Chapter Twenty-Seven
Lobby card found on the street
New York City, New York, USA
I’ve been to grand balls in some of the most glittering palaces in Europe. Why does this feel so much more exciting? Anastasia thought.
That question hovered behind Anastasia’s eyes as she watched the lights of Manhattan slide by outside the limousine’s tinted window.
“Are you excited, my dear?” Alice Roosevelt asked, reaching over to squeeze Anastasia’s hand. True to Alice’s father’s predictions, Alice and Anastasia had quickly become close. Anastasia’s grandmother was not particularly fond of the association, but as the daughter of a former President, Alice was just respectable enough that Grandmama Dagmar had no real cause for complaint. And so, for perhaps the first time in her life, Anastasia had a bosom companion who was not one of her sisters.
“I am, I find,” Anastasia replied with a smile. She returned the affectionate hand-squeeze. “I was just thinking that while I am no stranger to high-profile affairs, this will be my first American film premiere. I hope your press will be kind.”
“Oh, they’ll love you,” Alice said with a wave of her free hand. “A beautiful Russian princess joining the New York social scene? That’s exactly the kind of thing they love!”
“I hope so,” Anastasia said again. “It’s lovely that your youngest brother could join us.”
“Yes!” Alice said, her enthusiasm ratcheting her voice up an octave. “It is so good to have him home! We were, of course, worried sick about him and Archie and Ted and Kermit. All four of the boys! This damned war . . . such a terrible thing.”
“War generally is,” Anastasia said softly, turning back to her study of the lights outside. “But it’s not the worst thing.”
“Oh! Darling, I’m sorry—”
Anastasia turned back to Alice with a smile and a quick shake of her head to indicate that she was neither offended nor hurt by the comments. She didn’t have time for more, however, as their limousine was slowing to a stop outside the theater’s lit marquee.
Alice squeezed her hand once more before sitting forward on the seat and pulling the collar of her evening coat close to her neck. An attendant of some kind came up and opened the limousine’s door and extended a hand to help Alice out.
Shouts and pops of photographers’ flashes rose as Alice stepped onto the red carpet that extended from the car to the front doors of the theater. Anastasia moved closer to the door, ready to step out as well. A quick peek reassured her that Dostovalov stood next to Quentin, who was currently kissing his sister on both cheeks under the photographers’ strobing lights. Quentin had arrived in the car ahead of them. Dostovalov had ridden alongside the driver in their own car.
Anastasia was expecting the attendant, but instead Quentin turned and reached down to her. Anastasia blinked, but her childhood court training reasserted itself quickly, and she gave Quentin a smile with the proper degree of warmth and laid her fingers lightly in his.
As she stepped out, the noise erupted into a roar. People shouted her name and her title. One particular flash went off close by, leaving her stunned and blinded by its intensity. She blinked again, hoping that her eyes didn’t tear, and looked to the side for Dostovalov.
“Here, miss,” he said, his voice a soft, reassuring rumble just behind her shoulder.
Anastasia felt her smile deepen with relief at Dostovalov’s solid presence nearby, and so she turned her attention back to the front doors of the theater as Quentin tucked her hand into the crook of his elbow.
The doors swelled, and then bulged out toward them as light spiked around the doors like a corona. Anastasia had a split second to wonder at the cost of such a pyrotechnic effect before the concussion hammered into her, picking her up and flinging her back toward the street as if she were no more than a child’s doll.
Somehow, Dostovalov had his hands on her, shoving her down beneath the shelter of his body. She felt the thin silk of her gloves snag on the concrete of the pavement as he rolled her under himself and cradled her face to the side, away from the blast. Heat and noise roared over them, singeing the air as Anastasia fought to inhale with Dostovalov’s weight on her back. Sound disappeared, replaced by a high, incessant whine that stabbed through her skull and throbbed behind her eyes.
Anastasia squirmed. The beads on her dress pressed into her neck unpleasantly, and she desperately wanted to see. Dostovalov held her firmly in place, however, and she lay there unable to do anything but watch as a charred, flaming bit of the theater’s fabric marquee fluttered to the ground an arm’s length from her nose.
Dostovalov’s weight shifted, then disappeared, and finally Anastasia could drag a full breath into her lungs. The air tasted of burnt wood and metal, and the faint underlying scent of cooked meat.
“—ighness! Are you all right?! Your Imperial Highness!”
Faint sound returned as Dostovalov gripped her shoulders and hauled her up to her feet, his face white and wild with fear. She shook her head to try and dispel the remaining ringing and blinked away the ashy dust that clung to her eyelashes.
“Yes,” she gasped. “Yes! Anton Ivanovich, I am fine! I am well! What happened?”
“Anastasia!”
