The train station at Tsarskoe Selo was silent, but for the rustling of the nurses and doctors and sanitary that waited at the platform—small coughs and genteel whispers, the shifting of weight from foot to foot. Standing shoulder to shoulder with Tatiana and Rita Khitrovo, Olga glanced up at the frantic sound of beating wings. Overhead, a bunting swooped beneath the vaulted ceiling, disappearing into the tangle of a nest it had fashioned in the crux of a pillar.
Farther down the line, Dr. Gedroits stepped forward, consulting her pocket watch. “There,” she said quietly, and beyond the open arch of the station Olga could hear the heavy chug of steam and iron, the noise sending a frisson of anticipation and dread coursing through her veins. All around her, the Sisters of Mercy began to stir. Dressed in identical frocks and white habits, it was difficult to distinguish between them, though Olga did recognize a few faces from long-ago ballrooms. There was Princess Rayevskaya, her petite frame dwarfed by the doctor standing next to her; at the far end of the hall stood Anya Kleinmichel, her nursing habit strangely reminiscent of her wedding veil. Olga had given her a thin smile as they’d assembled in the train station, thinking of Pavel: was he well? Olga was sure she would have been sent word if Pavel had perished—still, she didn’t have courage enough to ask Anya a question for which she might not want to hear the answer.
The locomotive eased into the station belching black steam, its battered carriages adorned with the red-and-white emblem of the Red Cross. Olga recalled touring one of the ambulance trains before its inaugural voyage to the front: threading through the gleaming bunks, listening with interest as some official or other detailed the work that had taken place to make the carriages useful for medical transport. Dust-covered and pockmarked, the carriages that made up this ambulance train looked as if they’d crossed through hell and back, and Olga supposed, in a very real sense, that they had. From beyond the soot-covered windows, Olga could make out the indistinct movement of hands and faces.
The sanitary were the first onto the train, bypassing the combat sisters who’d accompanied the train from the front line. The sisters descended, bloodied and weary, and it was clear they’d not slept for a single minute of their journey from the front. They stared at Olga and the rest of the sisters from the city hospitals as if suspicious of their clean aprons and scrubbed hands; more than one followed on the tail of stretcher-bearing sanitar, barking directives for a patient’s care.
One by one, the sanitary deposited their stretchers on the marble floor of the train station and Olga, along with the rest of the sisters from hospitals around Tsarskoe Selo, stepped into action. She knelt by the nearest stretcher, which contained an unconscious infantryman. Somehow, the dust that had settled into the creases around his eyes put Olga in mind of the stage makeup she’d seen on Bolshoi dancers, nimble twenty-year-olds tasked with playing jealous fathers and aged patriarchs, their dark hair powdered with flour. Despite the jostling of the sanitary as they’d brought him off the train, the soldier was motionless, and Olga suspected he’d been given morphine. The smell of him was almost overpowering: it was clear he’d been injured days ago, the stench of blood and sweat and vomit commingling with such potency that Olga struggled not to retch. Instead, she lifted the blanket that covered him from the neck down.
His legs were a bloodied mess, flesh and bone and bandage stained with the browning rust of blood. Someone—a doctor or medic—had cut the man’s breeches to better access his wounds: they hung in clotted ribbons, the khaki congealed and black.
Olga gasped, holding the edge of her habit to her nose before steeling herself to finish her assessment. Somehow, in the open chaos of the station, suffering seemed easier to bear than in the cloying closeness of the surgery; here, she was able to calm her shaking hands, focus on the man in front of her as she took stock of his injuries.
“Sister Romanova.” Olga looked up; behind her, Dr. Gedroits cast an appraising eye over the soldier, her spectacles glinting, calm despite the confusion of soldiers, sanitary and sisters. “What have we here?”
“Looks like the work of an artillery explosion. He has extreme damage to his lower extremities, as well as shrapnel wounds to his abdomen and chest.” Olga sat back on her heels, wiping her hands on her apron. “He’s an infantryman—bound for the wards at Catherine Palace, I should think.”
Dr. Gedroits nodded, the crease between her brows deepening. “Any more details?”
“According to the tag on his lapel he was sedated six hours ago. Morphine. It looks as if they’ve treated his wounds with potassium permanganate, but he’ll likely require amputation of one, if not both, of his legs.”
The doctor made a note on her clipboard. “Well, we’ll leave that to the surgeons to decide,” she murmured. “All right, mark him down for the Catherine Palace and move on. And Olga? Good work.”
The day was far too long and frustratingly short, the stream of casualties carried out of the train so endless that Olga worried there wouldn’t be space for them all in the wards of Tsarskoe Selo, created out of hastily converted summer homes provided by Papa’s friends and government ministers. Between the whispers of the other nurses and the griping of conscious soldiers, Olga could tell that the war was going poorly: Russia had abandoned Poland entirely, had simply up and left a region of the Empire they could no longer defend. She mourned for the lives lost in Poland but set aside her grief: every soldier here was a life spared, a warrior who, God willing, could return to the front and one day make right the devastating loss.
