Colossal heat tho’ rained a little… I went early to bed, but slept only 3 hours, as they made so much noise outside.

To this day I imagine the Romanovs lying there sleepless as they drank in every step, cough, word, bark, and stir of wind. I’m quite sure they tossed all night long, wondering, hoping, fearing. And a horrible night it was, followed by a long, horrible, hot day, which was in turn followed by another terrible night of heated worry, for on the twenty-seventh she recorded:

8:00 Supper. 23 degrees in the room. Scarcely slept.

Perhaps it was Aleksandra’s bitter dealings with the aristocracy of Sankt-Peterburg that made her paranoid – high society thought her much too prim and constantly mocked her – but she was quite correct not to write all in her diary. In the old days, everything that could be used against her certainly had been. Consequently, she understood the dangers of writing a diary that was too specific. She had to be most careful, and for this reason it had become not so much a personal account, but a logbook of day-to-day events. Hence she recorded her work with her pounds and pounds of diamonds as “arranged medicines,” and her mention of scarcely sleeping, of so much noise outside, refers to those nights when we all waited for the rescue that did not come.

At the same time, Nikolai Aleksandrovich proved himself not as savvy as his wife:

27 June. Thursday. Our dear Maria turned 19 years old. The same tropical weather held, 26 degrees in the shade and 24 degrees in the rooms; one can hardly stand it! We spent an anxious night and sat up dressed.

All this was because we had received two letters in the last few days, one after the other, in wh. we were told that we should get ready to be abducted by some sort of people loyal to us! The days passed and nothing happened, but the waiting and uncertainty were quite torturous.

But why? Why in the name of God would he have recorded such things for the Bolsheviki to find and read? Was Nikolai Aleksandrovich so naive? That… that stupid? Or was he simply too much of a gentleman, too much an aristocrat of the Old World, too much of a tsar to even imagine that such a personal intrusion and affront was even possible?

So there we were, the morning of the twenty-seventh. The day was sunny and hot – twenty-two degrees by early morning – but there was no summer brightness from any of us. Nyet, we’d just woken from fitful dreams of hope and were still groggy with disappointment. For better or worse, our emancipation had not been attempted during the depth of the night and the waiting was, as Nikolai wrote, torturous. Whatever was to come, we all clearly understood it was the beginning of the end. Of course Nikolai and Aleksandra wanted their family to be rescued and carried to safety, but when they were faced with that very possibility they realized how utterly foolish and dangerous such a rescue would be. And when it didn’t take place in those first few days, Nikolai could see the darkness rumbling toward them, so much so that within a week or so he stopped writing his diary altogether, the very diary he’d faithfully written every day since boyhood.

We gathered under a gloomy cloud for our morning inspection and ate our bread and drank our morning tea with few words, but all of that was shoved aside for Maria’s birthday celebration at eleven. The Tsar insisted, for both as a good father and a good soldier he was concerned about the morale of his little troop. Seeing how heavy our hearts were, he recognized that our spirits needed attention. Hence he issued a decree, beckoning Romanov and servant alike to wish the Sovereign’s number-three daughter everything sweet and beautiful.

“A tea table in the late morning… how unusual,” said Aleksandra Fyodorovna, surveying the spread before her in the drawing room.

“And why not?” pressed a beaming Maria, her eyes as big as saucers.

“That’s right, why not?” seconded the Tsar. “After all, there’s been a revolution.”

“Oh, believe me, I know that.” Aleksandra shook her head in bemusement. “Just imagine, everyone else used to have such interesting afternoon teas, but not us. We always had the same tea with the same breads, served on the same china, presented by the same footman. And it all happened precisely at the same time everyday. Why, I don’t think anything had changed since Catherine the Great.”

“No, I think you’re quite right, my dear,” replied the Tsar. “The palace ran on tradition alone.”

Demidova, who stood next to me, volunteered, “I quite remember, Madame, when you tried to change a few things.”

“I do too. Only too well, as a matter of fact. And wasn’t that a disaster?”

“Wasn’t it though!”

Later that day Demidova went on and on about all this, explaining that before the war the Tsar’s tea, like everything else, had been an amazingly regimented thing: the doors opened at five, the Tsar came in, buttered a piece of bread, and drank two glasses of tea, not one more, not one less. On the other hand, Demidova had heard from other maids that the teas of the nobility had been infinitely more creative and extravagant, for it had been all the vogue to have a minimum of six different cakes at the tea table – chocolate, nut, berry, meringue, and so on.

Now looking down at the large knot-shaped sweet bread on the table, the Empress smiled in delight, and asked, “Tell me, cook, where on earth did you get such a beautiful krendel? Did the good sisters bring it?”

“Nyet-s, madame. I made it.”

“Really?”

“Look!” exclaimed Anastasiya. “It even has raisins.”

Aleksandra smiled. “You’re a magician, Vanya. How on earth did you make it in such a small kitchen and how on earth did you come up with all the ingredients?”

Kharitonov humbly bowed his head, and said, “Leonka and I, well, we make do. We make do.”

The truth of the matter was that while we had scrounged up a few raisins over the past few weeks, the krendel was missing cardamom as well as candied orange peel, items that had vanished from the markets months ago. Nevertheless, the entire household recognized the creation as quite a feat, particularly because it was made of the precious white flour we’d brought from Tobolsk and had carefully hidden in trunks and walls and even the back of the piano, all this lest it fall into the hands of the guards. However, the recent spat of fresh eggs and milk, not to mention a bit of vanille secretly brought by Sister Antonina last week, was more than Kharitonov could creatively resist. For days he’d been looking for an excuse, finally seizing upon Maria’s birthday. Making do without an oven, the master of improvisation had cooked the sweet bread atop the oil stove just this morning, baking it between two iron pans that he had carefully cupped together.

Following the Tsar’s lead, we rose to our feet, held hands, and bowed our heads as he intoned, “Gracious Lord, look down upon our dearest Maria with all of Your infinite kindness and wisdom. We beseech Thee to bestow upon Maria good health, long life, and great happiness.”

“What about a husband, Papa?” interjected Anastasiya. “She wants to get married, you know, and have scores of children!”

“Anya, don’t interrupt your father,” chided her mother.

“But it’s true, she wants to get -!”

“Anya!”

Nikolai Aleksandrovich crossed himself. “Hear our prayers, O Lord, and in these trying days protect our cherished daughter. Ah-min.”

All of us, even the one guard who stood in the doorway, likewise followed the Tsar’s example, crossing ourselves and muttering a solemn chorus of, “Ah-min.”