Maria couldn’t bear to think of them as “skeletons” with “skulls.” “I hope they are being treated with respect,” she cried.

“Ryabov assures me that he got a local priest to say a panikhida for them,” Stepan said.

Maria thought of Tatiana. Was she still alive? Would she hear this news? She would be eighty-two years old that month. Maria’s first instinct was to travel to Ekaterinburg and ensure that the bodies were reburied with religious honor and ceremony. She knew Tatiana would wish the same. Perhaps they would bump into each other there.

“Do you think I would be allowed to bury them, if I tell the authorities who I am?” She asked the question with longing, but knew the answer before Stepan responded. She had no evidence to prove her identity now and would simply become one in a long list of Romanov claimants stretching back to the 1920s. Her aunt Olga had died almost twenty years earlier and there was no one left who could personally identify her. Besides, although it was more than sixty years since the Revolution, it could still be risky to reveal herself. Soviet president Leonid Brezhnev tended to have those whose political views differed from his own committed to mental asylums, and rumor had it the conditions weren’t much better than in the gulags. She felt sure Tatiana would make the same calculation. If she was overseas, she would not risk returning.

“The authorities want to brush this under the carpet,” Stepan told her. “The news will not be announced in the press and no official ceremonies are planned. I think they might leave the bodies where they are.”

“We can hold a private ceremony for them here,” Peter suggested, and Maria laid her head on his shoulder in gratitude. He had never believed in her religion but he knew how much comfort it gave her.

She decided she would gather her entire family and ask a local priest to conduct a memorial service. They would have flowers and candles, and she would say goodbye properly, even if she could not lay their corporeal remains to rest.

It had all been such a waste. Stepan and Peter hugged her, one on either side, as she wept for the future her family had been denied, and for the children and grandchildren they never had a chance to bear.

* * *

In the weeks after the bodies were discovered, Maria started having vivid dreams about her childhood: playing quoits with the sailors on the deck of the Shtandart; that Frenchman at a ball who called her “the true beauty of the four”; the excited barking of Jemmy, Joy, and Ortipo when they chased squirrels in the park. Sometimes she woke in a sweat when the dream changed and her siblings were transformed into hideous skeletons, their flesh dissolved in sulfuric acid.

“Your siblings stayed forever young,” Peter said. “Their skin never wrinkled and their hair never thinned.”