The Lost Daughter Read online

  Val shook her head. She might not be any use as a mom at the moment, but she needed Nicole around. Her daughter’s happy chatter and innocent take on the world were the only things keeping her remotely sane.

  * * *

  Nicole started at primary school and was immensely proud of her school uniform, with its pleated gray skirt and short-sleeved white blouse. Peggy complained that Lenny never told her what he had done at school during the day, but Nicole always rushed out to the playground in a breathless torrent of words.

  “Today the teacher told us a story from days of yore. Do you know about days of yore, Mommy? It’s like the past, when they had knights in armor and unicorns.”

  She kept up the stream of news on the walk home, requiring little response from Val, pausing only to beg for some popping candy or fizzy cola sweets when they passed the milk bar. Val never had the heart to refuse, even though it was expenditure she would have to hide from Tony when she filled in the accounts book. He didn’t approve of sweets.

  “We’ve got a pet rabbit at school, Mommy,” Nicole continued, her words thick from the sweet she was chewing. “His nose goes like this . . .” She demonstrated, her tiny nose wiggling up and down in a pretty accurate imitation of a real rabbit.

  “What color is it?” Val asked.

  “White. And his name’s Edward.”

  “How do you know it’s a boy?”

  Nicole raised her eyebrows: “Of course he’s a boy! He’s got a boy’s name.”

  “Silly me.” Val smiled, and the movement felt unfamiliar, as if the corners of her mouth might crack.

  “He escaped today. Sally was holding him and he jumped out of her arms and ran all over the classroom. Everyone was screaming. Mrs. Cole shut the door and got a piece of carrot and she tried to trap him in the corner but when she got near, he leaped over her arm and escaped again.” Nicole giggled from deep in her belly, a sound full of joy. “It was the funniest thing ever.”

  Her face was so animated, her pleasure so genuine that Val spoke without thinking. “Maybe we should get a pet rabbit at home.”

  As soon as the words were out, she regretted them. Tony would never agree. He’d worry about the smell, the cost of pet food, the incursion of a rabbit run into his precious yard.

  “Oh, please!” Nicole begged. “Pretty please.”

  “We’ll see what Daddy says. Maybe he’ll want you to wait till you’re older so you can look after it yourself.” It was hard to backtrack from such a tantalizing offer. “Why don’t you leave me to ask him? You don’t want to annoy him or he’ll definitely say no.”

  But the seed had been planted, and Nicole’s talk all afternoon was of names for rabbits, the different colors of their fur, and the foods she thought they liked best.

  At dinner that evening—sausages and mashed potatoes—Nicole told Tony about the school rabbit. He laughed out loud at her imitation of its nose twitching, and encouraged by the response, she told him about Edward escaping and the pandemonium in the classroom as they tried to catch him. Proud that her story was going so well, she waved her arm in the air to demonstrate how Edward had leaped over the teacher’s arm, and a lump of potato flew from the fork she was holding and landed on the floor.

  Quick as a flash, Tony reached across and rapped her knuckles with the handle of his knife, so hard Val could hear the clunk of metal on bone. “Mind your manners,” he said calmly.

  Nicole gasped, a deep, long in-breath when time seemed suspended.

  Val leaped to her feet and ran around the table before the scream erupted. She knew her daughter’s cries intimately: the ones that were for show when she wasn’t really hurt; the ones when she was scared rather than injured; but this was a cry of genuine pain. She grabbed Nicole and scooped her into her arms, then yelled at Tony, hysteria in her voice.

  “You can’t do that! She’s only five!”

  She could put up with him hitting her, but not her baby. Nicole was screaming, her whole body trembling. Val lifted the reddened knuckle to her lips and kissed it softly, feeling her daughter’s pain. Should she run it under a cold tap? Might the bones be broken?

  “She’s got to learn,” Tony said, lifting a forkful of sausage to his mouth. “You know how I feel about table manners.”

