The Secret Wife

by Gill Paul

  She forced herself to breathe regularly, counting to five between breaths and trying to make her mind go blank of everything but the in breath and the out breath, as they taught at her yoga class. A truck sped past with a whoosh, covering her windscreen with a wave of surface water.

  She knew she needed to keep herself occupied, and reading Dmitri’s next novel was not going to hack it. Then she remembered the overgrown patch of weeds behind the cabin that she’d been waiting for the right moment to deal with. It should be easier to uproot them now the earth was softened by rain. She’d get soaked to the skin but it would give her a real sense of achievement to clear that patch. It was flat and treeless so maybe she could do some planting there. Keeping busy was the best way to cope with a broken heart.

  Chapter Twenty

  The rain continued all week but at least it was still hot. Kitty spent her time clearing the earth around the cabin and it was like working under a power shower as the torrents beat down on her back and steam rose from the freshly dug earth. It was tough work that left her streaked in mud, with muscles that ached in new places every day. She used her camping stove to heat noodles and make tea indoors, and spent the evenings sitting in her swing seat on the covered porch, drinking wine and reading Dmitri Yakovlevich’s remaining novels.

  They were rich and in some ways surprisingly modern stories, with an overriding theme of love and loss. His male characters were more in touch with their emotions than any man she knew, endlessly analysing their reactions to events, but his women were all slightly idealised, a little too perfect, maybe. Could any male writer create convincing female characters? she wondered. The last two novels, the ones written in America, could easily have been published in the present day. The writing was clean and spare, but evoked glorious images that filled her head until she felt she knew the people in his stories as well as if they were her companions in the cabin. They were complex and flawed but never dull. Was that what Dmitri was like?

  Kitty remembered that she held the copyright to these novels, as part of the inheritance. She should try to get them reissued. Perhaps she would contact his last publisher, Random House, and ask if they might be interested. She could imagine them selling well with modern covers and intelligent broadsheet reviews. She could write a feature about her great-grandfather and explain how she came upon his story … but she would have to find out more about him first. He was still a shadowy figure with a biography that consisted of a few dates and places and huge gaps in between.

  One afternoon, when the rain was coming down in sheets, she heard a car pulling down the track towards her cabin and she dropped her spade to watch. It was a police car with two officers inside. One of them opened his window and called out: ‘You Kitty Fisher?’

  She was astonished, and before she answered ‘yes’, her mind had invented a dozen different reasons why they might be there. Had she breached her car-rental agreement? Was there a problem with the ownership of the cabin? Did she owe local taxes for something?

  ‘Your husband reported you as a missing person back in England,’ the closest officer explained. ‘They tracked you down from your credit card use and the vacation park told us you were here. Is everything OK, ma’am?’

  It had never occurred to her that Tom would call the police. What an idiot! ‘I’m so sorry you’ve had to come out all this way,’ she gasped. ‘Please – come in for coffee and I’ll explain.’

  They followed her to the cabin door, carefully wiping their feet before entering. Kitty lit the gas stove.

  ‘I’m sorry I only have one chair,’ she told them. ‘You’re my first guests. I’ve been here a month doing up the cabin. I recently inherited it.’

  ‘You didn’t tell your husband you were coming?’ One of the policemen did the talking while the other wandered round examining the work she’d done patching the walls.

  She turned away to spoon instant coffee into cups. ‘I decided I needed a break. He’d been cheating on me.’

  ‘So you’re teaching him a lesson?’

  ‘No.’ Kitty shook her head. ‘I couldn’t decide what to do, and I wanted to see if I could rescue this cabin, so it fell into place.’

  ‘Looks like you’ve done a good job here – but you should let your husband know you’re safe. He thought you might have done something stupid …’

  Kitty frowned. ‘You mean suicide? Tom knows me better than that …’ Her voice trailed off. Did he? Could he really have believed she might have killed herself over Karren with the double ‘r’? That implied a level of arrogance she hadn’t thought him capable of.

