The Secret Wife

by Gill Paul

  In his head Dmitri sometimes compared the two women he had loved. Sex had never been especially important in his relationship with Tatiana; Rosa had been much more enthusiastic in that department, and she had brought him great pleasure with her skills. There had never been the meeting of the minds he had with Tatiana, though. When you were in your eighties, that became most important. To feel that another human being truly understood the core of you and loved what they saw, while you felt the same about them – that was the best feeling of all. In some ways, he thought, it was the highest achievement of humanity. He had failed in all his other close relationships but at least he got the most important one right.

  One spring day he drove to the store in Indian Lake – slowly, peering through the windshield because his glasses were not strong enough and the road appeared as a blur. He bought a few items then on the way back remembered he had forgotten tea, the one thing Tatiana had expressly asked for, so he turned round to get some.

  When he drove down the track and the cabin came into view, he saw Tatiana lying on the soil and his first thought was that she must have lost an earring. Trina was sitting nearby, whining. He got out of the car and hobbled towards Tatiana.

  ‘Angel?’ he called. ‘Is everything OK?’

  When she didn’t reply, he limped across and sank to his knees, turning her onto her back. She wasn’t breathing. Gulping back a sob, he put an ear to her chest but couldn’t hear a heartbeat. He had never given artificial respiration but he’d read about it in a magazine so he tried frantically pressing down on her chest and blowing into her mouth. All the time he knew, deep inside, that she had gone. He was simply delaying the moment when he must accept it. The expression on her face was calm. At least she had not felt any pain.

  When he had tried to revive her for several minutes without getting any response, Dmitri gathered her in his arms and howled, the sound echoing across the lake. He howled again and again. ‘Don’t go, Tatiana, don’t go, come back, don’t do this to me.’ He cried out loud, tears spilling as he rocked her back and forwards, trying to shake her out of death’s grip. The pain was so appalling he thought he must be dying too and he looked up at the sky and prayed that God would take him now. ‘You don’t understand. I can’t be without her. I can’t survive.’

  A light rain began to fall but still Dmitri sat there, holding her, stroking her hair, kissing her cold lips, squeezing her to see if there was one ounce of life left. ‘Can you still hear me, darling? If you can, please try to come back. Oh, you must come back to me. I can’t bear it.’ Her face was changing, tightening in death. The lips were pale and thin, her cheeks alabaster.

  Dmitri knew he should call the police. They would come and take her away to an undertaker’s. Perhaps there would be an autopsy to establish the cause of death. What did that matter to him? She was gone and he would never find her again if he searched the world over. I’ll keep her with me a little longer, he thought. Just a while.

  The sun had started to lower in the skies when he decided that he did not want anyone to take her away, not ever. He would keep her with him at the cabin. No one need know. He would have to work fast because he couldn’t risk someone coming by and finding them like this. He lifted her head off his lap and rose with great difficulty, his hips and knees locked in place from sitting too long. Trina followed as he staggered to the cabin for his tools and some planks of wood he had bought for repairing the porch. Along with a couple of wooden boxes they used for storage, there would be just enough for a makeshift coffin.

  He wasn’t a proficient carpenter but he managed to fashion a coffin of a size that would accommodate her. The edges were uneven, the angles askew, but it would do. He hobbled around looking for the perfect spot. Just to the west of the cabin there was a grassy bank between the silver birch trees, with a view out across the lake. The ground was malleable beneath his spade and the moon came out as he worked. He didn’t stop to eat or drink, not once, because he was scared he might collapse and be unable to finish. His back was aching, his hips and knees screeching complaint, and he was wheezing for breath in the cold night air, but he kept going, deeper and deeper. He welcomed the work because it stopped him thinking about the infinite vastness of his loss.

  Tatiana lay on her back, looking more beautiful than ever, the moonlight glowing on her skin, her eyes closed as though she was simply asleep. He hoped she would approve of what he was doing.

  Dmitri kept digging until he’d made a hole that would accommodate the coffin, and he lowered it inside. Next he lined it with a rose-coloured satin quilt so the rough wood could not scratch her skin, and he put in a little pillow for her head. Clouds scudded across the moon and stars twinkled but it was utterly silent on the lake, apart from the lapping of tiny waves on the shore and Trina’s snuffling. No owls hooted, no whip-poor-wills sang.

