The Romanov Empress

by C. W. Gortner

  On that very day, as we set up tables in the garden under sheets strung over clotheslines to shade our guests from the sun, Nikolasha came to inform us that a Canadian colonel had arrived on our threshold.

  “He serves in the White Army,” Nikolasha told me. “He says he’s traveled across the country at great risk to bring us word from the British. It seems your sister Alix has prevailed upon King George to send a battleship for us, once the Germans evacuate.”

  Together with Olga and Xenia, I went into the drawing room, where this Canadian, Colonel Boyle, stood with Felix. Boyle gave us a pained bow. He must have been a handsome man once, over six feet tall, with impressive shoulders, but he appeared to have lost more than half his flesh. To me, he looked as if he’d walked across Russia, barely able to stay on his feet. Yet with a stoicism I admired, he did just that; upright, he accepted our offer of tea and replied to our questions, confirming that my sister had indeed persuaded her son to assist us.

  When Xenia demanded, “And have you any word of my brother the tsar?” I saw Boyle’s scarred hand flinch, nearly spilling his third cup of tea.

  “I was in Yekaterinburg,” he said carefully. He shifted his gaze to me as Xenia said in impatience, “Well? Were my brother and his family there?”

  The colonel blinked under the grime on his face—he was filthy, in dire need of a long bath—and as he struggled for words, my heart shrank in my chest.

  “Where are our manners!” I exclaimed, startling everyone. “Can’t you see Colonel Boyle is exhausted? We must let him take his rest. We have our picnic this afternoon; he can join us later, if he likes. Come.” I gestured to my daughters. “Let Felix and Nikolasha see to our guest.”

  Grimly, Xenia rose to follow me. Her husband was no longer with us. Despite my irate protests, Sandro had accepted the German offer to sail from Yalta with his eldest son, Andrei, to persuade the Allied powers of the severity of the crisis in Russia, as Lenin’s accord with the kaiser did not signify peace for us.

  “They won’t listen,” I’d warned him. “They’re still at war. Do you think they’re going to stop killing one another to see to our welfare? They haven’t thus far.”

  Xenia likewise pleaded with him to stay, but Sandro had had enough. I was so upset at him for abandoning us, I did not say goodbye.

  I now herded Olga and Xenia outside, leaving Boyle with Felix and Nikolasha. But a part of me remained in the drawing room, seared by the misery on Colonel Boyle’s face.

  About an hour or so later, as we set the tables with cutlery and plates, Xenia gripped my arm. She’d gone white as the sheets overhead. “Felix is on the terrace.”

  I turned with a hand at my brow to shield the glare. Felix was immobile; when he didn’t make a move toward us, I said, “Whatever is the matter with him? Why is he just standing there?”

  “Go to him,” said Xenia, with a quaver in her voice. I glanced at Olga, who kept her head down, sorting out the cutlery. I almost chided her for setting the salad forks on the wrong side. Instead, I turned resolutely to the terrace.

  As I neared, I saw that Felix had gone almost ashen, as if he’d received terrible news. And in that moment I no longer saw him or the faux-English manor behind him. I no longer heard the sough of the sea or Xenia’s sons’ cheers as they played a ball game before the luncheon. I heard my grandson Alexei instead, on that day he’d slipped at my Anichkov:

  I only stepped into the pond. I’m not bruised at all. See?

  “Minnie.” Felix’s quiet voice broke into my reverie. “Please, come inside.”

  I moved with him into the cool of the house. The drawing room was empty, the reek of Nikolasha’s cigar lingering in the air. Both he and Colonel Boyle were gone.

  “I trust you saw that poor Canadian to a bathroom,” I said. Stepping to a table and a vase of wild hyacinths that Xenia had arranged, I leaned to the fragrant blooms, breathing deep, wanting to fill myself with their scent. As soon as I did, I recoiled, almost upsetting the vase.

  The scent of lilac. Alexandra’s favorite flower. The smell of her perfume.

  Felix cleared his throat. Before he could speak, I said, “Whatever it is, I warn you now: The Bolsheviks are liars. They lie and deceive to torment us.”

