The Tsarina's Daughter (Reading Group Gold)

by Carolly Erickson

  In the palace, it was as if the events of that night—the dancing bear, the commotion, the tumult, and finally the restoration of our captivity—had never happened. The guards never mentioned them and neither did we, though my sisters and my parents saw that I was worried about Michael and knew very well what the cause was.

  Papa missed Michael. He had grown accustomed to his companionship and service, and no one could take his place, as old Chemodurov had been pensioned off. My sisters and Alexei—especially Alexei—missed Michael too. He played games with them and gave Alexei rides on his strong back and his presence always lifted everyone’s spirits.

  Only mama was, I suspect, relieved that he was gone, for it meant that she did not have to pretend not to know that Michael and I were lovers. I had always thought her to be exceptionally open and natural about sex and love, just as she said her mother and Grandma Victoria had always been. But when it came to my love for Michael and his for me, she had never said a word about the physical side of our relationship. In this she was the opposite of Aunt Olenka, who was happy for us and had often told me how glad she was that I had found a lover who pleased me so completely.

  Aunt Olenka! Where was she now, I wondered. We had heard that she had gone to the Crimea with Aunt Xenia and Uncle Sandro and Grandma Minnie. We had had several affectionate, concerned letters from Aunt Xenia—proof that not all our mail was confiscated or destroyed by our jailers—but as the summer wore on we heard nothing more, and we wondered whether they were all still safe.

  One very important letter did arrive, not long after Michael left (somehow I dated everything from that last glimpse of Michael, running off into the woods on the Children’s Island). It came via Monsieur Gilliard’s friend in the Swiss embassy. It was from Adalbert.

  “My dear Tania,” he wrote, “how glad I was to get your letter. We have all been concerned about you and your family. We hope that everyone is well, especially your brother. I will sail the Mercury into the Baltic as soon as the ice breaks. Send word where I should wait for you. Trust me. Remember the Peace Initiative. Ever your loving friend, Adalbert.”

  Overjoyed, I started to take the letter to Michael—and then remembered that he was gone. How glad he would be, I thought, to know that someone in my family was concerned about us, and was coming to help us.

  Being careful to hide my excitement from the ever watchful guards, I folded Adalbert’s letter again and again until it was just a small square of white paper and slipped it into one of papa’s books—not all of which had been destroyed by the guards. I put the book beside his plate at our midday meal.

  “Monsieur Gilliard has been reading Gibbon to us,” I commented to papa as we ate. “I marked some passages that we thought were especially eloquent.”

  “I don’t remember us reading any Gibbon,” Olga countered. I kicked her under the table.

  “You must have been dozing. You are too old for lessons anyway.”

  “I should think Gibbon would be depressingly apt reading,” mama said wearily. “The decline and fall of Rome. We are taking part in the decline and fall of Russia—at least for now. And like the Romans, we are drawing strength from a new spiritual force rising in our midst.”

  “If you don’t mind, Tania, I’d much rather go on reading The Girl with the Diamond Bracelet, the crime novel I brought from Mogilev.”

  I moved over and whispered in his ear.

  “This is important, papa. There is something in the book.”

  “Are you whispering about me again?” Mama spoke sharply.

  “No, mama. It’s nothing. It’s not about you.”

  “I’m sure it’s not about me. Nobody cares about me.” It was Marie’s familiar complaint, which we all heard far too often.

  “I don’t like Gibbon,” Anastasia remarked. “Too many long words. Too many long sentences.”

  “What a dolt you are,” Olga snapped. “I don’t know what you are doing in this family anyway.”

  “Be quiet, Olga. You know I don’t like it when you criticize your sisters.” Papa spoke wearily. He got up from the table.

  “I’m going to ask you all to excuse me. I’ve been told to expect a visit from the new prime minister of the Provisional Government, Kerensky. I must prepare to meet him. Tania, come up to my study. I can look at your Gibbon there.”

