Enchantments: A Novel of Rasputin's Daughter and the Romanovs (4 page)

“I wish you wouldn’t say that.”

“What?”

“ ‘Your highness.’ ”

“I’m sorry, Alyosha,” I said, and I begged his pardon, as I’d had to do on several occasions since the day we were left in the schoolroom to get to know each other, an introduction postponed by my falling ill with quite the worst flu I’ve ever had. My head was aching when I left the tsarina in her boudoir, my eyes dry and hot. As soon as I was delivered to my room, I crawled under the counterpane in my street clothes and fell into a restless sleep from which I woke before dawn, worrying over Father’s body, which the coroner had promised to release by noon, and his burial, for which arrangements had yet to be made.

There was no point trying to rest. I bathed, dressed, and secured
permission to return to the capital, and by the time I made my way back to bed, I’d missed another and another night’s rest and, thoroughly spent, succumbed to a fever that climbed and broke, climbed and broke, a hundred times it seemed, before I was well enough to sit up against my pillows with a tray on my lap.

“You’d better eat something,” Varya observed from the chair by the window, where she was buffing her fingernails in the wan winter light. “You look like a ghost.”

I felt like one too, when I made my way to the water closet, my head spinning with the effort of walking a few yards. Too faint to stand and put my hair to rights before the mirror, I took the brush back to bed with me, where I found I wasn’t any more equal to the effort of sitting up for as long as it would take to untangle so many snarls.

“What are you staring at like that?” Varya asked.

“Nothing. I was just trying to sort out the date.” And to separate the nightmares I’d dreamed from the one I was living.

“The ninth.”

“Of January? That’s impossible.”

“Ask Doctor Botkin. He should know—he’s been in to see you every day.”

“The admiral? The one with the gold buttons?”

“He’s not an admiral. He’s a physician.”

He looked like an admiral, though, with a navy-blue military coat trimmed with enough gold braid to inspire nautical fever dreams, and he wore so much cologne it made me sneeze, which he interpreted as evidence of continued infection, keeping me to my bed for a full week more and quarantined to my room for another one after that. It was February before I made the tsarevich’s acquaintance, stepping into our friendship on a more querulous note than I might have had the tsarina not saddled me with a responsibility I knew I couldn’t meet.

“You have the reputation of being a rather difficult person,” I said, aborting a curtsy and offering him my hand. I didn’t mean to say it—the words just popped out of my mouth.

“Really?” he said, squeezing my fingers hard, as if to assert his station. “Who told you that?”

“I don’t know. Someone must have, but I don’t remember who.”

“It wasn’t your father, was it?”

“No,” I said. “A girl at school, most likely. Father never criticized.” Alyosha said nothing. He was more handsome a boy than I’d gathered from photographs, with dark hair and gray eyes. “Do you know why I’m here?” I asked, finding myself annoyed by his good looks and by his height, which allowed him to look down his straight nose at me. “Here at Tsarskoe Selo?”

“Because my father wished it.”

“Yes, I suppose that is true, in that nothing happens outside your father’s wishes.” I wondered suddenly—but only after the words left my mouth—if the tsarina had meant me to keep our conversation in confidence. “My understanding is that Father believed Varya and I would be safer here than anywhere else he might send us in his absence. Your mother imagines I will be able to do for you what he did,” I said. “That I can cure you.”

“Does she?” the tsarevich said. He studied me from where he was standing, leaning against one of the schoolroom desks. There were five, one for each of the Romanov children.

“She told me she did. She seems to believe Father bequeathed me to your family for the purpose of preserving your health.”

The tsarevich nodded. “That sounds like Mother.”

“You seem quite well to me,” I observed.

“I am at the moment,” he said. “It won’t last though. It never does.” His expression was one of resignation, but he didn’t feel sorry for himself. I could see that much.

“Well, then,” I said, “I suppose I will be tested when the time comes, and we will discover if I’m of any use to you.”

Alyosha smiled, his eyes on my face.

“What are you looking at?” I asked him.

“Nothing. Your father called you his ‘little magpie.’ I was wondering why.”

“A pet name, that’s all.” One inspired by my talking too much when excited. “Like a bird in a tree,” Father used to say. But I didn’t explain this to the tsarevich. I was still holding tight to whatever I could that was left of my father, guarding it jealously and keeping it for my own. It wasn’t fair to blame Alyosha, and I didn’t. Still, I had to push the thought away: if it weren’t for his everlasting illness, my father would never have been murdered.

