She wandered out to a headland and squinted up the coast. It was a perfect day, of the type she remembered from her childhood: warmth in the sun and freshness in the breeze, with a bright blue sky above. Toward the horizon she could see the jetty where they used to moor the royal yacht, the Shtandart, and through the trees she thought she could make out the glint of the golden cascade of fountains that led up to the Peterhof palace. Had her father still been Tsar, she might have visited there and let her children play in the park with their nanny, but that cosseted life had no appeal for her now. When she thought back through the men she’d had crushes on, the few foreign princes her parents considered for her spouse, she knew that although Peter was neither aristocratic nor royal, she could not have found a better husband anywhere in the world.

* * *

The Peterhof vacation was romantic, and a few weeks after their return, Maria found she was pregnant again. Although her fourth pregnancy, this was the first in which she had experienced sickness. She had a constant debilitating nausea that lasted all day, dry-retching when she had not eaten a morsel or drunk a drop of water, and it was difficult to find any foods that she could keep down. Peter brought an herb called black horehound, which he stewed in boiling water to make a tea that offered some relief, but when the sickness continued beyond her third month of pregnancy, he called a doctor to their apartment.

The doctor examined Maria and listened to the baby’s heartbeat through a stethoscope, pronouncing himself satisfied that it was strong. He told her to nibble a dry biscuit first thing on awakening, to avoid rich foods, and to keep sipping water so she did not dehydrate.

“What was the date of your last menstrual flow?” he asked, looping the stethoscope around his neck.

“It was in May,” Maria told him. “The twentieth or twenty-first.”

He took a chart from his medical case and consulted it. “In that case your child is due around the twenty-fourth of February next year,” he told her.

She nodded. “Yes, but my babies can be early. My eldest was born on the third of April but I only conceived him in September.”

“He must have been small at birth.” The doctor frowned.

“No.” She shook her head. “He was the same size as the others. I think he just grew faster in the womb.”

The doctor smiled, and she sensed an air of condescension. “That is not possible. You must have made a mistake over your dates.”

“I’m sure I didn’t,” she argued, remembering the night when she and Peter first made love by the fire in their mountain hideaway, several weeks after fleeing from Ekaterinburg. He had said it was the third of September.