  Val never swore, but a string of expletives filled her head. She wanted Tony to feel her fury, and only the presence of the shrieking Nicole in her arms stopped her from venting it. Instead she hurried to the sink, where she made a cold compress, keeping one arm tightly around her daughter, not letting her go for a second. She sat with Nicole in her lap, holding the compress around her knuckles, rocking her gently as the screams subsided into sobs and then whimpers.

  “Daddy didn’t mean to hurt you,” she whispered. “He didn’t know it would hurt so much.” But that was a lie. He had meant to inflict pain on their daughter. Severe pain.

  In a flash, it came to Val that she had to leave him. If they stayed, he would bully Nicole just as her father had bullied her. History would repeat itself. She couldn’t bear to watch that confident, sunny little girl become anxious and withdrawn, the way she herself used to be as a teenager—still was, if truth be told.

  “What’s for pudding, Val?” Tony demanded, but she ignored him.

  Peggy had urged her to leave many times, but Val had always been overwhelmed by the knowledge that Tony would do everything in his power to stop her. She had never stood up to him, just as she had never stood up to her father. But Nicole was so full of happiness that it would be a crime to sit and watch as it was knocked out of her, blow by blow.

  She had fallen asleep in Val’s arms now. She often fell asleep after hurting herself; it seemed to be her body’s physiological response to shock. Val rose to carry her upstairs to bed.

  “Where’s the bloody dessert?” Tony called after her.

  “There’s ice-cream sponge in the freezer.” She felt like ramming it in his face but restrained herself.

  She walked slowly so as not to wake Nicole, and laid her carefully on the bed. She managed to strip off her school skirt and blouse and slipped her under the covers in her undershirt and panties, then sat by the bedside, thinking hard.

  Suddenly it came to her that her depression over the last two months hadn’t been about her father’s death; it had been about her subservience in a loveless marriage. Becoming an orphan had focused her mind on her own mortality and made her assess her life—and she couldn’t bear what she saw.

  She would have to plan her departure carefully, arranging everything in advance. If she waited till the beginning of March, when Tony gave her the housekeeping money, there should be enough to pay a month’s rent somewhere cheap. Peggy would help out with furniture; she had stacks of it in the attic from her great-aunt’s house. Better not to let Tony get wind of it. If she presented him with a fait accompli, he would accept it eventually, and when they came to a settlement, she should get the money from the sale of her father’s house. It would be a lifesaver.

  During the next two weeks, Val often felt terrified about what she was planning, but whenever she looked at her daughter’s swollen knuckles, she knew she had no choice. She found a one-bedroom flat not far from the waterside in Balmain—just a box of a place on the first floor of a large, decrepit house, with a stove, fridge, and sink along one wall of the living room and a toilet and shower in a closet off the bedroom. Peggy borrowed her brother’s van and drove over with an old bed, table, and chairs to furnish it.

  Then one Saturday morning, while Tony was playing golf, Val packed all her and Nicole’s possessions into the car and, with shaking hand, wrote a note for him and propped it on the kitchen table.

  I’m leaving you, it said, and taking Nicole. From pure force of habit, she added a PS: There’s a casserole in the fridge.

  She took Nicole’s hand and led her out to the car, feeling lighter than she had in years.

  Chapter 13

  The Ural Mountains, July 17, 1918

  THE FOREST WAS
SO DENSE THAT LITTLE LIGHT PENETRATED. There were just a few slanting shafts as the sun rose higher in the sky. The air was damp and smelled strongly of spruce. Maria clung to Peter as he ran with her slung over his shoulder, jolted by his pounding footsteps. It was clear he knew the area well, because he didn’t once hesitate about the direction he took. She strained her ears for the sound of guards pursuing them, but all she could hear was Peter’s feet tramping in the undergrowth, his heavy breathing, and the squawking of birds high above.

  “Please stop,” she begged. “Leave me here and go back for the others.”

  He didn’t slow down. “It’s no use,” he panted. “I’m sorry.”

  Maria’s voice rose. “I’m sure some of them are alive. We can’t leave them behind.”

  Peter kept running. “If I go back,” he explained, “I will be arrested, then they will find you and kill you.”

  “You would leave my sisters to their fate at the hands of those monsters?”

