The Romanov Empress

by C. W. Gortner

  The men tromped out.

  “Dear God,” I breathed, as Tania quivered beside me and I peered past the screen to the mess they’d made. “I shouldn’t have heeded Felix. He said it was safe to send letters via Kerensky, but they’ve questioned the vice chairman. He told them everything to save his skin.”

  “Kerensky and the Duma have fallen,” whispered Tania. She moved jerkily, picking through my scattered clothing for a day gown. “They told Sandro when they barged in that Comrade Lenin has seized power. God save us, the Bolsheviks rule now, Majesty.”

  Once she fastened the dress on me, I shook her away to coil my graying tresses at my nape. I now looked every one of my seventy years. I didn’t even keep a mirror in my room, disgusted by how precipitously I’d aged. The vibrant dowager who had seemed to stop time was now as much of a memory as our galas and balls.

  “No ‘Majesty,’ ” I told her. “Don’t address me by my title, because they may shoot us.”

  As Tania gasped, I added sternly, “And you mustn’t show them any fear. They’re villains and louts. They’ll expect us to beg for our lives. We will not.”

  * * *

  —

  MY FAMILY WAS assembled in the drawing room, Xenia and Olga, with her baby in her arms, flanked by Xenia’s sons, as well as Olga’s husband and Sandro, both of whom were obviously trying to appear calm despite their worried expressions. The Yusupovs hadn’t stayed with us tonight; I was glad of it. Gathering my cowering pug from under the piano, I took a seat beside my daughters, with Tip in my lap.

  About a dozen men were loitering in our drawing room, handling our possessions, banging their elbows on the pianoforte keys with loud, discordant twangs—sailors in dirty coats, carrying pistols and bayonets. The sight of their weapons horrified me. I had to school myself to indifference. No fear. No matter what.

  Commissar Spiro entered, brandishing a sheet of paper. He appeared to be one of those ubiquitous lower-level officers who’d deserted our cause to join the revolution, puffing out his cheeks and chest with his newfound authority as he declared, “I will call out your names, and you respond.” He began reading from the paper in hand: “Alexander Mikhailovich,” and Sandro nodded. “Xenia Alexandrovna,” to which my daughter glared, and onward, citing Olga by her married surname. When he uttered my name, I refused to acknowledge it. He knew I was here.

  “Everyone accounted for,” he announced, to no one in particular. “Well, then. That was easy enough. By order of the Sevastopol Soviet, I’m hereby commanded to remove the following: Maria Feodorovna, Xenia Alexandrovna and her husband, Mikhailovich, their six sons named herein, as well as any of their servants, to the estate of Djulbar.”

  “Djulbar!” Sandro lost his precarious calm, though I went limp with relief, having expected much worse. “Whatever for? It’s not far from here, and we have the Tartar regiment as our guard. There’s no reason to move us—”

  “Not anymore.” Spiro regarded my son-in-law as if he wasn’t sure whether to laugh or strike him. “You’ll be housed under our authority by order of Comrade Lenin.” At the mention of the “little exile,” as Felix had dubbed him, Sandro went pale. “The Tartars are relieved of their voluntary duty,” Spiro went on. “They have no business here, as the Widow Feodorovna informed us. You’ll be protected by us in Djulbar. Start packing. We leave at once.”

  Forcing my voice out of my throat, I asked, “And Olga Kulikovsky?”

  Spiro checked his roster. “She and her husband are free to stay here or go wherever they like. They’re not designated as members of the former imperial family.”

  Before Olga could protest, I gave her a sharp glance. She went quiet. If she was left free because she’d wed a civilian, at least one of us would escape the roundup. Though she had a baby and could hardly move about, she might be able to help us.

  “Can we pack our food?” I asked, hoping to secretly alert Olga to the cocoa tins she must somehow hide. Then I realized my mistake.

  Spiro’s gaze narrowed. “No. We have plenty of supplies in Djulbar.”

  They did not; I knew it at once. They were going to steal ours and leave us to fend for ourselves as best as we could. When I met his stare, his mouth parted in a sneer.

  “You may count yourself fortunate, Widow Feodorovna. The Yalta Soviet wants all of you shot as traitors, but until Comrade Lenin himself authorizes it, you’re safe with me.”

