Princess Daisy

by Judith Krantz

  In November of the following year, 1911, Vasily and Titiana’s son was born. They named him Alexander after his paternal grandfather, and the young mother who had missed so many entertainments while she was pregnant was more determined than ever to dance every night. Valensky did nothing to dissuade his wife from her pursuit of pleasure as she graced the balls given by the Sherementevs and the Yousoupovs, the Saltykovs and the Vasilchikovs. She led all the other ladies of St. Petersburg in the élan of her waltzing, and she astonished them with her inventiveness at the costume balls of Countess Marie Kleinmichel.

  The approach of Lent, which began on the Sunday before Ash Wednesday, signaled the end of dancing. During Lent, concerts and dinner parties replaced balls and, in the private opinion of Masha, Alexander’s wet nurse, it was a good thing that her mistress was going to be forced to go to bed earlier. Although the Princess only flitted in from time to time to watch Masha as she nursed the baby, the peasant girl, stout, plain and sensible, thought to herself that in spite of her prettiness the Princess looked tired and too thin. Masha was only seventeen. She had spent all her life on the Valenskys’ Kashin estate where she had been unlucky enough to bear an illegitimate child the day before Alexander’s birth. However, Masha’s baby had not lived and the estate manager immediately sent her to St. Petersburg to nourish the newborn heir. Her homesickness had disappeared as soon as little Prince Alexander had claimed her milk.

  On that last Sunday the Valenskys went to a lunch party on a country estate. Afterward they joined in a parade of galloping troikas and finished the afternoon with an especially boisterous snowball fight. When the last dance of the season stopped at the sound of the great clock in the hall striking midnight, Vasily found Titiana strangely willing to drive home. He had expected her to be in despair at the prospect of a temporary end to merrymaking, but instead she felt so tired that she went to sleep in his arms in their heated carriage and the next morning she slept late and woke up no more rested than she had been the night before. She complained, in petulant tones, that she must be getting old.

  Vasily immediately sent for the doctor. He had never seen Titiana listless and fretful before, and he was frightened. The doctor spent an endless amount of time in Titiana’s pink and silver damask bedroom. When at length he emerged, he spoke of a minor congestion of the bronchi, of a tendency to overstrain the nerves, of a febrile condition.

  “What is the treatment?” Vasily demanded impatiently, interrupting the man’s interminable medical obfuscation.

  “Why, Prince, I thought you understood at once. It may be an inflammation of the lungs, in effect, although I am not a specialist, you must understand, in effect, it may be tuberculosis.”

  Valensky stood as if he had been shot and was waiting to fall. Titiana and tuberculosis? Titiana, who galloped in breeches as in the time of Catherine the Great; Titiana, who only laughed when she was thrown into a snowbank from an overturned troika during a race; Titiana, who tobogganed fearlessly down the dangerous twisting slopes of the ice hills; who had given birth to their son in six hours without a whimper; Titiana, who would let him take her even in a field where the harvesters might have found them?

  “Impossible!” he cried.

  “Prince, I am not an expert. You must call Dr. Zevgod and Dr. Kouskof. I cannot be responsible.” The doctor edged toward the door, anxious to escape before the Prince realized that he had pronounced what, at that time, often amounted to a death sentence.

  Zevgod and Kouskof agreed on the necessary steps to be taken. Princess Valensky had admitted to them that, for the last months, she had been troubled by night sweats and a loss of appetite, but she had refused, foolishly, to worry about them. Her lack of caution and her strenuous life had aggravated the condition and now no time could be lost. The Princess must go directly to Davos, in Switzerland, where the treatment of the disease was clearly superior to that found elsewhere.

  “For how long?” Vasily asked sternly.

  The two doctors hesitated, neither one willing to commit himself. Finally Zevgod spoke.

  “There is no way of knowing. If the Princess responds to the treatment, she may be back within a year … or two. Perhaps a little more. But she must not return to this damp city until she is perfectly well. As you know, it is built on marsh and swamp. To come back would be suicide for anyone with a weakness of the chest.”

  “A year!”

  “That would be a miracle,” Kouskof said gravely.

  “Then you really mean that it could be for many years—is that not what you are trying to tell me, gentlemen?”

  “Unfortunately, Prince, yes. But the Princess is young and strong We must hope for an early recovery.”

  Valensky dismissed the doctors and went to his study and closed the door. He could not possibly tell his sparkling, brave, treasured wife that she had to go away for even as long as three months or three weeks. There was nothing on earth which would make him sentence her to live in a sanatorium. The very word filled him with horror. No! She would go to Davos, that was essential, but they would take Russia with them.

  Prince Vasily dispatched his chief male secretary to Davos to rent the largest available chalet. Three French lady’s maids were immediately put to work filling Titiana’s trunks. There was one which contained nothing but gloves and fans, three which held only narrow embroidered satin slippers, twelve for her dresses, four for her furs and five for her underclothes. Pouting enchantingly over the clothes she had to leave behind, she told Vasily that it was a good thing that she was not overfond of her wardrobe, like the Empress Elizabeth who had owned fifteen thousand dresses.

