Digging Up Lilies
Things had continued to be tense between Anya and Dimitri, even with a week elapsing since Olga informally acknowledged Anya to be Anastasia Romanov.
From Dimitri's end, it was pure awkwardness – he wasn't cross with her, save for a little put out that he was barred from the guestroom for two days straight, leaving him sleeping on a sofa in the parlor before she allowed him back into their bed – he just didn't know how to put things right.
What could he possibly say in his defense, other than – in fairness – it had been a success, his keeping her grandmother's death a secret in order to secure her meeting with her aunt?
From Anya's end, there was genuine coldness. Her exchanges with him were short and frosty, at best. At their worst, she could barely stand to look at him.
The latter, at least, had lessened considerably in the last couple of days, which Dimitri took as the only positive sign she'd given that she might be on the road to forgiving him.
If nothing else, she stayed in his presence more often during this week's end than she had in the days before. He clung to that fact like a drowning man, little true hope though it actually gave him.
On this partly-sunny afternoon speckled by passing clouds and the occasional light shower, they both found themselves sitting on an iron filigree bench in Sophie and Vlad's spacious lawn.
Anya was seated at one end, throwing a little rubber ball for her new dog Toby to chase. Olga had been as good as her word and indeed brought over the promised pet for her niece, which Dimitri, though he was not fond of the drooling and, in his opinion, somewhat dim-witted mutt personally, believed did his wife a world of good. Anya had the little spaniel follow her everywhere, and seemed happy whenever he whined for her attention, even if it was simply to inform his mistress he was about to piddle on Sophie's formerly clean kitchen floor.
Honestly, as far as new pets went, Dimitri preferred the white, green-eyed cat Olga had also brought for Sophie out of politeness when she came to deliver Anya's dog. Called Kiki, the cat was remarkably clean, very quiet, and usually stayed out of everyone's way. She generally only came out of hiding when Sophie or Mariette bribed her with a saucer of milk. This was the stark opposite of poor hapless Toby, who they were all always tripping over.
Dimitri was seated at the other end of the bench, his head lowered, going over an unexpected letter he had received from Russia that morning.
From Irina, of all people.
How she had learned he was staying with Vlad and Sophie, whom he had never told her about, much less discovered their postal address, he hadn't the foggiest notion.
Anya, having seen the not-at-all-subtle loopy script of the return address, knew who it was from and was waiting, rather impatiently, for Dimitri to tell her what it said.
The longer he poured over it morosely, the more visibly impatient she grew.
Thinking it might encourage her to say more than 'pass the butter' or 'you're sitting on the corset I left on the bed' to him – a near-impossible feat these days – he waited in silence until Anya finally snapped, "Are you ever going to tell me what's in that letter you're mooning over?"
Lifting his head and raising his eyebrows, Dimitri smirked. This was slightly more vehemence than he had banked on, and for whatever reason he took it as a positive sign.
"Is that a twinge of jealousy I hear?" he asked, in the most aggravatingly sing-song tone he could muster under the circumstances.
Not that anything involving Irina Alexandrovna ever needed to inspire such a feeling in her, as he'd explained perfectly well before. The chances of him ever mooning over anything whiny, motor-mouth Irina had to say were exactly nil. Still, he liked that Anya obviously felt a kind of ownership over him, enough that she didn't like him reading another woman's letters and keeping their contents to himself. That at least meant she wasn't entirely apathetic to him after what he'd done. He was still hers, and maybe – just maybe – she intended to keep it that way.
"It most certainly is not," Anya grunted, momentarily ignoring Toby's insistent whining for her to throw the rubber ball again and focusing her narrowed eyes on Dimitri.
"I was only waiting for you to ask," he pointed out.
"Well, I'm asking, okay?" She whipped the ball with more vigor this time, accidentally smashing in the front of a freshly-pruned bush (Sophie's gardener was going to have a heart attack when he saw that). "Are you happy now?"
Toby barked and chased the ball into the damaged bush, oblivious to his mistress' sudden change of mood. He had tiny leaves and clods of mulch stuck to his beautiful golden fur when he returned, placing the ball at Anya's feet and wagging his tail enthusiastically.
"Practically jumping for joy." Dimitri sighed and placed the letter in her lap.
Anya looked down, wrinkled her nose, and gasped out, not quite laughing but almost, "It's a bill!" She shook her head, as if she'd expected or at least imagined something very different and was chiding herself for being so foolish. "She wants you to pay her back every ruble of her father's you helped spend."
