Carter shifted from one foot to the other and then glanced over at me before answering Nika. “I’ll be here for a while. There are lots of stories to write.”
Nika gave a very loud sigh. “You might find it’s too cold here to stay. Sometimes foreigners don’t notice that their fingers and noses have frozen until they turn black and fall off. You should go back where you came from.”
“Nika! You’re being rude! That doesn’t happen to people in Petrograd.” I turned to Carter. “Though if a Russian approaches you and starts talking and pointing at your nose, that means you are showing the first signs of frostbite. They do look out for foreigners.”
I slung my skates over my shoulder and then took hold of Nika with one hand and Sophie with the other. “Let’s cross. Do you have any brothers or sisters?” I asked Carter.
He shook his head. “Only child.” I had to bite my tongue not to offer him a few of mine.
When we reached the grand duke’s house, Anna Andreevna was waiting for us with a girl dressed as a nursemaid who looked very much like Polina, small and fair. “This is Nadia,” Anna announced as she danced around. From the looks of Anna’s flushed face, she’d been dancing long before we arrived. She ran over and hugged both twins. Somehow they all three managed to get their arms around one another and spin around, singing loudly.
“Hello,” I said to the girl over the noise. “My sisters were very excited to come over today.” I wondered where Anna’s governess was. She was good at making sure the three didn’t get up to too much mischief. “I wanted to say hello to Mademoiselle Bessette. Is she here?”
“She is, but she’s ill, miss. She said that if it’s all right with Polina, I can watch the little girls while they play.”
I wasn’t sure she could manage all three, but I did want to talk to Carter without extra commentary. “All right. Mind Nadia, girls.” They weren’t listening.
When we got back outside, Carter said, “I’ve got directions to a private skating area that the English use on the Neva.”
“No, we don’t want to go there. It’s too small.” I found myself actually looking forward to skating. It had been too long. “I’ve got a card to get into the skating area in front of the Tauride Palace. It’s where Russians go and it’s much better and bigger. The czar’s daughters skate there sometimes.” I thought Carter would be intrigued by that bit of information, and he took up the topic of the czar’s daughters with great enthusiasm as we walked.
I wanted to start asking him questions right away about traveling, but as we moved out of the residential area into the main part of Petrograd, we heard a big crowd singing in the distance. The streets were so packed with people I couldn’t tell where the song was coming from. There were a few more droshkies back on the streets, but they were all occupied. I told Carter I was fine with walking, so we continued on, winding our way through the crowds.
“Look over there,” Carter said. “Demonstrators on the bridge.” He pointed to a large group of people singing and carrying red banners as they came across the Nikolai Bridge. Some of the czar’s Cossack troops had positioned their horses at the end of it to block them from getting all the way across.
“Isn’t that the song the French sing? The ‘Marseillaise’?” Carter asked.
“The tune is the same but it has different lyrics, ones a Russian wrote.” I translated a little of it. “‘Stand, rise up, working people! Arise against the enemies, hungry brother!’”
“So is this it?” Carter asked, doing his strange little jig and nearly falling on the packed snow.
“‘It’?”
“The revolution! The journalists I know are taking bets on when it will break out. The best guess of the people who have been here for a while is next week, though one fellow told me I shouldn’t go skating today in case it started early.”
I was shocked to hear they’d been taking bets as if the total upheaval of a country were a sporting event. “I’ve never been in a revolution, but if it happens, it’s not going to be some spectator event where, when it’s all over, the participants shake hands and go home.” The thought of fighting breaking out in the city terrified me. People would be hurt, and the hospitals were already packed with wounded soldiers.
The Cossack troops were riding back and forth in front of the crowd, which had stopped, and the troops were laughing and joking with them. It almost seemed like a celebration. “So many people revere the czar,” I said. “You should have been here when war was declared. Ordinary people filled the streets, marching in support of the czar, holding photographs of him high above their heads.”
Carter shook his head. “They might revere him, but they hate his wife and his advisers. Maybe nothing will happen today, but that’s not the last of it. Some of the workers in the big factories have gone on strike, and they’re calling for a general strike tomorrow.” He paused. “Let’s stop for a minute. I want to see what happens. If this is it, we may not be able to go skating after all.”
The crowd on the bridge turned around and went back the other way, still singing. The Cossacks moved away.
I hadn’t realized how tense I was until I saw the crowd leave. There wasn’t going to be a clash, not then, but Carter was right. That wouldn’t be the end of it. We’d have to brace ourselves for what might come. I couldn’t pretend to believe my stepfather any longer. Things would not get back to the way they’d been before.
And if ordinary people did get hurt, I decided I’d talk to Dr. Rushailo about opening up the hospital for as many as we could treat. I told myself I couldn’t get overwhelmed with fear. The doctor never did. She took everything as it came, and I wanted to be the same way.
But Miles still wasn’t safe. I didn’t believe Carter and his friends really had any idea of when something would happen. Miles still needed to leave. We walked on, and I turned the conversation to what I wanted to know. “How did you get to Russia? My brothers are going back to the United States for a visit, but we haven’t traveled for years. I don’t even really know where to begin. You said something about the Americans in the hotels being too scared to travel because of the German subs.” Everyone had been horrified when the British ship the Lusitania had been sunk two years earlier, but American passenger ships hadn’t been targeted. “Why are they so scared? They must know something I don’t.”
“You didn’t hear? Just a couple of weeks ago, the Germans announced they were going back to unrestricted sub warfare. Nothing is safe now, so if your brothers want to go the States, they’ll be far better off going east, crossing the border into Manchuria and then getting to Japan so they can sail from there.”
That meant weeks more of travel, including a very long train ride all the way across Russia. But since there was no other good choice, that was the way they would have to go. Having only one option meant fewer decisions to be made.
We reached the skating area, which held no grand duchesses but plenty of skaters. I couldn’t wait to get on the ice. I wanted to skate and not think about anything else for just a little while.
Carter was a good skater. It was fantastic racing around trying to see who could go the fastest. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky, and the sun made the snow so bright it almost hurt my eyes.