  ‘He’s gone to a lot of trouble to find you, so he must be pretty torn up.’

  Kitty considered this. Tom was torn up? Well, good! But still she couldn’t face talking to him and listening to all the pathetic excuses he was bound to come up with. ‘I don’t suppose you could pass on a message that I’m safe, and that I’m staying here for the rest of the summer? But please don’t give him the address. I don’t want him turning up.’

  ‘Why? Is he violent?’

  ‘No,’ she said quickly. ‘It’s not that.’

  They looked at each other, and the talkative one pursed his lips before replying. ‘You’re awfully isolated out here. You sure you don’t want him to visit?’

  She tried to picture Tom at the cabin, but it felt wrong. The cabin was hers, not his. And, as her panic attack the other day showed, she wasn’t ready to talk to him, not yet. She was acting instinctively, protecting herself from further pain, and when she felt strong enough she would get in touch. ‘I’ll call him, but not yet. I apologise for taking up your time. I’m sure you’ve got far more important things to do.’

  ‘No, ma’am. It’s pretty quiet out here. The odd car accident, a few DUIs … we’re not a crime hotspot. If you’re sure that’s what you want, we’ll email the police back in England and tell them you’re fine. Thanks for the coffee.’

  They looked around for somewhere to put their cups. Kitty smiled and took them. The officers paused for a moment peering out the cabin door, waiting for a lull in which to dash to the car without getting soaked, but no let-up appeared to be on the way.

  ‘Keep safe, ma’am,’ they called as they ran out into the downpour. She waved from the porch then came indoors and sat on the bedding roll, hugging her knees to her chest and rocking back and forth. How stupid Tom was! He’d be lucky not to get charged with wasting police time. He must have guessed where she’d gone before they tracked her credit card use … he just hated the fact that he couldn’t control this situation.

  In a flash of insight, Kitty realised they had slipped into a pattern in which Tom always made the decisions in the marriage. Perhaps it was because he was the one with the regular salary. He decided which holidays they could afford or when they needed new cars. He had wanted to move to Crouch End, a smart middle-class area, even though it meant all the profit she had made on property developing, as well as her inheritance from her parents, was swallowed up. She would have been quite happy staying in the multi-cultural whirl of Turnpike Lane, but Tom thought the crime rate was going up and the final straw came when his car window was smashed in an attempted theft.

  It hadn’t been like that in the early days when money was scarce. Holidays had been spur-of-the-moment, and they never booked package tours – simply got a cheap flight to Bangkok or Mumbai and travelled around by local transport, finding basic accommodation in beach huts or rooms in villages where tourists were a rarity. Suddenly she remembered the delicious smell of the fresh tea growing in the mountains of southern India, where they had stayed in a tiny hostel. They’d hiked in the hills by day and sat outside in the dusk eating mango and chatting with local people who passed on their way home from the fields. She remembered the day Tom saved her life by throwing a well-placed stone when a black snake appeared on the grass beside where she was sitting. She remembered the scent of the garland of white jasmine he bought from a street seller for a few pennies and placed around her nec
k. She remembered how they used to talk and talk and never run out of conversation, endlessly fascinated to hear each other’s point of view. What had happened to that?

  Something in Dmitri Yakovlevich’s last novel came into her head: a male character ponders why his relationship is so different twenty years down the line; the dynamic has changed, the power base has shifted. And he realises that as his own position in life has changed, it has skewed the way he views his partner. Kitty mused on this. Tom was not a dictator. She had let him drift into becoming the one who took responsibility for mortgages, cars and holidays. He hadn’t taken the power – she had given it up. She didn’t like making decisions of that sort because she found them stressful – it was easier not to take the risk of what her mother deemed ‘failure’ – and by default had slipped into a role that was almost like that of a child. It was an interesting theory, and the more she thought about it the more true she realised it was. She had been coasting along, not being a full partner in the marriage. Perhaps Tom would have liked her to pull her weight more.

