Chapter 36

The electric chandelier was ablaze with light, and Jemmy, who usually slept soundly on her feet, was stirring. Anastasia rubbed her eyes and said, “What’s going on?”

Her father was standing in the doorway in his nightshirt. “The commandant has asked us to dress and go down to one of the lower rooms.”

“Why?” Olga asked from her cot.

“He says that there is some unrest in the town, and it will be safer for us if we are not on the upper story.”

All four of the girls hastily exchanged looks, wondering what this really might portend, but Anastasia prayed that it was the first news of their deliverance. Sergei had said telegrams had been flying back and forth from Moscow and that something was afoot. Maybe the White Army was indeed within reach. Even now, the night wind carried the faint rumble of distant guns.

The girls sprang out of bed and had no sooner started dressing than their mother appeared and reminded them to put on their special corsets — the ones with the royal jewels so laboriously sewn into all of the linings.

“We have to be ready for anything,” Alexandra said. But there was a note of hope in her voice, too, a note that Ana had not heard for so many months of their captivity. “We might not be coming back to these rooms.”

Even though they had spent countless hours working on the corsets, the girls had never actually worn them yet, and Ana found that hers weighed much more than she might ever have imagined. It was hard to get on, and with the emerald cross from Father Grigori hanging around her neck, too, she felt like a walking jewelry box.

Like her sisters, she put on a long dark skirt and a white blouse, and by the time they were out in the hall the family’s companions in exile had also assembled there — Dr. Botkin, polishing his gold-rimmed glasses; her father’s valet, Trupp; her mother’s personal maid, Demidova; Kharitonov the cook. Tatiana asked what time it was, and Dr. Botkin consulted his pocket watch.

“Nearly one o’clock.”

Her mother came out next, clutching one of the pillows that also contained a cache of jewels inside it (Demidova had the other), then her father emerged, carrying a sleepy Alexei in his arms. Her father was not a tall man, but he had a broad chest and strong arms, and somehow he always managed to carry his son as effortlessly as if the boy were made of feathers. Ana carried Jemmy, who was strangely, but blissfully, silent for a change.

With Nicholas leading the way, the family trooped down the creaking stairway to the foyer. Yurovsky was waiting at the bottom, stroking his black goatee and wearing a long overcoat far too warm for the July night.

“This way,” he said, guiding them out into the courtyard — Ana was so glad of the chance to see the stars and breathe the fresh air, perfumed with lilac and honeysuckle, that she almost cried aloud for joy — then back down a set of stairs that led to the cellar. “You will please wait in here,” he said. “It won’t be long.”

The room was not much bigger than the girls’ bedroom upstairs, and the walls were covered with peeling wallpaper in a pattern of yellow stripes. There wasn’t a single piece of furniture in the room — Ana wondered if Yurovsky hadn’t already started his looting of the place — and a single electric bulb, with no shade, hung from a string, casting a harsh white light around the barren space. Just before the commandant closed the double doors behind him, Alexandra said, “May we not have some chairs?”

Ana knew that her mother’s back was very bad, but she also knew that it was Alexei she was most concerned about.

“Of course,” Yurovsky said, and closed the doors. Ana assumed that they would never see the chairs, any more than they saw the powdered sage or anything else that the commandant promised, but to her surprise, he kicked the doors open a minute later and dragged in two wooden chairs.

Alexandra sat down on one of them, casually placing the pillow behind the small of her back as if for comfort, while Nicholas sat down on the other with Alexei cradled in his lap.

“The capitalist newspapers have been circulating stories,” Yurovsky said. “They claim that you have escaped, or that you are not being kept safe. We need to take a photograph to put an end to these rumors once and for all. You will please arrange yourselves so that you may all be seen.”

Having had their portrait taken a thousand times, the royal family obligingly fell into their customary spots, with the parents and Alexei in the middle and the girls spread out on either side.

“Yes, yes,” Yurovsky said, directing Dr. Botkin and the others into a single file against the wall behind them. “Exactly. Everyone stay right where you are.”

Then, he popped back out the door again. There was nothing to look at and nothing to do. Ana fidgeted in her corset, stifling not only from the weight but the heat of it. Who knew that diamonds and rubies could be so heavy? Olga put a hand on her mother’s shoulder, and Alexandra kissed and squeezed it hopefully.

Ana wondered where Sergei was, and if he knew what was going on. There was only one window, crossed with iron bars, opening onto ground level, but it was placed high in the wall and she couldn’t see anything outside. How many officers, she wondered, were riding to their rescue even now?

Time seemed to stand still in the airless cellar as they held their positions and waited for the photographer to come in with his tripod and his camera and his black cloth. Jemmy squirmed in her arms, but she didn’t want to put him down for fear he’d get into some trouble. The commandant had made plain, on previous occasions, that he had no use for dogs.

When the doors did open again, Yurovsky came in, with his long coat unbuttoned and nearly a dozen guards jostling to join him inside. Reading aloud from a sheet of paper he held high in his hand, Yurovsky announced that “in view of the fact that your relatives and supporters have continued their attacks on Soviet Russia, the Executive Committee of the Urals has decided to execute you.”

Ana thought she could not have heard him correctly, and her father, after looking quickly at his family assembled around him, turned back to Yurovsky in disbelief and said, “What? What?”

The commandant quickly repeated the sentence, word for word, then drew from his belt a revolver and shot the former Tsar directly through the forehead. Ana saw her father pitch backwards in the chair, dropping Alexei to the floor. She saw her mother fling up a hand to cross herself, and her sisters shrink back against the wall. She heard Demidova cry out and Botkin protest, then everything became an awful blur.

The Red Guards pulled out their own guns and all Ana remembered was a deafening roar as the shots rang out and the room filled with choking smoke and screams for mercy and the hot splash of blood, blood flying everywhere. Jemmy turned into a limp soaking rag in her arms, and as the bullets clanged and ricocheted off the gems in her corset, Ana toppled over and fell beneath the crush of dead and dying bodies … and still the firing continued. The lightbulb in the ceiling exploded, and the last thing she saw, as she clutched at the emerald cross beneath her blouse, was the looming phantom of Rasputin himself rising before her, as if his black beard and cassock were fashioned from the swirling smoke and gunpowder. In her ear, she heard the deep rumble of his voice whispering, as he once had done at the Christmas ball, “I shall always be watching over you, little one.” Malenkaya.

PART THREE

Chapter 37

Lantos, accustomed to working under optimal conditions at M.I.T., was having to make some adjustments. She wasn’t used to her feet sticking to damp rubber mats on the floor, for instance, or to Arctic blasts battering the walls of her lab. Nor was she accustomed to the constant roar of the wind, like a ceaseless pounding surf, or the lamps swaying overhead.