Free The Lost Crown by Sarah Miller Page A

leaving her cotton and carbolic acid behind once in a while doesn’t hurt her a bit, either.
    Since Papa took over the high command, we can’t cruise the Finnish skerries on the Standart , or take our train south to Livadia for months in our white marble palace on the Black Sea. It’s different now, like pushing the stop lever on my camera until nothing except the war can squeeze through the lens. I don’t read the papers like Olga, or trail behind Mama every minute like Tatiana, but I’m no idiotka . I can see Papa getting worried and tired as well as anyone. The Big Pair mopes and frets, but I won’t give Papa anything more to worry about. Soldiers need to keep up their morale, after all.
    I write him cheerful letters sealed with thousands of kisses and clown about just like I always do. Papa always thanks me in his telegrams, writes back cheerful letters of his own whenever he can, and sometimes even sends me cigarettes, too! But the more I see him as the war goes on, the more I hear a little Olga-voice in the back of my own head, wondering if Papa himself is trying just as hard to keep up our morale.
    Stavka ’s supposed to be men’s quarters, but Mama doesn’t care, especially since Aleksei went back to the front to stay with Papa once he recovered from his nosebleed. All of us ladies have to motor back to the rail station every night to sleep on our train, but during the day we march right in. Who would dare look the empress in the eye and say, “No women allowed”?
    “What do you men do all day long that’s so important?” I ask Aleksei.
    “I have breakfast with Papa and all the highest-ranking officers every morning,” he says, puffing up like a dinner roll. “Then lessons. In the afternoons we usually drive along the Dneiper, and sometimes the generals eat zakuski with us before supper. At night we write letters to you women and then play cards or read out loud together.”
    Appetizers and river tours? To hear him talk, you’d think it was a camping trip instead of a war. “What about Papa?”
    Aleksei shrugs. “He reads the dokladi and eats lunch with the commanding officers while I have my lessons.”
    Why in the world does Papa need to be five hundred miles from home to do any of that? “What about battles?”
    “We inspected troops near the front once!” Aleksei rubs his cuff over the medal pinned to his khaki tunic. “If the Germans had fired they could have hit us, but I was brave and got the medal of St. George, fourth class.”
    Some war.
    Whenever Papa can get away, we all motor down the river Dneiper in a launch and picnic on the shores. It’s just like Aleksei said, and almost as much fun as our summers in the skerries on the Standart .
    “Bury me,” Aleksei demands, spread out on the sandy bank in his striped bathing costume. Mama won’t let us bury him, but we sprinkle shovels full of sand over his back until he looks like a breaded cutlet. Papa pins him to the ground with his boot like a hunter over a stag while they both grin at Mashka and her camera.
    “Take off your cap, you idiot!” I yell from the shore when he gets loose and runs down to rinse off. “Soldiers don’t wear their hats swimming!” I think the little show-off would wear his cap and his medal with his bathing suit if he could get away with it. He’s so oafishly proud of that thing.
    Farther inland, we tromp through fields and flop down together in heaps to rest in haystacks while Aleksei marches about with his miniature rifle, pretending the tall banks are trenches along the front lines. Mama mostly stays under her parasol, so I sneak smokes from the cigarettes Papa gives us. Tatiana fusses all the time, “Be careful of the ashes! You will fry us to a crisp, Anastasia Nikolaevna!” but she never once tells on me.
    “Oh, Mama, please let’s stop,” Maria begs every night as we motor through the town of Mogilev on the way back to our train. “There’s Stephania and Bolyus, and I brought cherry