Enchantments: A Novel of Rasputin's Daughter and the Romanovs (13 page)

Alexandra had grown into an even more peculiar teenager than she had been a child. The unrelenting cloud remained, immune to capture in a bottle or incineration over a gas ring, and the girl under its shadow, always a rapacious, even gluttonous, reader, had finished with juvenile romances and moved on to tomes of history, philosophy, and theology. She held gossip in contempt and, raised by Queen Victoria the Prudish, shrank from all mention of the one topic that consumed Petersburg nobility, men and women alike. Sex. Alexandra’s lovely face could have been chiseled from marble, its public expression so controlled and unreadable she impressed people as frigid. But Nikolay wasn’t easily discouraged. Twenty-one, conversant in Italian, fluent in French (practically unavoidable, as it was the Russian aristocracy’s chosen tongue), Tsarevich Nikolay spoke English as well as he did Russian.

“One happy, heavenly day, your image appeared before me,” he breathed, whispering the lyrics’ English translation as Alfredo declared his love for Violetta, who wrung her hands onstage and begged that he leave her, even as Alexandra shrank from the hot words the tsarevich poured in her ear’s pale canal. “Since that trembling moment, I have secretly loved you,” Nikolay whispered.

Alexandra moved her chair to the right, closer to the wall, and then Nikolay moved his closer to hers, and so it went, inch by inch. “If you were mine, I’d take care of you day and night,” Nikolay said, his lips so close to her ear that she felt his breath wash over the damp curls on her neck.

“Stop. Please. Please, won’t you please stop?”

“Why? Don’t you want to know the translation?”

“No. I mean, I don’t … I’m happy just listening to the music.”

“Are you sure?” Nikolay said. “Wouldn’t it make the opera more enjoyable, to know the meaning?”

“I’m fine as I am. Really I am.” Alexandra fanned her cheeks with both hands, from nerves rather than heat. The habit was one her grandmother found worse than inelegant—outlandish!—and once, when she caught the girl “flapping,” as she called it, during a state dinner, Victoria had kicked her smartly under the table, catching her on the shinbone and precipitating a cloud so dense that Alexandra had had to excuse herself and flee upstairs to her room.

“Are you too warm?” Nikolay asked. “There’s champagne.”

“No. No, thank you. It’s very kind but …” Alexandra fell silent. In the minutes that had transpired between Act One’s friendly rebuffs and Act Two’s fatal passion, Nikolay had trapped her chair tight between his and the wall, and moved his body closer to hers until she felt the heat of his thigh through the fabric of her dress.

Was it the panic in her eyes that showed him? Was it her trembling fingers, or the shiver of her leg against his? Was it the hammer—not the race but the hungry throb—of her pulse under
his lips when, while whispering, his mouth strayed from her ear to her throat? Something told Nikolay what other suitors hadn’t drawn near enough to guess: virginal Alexandra was the prisoner of a secret, unslaked sexual thirst.

“Please, I want just this very little one,” he said when the curtain fell after the final act. He reached forward and with his index finger caught one of the red-gold locks that had escaped her chignon during the chase of the chairs. Slowly, he twirled the trespassing finger until he had the hair coiled tightly around his knuckle. Her eyes remained on his and, not knowing how firmly he held the curl, she joined her hand with his and pulled, expecting to remove its too-familiar touch. But even had he wanted to, Nikolay didn’t have time to loosen his hold, so together they yanked the hair hard, and, as it was growing from that most tender spot, at the nape of her neck, tears spilled from Alexandra’s already brimming eyes.

“I’m sorry,” they said, at the same instant. Still, neither let go of the curl. The remainder of the box’s occupants—Ella and her husband, Sergei, Number Three of the Meddlesome Four—turned away when they saw that Alexandra was weeping, for, good heavens, the girl burst into tears at any provocation, or at no perceivable provocation, and when she cried, the cloud was sure to rain, causing that much more dampness and fuss, and the longer people stared, the longer it took her and the rain to stop.

“I have …” she said, brushing at her wet face when she’d regained her voice.

“Have what?” Nikolay asked, removing his coat to give it a shake. Did the girl never speak a full sentence? The wet curl, unwound, drooped over her shoulder.

