by Gill Paul
Peter left her to her own thoughts, asking only if she was warm enough, or if she would like some food or water. She wished she had another gown to change into instead of the one she was wearing with a slash in the bodice. By turning her petticoat back to front she could stop her flesh being exposed, but she felt tainted. Each day Peter checked her wounds, looking for signs of heat or redness or swelling that could indicate infection. When he lowered his head and sniffed them, she asked, “What are you doing?”
“I would be able to smell if an infection was taking hold,” he said. “But you are healing well.”
She didn’t care if she healed or not. It seemed irrelevant. She didn’t even ask him where they were heading or if he had a plan. Somehow she couldn’t bring herself to care.
During the afternoon of the third day, they arrived at an abandoned half-ruined hut. The roof had collapsed inward and the interior was full of rubble and animal droppings. Peter laid her on a grassy bank nearby and went inside.
“I thought we could stay here till your wounds heal,” he called through the doorway. “No one will find us in such a remote spot.”
She nodded. All around was silent and still, with only the barest breath of wind ruffling the topmost branches of the trees and a few birds calling from afar. She had never been anywhere so quiet.
White clouds meandered past in the vast blue sky and she lay back to watch. Her brain was awash with emotions: guilt, anger, and sorrow, all mixed together. Sometimes her fury with the assassins came to the forefront, at other times her guilt that she had abandoned her family. Grief always hovered in the background, so immense that she could not let herself give into it for fear of being swallowed up.
Peter occupied himself with clearing the hut, then he used his knife to cut some spruce branches with which to repair the roof. Maria twisted to watch as he arranged the fronds in an overlapping pattern. He jumped down and stood inside the hut, peering upward to check for gaps, then hacked off more branches to fill them. Once he’d finished, he collected armfuls of fallen leaves and moss and arranged them over the top, before bringing further armfuls to create a floor covering inside. It was clear he had done this before.
He vanished for a moment, then appeared by her side with the clay bowl full of water.
“Drink,” he said, and she obeyed. The water was icy.
“Do you think I must have committed terrible sins to be so punished?” she asked him. “Perhaps I should have been a better sister and a better daughter. I often argued with Anastasia, and sometimes I hid when Alexei wanted to play with me. Do you think God has cursed me for my selfishness?”
“No.” He shook his head vehemently. “I am not a believer in God, but if there is such a thing, I cannot believe he is some tit-for-tat tyrant. Besides, it makes no difference what God wills when you are faced with a band of crazed men intent on murder.”
“Why did they want to murder us? I don’t understand.” She frowned and closed her eyes to hold back the tears.
He hesitated a moment, choosing his words. “The Bolsheviks have a black-and-white message: the old system under your father was corrupt and favored the few, while the new regime will make society fairer. They need to create demons in order to push through their reforms—and sadly they decided your family were those demons.”
Maria noticed he said “were.” Past tense. They were no more. “Do you think we were demons?” she asked.
“Of course not.”
“Yet you worked for the Bolsheviks.”
“I did. I believed—still believe—that the country’s wealth should be more fairly distributed, but I don’t think Lenin’s men are going about it the right way. It’s not necessary to destroy the old in order to bring in the new.” He stood up. “But it does no good to dwell on these matters. What’s done is done. I am going to find dinner. I will be gone no more than an hour.”
Maria opened her mouth to object, but he had vanished into the trees. She peered after him and suddenly remembered one of the guards telling her that there were brown bears and wolves in those woods. What would she do if a wild animal appeared? She couldn’t run; her injured leg wouldn’t take her weight.
A cloud passed in front of the sun and she shivered in the sudden chill. There was a rustle in the undergrowth behind her, but when she turned her head, there was nothing to be seen. Surely Peter would not leave her if there was any danger? Fear pricked the back of her neck and suddenly she was back in the basement, her ears ringing with the terrified screams of her sisters, crawling on her hands and knees across a floor that was slippery with their blood, the smell of gunpowder choking her. She saw her mother’s brains glistening, Anastasia whimpering by her side, her father falling as the bullets came thick and fast. She saw the hatred on that guard’s face as he thrust at her with his bayonet, heard the ugly crowing of the men as they plotted to scavenge their corpses. She covered her face with her hands and moaned but couldn’t make the images go away. There was the sound of repeated screams and she realized they were coming from her own lips, bursting out of her in staccato pulses.
“What is it? What happened?” Peter appeared from nowhere and crouched to put an arm around her shoulders.
He placed two fingers on her lips to silence the screams, then sat on the ground and wrapped his arms tight around her, careful not to touch her wounds. His body was warm and sturdy and smelled of earth and spruce. She clung to him as hard as she could, taking comfort in his steadiness.
“It’s all right,” he murmured. “You’re safe.” His hands were on her back, his chest pressed against hers, and she felt his warmth flowing into her cold flesh.
She pulled her head back to look at his serious gray eyes. A straggly beard was sprouting on his chin, as he had not shaved for three days; it made him look older. On impulse she leaned forward and kissed his cheek, then his lips, and soon she was kissing all over his face in a frenzy. It wasn’t planned; she was just following some instinct she did not understand. She held his face in her hands and planted kisses on his forehead, his chin, his nose, his temples.
