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perfunctory expression that betrayed no emotion.
    “I’ve spoken with Nikolay Alexandrovich,” she answered, her tone almost serene. “He is confident he can negotiate on your behalf. There are officials who remain faithful to his wishes even if they can no longer be called commands. And remember, Masha, you are a Rasputin. You are God’s chosen, safe in his providence.” I nodded, as I had when she’d said the same thing a week earlier, after we learned the tsar had stepped down.
    “May I send my mother word that Varya and I are all right?”
    “Of course. You must send her a telegram. I’ll call Fredericks—he’ll help you. It’s all God’s will, Masha. You know that. Nothing comes to pass that isn’t. How could it?”
    As I reported to Alyosha when I went back upstairs, only a few loyal and mostly ancient retainers were staying in the Romanovs’ service: two valets, half a dozen chambermaids, ten footmen, the kitchen staff, the butler, and old Count Fredericks, an unlikely source of help of any kind.

The Old Guard and the New

    M ASTER EMERITUS OF COURT LIFE , Count Vladimir Fredericks might well have been relieved by the contraction of his demesne. Disoriented by the imminence of a revolution that had declared his worldview not only myopic but also corrupt, for weeks the count had been continually lost in the palace corridors. Sent bearing a message from the tsarina to her confidante, Anna Vyrubova, the count would nod briskly, click his shiny heels, and return to the tsarina’s suite some hours later, his mouth and mustache quivering in anxious confusion and the message still on his salver, envelope unopened.
    “Why, Count …” the tsarina would begin, but then she’d trail off and smile. “How debonair you’re looking, dear Vladimir! No wonder poor Anna didn’t read my little note. She must have been overcome with shyness when she saw your new waistcoat. Exquisite! It is new, isn’t it?” The count, who at ninety was at least as vain as he had been at twenty, looked down at his waistcoat (which was certainly not new despite his freshened appreciation) and forgot the shame occasioned by the failure of his errand. No one had the heart to scold him, and he spent his days in perpetual futile perambulation, wandering in and out of one suite of rooms after another until he arrived somewhere he recognized.
    It was Count Fredericks who had been in charge of lightingwhen, in 1873, five electric lamps were installed on Odesskaya Street. The count had been following the announcements of the grim eastward march of progress and was among those who gathered for the lamps’ inaugural illumination. A terrible light, poisonous and green, flickered, strobed the crowd of faces, and flooded their open mouths with something that looked like oil of vitriol. Or so Fredericks reported to Tsar Nikolay’s grandfather, Tsar Alexander II. Electricity, he predicted with obvious relief, was too vulgar to catch on. A year passed, and then another, and soon it was five, and there was no further mention of electric lamps. Someone had finally taken down the ones on Odesskaya Street, which had remained lit only as long as their inaugural performance. Fredericks, considering his position secure, celebrated their removal by ordering many times the amount of candles he usually did for a year. But no sooner had the candles been delivered than some infidel greedy industrialist plugged the entire Liteiny Bridge into a sinister smoke-belching generator, and just like that the Neva was showered with diamonds. Transformed into a great glittering serpent, the river turned and twisted under the delighted gaze of the hundreds of technology-mad fools packing the bridge’s span, and the count went back to the Winter Palace and embarked upon an epic bender. By 1889 the palace had its own direct-current generating station, and the ever more forceful incursion of vulgarians denied the count his august position: Bringer of Light to Darkness!