Dimitri turned a little red. It embarrassed him to think of just how much money he had blown before he got his own income from The Sunbeam's profits. The first year it hadn't made any, being a new business, and he'd needed to spend Irina's inheritance to live. Irina hadn't seemed to mind, not back then – she'd been spending it like water, too.
Still, after eating from the trash and nearly starving, he'd admittedly gone a little overboard, mad with the power a constantly-replenished handful of rubles gave him, especially in the cruddy Bolshevik run economy. He'd felt... Well, it was sacrilegious to say, after everything, but rather like a tsar. He'd liked having everything he wanted exactly when he wanted it.
True, it had only been a way of trying vainly to fill in the hole losing the Romanovs had left in his life, but he still could have been more careful. If he'd known that one day Anastasia would return to him and he'd have to leave Irina and flee Russia in order to be with her honestly, he would have been. Or, more likely, he'd never have pretended to be Irina's husband in the first place.
Ironically, he had grown more careful after he got his own hard-earned money. It was only during the time Irina was doling out cash like free sweets that he went a bit crazy.
"You spent how much on vodka a month?" Anya exclaimed, reading on.
"No, no, that's not fair," Dimitri protested. "She drank as much of that as I did – it was the only way we could stand being around each other."
"She wants you to pay for a new back scratcher?" Anya blinked, confused.
Dimitri winced. "That's actually fair – I may have used that in places it wasn't intended for."
Anya cocked her head at him. "Are you saying you used it on your–?"
"Next item," he all but begged, trying desperately to wave it off.
"She paid exhuming and reburial funeral expenses for your aunt?" Anya frowned. "You don't have an aunt." One of her hands was on her hip now. "Dimitri?"
He felt his expression falling automatically, from embarrassment to sadness, and he could do nothing to stop it, to downplay what this meant. There was no more hiding it from her, much as he desperately wanted to.
"She says," Anya pressed, waving that page of the letter under his nose, "that she had your dead aunt relocated from Siberia to Petersburg. Who is she talking about?"
Dimitri's shoulders slumped. "Lili, Anya, my 'dead aunt' was your mother's lady-in-waiting." He did air quotes on dead aunt. "I couldn't tell Irina the truth, and I couldn't leave the poor woman there, buried in an unmarked grave in a place she was so scared of. She hated Yekaterinburg, Anya, she was only there to find you and your family. Leaving her there forever felt wrong; she was born in Saint Petersburg – it was her city once."
Anya softened considerably, the remainder of ice in her now-watering blue eyes melting. "You did that? You brought her home?"
"Don't sound so surprised," he scoffed, trying to be gruff to avoid crying.
She sounded awed. "I didn't even know she was sick."
"She wasn't," Dimitri murmured.
"What?"
"She wasn't sick."
"What are you saying?"
Toby finally seemed to sense some of the tension and plopped down on Anya's shoes, whining at a different pitch, as if trying to comfort her.
"She hung herself, Anya." He put his hand to his forehead. "And I'm the one who found her."
Her face twisted in pain, Anya swallowed, struggling to clear her suddenly dry throat. "Why would she do that?"
"It was my fault," Dimitri sighed. "I told her what they did to you – to your family. It never occurred to me that she wouldn't be able to handle it; I thought, I just assumed, we both had to."
To his surprise, Anya took his hand in hers. "Thank you for not copying her – I don't know what I'd do without you."
Without his saying so, she understood, the way she always had; the way he should have known she would. Dimitri didn't need to say he'd been tempted more than once to copy Lili's example, to end it all. Just being told about Lili, about his guilt regarding the poor woman's fate, was enough for Anya to fill in the rest. He should never have underestimated her strength. He should have remembered that, yes, his wife could have a breakdown over almost anything if it reminded her of her past trauma, but also that, no, she was not weak. Not for nothing had she survived not only the massacre of her family, but also a night in the woods wounded and bleeding, as well as nine years in a dangerously changed Russia following this.
She was brave, though she had been afraid, and she understood everything.
"You're welcome," he whispered.
"Hey," she said, in a very different tone now, "I wanted to ask you something."
"What's that?"
"Aunt Olga wants to host a special party with the family, at a reserved restaurant, tomorrow night." Anya bit her lip. "To show me to the other Romanov relatives."
Ah, Dimitri saw what her aunt was up to. It was a kind of buffer, a prelude. This was her way of – still unofficially, yet somewhat publicly, in a way that could not be taken back – showing her support for Anya's claim.
