had to fight an overwhelming impulse to hurl herself off the precipice and into the waiting sea below. All that kept her from doing so was an even greater fear—a fear that the power of the emerald cross was so great she might find herself alive even then, tossing and turning beneath the icy waves for eternity.
Among the last to die was the sexton, and Ana took over his job, dutifully recording the names of the deceased and the dates on which they died. Some of them, in their delirium, had wandered off into the woods, never to be seen again, while others perished on the rocks below the colony, their bodies lying crumpled and still until the tide took them out to sea. For the rest, Ana scrounged among the half-completed headstones and coffin lids that the sexton had left, and provided each of them with as much of a proper burial as could still be managed. The sexton—plainly as industrious as he was fatalistic—had also had the foresight to leave a number of empty graves … more than enough, as it turned out, to accommodate his fellow colonists.
And then, one day, there was no one left to bury, no one left to mourn. There was no one else at all. She had walked to the edge of the cemetery, clutching the emerald cross when she saw a dark figure lying on the beach below, the tails of a sealskin coat spread like a bat’s wings across the pebbles and sand.
She stopped dead, her toes already extending over the precipice, and stared down at it. Could it be? After all this time?
Making her way down to the beach, she approached the body as if it were a trap waiting to spring. She did not believe her own eyes. But as she came closer, she saw that even now, a brown cowlick, frozen stiff, was standing up at the back of his head. She knelt, the freezing sand crackling under her boots, and gently turned the body onto its back. Coated in ice, Sergei looked as if he were made of glass.
“The sea often yields in the end,” the deacon had said. And so it had.
In the cemetery, an empty grave remained; it was the one closest to the cliffs, and Anastasia had wondered if anyone would be left to put her in it one day. Now she could use it to embrace the body of her beloved protector, Sergei, instead—which was precisely what she did.