  There was panic in her voice. It was imperative he return. Why could he not understand?

  It was a while before Peter replied, and she sensed he was trying to decide what to say. “None of the others were alive,” he told her at last. “I’m sorry.”

  “How do you know? How can you?” She wouldn’t believe it. “You didn’t know I was alive until I opened my eyes.”

  He didn’t answer, just kept pushing forward. Each step caused a jabbing pain in her belly. She felt light-headed and so profoundly shocked she couldn’t think straight. Her brain wouldn’t work.

  They emerged by the side of a lake, which glowed pink in the morning light, with a mirror image of the tall trees reflected on the surface of the water. Peter stopped and laid her on the bank, and she was grateful to be still. She closed her eyes to stop her head spinning, but opened them when she sensed him nearby. He had some water cupped in his hands.

  “Drink,” he ordered.

  The water was so cold, it jolted her awake. It had a sweetish taste.

  “Are you sure they’re all dead?” she asked again.

  He nodded. “I’m afraid so.”

  “What about little Alexei? Anastasia? How could they kill children?” She couldn’t believe it. Refused to.

  Peter had no answer. He busied himself making a small fire from some twigs, under the shelter of a rocky alcove.

  “Tatiana is alive,” she told him. “She wasn’t in the house last night. She was with a friend who was trying to rescue us, a man called Malama. We need to find them.”

  Peter created a spark and blew on it to get his fire burning. After that, he returned to the lakeside and scooped up some mud with his hands, bringing it back to the fire.

  “We can’t go to Ekaterinburg,” he said at last. “We need to get as far from here as we can. We’ll worry about finding your sister later.”

  “But how will we find her?”

  “I don’t know.”

  She saw he was fashioning a kind of bowl from the mud, shaping it with his curved palms. He held it over the fire, turning it this way and that, jacket sleeves pulled down to protect his hands from the heat. It was pale gray in color and she could see it becoming solid as she watched. It must be clay.

  “Tatiana is clever,” she told him. “She will know what to do. We just need to find her.”

  Peter didn’t say anything, but after a while, he rose and went back to the lake, where he scooped some water into his makeshift bowl.

  “What are you doing?” she asked.

  “I’m boiling water to clean your wounds, if you will allow me. We can’t risk infection setting in.”

  He placed his bowl in the fire, fanned the flames around it, then sat watching as the water heated.

  “Won’t the guards see the smoke?” she panicked.

  He shook his head. “The wind is blowing in the other direction and we are sheltered by that rock face.” He pointed behind her.

  “You won’t leave me, will you?” she asked, remembering that not long before, she had begged him to do just that while he went back for the rest of her family.

  “I won’t,” he said, in a tone that made her understand she could trust him.

  She lay back and rested for a while, but opened her eyes when she felt him dabbing the side of her head with a handkerchief soaked in boiled water.

  “I’m sorry to wake you,” he apologized. “The bullet only grazed your temple. There’s a lot of blood but it should heal quickly. Where are the other wounds?”

  She placed a hand on the blood-soaked bodice of her gown, where the pain was throbbing and incessant. “Here. And in my leg.” She touched the spot on her outer thigh.

  “Do I have your permission to dress them?” he asked, his eyes serious, his tone formal.

  “Yes,” she said, then added, “Thank you,” in a quiet voice.

  She closed her eyes as he cut open the front of her gown with a knife and cleaned around the gash in her abdomen. She could feel he was doing his best to protect her modesty, exposing no more than was strictly necessary, but still it felt strange to be touched there by a man she hardly knew.

  “There are jewels in your bodice,” he said. “It seems they deflected the bayonet thrust. They almost certainly saved your life.”

  “You saved my life,” she murmured.

  He peeled back the hem of her dress to look at the wound in her thigh, and she shuddered, remembering Bolotov raising her skirt and the ugly fingers that had prodded between her legs. Peter could not have been more different; his touch was gentle and he restricted his attention to the wound site.

  “The bullet has emerged through the other side,” he reported. “That’s good. I won’t have to remove it.”

