The Secret Wife

by Gill Paul

  She lay, heart beating hard, trying to adjust her eyes to the darkness, when suddenly she became aware of a faint movement in the far corner of the cabin. Terror gripped her. She pulled herself to a sitting position and groped for a box of matches. She couldn’t hear any sounds now except the ones she was making, but it still felt as though something was in the room with her. The thought crossed her mind that it could be Dmitri’s ghost, then she shook herself. Stupid girl. No such thing as ghosts. She struck a match but her hand was shaking so badly she couldn’t get the wick of the oil lamp to take the flame and had to strike a second one.

  A pool of flickering light spread round the room and she looked into the corner where she had been convinced she heard a noise: nothing but bare wood. She stood up, back to the wall, peering round and listening hard. She was covered in a film of sweat, her hand still shaking, so the lamplight shifted and swung.

  Suddenly, out of the corner of her eye, she saw something coming towards her. She screamed and almost dropped the lamp in panic before realising it was a large white moth, drawn to the light. Its wings flapped and it smacked against the glass of the lamp. Instantly Kitty realised that was the sound she had heard earlier in the darkness; it must have flown into a window.

  ‘You idiot!’ she whispered, still feeling shaken. She walked across the floor and opened the cabin door, placing the lamp on the porch so the moth would follow it out. The night air was cool and she padded barefoot down to the water’s edge, feeling the sweat evaporating on her skin. There was just a sliver of moon among hosts of faraway stars in an ink-black sky, and the water and trees were utterly still. An owl hooted, breaking the silence.

  Suddenly there was a loud, distinctive rustling in the trees to one side of the cabin, and the terror returned. Kitty rushed to the end of the jetty, ready to dive into the lake if a wild animal ran out. What creatures might there be? Most likely it was a deer, she told herself. They wouldn’t have bears or wolves by the lake – or would they?

  She crouched on the end of the jetty, scanning the forest, alert for any further rustling sounds. The distance to her cabin door seemed huge. Something might pounce on her as she crossed the space. Her heart was racing. What if she were mauled to death by a wild animal out there miles from anywhere? It would be days before her body was found. She would die alone, in pain and terror. She hoped at least it would be quick, unlike the gruesome deaths of the Romanovs.

  A morbid mood descended as she crouched beneath the vast twinkling sky. What difference would her death make? Tom would miss her. So would a few friends. But she had left no mark on the world. The Romanovs had their place in history, Dmitri left behind his novels and his descendants, but she had produced no children, hadn’t achieved anything of note. She had never felt so insignificant as she did at that moment.

  Why had she not written a book yet? This summer by the lake would have been an ideal time but she hadn’t produced a single word. Writing was hard work and while she could force herself to do it when there was money on offer and a deadline to meet, she couldn’t imagine how authors slaved for hundreds of hours without pay, on the off-chance they might one day get published. Perhaps she simply wasn’t good enough. Maybe those with a genuine gift felt they had no choice but to write.

  But if she wasn’t a writer, what was she? What talents did she have? She thought of her mother’s wish that she should study law and shuddered. That would never have worked. She had chosen journalism because English was her best subject at school, not because of any burning desire to communicate the truth or any of those worthy reasons real journalists have. Perhaps she was simply lazy, as her mum had always said. Good for nothing. Useless.

  I suppose this is what they call a ‘long dark night of the soul’, she mused once her heart had stopped racing. There had been no further rustlings in the trees so she hoped whatever creature had been there had moved on. She decided to make a run for the cabin, slam the door and crawl back into bed.

  As she stood up, the wood of the jetty was smooth and even beneath her feet.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Urals, Russia, September–December 1918

  Every night as he lay in his bedding roll on the hard earth, Dmitri tortured himself with thoughts of the terror Tatiana must have felt when the cottage door was hacked down, the shouting, the rough handling she might have endured. He was still in shock about her disappearance.

  Malevich was convinced the family were being held in Bolshevik territory to the west of the mountains, and Dmitri prayed he was right and that Tatiana was with them, but he felt sick to his stomach imagining alternative scenarios.