  None of us could move. The sailors paused in their meandering of the room, where they’d been examining objects at will, shoving whatever they liked into their pockets. I noted Sandro’s finger was bare, his gold wedding ring stolen by one of them. By their surly expressions, I doubted they’d have any compunction in taking aim at us with their pistols.

  A sudden commotion at the door caused Xenia to let out a stifled cry. With laughing assurance that he posed no threat, Felix strode in, wearing his hat and overcoat and, incongruously, red leather Moroccan slippers, the cuffs of his silk pajamas peeping over his ankles.

  He met my gaze. He’d raced here in his motorcar, alerted to our arrest; no doubt he regretted encouraging me to write those letters, but I wished he’d stayed put. They had him now. He’d left Irina, Bébé, and Zenaida alone, with only a handful of servants to defend them.

  “Who are you?” barked Spiro.

  “Felix Yusupov,” he answered, with an air of offense. As he watched the commissar check his paper in consternation, Felix said, “Am I not on your list? Good. I shouldn’t be. I did our Mother Russia a great service not long ago.”

  I was holding my pug so tight that Tip wiggled, trying to get loose. Prince Yusupov, married to Princess Irina Alexandrovna, a member of the imperial family. Was Felix insane?

  Spiro looked up thoughtfully. “Oh?”

  “I killed Rasputin,” declared Felix, and the sailors began to chortle. “I shot him with these two hands.” Felix held up his palms. “Or with the one. I used the other to beat him about the head with the butt of the gun. The devil just refused to die until I threw him into the Neva, but he sank then. Like a stone. Right to the silt.”

  The sailors started applauding. Sensing he was about to lose control of the situation, Spiro barked, “Silence!” and unhooked his pistol from his holster. “Then I must also do our Mother Russia a service in return,” he said, glowering at Felix. “Which of these enemies of the state do you suggest I shoot first? The widow, perhaps?”

  As Spiro veered toward me, his pistol leveled, Felix said with remarkable calm, “Before you do, I suggest you check the cellars. An excellent vintage, favored by the tsar himself. Perhaps we should toast together the death of the mystic and our glorious revolution.”

  The sailors discarded all semblance of obedience. As I watched in amazement, they gave a bellowing cheer and propelled Felix between them to the cellars, asking him to tell them the story of how he’d killed Rasputin. Spiro looked after them in dumbfounded bewilderment, shoving his pistol back into the holster.

  Felix was insane. Mad as only a prince of Russia could be. And he saved us that night. He set the sailors to carousing, getting drunk as gypsies on our most excellent vintage, while he strummed a guitar and they embarked on maudlin choruses until dawn. It took Spiro two full days to regain command over his unruly men, who emptied the cellars of every bottle and hoisted Felix onto their shoulders like a hero to parade him about.

  The resultant chaos gave Xenia and Olga time to hide our cocoa tins under paving stones in the garden; we then hastily stitched our precious, smaller jewels into the lining of Olga’s coat. When we said our tearful goodbyes at the gates of Ai-Todor, Olga clung to her colonel’s arm, weighted by the remnants of our wealth.

  * * *

  DJULBAR HAD A high wall, patrolled by Soviet sailors with purloined German artillery, under the leadership of one Comrade Zadorozny. Massive and rough-mannered as Spiro, to whom he sent his weekly reports,
he was fully invested in his charge. Yet unlike Spiro, he watched us in covert interest. I ignored him as much as possible, taking strolls with Tip in the parched garden inside the wall, despite the autumn chill, accompanied by Xenia and her eldest son, Andrei. After one of these walks, I caught Zadorozny staring.

  “Do we seem so strange to you?” I asked him.

  He averted his gaze. “I saw you once in Moscow when I was a boy. You seemed so…large. Like a statue. All covered in diamonds and silver. But you’re really quite small.”

  I smiled. He’d seen me when he was a child. He had revered me and must retain some of that reverence still. A good sign. Unless he had a direct order, he wouldn’t harm us.

