The Tsarina's Daughter (Reading Group Gold)

by Carolly Erickson

“I am Georgy Kochetkov,” he whispered, “leader of the Brotherhood of St. John.”

  “A religious order?”

  “No—but we are inspired by the patron saint of Tobolsk, St. John, and the Cathedral of St. John is our headquarters.” He looked around, and saw that three of the guards had come out into the yard but were staying in a cluster near the door to the house, as if eager to go back in and get warm again.

  “We have a cache of weapons in the basement,” Georgy confided. “The cathedral is our rallying point—for when we retake the town.”

  Papa’s eyebrows rose in surprise.

  “How many of you are there in this brotherhood?”

  “More every day.”

  “You there!” It was the harsh voice of the Bayonet. “What are you talking about? I demand to know!”

  He had come out of the house and was striding across the snow toward us, bareheaded despite the cold, his long red hair flying, his nose turning red as well.

  Georgy bowed deeply. “Your worship, I was saying I had never seen a winter as harsh as this one, not in all my seventy years.”

  So I had been wrong about his age. He was not of my father’s generation, he was an exceptionally fit old man.

  The Bayonet frowned.

  “Seventy years in Siberia! It’s a wonder you’re not dead! You will be soon enough if you keep talking to the exploiter!”

  “Yes, your worship.”

  His posture submissive, Georgy moved off, toward the far corner of the yard where he began chopping at a log. We resumed our work. The Bayonet stood watching the old man for a time, then shrugged and went back into the house.

  After about fifteen minutes Georgy brought an armload of wood to add to our accumulation. He dropped it in the snow, then began stacking it carefully alongside our pile. As he did so he whispered to papa once again.

  “Little Father, there are many in Tobolsk who hate the revolution. We hate these new men, these brutal, cruel men who claim to speak for the people. Who are they really? Criminals! Traitors to the true Russia!

  “We are growing strong in numbers. Some of us are landowners like myself who fear that the peasants will seize our estates and murder us. Some are soldiers. There are three hundred officers of the Tiumen garrison who are pledged to support us when the time comes for our rising.”

  He took another quick look around the yard, then went on, keeping his voice very low.

  “Money is being raised. Contributions are pouring in to our banker in Tiumen. There is another banker in Petrograd who is secretly collecting funds from all over Russia. I hear he has already raised two hundred thousand rubles. We want our tsar back!”

  I watched papa’s face as he heard these remarkable words. It seemed alight from within.

  “Is it possible!” he whispered, shaking his head in disbelief. “Is it really possible!”

  “Our aim is to seize Tobolsk when the thaw comes,” Georgy said. “Tobolsk will become the new capital of Russia, with you, Little Father, restored to your throne and your rights.

  “Meanwhile we are recruiting more aid, and our numbers are growing. Your wife’s oculist and dentist carry messages for us, and your laundress too.”

  “And does the Bayonet suspect how strong you are?”

  “He suspects everyone. He knows that as long as you are alive, there will be opposition to the Bolsheviks and their aims. But he cannot convince his superiors in Moscow to order your execution. They think you may be more useful to them alive than dead.”

  “If only we could be sure of that!”

  “Certainty is the one thing we cannot be certain of,” Georgy whispered, with a wry smile.

  We had read in the newspaper that the Bolshevik government had declared Moscow to be the new capital of Russia, and that all their orders now came from there. They had, it seemed, abandoned poor Petrograd to its fate. Beautiful, sad Petrograd! I could hardly bear to think of it.

  Georgy went back to his far corner of the yard and we continued to hear the sound of his axe biting into the stubborn wood, though the daylight was beginning to fail and the wind was growing colder.

  Eventually papa and I each took an armful of firewood into the house and left him there. But all that evening papa’s thin face glowed with happiness, and he could not seem to stop smiling, at us, at the guards, at the weeping icon that hung near the stove.

  It was the icon of St. John.

  Fifty-three

  Icollected all our dirty laundry in a large basket and waited by the door for the laundress to arrive, as she did each Wednesday. I tried to avoid reacting to the snickering of the guards, who rummaged through the basket, making off-color jokes and tossing our underwear back and forth to each other. It was an old routine by then, it had become tiresome.

  Several nuns arrived along with the laundress, who brought with her a basket of clean clothes and linens.

  “Be sure to hang out the blue petticoat,” one of the nuns remarked to me. “It is not quite dry. Hang it by the stove.”

  I took the basket to the bedroom I shared with my sisters, as I always did, and began to sort and fold the clothes, looking eagerly for the blue petticoat. I had no doubt the nun had mentioned it for a reason. When I found it I hung it on a hanger and took it into the sitting room and draped it over a chair, smoothing out the wrinkles but actually feeling in the folds and creases of the fabric for any irregularity. In a pocket of the bodice I felt the hard edge of a folded paper. I managed to slip the small paper out and conceal it in my sleeve.

