The Grand Duchess of Nowhere

by Laurie Graham

  ‘You see, Papa?’ he said. ‘This person’s children are younger than me and they’re allowed bicycles.’

  I’d rather hoped Nicky would go straight to Sunny’s suite to break the news to Botkin in private but instead he had him sent for and then stood about discussing the prospect of more snow and puffing lightly on his cigarette.

  I said, ‘Should I stay? When Botkin comes?’

  ‘As you wish.’

  ‘Perhaps somewhere less public?’

  ‘Public?’

  ‘The children?’

  ‘Ah, yes, I see what you mean.’

  Too late. The door opened and Genya Botkin walked in, so genial and unsuspecting. I wished myself a thousand miles away. And then Nicky muffed things even further. Instead of going straight to the point he asked first about Sunny’s health and I had to listen to a long reassuring rigmarole about the workings of the Empress’s nervous system, all the while waiting for that terrible blow to be dealt. And in a room full of toys. It was too awful.

  Poor, poor Botkin. He remained perfectly composed. Apologetic even, for having to cut short Sunny’s consultation.

  Nicky said, ‘The Empress will understand perfectly. Sad day. No greater sacrifice. You have the nation’s gratitude, Botkin. Won’t keep you. You must be wishing to get off.’

  I thought he might order a car to take Botkin home but he didn’t. He just lit another cigarette and turned away. The interview was over.

  I wheeled Tanya’s bicycle and Botkin and I walked together. It’s not a great distance but it seemed to go on for ever. I suppose that’s why I talked to him about losing Elli, to fill the silence. To put myself on a certain footing with him, that I knew what it was to lose a child.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ he said. ‘I never knew.’

  Then he said, ‘My wife, my former wife, will have to be told about Mitya, but I’m not entirely sure where she is. So many things I don’t know.’

  20

  There was an accident on the line just north of Tsarskoe Selo. The Petrograd train halted at a signal and was shunted by another train coming up from Pavlovsk. It jumped the rails into the path of the down train. There were dead and injured. Anna Vyrubova was among them. Lyubov Obolenskaya was the first to tell me. She said Vyrubova had been killed.

  An hour later the news had changed. Anna Vyrubova was alive but only just. She’d been carried to her house and a priest had been sent for. Tsarskoe Selo was the village of unreliable information. Uncle Paul’s Olga brought me the revised version the following day. It wasn’t a priest that had gone to Anna but Grigory Rasputin. He’d stood by her bedside and told her to get up and walk.

  ‘And she did,’ Olga said. ‘The Empress’s monk really seems to have performed a miracle.’

  ‘Just like Jesus,’ said Kira, who was not supposed to be listening.

  Anna Vyrubova did recover, though not completely. On good days she walks with crutches, on bad days she uses a merlin chair. It was after the accident that she closed up her house and moved into rooms at the Alexander Palace. Sunny’s orders. What Anna’s husband thought of his house being given up, I don’t know. Vyrubov was away with the Pacific Fleet and I don’t ever recall seeing him. Perhaps he made his own arrangements.

  It was April. Cyril’s idiot dog was celebrating the thaw by digging his way to the centre of the earth, when he suddenly left off this important work to start yipping and squealing. I thought he must be injured and ran to the window, but Krot was barking with joy not pain. A car had pulled up and his master had climbed down from it. Cyril was home on leave.

  The girls came running but then, when they actually saw him, were a little shy of him for a minute. Then they joined Krot in his frenzy of doggy happiness. I had to wait in line for my kiss.

  ‘At last,’ he said. ‘I thought I’d never get here.’

  Kira said, ‘Why is Daddy kissing you so much?’

  Cyril said, ‘Because I’ve missed your lovely mama so very much.’

  ‘Even so,’ she said.

  He looked tired but he’d put on weight. Whatever else might be going wrong on the Polish Front they dined well at Headquarters. He had things to tell me too, after the children were in bed. In particular about Sunny and her holy man. After a few glasses Uncle Nikolasha apparently grew very free with his opinions.

  ‘According to Nikolasha’, were the opening words of several delicious pieces of gossip. In ascending order of outrage they were: that Grigory Rasputin wasn’t a miracle-worker at all, but a fake; that he was plotting against Uncle Nikolasha, to have him removed from command; that he was an insatiable satyr who cured women’s ailments by driving them to excesses of ecstasy and that Empress Sunny sometimes received him wearing nothing but her nightgown and shawl.

