She nodded, waiting for more explanation of her job. Would it start with housekeeping?

“I’m sure you’re familiar with President Roosevelt’s Lend-Lease program. I’m in charge of it, more or less. In short, I work for him, and you’ll work for me. Let me show you to your office.” He stepped toward the door and held it open for her. “How’s your shorthand, by the way?”

“Tolerable. I can read it myself,” she said, passing him.

They strode along the corridor together. “That’s fine. The supply orders are constantly changing, and while the federal budget office will do the final accounting, I’ll need early estimates to present to them. So you’ll be my accountant, too.”

They stepped through a door into another hallway and then into an elegantly furnished room.

“And the Russian?” she asked. “You said that was a requirement.”

“The Russian. Yes. For the correspondence from the Soviets. The president has his official translators, of course, but I want to have my own resources.”

Her mind was buzzing with the amount of responsibility he seemed to be handing her, but it was a good buzz.

“Ah, here we are.” He opened the final door to a cubicle with a tiny desk, typewriter, and a gooseneck lamp. “This is your work space. On the other side of this wall is the First Lady’s office. It’s small, I know, but half the time, you’ll be at conferences with me taking notes.”

He glanced at his watch. “I have a meeting now with the president in the West Sitting Hall, so Mr. Allen will show you to your quarters. You can settle in and then meet me back at my room at ten.”

Escorting her to the door, Hopkins started off down the corridor on his long legs.

The butler still waited outside the office with her suitcase, and she rejoined him, stifling a grin.

So that’s it. I work for the president of the United States.

* * *

“Here you are, Miss Kramer.” The butler opened the door to her room and set her suitcase down just inside. “The bathroom is down the hall on the left, and you’ll be taking your meals downstairs in the White House kitchen. Supper is at seven.”

“Who else is up here?” she asked, noting the other doors.

“At the moment, just the housemaids and the occasional non-state guests. So, I’ll leave you to your unpacking now.” With the slightest hint of a bow, he backed away and closed the door gently.

She glanced around at her new quarters, in a part of the White House she hadn’t even known existed. The narrow room with a sloped ceiling was sparsely furnished, with fewer amenities than her rooming-house accommodations had offered.

She laid out her few belongings: her comb and brush, toothbrush, three changes of clothing, several sets of underwear. Nervously, she checked her watch. Almost ten.

After running her brush quickly over her hair and checking that her slip didn’t show, she hurried down to the main floor to the Lincoln Suite. No one replied to her knock.

Hopkins was undoubtedly still with the president, so she strolled toward the room where they were meeting. She’d only just arrived when the door opened. Hopkins stood in the doorway, his back turned, making some final remark. Curious, she looked past him to catch a glimpse of the president and caught her breath.

The president of the United States was in a wheelchair.

Chapter Three

Russia, September 1943


The air raid siren over the city of Arkhangelsk began to wail for the hundredth time, and Alexia sprang into action. The Red Army was pushing back the Germans all over the Eastern Front, but the Luftwaffe persisted in bombing Arkhangelsk, trying to block the arriving arms shipments. Not only the harbor came under repeated attack; the town itself was regularly bombarded.

She rushed down the creaking wooden staircase at the back of the house and ran full-out toward the school. The first wave of bombers was overhead now, dropping their high-explosive charges. Knocked to the ground by the first concussion, she rolled behind a truck, covering her head. Her ears rang, and when she looked up she saw that the school, just in front of her, was untouched. Unfortunately, another raid would follow within minutes.

She staggered along the cratered road to where the rest of the wardens were already assembling with gloves and helmets, and Grigory was unrolling the main hose. Waving to the team leader, she rushed up the stairs to her post, cowering behind one of the walls as the next wave of planes arrived.

As usual, the second wave carried only incendiaries. Where the earlier explosions had penetrated the roofs, the incendiaries would finish the job inside the buildings, igniting fires inaccessible to the water hoses.

The incendiaries themselves were small, but very hot. Hundreds fell at once, littering the tar-and-wood roof in a network of sizzling sparks, and the wardens lurched toward one after another to snatch them up before they burned through.

Though she held them for only a second, they scorched her gloves, and the acrid smoke reddened her face, but she and the others succeeded in flinging them onto the courtyard below, where they burned out.

Then the planes were gone, and the school still stood. Exhausted, she joined the others jogging back to town, too exhausted and coughing to cheer, or even talk.

Ten minutes later, still standing in the road, she heard the rumble, and her heart sank. A third raid. And this one was in earnest, for bombs began exploding all around them. The school took a direct hit. From their position, Alexia and Grigory watched, stupefied, as the interior of the building shot up in a mass of wood and flame and fell again, battering what was left of the walls. They didn’t budge from where they crouched. There was nothing left to save.

“That’s it,” Alexia said. “I’m joining up.”

* * *

Alexia brought the glass of hot tea from the samovar and handed it on a napkin to her grandmother. “I’m sorry, Babushka, but the time has come. All the men I know are at the front already, and now that the school’s destroyed, I have no job, no reason to stay at home.”

“I don’t want you to leave, my Alyosha. You’ve been the light of this house for so many years, since your mother died.” She gestured toward the simple room cluttered with painted pottery and embroidered cloths. “How will I manage without you?”

