Olga Alexandrovna finished kneading the dough for her scones, wiping her forehead with the back of her palm. As she patted the dough into plastic wrap to chill, she glanced out the kitchen window. Outside, Nikolai was herding the sheep into the barn. Though his dogs did most of the work, he preferred to walk the fields when he could, leaving their sons, Tikhon and Guri, to the shearing. He whistled, his gnarled hand curled over the fencepost, and Olga knew he wouldn’t be long in the fields: he felt the damp, these days, settling in his knees, in his back.
She set a kettle to boiling and rummaged beneath the sink for a hot water bottle. The instinct to nurse—cultivated so long ago, in such terrible times—hadn’t left her; not when it came to her beloved husband. She looked out the window once more, smiling: though his dark mustache had long since faded to gray, he still carried himself with the disciplined bearing of the soldier he used to be; the aide-de-camp who’d brightened the echoing halls of her St. Petersburg mansion.
She sighed. Nikolai was spending fewer and fewer hours in the fields these days. His old back injury—sustained in the Great War—made it increasingly difficult for him to work; their sons, meanwhile, had never expressed much enthusiasm in taking over the farm. No, their boys craved the excitement of city life, never truly understanding Olga and Nikolai’s preference for a peaceful country existence. But then, she’d once scoffed at her brother’s longing for a country life, too. In the long years since, marked by heartbreak and horror, she’d learned to value the simple pleasures of a simple life.
She set the dough in the icebox, allowing herself a rare moment of nostalgia. Life had been too cruel for her to regularly dwell over reminiscences of her brother and his family—too cruel for her to think about the unknown fate of her four beautiful nieces, her handsome nephew. But moments like this were undeniable: how could she not think of her brother Nicky, when she was living the life he’d wanted to lead from the outset? No, she thought, looking out over the farm that she and Nikolai had cultivated since moving across the Atlantic—Nicky had never been cut out for what fate had destined for him. It would have been far better if Nicky had been dealt a hand like hers: a quiet life, even if she’d had to fight him for the privilege of spending it with the man she loved.
Still, she couldn’t begrudge Nicky for his stubbornness, no more than she could begrudge herself for marrying a man so impossibly ill-suited to her in the first place. Nicky had warned her off of Petya when he’d first proposed marriage—it had been Olga, with her headstrong manner, that had insisted upon the union, only finding out weeks later that Petya was fundamentally unsuited toward the duties of a husband. She still recalled her wedding night: handsome Petya, leaving her bedchamber with a bottle of wine in one hand and a glass in the other, smiling his reassurance that he’d breakfast with her in the morning.
Thank the Lord for Nikolai. As Petya’s aide-de-camp, he spent more time at their home than anyone else—they’d gotten to know one another through the long days of her estrangement from her husband, while Petya spent his evenings pursuing handsome soldiers. It had taken her a few short months to fall in love with Nikolai; years to convince her husband to divorce her.
Years longer, still, for Nicky to agree that her marriage had been a failure. Granting divorces had been within the sole purview of the tsar back then, and Nicky had been bound by the strictures of Russian Orthodoxy to deny her the one thing she’d ever desired. For fifteen years her own happiness had been a lamb upon the altar of her faith.
It was only when Nicky could admit to his own failures as tsar that he’d finally granted Olga’s wish. She thought back to the last time she’d seen her older brother: the harsh words they’d spoken to each other; Alix’s blind refusal to see reason. Though they’d parted on poor terms, Nicky had still given her the divorce she’d yearned for; he’d allowed her to marry the love of her life.
It had been a last act of love, from the brother she’d mourned every day since.
Olga watched Nikolai out the window. Nicky had made his choices, but the choices he’d made on behalf of his daughters—Olga’s nieces—still pained her. She’d thought about the demise of his family a thousand different ways and seen a thousand different roads her brother hadn’t taken: but still, her imagination couldn’t count for fact. There were no guarantees that another path might have led to a different end. She had faith enough to know that her brother had done what he’d thought best under circumstances of his own making.
She filled the sink with soap and water, hardly noticing when the water splashed on the countertop—were Nikolai in the room, he would have noticed her distraction and pulled her back from the brink of memory. He’d lived with her long enough to know that the ghosts that haunted her would never leave. How could they? Lenin’s government had never admitted what they’d done to her brother, but the silent disappearance of Nicky’s family—of Olga and Tatiana, Maria and Anastasia and sweet Alexei—carried its own admission. The last anyone had heard of them was in the letters Maria had sent from Ekaterinburg; letters that had ceased, without explanation, in 1918. Regardless, the whispers still regularly captivated Europe—rumors that Olga’s mother, the Dowager Empress Maria, had believed to her dying day.
It rankled Olga to think of the impostors who’d shown up at her door, stalking her from Denmark to London, trying to prove, through an errant birthmark or the unique structure of their feet, that they were one of Olga’s nieces. Those charlatans spent their lives torturing Olga with the hope that someone in her family might have survived: that one of her nieces might have outlived their parents.
Such hope didn’t sustain her anymore, but she still yearned for the beautiful serendipity that could never be: the survival of Nicky’s line; the survival of the remarkable girls that Olga had loved so deeply.
She finished cleaning the dishes and opened the half door to air out the kitchen. She recalled, with a smile, the tea parties she used to host for Olga and Tatiana—would they recognize her now, with her penchant for dishwashing; with her Canadian farmhouse, half the size of her ballroom in St. Petersburg? With a smile, Olga realized she didn’t mind if her nieces wouldn’t have recognized her new life; in fact, she thought they would have enjoyed it, along with the opportunities it would have afforded them, outside their parents’ cloistered world. Olga and Tatiana had yearned for nothing more than the chance to live their own lives.
She crossed the kitchen—the chickens would need tending to, she knew, before too long, but if she could get the laundry on first it would be all the better for tomorrow. She dissolved lye in boiling water, but before she could add her husband’s shirts, a knock came at the door.
It was a tall man with a narrow face and salt-and-pepper hair. With his unkempt shirt and cardboard suitcase, it was clear he’d been traveling for quite some time; she smiled, noting that, beneath his trimmed mustache, he was a handsome man.
“Olga Alexandrovna?” He bowed at the neck, and Olga tensed, recalling so many impostors who’d come to make some claim of friendship to her nieces—some story intended to wound, to draw out whatever remaining money they thought she might have had.
The man rummaged in his overcoat, and Olga couldn’t help but notice that the fingers on his left hand curled in on themselves, as if over the ghost of a chess piece. She leaned against the door, not quite allowing it to open: she’d had too many of these pilgrims to her door.
“I... I knew your niece, Grand Duchess,” he said. He met Olga’s eyes, and something within his gaze caused her to hold back her half-formed rejection. “Olga—your namesake. I... I suppose we were friends—more than friends—long ago.”
Olga found her voice, somewhere deep within the pain that, at seventy, she still carried. “What makes you think you were friends?”
He pulled his fist from his pocket and held it out. Between his fingers, Olga could see what he carried: a pearl necklace, the clasp an undeniable Fabergé, still luminous, bearing the double-headed eagles of the Romanov family. “You might have heard of me, from her... She used to call me Mitya.”
Olga reached for the necklace, almost involuntarily. The pearls were warm, still carrying, she fancied, the long-lost warmth of their beautiful owner.
“Well,” she said, clearing her throat with sudden emotion, “I suppose you ought to join me for tea.”