  During the day, the discipline of military life kept him occupied: they rose at a set hour, tended their horses, ate breakfast then broke camp, before continuing across the Ural Mountains in pursuit of the Red Army. The terrain was steep and rough and already there was a hint of winter in the air. If they did not get to the other side of the vast range before the first snowfall, they could be stranded for months with no food or shelter to speak of, so they rode from dawn until well beyond dusk. He did his duty in a daze – riding reconnaissance, poring over maps, giving orders to his men – but all the time the shocking disappearance of Tatiana hammered on his consciousness.

  One evening a newcomer rode into camp, and Dmitri was astonished to see a familiar face from Tobolsk: ‘Vasily Yakovlev! What on earth are you doing here?’

  Yakovlev leapt from his horse and came over to greet Dmitri. ‘I couldn’t bear to watch what the Bolsheviks were doing to our people. The Red Army is a hornets’ nest of suspicion and backstabbing. If I’d stayed, I would probably have been executed by now. So I switched to the side whose cause I believe in and am fighting for the Whites.’

  Dmitri regarded him with suspicion. Their camp was no stranger to spies and all had been warned to be wary about what information they passed on. Still, this man had once been a friend of sorts – and perhaps he had news of the Romanovs. Dmitri poured him a coffee and invited him to sit, introducing him to Malevich.

  ‘Last time we met, you were trying to save the royal family by diverting their train to Omsk. Whatever went wrong?’ he asked.

  Yakovlev shook his head sadly. ‘I did my best but the railway workers took orders directly from Moscow and the matter was out of my hands. I bitterly regret that I failed, especially since the rumour is that all have now been killed.’

  Dmitri’s face blanched and he sat very still. ‘What did you say?’

  ‘That I hear it wasn’t just Nicholas who was shot in the Ipatiev House …’ Yakovlev seemed surprised at Dmitri’s shocked reaction. ‘I’m only repeating what I’ve heard, mind. I wasn’t actually there.’

  Malevich joined in. ‘I have heard the same rumour but cannot believe it. This government would lose the sympathy of all its supporters and would be condemned the world over. Perhaps Nicholas is dead – even that is in doubt given that they have not produced the body – but I’m confident we will discover the rest of the family as we march on Moscow.’

  Dmitri stood and excused himself from the group, stumbling into the woods at the edge of the camp. Once out of sight he bent over and threw up violently, the bitter taste of bile scorching his throat. They can’t be dead. They simply can’t. If they were, he had failed utterly. He was directly responsible for the fate of the farm girl Yelena. He had bungled all his attempts to rescue the family. It was possible their deaths were his fault because the guards panicked when they realised that Tatiana had been freed.

  Malevich appeared behind him and flung an arm around his shoulders. ‘Don’t listen to him. Stay strong.’

  Dmitri looked up in despair: ‘If I discover Tatiana is dead, I cannot go on living.’

  Malevich spoke sternly. ‘First of all, I simply don’t believe the Bolsheviks would be so stupid as to kill them all. And even if they did kill those in the Ipatiev House, you have no proof Tatiana was there. I firmly believe she is out here somewhere, and she’s waiting for you to find her. Y
ou owe it to her to carry on looking.’

  Dmitri turned and smashed his forehead against a tree. ‘I miss her so badly. I can’t bear this agony.’ He drew his head back to smash it again and Malevich caught him by the shoulders.

  ‘You can and you will,’ he said firmly. ‘Imagine she is watching you, and do as she would want you to do.’

  Dmitri felt the sense of his words and they gave him the strength to pull himself together. One day, if he found Tatiana, she would ask what he was doing in this period, and he hoped to be able to say he behaved with courage. He vowed he would never give up searching until he found her, wherever she might be.

