Memories came flooding back: tea parties with Alexei and Anastasia in the pavilion on Children’s Island; running around the park with their dogs as they chased birds and squirrels; the pet elephant given to them by the King of Siam, which always used to make Maria nervous with its huge stamping feet. And she remembered their days under house arrest, when townspeople jeered at them through these very railings, yet they carried on as normal a life as possible inside the palace walls. Suddenly she yearned to travel back to those days, just to be with her family once more. Had he lived, Alexei would be eighteen now, Olga twenty-seven. Her sisters would no doubt be married, with children of their own. If only she could see them, talk to them, embrace them one more time.

And yet . . . if she did go back, the tiny children who were now tugging impatiently at her skirt would not exist, and she would not have found Peter. It was impossible to imagine ever being truly happy without Peter. He was the magnetic core of her existence. From the evil of the execution in Ekaterinburg had sprung the precious miracle of their love for each other, and she never ceased to be grateful for it.

“Can we go now, Mama?” Stepan demanded in his high-pitched little-boy voice.

She shook herself. “There’s another, even more splendid palace just over the hill. Wouldn’t you like to see? Come with me.”

The Catherine Palace, with its azure-and-white exterior, golden domes, and rococo decorative motifs, was every child’s fantasy, set in acres of parkland scattered with lakes, fountains, and grottoes. When they arrived at the brow of the hill, Maria saw the gates were open and there were citizens strolling in the park. She remembered hurrying along the route between the two palaces during the Great War, when she used to visit wounded soldiers who were being nursed there. That was where she had met Kolya Demenkov, the man she’d had a crush on as a fifteen-year-old. It was all so long ago, in a different lifetime; she had been another person then.

She led the children into the grounds, remembering her elder sisters, Olga and Tatiana, in their nurses’ uniforms, their hair entirely covered by long white headdresses. They had seemed to flit from girlhood to adulthood overnight as they learned to change bandages and administer injections to the wounded. Tatiana had even assisted at surgical operations, but Olga found they made her queasy.

Suddenly Maria’s eye was caught by a tall, slender woman walking down the central pathway toward the lake. Her posture was erect and her gait particularly elegant, and that was what drew Maria’s attention first; but then she noticed the pale brown hair set against a swan-like neck and she blinked. It was Tatiana, her beloved sister. A feeling of purest joy spread through her veins.