  He found he did not have the strength to lift Tatiana so he slipped his hands beneath her shoulders and pulled her, legs dragging, to her resting place. As he arranged her so she was comfortable, he noticed that she was wearing Ortipo’s oval dog tag on a chain around her neck, with the tiny sapphire, ruby and imperial topaz stones set within fancy swirls. On a whim, he took it off and fastened it around his own neck instead.

  It was April and he had seen some wildflowers blooming in the woods. Tatiana loved flowers. She should have had magnificent roses and orchids, lilies and cherry blossom, but all he could find were some tiny pink, purple and white flowers hidden in the grass. He picked a few handfuls and sprinkled them around her.

  When he was done, the sky was turning salmon-pink over the eastern part of the lake as the sun nudged the horizon. It was time. He lay down and leaned into the grave to kiss her one last time, letting his lips move all over her face, her neck, her hands, in a frenzy of kisses. He could still smell her scent and he took a deep breath as if to preserve it within him forever. Then he wrapped the quilt round her to keep her safe and warm and that’s when the tears started.

  As he hammered the lid on her coffin and covered it with soil, he couldn’t stop crying. Something had broken inside him and he knew it would never be fixed.

  Chapter Sixty-Seven

  London, November 2016

  When Kitty got back to London, there was an email waiting for her from the editor at Random House, New York, asking if she was able to go for a meeting with them. She replied that she was in London and unlikely to be back in the US till the spring, whereupon they asked if she could visit their London offices, which were on Vauxhall Bridge Road, just behind Tate Britain. Kitty wondered if they wanted to talk about reissuing Dmitri’s novels. She hoped so.

  She gave her name in the glass-fronted reception area and in no time at all a dark-haired, bespectacled girl called Annabel arrived to lead her upstairs to a pokey office, where she was introduced to a girl called Olivia. She had the grand title of Publishing Director, although Kitty thought she looked as if she was fresh out of university.

  ‘This is an unpublished manuscript of your great-grandfather’s that we found in the archives,’ she said, indicating a stack of pages covered in an old-fashioned typewriter font. ‘There was a memo attached from Alfred A. Knopf, the founder of Knopf Publishing, which is part of Random House.’ She handed it to Kitty, who read it quickly.

  ‘To the editorial director of non-fiction in 2020: This is dynamite! Believe me when I tell you that you have a bestseller on your hands. My good friend Dmitri Yakovlevich wanted us to publish it but not until after the death of his daughter, Marta, as she was opposed to publication for reasons that will become clear when you read it.’ He gave the last known address for Marta and asked them to liaise with any descendants they could trace. ‘Publish it sensitively,’ he advised. ‘You will not be able to prevent the sensationalist press having a field day but this man is a writer of great literary merit and I would hate for that to be lost in the furore that will undoubtedly erupt.’

  ‘What on earth is it?’ Kitty asked.

  ‘I read it at th
e weekend,’ Olivia told her. ‘It’s the story of your great-grandfather and his love affair with the Russian Grand Duchess Tatiana Romanova. It’s quite astounding.’

  ‘Who wrote it?’ Kitty asked.

  ‘They both did.’

  ‘Wow!’ Kitty grinned. ‘I had no idea they’d done that, but I’m delighted!’

  ‘This is a delicate question,’ Olivia said, ‘but is there any way of proving it’s true? There have been so many Romanov impostors over the years.’

  Kitty showed her Ortipo’s dog tag, with the jewels set in a pretty golden oval. ‘This dates from the very beginning of their relationship,’ she said. ‘But the only way of proving it categorically will be if we have DNA tests carried out on a skeleton that I found a few weeks ago at Dmitri’s old cabin in New York State.’

  Now that she knew Dmitri and Tatiana had wanted their story to be published one day, she would make sure it was. She would call the detective in Indian Lake to tell him of her suspicion that the body would prove to be a member of the Romanov royal family and suggest he contact the laboratory in Stanford University that had done recent tests on the Romanov remains. Once all the legal paperwork was completed, she would rebury Tatiana’s body in Dmitri’s grave in the Cedar River cemetery near Lake Akanabee. She and Tom could organise an appropriate service to mark the occasion.

