“I wish you would explain women to me,” he said, gazing at her directly. “A great beauty like you must surely have insights that would help me to find a sweetheart.”

Maria snorted. “A great beauty indeed! Do you know what my family call me? Fat little bow-wow. I can have no illusions about my appearance with such a nickname.”

“But you have eyes as big as saucers, hair that gleams like sunshine, and skin like finest porcelain.” He shook his head, glancing down at her figure. “And you are not even slightly plump. Families are cruel. My brother calls me Teeny because I am the shortest of the three of us.”

“I think you are the perfect height,” Maria exclaimed. “I’m sure you will have no trouble capturing the heart of a woman—when you meet the right one.” She blushed, then continued. “You are lucky to have the opportunity. I will be nineteen years old on the twenty-seventh of June and have not yet had a beau. At this rate, I will die an old maid.”

Ivan shook his head. “That will never happen. All men must find you irresistible. As soon as your family’s situation is settled, I’m sure you will find happiness.”

Maria pursed her lips and gave him a sad look.

* * *

Little Alexei was still in terrible pain, with acute swellings in his joints after being bumped around so much on the journey. The girls took turns to entertain him, trying to distract him from his suffering. Maria drew pencil portraits of their captors and tried to amuse her little brother with humorous descriptions of their characters: “as pompous as a walrus on a beach,” she said of Avdeyev; “a slippery ferret in a rabbit hole” of his deputy, Medvedev. The girls took turns to read to him from any books they could find, and they revived Three Sisters, the Chekhov play they had performed at Tobolsk. Sometimes Alexei was well enough for a game of halma, and they moved a table close to allow him to join in.

One sunny day in June, Maria carried him down to the yard to get some fresh air. She had always been physically the strongest of the four girls and did her best to carry him smoothly, without jarring, but she could tell from the frequent intakes of breath that the movement was hurting.

She placed him in a bath chair, from where he surveyed the shadowy yard. Turrets were being built in the corners of the tall fence, and the men’s hammering mingled with the clanging bells of streetcars in the road outside.

“Why are we here?” he asked in a small, sad voice. “What do they want from us?”

Maria watched a blue butterfly flit past. “I suppose they want to keep us safe so we can be delivered overseas in due course. It is taking an interminable time, though.”

“Why would we not be safe? I don’t understand.”