  I took it into the bathroom and quickly unfolded it—aware that even in the bathroom I had no privacy, as the guards liked to burst in on us at our most intimate moments.

  “Come down to the basement when everyone else has gone to bed,” the note read, in Michael’s small spiky handwriting.

  I tore it into tiny pieces and flushed the pieces away, worrying that they might not disappear but be spewed up again by the faulty toilet. When I had flushed three times I felt confident enough to leave the bathroom and go and sit with mama, who was knitting a sweater. She had dark circles under her eyes. She greeted me with a wan smile. I noticed the vial of Veronal on the table beside her, and a glass half full of cloudy water—she continued to increase the amount of Veronal she took each day, sipping from a water glass with ten or twelve drops of the sedative in it—and several letters.

  “Did you know, Tania, that this is the feast day of St. Euthymius? No—wait—I believe it is St. Alexis, or perhaps the Feast of the Most Holy Mother—” She broke off in confusion, worry lines deepening on her white brow. “I have it written here somewhere.” She put down her knitting and searched in the blanket covering her legs for something. “Never mind, I can’t find it.”

  “Your calendar?”

  “Yes. My calendar of saints’ days and feasts.”

  “I would have thought you knew them all by heart.”

  She shook her head, a rueful half-smile on her pale lips. “My memory—so poor these days—”

  She took up her knitting again, and I noticed that the pattern of white stripes running through the grey wool was askew; mama, whose knitting was always so precise, the stitches uniform and flawless, the colors in perfect alignment, was becoming sloppy and careless.

  “It must be hard, knitting with your gloves on.”

  “I have gotten used to it. But my fingers hurt.” She yawned.

  “Shall we have a game of bezique later?”

  “If you like dear. I have some letters to write.” She trailed off, as if her thoughts had wandered. “Do you know, Tania, that there is some lady in this town who is writing me letters in Old Church Slavonic?”

  “Can you read them?”

  “A little. But it tires my brain.”

  “They could be important, you know. They could help us.”

  She looked befuddled. “I don’t see how.” Her face brightened. “At first I thought they might be coming from mama. But I don’t think mama ever learned Old Church Slavonic.�
��

  I knew that there was no point in trying to explain to her that the letters might be from the Brotherhood of St. John (of which she knew nothing), and that they might contain instructions or encouraging information. I wondered, did the nuns read the obscure old church language? Did Georgy Kochetkov know it, or was he in contact with someone who did?

  I was excited and anxious all that day, waiting for the hour when the family went to bed—usually about ten o’clock—and most of the guards too retired, leaving only two or three men who dozed beside the stove all night and sentries who watched the outer doors to the basement and main house.

  It was not thought necessary to post guards outside during the night; were anyone so foolhardy as to venture into the extreme cold of a Siberian midnight unprepared, so we were told, their skin would freeze in less than a minute and in another minute, when the cold had penetrated their forehead, they would be unconscious.

  Come down to the basement, Michael had written. Putting on every garment I possessed, my woolen socks and felt boots, I took a lantern and crept down the stairs into the basement. I stepped out onto the floor of frozen earth and waited.

  It was a dirty, damp basement that smelled of mold, empty save for an ancient coffin-sized chest, its lid torn away, its metal hinges rusty. Daria and Iskra, I knew, were in a locked pantry at the far end of the room. I heard no sound and thought they must be asleep. I shone my lantern around the walls. Like the floor, they were of frozen earth. Nothing in the room offered a scrap of comfort or character. It was dark, bleak and empty with the dispiriting emptiness of extreme cold.

  Before long I heard a very faint sound.

  At first I thought it might be coming from the pantry, but then I realized it was closer than that. It seemed to be coming from the dilapidated chest.

  I walked closer to the chest, shone the lantern down into it, and peered in.

  I almost shrieked when the sound came again and the wooden bottom of the chest began to move. It rose slowly upward, as if on hinges.

  “Tania?”

  “Michael? Please say that it’s you, Michael!”

  With a creak the wooden slab rose higher still, and now I could see a fur-clad arm, and then a head—Michael’s head, encased in hat and scarf—and finally the thick slab was upended and the lantern shone down on another staircase.

  “Come,” he said, and reached out for me. I took his hand and followed him down the wide set of stairs, pausing while he closed the false bottom of the chest over our heads.

  “You’ll never guess where this leads,” he said as we went on, my lantern showing the way, along a narrow passage that led into darkness.

  Fifty-four

  It really did seem, for awhile at least, as though our liberation was at hand. The passage Michael led me along on the night I met him in the basement of the Governor’s Mansion went all the way to the basement of the Ivanovsky convent.

  An escape route for us all!

  He explained that the nuns had revealed to him the existence of the passage, which had been built by the former governor of Tobolsk in case he and his family needed to leave their house quickly in an emergency. No one besides Michael and the dozen or so of his fellow-soldiers in the Fifth Circassian regiment who had followed him to Tobolsk knew about it. Neither the Bayonet nor our tormenting guards suspected its existence.