  With Olga’s colonel and Felix free to move about, they arranged for weekly visits. Not with them, as they weren’t allowed, but with little Bébé, brought by her nanny, as Zadorozny didn’t think a child mattered. Olga pinned her letters inside my great-granddaughter’s bib and we returned our replies the same way. Felix had a contact in Petrograd; thus did we learn that sometime while we’d still been in Ai-Todor, Nicky, Alexandra, and their five children had been taken from Tsarskoe Selo to the remote province of Tobolsk in Siberia.

  I fell apart for the first time since the upheaval. Taking to my bed, all the sorrow and loss coalesced to sicken me. I developed bronchitis. As I hacked up what felt like my very lungs and shivered with fever, thinking I’d do better to die now in my bed rather than stay alive for whatever came next, Xenia tried to console me.

  “The Duma ordered their transfer months ago,” she said, plying me with a foul herb tonic she’d brewed herself. “For their own safety. They were already in Siberia when the Bolsheviks seized power; now we have the White Army fighting for us. Lenin can’t harm Nicky when he has his hands full trying to salvage his revolution. It’s better this way.”

  “How is it better for Russia to descend into civil war or Nicky and his family to suffer winter in Siberia?” I cried. “How is any of this better?”

  I did not die, even if I wanted to. I slowly recovered, though I couldn’t smoke nearly as much for the cough. Not that cigarettes were any easier to come by than decent food; Xenia was outraged when she caught me requesting a cigarette from one of the guards, chastising me for consorting with the enemy.

  “He’s a boy,” I said, spitting out shreds from the cheap tobacco. “He’s not even twenty. Look at them: They’re all boys. Their revolution is a child’s game. He doesn’t hate us. None of them do. He told me so himself.”

  “Your boys will still shoot us if Lenin gives the order,” she retorted. The next time my great-granddaughter visited, along with Olga’s letter there were Turkish cigarettes from Felix, stashed in the pram. “If you must smoke,” said Xenia, “smoke our kind.”

  In the spring of 1918, Zadorozny informed us that Lenin had negotiated an accord with the kaiser. Panic broke out among us; we waited in terror every day for word that we were to be transferred to Moscow, where Lenin had established his Bolshevik capital, with his own security force called the Cheka, which mandated the registration of every Romanov. I worried most about Misha, from whom no one had heard a word. I kept asking about him, to no avail, until in a rare outburst for me, I railed at Zadorozny.

  “I’m a mother,” I cried. “To you, this may be freedom for the people, but to me, it’s a calamity for my children.”

  He gave a solemn nod. “I swear to you, I know nothing about your son. I’m doing all I can. The Yalta Soviet wants you and the others delivered to them, but I will only answer to Comrade Lenin and the Petrograd Soviet.”

  In retaliation, the Yalta Soviet came to fetch us, under the guise of protecting us from approaching German troops, now sweeping in retreat to the Crimea. Zadorozny refused to unbolt the gates, manning the guns on the wall with Sandro and my grandsons. Deprived of their prize, the Yalta soldiers looted several villas nearby, including Ai-Todor, forcing Olga and her colonel to flee to the Yusupov estate, where Felix was dismantling jewels to pay local Tartars to protect his family. As the region collapsed into disorder and we expected to be rounded up and shot at any moment, Zadorozny decided to depart, lest he and his men face German reprisals. After he offered to take us with him and we declined, he gave over the guns on the wall to Sandro.

  When he took his farewell, he kissed my hand with such startling gallantry, rousing a fleeting resurrection of my bygone glory, that it brought tears to my eyes.

  “God be with you,” he murmured. “My duty was to keep all of you safe.”

  A revolutionary he might be, but his Russian reverence ran deep. I almost missed him and his crude comrades when all of a sudden we found ourselves waiting, at the mercy of the Germans, about to be liberated or made prisoners again by the very kaiser who’d plunged most of Europe into a maelstrom of destruction.

  I did not sleep. I stashed a knife under my pillow and paced my room.

  When a German field marshal arrived with a detachment of soldiers to declare us under their protection, I wouldn’t receive him. Sandro had to act as our go-between, conveying the kaiser’s invitation of refuge in Germany and returning my indignant refusal.