  “Now then, what is so important, Tania?” papa asked once we were seated in his study. He opened the volume of Gibbon and the small white square of folded paper fell out. He unfolded it and read it.

  “Ah, I see. Your faithful Adalbert. A good boy. Yes, a very good boy.”

  “He’s hardly a boy, papa. He’s a married man and a naval officer.”

  “To me, he will always be the boy who asked for your hand. In the old days, before the horrors came upon us.”

  “We need to prepare to meet the Mercury. We are being given a second chance to escape. We must take it.”

  “Tania, the German army is practically at our doorstep. The Germans and Austrians have killed a million of our men. More than a million. Do you really imagine that your mother would go aboard a German vessel claiming to offer us rescue?”

  “But Adalbert is not some savage murderer, he is my friend. He offers help and friendship to us all.”

  “Was he not a serving officer in vessels that fired on our navy?”

  “Yes—and we sank one of the ships he was serving in. He could well have drowned.”

  “The point is, Tania, Adalbert is the enemy.”

  Oh papa, how little you understand! I wanted to cry out. Instead I said, quietly, “What will it take to make you understand?”

  He said nothing. He reached for his pipe and began to fill it from the tobacco jar on the table beside his chair.

  I shook my head in despair and was about to get up and leave when one of the guards opened the study door and announced, “Prime Minister Kerensky.”

  He was a very short, nervous man, with darting black eyes that took in at a glance my father’s unhurried filling of his pipe, my look of evident frustration and dissatisfaction, the elegance of the high-ceilinged room with its thick, richly patterned Persian carpet and its ornate plaster moldings. He strode rapidly toward my father, extending his hand. Papa rose and grasped the proffered hand.

  “Romanov!”

  “Prime Minister. May I present my daughter Tatiana.”

  Kerensky bowed politely—not deferentially—and turned his attention back to papa, who offered him a chair.

  “Tatiana,” papa said to me, “we must congratulate the prime minister on his recent appointment—I mean election.”

  “Congratulations sir,” I said.

  “Thank you but my tenure may be brief. Elections will be held very soon and no one can predict their outcome. I need hardly tell you, sir”—he turned all his attention back to papa—“that it is becoming more and more difficult to control the Soviet.”

  “That’s the radical group, Tania. The rabble-rousers.”

  “I know, papa. Constantin keeps me well informed.”

  And I have heard the radicals speak with my own ears, I might have added, but didn’t.

  The thin, wiry prime minister, unable to keep still, got up from his chair and went to stand by the marble fireplace. There was no fire, as the afternoon was very warm.

  “I have had to arm the workers,” he confided to papa. “Otherwise the radicals would create chaos—”

  “But if you arm the workers they will take over the city!” I burst out.

  “I must gamble on their loyalty. Meanwhile, I must not gamble on your safety, Romanov. I understand you had some trouble here not long ago.”

  “Nothing of any significance,” papa said, drawing on his pipe. “Some of the guards got excited when a gypsy came, with a dancing bear.”

  “Then it isn’t true that an escape was foiled?”

  “An escape? No one escaped. As you see, Tania and I are here, and the rest of my family is also here in the palace, as always.”


  The prime minister looked at me.

  “Was there an escape, miss?”

  “No,” I said simply. Which was true. Had he asked whether an escape was attempted, I might have had to answer differently.

  Papa continued to smoke his pipe; he appeared to be serenely indifferent to the short little man’s piercing eyes and sharp inquiries.

  “Be aware that, should you attempt to escape, you would most certainly be executed. The Soviet—the rabble-rousers, as you call them—are eager to eliminate your family. They fear—quite correctly—that many Russians do not welcome either your abdication or the authority of the Provisional Government. Many Russians reject the revolution and want a return to monarchy.”

  “I appreciate their loyalty,” papa said softly.

  “But not the danger to you—and to the country—that they represent. A counter-revolution would mean civil war. Your family would be the first casualties—but far from the last.”

  “Yes. I see. If only the British would let us in.”

