Right away, I wrote to Katie to tell her that her nephew was alive and safe. She and her children and grandchildren had been evacuated to the countryside during the Blitz the previous year. London had been attacked by the Luftwaffe 71 times, causing the damage or destruction of over one million homes and the deaths of over forty thousand people. The assault had finally ceased after more than eight months, and Katie and her family had been able to return to their home at last. After almost a year, they and their country were still recovering.

Communication with Rhett was sporadic following his departure for Germany. It was many months before he was finally able to return to the United States again, and my joy upon seeing him again was combined with shock at the fact that he was accompanied by a German soldier.

"This is Nikolaus Schiller, Grandma," he told me. "He's my cousin."

"Your cousin?" I could only stare in disbelief.

"I was aboard the HMS Le Tigre," Rhett explained. "We were in search of the U-215 that had torpedoed the Alexander Macomb. After we found it, it was sunk by the HMS Veteran. I saw Nikolaus treading water and was about to shoot him when he called out to me. 'You wouldn't dare shoot the grandson of a former Tsar!'"

"I was so shocked that I almost dropped my gun. I helped Nikolaus aboard the ship. 'There's no way you could be the grandson of a former Tsar,' I told him."

"'But I am!' he insisted. 'My grandfather was Tsar Nicholas II of Russia.' 'My grandfather was the Tsar's younger brother,' I told him. 'That makes us cousins.' We embraced, and he stayed with me until we reached our destination. We stayed in touch after that, and he wanted to come home with me and meet his other relatives."

Olga's son. I couldn't believe it. I hadn't spoken to the tragic young woman since bidding her goodbye almost a quarter of a century previously. Could it really be that she was alive and well, that she had a new life and family now?

"Tell me about your mother," I said to Nikolaus.

"What do you want to know?" he asked in heavily accented English.

"How is she faring? I haven't seen her in ever so long now, and she'd been through so much the last time we spoke..."

"How do you know my mother?" His eyes narrowed in suspicion.

"Why, she's my niece!" I exclaimed. "She and her husband stayed with us after the Tsar banned him from the Imperial court."

Nikolaus frowned darkly. "My father never even met my grandfather, nor did he ever set foot in Russia."

I realized that Olga had never told her son of her marriage to Vova. To me, it was perfectly understandable that she'd want to erase that dark chapter of her life from her memory as thoroughly as possible.

Well, far be it from me to dredge up painful revelations with which to confront this young man whom I'd only just met. Instead, I sighed resignedly.

"Would you like to stay for dinner?" I asked Rhett and Nikolaus. "It's chicken and dumplings with turnips and corn bread."

Nikolaus stayed with us in Georgia for several weeks and met Wade and Ella's children and grandchildren and their friends. He turned out to be an intelligent, polite, thoughtful young man, and it boggled my mind to think that he was of the same ilk who committed the atrocities in the concentration camps of which I'd heard.

He wanted to hear all about George, about Katie and her family, about the lives we'd lived in Russia, France, and England, and I told him everything I could, being careful to omit any mention of Vova and the unwittingly incestuous union.

He told me that his mother was doing reasonably well, considering that she'd lived through even more tragedy since joining her uncle in Darmstadt. "My mother's uncle died five years ago," he told me. "It was only a few weeks after that when my cousin Georg's airplane crashed in Osten, Belgium. Georg, his wife, and their two sons were all killed. As Georg's brother Louis doesn't have any children, that's the end of my great uncle's line."

"That's simply terrible!" I shook my head, scarcely able to believe that such misfortune had fallen upon a family already so heavily decimated.

"I've something interesting to show you, Grandma," Rhett said to me a couple of days before he was to depart once again for Europe. He took a small object from his pocket and held it out for me to see. I gasped in shock.