“Thank you, my friends, thank you!” exclaimed Kirpichnikov. He had a small basket hanging from one arm. This, by way of a tip, he passed over to the man who’d opened the gate.
“And who’s your little friend?” that guard asked. “She looks familiar, at least a bit.”
“Oh, I’m going to put her to work as a scullery.”
The guard shrugged. “But how are you paying her?” he asked. “You-know-who has no money.”
“She doesn’t cost much. She’s an orphan. These days, such as her can be put to work for the price of a meal.”
If there was a double entendre there, the guard chose to ignore it. He waved the pair through.
None of the royal family were out in the outer enclosure, though there was a big pile of unsawn wood standing near a saw and a couple of wooden sawhorses.
“This way, girl,” Kirpichnikov ordered, leading her past a picket fence, through a rectangular opening in another wall, and to the kitchen, which was a separate building to the west of the main mansion, connected by an enclosed passageway.
Once they were safely inside, and no guards were seen hanging about, the cook and pigkeeper pointed east, toward the house. “Follow that passageway,” he said. “There will be stairs to your left after you get to the house. The royal family will be either upstairs or in the dining room which will be to your left front. You have maybe twenty minutes to get back here and get to work on the pots and pans before it begins to look suspicious. If you see me with a guard when you return, thank me graciously for letting you use the toilet, clear?”
“Yes,” Natalya answered, “clear enough.”
“Now go.”
Given that she weighed half a pood—about seventeen pounds—more than usual, with most of that being top heavy and front-centered, Natalya walked gracefully enough. That had required a bit of practice, too. Reaching the house and entering it, she stopped for a moment, to listen. There were no sounds coming from the room Kirpichnikov had told her was the dining room, so she turned and began to ascend the stairs.
At the top floor, she did hear voices. Most she didn’t recognize but from her left front, over where the dining room stood, she thought she heard the Romanov girls. They were speaking Russian, but actually had non-Russian accents, a result of growing up in a household where the only language their parents had shared from the beginning, and still the lingua franca of the family, had been English.
She hurried across the floor and finding the door locked, knocked a few times to gain admittance.
The door was partly opened by a stout girl, stout, though terribly pretty with enormous eyes. Those eyes could not be mistaken for anyone else’s.
“Let me in, Maria,” said Natalya, to the girl blocking the doorway. “For the love of God, let me in.”
“Do we know you?”
“Yes, from happier times. Now get out of the way and let me in.”
They all spoke in whispers, with Natalya making her re-introductions. “I’m that Natalya. My mother and father, sad to say, are dead, murdered by the Bolsheviks. A… a friend asked me to try to get some money in to you. Speaking of which, have any of you any idea how cold gold can be on one’s tits? And it doesn’t help when they’re small tits.”
With that, Natalya partially disrobed, then began taking out small packets of tightly cloth-wrapped gold coins from her sort-of-kind-of brassiere. The girls, Olga, Tatiana, Maria, and Anastasia stood open-mouthed, at the sudden shower of wealth.
“That’s about six thousand, five hundred rubles in gold,” Natalya informed them. She then began to pull tightly tied bundles of cash from up under her skirt. “That’s about forty thousand in currency. It’s really only worth maybe as little as four thousand in coin. Now I need some clothing to fill up this enormous bra in its place.”
The girls quickly began assembling a set of false breasts from whatever cloth could be spared.
As Turgenev had coached her, she continued, “And now, if you want the largesse to keep flowing, you need to take control of this money and show it to your parents. And then you have to get them to hire me. Can you do this?”
“We can’t show it to Mother,” the tallest one, Tatiana, said. “She not only talks too much but everything that happens that isn’t a complete disaster is, in her view, a sign from God of our eventual release.”
“Besides, she’ll probably waste it,” added Maria, the somewhat stout girl with the huge eyes. “Tati, you should take control of it and arrange to hire… by the way, tell me again, how do we know you?”
“We’ve met when my parents were guests of your family. I was little then; it was before the war. I am… well, since the murder of my parents I am now Baroness Sorokin. But you can’t tell anyone that.”
“Are you associated with Little Markov and a rescue attempt?” Tatiana asked.
“Who’s Little Markov? And, no, I am sorry, but I don’t know anything about a rescue attempt.” Well, one truth and one lie. Forgive me, please, God. Though, in fact, I don’t know much about it. As Maxim said, “What I do not know cannot be tortured out of me.”
“Little Markov,” Tatiana explained, “is a nice boy, a lieutenant of the Crimean cavalry, who writes to mother and would desperately like to rescue us from this place. I don’t believe it will happen.”
“Sorry, then,” Natalya said, “but I’ve never heard of him. Anyway, time is short. If you can arrange to hire me in some capacity, pass the word to Kirpichnikov. He’ll know where to find me.”
“Why,” asked Anastasia, the youngest of the lot, “would you bring all this money then ask us to hire you for a fraction of it?”
“No time! I have to go now. Just arrange the hiring.”
Camp, south of Tobolsk
Mokrenko arrived, after a day’s hard ride, to find things well in order, the horses healthy, and a guard properly posted.
Lieutenant Babin rolled out from a lean-to shelter. Mokrenko saluted, then dismounted from his short Yakut horse. Corporal Koslov stood up from the fire he was attending and joined the trio. After an exchange of pleasantries, Mokrenko asked, “How’s our man, Shukhov?”
“I’m fine, Sergeant,” came from one of the other lean-tos. “Fine enough that, if you people need me to blow something up in Tobolsk, you had better bring me there. I’ve already prepared the lake, here, for blasting. If you need me to blow anything substantial up in Tobolsk, you had better get me some more explosive.”
“Is he well enough to travel?” Mokrenko asked Babin, sotto voce.
“Probably. I’m not a doctor but I can, at least, say there’s no more external bleeding and no sign of infection that I can see.”
“All right, I’ll be taking him with me, then. As for the rest of you, just wait. Cut wood for four big bonfires. And Lieutenant Turgenev says—well, a message from the rear says—that it would be a great help if you could hunt for a lot of meat. As much as we can get. Cold as it is, it will keep in this weather until needed. I’m going to be ranging to the east and northeast of here, looking for the same. I’ll be taking four of the horses and two of the sleighs; Shukhov can drive the other one. We’ll take my horse behind one of them.”
“Define ‘a lot,’ Sergeant.”
“As much as you can get. ‘A thousand pood would not be too much,’ Lieutenant Turgenev told me.”
“I doubt we’ll get that much,” said Babin, “but tell him we’ll do the best we can.”