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“Good, for I am bored,” she said. “I don’t like the Winter Palace in the summer.” She
chattered on about the glories of the Palace in cold weather- grand balls for Christmas, sledding on
the hills or ice skating on the Neva- and Trevor reflected that the Romanov family, like most of the
royal houses of Europe, were hardly a bevy of intellectuals. They liked to talk about the events of
their days, but their days never varied. They liked to talk about their relatives, but their relatives
were all alike. Irony was lost on the majority of them, as was humor, unless you counted vulgar
jokes. Belches and farts and the like and they did not like to debate ideas, for to enter into a debate
was to concede that there might be more than one rational way to look at a matter, and this was
something that royals as a species were loath to accept. As Xenia prattled on to her captive audience
about toboggans and snowmen, Trevor let his gaze once again move to Alix and Nicky.
“Religion,” Alix was saying, “is not a ring that one can slip on and off.”
Oh dear, thought Trevor. She sounds so serious, so pious, so much the exception to the rule I
have just established. The next thing we know she will be lecturing everyone on the meaning of
Paradise Lost. She already has the wrong clothes and she furthermore distinguishes herself as an
intellectual, her position at court is fully doomed. Bloody slabs of venison were being deposited on
each plate along the table.
“Of course not,” Nicholas was responding. “I quite agree. I agree with…I agree, of course,
with everything you say.”
They could be such a nice young couple, Trevor thought. The boy a little timid, too eager to
please, too desperate to be liked. The girl tense and solemn, pitched forward with the weight of her
unaccustomed jewels. If they lived in another time and place, if they were not required to become
Nicholas and Alexandria, and could remain just Alix and Nicky… He might make a great success
somewhere as a greengrocer or a bookkeeper, perhaps a chemist. She would be a devoted mother,
the sort who read to her children each night as they drifted to sleep. They’d be lovely people to have
as neighbors, a family you smile and tip your hat to on a Sunday stroll.
They would be fine, Trevor thought, just fine if they were average people.
Trevor cut a bite of venison and raised it to his mouth. It was delicious, stunningly so, with the
lusciousness of the flesh unchanged even when he looked into the tranquil brown eyes of the faun
centerpiece on the high table. What were they all to make of this, of this great dinner with its dozens
of hidden implications, not the least of which was that it was not truly so great? That the imperial
family was welcoming them with a yawn and not a fanfare, and beyond the wine-dulled drone of
conversation swirling over the tables Trevor’s eyes moved to the double doors opening into the