they could take this carriage apart in minutes if they chose to.”
All at once the coach lurched to one side and then the other.
Agnessa brought one hand to her throat. “Ivan—”
I leaned toward the window to see soldiers in dirty uniforms, their epaulets ripped off, press their shoulders to the carriage and rock it to and fro. Most brandished sabers and flags, the bayonets of their rifles poking out of the crowd at all angles. A group sang “La Marseillaise,” which had started to replace our Russian anthem.
The carriage tipped and Agnessa slid toward me on the seat, pinning Max between us.
Afon slapped one of the soldiers with his crop. “There are children here.”
The soldier swung around, holding his shoulder as if stung. “Bourgeois pig.”
A voice came from the crowd. “Hold on. That’s Captain Stepanov. From the academy.”
“I’ll be,” said another. “Make way, citizens!” The men pushed their way through the masses shouting, “My good teacher coming through!”
“Why should we?” someone in the crowd called out. “Take them all.”
“Be courteous, comrades. He’s an old friend.”
Soon the crowd gave way and we picked up speed.
“This was a one-time pass,” one of the men called out as we rolled by.
“Don’t expect such special treatment again,” another shouted and we left the rabble behind.
Afon doubled back to free the other carriages and I wiped my palms dry on my skirt. How often Afon’s good reputation had helped us through such situations lately.
Agnessa touched the cracked window. “How can they deface the tsar’s property?” She reached under her seat and released her little dog Tum-Tum from his canvas carrier. “I worry about the tsarina, alone with the children.”
I smoothed one hand down my son’s back. “Please. This is her fault.”
Father sent me a warning glance, for he seldom allowed criticism of the imperial couple. But how frustrating it was to see the tsarina run beautiful Russia into the ground.
Little Max pulled himself up and stood on the seat next to me, his eyes extra blue with unshed tears, angelic with his mass of baby curls.
As the carriage swayed I held him around his waist and searched for signs of injury, running my fingers along his arms and legs.
He cupped my cheeks in his two hands and turned my face toward him. “Mama?”
“Yes, my love?”
“Un biscuit?”
I pulled a biscuit from the wicker hamper at Agnessa’s feet and he took it in his fist.
Max settled on my lap, burrowing himself into the soft folds of my silk coat and I breathed in the luscious scent of him, of French baby soap and sour milk. What a lucky child he was. If not for an accident of birth he might have been in that crowd.
Luba rode next to Father, their backs to the coachman above. She was a perfect, scaled-down, female echo of Father, with his wide brow, oval face, and keen eyes that missed nothing. Almost twelve years old, Mother’s “late in life” child, Luba sat coatless, the yellow scarf the tsarina herself had given her for her name day looped about her neck, a black smudge of ink staining the left cuff of her dress sleeve. She tucked a tangled lock of hair behind one ear, aimed Father’s old sextant out the window, and squinted through the eyepiece.
“Do put that thing away,” Agnessa said in Russian, which she only spoke when she was cross with us or to the servants since her own mother had only allowed French spoken in their Moscow home. She unearthed a cotton wool–wrapped orange from among the tinned delicacies in the lunch basket. “No man will marry a girl so fixed on the stars, Luba.”
“Well that’s good, Agnessa, since she’s twelve,” I said. “Trying to marry her off like a peasant girl?”
Agnessa lifted the orange to her nose and inhaled its sweet perfume. With its vivid color and pebbled skin, it looked like a thing dropped from another planet.
“Marriage stifles creativity,” Luba said, adjusting the sextant mirror. “I’m more interested in determining latitude.”
“Dear God,” Agnessa said. “Mind the paneling.”
The tsar himself had loaned us the carriages and we five rode in the first. I brushed two fingers along the red velvet–upholstered seat and shuddered. The whole coach interior was covered in it, tufted, like the inside of a nobleman’s casket. I was happy Agnessa kept the windows closed, still jumpy from the mob scene in the city.
“This coach belonged to Catherine the Great,” Agnessa said.
Luba squinted at the ledger in which she wrote her celestial calculations. “It would be greater