  All the same, it hurt a lot when he began to clean around the holes in her thigh, and suddenly a wave of darkness descended, carrying her off to unconsciousness.

  * * *

  When she came around, Peter was nowhere to be seen. Maria raised herself onto her elbows to look for him, scared that he had left her. The movement caused a wave of sickness. She turned her head and vomited into the grass, then wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. Alerted by the noise, Peter emerged from the woods carrying handfuls of plants. He hurried over, dipped a piece of cloth in the warm water and wiped her mouth clean, then used the remaining water in his bowl to rinse the grass alongside her head.

  “This is yarrow,” he told her, indicating the plants he’d brought, which had white flowers on feathery-leaved stems. “We call it soldier’s woundwort because the army often use it in the field. It stops bleeding and prevents infection. I’m going to make poultices with it to bind your wounds. Then I’ll look for some meadowsweet, which will relieve the pain and stop you feeling nauseous. After that, we must be on the move again.”

  She watched as he peeled the yarrow leaves from the stems and mashed them in his clay bowl. The pain in her wounds was fiercer now and she couldn’t help moaning as he laid his poultice across her belly and secured it firmly with strips of cloth. She wondered where the cloth had come from, then noticed that he had cut strips from the bottom of her petticoat. He must have done it while she slept.

  Next he bound her leg, and finally her head. She tried to be brave, but there was pain radiating around every part of her: her head, her belly, her leg, but most of all her heart. Her chest was so tight it was an effort to breathe. Tears sprang to her eyes, and he watched without speaking, his own eyes full of compassion, as she tried to blink them back.

  “I let them down,” she whispered. “I abandoned them.”

  “You were the only one alive,” he said quietly. “I promise you.”

  That was when she began to cry properly. She didn’t want to, because she was scared she might never stop, but the sobs forced themselves out.

  “I should have died too,” she said. “Then I would have gone to heaven with them. Instead I saved myself and that makes me a bad person. I wish with all my heart I were dead.”

  Peter picked up an unused st
rip of petticoat and handed it to her to use as a handkerchief, his eyes downcast. On a tree branch nearby, a tiny bird with brown feathers and a ruby-red throat trilled urgently as if trying to tell them something. Its tone was pure and clear as a flute played by a world-class musician.

  Chapter 14

  Ural Mountains, July 1918

  AFTER HER WOUNDS WERE BOUND, PETER LIFTED Maria onto his back, like a soldier’s kitbag. The position was immodest since her legs must wrap around him, but he said it would be easier for him to walk without stopping to rest.

  “Where are we going?” she asked, as he headed back into the forest.

  “West,” he said. “Into the mountains.”

  They walked for many hours, stopping only for short breaks, and when night fell and it grew too dark to see, he laid her on the earth and found leafy branches to place over her bloodstained gown to keep her warm. He curled up nearby, keeping watch, and Maria drifted off to sleep within minutes, overwhelmed with fatigue. She dreamed that she was with Olga and Alexei, Anastasia and her parents, all of them playing with the dogs in the snow, laughing as they slid and fell. And then she opened her eyes to a Siberian forest dawn and the unthinkable truth.

  Peter was crouched beside her, offering a handful of wild berries. “You must eat,” he said, but she turned her face away. How could she eat when her family were dead? How could she even think of it? What had been done to them felt unreal, like a grotesque nightmare. She couldn’t begin to comprehend the enormity of her loss.

  For three days they headed west, most of the time in silence. Thoughts of death were never far from Maria’s mind. It was hard to understand the finality: that she would never cuddle Alexei or giggle with Anastasia again; that she would not see her parents anymore in this lifetime. Hopes of finding Tatiana seemed unrealistic; she could be anywhere. Maria often contemplated killing herself but worried that it would mean turning her back on God, and if she did so she would not be reunited with her family in heaven. Instead she murmured prayers for them, remembering the words of the memorial panikhidas as best she could: “O Lord, set to rest the soul of your servants who have fallen asleep, in a place of light, in a place of green pastures, in a place of rest whence all pain, sorrow and sighing have been driven away.”