The Secret Wife

by Gill Paul

  I decided that when he woke, I would be nice, pretend to like him, and try to persuade him that I would tell no one if he would just take me back to the house. I had worked the rag off my mouth by now although my hands were still tied and as soon as he woke I spoke kindly, using terms of endearment. My attempts did not persuade him for one moment, though. He violated me again then tied me securely, feet as well as hands, before leaving. The hovel fell silent. I rolled to the door and nudged it with my shoulder but it wouldn’t budge. I knew Malama would be looking for me and couldn’t bear to think of his distress. What would he do? Where would he turn?

  I tried everything I could think of to get free during those long hours, pulling and twisting my ankles and wrists until they were bleeding. I was raked by savage thirst and when I drifted into sleep I dreamed of cool, clear mountain lakes and woke even thirstier than before. The light faded and now it was night again, with no chink of light coming from the outside. Anton and his friends returned and I realised this must be the house where they slept.

  He was drunk when he barged in, swinging a lantern that made me blink. And then he said the most hateful words in the world: ‘Your family are all dead and it’s your fault. By trying to escape you signed their death warrants and tonight the executions were carried out. How does that make you feel?’

  He tore the rag from my mouth, wanting to hear my reaction, and I screamed as hard as I could from deep down inside and only stopped screaming when Anton hit me on the head and knocked me unconscious.

  17th July, Wednesday

  The next morning when I awoke, Anton had brought me a glass of water but I knocked it over. I wouldn’t take anything from him. ‘We are going to make a little trip today,’ he said. ‘I thought you would like to see where your family died before you join them.’ And it may sound strange but I was comforted by this. I believed him when he told me they were dead and all I wanted was to join them in the hereafter, the sooner the better. ‘You must behave as I tell you when we reach the house,’ he said, ‘or else I shall bring you back to this place and keep you here as my slave to use as I wish. Remember that.’ He wrapped me in a long cloak with a hood, which was stifling in the summer heat, then we rode through the streets until I could see the Ipatiev House. My heart was beating hard. Might Malama be somewhere nearby looking for me? Might Anton have been playing a trick and my family were still alive?

  The guards were not at their usual posts but two of them were sweeping the yard, backwards and forwards in a scrubbing motion. Anton took me in through a side door and down a flight of steps that led to the basement. Twenty-three steps, I counted. ‘This is where it happened,’ he whispered, and straight away I could smell the salty metallic scent of blood. It turned my stomach. Anton had his arm through mine and dragged me along to a storeroom and as soon as I saw it I felt faint. Someone had tried to clean up but there was so much blood that their efforts had only served to smear it across the floor, up the walls. In places it had congealed into dark lakes. ‘This is where they died,’ Anton told me. ‘Your mama had a chair in the middle here’ – he stood on the spot – ‘and little Alexei beside her.’ My knees were collapsing and I leaned back on a wall as Anton demonstrated where each one had stood. I could feel their presence in the room and sense their terror, their screams. And then he told me that the girls had been slow to die so they were slashed with bayonets. And he showed me the slash marks in the floor, the bullet holes in the wall, and there was a buzzing sound in my ears. I must have collapsed because suddenly I was lying in the blood and it was all over me. The blood of my parents, the blood of my sisters, my baby brother.

  Anton took out a gun. ‘Brace yourself,’ he said, pressing it into the back of my head, ‘because now you will join them.’ I prayed that he would hurry up, then I prayed that Malama would have a good life without me, then I prayed for the souls of my family, but still the shot did not come. I opened my eyes. Anton was leering down with sadistic enjoyment. ‘Perhaps I will not kill you yet,’ he sneered. ‘No one knows you are still alive so no one will seek you. I will keep you for a few more nights, until I get bored of you.’ I froze at his words. The thought of going back to that room was abhorrent.

  ‘Please … if you have any mercy, please shoot me,’ I begged, but that made him laugh.

  ‘I like to hear you beg,’ he said. ‘Tonight I will make you beg some more.’