“My grandmother gave me …” From her evening bag Alexandra withdrew a tiny red leather case, inside it a paper of needles, a twist each of white, black, red, blue, and yellow thread, and a pair of folding scissors that, unfolded, were no longer than her smallest
finger. “For emergencies,” she said, and she looked so solemn at the idea of an emergency that might be cured by a needle and thread that he laughed, and she smiled. “Here,” she said. “Take all you want.” Her sister and her brother-in-law had left; only the two of them remained in the box.

The scissors were too small. He couldn’t get his thumb and finger into the holes. “I’m afraid you’ll have to do it,” he said, handing them back. “Just as well. I’d take too much.” He watched as her hand found the pulled curl and separated it from the others. Another cascade of hair broke free of the pins, and then they, too, were falling. “Let me,” he said, and he bent to retrieve them as she sawed at the lock of hair.

“Shall we trade?” he asked when she had finished, and he held out four platinum hairpins, each adorned with a flower of diamonds, in exchange for the one little curl. Once in possession of his prize, Nikolay lifted it to his mouth, feeling with his lower lip how silky it was. “At such a price only a king could afford all of you.”

“I’m sorry?”

“So many diamonds in exchange for a bit of your hair,” he explained, gesturing toward the profligate pins in her hand, and Alexandra blushed even more extravagantly than before, red blotches staining her white neck.

“I’m … Perhaps I will have something to drink. Water?” she said, and as the box offered only the sweating bucket of champagne, he took a glass and went in search of it. As soon as she saw her way cleared, Alexandra snatched up her fur and ran down the stairs leading to the grand foyer, to catch up with Ella and Sergei outside the opera house, the cloud following just as quickly, but a different color than ever before, almost pink, as if illuminated by a sliver of sun breaking over the horizon. Too high to fit in the carriage when the three of them climbed inside, it had no choice but to follow overhead.

What, what, what was I thinking, she asked herself all the way home, watching out the carriage window, staring at the houses they passed. So many windows, and each a square of golden light through which black silhouettes moved, some walking, others waltzing. Alexandra tried to keep her hands folded in her lap, but her fingers kept returning to the shorn place at the nape of her neck. What was I thinking, she asked herself. What have I done? And she answered.

I’ve fallen in love, she thought. Oh God, oh no, oh God have mercy on me, I’ve fallen in love. She stood and leaned out the window, leaned all the way out to look for the cloud, but, as she expected, it was gone. She caught the very last puff of pink as it vanished into the night.

“What’s this?” her lady-in-waiting asked when she brushed out her hair for bed.

“What’s what?” Seated, Alexandra looked into her lap. “Oh, that,” she said. “Nothing. It was a snarl. I cut it out.”

“Your hair got tangled at the opera?”

“It must have done. Or perhaps it happened when I leaned my head out of the carriage to get some air.”

“Were you unwell?”

“Oh, no, not at all. Just … it was a bit stuffy, that’s all.” Alexandra pointed at her evening bag, lying discarded on the bed. “I used the scissors Granny gave me. The little sewing scissors I carry.”

“And what about the …?” The lady-in-waiting spun her finger in the air over Alexandra’s head. “The … the you-know: it’s disappeared.”

“Has it?” Alexandra looked up, feigning surprise. “I’m tired, I suppose. I’m not feeling my usual self.”

The Wayward Hand

“I
T’S PECULIARLY UNCOMFORTABLE
,” Alyosha said, “imagining Mother as a girl.”

“What do you mean ‘as a girl’?”

“You know what I mean. As the object of … of the attention of a suitor.”

“Oh,” I said, embarrassed enough that I glanced away, out the window. “I’m sorry, Alyosha. You can’t imagine it was my intent to make you uncomfortable.”

“No, but …” He waited, and when I said nothing, continued, “You told the story. I listened. That’s all.” As he was speaking, I noticed that Alyosha’s hand was in my lap, having insinuated itself with exceptional delicacy, so lightly I didn’t feel its arrival so much as I was aware, suddenly, of its intimate placement.