  “Why?” Sandro threw up his hands. “We can’t stay here, hoping against hope that Nicky will be restored to the throne. White Army or not, it is over. We’ll never be the imperial family again.”

  “We will always be the imperial family,” I retorted. “Their offer is a formality. Lenin has made peace with the kaiser. Do you think rescuing us was a term of their accord? If they manage to get us out, it will only rouse Bolshevik antipathy toward those we leave behind.”

  With the Germans in charge of the region, Olga made haste to join us, with her colonel and her baby. Soon thereafter we left Djulbar for the villa of Harax—an English-style estate near Cap Ai-Todor, close to the port of Yalta. A lovely manor house overlooking the Black Sea, with terraces garlanded in honeysuckle, it belonged to Grand Duke George Mikhailovich, first cousin of my Sasha, now a captive of the Cheka. It reminded me of Hvidøre; I felt more at ease here, even if provisions were scarce as ever and the renewed influx of news did nothing to alleviate my fears.

  Aristocrats fleeing behind the Germans flooded into the Crimea. Other family members joined us, including a battered and dispirited Nikolasha, whom Nicky had relieved of military command. For months he’d been in hiding, moving from place to place to avoid detection. He believed the Germans might arrest him for his part in the war, so Felix and Sandro arranged a Tartar bodyguard for us. More jewels were dismantled and dispersed, but not ours. Olga had crept back to Ai-Todor to retrieve our cocoa tins, and we hid them under floorboards in the manor; we might need the jewels to ransom our family, I told my daughters. Let Felix pawn off Zenaida’s pieces. She’d left the bulk of her collection in her palace vault and might retrieve it one day. She’d not suffer the lack as we would.

  Everyone had a dire story to tell, of hardship and terror. A few also had disquieting confirmations to impart. Felix, who received everyone, told me that Misha had indeed been arrested by the Cheka after the registration mandate. My son sent Natalia and their son into hiding, but he was apprehended with his secretary and dispatched to Perm, in the Ural Mountains bordering Siberia. I was frantic for him, unable to absorb the blow when I also learned that Alexandra’s sister, Ella, and a fellow nun of her convent, along with Grand Duke Sergei Mikhailovich, Sasha’s first cousin; Prince Vladimir, son of my brother-in-law Grand Duke Paul by his morganatic marriage; and the three sons of Grand Duke Constantine, nephews of my late brother Willie’s wife, Olga of Greece, had likewise been arrested and sent to Alapayevsk in the eastern Urals, where they’d disappeared without a trace.

  Most disturbing was the news that Nicky and his family had been removed from Tobolsk, to no discernible purpose. Speculation ran wild that they’d been rescued by the Germans, which I thought improbable. A more credible and horrifying rumor was that Lenin
had ordered Nicky brought to Moscow to stand trial but the fanatical Ural Soviet intercepted him and Alexandra en route, taking them captive and demanding that the children also be rendered into their custody.

  “In the city of Yekaterinburg,” said Felix. “They’re being held in a merchant’s house there.”

  “Allegedly,” I countered. “No one has actually seen them that we know of.”

  “Not that we know of. But it’s the most persistent rumor about them.”

  “There were persistent rumors that we’d been killed. Yet here we are. Alive.”

  Felix tried to summon his mordant humor. “If you can call it that.”

  “We are still breathing, aren’t we? So are they. We must pray for them.”

  I did pray. Every hour of every day. During our paltry Easter celebration and on my knees in my bedroom at night, I prayed with every ounce of strength in my being. I prayed as I had never prayed before. The faith I thought I may have lost, of which Nicky had said Alexandra possessed a surfeit—that faith, tenuous and frayed, was all I had to sustain me.

  This time, however, I prayed for a miracle.

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  September of 1918 was so infernal, only at night did the heat dissipate into sultry relief. We expanded our vegetable garden to have extra fresh foods on our table, as more refugees arrived to seek asylum in neighboring villas, hoping proximity to us would safeguard them. To entertain them, and distract us from our worries, I organized an outdoor luncheon. Although Olga regarded me as if I’d lost my mind, Xenia eagerly took to the idea. Anything, she said, was better than digging up weeds, rationing our pitiful supply of meat, and wondering when the next batch of week-old rumors might arrive.