  Of course, none of this excused the fact that he had been unfaithful to her. She was still furious when she thought about that. Was she punishing him with her silence? Probably. But the main obstacle was that when she thought about calling or even emailing him, she began to feel panicky. It brought up such a host of anxieties – about money, security, family, what she was doing with her life – that she had to shut the lid on the box quickly and busy herself with something else.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Tobolsk, Siberia, 6th August 1917

  Malama sweetheart,

  We have arrived in Tobolsk, after a long journey by train and then steamer. How remote and strange this countryside is: flat and marshy, with swarms of insects and wide open skies. I’m told it is only possible to reach here in the summer months because as soon as winter sets in the river freezes and no traffic can get in or out. Perhaps this is why they chose to send us here: shut away and forgotten, where Papa can cause no political problems for the new government.

  We are staying on the steamer for now because the Governor’s House, where we are to be accommodated, was recently used as a barracks and is in desperate need of cleaning and refitting. We are able to walk around the town and I have found the people curious but friendly. Everyone asks why we girls have short hair, thinking it is some new fashion in St Petersburg, and they don’t know what to say when I tell them the real reason, that we have been ill.

  I will mail this letter quickly in the hope that you will come to join us in this little hamlet. I wish I could say more to recommend it, but as you know we will make the most of it. I require little to make me happy: merely to know that my family – and that includes you – are safe and well.

  Tenderest love from Your T

  The letter reached Dmitri in Tsarskoe Selo two weeks later and he went straight to Malevich’s lodgings. Rather than reveal the truth he told him he had heard from some contacts about the Romanovs’ latest location.

  ‘Why Siberia?’ Dmitri worried. ‘It’s the landlocked dead centre of the country. They obviously don’t plan to send the family overseas any time soon.’

  ‘I suspect they don’t know what to do now the British have refused to take them. But why couldn’t they could go to Denmark, where Nicholas’s mother hails from?’

  ‘If the government won’t do it, then we must try to get them there. I will travel to Tobolsk, look at the lie of the land, and see what can be done.’

  Malevich agreed. ‘And I’ll stay in St Petersburg and find comrades prepared to help. We can communicate by telegram. But be careful what you say, because there is no doubt it will be read by the new power-crazed authorities. Let’s pretend to be businessmen and refer to the family as cargo.’ Dmitri flinched. ‘Yes, I know it’s insensitive, but needs must …’

  The thought of a Siberian winter filled Dmitri with gloom but he packed a bag with snowshoes and his wolfskin coat and hat and set off for the long journey to Tobolsk by train and then river steamer. His only consolation was that each mile brought him a mile closer to his beloved wife.

  As he walked up from the docks on the Irtysh River the skies were leaden, although the temperature was sweltering. He asked directions to the Governor’s House, assuming the family would be installed there now, and was directed to a square, white building of two storeys, in the classical style, with a courtyard around it bordered by a ten-foot fence. A couple of guards stood by the gate. There was no sign of the family, but he caught a glimpse of movement by a first-floor window that made his heart lurch. Was that Tatiana? If only she would glance out. He ached to see her.

  Dmitri hung around until the guards were beginning to eye him with suspicion, whereupon he wandered round a corner and was overjoyed to encounter Trina, the ladies’ maid, coming up the hill with a basket.

  ‘Thank goodness you’re here!’ he cried. ‘I’ve just arrived. Are the family well?’

  ‘As well as can be expected,’ she told him. ‘The Tsar is frustrated by the lack of space for outdoor activity; you can walk round that yard in three minutes or less and there’s nowhere he can plant his vegetables. The Tsarina has made a chapel in the old ballroom and prays there daily, but otherwise keeps to her bedchamber. And the girls and Alexei are bored. They’re only allowed into the yard between eleven and twelve, and then from two until dusk.’

  ‘Are you able to pass letters to Tatiana? The guards don’t search you?’