  He yanked me up by the hair and bundled me outside. I thought of screaming for help from the two guards sweeping the yard but Anton clapped a filthy hand across my mouth. I don’t think they knew who I was. I was stunned, incapable of action, and then we were back on Anton’s horse and galloping across town to the hovel and I sank into a state of utter hopelessness. No one knew I was there apart from Anton and his two acolytes. Did Yurovsky think I was free? Is that why he slaughtered my family? Was he looking for me even now?

  That night was worse than before as Anton violated me in different ways, forcing himself into my mouth, biting my breasts and thighs and hurting me in every manner he could think of. I could hear the other two men next door and knew they must hear my cries but neither of them intervened. I was utterly alone.

  Anton fell asleep at last and began to snore. I lay awake, every part of me in pain. I could not get the smell of blood out of my nostrils; it was caked in my hair, on my skin. The blood of my loved ones. Oh God, may no one else ever have to experience that.

  The door to the room opened slowly and one of the men beckoned me to come. At first I thought he planned to violate me too but he put a finger to his lips and opened the door to the street outside. I staggered to the opening, grabbing what clothes I could, my legs barely able to support my weight. ‘You do not deserve this. Take a horse. Run,’ he whispered.

  ‘What is your name?’ I asked him, but he wouldn’t tell me. So I untied a horse and climbed on its back and I rode east towards the dawn.

  Chapter Sixty-Four

  Brno, Czech Republic, 16th October 2016

  Kitty sat in silence while Hana was reading, feeling the horror of the words written almost a century ago. Goosebumps pricked her flesh. Hana stopped and fetched some beers from the fridge, flipped open the tops and poured them into glasses.

  ‘My father found Tatiana the day she escaped. He said she was raving like a madwoman and trying to hang herself from a tree but the rope kept slipping. When she told him she was a Romanov grand duchess, he thought she was delusional. It was only when she showed him the jewels hidden in the seams of her undergarments that he began to believe her. He took her back to his tent and fed her some broth, then persuaded her to rest a few hours while he decided what to do.’

  Kitty tried to imagine Tatiana’s state of mind. She must have been in profound shock, but somehow this man had won her trust. ‘Your father was clearly a good person,’ she said.

  ‘The very best. They don’t often come like him.’ Hana smiled proudly. ‘Papa was a member of the Czech Legion fighting the Bolsheviks, but he took time away from the front line to nurse Tatiana. He told me he knew that if he left her for so much as an hour, she would have found a way to kill herself. She couldn’t bear to be alive any more, knowing what had happened to her family.’

  ‘Didn’t she want to find Dmitri?’

  Hana tilted her head and nodded thoughtfully. ‘Sometimes she tore her hair with yearning for him then at other times she said she would die of shame if he found out what had happened to her. There were moments when she blamed him, saying if he hadn’t rescued her the rest of her family might still be alive, but then she would change her mind and cry out for him. As soon as the Czech Legion reached Ekaterinburg, Papa made enquiries but was told Dmitri had left town and no one knew how to reach him.’

  ‘So your father kept Tatiana with him?’

  ‘Of course. The Bolsheviks would have stopped at nothing to kill her had they realised she was still alive. She maintained she wanted to die and Papa had to coax her to eat. At night she woke screaming from terrible nightma
res of men slashing at her with bayonets.’ Hana got up to check on the casserole bubbling in the oven and there was a blast of hot air then a fragrant meaty smell as she lifted the lid and stirred it. ‘To be honest, I don’t know how he managed. He says they followed along behind the front line and he kept Tatiana out of sight because once her face healed from the wounds that guard had inflicted, she would have been recognisable to any Russian civilian.’

  Hana took out some gaudily patterned red and purple plates and heaped spoonfuls of casserole onto each then added slices of what looked like spongy white bread before passing one to Kitty. ‘Goulash with dumplings,’ she said. ‘A local speciality.’

