Shots rang out across the twilit grounds of Alexander Park. Sitting on the window ledge in her father’s study, Olga turned her head toward the sound. She’d heard gunfire in the days and weeks since the riots had broken out in Petrograd, though they’d never sounded so close, so final. Incongruously, she thought not of advancing troops, but of her brother, Alexei, and his cap-gun, firing at imagined enemies in the grounds where, at this very moment, true monsters stalked between the trees.
Across the room, shrouded in the darkness that had cloaked the palace since the electricity lines were cut days before, Olga’s mother pulled a shawl across her shoulders. Candlelight sent dark flames up the cavernous bookshelves that lined the walls, illuminating her weary face.
“Abdicated?” she whispered.
Panic gripped her by the throat, and Olga turned to face the window once more. In the deepening gloom, she fancied she could see the orange glow of bonfires. “I don’t understand. In favor of Alexei?” She glanced at Mamma: Alexei’s chronic poor health had always made him seem older than his age, but at twelve, he was still very much a child, and far too young to take on the heavy burden of ruling.
Standing in front of the tsarina, Major General Resin, the commander who’d taken charge of the garrison of troops that protected Olga’s family, cleared his throat. “No, Your Majesty. It’s more complicated than that. We’re still receiving information from the front, but it seems His Imperial Highness was most insistent on the matter. He offered the crown to his brother, Grand Duke Mikhail, but the grand duke refused it. The Duma has formed a provisional government to determine what will happen next, but as I said, we will learn more once His Majesty returns.”
Olga turned her attention back to Mamma, shutting out the continued rattle of gunfire—no closer to the palace walls, but no farther away, either. Having spent the last several weeks nursing her siblings through a fierce bout of German measles, Olga had not had the time nor the energy to keep abreast of political developments, but she’d heard enough to know that unrest had been boiling in the capital. Protests in the coal plants; riots in bread lines. Rolling blackouts, hitting tenements and palaces alike; rallies and calls for change, growing ever louder as the war against the Central Powers continued to leech provisions from households and businesses.
But abdication?
From within the white folds of the Red Cross veil she’d worn since the start of the war, Mamma’s face fell, her pale eyes darting around the room. “I don’t understand,” she said. “I simply don’t understand.”
She reached out a thin hand, waving her fingers insistently; recognizing the movement, Olga stepped forward and took it, searching for a logical route through her own confusion. She could hear a buzzing in her head: an insistent roar, the sound of surf crashing against the hull of a ship. With Papa’s abdication, the situation had become everything she’d feared, the sickening finality in the word itself enough to keep it from passing her lips: revolution.
She squeezed Mamma’s hand, watching as Resin’s fingers tightened on the flat brim of his cap. “Where is Papa?”
“He’s coming here, Grand Duchess,” replied Resin, “but in the opinion of the Provisional Government, the palace is not the safest place—not for His Imperial Majesty, and not for you, either. I’m afraid they can no longer guarantee your welfare.”
Mamma looked up sharply. “We have three hundred loyal Cossacks at the gate—the finest soldiers this country has ever produced,” she said, sounding for a moment like her old, fierce self. “They’re loyal to my husband. I fail to see the danger.”
Resin shifted his weight from one foot to the other. “With all due respect, Your Majesty, Minister Rodzianko disagrees. The barracks in Tsarskoe Selo have begun to riot; they’re singing the ‘Marseillaise’ as we speak.”
Mamma paled. Olga recalled visiting the garrison less than a year earlier, trotting on horseback past 40,000 troops all sworn to protect the tsar and his family. How could 40,000 minds be so easily turned?
“And what of my children?” Mamma persisted. “Tatiana can hardly walk. Maria and Anastasia are delirious, and the tsarevich is in a very delicate state—”
“With all due respect, Your Majesty.” Resin met Mamma’s gaze directly. “When the house is in flames, one carries out the children.”
The room fell silent. Despite her attempt at composure, Olga began to shake, a thin, uncontrollable trembling, which, given the darkness of the study, she hoped Resin couldn’t see.