  She nodded. ‘Of course. I’m staying in a house down the hill so walk up here every morning at seven-thirty, and I often come up and down on errands.’

  ‘I’ll bring you a letter each day at seven-thirty. Bless you for your loyalty.’ He clasped his hands together. What would he do without Trina as a conduit? She must have guessed they were lovers but had been utterly discreet.

  ‘If you like, I’ll ask Grand Duchess Tatiana to come out onto the balcony and wave to you,’ she offered.

  ‘Is that safe? Won’t the guards notice?’

  ‘The girls often sit on the balcony and watch people go by. Come at a quarter to two.’

  At twenty to two Dmitri walked up the hill, trying to appear as if he was strolling casually. From afar he could see the silhouette of Tatiana on the balcony: she was taller, more slender than her sisters, and she held her head high, almost like a ballet dancer. As if she felt his gaze, she turned and saw him and they stood for a few moments watching each other from afar. It was intensely moving for Dmitri. To know she was safe, to see it with his own eyes, was overwhelming and he realised that throughout the journey to Tobolsk he had been afraid of arriving to find her dead. The example of the king and queen guillotined after the French Revolution was stuck in his head. On the one hand he was sure no loyal Russians would kill their imperial family, but this spirit of revolution that had been unleashed was volatile and unpredictable.

  The guards did not appear to be watching, so Dmitri sauntered along the road bordering the garden, glancing up whenever he thought it safe. Tatiana touched her fingers to her lips then clasped her hands to her heart.

  He wanted to walk past again, but a guard turned to watch him so he crossed the road as if he had just remembered some errand. If he were careful, he would be able to catch a glimpse of Tatiana every day; that was something to look forward to. Goodness knows what these guards would do if their marriage was revealed; he would probably be arrested on the spot.

  The letter Trina gave him the next morning detailed a little of life inside the house and no matter how hard Tatiana tried to be positive, Dmitri could tell she was miserable.

  Malama sweetheart,

  I thank you from the bottom of my heart for following us to this remote place. We have done our best to make a comfortable home, with all the photographs and nick-nacks we brought from Tsarskoe Selo, but the lack of freedom weighs heavily. Most of all I miss being able to walk in the woods and meet you inside the tower. It seems no such thing will be possible here. Did you know Dostoevsky
was briefly imprisoned in this town, in 1850? I often wonder what he made of it.

  Our days are spent reading, playing bézique or dominoes, exercising in the yard, praying, or eating meals, and the time drags interminably. I look at the clock, thinking an hour must have gone by and realise it is only minutes. We have one light on the horizon: we have been given permission to attend Blagoveschensky Church this Sunday, the first church service we have attended in six months, so all are very excited. Perhaps you could be there too? I would love that.

  I know you will never abandon me but all the same do not think I am unappreciative of the sacrifice you have made in following me here, and the possible danger it could mean for you. I love you for it. I love everything about you. My sole happiness lies in daydreaming about a future in which we are together.

  Dmitri made sure he was in the church well before the service, on a side from which he could survey the rest of the worshippers. To his surprise, the royal party were led in through a side door, which meant they had to pass directly in front of him. Tsar Nicholas was lost in thought but the Tsarina gave a slight nod of acknowledgement. Tatiana gave a quick smile, while Olga looked astonished as she glanced from him to Tatiana. Her sister obviously hadn’t mentioned that he was in town.

  He watched Tatiana as she crossed herself then lit a candle. She was wearing a cornflower-blue dress with a high neck and her short hair was arranged in fetching waves, almost reaching her shoulders. She looked solemn as she stood alongside her mother and sisters, but as soon as the singing began she joined in, and she turned to catch eyes with Dmitri several times.

  Orthodox services were always long but this priest seemed determined to impress his royal visitors with his stamina as one hour stretched to two. Dmitri would have liked him to preach all day just so he could stand and watch his beloved. It was wonderful to be under the same roof as her after the weeks of separation, and to see for himself that she was healthy.