“I do, very much! I can’t wait till they join us. You’ll like them.” She set the camera aperture to the indoors setting and looked through the lens, sliding the bellows in and out to focus. Her sisters had Box Brownies, which were simple to operate, but Maria preferred the sharper results she got with her more sophisticated model.

Peter seemed uncomfortable, clutching the album tightly as if afraid he might drop it, hunching his shoulders and leaning toward the lens.

“Why don’t you put the album on that side table?” she suggested. “Then try to stand naturally, as you would if I were not here. Look directly at the camera.”

He still appeared stiff, but his gaze was direct and unwavering as she pulled down the lever and took the picture. It would come out dark, but the light spilling from the window illuminated the right side of his face in a way that she hoped would seem artistic.

“Thank you.” She smiled, winding on the film. “I will let you see the picture once I am able to get it developed.” She wondered when that might be. Perhaps they would be overseas by then; in Great Britain, maybe. She knew that George V, her father’s cousin, had invited them a year ago and couldn’t understand why they had not left yet. “There are protocols and procedures,” was all her father would say.

Commissar Avdeyev came out of his office and scowled at them. “What are you doing? Citizen Romanova, go back to the family rooms immediately.”

She picked up her camera and album and obeyed, hoping that Peter would not be chastised for talking to her.

In the sitting room, her mother was sewing, her father was reading, and the air was thick with dust and dullness. They had not been there twenty-four hours, but already she felt the confinement weighing on her soul. She picked up a pen to write to her sisters, to tell them about Konstantin Ukraintsev and Peter Vasnetsov and the house that was nothing like a home.

* * *

There was a clock on the mantel in the drawing room and Maria rationed herself: she would only look at it again when she had finished writing one page of her diary, or sewing a hem of her petticoat, or reading a chapter of a book to her mother. Inevitably, when she did look, the hour was less advanced than she had expected. The minutes crawled interminably, so slow she suspected the clock had been tampered with in order to torture them.