At the sound of her given name, she and Dostovalov both turned to see Quentin holding Alice up by her shoulders. Alice’s face twisted in pain and a ragged gash marred the side of her face. Blood dripped from this wound down onto the bosom of her beautiful gown, and she leaned heavily on her brother.
“Alice!” Anastasia cried, and took a step towards her friend.
“Your Highness, we have to get you out of here!” Dostovalov’s grip on Anastasia’s shoulders tightened, and then suddenly released as he dropped his hands, his face looking, if possible, even more horrified at having manhandled her.
“In a moment,” Anastasia said. She reached out and gripped Dostovalov’s arm. “Please! I must see Alice!”
Dostovalov nodded, and reached out to help Anastasia as she carefully navigated her way over to the two Roosevelt siblings.
“I am all right,” Alice was saying. “It’s just a little scratch . . .” But she trailed off as her knees buckled. Quentin caught his sister, and then bent and hauled her up into his arms, holding her as if she were a small child.
“Sir!” someone shouted behind them, back toward the street. “Sir, over here!”
Anastasia shook her head again as a high warbling started once more. But unlike last time, this sound grew louder and louder, and soon a pair of motorcar headlights cut through the dust-coated gloom.
“Sir!” a man in a police uniform shouted as he ran up beside them. “That’s the ambulance. Is she hurt? I’ll take her!”
“I’m fine . . .” Alice started to say, her voice weak.
“You’re not, Sister,” Quentin said. “Lead the way, man. I’ll bring her. You’ve got her Highness?” He said this last over his shoulder to Dostovalov, who nodded once and presented his arm to Anastasia.
She felt purely ridiculous as she took it, but the truth was that her own legs were none too steady as they picked their way through the rubble and bits of flaming debris towards where the ambulance screamed to a stop. Quentin took Alice to the back and set her down while the medical crew began to clean and examine her head wound.
Anastasia looked around in dismay as clarity started to return to her thoughts.
The once beautiful theater had all but collapsed. The marquee, the postered windows, the box office . . . none of it remained. Instead, there was only dust and rubble, and—
“Help! Please!”
It was faint. So faint Anastasia thought at first she’d imagined it. But then the cry came again, from beneath a pile of debris. Anastasia took one tentative step toward it, then another.
“Your Highness, what are you doing!?”
“Help me, Anton Ivanovich!” Anastasia cried as she reached the pile. She fell heavily to her knees and began pulling at the shattered bricks and splintered wood. Her poor, abused gloves snagged and tore, but she barely noticed. The cries were getting louder.
“There’s someone alive under here, Anton Ivanovich!” Anastasia said, panting with exertion as she continued to dig. “Help me, please!”
“You need to leave!” Dostovalov’s voice was raw and rough as he nearly spat the words in Russian. But he, too, crouched beside her and began digging. “I need to get you out of here, now!”
“Please, just let us help this one person first!”
Before long others joined them. Anastasia didn’t notice whom. Other voices called her name, called Dostovalov’s name, but she kept her focus on the faint cries beneath her hands. Faint . . . and growing fainter.
Finally, Dostovalov pulled aside a broken piece of concrete to reveal a small cavity. Inside, a woman lay, her eyes half-closed, her face pale. For one heart-stopping moment, Anastasia thought she was dead, but then she let out a small moan. Dostovalov muttered something that was either a curse or a prayer and bent to try and pull her free of the sliding, unstable mass of debris.
“Here. Let me help.”
To her surprise, Anastasia looked up to see Quentin on her other side.
“Alice?” she asked quickly.
“Our driver is taking her to the hospital,” he said, grunting a little as he helped Dostovalov lift the woman’s body free. Her legs hung at odd angles, and something seemed wrong with the shape of her pelvis, but she was breathing.
Once more, the three of them trekked back over the treacherous ground to the ambulance in the street. They turned the unfortunate woman over to the medics and stepped back.
Anastasia closed her eyes for a moment and whispered a prayer for the woman.
“Your Highness, I really must insist that you leave now.”
Anastasia opened her eyes and looked up into Dostovalov’s face. He was no innocent farm boy, but there was an earnestness about the hardened soldier’s expression, and she realized with a jolt to her gut that he had truly been afraid. Not for himself . . . but for her.
“Anton Ivanovich,” she said softly. “You saved me. Again.”
“It is only my duty, Highness. But now we must go.”
Anastasia shook her head. “We cannot go now.”
“Your Imperial Highness—”
“No, listen. We cannot go now. Look around you! This place is chaos. There are others buried under the rubble, and we haven’t even begun to think about who was inside the building! It would have been us, my friend. It should have been us, had the motorcars not been delayed by the traffic in the streets uptown.”
“That is why you need to leave. It’s entirely possible that this was a plot to kill you!”