  At first, momentum in battle was with the White Army. With the help of arms supplied by the British government, and with a ragtag band of recruits from various different factions who were disenchanted with the Bolsheviks, Admiral Kolchak’s men marched steadily towards Moscow. As they went they liberated villages from Bolshevik control, freed prisoners and overturned socialist reforms that had been imposed. White Army morale suffered a blow in November when the British withdrew their support after signing an armistice with Germany, but the advance continued and soon Kolchak’s troops reached the River Volga, only a hundred miles east of Moscow.

  By now the snow lay deep and temperatures were dropping daily. All the men stopped washing because to expose bare skin in such cold would be a sure way of catching frostbite. They requisitioned food for men and horses from farms they passed. Dmitri felt ashamed to be depriving the occupants of their winter stores, but there was no alternative if they were to free the country from the lunatics who had taken charge.

  In December Dmitri’s division was dispatched further south to the strategically important town of Tsaritsyn, which the Red Army refused to abandon, and straight away there were fierce clashes. The Soviet 10th Army they faced had twice as many men, dozens of machineguns and artillery placements, but still it seemed the White Army was creeping into the suburbs, winning over the town street by street. Dmitri took a few men with him on daily reconnaissance missions to check where the big guns were placed before each assault. They needed their wits about them in the hostile terrain, but his superlative training took over. He knew he was more capable than these Bolshevik opponents, who could spout socialist rhetoric but knew nothing of military tactics. It would not be long before they drove them back.

  On the 1st of January 1919, the White Army launched a major assault on Tsaritsyn. Within two weeks they had advanced to form a semicircle around the city and looked set for victory. One afternoon Dmitri’s men were in a tall office building near the town centre, planning their next move, when suddenly shells began to rain down. He sprinted up to the roof and, peering through his binoculars, realised they were surrounded and vastly outnumbered by Red Army troops that had materialised seemingly out of nowhere. No other White Army groups were in sight. He ordered a small band of men to break free of the building and ride for help, but as he watched they were shot down in the street like wild boar on a country shoot.

  While the officers were debating what to do, a shell smashed through a corner of the room, showering them in debris. As the dust settled, Dmitri saw that Malevich was trapped beneath the rubble. He was unconscious, his face white with plaster dust. Dmitri crouched to listen for sounds of breathing but couldn’t detect any.

  Working frantically he heaved aside the debris, urging, ‘Malevich, wake up. Open your eyes. Breathe, man.’ After lifting one massive block he was confronted by a hideous sight: Malevich had been cut in half by the force of the blast, his upper body separated from his lower. His guts spilled out of the torso, while his mangled legs were facing the other way. Dmitri screamed in high pitch, and couldn’t stop screaming. His entire body shook in revulsion. He turned away, unable to look at the slippery coils of intestine, the blank expression on his dearest friend’s face. No, God. Please. How can you do this? Why?

  He should try to drag him clear and arrange a Christian burial but the room was empty now. There was no one left to help. The sounds of shelling were further away but the smell of blood and smoke still filled the air. Dmitri’s ears rang and he was shivering with shock as he paced up and down, up and down. Eventually he decided the only thing he could do was to cover Malevich where he lay. He did that, murmuring a prayer for God to have mercy on his soul since he had allowed his body to be so hideously butchered.

  When Dmitri finally went to look for his men, he realised the fighting had moved several blocks away. He ducked into doorways, making his way back towards the muster point where they had started that morning. No one was there. He headed towards the camp in the woods where they had slept the night before. Much of it was intact, the horses still tethered and bedding rolls abandoned on the ground, but there were no men in sight. He picked up his pack, which contained his most treasured possessions: Tatiana’s diary and the waistcoat she had knitted for him.

  Dmitri found his horse, filled a canteen with water then rode out to try and locate his troops, but wherever he went he found piles of the dead. It had been a mass slaughter. He tried for several hours but couldn’t find anyone to report to, or any group of survivors numbering more than two or three. His unit seemed to have vanished into thin air.

