Hearing my quick steps, Maria shook with fear. This most beautiful of girls, this protected princess, opened her mouth to scream. I saw that she was going to howl to the sky and moon and back, and I charged forward. As quickly as I could, I threw my hand over her mouth, gagged her fear, kept it bottled up inside the poor thing.
“Eto ya!” It’s me, I hissed into her ear. “Eto ya!”
I gently lowered her back to the road, and Grand Duchess Maria fell weak and silent beneath my youthful power. She attempted to struggle but then, gazing up at me with those rich eyes, fell still.
“Leonka…” she gasped, clutching my arm.
Like the sternest of schoolmasters, I ordered, “Keep quiet or they’ll come after us both!”
She understood, of course. At the same time I saw her eyes strain after the lorry that was carting away her family.
“Papa… Mama…” she moaned, her body now falling flaccid in my arms.
Only as I held her did I realize how badly she was bleeding. I didn’t know if it was a bayonet wound or if a bullet had grazed her temple, but she was bleeding most profusely from the side of her head, from just above her ear. I touched her temple, sensed a long, deep wound, and then tore a swath of material from her skirt, which I wrapped around her head. Fearful that the truck would turn around and come back, I tried to help her get up.
“We’ve got to get off the road and into the woods,” I said.
But when she moved, she clutched her side and cried out, “I can’t!”
The bullets meant to kill her had instead struck her diamond-studded corset, the force of which had broken a number of her ribs. She started gasping for air, and as I held her, I saw she was bleeding terribly from her left leg as well. Raising her skirt, I saw two wounds in her left thigh, one on the front, the other the back. A bullet had apparently gone through her leg, perhaps shattering the bone. As she leaned upon me, I tore more of her skirt, then tied that strip around the top of her leg, tightening the tourniquet to stem the blood. I glanced way down the road, saw the vague, dark shape of the lorry slowing. Or had it stopped? Panic seized my throat. Had they discovered that not one but two of the Romanovs had fallen from the back of the vehicle? Were the Reds about to return and hunt us out? I had to get Maria Nikolaevna off the road and hide her in the woods. Somehow I found this strength. She was a big girl, and I turned around, pulled her up on my back. It was then, as I half-dragged her off the road, that she saw the other body.
“Aleksei…”
There was no way to soften the truth, not on that night, and I said, “Ew-bili.” They killed him.
I kept moving, carrying the Grand Duchess into the woods, which were not really that thick. Behind a clump of bushes I found a pine, and there I placed Maria, lowering her to the sandy ground and then propping her up against the tree.
“My brother,” she begged.
“Ew-bili,” I repeated.
I wondered if we shouldn’t just leave him for the guards to find. A decoy. And she understood this, the Grand Duchess did, for she saw the hesitation on my face.
“Bring him to me.”
In all the time that I’d spent in The House of Special Purpose I’d never heard any of the Royal Family issue a command, particularly none of the children. Yet Grand Duchess Maria Nikolaevna so ordered me. Dead or alive, she would not abandon her brother. And so wasting no time, I darted through the wood and back onto the road. I glanced into the distance and sure enough, there was the truck, stopped or perhaps stuck. There was little time, and so I grabbed Aleksei by the shoulders and pulled the boy out of the road and into the pine wood, leaving a swerving tail of blood behind. Reaching the trees, I stopped and took off my light jacket, which I in turn draped over the boy’s mutilated head. I then dragged him on, all the way to Maria, whereupon I laid him by her side. She immediately took his hand, then started to pull away my jacket.
It was my turn to order, and this I did, catching her hand, pushing it back, and commanding, “Nyet-s!”
She understood quite clearly, and she laid back, holding his hand, which she pinned to her chest. Her eyes blinked quite heavily as if she were about to fall into the most permanent sleep.
Suddenly her mouth moved, and she begged, “Please, you must go after them, after… after Tatyana…”
Tatyana? It couldn’t be. My mind exploded – I’d seen her shot, I’d seen that guard attack her with a bayonet, or was I all wrong?! Could she have been protected by her corset as well?
I demanded, “She lives as well?”
She gazed weakly at me. “You must go. You must bring her.”
She slipped away then, Maria did. At first I thought she’d simply expired on the spot, but then I saw her chest rise and fall, albeit quite slowly. Whether she was passing into some kind of shock or she was about to die I couldn’t tell, but this much I knew – I had to find out if indeed the Tsar’s second daughter, Tatyana, was still alive.
And so I said, “I’ll be back.”
Her head slowly rose and fell.
“Trust me, I’ll be back to take care of you. Just don’t try to move. Just wait. I’ll go see if your sister is… is…”
“Go,” she pleaded with the last of her strength. “Go now.”
“I’ll be back,” I chanted yet again, making a pledge as much to myself as to the Princess.
Those were my last words to her before I scrambled out of the woods. I had no idea how much blood she’d already lost, just as I had no idea how much longer Maria would live. I was so young and knew so little of such things.
So… I left her. I did exactly as the Grand Duchess begged, no more, no less. I abandoned her, which of course turned out to be the stupidest thing. I followed her command, hurried to the road, whereupon I saw all that blood pooled like motor oil on the dirt. I knew I couldn’t leave such an obvious sign, so I returned to the edge of the wood and took a large branch. And this branch I dragged over the blood of Aleksei and Maria so as to obscure it. Which I did. I swirled the dirt around, buried the redness as best I could, and then… well, then I threw the bloodied pine bough into the bushes and started running after the motor lorry, the engine of which coughed and sputtered in the distance. Already the depth of darkness had passed, and in the faintest of early light I could see it, that clumsy truck laden with all the bodies.
I ran and ran, my mind on fire. The vehicle passed over a railway embankment, and I was just catching up when suddenly I heard all this commotion. I heard shouting voices, the stomp of many horses, and I ducked behind a clump of birches. From nowhere a convoy of men, as many as twenty, charged out of the night. Most of them were on horseback, a few in small horse-pulled carts, and they were shouting with the drunken revelry of revolution. And murder.
“Give us Nikolashka!”
“Off with his capitalist head!”
“Death to the blood drinker!”
I quickly understood that this haphazard detachment of Reds had been told they would get the honor of killing the royal ones, not simply burying them. When they found out, however, that their hated Nikolashka and his traitress whore, the German bitch, were already dead, there was a fiery roar of disappointment and anger.