“And that is exactly why I cannot leave.” Anastasia pulled her spine straight and her shoulders back and stared into the furious eyes of her faithful protector. “I will never let it be said that a daughter of Imperial Russia runs away scared from a threat. There is work to be done here; we can help these people. But I need you beside me. I need you to watch my back and keep me safe. Please, Anton Ivanovich, in the name of my sister, whom you could not save . . . please help me save these people!”
Dostovalov swallowed hard, his face going, if possible, even paler in the flickering light from the remaining flames. He stared right back at her, his eyes boring into hers with an intensity that may have, in that moment, carried something of hatred in it.
But slowly, slowly, he nodded.
Anastasia pressed her lips together, closed her eyes and breathed a “thank you” in Russian. Then she reached out and squeezed his arm.
“Thank you,” she said in English, for Quentin’s benefit, for he stood very near.
“It’s about to get quite chaotic,” he said. “The police are on their way, and the fire department, but—”
“Anton Ivanovich and I are staying,” Anastasia said, her voice firm. “I have seen war before and nursed soldiers at their bedsides. We can help these people.”
Quentin looked from her to Dostovalov, and then back to Anastasia before giving her a tiny, approving smile.
“Her Highness help,” Dostovalov broke in then, his English as rough as his voice. “I guard her back.”
“Good man,” Quentin said. “All right, then, Princess. Let us begin.”
It got worse.
They didn’t find another survivor, though they found quite a few mangled bodies in the rubble. True to Quentin’s prediction, it became quite chaotic as more and more bystanders rushed to help. Anastasia found herself playing the role of coordinator, making sure that they searched each section of rubble thoroughly, literally leaving no stone unturned.
Not long after they started their search, a fire broke out, and Anastasia suddenly had the unpleasant realization that she knew exactly where the scent of roasting meat originated. Still, she shoved that thought to the back of her mind and set to as part of the hastily formed “bucket brigade.” She’d never heard the term before, but when Quentin said it with a jaunty grin, she had to admit that it fit.
Despite his protestations, Dostovalov did, indeed, assist with the search and recovery efforts. He would not, however, leave Anastasia’s side. Several times, she looked over at him to find him peering into dark corners and puddles of gloom, his hand resting softly on his hip where she knew he concealed a pistol.
“He worries about you,” Quentin said at one point, while the two of them worked together to clear yet another pile of debris.
“He is my telokhranitel. My . . . bodyguard. He considers my safety a matter of honor.”
“Sure, but it seems more than that. Almost . . . familial? He looks to you the way I look to Sister.”
Anastasia pressed her lips together and glanced over at Dostovalov. He met her gaze, his eyes asking if she was all right. She gave him a reassuring nod and a smile before turning back to Quentin.
“If things had been different, he might have been my brother of a sort. If I had been a different girl, from a different family. Or he a different boy . . .”
“Different how?”
Anastasia fought the sudden, completely inappropriate urge to laugh. It wasn’t funny. Nothing was funny about their current situation, and yet there it was.
“I know you are American, Quentin Roosevelt, but you cannot be that naïve. My sister was the daughter of a Tsar. Anton Ivanovich Dostovalov is a common soldier.”
“And yet he loved her.”
“And she, him. I think.”
“This was Olga? Your eldest sister.”
“Yes.”
Quentin’s hands stilled for just a moment. Anastasia glanced up at his face.
“I am very sorry, Princess, for your losses.”
Startled, Anastasia blinked, and then gave him a half-smile. “Thank you,” she said. “Thank you for saying that, but others have lost much more than I.”
“Still. I see what my father meant when he said that you were older than your years.”
That did make Anastasia laugh, a bitter, hollow sound.
“War has that effect, sir, as I’m certain you would agree.”
“So it does,” Quentin said, returning her half-smile. “So it does.”
A shout of warning went up from another group as more flames surged. Quentin and Dostovalov reached out at the same time and grabbed Anastasia, both pulling her back from the fire.
She caught her heel on a broken piece of brick and nearly fell. Just as the two men held her up, a blinding flash exploded in her face and she gasped. Another explosion?
“Your Highness, over here!”
Another flash burst in front of her eyes and all of a sudden, Anastasia realized what was happening. The press had arrived.
Many of them, anyway. Most of the bodies they pulled from the rubble had been buried with the smashed remains of cameras.
“Let me stand,” she said softly, first in English and then in Russian. Then she turned toward the voice crying her name and raised a hand to block the flashes that resulted.
“What is your name?” she called out into the blinding light, as the wavering siren of yet another fire truck or ambulance rent the air.
“My name, Princess?”
“Yes, you! The one with the camera! What is your name?”
The flashes never stopped, but a voice called back. “I’m Sam, Your Highness!”
