Despite whatever benign intentions she was trying to telegraph, however, she was getting no such messages in return. Just a howling, empty void.

Stopping in front of the church, which sloped ever so gently to one side, she felt that she had come, not surprisingly, to the fulcrum of the colony. The one place where the power — and the essence — of the sect had been most concentrated. And even as she heard Sergeant Groves bellowing out into the darkness that it was dinnertime—“and we close the kitchen at eight!”—she dropped her backpack and sleeping bag on the church steps. Precisely because it gave her the willies, and because it had been the one place she could be assured that all the souls here had regularly gathered, she knew that this was where she would need to bunk down later that night.

Chapter 24

Rasputin had been right.

But Anastasia had to struggle to remember his very words.

He had predicted that if a member of the aristocracy, or more specifically her family, were responsible for his murder, it would signal the end of the Romanov dynasty. Pamphlets secretly published by his irate followers proclaimed that the streets would run with blood, brother would turn against brother, and no one in her family would be safe.

And lo and behold, so far it was all coming to pass.

This day — August 13, 1917—was to be the last one the Romanovs spent at their beloved Tsarskoe Selo. The country had been torn apart by war, then by revolution in the streets. Ana could hardly keep straight all the different factions fighting for power — Reds, Whites, Mensheviks, Bolsheviks, the supporters of President Kerensky and his provisional government. All she knew was that her father had been forced to abdicate the throne, and that ever since then, she and her family had become virtual prisoners, kept under close supervision and constant guard.

And not by the Cossacks who had been their loyal defenders, or the four proud Ethiopians who had stood sentry at their doors.

No, now they were guarded by insolent soldiers and common workers, wearing red armbands and surly expressions. Men who had refused even to carry their trunks and suitcases to the train station, from which they were to depart that evening. Count Benckendorff had had to give them each three rubles to do it.

The night before, Ana had been awakened from her sleep by the sound of gunfire, but when she ran out onto the balcony in her nightgown, the soldiers had looked up and hooted, and an officer had lifted the head of one of the tame deer that they had been rounding up and shooting for sport. Her spaniel, Jemmy, barked furiously through the balustrade, and that only made the soldiers, if you could even dignify them with the term, laugh harder.

Now, that same officer was milling about the grand entry hall, poking his nose into their suitcases. Even the count could do nothing to stop him. Her mother and father were reduced to standing meekly to one side as the contingent in charge debated how and when to move their prisoners to the train station. Apparently, there was some question about their safety once outside the gates of the imperial park. It was hard for Ana to believe it was any worse out there than it had been in here.

“Just do as they say,” her father had told her, and it made her both angry and sad to see him — once the Tsar of All the Russias — so diminished. “Kerensky himself has guaranteed that he will find a way to get us out of the country.”

How could he do that, she wondered, if he could not figure out a way to get them from the palace to the train depot?

It was nearly dawn when the orders were finally given to convey the exhausted royal family, and a handful of their faithful retainers, to the station. A troop of cavalry accompanied them. The train, disguised with a sign and flags proclaiming it to be on a Red Cross mission, was stuck on a siding where there was no platform. With as little courtesy as possible, the soldiers hoisted the Tsaritsa and the other women up into the cars. Ana hated having their hands on her, and brushed her skirts madly as soon as she was out of sight inside the cabin.

And so began their long journey eastward, into the wide and empty spaces of Siberia. The train itself was comfortable and well provisioned, and enough of the family’s household members were accompanying them — such as her father’s valet, her mother’s maid Anna Demidova, the French tutor Pierre Gilliard, and best of all the cook — that the trip occasionally took on the aspect of an outing to the royal estates in the Crimea, or some other country retreat. Every evening at six o’clock, the train stopped so that Jemmy and her father’s dog, too, could be walked. Ana couldn’t wait for these little breaks, to feel the solid soil under her feet instead of the constant rumble of the train tracks. And she found a beauty in the green marsh grasses and endless vistas of the steppes. If a grove of white birch trees happened to present itself, she and her sisters sometimes played hide-and-seek, a child’s game that took them back to happier days. Her mother, laid up by her sciatica, would watch them from the train window, and Alexei, if he was feeling well enough, would stroll along the side of the tracks with his father.

Once, when Ana had strayed too far from the train while picking cornflowers, a young soldier, thin as a rail and with a struggling brown moustache, had warned her back. Anastasia, gesturing out at the vast wilderness, said, “You think I would make a run for it? Where do you think I would go?”

The soldier, who seemed flustered to be speaking to a grand duchess at all — even a deposed one — said, “I don’t know. But please don’t try.” His tone was less admonitory than it was pleading. He was doing his duty, that she could see, but he wasn’t entirely at ease with it. She smiled at him — he couldn’t be more than a year or two older than she was, nineteen or twenty at the most — and he held his rifle as if it were a hoe, something she suspected he was much more familiar with.

“Sergei!” another of the soldiers hollered from atop a nearby hill. “Get that limping bitch back here!”

Sergei blushed deeply; some of the soldiers enjoyed delivering insults to their royal prisoners. Ana, who had grown accustomed if not inured to it, glanced at the bouquet of bright blue cornflowers in her hand and said, “I have enough.”

When she dropped one on her return to the waiting train, Sergei picked it up and, bobbing his head as if in a furtive bow, tried to give it back to her.

“You keep it,” she said, and if she thought he had blushed before, it was nothing compared to the crimson flush that filled his young face now. He looked so much like a tomato she laughed and said, “Don’t let the others see that you have it, Sergei. They’ll call it imperial property and take it away.”

He stuck it into the pocket of his frayed military tunic as if it were made of gold.

After that, Ana got used to Sergei’s guarding her. Whenever she stepped off the train with her spaniel, Jemmy, she expected to see him trailing her at a distance, and the other soldiers, too, seemed to regard her as his charge. Her sisters kidded her that she had found a suitor. Usually, the train would not stop anywhere near a station or a town; Ana didn’t know if it was because the Red Guards thought the local people would attack the imperial family, or try to liberate them. On one day, a village was in sight — a prosperous-looking one, judging from the flower-filled window boxes, the green fields, and busy barnyards — but it was safely removed on the other side of the river. Ana noticed that Sergei was gazing at it longingly, his rifle drooping even lower than usual.

“What’s the name of that village?” she asked, and at first he was so lost in thought he didn’t answer.

When she repeated the question, he said, “That is my home.” And then he turned toward her and said, “It’s called Pokrovskoe.”