Mamma gripped Olga’s fingers in a silent plea to keep calm. Though her poor health would make it appear otherwise, Mamma’s Victorian upbringing had given her a stiff upper lip which Olga and her sisters lacked. She’d been instrumental in running the government since Papa went to command the front, overseeing the distribution of relief aid to soldiers’ families, orchestrating shipments of food and provisions, reining in the government ministers whose political agendas risked the country’s success at the front. Despite what people said about her—despite her German roots—Mamma had led Russia through the worst of the war years, relying on her faith in God and in Papa to make the decisions others would not.
How had things gone so wrong?
Mamma stood. “We will stay,” she said finally, lifting her chin. “I won’t leave the palace without my husband.”
Olga walked through the playroom, the cloying scent of illness lingering in the air. Four army cots lined the back wall: within, Olga’s siblings dozed, their flushed complexions showing various stages of the virus’s progression. In the cot closest to the fire, Alexei writhed in discomfort as Mamma laid a cold compress against his forehead.
Olga knelt beside Tatiana’s bed and felt her forehead, inspecting her sister’s face for the slowly dissipating rash. Tatiana had been the first to contract measles; to Olga’s intense relief, it appeared that she’d be the first to recover, too.
Tatiana’s eyes fluttered open at Olga’s touch. Even in the throes of illness, Tatiana was beautiful, her usually luminous face pale but lovely, nonetheless.
Olga smiled. “How are you feeling?”
“Better,” Tatiana sighed, “though I don’t think I’ll be dancing the kozachok anytime soon. How are the others?”
Olga looked down the line of beds. In the next cot over, Maria slept soundly, her cheeks still covered in spots; between Maria and Alexei, Anastasia was curled into a ball, her disheveled blond hair cascading over the side of her pillow.
“They’re on the mend,” she replied.
Tatiana’s smile grew. “Good,” she said, closing her eyes. “And Mamma?”
Olga hesitated. After Resin left, Mamma had stood defiantly by the door, candle in hand, watching him retreat down the hallway. She’d closed the door, then circled back to sit at Papa’s desk.
“Abdication,” Olga had whispered, sinking into the cold leather of the sofa. Though she could feel the weight of unshed tears behind her eyes, she was too shocked to cry. “Did you know?”
Mamma opened the desk drawer and pulled out a stack of Papa’s letterhead. “No.” She searched the crowded desktop, pulling a candelabra close as she ran her hand along the leather blotter for a fountain pen. “I wish he’d consulted me first. I wish—dear Lord, I wish Our Friend was here to guide us.” She unscrewed the lid of the pen with shaking hands and began to write, her script loose and fluid as she raced ink across the page. Since Papa had gone to the front, Mamma had taken to using his office as her own. Over the past few months, Olga couldn’t count the number of times she’d watched Mamma follow Father Grigori into this room, closing the door behind them as they discussed the country in hushed tones.
Father Grigori. What would he say, if he were here now? If he weren’t cold under the Russian soil, his mutilated body barely able to fit into a casket?
If you want him gone, say the word. Simply say it, and I will make it so.
“What will we do?” said Olga. “What do we tell the others?”
Mamma shook her head. “We tell them nothing.” She pulled a bottle of veronal from the folds of her skirt, not bothering to mix the crystals into water before setting them beneath her tongue. “They don’t need to know a thing until they’re well again. Circumstances might be different by then.” She closed her eyes as the opiate took effect, then resumed writing, her pen scratching across the page: Dearest Nicky, if what they’re saying is true...
“How?” said Olga. She could see her mother slipping into the mania that had driven her for months, the mania which had reached new heights since Father Grigori’s death. “Papa has signed his crown over to Uncle Mikhail. There is no going back.”
Mamma looked up, her pen pooling ink as it stilled on the page. “Your father is the tsar. It is a God-given responsibility; it cannot be taken away.”
They’d gone down to the courtyard shortly afterward to visit the Cossacks on duty at the front gate, their collars upturned against the cold. Mamma had spoken to each soldier in turn, grasping their hands in a show of solidarity, asking, with motherly concern, whether they were warm enough, whether their families were safe. Olga had followed, looking past the soldiers she considered friends to the blackness beyond the palace gates. Who was waiting there, in the woods, with bayonets and rifles, ready to fire on her family? Were these soldiers enough to keep civil war at bay?
“Olga?” Tatiana pulled Olga from her recollections, her gentle face creasing into a frown. At the other end of the playroom, Mamma was speaking to Alexei, her voice low.
“It’s Papa,” Olga replied. “He’s—he’s coming to see us. Very soon.”