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They all had their favorite dogs. Anastasia had a tiny King Charles, which a wounded officer had given the sisters in the hospital. It could be carried in a muff.

Mikhail Medvedev, the son of a guard who took part in the family’s execution, told this story: “My father used to tell us—when they loaded the corpses onto the truck, he was in charge of the loading—the corpse of a tiny dog fell out of the sleeve of the outfit of one of the grand duchesses.”

Here, in Livadia, Olga turned sixteen. She was appointed colonel-in-chief of the Hussar Regiment. In the evening there was a ball. An orchestra of military trumpeters played. Blond, wearing a long pink dress, she stood in the middle of the hall, and all the Hussar officers at the ball were in love with her.

That evening she put on her diamond jewelry for the first time.

Every birthday, the thrifty Alix gave her daughters one pearl and one diamond. So that when they were sixteen they could have two pieces of jewelry made.

——

The family spent the winter at Tsarskoe Selo, in their beloved old Alexander Palace. Everything followed Alix’s regular routine.

At two o’clock she emerged from the room with the children: an outing in the carriage. She did not like to walk; she had weak legs. She drove to some distant church where no one knew her and there prayed earnestly, kneeling on the stone slabs. At eight o’clock, dinner. Nicholas came out as well. Alix appeared in an open dress with diamonds. At nine they went upstairs to the nursery and prayed with Alexei, and then Nicholas went to his study to write in his diary. In the evening, the traditional reading aloud.

In the golden cage where the family lived, nothing had changed for centuries. Anya described it: the furniture in the palace smelt of the same perfume as it had under her great-great-grandmother Catherine the Great, and there was the same gilt furniture, and the same footmen in feathered caps.

The Alexander Palace floats out of nothingness. Now we see it through the eyes of the French ambassador to Russia, Maurice Paléologue:

“The Alexander Palace appears before me in its most ordinary aspect,… my suite includes a footman … wearing a little cap decorated with red, black, and yellow feathers. They lead me through the formal drawing rooms, through the empress’s drawing room, down a long corridor onto which open the rooms of the sovereign. There I encounter a lackey wearing a very simple livery and bearing a tea tray. Further on a small internal staircase opens up leading to the rooms of the most august children: the parlormaid runs up it to the next floor.”

This parlormaid running to the upper floor may have been Elizaveta Ersberg.

THE PARLORMAID ELIZAVETA ERSBERG

One day I received a letter.

“Writing to you is Maria Nikolaevna Ersberg.”

I confess, I shuddered. That was the last name of the imperial family’s parlormaid who shared their exile.

“My grandfather Nikolai Ersberg was the palace stoker under Alexander III. He stoked the furnaces in Anichkov and Gatchina palaces, as well as the Winter Palace. He suffered a blow in the wreck of the imperial train near Borki and died in 1889. His daughter, my fathers younger sister, Elizaveta Nikolaevna Ersherg (born September 18, 1882, died in the blockade, March 12, 1942), graduated from the Patriotic Grammar School and was chosen by Nicholas’ mother Maria Feodorovna for a parlormaid. She served with faith and truth from 1898 until May 1918.… When the family was forced into exile in 1917, the tsaritsa gathered together all the servants and announced that she would be pleased if any of them wanted to serve them in exile as well. Inasmuch as the situation was altogether uncertain, however, she could promise no salary. Elizaveta, moved by a sense of duty and by her devotion to the girls, decided to go. In the blueprint of the Alexander Palace at Tsarskoe Selo, all the quarters are marked as to whom they belonged to. On it there is the room of my Aunt Elizaveta.

“When I was in the palace for the