After hours of assessing patients, Olga’s back ached from leaning over stretchers; her fingers, so nimble and quick from years of piano lessons and embroidery, were stiff and shaking as she unwrapped dirty bandages. Most of the soldiers had been hit by artillery fire, their wounds gaping and impersonal: abdominal injuries that stank with infection, their torsos—that marvel of God’s engineering—rendered so vulnerable, so fragile, by steel and bullets. Wounds to the extremities, too, were gruesome. Some had already undergone the most rudimentary of amputations at the front, leaving them with stumps where their arms and legs used to be, ragged and black with potassium permanganate; others pleaded with her, sobbing, to save their limbs. What use would they be to their families, to their farms, without arms to bring in the harvest? Few recognized her as the grand duchess she was, and for that Olga was grateful: to the soldiers under her care, she was just another nurse with a soft smile and tender hands.
The worst, though, were the head wounds: the men who came in disfigured by bullets and shrapnel, their contorted features concealed beneath the abbreviated dignity of a gauze bandage. To Olga, the physical pain of their injuries was difficult enough to contemplate but knowing what awaited them on their recovery was more overwhelming still: they would be condemned to a life in the shadows, poor devils, their faces an unwelcome reminder of a war that had already taken too many young lives.
It was over one such patient that Olga’s nerves finally failed her: a young man, barely eighteen by Olga’s estimation, his head swathed in a bandage so thick that the only clue to his identity was the scrub of a mustache he’d tried, and failed, to grow. She lifted the gauze to assess the damage: his skull, visible through a split in his scalp, had been crushed inwards, bone fragments pressing on the gray matter beneath. The fact he’d survived so long was a miracle in itself. His eyelids fluttered at her touch, revealing flashes of white.
She pressed the dressing back into place, but his brain, swollen beyond the constraints of his skull, had begun to bleed anew: she could feel him slipping away beneath her fingers, his pulse erratic as he began to convulse. His eyelids flickered, as if questioning the absurdity of circumstances that had led to his arrival here, now, at the end of his short life. Given time, given peace, the boy’s wounds might heal—unlike Alexei, his blood might clot, giving him a fighting chance. But what matter of life would he have? Perhaps a cleaner death was what he deserved: his hand held by someone whispering comfort, someone who, in the farthest reaches of his listening soul, he might believe to be his mother, his sweetheart, the wife he’d had yet to meet.
But Olga’s role was to heal, and she redoubled her efforts to stem the inevitable tide, pressing his brain back into place as if such a thing would save him—until she felt his pulse weaken beneath her fingers, sputtering like a candle at the end of its wick. Slowly, carefully, she lifted her hands. She began to whisper platitudes and Bible passages, long-ago nursery rhymes from her childhood, songs he might have known. In her mind’s eye, she pictured the home she hoped he’d had: the fields he’d tilled, the gleam of sunlight on billowing wheat.
Too soon, she closed his eyes and stood. Brushing a clean patch of her sleeve across her cheeks, she signaled for a team of sanitary to bear him away, to join the growing assembly of those who’d not survived the journey home.
She stepped outside, the fresh air a jarring contrast to the miasma of the train station. To Olga’s surprise, dusk had fallen over Tsarskoe Selo, the dim half-light as close to darkness as the city ever saw in summer. On the street below, ambulance lorries idled in a long line, ready to bear their patients away to the comfort of a warm bed, and though the prospect of a long night’s sleep was still hours away, no one would begrudge Olga a moment’s peace. She patted down the pockets of her apron for her cigarettes, her heart beating dizzyingly loud in her ears.
“Light, Grand Duchess?”
Olga looked up. Anya Kleinmichel was leaning against a nearby column, looking nearly as weary as Olga felt. She held out her lighter, fingers loose around the silver and Olga took it with a nod of thanks. She inhaled, willing her shaking hands to still, but Anya didn’t seem to notice; together, they leaned back against the pillar and watched the line of ambulances receive their steady stream of patients.
“We look,” said Anya finally, as she tapped ash onto the cobbles, “like the only two people in the world having a bad day.”
Olga looked over, incredulous. A joke, from Anya Kleinmichel? She’d always seemed so quiet...but then, Olga had never made much of an effort to get to know her.
She rested the back of her head against the windowpane, staring up at the tangle of electrical wires overhead. “We’re an awfully long way from my aunt’s tea parties, aren’t we?”
Anya let out a billowing breath of smoke. “You know, I never thought you noticed me at those parties,” she said. “You were always at the opposite end of the room.”