  ‘Might I borrow a copy of the manuscript to read?’

  ‘Of course!’ Olivia agreed. ‘It’s your copyright so we will need to contract you in order to publish it. If we can prove this was co-written by a Romanov grand duchess, we will be able to offer a substantial advance.’

  Kitty started reading on her journey home. It began with Dmitri wakening from a laudanum stupor to see an angel in a white dress, with whom he fell in love almost immediately. The writing was elegant and spare.

  When Kitty got home she made coffee and curled her feet beneath her on the sofa to read about their secret marriage in 1916, of Tatiana’s eighteen months of house arrest, and then the shocking night of their separation in July 1918. She stopped to have dinner with Tom then returned to the sofa to read long into the night about Dmitri and Tatiana’s reunion in Prague in 1948, followed by the difficult years when she was his secret mistress in Albany and finally the traumatic rift with his children.

  That explained why Kitty had never met him. She was surprised that Marta, the sweet grandmother she remembered, could have held a grudge lasting thirty years. Perhaps she avoided confrontation, like her granddaughter, and the result was that the wound was never able to heal. She felt sad that her mother had never learned the truth; surely she would have found a way to bridge the chasm between Marta and Dmitri and he could have died knowing he was forgiven. But Marta had told Elizabeth that her grandparents died before she was born. A lie like that, once told, can never be untold. Had Marta regretted it? Dmitri was still alive when Kitty was born. Did her grandmother consider breaking her silence then or was she too stubborn?

  If only Dmitri had tried harder to heal the rift with his children. Perhaps he simply did not know how. Men of that generation did not have much practice at dealing with complex emotional situations. Perhaps he felt he was doing the right thing by respecting Marta’s choice. It was such a shame.

  Honest communication was the only way through an emotional impasse; Kitty had learned that over the summer. Brooding never helped anyone to heal, but talking did. She had also learned that infidelity need not be the end of a relationship – some things are more important. Tragically Marta never learned that and the upshot had been a lifelong estrangement.

  Dmitri and Tatiana’s lives had been full of tragedy. And yet theirs had been such a strong love, lasting through the decades and transcending all obstacles, that you could also say they had been fortunate. Not many people find such life-affirming intimacy. Kitty’s thoughts turned to Tom. What other man would have put up with her running away for three months? He knew her inside-out and still he was prepared to stick around, and she realised she was incredibly lucky. It must have been difficult being her partner during all those years when she clammed up and refused to talk about her parents, or anything else that was upsetting her. It had taken the thunderbolt of Tom’s infidelity to shake her out of her cocoon, and now she was almost glad it had happened.

  She thought of Tatiana and Dmitri living in the cabin in their seventies, supporting each other as they succumbed to the ailments and indignities of old age and continuing what they described in the book as a lifelong, never-ending conversation. Suddenly she knew she wanted to have that with Tom. She wanted to be with him when they were both in their seventies. She liked the sense of history coming around. If only there was a way of letting Dmitri know how much he had helped her; she hoped he would have been pleased.

  Chapter Sixty-Eight

  Lake Akanabee, New York State, 1986

  One night in the winter of 1986 Dmitri woke with an acute pain in his chest and knew it was a heart attack. ‘Tatiana!’ he cried, then rolled out of bed, landing with a bump on the floor. Ortipo followed, licking his face. The pain came in waves and between them he scrabbled across the cabin floor to the door, managed to open it and hurl himself down the steps. The chain around his neck caught on something and the Fabergé dog tag with its sapphire, ruby and imperial topaz jewels was ripped off. Ortipo was whining and nudging him to get up.