“You do very well without me, Babushka. The neighbor’s boys feed the goat and chickens, you’re in good health, and Father Zosima will still come by every day, as he has for years.”

The old woman sipped her tea. “But it is a sin to kill,” she grumbled.

“I know that, Babushka, but it’s not a sin to defend yourself from a murderer. And the Germans are murdering us.”

“I pray to the Virgin every night that the war will end, but it never does.” She glanced lovingly toward the “beautiful corner” of the room, where a cabinet draped with a silken cloth held candles and three icons.

“Babushka, you know the village headman doesn’t like you keeping those.”

“I don’t care. No one is going to arrest an old woman for her icons. Even if you claim to be a good communist and member of the Komsomol, I know you have a soft spot for them.”

There was some truth in that. The Virgin and Child image had comforted her when she’d been orphaned at the age of seven and adopted by her grandmother. Saint George’s icon was appealing because he had a horse, and she liked horses.

The third, supposedly of the Annunciation, attracted her the most. Gabriel, with silver-painted wings and streams of golden hair, was suspended in the air over the Virgin, the angelic lips lightly touching the virginal ones. From her earliest notice of the icon, Alexia had assumed the angel was a woman offering a holy, life-changing kiss. It had filled her first with contentment and then with longing. Even after formally renouncing the faith upon entering school, she had fallen asleep at night imagining that the divine female Gabriel, in a robe of fluttering silk, hovered over her and pressed angelic lips on her own childish ones.

She laid a protective arm over her grandmother’s back. “I’ll always have a soft spot for you and this house. But I have to go. Patriarch Sergei himself said on the radio that the task of all Christians is to defend the sacred borders of the homeland against the German barbarians.”

The old woman sighed and set her tea glass aside. She placed a noisy kiss on Alexia’s cheek and stroked her hair. “All right. You have my blessings, Alyosha. But you must first promise to go and see Father Zosima.”

Alexia braced herself. That was going to be the hard part.

* * *

The old wooden church of Arkhangelsk had been closed for years and adapted as a storage depot. But the old priest known as Father Zosima still lived in a room at the back of it. When she knocked on his door, he greeted her with an embrace and led her into the church where barrels of kasha and dried fish had replaced the holy objects.

He drew her down next to him on a bench. “You see what the communists have done to us?”

She understood his sorrow and recalled the Christmas celebrations of her childhood, but she had no time for nostalgia. She gathered her courage and blurted out the news.

“The German bombers have destroyed my school. I have no more work, no more reason to stay here, so I’m enlisting.”

He took both her hands in his. “I am aggrieved to hear it, my child. I wish you would not soil yourself by killing. Even in defense. God gives us a free choice at every moment. You can choose to serve but not shoot. Perhaps you can be a medic or a guard or a mechanic.”

“Mechanic? I don’t know a wrench from a potato. As far as medicine is concerned, I’m afraid I’d cause more harm than good. I’ll go where they send me. Besides, weren’t you in the tsar’s military when you were a young man? My grandmother mentioned it once.”

“Yes. I was an officer. I was also a brute to my servants and a charmer to the ladies. I even fought a duel for a woman.” He chuckled at her expression of astonishment.

He smiled wanly. “I was really quite dashing, in fact, and caught the eye of a certain married lady. When her husband challenged me to a duel, I could not refuse. But the night before was a particularly beautiful summer evening. Moonlight shone on the water of the park where we were to duel. I decided I could not defile such beauty by killing someone, especially a man whom I had wronged in the first place.”

“So you canceled the duel?”

“No. I let him shoot me. And you know, God rewarded me for my decision by letting me be wounded but not killed. I recovered and vowed to never hurt any man. I renounced my military commission, and after a year of study I became a priest. So you see? We always do have a choice, even if it is only the choice of self-sacrifice.”

“I… I don’t know what to say. I suppose I will have choices, but not many.”

“Then choose to serve without shooting. And pray for the salvation of those who want to harm you. Remember, the most important gift we have is our capacity to love. Do not forget to love.”

Alexia sighed. She had grown up under the guidance of Zosima, but his faith didn’t include defending himself, or anyone. She thought of the angelic kiss of the icon. It seemed worlds away from the bombs dropping on Arkhangelsk.

She embraced him and left him sitting in his dusty church-turned-storeroom.

* * *

The commissariat was housed in an old brick building that had once been an export station for cod, snail fish, and salmon to the inland cities. The Bolsheviks had confiscated it in the 1920s and removed its processing equipment, and now the sign overhead read Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army. As she entered, Alexia was sure she could detect the faint odor of fish.

The commissar was short and somewhat spherical, his plump jowls blending in a smooth line with his wide neck, and the top button of his uniform collar was invisible under the rolls of his chin.

“So, you’d like to enlist,” he said. It wasn’t a question, so she merely nodded.

“How have you served until now?”

“In the Komsomol. I’m also a schoolteacher. Was. My school was bombed.”

“Schoolteacher, I see. But what about military training? Did you follow any of the Vsevobuch courses?”

“Yes, Comrade Commissar. Driving, marching, small-arms firing, political instruction.”