“You beast!” Tatiana exclaimed, standing in the crowd of rescued people in the western warehouse. “You murdering monstrosity on two legs! You incarnate idiot! Yesterday I had a full family and a good friend. Now, thanks to you, I’ve lost two parents, my closest sister, my little brother, and my friend. Great job, Daniil Edvardovich Kostyshakov. Great job. You could have left things alone, but noooo, not you…”
Daniil simply stood there and took it. Nothing she said could possibly make him feel worse than he already did. Shoulders slumped, he turned away and walked off.
Lieutenant Molchalin, standing in the warehouse’s small personnel door, heard it all. He shook his head. Talk about ingratitude. He walked directly over to where Tatiana stood and, as was his wont, wordlessly passed her the pertinent document, the one taken from the now one-legged Yurovsky.
As Tatiana read her normally pale skin turned even whiter. “They were going to… oh, my God…”
“God had abandoned you all,” said Molchalin, speaking loud enough for everyone in the warehouse to hear. “Only one man had the guts and vision to try to save some of you. And you just insulted him. Well done, Your Highness! Oh, that was so well done.” As loudly as he’d spoken, Molchalin began to applaud and sardonically to bow.
Maria and Anastasia came up. “What’s…?”
Wordlessly, Tatiana showed them Yurovsky’s orders. They both read through, quickly.
“They intended to murder us all?” wondered Anastasia. “Even the children of the staff? What kind of monsters…?”
“I think maybe you owe him an apology,” said Maria.
“A private apology for the public wrong I did him?” asked Tatiana. “No.” She looked around and, in the light filtering through open doors and cracks in walls, she spotted a dozen hay bales, piled against one wall. She went to them and climbed.
“People… oh, God, do you have any idea how much I hate speaking in public? People, listen to me. Come here, gather round, and listen.”
When they had, all of them. She began to read from Yurovsky’s orders, with particular emphasis on framing the tsar and his family members, as well as on the open statement that all, and all witnesses, must die.
“So the only reason any of us will be alive in two weeks’ time is that some brave Guards, under a brave commander, risked their lives to save us. And I, I, Tatiana Nicholaevna Romanova, am a total and complete and unforgiveable bitch for insulting him.
“That is my public apology. Now I am going to seek him out for a private one.”
Tatiana found Daniil, sitting alone on a pile of logs, facing the Irtysh River, with his back to the warehouse and the town.
“I can’t tell you how sorry I am,” she began. “I can only ask you to…”
“I screwed it all up,” answered Daniil, before she could finish. “A million things I should have done differently and…”
Tatiana went and sat down beside him. “You got the important thing right.” She handed over the orders to Yurovsky given her by Molchalin. “Read. We’d all have been dead within a couple of weeks, anyway. If I have any family left at all it’s because of you and your men.”
He did read, muttering and cursing as he did. “Communist bastards!”
“I’m not just sorry,” Tatiana said. “I also owe you an explanation. Yes, of course I was—am… always will be—hurt by the loss of my parents, sister, and little brother. But there was something else going on, too. You see, I was—and, again, am—absolutely terrified of what it meant that I was now the senior Romanov.
“My father had, before Alexei was born, made up a new rule, countermanding the old rule against a woman succeeding to the throne. It was supposed to be Olga if there was no male heir. She never let on to anyone but me—we were extremely close, you know—but she did not want to be tsarina.
“Well, she’s gone; Alexei is gone; and the new-old rule remains. I am going to have to be tsarina if anyone is. And that scares me to death, Daniil. I am so frightened of it that I can hardly think straight. And half of the fear is knowing that my father’s huge mistake, worse than all the others, was in signing too many pardons and not enough death warrants.”
She placed a hand on his shoulder. “I think I was more angry at that than I was about the loss of my family.”
“I think you can do it,” Daniil assured her. “Moreover, though it pains me to speak ill of the dead… well… you can hardly fail to do a better job than your father.”
“I know,” Tatiana agreed. “He was a fine father but I don’t have any illusions about what a disaster of a ruling couple he and my mother were. But…”
“Yes?”
“Not all of my mother’s family were such complete… I’m not sure what the word would be. Idiots doesn’t cover it; my mother was intelligent enough. Is there a word to describe those completely lacking in wisdom? I confess; I don’t know it.”
He shook his head, not sure where the conversation was going.
“My aunt Ella. She is the best candidate for sainthood I know. And she is terribly intelligent. She is also, quite despite having become a nun, ruthless enough when the situation demands ruthlessness. She may have begged the tsar for the life of her husband’s murderer, and prayed for him, too. That’s because the deed was already done, no one would be deterred by the execution, and so it would do no good.
“But she knew they were going to murder Rasputin, knew it and let it happen because he did have to go.”
Daniil shrugged, not understanding.
“If I am going to be stuck with this job,” she explained, “I need my Aunt Ella’s shoulder to lean on, her advice to rely on. I need you to take your men and go save her. Quickly, because, if the Reds ordered us murdered, orders to get rid of her cannot be far off.”
“I’ll try,” he said. “We know she’s in Yekaterinburg, or was, a few weeks back. Now? Now it’s anybody’s guess. I’ll kick Strategic Recon out this afternoon. Third Company should be showing up here soon. But… no, there’s not a chance of catching the zeppelin before it goes back for the next lift. It’s supposed to come into Tobolsk with that final lift. We’ll stop it then and use it to get near Yekaterinburg. That’s the best chance we have.”
Interlude
Lenin and Trotsky: “What is to be done?”
Trotsky, Lenin and Sverdlov stood around Lenin’s desk in his flat. Trotsky had woken Sverdlov in the middle of the night with the catastrophic news. Sverdlov had dressed quickly and crossed the hallway to awaken Ilyich.
“Reports are confused,” Trotsky said. “But we are certain that Yurovsky and the bulk of our men at Freedom House are dead or captured. At least some of the Romanovs escaped… rather, to be honest, were rescued.”
Lenin slammed his fist into his desk, Sverdlov smoothed his mustache and glared out the window. They were arguably the most powerful men in Russia, they had sacrificed everything for the power to cast down the autocrats. Now that was all in danger, thanks to their leader’s indecision.
“How did they get there?” Lenin demanded.
“We don’t actually know,” Trotsky replied, “but I have a sneaking suspicion.”
“What’s that?”
“An airship, one of the big lighter than air jobs the Germans use, was spotted in a couple of places over the previous two weeks. It’s impossible to tell its direction from the spottings because literally nobody who saw it had a watch or a compass. But, for my money, it carried the Guards to Tobolsk.”