  “Boyle is not a Bolshevik.” Felix took a step toward me. “You heard him. He was there. In Yekaterinburg. The White Army laid siege to the city and forced the Reds out. They reached the house. The locals…they call it ‘The House of Special Purpose.’ That was how the Ural Soviet had designated it. It was empty. Nicky and his family weren’t there.”

  A burst of laughter escaped me—harsh in that room, not my laugh at all. To my own ears, I sounded like a stranger, an embittered old lady, refusing to heed anything that might disturb her final idyll.

  “Of course they weren’t. They never were. Another rumor, like so many others.”

  He hesitated. I felt myself inch away from him, staking a precarious distance.

  “There was evidence,” he went on, his voice almost inaudible. “The rooms ransacked. Some of their belongings left behind. And in a cellar on the ground floor…” He paused, as if gathering his fortitude. “Bullet holes in the wall. Bayonet gouges in the floor. Boyle recognized the marks. And dried blood, he said, hastily wiped up. He’d seen traces like it before, in battlefield infirmaries. He said there must have been a lot of it.”

  As this dreadful pronouncement thickened the air, I met his eyes. “You’ve always had a nerve, Felix Yusupov. More nerve than any man I’ve known. The nerve to kill a mystic and boast of it.” As he flinched, I went on, “But you’ve exceeded your own nerve today, to have the effrontery to utter such a monstrous falsehood to me.”

  He held out his hands. “Minnie, no more. Please. You cannot deny it. You must accept it, for all our sakes. Boyle said the other soldiers with him saw it, too. One of them had a camera and took a photograph. He said they were going to send it to your nephew King George.”

  “Of a filthy cellar?” I did not raise my voice, but I felt my scream cresting inside of me, a wail that would shatter the entire world if I gave it release. “What proof is that?”

  “That they’re dead. The Bolsheviks murdered them and disposed of their bodies.”

  The room darkened around me. I swayed, unmoored; I had to grope toward the sofa as if I slipped across the deck of a floundering ship. Dropping onto the sofa, I saw my granddaughters at the Mariinsky in their new gowns, waving to the audience; Alexei frowning on the terrace at the Alexander Palace, wanting to run after hoops with his sisters; and then, with heart-wrenching clarity, Nicky on the platform at Mogilev, turning from his train to lift his hand in farewell.

  Be strong for everyone, as you always are. We will see each other again soon.

  “No,” I whispered. “It cannot be. I don’t believe it.”

  Felix sank to his knees before me. “No one wants to believe it. But they’ve not been seen for months. Something horrible must have happened to them in that house.” He paused, meeting my eyes. “There’s more.”

  “More?” I could barely look at him. He was no longer the impeccable dandy who’d set an Abyssinian at his door while he dawdled with Irina—his face was fallen, his eyes haunted, as if he’d witnessed too much. I saw myself in him. I realized all of us here must look the same.

  “Boyle said other members of the White Army went on to Alapayevsk, where they heard that Ella, Constantine’s three sons, Prince Vladimir Paley, and the others with them had been thrown down a mine shaft. Locals took them to the site. The soldiers lowered ropes into the shaft and found the remains. And Grand Dukes Nicholas and George Mikhailovich, Dmitri Constantinovich, and Grand Duke Paul, your own brother-in-law—Boyle claims the Cheka has ordered them returned to Petrograd from their exile in Vologda to be executed.”

  I was suffocating, starved for air. “Rumors. That’s all it is. Rumors. Nothi
ng more.”

  Felix seized my hands. “It is happening. To all of us. We’re being exterminated.”

  I heard Spiro in my mind: Romanov vermin, the lot of you…

  Then Felix hesitated. I felt it in his grip, a sudden laxness, as if he were holding back.

  “Say it,” I hissed. “Say it now or never speak of it to me again.”

  He whispered, “Misha,” and I wrenched my hands from his.

  “No.” My cry wasn’t loud. It was scarcely a sound, but tears started to slip down his haggard face as he said, “Taken into the forest near Perm and shot. Boyle heard it from another White Army soldier, who met someone in Perm who’d witnessed it. The Bolsheviks claim Misha was abducted and has disappeared, but no one believes them.”