“Sam. There are several of your fellow countrymen and women here! Please, come help us rescue them!”
“I’m a reporter, Princess, I can’t get involved.”
Anger surged through Anastasia, making her lift her chin and stomp her slippered foot on the uneven ground.
“Sam, I am a Grand Duchess of Imperial Russia! Anton Ivanovich Dostovalov is a soldier and my bodyguard. Lieutenant Roosevelt is an aviator and war hero and yet we do not hesitate to get involved! These are your fellow reporters, man! I promise you, if you put down your benighted camera and get to work, I will grant you an interview myself . . . after!”
The flashes finally stopped.
“You mean it? An exclusive interview?”
“I did not say exclusive . . . but yes. I will grant you an exclusive interview if you help us help these people!”
“Oh, masterfully done,” Quentin breathed behind her, so softly that Anastasia could barely hear. She didn’t acknowledge his compliment, but simply blinked as her temporary flash-blindness faded and she got a look at the tall, thin man approaching.
“I’ll help, for an exclusive,” the man—Sam—said. He pushed his hat back on his head and looked around. “Where do you want me?”
“Get on the bucket brigade,” Quentin said. “And help us enlist the help of any other reporters who show up.”
“Holy smokes . . . You’re the President’s son!”
“You’re a quick one, Sam. Now grab those buckets!”
By the time it was over, Anastasia couldn’t remember ever being so tired. Her body ached from head to toe, though she couldn’t really say if that was from the work or from Dostovalov hurling her to the ground and covering her from the blast. Her poor silk gloves had been shredded, and hung in ragged ribbons from her wrists, and her beautiful beaded gown was torn in four places. Fortunately, none of the tears were enough to compromise her modesty, but she was certain that Sam’s photographs would show her a disheveled, battered mess.
Grandmama will be appalled, she thought tiredly as she leaned her head back against the seat of the Roosevelts’ motorcar and closed her eyes. It was long past midnight, and the police and fire department had finally gotten the theater blaze contained enough to dismiss the bucket brigade and send them home. Anastasia was certain they’d found everyone who could be found in the wreckage . . .
Mostly certain, anyway.
“Your Imperial Highness, we have arrived,” Dostovalov said from the front seat. Anastasia opened her eyes and looked around in confusion. This was not the Plaza entrance!
“I had Cole bring us to the back entrance,” Quentin said quietly from the seat beside her. “I thought you might want to avoid any further scrutiny, at least until you have had time to rest.”
“Oh, thank you,” she said. “You are exactly right, Que—Lieutenant Roosevelt.”
Quentin smiled at her misspeak. During the chaos at the theater, they’d certainly used first names with each other. But even though they were but a few blocks away from the scene of the disaster, they’d entered an entirely different world—one where propriety reigned supreme, and young men and women in the public eye must tread a careful line.
“I will call tomorrow, if I may?” he asked as Dostovalov exited the motorcar up front and walked around to open Anastasia’s door. “To check on you?”
“Perhaps not tomorrow,” Anastasia said. “The day after might be better. I will have much to explain to my grandmother.”
“Of course.”
“If you would be willing, though . . .” She trailed off as a thought occurred to her.
“Anything.”
“Well, I thought perhaps we could talk to that reporter together. Sam.”
“Sam. Works for the Times. That’s a good idea. My father knows some people, too. I’ll have him check out old ‘Sam’ as well. You’re going to try and spin the interview?”
“I think I must, if I understand your term ‘spin’ properly. It is obvious that the story cannot remain out of the public eye. Therefore, we must control the story.”
Quentin let out a little laugh. “You sound like a politician.”
Anastasia gave him a wintry smile. “I am a daughter of Imperial Russia. It is the same thing.”
Quentin’s laugh stilled, and he looked intently at her for a moment, and then grinned. “It was an honor to labor beside you tonight, Your Imperial Highness.”
Surprised, Anastasia blinked. “Thank you, sir,” she said. “The honor was mine.”
“Feldfebel Dostovalov, I was proud to work beside you tonight as well, Keep taking care of her Highness.”
“With my life, Lieutenant,” Dostovalov said from his post beside the door.
“Good man. Goodnight to you both,” Quentin said. Anastasia nodded at him and turned to let Dostovalov hand her out of the vehicle. He closed the door behind her and they both waited until Cole, the Roosevelt driver, pulled the car away before turning.
“I could almost have you carry me, Anton Ivanovich,” Anastasia groaned. “Everything hurts.”
“Shall I carry you?” Dostovalov paused, as if he would sweep her up into his arms as Quentin had carried Alice.
“No. But thank you. I think I will need to be on my feet when I speak with Grandmama.”
Dostovalov didn’t say anything . . . which meant he agreed.