  Cyril agreed with me that the last charge was utterly fanciful. Sunny would never do anything so improper. I thought Nikolasha’s fears for his position sounded a little mad too, but Cyril wasn’t so sure.

  He said, ‘They had a set-to, you know, quite some time ago? Nikolasha came right out with it, called the Holy One a fraud. Told him he saw straight through him. Rasputin went running to Sunny and Sunny was in an absolute fury with Nikolasha, for upsetting her ju-ju man.’

  ‘But that was before the war. Nicky needs Uncle Nikolasha now. Even Sunny must understand that. Who else could run the war?’

  ‘Oh, but it gets worse. You know what Nikolasha’s like. He doesn’t care for anyone’s good opinion. Rasputin wrote to him, acted all conciliatory. He offered to come out to the Stavka to bless the chapel and lead the officers in prayer. And do you know how Nikolasha replied? “Yes, come, you reptile. I’ll string you up.” And now there’s talk of Nikolasha being replaced. It’s just a rumour, but these things come from somewhere. There’s talk of Nicky taking command himself.’

  ‘Would that be a bad thing?’

  ‘Bad? It’d be a bloody disaster.’

  ‘Have you ever seen Rasputin?’

  ‘Only that time in the Kazan Cathedral. Got chucked out of the ADC’s seat, remember? Well, he certainly seems to have enchanted everyone now. You’d think it was the Second Coming.’

  The Russians do love their Holy Men. I was always reluctant to say anything for or against Grigory Rasputin. I didn’t know him, and if he’d truly stopped Alyosha’s bleeding when he was sick, what mother could blame Sunny for believing in him and keeping him close at hand? I will only observe that the women who flocked to his apartment and invited him into their own drawing rooms were, without exception, reckoned to be St Petersburg’s silliest.

  Cyril brought news of Missy too. Nando’s old Uncle King had died and Nando had succeeded him, so my sister now truly was the Queen of Romania. They still hadn’t come into the war though.

  Cyril said, ‘Nor will they, unless the war reaches their own doorstep and they’re forced to declare. Nando prefers a quiet life.’

  I said, ‘He may do, but Missy doesn’t. I’m sure she’s raring for Romania to come in on our side.’

  He laughed.

  ‘Missy, the Warrior Queen?’ he said. ‘I’m not sure about that. Mightn’t it rather ruin her hair?’

  I said, ‘Is that what you think of us? Don’t you think Missy will want to do her bit?’

  He said, ‘It was just a joke.’

  But I didn’t find it very amusing. He underestimated Missy and he underestimated me. He never asked me anything about my time in Galicia, about the things I’d seen.

  ‘Pas devant les enfants,’ he’d say. ‘Sterling work, Ducky, I’m sure, but you should never have gone to the Front. I’d never have permitted it. Your place is here, with the girls. Offer Sunny a hand at one of her hospitals if you feel you must do more. She’d appreciate that. Might even improve relations.’

  *

  It came time for Cyril to return to the Stavka. It hung over us those last few days.

  I said, ‘I dread getting a letter, like Botkin did.’

  He said, ‘I’m not in any danger. You were f
ar more likely to be killed, going off with those damned ambulances. Promise me you won’t go back.’

  I promised.

  He said, ‘I waited long enough for you. I couldn’t bear to lose you now.’

  I was very teary his last day at home. He had his valet pack his dress coat, to be ready for a victory parade.

  He said, ‘Chin up, darling. I reckon we’ll be in Berlin by October.’

  The Germans had turned their attention to the west, so Russia had breathing space, to build up her lines, to train her men and equip them properly. But Russia isn’t like Germany. Things don’t happen in a timely, orderly way. Sometimes they don’t happen at all. Supplies are despatched but somehow they never reach their destination.

  ‘Well,’ people say, ‘it is a very big country.’

  Of course we weren’t in Berlin by October. On the contrary, we were in retreat. Cyril hates to recall that time.

  ‘Sheer bloody incompetence,’ he says. ‘Defeat snatched from the jaws of victory.’

  Towns that we’d captured were lost again. And while our units and munitions went missing or arrived in the wrong place the Germans regrouped, very quietly, and then hit us hard, first at Gorlice and then all along our southern lines. They took back Lviv, they took back Przemyśl, and our infantry turned and ran. It’s been said that they threw away their weapons. Cyril grows very angry when anyone repeats that.

