Interlude
Tatiana: The Sewing Circle
It broke my heart, seeing Olga withdraw into herself. She had always been the most serious of us girls. How could she not be? For nine years, Mama and Papa thought she would be the future tsarina. Papa even had a decree drawn up stating that Olga would succeed him to the throne. He made her co-regent, along with Mama, should he die before Alexei reached the age of twenty-one.
Yet when Alexei had been born she’d been filled with joy. Some might say that as a child of nine she couldn’t possibly understand, but they would be wrong. I remember the look on her face—the pride—when Papa made her Alexei’s godmother.
She could have resented Alexei, but didn’t, not even when he wouldn’t listen to her, when he’d misbehave so badly that Mama would blame Olga.
As she stared out of our bedroom’s window she seemed a very different person. It went beyond the melancholy woman she had grown into.
Once, she had spoken to me of the future of which she dreamed.
“I want to get married,” she’d said. “To live always in the countryside, always with good people, and with no officialdom whatsoever.”
I shared that dream. How it had soured.
Just the other day Olga had sat in the parlor with Mama, going through Mitya’s letters. Her eyes filled with tears which she wiped away with trembling hands. I believed that she was getting better, or at least, forgetting. She still kept mostly to our room and avoided conversation. Fortunately, Anastasia was happy to fill the silence with her own chatter.
Mama seemed to be too much in her own pain—and Alexei’s—to notice Olga’s and for this I was grateful. There were times when I thought that Madame Hendrikova suspected, but if she did, she chose not to speak of it.
I could hear the chopping of wood and the barking of dogs down below in the courtyard as I shut the door behind me. Olga didn’t seem to notice me coming in.
I knelt and reached under my bed.
“Here,” I said, pulling out a small box. “Can you help me with these?”
She turned around, blinking as if she’d just realized that I was there.
I opened the box and pulled out the letters sitting within to reveal a false bottom. A good tap popped it free.
Olga looked inside and her eyes went wide. Several of Mama’s brooches and earrings lay within, so tangled with each other they looked like cheap trinkets one might have thrown carelessly aside.
“Are you sure we should have these out?” she asked, glancing at the door.
“Mama wants us to sew them into our clothes. And a lot more besides these.”