stepped around the back of the palace and crept up the stone steps to the chapel. How many times had we worshipped there, the tsarina too ill to go out to the church in town? Was Luba right about the chapel being unlocked?
I hurried to the chapel door, my heart thumping in my ears, and reached for the brass knob.
Cold in my bare hand, the knob gave way and I opened the door.
Every part of me calmed as I stepped through the doorway and into the high-ceilinged chapel, my steps echoing on stone. We’d often sat in the front row, close to the royal family as they sat behind the screen, for the devoutly religious tsarina needed her privacy.
I stepped through the adjacent billiards room, careful to make not a sound, up the stairway and down the carpeted hallway to the private apartments.
I hurried toward the door of the tsarina’s inner sanctum, her Lilac Room. How Alexandra’s society critics had panned that room. Expecting her to entertain publicly as previous monarchs had, they chastised the quaint, homey sanctuary where she retreated with her family.
I followed Olga’s voice, reading aloud from the Bible. Tears came to my eyes at the sound of her voice, so clear and direct.
I stood in the doorway for a moment taking in the scene. It was dark in the room, except for one candle near Olga. Olga and Tatiana, the two eldest sisters sat together in one chair, clothed in white dressing gowns, their heads shaved smooth. Next to them, their mother, the tsarina, lay upon a lilac silk chaise. The sweet scent of lilac branches, forced to bloom, from cuttings in the imperial hothouse, hung in the air. Clearly, their house arrest was not stripping every luxury from the family.
How I’d loved that room as a child, with the pale lavender silk walls, dyed to match a lilac sprig the tsarina had given her decorator. The soaring ceilings. The polished lemonwood furniture. Barely an inch of the walls at head height was left uncovered by some framed picture, treasure, or bibelot; and the dressers and tables held little villages of framed photographs and golden icons. But that night it suddenly seemed old-fashioned, maudlin even.
Tatiana noticed me first and stood as if stung. “Sofya.”
Olga snapped closed her Bible and joined her. “How did you get in here? There are guards everywhere.”
They ran to me and hugged me.
“Through the chapel.”
“I thought only the front and kitchen doors were open,” Tatiana said.
Olga took my hand in hers. “I prayed for this.”
Tatiana smoothed one hand across her head. “What do you think of this? We’ve had the measles. It’s much easier, actually, and has made us appreciate hats. The others are still sick with it, upstairs asleep. Papa is finally getting some rest, too. You’ve heard they made him resign? Each day they make him clear the snow down by the fence so the lower classes can stare and jeer.”
I was conflicted hearing this. I had great affection for the tsar, pitied him as I did the blinkered horse at the mill forced to walk in endless circles, but the price we were all paying for his narrow-mindedness was so great. Did he not deserve his fate?
“Come see Mama,” Olga said. “She’s having a five. Not well, another headache.”
Some things never changed. The girls still used a system of numbers to rate their mama’s pain.
We stepped toward the tsarina, at rest on her favorite settee, much thinner since I’d seen her last and her eyes red-rimmed, a double shawl of lace lined with lilac-colored linen drawn to her knees. A vase of her flower of choice, Frau Druski white roses, sat by her side.
The tsarina held out one hand. “Sofya. What brings you here at such a time?”
I kissed her hand and received her embrace, catching the scent of her favorite perfume, Atkinson’s Essence of White Rose. How quiet it was there, so different from before the tsar had abdicated. Even at night while the family slept, the palace had always been fully lit, humming with activity, visitors and servants milling about. But one got the feeling the tsarina rather liked the solitude, finally had what she wanted.
“I come from Malinov.” Why, after so much hardship did I choose that time to want to cry? “Last fall bandits broke into the estate and took us all hostage.” I unbuttoned my coat and let it slip down off my shoulders.
Olga gasped. “Sofya. You’re so thin. Bandits kept you all that