  Meanwhile, the other servants were packing the finest furnishings of the palace, under the direction of another of the Prince’s private secretaries, who chose only the best French pieces from the period of Louis XV and XVI. Valensky himself made the decisions about which works of art to take. He was an avid collector but since he didn’t know the dimensions of the chalet they were to inhabit, he took only easel paintings by Rembrandt, Boucher, Watteau, Greuze and Fragonard, leaving behind the vast canvases by Raphael, Rubens, Delacroix and Van Eyck.

  In spite of the modern way in which they lived, the Valenskys, like all Russians, had never stopped venerating icons and the Prince stripped the separate rooms which had been kept as an oratory. There, rows and rows of icons, many of them so adorned with gold and jewels that they were literally priceless, stood with lamps burning before them day and night. Their protective curtains were drawn, they were laid in their own velvet-covered boxes, after which they were carefully placed in special crates. Certain icons, particularly personal, that were considered to be protectors of the household, would travel in the train with the family in their own compartments.

  Nothing that was needed to reproduce the palace on the Moika was left behind, from kitchen pots and pans to three rock-crystal chandeliers that had once belonged to Madame de Pompadour.

  Ten days later, forty servants, an adequate if skeleton staff in Vasily’s opinion, gathered at the station in St. Petersburg. Additional sleeping cars had been added to the Prince’s train to accommodate them all. All the baggage cars were fully loaded, and the two kitchen cars were so packed with food that the chefs had difficulty going about their tasks.

  Prince and Princess Valensky, with Masha carrying little Alexander, drove to the station in a closed carriage accompanied by a most important servant, Zachary, the chasseur, in his dark blue uniform with gold epaulets and his formal cocked hat trimmed with white feathers. Zachary was in charge of the actual logistics of the journey; he was responsible for making sure that there would be no frontier delays, no lack of fresh provisions, no lost baggage or any other problem that might disturb the smooth progress of the train on its long southwest journey.

  At Landquart, in Switzerland, the private train had to be abandoned since it could not run on the narrow-gauge Alpine tracks. The Valenskys remained in it for several days until all their servants and possessions had been laborious
ly transported by a smaller Alpine train up to the heights of Davos-Dorf. Then they, too, made the steep, winding, upward journey among frozen waterfalls and snow-smothered fir trees. Titiana shivered although the compartment was warm and she was covered with furs. Her glance recoiled from the vast drop into the abyss on one side of the train but could find no comfortable resting place on the peaks toward which they climbed. Her small, gloved hand clutched her husband’s arm as they climbed higher and night began to fall. It was dark outside before they reached the point at which the valley began and the roadbed became level.

  “We’re almost there, my darling,” Vasily said. “Boris will be waiting at the station with the Rolls-Royce.”

  “What?” Titiana asked, her strange terror momentarily canceled by surprise.

  “Certainly. Did you think we were going to drive in some hired cabriolet like a good bourgeois couple on their way to a christening? I ordered the new Silver Ghost last year as a present for you. It was ready two weeks ago so I merely telegraphed Mr. Royce in Manchester and requested that he send it on here instead.”

  “But Boris can’t drive an automobile,” Titiana protested.

  “I instructed Royce to send one of his English driver-mechanics with the car. He can teach Boris—or, if not, we’ll keep the man on.”

  “Even the Tsar doesn’t have one!” Titiana clapped her hands gleefully. “How fast will it go?”

  “Last year a special model went one hundred and one miles an hour—but I think well stay well under that—I don’t want to frighten Boris.” Vasily was delighted with the success of his surprise. It was exactly the thing needed to take Titiana’s mind off her arrival in a strange land where her disease would finally have to be faced. It had been worth all the effort and thousands of pounds expended to make sure that the automobile would be in Davos in time for their arrival.

  It seemed perfectly natural to Titiana Valensky that her chalet in Davos should be a miniature of her palace in St. Petersburg, and that she should have the same quality of total service she had always taken for granted, service so complete that the same woman who risked her life on a horse without hesitation had never put on her own stockings. Women of her class never knew the price of anything, neither the price of their jewels, their shoes nor their furs. They would not recognize that piece of paper called a bill if they had ever chanced to see one. They chose everything they wanted without asking or thinking of cost Expense did not exist for them, not even as an abstract concept, just as it never occurred to them to visit the kitchens of their own palaces.

  Now that Titiana was confined to Davos, she set about regaining her health with as much blind determination as she had put into losing it.

  Vasily, marooned as a mountaintop, kept in almost daily touch with events in Russia by means of mail and the telegraph, and Russian, French and English newspapers reached him twice weekly by a special courier from Zurich. In 1912, when five thousand workers in the Lena goldfields went on strike and incredibly held out for a month, he took note. This strike led to others, far more widespread until, in 1912, there were over two thousand strikes. The last time there had been such serious troubles in Russia had been in 1905 when troops had fired on workers in front of the Winter Palace, a day that would always be known as Bloody Sunday.

