A mischievous note entered Nicholas’s voice as he replied. “Birds, I believe. Or at least, that’s what you and Baron vonBird-watching were talking about.”
“Alas, I know very little about birds.”
“I know a bit, actually. My grandfather was a bird enthusiast,” Nicholas explained, as a pair of servers placed the next course before them: a glazed partridge stuffed with foie gras. “He used to take us out in the mornings to look for birds, usually when we went to Livadia.”
“Livadia?” Alix carved a small sliver of meat with her knife but didn’t eat it, too intent on his story.
“Our summer palace.”
“I thought Peterhof was your summer palace,” she said hesitantly.
“Peterhof is our summer palace in Russia. Livadia is in the Crimea,” Nicholas explained, as if it were perfectly reasonable to have multiple summer palaces.
The closest thing Alix’s family had was an open-air cottage on the grounds, where they used to do lessons on hot days.
She felt a stab of self-consciousness. Talking to Nicholas, it was so easy to forget his family’s staggering wealth, theirimmense reach and power. Compared to his, her life was provincial, almost quaint.
“Livadia is beautiful,” Nicholas went on, sensing her discomfort and changing the subject. “I wish you could see it in the mornings, with the sun rising over the water; the skies are such an impossible blue. I know everyone says the south of France has the prettiest beaches in the world, but I challenge France to find a prettier view than the one from our back terrace.”
Alix loved this about him: his unabashed love for his homeland, his unshakable pride in being Russian.
“What birds did you see there?” she asked.
Nicholas looked sheepish. “Gulls? Or maybe ospreys? All I really remember is sitting outside with Grandfather while he drank his morning coffee. It was the most peaceful I ever saw him.”
Alix hesitated. This would be hard to say, but it felt crucial that she acknowledge his loss openly—instead of skirting around it, the way people always did when her mother was mentioned.
“I’m sorry about your grandfather. I know it must have been a shock, losing him so suddenly.”
Nicholas stared down at his dinner plate. “I miss him. All of Russia misses him.”
“You must hate the anarchists,” she blurted out.
“My father does.” The tsarevich sighed. “I obviously wish that they had found another way to make their point, instead of reverting to violence. It made things so much worse in the end. My grandfather was on their side.”
Alix knew that Alexander II had been the most liberal tsarin Russia’s history. He had emancipated the serfs and modernized the judiciary, and he had been working to reform the National Assembly when the terrorists blew him up.
Nicholas’s father, in retaliation, had promptly undone many of his father’s reforms.
“I was there, you know, on the day he died.” Nicholas’s voice was barely a whisper.
Alix blinked, shocked. “Not in the carriage, surely?”
“No, but they summoned me to his bedside immediately after the bomb exploded. Misha and I were walking to the pond to ice-skate. They sent Misha home, but as for me…Father said I needed to see it.” Nicholas’s face looked pained at the memory. “There was so much blood. And Grandfather’s legs were just…gone.”
Alix could picture the scene: a frightened twelve-year-old Nicholas, dressed in a scarf and coat for an afternoon of ice-skating with his younger brother, dragged to the bedside where his grandfather lay legless and dying. She could practically smell the incense they would have brought into the room, could hear the hypnotic chants of the priest reciting his last rites.
“I’m sorry, I shouldn’t speak of such things, especially not at a dinner party,” he amended.
“No, I’m glad you did.” Alix clenched her hands in her lapto keep from reaching for Nicholas.
It felt like the more he shared, the more desperate she felt to keep listening. She wanted to understand every last part of him, to see the way his mind worked.
“I know it must have been hard on you, but at least you got to say goodbye,” she offered, in a small voice. “I never gotthat with my mother. They refused to let me look at her afterward; they said the illness had ravaged her body, and they wanted me to remember her as she was before. But it made it harder to digest, somehow.”
Nicholas nodded sympathetically. “I’m sure it felt less real to you, which is hard on a child. Did you secretly imagine that it was all a mistake, that they’d gotten the wrong person and your mother would come back and laugh about the misunderstanding?”
“All the time,” Alix confessed.