This way, Anastasia's other relations would have a chance to see her for themselves and draw their own conclusions, connected to and separate from Olga's say-so, before any public announcement was made.
She was clever; Dimitri had to give her that. However, he did wonder how she'd convinced that stubborn husband of hers to go along with it.
"Anyway," Anya continued, "I know things haven't been..." She trailed off. "But I still... I mean, I was wondering if..."
"Yes?" he prompted.
"Would you escort me?" Her face, gone pale since he told her about Lili, had never fully regained its color and was draining all over again. "I don't think I can do this on my own, Dimitri. I'm still frightened."
He squeezed her hand, still in his own. "Why, I'd be honored, Anastasia Nicholaevna."
She cracked a smile, intertwining their fingers and rolling back her shoulders in relief. "The honor is mine, Dimitri Viktorovich."
They shared this tender moment until Anya had to break away to shout for Toby (who had gotten off her shoes and wandered in the other direction) to stop digging up Sophie's perfectly symmetrical rows of white-and-red lilies.
Toby obliged by ceasing his vigorous digging in the flower bed, only to pee and then 'do the Governor' on the freshly up-turned soil under the half-dug-up flowers instead.
The poor gardener. This befouling of the lily-bed might just push him into an early retirement.
The dress Aunt Olga had sent over for the highly-anticipated dinner was certainly beautiful, if a little provoking.
Simply put, it definitely didn't understate the fact that Olga was putting Anya forward as Anastasia Romanov, daughter of her late brother, former Tsar Nicholas.
As Anya opened the long box and unwrapped it from the tissue paper, she couldn't hold back a little gasp. It was an elaborate evening gown, bright red, embroidered with gold thread and set with gleaming rubies. The front of the gown had the rubies and gold thread forming the contour of an imperial eagle. Only one of Nicholas Romanov's children would have the right to wear such a thing in front of the people who would be present at this dinner.
Perhaps wanting to downplay the obvious anxiety this caused Anya despite the fact that she had every right to it, Dimitri's comment was, "It's exactly the same color as your hair."
"Don't stand in front of any red curtains tonight," he added jokingly, wiggling his eyebrows at her, "or you might be too camouflaged for your relatives to see you."
She stuck out her tongue at him over her shoulder and cut her eyes, fighting to bite back a smile all the same.
Under the dress were a fresh pair of white satin gloves, the tiniest diamond tiara imaginable, and a velvet box that – once the lid was popped open – revealed a pair of ruby teardrop earrings.
Sophie fawned over the earrings and stated firmly that Anya was going to be the loveliest lady in that formal dining room tonight. "Walk down the stairs very slowly when you descend," she recommended heartily. "I remember that restaurant well – the room your aunt will have rented is the one in the ground floor, the largest and finest. There will be such a lot of stairs. Walk down these slowly and let everyone take you in. They'll all know who you are the moment they see you enter like this, I just know it!"
"Today returns the little lost princess," Vlad added sentimentally from the corner where he sat, his aching back propped and padded with soft down pillows, ironically reading a book by Sigmund Freud.
The excitement Anya knew she ought to feel, over being where she should be, was actually more like a hollow, sour feeling in her stomach at the moment.
Anya didn't understand it. Why was this so?
Was this the way her poor Mama felt when she had had to attend functions involving the Russia aristocracy? Like her head was lingering on the verge of exploding at any given moment? Like she might vomit if she moved too quickly?
Why she should be so worried, she didn't know. Auntie Olga would protect her. Even if Grandmama had lived to see and recognize her, this still would have been inevitable; she would still have to come forward like this.
And this was only the beginning.
The press hadn't gotten wind yet. Just wait until that happened! Or when she was required to attend her first ball since childhood, which seemed a thousand years in the past now.
She was glad she had reconciled with Dimitri, that he was escorting her and would be at her side all evening. Between him and Auntie Olga, she could easily reassure herself there was nothing to be afraid of.
Even if tonight went badly, she would always have them.
And that was, even if he'd gone about it the wrong way, largely to Dimitri's credit. Without his stunt, and his selfless testimony that she was Anastasia, she might never have gotten her godmother back in her life.
Yet one question lingered.
When this was all over, and she was publicly recognized as Nicholas and Alexandra's daughter, then what?
Where did they – herself and Dimitri – go from here?
And why did things going so relatively smoothly in her life for once also feel like she was fast approaching a jarring dead end which there was no swinging back around from?