“You’ll have to …” he said, “I mean, I hope you will forgive my mother. She is … I’m afraid she can be a little unreasonable. I’ve caused her so much worry, you see. It’s made her nervous. And she … she believes …” Spots of color appeared on his cheeks.

“What does she believe?”

“In the grace of God,” he said after a moment.

“And you?”

“I believe in history,” the tsarevich said, with a gravitas I wasn’t ready to accept as genuine, coming from a boy who wasn’t quite fourteen. I hadn’t yet learned—witnessed—how life had taught him fatalism.

“And what about the future? Do you believe in it too?” I wish I’d only thought the words, but I said them aloud, with a tart tone in my voice.

B
ULLETINS ARRIVED AT
T
SARSKOE
S
ELO;
the tsar was apprised of each new disaster, but weeks passed and he did nothing—nothing of a political nature. He marched through the woods, he swam in
the saltwater natatorium, he hunted, and he rode his horse, until, on March 10, he made the mistake that cost him his crown—well, not
the
mistake, as there already had been too many to count, but the last and most egregious one. He ordered that the capital be returned to its former state of relative calm, no matter what was required. To accomplish this, his police tore around the city in armored cars; his Cossacks galloped along the avenues, cracking whips and brandishing bayonets; his soldiers fired Chauchats imported from France that spat out 240 bullets every minute. But not only was it too late, order no longer possible; the actions he took against the rioting citizens inspired the Bolsheviks to organize themselves and prepare to challenge his authority.

“How much does my father understand of revolution? Anything?” Alyosha wanted to know. “Can it be a concept he refutes, one he finds heretical, the way Pope Urban the Eighth insisted the sun revolved around the earth and called Galileo a heretic?”

“I should think you know him better than I,” I said, answering what was probably a rhetorical question. We were in the schoolroom, occupied with our separate studies—Alyosha’s directed by his tutor, whose head was bent over the second volume of Gibbon’s
Decline and Fall
while Alyosha force-marched himself through the first. I was rereading
Jane Eyre
, in English instead of Russian, allowing me to call it a scholarly occupation rather than the pleasure—the escape—it was. Varya was with the Romanov girls, learning the correct way to put stalks in a vase, a lesson I’d dodged as Admiral–Dr. Botkin, having detected a wheeze while listening to my back with his stethoscope, wouldn’t allow me to walk through the cold to the greenhouses.

Tsar Nikolay didn’t talk about politics. He had four uncles filled with opinions and would have been, by everyone’s account, happy to hand them the empire. He wanted only to be allowed his exercise and to travel to his army’s headquarters in Mogilev, where he could
sleep, eat, and march among his soldiers. As far as I could tell, he spent more time with his army than he did with his family, and I’d heard it said he would have had trouble deciding between the life of a soldier and that of a farmer, had he escaped his heritage.

But, as all the world knows, he did not escape, and on March 21, 1917, General Kornilov, who had lately presided over the Petersburg garrison, arrived at the Alexander Palace to inform the tsarina that, as there wasn’t any empire left, she and her family were under arrest. The former tsar, his abdication extracted from him as he traveled in his imperial train, had yet to return home from Mogilev to Tsarskoe Selo because the railway workers had received the news of the tsar’s having been toppled as an invitation to stop service for all Romanovs and their retainers.

“Go down. See what’s happening,” Alyosha said, after Kornilov had been announced. He got up from where he was sitting with his bodyguard Derevenko, playing yet another game of dominoes, a game I hated and refused to join. Alyosha had two bodyguards, Derevenko and Nagorny, both of whom appeared to dote on their charge and were gentle in spite of their military demeanor. Each had previously been a naval officer; now they took turns supervising all the tsarevich did, to make sure no harm came to him, and carrying him in their arms when, inevitably, it did.

Alyosha gave me a push toward the stairs, and I pushed him back, just a little bit, because I hated that kind of thing in boys, especially in princes, who ought to know better than to boss people about, if only because they got all they wanted anyway. After slipping downstairs, I hurried to the drawing room’s double doors, which were left open into the corridor, one widely enough that I could hide myself behind it, my back to the wall. Even Father admitted that his little magpie had a talent for silence and for making herself as invisible as a scullery maid.