  “No. No.” I was shaking my head, wanting to shove him away. The details. How did Boyle know these horrible details? How could he know when we hadn’t? “It’s not true. It—”

  “Enough.” From the terrace doorway, Olga’s voice sundered the room.

  Felix turned on his knees to her. “She must hear it. She has to know. Sandro was right. You know it, too. They’re coming for us next. Boyle came here to warn us—”

  “I said, enough.” Olga glared at him. I’d never seen her like this; she’d become the personification of Sasha, her shoulders squared, her chin thrust forward in that manner he had, as if she’d smash her way through any obstacle. “Go to Irina and let my mother be.”

  He staggered to his feet. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, Minnie.” As he moved past Olga, I heard him sobbing. To my surprise, I spat out, “Stop blubbering like an infant. You’ll terrify the others. Not a word, do you hear me? Not one word to any of them.”

  Olga came to me. Coiled in my rage and sorrow, I turned on her. “You knew it, too?”

  “I feared it.” Her voice was subdued. “I told you in Kiev that they’d called for our arrest. Our lives were at risk. But I didn’t know this. How could I?”

  “No one could, because it’s impossible.” My voice fractured. “Do you believe it?”

  “Does it matter?” She regarded me with such tenderness, my youngest daughter, who’d rarely shown me affection or tolerance; she looked upon me now as she might her own babe after he’d thrown a tantrum and she must patiently suffer through the aftermath.

  “Yes. It matters,” I said. “If you believe it, if Felix, Nikolasha, and the others believe it, then they are dead. Whether it is true or not, we’ve killed them by losing hope.”

  “Mama.” Her voice wavered—I could see how deeply affected she was—but she didn’t offer me any comfort. She stood there, not awkward like Sasha when I’d flown into a temper, yet stolid like him, unwavering. “I ask if it matters because the only person who must believe it is you. None of us can leave without you, and you will never leave unless—”

  “They are your brothers.” Grasping at the couch, I hauled myself to my feet. “My sons. Our flesh and blood. How can you? How can you think of leaving when we don’t know anything? We have no proof, no matter what that Canadian says. They could be anywhere, dependent on us to save them, while we’re here debating whether or not to flee.”

  “We are not debating it,” she said, and once again I realized how much I underestimated her. Despite her artistic notions and unsuitable spouse, she was more of a Romanov than I cared to admit. “The only one still debating it is you. We all think it must be true. Why else have they gone missing? Why has no one seen them or provided any proof they’re still alive? But none of us will say it. None of us can say it, because we love you so much. Is the truth worse than letting you think you will see them again? Which is best to keep you safe with us?”

  “The truth,” I whispered. “I want only the truth,” and as she gave a futile sigh, I crumpled. She gathered me in her arms—sturdy arms that enfolded me, the sole anchor I had left in my anguished, vanishing world.

  “We may never know,” she said. “But whatever you believe, we will believe it, too.”

  * * *

  WINTER CAME AGAIN. In the Crimea, the wind had fangs, and the urgency of our predicament escalated, our supplies dwindling as the Germans consumed everything in sight. In November, the Allied powers hammered out an armistice with the kaiser, whose war machine had turned into wreckage. He suffered for his hubris: his regime toppled, his person exiled, his people forced into concessions that would starve Germany to its bones.

  We did not rejoice. The Great War might be over, but in Russia our civil war raged on, with Lenin’s Reds gaining ground. In late March 1919 a German general came to Harax to warn us of a Bolshevik takeover in the Crimea once his forces departed. They couldn’t protect us any longer here, but my nephew King Christian had sent word that he would receive me in Denmark. Likewise, my nephew King George had confirmed dispatch of the HMS Marlborough to Yalta. Though I did not see or speak to him, the general emphasized to the others that we now had a narrow window for escape. Within the week, we must be ready to depart.

  “We cannot be here when the Reds arrive,” expounded Olga, when we gathered for a family conference on the very day of Xenia’s forty-fourth birthday. My younger daughter was nine months’ pregnant with her second child, yet she exhibited none of the listlessness of most women in her state; if anything, she was invigorated. “We have an offer of safe passage and we must take it. Sandro is now in Paris with Andrei. Xenia and their other sons can join him there. Mama, you can go to England and then on to Denmark.”