  “As you know, that is what I have wanted from the start. And King George continues to hope that a refuge will be found for you. Just not in his country.”

  “We have an of—” I began, before papa interrupted me.

  “There is no point in bringing up what can never be, Tania.”

  Kerensky turned his piercing eyes on me. “What were you going to say?”

  I hesitated. “Perhaps papa is right. No need to raise false hopes.” I regretted nearly blurting out what Adalbert had written, about sending his yacht to rescue us. So papa did not trust the prime minister, even though they had discussed our possible departure for Britain.

  “Tania has a friend who would like to help us.”

  “Private help would be inadequate. There must be a sponsoring government. And as long as this war continues, grave difficulties remain.”

  The prime minister sat down again, on the edge of the chair.

  “Meanwhile, we are formulating a plan. We want to send you far from Petrograd. To Siberia, in fact.”

  Papa opened his mouth and his pipe fell on the rug.

  “Siberia! That frozen icebox!”

  “Frozen in time. The town where you will be going has not changed in decades. Your grandfather, if he were alive today, would be right at home there. There are no disgruntled, radical factory workers—no factories at all—and no bomb-throwers. Only small town folk who go to church and revere the saints and the tsar, not necessarily in that order.”

  “It sounds very safe,” I offered.

  “It is.”

  “But Siberia!” papa repeated, bending down to retrieve his pipe, which had gone out.

  “You needn’t be so shocked,” the prime minister was saying, having gotten up from the chair again and begun pacing around the room. “It seems a perfectly natural and sensible choice. You need not be there long. In time we will be able to negotiate a permanent refuge for you.”

  He bowed to us both. “I will take my leave. You will be sent instructions about your departure.” And he was gone.

  Papa and I sat in silence for a few moments, each lost in our thoughts. I was wondering how Michael would be able to find me if we went so far away. How could I get word to him? What if he never found me? What if I never saw him again?

  Papa seemed dazed. He looked out unseeing into the opulent room, his dead pipe lying forgotten on the table beside him.

  “Siberia!” he said again. “Surely, Siberia is the end of the world.”

  Forty-eight

  For four hot, dusty days in August of 1917 we traveled on a lice-infested train into the bleak wasteland of Siberia.

  I had not known that Russia possessed such empty lands—empty of towns, empty of vegetation, above all, empty of people. We traveled for hours without seeing so much as a tiny village, through barren steppe country and swampy lowlands glistening with small lakes and over mountain passes where the train, huffing and puffing slowly, seemed to strain to its utmost to pull its heavy load.

  We were a large party, the seven in our family plus our three dogs plus Niuta and Nikandr, Daria and Iskra, who had come to seem, at least to me, like a second family, plus mama’s maids and Sedynov and Monsieur Gilliard and Dr. Botkin, Alexei’s most recent doctor and a better one than Dr. Korovin, and our greatly reduced household staff of cooks and valets and the several hundred guardsmen who had been our jailers ever since the outbreak of the revolution five months earlier.

  Our family baggage filled an entire car of the train, as mama would not leave anything behind and had packed trunk after trunk with her precious icons and family heirlooms and photographs, not to mention her many gowns and hats and pairs of gloves and yards and yards of handmade lace. My sisters and I each had several trunks and papa brought his remaining books and some treasures that had belonged to his father and grandfather.

  Our most valuable possessions, needless to say, were mama’s jewels. Extravagant, magnificent diamonds and emeralds and pearls, tiaras and necklaces each worth a fortune and many beautiful rings papa had bought her over the years from his great personal wealth. Had my parents been willing to admit to themselves that the revolution was inevitable, they would surely have sold some of these jewels and deposited the profits in Swiss banks or placed them with discreet agents in London or Paris. When we took our trip to Cowes, Mama could have left some of her pearls and diamonds with kindly Queen Alexandra to be hidden away with the royal jewels in the Tower of London, or so I imagined.