  ‘What weapons?’ he says. ‘Half of them had nothing but broom handles, poor buggers.’

  But in May of 1915, when he went back to Headquarters he was still full of optimism.

  ‘Next year,’ he said to the girls, ‘when the war’s over, we’ll go up to Haikko and have a lovely holiday.’

  War quite altered St Petersburg. Petrograd. I must remember to call it Petrograd. Many familiar faces were missing but there were plenty of new arrivals. There were the press men, like Dr Williams who was terrifically brainy and had a rather fierce-looking Russian wife, and Mr Walpole, whose eyes were too weak for the army to have him. Then there were the military bods, like General Alf Knox who worked out of the British Embassy, and Sam Hoare who set up the British Mission at the Astoria Hotel. And then there was Bertie Stopford who was neither one thing nor the other.

  I first met Bertie at Miechen’s lunch table in the summer of 1915. He was English but he often lapsed into French. His age was difficult to guess. By his skin, certainly over fifty, by his deportment he could have passed for thirty-five. He wore no uniform and he had no credentials, but he seemed to know everyone. Miechen said Felix Yusupov had ‘discovered’ him when he was in London and added him to his collection, but I have the feeling Mr Stopford was the one doing the collecting.

  Cyril’s brother, Andrei Vladimirovich, was at that lunch party, home on leave.

  He said, ‘Who’s the exquisite, Ma?’

  Miechen said, ‘Bertie Stopford is a great expert on Cartier. He also dances like an angel. There’s no one better to lead off a cotillion.’

  As Andrei said, a good dancer is a useful type to have around when there’s a war on. I’ve grown to like Bertie Stopford though. Some people think he’s a dangerous tittle-tattler but I’ve found his gossip to be entirely reliable. He has courage too. One wouldn’t think it to look at him but he’s jolly plucky, in that quiet English way.

  The summer heat settled over us like a damp horse blanket. Even riding our bicycles seemed like too much of an effort. Masha and Kira ran around barefoot and Miechen predicted the end of civilisation. I longed to go back to Galicia, to defy Cyril and try to find my lovely ambulances, but our kitchen boy had chickenpox and then Peach broke out in shingles and was wretchedly ill, so that put paid to any such plans. I did get news of my unit though. Florrie Marsh had broken her arm trying to crank-start the Talbot and been sent home, back to the Kudrin family who had kindly donated her services. I went to call on her, over Vyborg side. The Kudrins were tradespeople, manufacturers of rope. They had a very fine house. Funny, one never thinks where rope comes from and yet there are people who’ve made great fortunes out of it.

  I’d hardly have recognised Florrie. She’d lost a great deal of weight.

  ‘Not only me,’ she said. ‘We all have. We’ve been living off our blubber. The Boche have had us on the run and we’ve never had a minute’s rest. You’ve no sooner put your head down and there’s orders to retreat. At this rate we’ll all be speaking German by next year.’

  She said the worst part of retreating was leaving the wounded behind.

  ‘You can’t take them all with you,’ she said, ‘it stands to reason. You just have to hope the Boche will treat them right. I don’t know. If it was the Germans who shot them to pieces in the first place why should they treat them kindly once they find them in a hospital cot? Doesn’t make any sense. But that was the order. The able-bodied were to retreat and regroup. I’ve had men spit at me for walking away from them and I can’t say I blamed them. It haunts me, it really does.’

  My lovely Delaunay had leaked oil from a cracked seal and died on the road to Włodawa.

  ‘Pity,’ she said, ‘it was a very nice motor. I suppose some German brass’ll have his eye on that, whatever’s left of it. The last time I saw it a pair of milch cows were having a taste of its canvas hood.’

  She didn’t know whether she’d be going back into the war.

  ‘I wouldn’t mind,’ she said. ‘But I reckon it might be over by the time this arm’s mended.’

  Uncle Bimbo telephoned.

  ‘Just back in town,’ he said. ‘Thought I might motor over.’

  I told him we were a plague house but he said he’d come anyway. He brought flowers for me and calves’ foot jelly for Peach.

  ‘You may not have heard,’ he said. ‘Nikolasha’s out. He’s been relieved of his duties. Nicky’s declared himself Commander-in-Chief.’

  It was as Cyril had feared.