He didn’t try to stop her but he did not kiss her back either, and after a while she paused. Who was this man who would not take advantage of her, even when they were alone in the mountains and she had more or less invited him? He gave her a wan smile, tilting his head to one side.
Suddenly she realized that in saving her he had risked his own life. If they were caught, they would both be executed. “What have I done to you?” she asked, full of remorse that it had not occurred to her before.
“Nothing. At least, not compared with what they have done to you,” he replied.
“I had forgotten that you have lost your family too. Your mother. Your sister. All because of me.” He looked sad, and she added, “I hope one day you will find them again.”
“I wish you could meet them.” He had a distant look in his eyes. “After this war is over, perhaps I will be able to introduce you.”
“I would love that,” she said. Their faces were close, his arms still around her, but now that she had calmed down, he disengaged and moved away.
Maria watched as he built a fire. If only some other member of her family had been rescued by a man as kind as him. “Tell me . . . You are a Bolshevik, you believe in the Revolution, so why did you decide to save me, knowing that you would lose everything in the process?”
He shrugged. “It was simple. My father taught me there are right things to do in the world and wrong things, and that I must always opt for the right ones. When I saw you were alive in the back of the truck, I knew instantly what was right.”
Chapter 15
Ural Mountains, August 1918
MARIA’S WOUNDS HEALED WITHOUT BECOMING INFECTED and her body grew stronger, so that before long she was able to walk short distances using a walking stick Peter had fashioned. It was painful to lift anything or to turn at the waist, but she could wash herself and scrub the worst of the bloodstains from her gown in a freezing spring that gus
hed from the mountainside. Peter roasted rabbits and birds he had caught in homemade traps, and Maria gnawed the meat from the bones, suddenly ravenous. He made delicious tisanes from mountain herbs and soups from mushrooms he had foraged, and every day he brought bowlfuls of fruits of deep red, blue, and black hues: wild strawberries, cloudberries, and crowberries, he told her, as she devoured them.
While he spent his days gathering food, Maria wandered close to their camp engulfed in a thick fog of grief. She was becoming sick of the continuous crying that left her with no air to breathe, crying that came from a place deeper inside than she had imagined possible, but she couldn’t stop herself. The sight of a tiny bird pecking at the grass; a pretty flower nestled in the roots of an ancient tree; everything seemed to spark a memory of her family and set her off again. She tried to keep her tears from Peter now. It wasn’t fair for him to witness such misery, hour after hour. He had done his best by rescuing her and it wasn’t his fault that she wished she had died along with her sisters.
In the evenings, they talked. He told her he had learned his hunting skills from his gamekeeper father, and his knowledge of herbal medicines had been passed down from his mother’s grandmother.
“The estate where I grew up was a wonderful place to spend a childhood,” he said, “but I always knew my place. The children of the landowner would turn away when I passed because I was not of their class.”
Maria felt ashamed. Had she ever averted her eyes when she saw a child from a poor family? She didn’t think so. A memory flashed to mind of a time when they were traveling in their open-topped automobile through the countryside and saw a beggar girl by the roadside. Olga had been playing with a china-faced doll in a lace-trimmed gown but on a whim she threw it out the window to the poor bedraggled girl, who looked bemused as she picked it up. Maria remembered that look of puzzlement. Perhaps the child had never owned a doll before and did not know what to do with it. Perhaps she would have preferred food.
She asked Peter about his sister, and heard that she worked as a seamstress and had two children and a husband who, like Peter, had worked at the Makarov cloth factory.
“Why did you not remain on the estate and follow in your father’s footsteps?” she asked.
He hesitated before replying. “I had a growing sense that the old system must change, and I did not want to work for the aristocracy anymore. At the factory we held meetings and talked about owning the plant collectively, each man having a stake . . . It seemed fairer to me than one man taking all the profit of our labors simply because of the family he had been born into.”
“I suppose there was a lot of anger stirred up,” she mused. “Perhaps that explains why they directed it at my family.”
Peter shook his head. “I never blamed the Tsar personally. It was the system that was at fault.”
“And yet”—she shuddered—“those guards who formed the execution squad hated us. I could see it in their eyes.”
“Those men were animals,” he said forcefully. “They were brought in specially from the Verkh-Isetsk metallurgy works, where they had been handpicked for their brutality. At least one was a convicted murderer. None of us regular guards could have done what they did. I was asleep in the house across the road and awoke on hearing the gunfire.”
“What will happen to them now?” she asked.
He shrugged. “I hope that when Lenin learns of it, they will be arrested and imprisoned as common murderers.”
Maria wished it would be so. She couldn’t bear to live in a world where men like that could walk down the street as respected citizens. Whenever she thought about returning to civilization to resume the search for Tatiana, she imagined bumping into one of those killers and froze in terror. She would rather spend the rest of her life in the mountains, far from anyone else. At least there, with Peter, she felt safe.