  But of course they had not foreseen that our family would be all but dispossessed, and the vast Romanov fortune confiscated. So all we could do, as we prepared to move out of Tsarskoe Selo, was to take the beautiful, costly jewels out of their settings and conceal them. Some we hid in our corsets, others we wrapped tightly in silk and made into buttons to be sewn onto our gowns. We each carried thousands of rubles’ worth of gems on our persons and in our clothing, and we were aware that they might represent the difference between poverty and wealth in our unknown future.

  Before we left the palace I made one last trip to see the elephant. He was still there, in his sadly run-down enclosure, looking as dusty and shaggy as ever. His pond was muddy and he shuffled through piles of dirt and leaves as he made his slow, undulating way from one side of the barred enclosure to the other.

  “Goodbye, dear old thing,” I said to him as I put my hand through the bars and he lifted his trunk to smell it, searching for treats. “I have nothing to bring you. I’m sorry.

  “We’re going away,” I went on after we had looked each other in the eye. “I don’t know for how long. I hope you will be well. I hope you’ve had a good life.”

  He lifted his trunk and as I watched it rise I saw, on the brick wall that formed the rear of his pen, a row of freshly made holes. Bullet holes. The soldiers had been shooting at him, or near him, in order to frighten him. No doubt they enjoyed tormenting him as much as they did tormenting us.

  I longed to be able to protect the old elephant from whatever fate awaited him when we left. Would he starve? (There was no sign of his mahout.) Would he be executed as an enemy of the revolution? Or would he just be overlooked, one more victim of the chaotic state into which Russia was falling?

  I leaned my head against the iron bars and once again he came up to me and put out his trunk to smell my hair.

  “You know I love you, don’t you,” was all I could say before I had to go. I hoped he understood.

  As we traveled eastward the air became hotter and whenever we had to stop for coal or to pass a village we had to pull down the blinds to avoid being recognized, which made the air inside hotter still. We had brought along clean drinking water and we helped ourselves to the champagne from the restaurant car, which made us all tipsy and helped to pass the time.

  Trying our best to forget the biting of the lice and the jolting and swaying of the train—which made it very difficult to sleep in our narrow beds—we joked about our situation. There we were, jammed into
an ailing elderly train, on our way to the ends of the earth (as papa put it), our journey itself disguised as a Red Cross mission for our onetime enemy, the Japanese! Our train flew a Japanese flag, and two Japanese guards had been hired to patrol the tracks with guns every time the train stopped to take on coal and water.

  Once our uncomfortable train journey was finally over we went aboard the steamer Russia at Tiumen for the trip upriver to our ultimate destination, the small town of Tobolsk. There were far too many of us to ride on the steamer, and my sisters and I all had to share one tiny room with beds that were hardly more than planks and hardly big enough for our dogs to sleep on. I will say nothing about the toilet and washing arrangements because, quite simply, there were none. Whoever had traveled in this steamer before, they had not been very clean and I could not wait to get out onto dry land and into our new palace.

  But there were no palaces in Tobolsk, as we soon found out.

  Indeed there was only one large house, known as the Governor’s Mansion, and the rest were log houses barely large enough for one family, let alone an entire aristocratic household with servants and a tutor and a doctor and, in our case, our many jailers.

  The Governor’s Mansion was all boarded up and abandoned, yet we were expected to move in and just make the best of things. Sedynov and Nikandr tore some of the boards off the windows and went inside to have a look around.

  “You can’t possibly move in there,” Sedynov told us gruffly when we returned to the steamer. “There is hardly any furniture, the walls and floors are filthy and the gas has not been turned on. There is no water and the pipes are clogged. The boat is better.”

  “I can’t possibly stay another night on this horrid steamer!” mama complained. But we had no choice. We stayed aboard the Russia, kept awake by boat whistles and bugs and by the discomfort of the cramped plank beds, for another week, while the house was made ready.

  “I can’t believe a governor ever lived in this house,” papa remarked when we finally came ashore and moved in, and our trunks were being unpacked. “Everything is so old and shabby. The smell is terrible. And the attic! I’m ashamed to have the servants living there.”