I looked at Alyosha, who opened his large eyes, showing me the thick fringes of his black lashes, black as the ring around each iris, which sparkled in complexity. Storm clouds; the breast feathers of a chimney swift; shadows fading into dusk; a rain of silver coins: every moody, moving, mutable gray was represented. His mother’s eyes. I removed the hand from my lap and replaced it in his. We’d been playing rummy earlier, and a card fell from his lap to the floor. I can picture it still, the three of spades. I remember it as I might a title card between two scenes in a moving picture, announcing
intrigue to follow. I bent to retrieve it and then popped back up too quickly, betraying my nervousness. But he hadn’t moved.

“Father was supposed to marry Hélène,” Alyosha said finally, offering me escape. “Wasn’t he?”

“According to the Meddlesome Four.”

N
IKOLAY’S UNCLES COMPLAINED VEHEMENTLY
when the tsarevich told them he hadn’t any feelings for the daughter of Prince Philippe, Comte de Paris, pretender to the French throne.

“France is a republic,” Nikolay Alexandrovich said. “It doesn’t have anything but a pretend throne.”

“That’s not so,” the Meddlesome Four corrected Nikolay Alexandrovich. “A throne can’t be a pretender. Only a person of high birth can pretend. And Prince Philippe is Louis Philippe’s grandson.”

“And,” Nikolay said, “an ardent democrat who fought for the Union Army in America’s Civil War.”

“That was under the Second Empire,” the Meddlesome Four intoned. “That was under Napoleon the Third.”

“Of course he went to America,” Nikolay’s mother said. “Anyone with the money to do so would have emigrated at a time like that. It doesn’t mean a thing.”

“Of course it does, Mother. The man is a democrat. It’s only other monarchies that recognize him as a monarch.”

“Nicky! We are a monarchy!” his mother said.

“But France is not.”

“Nicky! Don’t be illogical, don’t be absurd, and don’t try my patience.”

The tsarevich’s first obligation was to the empire, and, republic or not, France had a marriageable princess. As tsarina, Hélène
would cement Russia’s relationship with France, and, as Russia’s sole ally, France needed cementing. But the future tsar was no wiser a statesman when choosing a bride than he would prove at placating revolutionaries. Having danced with clumsy, cloudy Alexandra, who had no inclination to make the kind of clever, carbonated conversation for which aristocrats had a thirst as intense as they did for Roederer champagne, he knew it was useless to try to love any of the other princesses, with their perfect manners and empty heads, their eagerness to nod and smile at whatever he might say. The little curl, folded inside his handkerchief and held together with a stolen bit of his mother’s own embroidery floss, was safe in the pocket closest to his heart. Just knowing it was there bolstered his courage, and in a few weeks, as soon as Lent arrived and ended winter’s revelry, he faced down his mother’s disapproval.

“Nicky! The girl has nothing, not one single thing, to recommend her. Doesn’t play cards. Can’t speak French—”

“That’s not fair, she—”

“Don’t interrupt, Nicky. She can’t speak it so anyone understands it. Her accent is absolutely and irredeemably abominable. What is it about the English? They simply can’t, or won’t, speak anything but English, not comprehensibly anyway. No matter how many far-flung colonies they claim, they remain provincial. They insist on seeing every acre as another opportunity to replicate their Englishness. You don’t see the Dutch forcing Indonesians to wear clogs or the French tarting up the Congo in their national dress. But every last maharaja in India covers himself in epaulets and—”

“Mother. Alexandra isn’t English.”

“I know. It’s worse than that! She’s German, and living in England hasn’t made her any less so. And she can’t dance, not even to save her own life. The girl can’t get through a waltz without tripping over her own feet, so we know she doesn’t tango or polka or—”

“Mother.”

“What?”

“Will you please stop calling her ‘the girl’?”

“Why should I? She’s seventeen, female. She’s a girl.”

“That’s not why you’re calling her ‘the girl.’ ”

“Nicky! She can’t dance, can’t smile, can’t make conversation. And she certainly can’t preside over the Russian court with that … that … that preposterous emanation, or whatever you call it, over her head. I can’t abide it when a person insists on making her unhappiness everyone else’s burden. I know when a person has potential, and mark my words, Nicky, the girl has none.”