Olga shifted, thinking of her aunt’s parlor: Tatiana, holding court by the fireplace, surrounded by friends; Olga, set apart, whispering in some dark corner, pursuing romance. “Of course, I noticed you,” she said finally. “You know how Aunt Olga is. Always making connections.”
Anya closed her eyes. Tendrils of her hair had escaped the confines of her habit: she’d not bothered to tuck them back into place, and they lifted with the gentle breeze. “Your aunt’s parties were the best I ever attended,” she said, her voice soft with faraway pleasure. “Even your coming-out ball, as beautiful as it was... I preferred the intimacy of your aunt’s home. She always invited such interesting people.”
On the street, a pair of sanitary hopped out of the back of an ambulance and shut the doors; one knocked on the cab and the ambulance pulled out—bound for Catherine Palace, Olga assumed. “Did you know Aunt Olga joined a flying column at the front?” She shook her head, chuckling. “She tells me she’s asked for no special treatment. She’s sleeping in the same quarters as the rest of the sisters: no bathing facilities, no comforts.”
“Good for her.” Anya jerked her head back toward the station as two sanitary carried out another stretcher. “Is it what you pictured?”
Olga’s fingers had stopped trembling; she looked down at her fingernails, grime showing beneath the tidy half-moons of her manicure. “No,” she said. “No, it’s nothing like I thought.”
“Nothing ever is.” Anya stubbed out the end of her cigarette. “Not nursing, not life; not marriage.”
Olga was silent as she offered Anya her cigarette case. On Pavel’s wedding day, she’d wished for his happiness—she’d not given a thought to Anya’s. “How so?”
“Well, for one, I didn’t expect we’d be spending our first year as newlyweds apart.” Anya inspected the brand on the cigarette before lighting it. “We didn’t know each other all that well when he proposed—it was all arranged, you know—but those first six months...after our wedding, before the war...” She smiled. “We grew close. He’s a good man, Grand Duchess. Kindhearted.”
Olga nodded, astounded that it had been little more than a year since Pavel and Anya’s wedding—little more than a year since she pleaded, one final time, for Pavel’s affections. Had she been the ghost in their marriage from the outset? Had her presence in their house diminished, as their feelings toward each other grew?
“He is,” she offered finally.
“You know, I joined the Red Cross to be close to him—or as close as I can be, given the circumstances.” Anya looked down at her cigarette, the ember edging toward her fingers. “But I worry it’s made me know too much of war: too much of pain, too much of suffering. Too much of what might happen to Pavel.” She glanced back at the door to the train station; they would have to return soon, back into the misery of the endless stretchers. “The physical injuries, I think we could withstand, but the impact of this war on his mind, on his soul... The man I sent off to war might not be the one who comes home to me. If he comes home at all.”
Olga bowed her head. The last time she’d spoken to him, Pavel had promised Olga friendship. Did she not owe that friendship to Anya in return?
“This war has taken so much from so many—husbands, fathers, brothers. Limbs, sanity...there’s no telling what the war might ask of you.” She glanced at Anya. “But the one thing it’s taken from everyone in Russia—every single person in Europe—is certainty. I can’t pretend to know what the future holds for Pavel, but what I do know is that he is a good man. Whatever the future holds, that core of him will remain.”
Anya’s eyes were hard. “Do you truly think so?” she said. “Even after all of the horror you’ve seen—all the horror Pavel will see—do you think he can withstand it and come out a good man?”
Olga squeezed Anya’s hand. “I know he can.”
They stood in silence a moment longer as they finished their cigarettes, though Olga didn’t want to tarry overlong. The doors to the train station opened and Olga looked up, worried it was Dr. Gedroits coming to chide them for their idleness. Instead, it was another patient, the blanket trailing from his stretcher as the sanitary carried him down the stairs.
“Wait.” Olga threw aside the end of her cigarette and jogged forward to tuck the blanket back into place. She paused, studying the soldier’s face in the light from the open door.
Mitya. His face bruised and swollen, with a nasty gash on his forehead and an arm bound up in a hastily tied bandage. Olga was surprised she’d recognized him at all.
She cleared her throat. “What happened to him?”
“Trampled under a cavalry charge, Sister,” said one of the sanitary. “He’s in quite a state, I’m afraid—he may not have use of his hand again. But the doctors at Catherine Palace will do their best.”
She ran her hand along his cheek, but he didn’t wake; like so many others, he’d clearly been sedated. She could only imagine the circumstances that had led to his injuries, and while she felt for his doubtless pain, she couldn’t help feeling a soaring, shameful relief. He was here, home.
Safe.
“Take him to the Annexe Hospital,” she said.
The sanitary exchanged glances. “Sister? I’m afraid he’s down for the officer’s ward at Catherine Palace, the good doctor said—”
“The Annexe,” Olga repeated firmly. “By order of the Grand Duchess Olga Nikolaevna.”