Maria looked at him in surprise, then went to the door to check that Irina and Yelena were out of range before she spoke. “I can understand you wanting to know more about our imperial heritage, and I’m glad of it—so long as you don’t take any risks . . .” She left the implication hanging.

“Your approval means a lot to me,” he told her. “And of course I’ll be careful.”

Within weeks, Stepan had been assigned to the team restoring the Peterhof palace, now known as Petrodvorets. He was to be trained in laying parquet flooring, molding cornices, and applying gold paint to decorative features, as they painstakingly returned the palace room by room to the way it had been in the Romanovs’ time.

“Perhaps you can help, Mama,” he said to Maria. “You knew it well, I suppose.”

Maria nodded, her thoughts slipping back to the years before the First World War when her family used to spend the months of May and June there, strolling in the gardens by the Gulf of Finland. Those innocent days had the shimmery quality of a fairy tale: days before Russians began informing on their neighbors, before the state executed its best men in great purges, before a whole city was left to starve.

* * *

The summer passed, and another winter came. When arctic storms blew across the land, Maria could not make her trips to search for Mikhail and Katya because the buses were not running. She stared out the window at the horizontal gusts of hail that rattled the panes, fretting about lost time. Soon it would be three years since she packed them off on the Ice Road. Did they think she had forgotten them? They must know that would never happen.

When news came in February that Stalin had met Winston Churchill and President Roosevelt at Yalta to discuss carving up Europe at the end of the war, Maria seethed that their leader was emerging from the conflict with his prestige boosted. Did the others know that he held his citizens’ lives as cheap as dirt? Did foreign newspapers report that Leningraders had dropped dead in the streets in their thousands because he would not send the Red Army to help them? She wanted to spit at his picture in the street but restrained herself.

By March, the thaw had set in and Maria began her search again, traveling further afield now. Always she carried her bulging card file of missing people and added cards for any displaced Leningraders she came across, checking to see if she had details of their relatives. She felt responsible when she saw the hope on their faces, then its gradual fading when she could not find whom they were looking for. She knew the sensation well because it was exactly what she felt with each children’s home she approached: hope and then heartbreak.

* * *