  Kitty inhaled the scent of paprika and garlic and her stomach rumbled. ‘How did they get back to the Czech Republic?’ she asked before taking a forkful. It was delicious, the goulash rich and flavourful, the texture of the dumplings soft and gooey.

  Hana started her own meal. ‘The Czech Republic didn’t exist back then. When a declaration was made in October 1918 that the Czechs and Slovaks could form an independent republic from the old kingdoms of Bohemia and Moravia, the Legionnaires were overjoyed. It’s what they had long campaigned for. The civil war was not going well for the White Army and my father persuaded Tatiana to come back here with him, just until the Bolsheviks were defeated. Of course, everyone thought their downfall was imminent, that Communism was a passing phase people would get sick of. Who could have guessed it would last the rest of the century?’

  Kitty watched her, wondering what it had been like to live under Communism in Czechoslovakia. That era had only ended in 1989 when student protests brought about democratic elections. Hana did not remotely match her mental image of an Eastern European of the Communist era. She had a matronly figure but she was smartly dressed in a grey skirt and pale pink blouse, and she wore a pearl necklace and matching pearl stud earrings. She probably had to dress smartly for her job. There was no sign of a husband or children in the house and she wore no rings on her fingers. Kitty was curious but didn’t like to ask about her marital status. Instead she asked when her father had told her about Tatiana.

  ‘He told me gradually, over the years. I always knew he had been married to someone before my mum and bit by bit the rest came out.’

  ‘Did you never consider telling the story publicly? To the press, I mean?’

  Hana shook her head emphatically. ‘Why would I want to bring a media circus down on my head? What purpose would it serve?’

  Kitty considered. ‘Maybe the truth should be told for the sake of historical record, if nothing else. And your father’s role is so heroic that I would have thought you would want it to be acknowledged.’

  Hana smiled. ‘No one who knew my father was in any doubt about his heroism. He needs no more accolades than those he received in his lifetime. But this is your story too, so I suppose if you want to publicise it, that is your prerogative. I would rather not be identified, but otherwise you can reveal what you like. I will let you have copies of some photographs, if that would help.’

  After they’d finished eating, Hana cleared the table and brought out a worn photograph album. The first picture in the book showed a group of men in military greatcoats and hats against a snowy landscape.

  ‘That’s my father, on the left,’ she said. He was taller than the others, very clean-cut and handsome.

  The next pictures showed a farm and in one there was a silhouette of a woman hoeing in a field. ‘That’s Tatiana.’ Kitty peered hard but could make out nothing except that she was willowy thin.

  The following photos showed some kind of village party, with flags in the street, then Kitty turned the page and there was a woman looking down at a baby with utter adoration, in a classic Madonna and Child pose. Kitty raised her eyes in question.

  ‘That’s Tatiana with her son Jaroslav, my half-brother. He was born in 1922, three years after they arrived in the Czech Republic. By then, she had married my father and taken the name Irena to protect her identity.’

  Of course! Irena Markova, the translator of Dmitri’s books, and Grand Duchess Tatiana were one and the same person. Kitty had realised there was a connection but hadn’t made that final step. So she had come to Albany to be with him.

  Even wearing the clothes of a farmer’s wife’s, with a scarf tied round her hair, Tatiana was recognisable as the second daughter of Tsar Nicholas. The fine bone structure, the intelligent eyes, the distant, self-contained air – of course it was her.

  ‘What happened to Jaroslav? Is he still around?’ If he was, he would be the direct heir to the Romanov dynasty.

  ‘No, he died in 1943. It was awful. I don’t think either Tatiana or my father ever recovered.’ Kitty flicked through pages of photographs of the boy at different stages of his life: a toddler, a schoolboy, a handsome teenager, while Hana told his story. ‘Jaroslav was always a headstrong boy. He’d been brought up to hate repression so when the Nazis marched into our country in 1939, he joined a partisan guerrilla group that sabotaged supply chains and helped to smuggle Jews out of the country. For four years he dodged capture but all the time his parents lived with their hearts in their mouths. And then in 1943, his luck ran out. He was arrested, probably tortured, and executed.’ Hana sounded emotional recalling the death of the half-brother she never knew. ‘I can’t begin to imagine how Tatiana survived that period. It’s unthinkable for one person to lose so much.’