  “I assume you will be coming with us?” I said darkly. She’d promised to stay with me, believing whatever I did, but with the threat now upon us, I sensed she had other plans.

  “Nikolai, Tikhon, and I will travel to the Caucasus. I can’t endure a sea voyage in my condition, and Boyle has offered to take us into the mountains; the Whites have driven the revolutionaries out of the region. At least this way, our child will be born in Russia. Afterward, we’ll make our way to Europe to meet up with you.”

  “You will not.” I was infuriated. “I’m not going anywhere, so you can give birth right here. The White Army hasn’t lost the war yet. And what of those who have sought refuge with us? We are still Romanovs. We are all that stands between order and chaos.”

  Xenia said, “Mama, you aren’t listening. You heard the general—”

  “I did not hear him. Germans. As deplorable as the Bolsheviks.”

  “God in heaven,” Xenia cried. “That German you find so deplorable took the time and care to warn us! It’s all been planned: only us, in absolute secrecy. I have my husband and our sons to think about. We’ve done as you asked, but we’ve heard nothing save horrors—”

  She cut herself short when Olga gave her a scalding look. “You won’t even look at the newspapers the Germans left us,” Olga said, in a steadfast tone that devastated me. “They’re holding memorial services for Nicky and his family all over Europe. To them, Russia is lost. They grieve us already. Do you want that to be our fate?”

  I stared at her, then at Xenia, who couldn’t contain her tears. Nikolasha kept his eyes downcast. Felix sat in silence with Irina, having avoided a single opinion since our confrontation over Colonel Boyle. At his side, his mother, Princess Zenaida, her former charm wasted by hunger and fear, met my eyes. She implored me without saying a word, this woman who’d been our most envied heiress, invitations to her palace balls the most esteemed after the court’s. All of it: Lost. Like Nicky was, to them. Vanquished. Already mourned.

  But not to me.

  I came to my feet. “I am ashamed to call you my family.”

  Before they could protest again, I climbed the staircase to my rooms. Tania had shut the window against the evening; although spring neared, a chill crept in with the night. As I stood there, Tip watching me anxiously from my bed, I wanted to fling things against the walls. I felt inchoate rage churning up inside me. I had to clamp down on it, biting into my
lip, the sting of it bringing me to reason as a tentative knock came at my door.

  I did not look around. “Go away. I will never abandon my sons. Do you understand?”

  “Yes, Grandmère.” At the sound of Irina’s soft voice, I started. She was a slip of a woman now, her fragile beauty turned gaunt. She ate less than a sparrow, hoarding her portions for Bébé. Yet despite her pallor and incised cheekbones, she was still ethereal, reminding me of my granddaughter Tatiana. “We will stay with you.”

  “No. You must take the British ship. Felix can sell his Rembrandts abroad. They’re worth a fortune; those and whatever jewels remain to Zenaida will support your family.”

  She shook her head. “Felix says he has caused you great distress. He will not leave you alone. And I cannot leave without him.”

  I almost smiled. “With refugees here by the dozens? I assure you, I’ll not be alone.”

  “What if they also decide to leave?”

  “They cannot. You heard Xenia. The British have orders to evacuate only my immediate family and me. No one else.”

  She went silent for a moment before she said, “Perhaps you can persuade the British to amend their orders. If you refuse to leave without everyone, what else can they do?”

  I knew what she was about. Despite his recent acquiescence, Felix had not forsaken his guile and had sent her to test me. I may no longer care what happened to me, but to be held responsible for those with us—he knew I wouldn’t abide it. He also knew that citing it would force me to make the one decision I’d avoided all this time.

  I finally assented. I had no other choice. “I suppose I can try.”

  * * *

  “IT IS QUITE beyond my orders,” declared the lieutenant commander of the HMS Marlborough. “His Majesty was specific. Only Your Majesty and your family.”

  “But you have more ships in the area? You’re not here alone?” When he gave reluctant assent, I said, “These people are our subjects. Find a way or leave without us.”