Free The Lost Crown by Sarah Miller Page B

candies especially for Gricha and Lenka.” Nobody spots the muzhik children who come to gape at our polished black motorcars faster than Mashka. Mama won’t order the driver to stop unless we ask, but she almost never refuses, either. At first the children are shy as pill bugs, but once we’ve romped and cuddled with them and stuffed them full of sweets they swarm us like bees. Even their mamas come out to chat with the Big Pair sometimes, while ours waits in the motor.
    At Christmastime, Papa and Aleksei come home to Tsarskoe Selo. While Papa walks in the imperial park, my sisters and I play and wallow in the snow with Aleksei like polar bears, lobbing snowballs at one another and making a warlike rumpus. Once, Aleksei sneaks up behind me and plasters my neck with a great mittenful of snow. I squawk and shiver while he laughs, until we hear Papa’s voice.
    “Aleksei Nikolaevich!”
    Too much roughhousing for the delicate little Sunbeam, I think as Aleksei trots to Papa’s side, and just when we were really having fun, too. But I’m wrong. Papa’s stern words march over the snow as I fish the slush out of my collar. “You ought to be ashamed of yourself, Aleksei. You’re behaving like a German, attacking anyone from behind when they can’t defend themselves. Cowardly. Leave that sort of behavior to the enemy.”
    Poor Aleksei. He hangs his head so I don’t even have the heart to pummel him with snowballs the way he deserves. So far, that’s the closest thing I’ve ever seen to Papa commanding a battle.
    Almost a whole year goes by, and practically the only thing that changes is the view out the windows as our trains chug to and from headquarters: snow drifts to lilac blooms to haystacks. Even when the seasons change, they’re the same. Stavka ’s no different. By the fall of 1916 everybody knows the war’s a mess, but you can’t tell by the way people act around us. The place is still crawling with generals and officers who bow and salute and say “Your Majesty” like a battalion of wind-up toys. They treat us like we brought a trainload of gold-plated rifles, even though all we do is stand in front of a row of Cossacks and pose in our new fur-trimmed coats for the cameras: THE TSAR AND HIS HAPPY FAMILY AT HEADQUARTERS, the title cards on the newsreels might say. We are happy, but it feels like pretending to make it look like we’re pleased with the war instead of just being together again.
    “Stop making eyes at that camera and behave yourselves,” Tatiana hisses at Maria and me from behind Aleksei’s shoulder. “This film is for Russia, not our home movies.”
    “It doesn’t matter what you do, just as long as you move,” Aleksei announces. “They took films of me running with Joy and pelting Monsieur Gilliard with snowballs and never complained. And you don’t have to whisper,” he informs Tatiana. “You know it can’t record the sound.”
    Mama would shush us all anyway, but she’s resting in the train. Papa only stands stout and proud as anything in his uniform with the red dolman and tall astrakhan hat and Aleksei like a matching toy soldier beside him.
    “How do you think we looked?” I ask my sisters that night on the train.
    “Otlichno,” says Tatiana, petting her fur collar while Ortipo pouts in the corner. “It has been so long since we had new coats. I only wish the film could be in color.”
    It isn’t what I mean, but I don’t know how to say it the right way. “Who’s in charge of the army when Papa comes cruising the river with us?” I ask instead.
    “Papa is,” Tatiana answers. “Why should anyone else take over? No one took charge of Russia when we had our holidays on Standart or in Livadia.”
    But this is war , not a quiet summer. And if he can leave like that, what does it really mean to be in charge of the army?
    Olga looks at me as if she can hear the thoughts linking up inside my head, like a verse to a song we both know. I’m not about to say anything