While the others play games, Alix sits in her compartment to watch Russia go by. Towns are infrequent now—it’s mostly woods upon woods, and more woods. Sometimes the train passes a field fenced with rough-hewn wooden boards, confining a few head of cattle, or a clearing with a small cottage and an even smaller barn. The afternoon grows misty, and the train crosses a lake on a long spit of land that splits the water into two pewter-colored halves. The farther east they travel, the more mysterious it seems. In Germany farms and lanes, towns and streets, are out in the open, known and mapped. Here the forests keep so much hidden. If Russia is the vastest country on earth, and Miss Jackson says it is, must it inevitably be, also, the most mysterious? What magical wonders unfold in the enormous, murky, remote stretches of land? Of course, they won’t be staying anywhere wild and nameless. Papa says their home for the trip will be Peterhof, the seaside estate of the Romanovs, built by a tsar called Peter the Great. A bit like Osborne, Alix imagines, but with onion domes. Late that evening, long after supper, they disembark at the…