Free Red Moth by Sam Eastland Page A

a marching posture. Propped on his shoulder was a rifle, whose tiny bayonet had cut through Stefanov’s shirt.
    Carefully, Stefanov removed the soldier from his sleeve, spat on it and rubbed away the dirt which had accumulated on the metal. He could still see the colours on the tunic: dark green with red piping, which, Stefanov seemed to recall, was the uniform of the Tsar’s Chevalier Guard.
    He immediately recognised this little solider as having once belonged to the Tsarevich Alexei. Stefanov recalled the day he had been helping his father to push a wheelbarrow full of rotten apples destined for the compost heap, and the two of them had come across the Tsarevich playing a game with what had seemed to Stefanov to be hundreds of these soldiers, ranks of them lined up along the path. There were foot soldiers and soldiers on horseback and soldiers with bugles and others with flags and cannons and one tall man on a fine, white stallion who, by his gold-trimmed uniform, Stefanov supposed to be the Tsar himself. Beside that figure rode another, smaller but wearing an identical uniform. It was a moment before Stefanov grasped that this must be the Tsarevich. To be in the game, marvelled Stefanov, and not even have to pretend.
    The soldiers had been brought outside in wooden boxes, in which special velvet-lined trays had been fitted to accommodate each piece. Sitting on the knee-high stack of boxes and smoking a short-stemmed pipe was the Tsarevich’s bodyguard, a sailor named Nagorny. He had high cheekbones and a long, sharp nose. His ears bent slightly outwards at the top, giving the sailor a slightly mischievous expression. Alexei had two bodyguards. The other man was a giant named Derevenko. Both men were sailors and often carried the Tsarevich when the boy’s haemophilia prevented him from walking on his own.
    When the Revolution began, the giant Derevenko had turned upon Alexei, ordering the boy to run errands, just as the boy had once commanded him to do. But Nagorny had stood by the Romanovs, accompanying them in their exile to Siberia. He was shot, Stefanov had heard, for trying to prevent the Bolshevik guards from taking a gold chain that belonged to the Tsarevich.
    The Tsarevich, on his knees in the middle of his toy army, looked up as Stefanov and his father moved past, leaving in their wake a trail of rotten apple juice which leaked through the wooden boards of the wheelbarrow.
    Finding himself in the presence of the Tsarevich, Stefanov’s father removed his cap and bowed, then snatched the cap from his son’s head as well.
    The Tsarevich blinked at them and did not speak. There was no sign of anger or impatience. He simply waited for them to pass by, as a person might wait for the passing of a cloud which had obscured the sun.
    As soon as they were out of earshot, Stefanov’s father turned to him. ‘What were you thinking, boy?’ he  snapped. ‘You know you should remove your cap in the presence of a Romanov!’
    The answer to his father’s question, which Stefanov was wise enough not to say out loud, was that he had not been thinking about anything except the sight of that army of toy soldiers. He would have given anything for the chance to join that game, to set up his own army in that yellow dust.
    Setting off again with their burden of rotten apples, they eventually reached the compost pile, which was hidden from view by tall hedges made of dense holly and barred by a wooden gate, held fast by a length of rusty chain.
    Stefanov’s father would come to this heap of rotting vegetation whenever he wanted to be alone, because the reek of the compost guaranteed his solitude. He called it his thinking place, although what the old man thought about, if anything, remained a mystery to his son.
    The compost pile was a black mound of leaves, potato peels, turnip tops, to which Stefanov now added his wheelbarrow full of apples. Although the smell was strong, it was not entirely unpleasant, since the compost