  For long hours Vasily pondered in his library in Davos. It was evident to him, from the doctors’ reports, that his family and his servants were not to leave Switzerland for many years. While his wife had not become dangerously worse, neither had she shown signs of improvement Willpower was no match for fever, courage could not win a victory over a bacillus. Her nighttime temperature curve was slightly higher than it had been several months ago when they first arrived and the rales in the right lobe of her lung were as harsh as ever. The doctors never spoke of time; a question about the future was treated as if it hadn’t been asked, as if it were the question of a fool.

  Prince Vasily Valensky set his teeth and determined that if his family was to live in exile for years, they must certainly live without the bother of sending to St Petersburg for money. He decided to sell his platinum mines in the Urals, and his sugar plantations, forests and sawmills in Kursk. He put the immense fortune thus realized into Swiss banks where it would be immediately available to him.

  Tattersall, the Englishman from Manchester, who had failed utterly in instructing Boris in the mysteries of the Rolls-Royce, now taught Vasily to drive the Silver Ghost. The Prince discovered that while the great machine, the most famous model the firm of Rolls-Royce ever made, could negotiate any mountain road ever constructed, there were not enough roads around Davos for a good day’s motoring. It was then that he sent to Russia for the great wooden troika. As soon as snow covered the ground, Vasily took the reins of three strong horses, and strapped little Alexander securely to the seat at his side. The father and son became a familiar and much admired sight in the shop-filled, festive streets of Davos, as they passed through the town on their way to the snow meadows.

  There were other Russians of noble birth among the patients of Davos, as well as a good sprinkling of British and French aristocrats, and soon many of those who were ambulatory could be discovered at Princess Titiana’s. It had never occurred to anyone in the family even to try to adapt themselves to this foreign country: cozy, quaint, comfortable, safe, dull, dull Switzerland. To enter the chalet was to walk into St. Petersburg where all things produced a distillation, profoundly nostalgic, of the profusion, the elaborate, careless abundance and warmth of their vanished home. Certain refugees who entered the chalet for the first time gazed about them, breathed in the scent of the dark, gold-tipped Russian cigarettes, listened to the sound of rapidly spoken French and burst into tears.

  These elegantly dressed habitues, cheeks a shade too red, eyes a shade too bright, ate with unappeasable appetite. Here and there, throughout the reception rooms, stood long tables covered with food. The Valenskys kept open house, both at tea time and dinnertime, with dozens of Russian servants busy refilling glasses and plates and passing boxes of imported cigarettes and cigars. On those evenings when the Princess was not well enough to appear, none of her guests was so tactless as to remark on her absence. On the days when she felt strong enough, she was dressed by her maids in one or another of her two hundred tea gowns. Languidly Titiana decided whether to wear her rope of Burmese sapphires of the prized cornflower blue which matched her eyes or her triple string of matched black pearls, before she descended on Vasily’s arm to reign over her guests.

  The festive atmosphere of the Valensky chalet might have deceived a total stranger, but everyone in the huge house was trained to revolve around a sickroom. The inner weather of the family depended on whether the Princess had spent a quiet night or a restless one. The barometer of spirits, from the kitchen to Vasily’s study, from the peasants’ rooms to Alexander’s nursery, rose or fell determined by Titiana’s fever chart or the news that either she had been permitted out for a walk or was confined to her balcony. Every day two doctors attended her and, at all times, two trained nurses made up part of the permanent household.

  From his earliest memories, the little boy, Alexander, never knew what it was like to have a healthy mother. His babyish play with her was always cut short by someone who was afraid that he was tiring her. When Titiana read out loud to him, a nurse would always close the book far too soon. When Alexander grew old enough to play simple games of cards with his mother, her chief doctor took him aside and gravely warned him of the dangerous excitement engendered by any games of chance. His love for her was imprinted, from earliest memory, by the terrible tension which lies between the sick and the well. From babyhood on he was crippled, permanently, with a resentment, a wordless hatred, and a deep and irrationally superstitious fear of any sign of illness. Even normal weakness was loathsome to him, although his frustrated child’s love for his mother made him conceal his sense of horror.

  From 1912 to 1914 this life, half enforced holiday, half devoted to the monotonous
routine of the cure, endured. On that day of June 28, 1914, when the Austrian Archduke Francis Ferdinand was assassinated in Sarajevo, the Valensky family, attended by ten servants, was having a rare picnic in a green pasture from which they could clearly hear the sound of cowbells. Titiana was making the most of one of her brief and deceptive periods of well-being. Their world had just died although no one yet knew it.

  Two months after that happy Alpine picnic, the defeat of Tannenberg took place, during which the finest and best of Russia’s fighting men were lost. Within a year over a million Russian soldiers were dead, while in Davos, far from the sound of guns, Alexander received his first pony for his fourth birthday. In 1916, the year of Verdun, the year in which nineteen thousand British soldiers were killed in a single day in the Battle of the Somme, Alexander’s chief interest was in the hours he spent in the garage, being surreptitiously introduced to the interior workings of a Rolls-Royce engine.