* * *
One afternoon, as Maria lay resting beneath a fir tree, Peter returned to the clearing dragging a small deer by the hind legs. Its throat had been cut and blood smeared the undergrowth behind him as he walked. He jumped in front of the creature when he saw Maria watching and apologized.
“I’m sorry. I hope the sight is not distressing for you.”
Tears pricked her eyes at his sensitivity. “Not at all,” she said, blinking. “I was merely thinking how delicious that deer will be for dinner tonight, and how talented you are to have caught it.”
“It is an elk calf. See the spots on its coat? It would have lost these by the end of the summer. This one is around three months old, I reckon. I wouldn’t normally kill creatures so young, but with only a small knife I couldn’t risk going for the mother, who looked as if she weighed four hundred pounds. Luckily I managed to scare her off.”
He pulled the calf to the area where he had dug a fire pit and began to slice the coat from the flesh. She watched his concentration as he worked methodically around the creature, not an ounce of meat going to waste. How clever to have such a skill, she thought. She was lucky to have been rescued by a man who was able to fend for them both, and a gentleman too.
When he finished, he rose. “I’m going to wash,” he said, and she saw that he was covered in the animal’s blood. “I hope you will forgive me if I wash my clothes. They should dry quickly in the sun and I will take care not to offend you with my nakedness.”
She laughed at that. “We are living outside society here and I think we must make our own rules based on pragmatism.”
He frowned, and she sensed he didn’t understand the word.
“We must live in a manner that is practical. I will not be remotely offended if I see you wandering around in your undergarments.” That was what she did when she washed her own clothes.
He strode off toward the spring, and a few minutes later she smiled as she heard the customary yell he gave when he splashed himself with the icy water.
When he returned an hour later, his hair was still wet and his clothes clearly damp. He shivered as he made the fire, whistling a tune under his breath.
“What is that song?” Maria asked, and he started.
“I hadn’t realized I was whistling out loud,” he said. “It’s a marching song from the war. I seem to remember it was called ‘Farewell to Slavianka.’ I don’t know the words but the tune is catchy.”
“You have a tuneful whistle.” She smiled and saw he was embarrassed.
“Me? No, you are surely wrong.”
He had brought a pile of sticks with him and used them to build two tripods on either side of the fire. He threaded a haunch of the elk calf onto a longer stick and suspended it on the tripods to roast above the heat. It dripped juices, making the flames crackle and spark.
Maria found herself watching the way Peter’s hands moved. She liked the contrast between his precision when performing a delicate task and his extraordinary strength. It had not occurred to her at the time, because she was stunned with shock, but somehow he had carried her through the forest for the best part of three days, barely stopping to rest. How had he managed that? His body was strong, with a thick neck and clearly defined muscles on his arms and legs. He was a man who had lived an active life.
The meat was delicious: fresh, with a rich gamy flavor. She huddled close to Peter at the fireside because the evenings grew cold as soon as the sun set. When she finished her first portion of elk, he hacked off another and seemed pleased to see her eat so heartily, a half-smile in his eyes.
Their knees touched as he leaned over to turn the meat on the spit, and he murmured an apology.
“Surely we are no longer strangers since we sleep under the same roof?” she asked, eyebrow raised. “There is no chaperone here but the moon and the stars.”
While he concentrated on arranging the meat over the fire, she placed a hand on his shoulder. “Your tunic is still wet,” she said. “Are you sure you would not rather take it off? I would hate for you to catch a chill.”
“No, it’s fine. Please don’t worry.”
“It
is getting cooler in the evenings, as if summer is coming to an end.” She shivered suddenly.
“It is September now. The third.”
She watched his face in the firelight as he busied himself with storing the remaining meat among some spruce fronds, and suddenly she felt an overwhelming urge to kiss him again, as she had the day she was overcome with terror. She longed to feel his body pressing against hers, wanted to hear his heartbeat. Was it very wrong of her? She shuffled closer and put her arm around him, turning his face toward hers with a hand, then touched her lips to his. It felt magical. She kissed him some more, rubbing her hand up and down his back, feeling the ridge of his spine. As before, he let her do as she wished but did not kiss her back, and suddenly she was overcome with desire. It wasn’t something she thought through, just a physical need.
She kissed his lips more insistently, turning his shoulders so he faced her and running her hands over his chest. He gave a little moan under his breath, so she continued running her hands over him, down his thighs now, to his calves, then back up.
He placed a hand in the small of her back to hold her close and stroked her hair, but pulled his face away. “What are you doing?” he whispered.
“This is what I want,” she told him. “Do you not want it too?”
He made an animal noise in his throat. “Of course, but I don’t want to hurt you. You would regret this later when you came to marry and could not be honest with your husband on your wedding night.”
In answer, Maria kissed him harder. “Please,” she said. “I won’t regret it. Please.”
Peter drew away, stood up, and walked to the edge of the clearing, his arms folded. “You are not in your right mind,” he said. “You are half crazed with grief and it would be wrong of me to take advantage.”