  Somehow he found himself on the outskirts of town, riding through snowy conifer woods towards open country. I should turn back, he thought. This is desertion. But he did not. He galloped till nightfall, sustained only by sips of water from his canteen. When tiredness overwhelmed him, he took a room in a cheap inn, where he was tormented by bedbugs and traumatised by vivid dreams of his best friend’s body ripped in two.

  Next morning, over breakfast, he saw the landlady reading a newspaper with a headline about the Romanovs, so he begged to be allowed to borrow it. The story read that Admiral Kolchak had commissioned a man named Sokolov, a local prosecutor in Ekaterinburg, to head an enquiry into the fate of the royal family, and it seemed he had found some burnt remains by a mineshaft outside Ekaterinburg: fragments of clothing, a pair of old spectacles, and some jewels that had belonged to the family. Among the more grisly remains there was a severed finger and the body of a small dog. Dmitri felt sick. The family would never have left one of their dogs behind if they could help it. Had it been poor Ortipo? And whose was the finger?

  The story continued with a fresh insistence from the Bolshevik government that although Nicholas had been executed, the family were safe. It said they were being accommodated in the town of Perm. Dmitri’s heart leapt. He did not trust this government one iota, but why would they specify Perm if there was no truth in it? Tatiana’s Aunt Ella had lived in Perm, so perhaps they were staying with her. Oh God, he hoped so.

  It was at least a thousand miles to the north, too far to ride, but if he changed into peasant clothes he could maybe take a train without raising suspicion. His mind made up, he went to enquire about train times.

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Perm, Russia, spring 1919

  Travel was treacherous in a country in the midst of civil war, especially when you had recently deserted from your army. Dmitri kept himself to himself on the train and did not get drawn into any of the heated discussions amongst his fellow passengers, both for and against Bolshevism.

  Perm was in the hands of the White Army. It was unlikely anyone in this northern group would recognise him, but Dmitri kept a low profile all the same. He took lodgings under an assumed name, bought a horse, and began riding through the town, street by street, just as he had done in Verkhoturye. There were heavily guarded munitions factories but he could find no private houses with guards outside. He began making discreet enquiries, asking if anyone had seen the Romanovs arrive but was disheartened by the casual response: ‘They’re all dead, my friend.’ No one seemed to care. From one café owner he heard that Tatiana’s Aunt Ella and her Uncle Michael, along with several other family members, had been executed by the Bolsheviks, but still he refused to believe they could have killed the young grand duke and the duchesses. They we
re children! He kept busy during the day, and at night he drank himself unconscious to drown out the appalling dreams of Tatiana being dragged away by men with axes, and Malevich cut in half.

  By spring 1919, the tide in the civil war had swung firmly against the White Army: Admiral Kolchak surrendered to the Bolsheviks in May 1919 and was promptly executed. The territories they had fought so hard for were recaptured. International help dried up and the Red Army were once again advancing towards the Urals.

  When he had exhausted his search of Perm, Dmitri caught a train south just before the Red Army arrived in town. A young man travelling alone would arouse suspicion and he did not want to find himself detained by a local soviet, answering questions about where he hailed from. He intended at long last to visit his mother and sisters in Lozovatka, which was in Ukrainian hands, but on the way there he heard from a fellow passenger that Tatiana’s grandmother, Maria Feodorovna, and several other relatives were staying at the Livadia Palace in Crimea so he decided to go there first. If Tatiana had managed to escape her captors, that’s where she would head. She had always loved Livadia.

  It was mid-summer and the heat was fierce when he arrived at the Romanovs’ luxurious white-granite Livadia palace to find it deserted, apart from a handful of servants.

  ‘Where is the Dowager Empress?’ he asked a housemaid who answered the door.

  ‘They were rescued a few weeks ago by a ship sent by King George V of England. All were very relieved.’

  ‘Were any of Tsar Nicholas’s children with them?’ He held his breath.

  ‘No, we’ve heard nothing of them. There are rumours that they’ve been killed but Maria Feodorovna refuses to believe it. She said no one could be so heartless … You look faint, sir. Would you like to sit down awhile?’