  There was no one left in his life now, no one to live for. If only Marta was nearby; if only she’d forgiven him. He thought of his daughter, so lively and popular as a teenager; somehow he had never understood her. After Tatiana died, he had written her a heartfelt letter about his grief at their estrangement and told her of his profound loneliness. Deep down he knew he could expect no sympathy; she’d rejoice to hear about the death of the woman she considered to have been his mistress. There was no reply and after that final attempt, he became a virtual recluse. He got rid of the Albany cottage and spent all his days in the cabin. Once a week he drove into Indian Lake to do some shopping, pick up a newspaper that he would never get around to reading, and collect his mail from the sorting office, but he dreaded it because too often the letters told of the deaths of people he had known.

  His sisters Vera and Valerina lived till their late eighties then died within a year of each other. Their funerals had already taken place by the time he picked up the letters informing him. He wrote to Vera’s children, with whom he had barely kept in touch over the years, offering his belated sympathies.

  His dog Trina died and he bought another Borzoi. This time he called her Ortipo, after the first dog he and Tatiana had tried and failed to train. She was a beautiful creature with a rich copper coat and white underside, a sensitive, timid dog who shrank behind him when they met other dogs in the street and hovered close by his side when he worked around the cabin. At night, Ortipo slept on the bed next to him, helping to keep him warm.

  Dmitri received notification from a new editor at Random House that his books had gone out of print and he could buy the remaining stock cheaply if he wanted, but he didn’t see the point. His lunches with Alfred A. Knopf petered out around 1980 when Dmitri could no longer face the long train journey into the city. Soon he had no social contacts at all, apart from the lady who worked in the grocery store and a fisherman called Bob who lived on the other side of the lake. Bob married a girl called Sue and Dmitri gave them copies of his novels as a wedding present because he couldn’t think what else to give. Tatiana would have known. Rosa would certainly have known.

  He knew he was becoming forgetful. Sometimes his memories of the two women joined up so that they were all sitting together in a glorious sunny field enjoying a picnic and it came as a shock when he remembered that they never actually met. There were days when he awoke and called to Tatiana, as if she were outside working in the vegetable patch, and it could be several minutes before he remembered that she was no longer able to reply. A few times he thought he saw her in the woods, and that was a nice feeling. He often spoke to her out loud, as
king what he should do about the rip in his shirt, or how the heck she stopped her scrambled eggs sticking to the pan, or commenting on a dark storm cloud looming over the lake.

  And now, in his final moments, his only thoughts were of Tatiana. It was just fifteen feet to the trees by the shore but Dmitri had no breath left. Who knew it would hurt so much? He clung to clumps of frozen grass, pulling himself along, until finally he was lying on top of the earth where his great love was buried. And he smiled in spite of the agony, and spread his arms wide across her grave in a final embrace.

  Historical Afterword

  I hope you’ve enjoyed reading The Secret Wife as much as I enjoyed writing it. The seed of the story came about in conversation with my very talented friend Richard Hughes, who gave me the greatest gift anyone can ever give to a novelist. He had just watched a BBC2 documentary about the Russian grand duchesses and was intrigued by the love affair between Tatiana and an officer called Dmitri Malama. ‘Could this be your next novel?’ he asked, and I instantly fell off my chair in excitement.

  I’d long been fascinated by the tragic story of the Romanovs. Back in my teens I read Anthony Summers and Tom Mangold’s book The File on the Tsar and desperately wanted to believe their theory that some of the family had survived. I read other books about the Romanovs as they were published and I knew that both Olga and Tatiana had flirtations with officers they treated in the Tsarskoe Selo hospital but I’d only come across Dmitri Malama as a footnote. Once I started reading about him, and realised how handsome and courageous he was, and how close he and Tatiana seem to have been, the plot of The Secret Wife fell into place.

  During my research I discovered that Dmitri Yakovlevich Malama was born on the 19th of July 1891 in Lozovatka, the son of a cavalry general, and he had two sisters, Vera and Valerina. He trained at the prestigious Imperial Corps de Page in St Petersburg, which brought him into contact with the royal court. In August 1912 he graduated and became a cornet in the Uhlan Lancer Guard Regiment, of which Grand Duchess Tatiana was honorary colonel. Two years later, during the opening week of the First World War, he was wounded in the leg while their regiment was under attack but he refused to leave the field, earning him the Golden Arms sword with an inscription that read ‘for bravery’.