They traveled all through that day and into the following night, sleeping only intermittently, before the bus pulled into a town square early the following morning. Bill nodded at Val and stood to get their bags from the rack above. This was Ekaterinburg. Val felt a tingle of excitement, despite the stiffness of her joints, the headache from lack of sleep. This was where the Romanovs had arrived in 1918, and it looked as though little had changed since then. She had been expecting a grim industrial town, but her first impression was of green spaces: parks, tree-lined boulevards, and pretty gardens. This was the view that had greeted Maria and her parents as they arrived, little knowing that they had less than three months to live.

Chapter 54

Sverdlovsk, summer 1976

BILL CONSULTED A MAP HE’D BROUGHT AND THEY walked uphill, past some pillared and porticoed buildings, to Vozhnevsky Prospekt. As they climbed higher, there was a clear view across the town and Val could see factory chimneys belching smoke in the distance.

As soon as she spotted the Ipatiev House, she felt goose bumps prickling her skin. It was two stories tall, with decorative cornicing and roof ridges, the bottom floor partly underground because of the way it was set on a slope. The fence that had surrounded it in 1918 was gone, as were the guard posts. Instead, there was a canopied front entrance with a printed sign alongside. Bill translated: “Museum of Revolutionary History.”

“Does that mean we can go in?” Val whispered, and Bill nodded. Nicole scuffed her heel back and forth on the pavement and sighed to express her dissatisfaction with this plan.

In the hallway, Bill did the talking as he paid for their tickets and was given a plan of the house. He took Nicole’s hand and led them through a door into a dimly lit office, with nothing to distinguish it. “We’re supposed to follow the arrows around the ground floor first,” he whispered, “although the main rooms where the family lived are on the upper floor.”

“We’d better obey,” Val replied. “But let’s make it quick. There’s nothing down here.”

They walked through a bewildering succession of rooms full of posters proclaiming the glories of Communism, then out into a yard.

“This is where the Romanovs exercised,” Bill said, referring to his plan. The ground sloped steeply and was shadowed by trees, with a climbing rose growing over a pergola. “Over there is the basement,” he told Val, “but I don’t think we should take Nicole inside. Russians don’t tend to sugarcoat grisly details.”

Val glanced at the open door and could see a flight of stark stone steps lit by a bare bulb. If she was to write about this as a historian, she should take a look, no matter how much her instincts were warning her not to. It was unlikely she would ever be back there again.