I watched through the crack as Alexandra Fyodorovna received
Kornilov. By now, nearly a week after her husband’s abdication, she’d moved on from destroying official correspondence to incinerating private letters, diaries, telephone messages, bills from the wine merchant and from the purveyor of caviar and truffles, even the former tsar’s game book, in which was recorded every boar, buck, and bird he’d dispatched with his shotgun—any scrap of information that might fall into the hands of some malevolent someone bent on slandering her poor blameless Nikolay. The drawing room’s fire had burned all night, its flames licking, cracking, and smacking as it consumed leaf after leaf of creamy stationery bearing the gold-embossed Romanov crest. The flue must have needed adjusting. The ceiling over the hearth was blackened with soot.

“Abridging history, I see,” Kornilov said, sniffing at the smoke-tinged atmosphere. He was a good-humored-looking man, with ears that stood out like handles from his shorn head and a mustache so robust it obscured his lips. The tsarina rose from where she had been sitting among emptied boxes. Her mauve-lipped pallor continued to unnerve me. On the cushion next to hers was a small bundle of billets-doux to her from her husband. This was all that remained of what had been thousands of letters to tens of recipients, her grandmother, Queen Victoria, foremost among them.

Already I’d overheard servants talking among themselves about plans for the tsarina and her children to join Tsar Nikolay at Murmansk, the seaport on Kola Bay, where they’d find a ship to board for a journey west toward asylum. Because even if England’s George V, the tsar’s own first cousin, wouldn’t have them, surely somewhere would. America or Australia or whatever other continent invited thieves and outcasts and exiled dreams.

But what of Varya and myself? I didn’t know whether we would be considered a part of the Romanov family and treated as such, or taken by the new regime’s police to be questioned about Father, or liberated with the rest of Russia and discharged into the chaos
of Petersburg to make our way home to Siberia, and I didn’t know which would be worse or if we had any choice in the matter. And timing—there was timing to consider. I’d intended, before the tsar left for Mogilev, to approach and speak with him, to find out what he knew, or could control, of our fate, but each time I’d succumbed to my fear of taking up the topic at exactly the wrong moment. Though they’d encouraged us to befriend their children and, to all appearances, welcomed us into their lives, the tsar and tsarina were like two people poised on the crest of a breaking tidal wave, surveying the landscape against which they would be dashed. Each time I marched myself, like a responsible older sister, down the corridor to the tsar’s study, rehearsing my little speech in my head, I ended up turning right where I should have turned left, grabbing my coat, shoving my feet into Wellingtons, and stealing away as fast as I could to the one place I knew I’d find comfort.

Just the smell of them and the sound of their breathing and all the other noises I knew so well: their soft whickering, the swish of a tail after a fly, and the accompanying stamp of a hoof. Just to press my face into the soft flesh of their necks, run my fingers over the ridge of velvet nostrils, feel the gust of their warm breath hit my face, my neck and chest. I would have petitioned to live in the stable had the idea not struck me as one my hosts would find preposterous.

Peering through the crack at Kornilov, I wished I’d had the nerve to approach the tsar while there was still time to act, before Kornilov and his soldiers came for us. But I hadn’t, and perhaps because it was simpler to contemplate their fate, I found myself worrying about the horses before the people. What would happen to the old ones, long retired from the harness? I hoped the groom would think to end their lives mercifully before soldiers took over the stables. And the others, who were fit for work, accustomed as they were to tranquil bridle paths and the affection of all who cared for them, what would
happen to such animals were they commandeered by the gathering Red Army and forced into the pandemonium of civil war?

There was one horse I particularly liked, Gypsy, a black mare compact enough that a bareback rider—the only kind I knew to be—was comfortable straddling her withers. She shared a loose box with Vanka, an aged donkey the Cinzelli Brothers’ Circus had presented as a gift to the tsarevich and his sisters after a private performance at Tsarsko Selo. As Botkin had forbidden me to ride as well as walk in the cold, I spent hours sitting in the hay, long enough that I’d seen Vanka do what she was famous for doing. Occasionally, the donkey entered a sort of fugue state in which she believed she was before an audience and, without any warning, ran through a repertoire of tricks that included running backward. The first time this happened, Alyosha told me, the tsarina had nearly fainted as the donkey swiftly (demonically, it seemed to Alyosha’s mother) approached him, the muscles of her hindquarters pumping energetically. What would the nervous tsarina assume but that the animal was rabid?