  Kitty paused over a photograph of a simple grave with a tiny vase of flowers beside it, and a headstone carved with the boy’s name and dates. ‘I know she came to America with Dmitri in 1948. How did he find her?’

  ‘She found him. Just before the war she came across an article about him and she was astonished because she had been told he died in 1919. She showed it to my father and he says he knew from that moment that she would leave him one day.’ Hana rose to clear their plates. ‘They had been good companions for each other and she was grateful to him for protecting her but she never loved him the all-consuming way she loved Dmitri. Of course, the war intervened, and then she was in deep mourning for Jaroslav’s death, but one day in 1948, after they’d brought in the harvest, she told my father that it was time for her to leave. She thanked him for all he had done for her and wished him the very best. It broke his heart but he didn’t try to stop her. He knew she was going to Dmitri.’

  Kitty felt sorry for Vaclav. It seemed a shame after all he had done for Tatiana. ‘Did she not keep in touch?’

  ‘I think there were occasional letters. I don’t have copies of them. My father met my mother a few months later and I was born in 1949, so he didn’t hang around for long!’

  ‘Did he divorce Tatiana?’

  ‘I believe he had the marriage dissolved, because he married my mother when I was three. I got to be a bridesmaid at their wedding. As you can imagine, this was considered shocking back in the 1950s!’ She laughed and rolled her eyes.

  ‘I’m glad he had another family. He deserved to be happy.’

  ‘We were. The three of us had a good life. I hope Tatiana found happiness too.’

  Kitty wondered about that. She knew little about Dmitri’s life in America, never mind his time with Irena. ‘I hope so too. But I wonder about the body found near his cabin. If it is her, and he was not responsible for the death – which sounds unlikely given how much they loved each other – then why would he not report it to the authorities in the normal way?’ She guessed the answer as she spoke but it was Hana who said it out loud.

  ‘Do you remember the furore over the bones of Romanov imposters? Anna Tschaikovsky’s remains were exhumed for further DNA tests several years after she died. I imagine he didn’t want that for Tatiana. It’s a shame it is happening now …’

  Kitty was quiet. Hana had said the decision about whether to expose the truth was in her hands. Did she want them testing these bones? Or should she ask that they be buried in her great-grandfather’s grave and let the two of them rest in peace? It was a tricky decision. />
  The next morning a friend of Hana’s, a woman called Erika who looked roughly the same age, came to take them out in her car. When she arrived, she kissed Hana on the lips and Kitty realised they were lovers, although they did not announce it.

  Erika drove them out to the karst lands and they caught a cable car over lush forested slopes down into a spectacular gorge with a river splashing through. They toured a collapsed cavern known as the Macocha Abyss, then some caves with elaborate stalactites and stalagmites, like spooky pointing fingers. There was a sense of ancient history that went back millions of years, long before the existence of man, and Kitty loved the otherworldly atmosphere.

  As they walked around the footpaths of the gorge they talked a little more about Tatiana and Dmitri and Kitty realised Erika knew the story.

  ‘I admire the fact that she was able to adapt to being a farmer’s wife after an upbringing of such wealth and grandeur,’ Erika said. ‘Hana tells me she did the heaviest farm work without complaint.’

  ‘Did she never consider trying to reclaim any of the Romanov fortune?’ Kitty asked.

  ‘Oh, no,’ Hana replied. ‘Once, when they had financial difficulties, Vaclav travelled to Prague to sell some jewels she had smuggled out of Russia and so many questions were asked that he ran away. In the end he sold them to a black marketeer who did not question their provenance, but he probably got far less than they were worth.’

  ‘She said she never wanted to be a royal,’ Erika added. ‘She liked a simple life.’

  ‘And your father: didn’t he want to be rich?’ Kitty asked Hana.