  Uncle Bimbo said, ‘It’s a regrettable step. I’m no great admirer of Nikolasha. He can be very quarrelsome. Always was a scratchy individual. But he’s a damned fine soldier. God help us now he’s gone. Our Imperial Majesty is a decent enough man, but what does he understand of warfare? Nothing at all. As you may imagine I thought it best not to say any of this on the telephone.’

  Uncle Bimbo was quite convinced that our telephone conversations could be overheard. I didn’t really see how, but one didn’t wish to argue with him. He understands how all kinds of machines work.

  He said, ‘The general feeling is that this is Rasputin’s work. He’s been campaigning against Nikolasha for months.’

  Also as Cyril had thought.

  I said, ‘But why? He’s a monk. What does it matter to him who’s in charge of the army?’

  ‘Monk, my eye!’ Bimbo said. ‘Monks don’t go out carousing till all hours. I’ll tell you what he wants. Emperor Nicky out of town. He already has Sunny in the palm of his grubby hand. Our beloved Empress doesn’t wipe her nose without his approval. And with Nicky at the Stavka who’ll be running the shop here? Sunny. That’s Rasputin’s game. We’ll have that German dumpling as Regent and an unwashed schemer as her right-hand man. That I’ve lived to see this day!’

  I said, ‘But Sunny won’t have any real power. She mayn’t do anything without consulting Nicky first.’

  ‘Consult Nicky?’ he said. ‘As well ask the man in the moon for a decision. He won’t even use the telephone. He’ll sit at the Stavka chewing his pencil while Rasputin tells Sunny what to do. You’ll see. Then all his friends and relations will start getting positions and contracts. They’ll be swarming in, under the doors and up the water pipes.’

  Uncle Bimbo got quite worked up, and I’m afraid I laughed at him, even later on when, true enough, Grigory Rasputin’s friends did start to profit from his influence. There was the wonder-working flame-thrower that turned out not to be worth a kopeck let alone the considerable sum Rasputin’s friend had been paid for it. I have apologised to Uncle Bimbo since.

  He said, ‘Never bl
amed you, Ducky. What sane person would have believed it? After three hundred years, our great house pulled down by a stinking faker and a foolish woman.’

  One afternoon, when she came in from her piano lesson, Kira asked me, ‘Who’s the Nyemka?’

  I said I didn’t know.

  ‘I do,’ said Masha. ‘It’s the Empress and no one likes her because she’s German.’

  I told her not to repeat such things.

  I said, ‘Granny Miechen is German too. Granny Edinburgh is half German. You should mind your tongue.’

  Kira said, ‘And anyway, Peach says the Germans are really our brothers and we shouldn’t be fighting them.’

  Aunt Ella wrote to ask me if I would talk to Sunny. In Moscow, she said, wherever a crowd gathered they shouted for the Empress to stop interfering in Russia’s affairs and take the veil.

  It’s so very unfair, Aunt Ella wrote. We can none of us help our blood or our upbringing and I’m sure Sunny has done everything she can to become a good Russian but if they take axes to Bechstein pianos, what might they do to a German Empress if she continues to provoke them? The children too. She should take them to a convent for safety. If Nicky must stay at the Front he should appoint Misha to be his Regent. Sunny has to understand her limits. To which I could only reply that Sunny had never been my friend so I was the last person on earth she would listen to. And the very idea of Grand Duke Misha being Regent seemed too ridiculous. Emperor Nicky had only allowed him to return because of the war. If Misha reigned in Nicky’s absence, people would have to start receiving his wife. And then, what if Tsesarevich Alyosha were to have a bleeding episode and die while Misha was Regent? Wouldn’t that make Misha’s little son the obvious next heir? It was unthinkable. Besides, in Petrograd there was another slogan going around. Grand Duke Nikolasha for Tsar!

  *

  Warsaw fell in August 1915. My ambulances returned to Russian soil and the Stavka pulled back from Baranovichi to Mogilev. I offered my services to Georgie Buchanan at her hospital on Vasilievsky Island. I drove for her, as required, and when I wasn’t needed as a driver I helped in the laundry. I loved the steam and the soapy smell and the endless, mindless nature of the work. I’d always thought I was strong until I had to haul wet sheets. But my strength improved and so, by all accounts, did Empress Sunny’s. Her neuralgia disappeared, her headaches stopped and daily visits from Dr Botkin were no longer required. Suddenly she was well enough to jump out of bed at first light. She put on a kind of nurse’s uniform and learned how to dress wounds.