  “So this way out has been here all along, ever since we were first brought here, only we didn’t know it!” I exclaimed as we made our way along, Michael walking ahead of me, the passage so narrow that my shoulders brushed against the cold walls with every step.

  “We only learned of it a few weeks ago,” Michael said. “The nuns didn’t tell us right away. They had to make sure they could trust us with your lives.”

  But the question remained, if my entire family went along the passage to temporary safety among the nuns, where were we to go after reaching the convent?

  The river was frozen; we could not leave the town by boat. To attempt to travel overland by sleigh was treacherous in winter, even if enough changes of horses could be provided. To hide our family in the convent basement would be futile, as there was a price on papa’s head—a high price of five thousand rubles, Michael heard in the marketplace—and beyond that, we felt certain that if we were to try to hide among the nuns, somehow our presence would become known and someone in the town would betray us.

  The Brotherhood of St. John had a ready answer to the question of where we would go: we would not go anywhere! Georgy Kochetkov advised us to stay where we were, freezing in the Governor’s Mansion, until the spring thaw began. Then the Brotherhood would seize the town and expel the Bolsheviks. Once the Bolsheviks were gone, the Brotherhood, acting for the Russian people as a whole, would crown papa tsar once again (they had elaborate plans for the coronation) and make Tobolsk the center of a glorious new Romanov realm.

  So for the time being we stayed.

  Meanwhile Butter Week was approaching. Already the bakers were beginning to sell the little cakes called larks, in the shape of birds with thin pastry legs and currants for eyes, that were the herald of the Maslenitsa. In the warmer corners of farmhouses and town kitchens, milk was being churned into butter, cheese was being made, and in the town square, carpenters were constructing booths where nuts and gingerbread and bonbons would be offered for sale. Tobolsk was filling with people arriving for the holiday; we heard the jingling of sleigh bells in the street below more frequently than in the past, and knew that traffic was increasing. We also heard, though more faintly, the music of the merry-go-round that was being hauled out from its storage in the basement of the town hall and put together, piece by painted piece, on the snowy swath of land in the main square.

  The Bayonet found two of the guards drunk on red currant vodka (a variety always supplied in abundance during Butter Week) and angrily ordered them to be shut in the cellar next to Daria and Iskra. We heard their raucous singing as we sat eating our meager dinner on the upper floor.

  “We’ll hear no more singing when they have gone without food for a few days,” the Bayonet snapped. But they continued to sing, hour after hour, despite his orders, and Georgy whispered to us when he collected our plates that the other guards were secretly ignoring the Bayonet’s commands and giving their imprisoned colleagues food and more vodka.

  Whether it was because of the approach of the festival or because of a growing rift between the guards and their Cheka commander it was evident to us all that the guards were growing more lax, and even disobedient. They did not watch us as closely as before, and they seemed not to care nearly as much as in the past what we did or said.

  “Do you suppose it is a trick?” I asked Michael. “Are they trying to entrap us, to fool us into thinking we can do whatever we like, and then, when we do something wrong, arrest us and send us to Moscow?”

  “I can’t tell, but I do know this: the guards complain that they haven’t been paid in three months, and the Bayonet is trying to replace them with Red Guards brought from Ekaterinburg, and they know it.”

  “Starving people right before the Maslenitsa is not right,” I overheard one of the guards say to another, referring to their drunken colleagues. “Nobody deserves that. Not after what we’ve had to deal with this winter.”

  “You mean who we’ve had to deal with,” his companion muttered, with a wry smile.

  The two imprisoned soldiers continued to receive their clandestine meals, and after a week they were back among us, looking no thinner than before their drunken binge. I wondered why the Bayonet did nothing to punish those who had disobeyed him.

  “Perhaps he is getting into the spirit of the season,” Georgy remarked as he was cleaning our rooms, referring to the Bayonet. “We have a splendid carnival here in Tobolsk every winter. Not only plenty of good food but lots of entertainment. Plays and shows, jugglers and clowns, all sorts of performers in costume. Everybody dresses up, even the tea vendors and the candy sellers. It wouldn’t be Butter Week without al
l the play-acting and disguises. I myself will be dressing up as Tsar Peter the Great.”

  “If only they would let us join in and have fun,” Anastasia said wistfully. “I want to slide down the ice mountain.”

  “And I want to ride in a sleigh,” Alexei added. “I haven’t ridden in a sleigh in so long.” He rubbed his knee as he spoke, and I noticed that it was slightly swollen.

  “Did you bump your knee, Alexei?” I asked him.

  “Only a little. It only hurts a little.”

  “You’d better have Dr. Botkin look at it.”

  But despite the concern and very limited ministrations of Dr. Botkin—for there was really nothing any physician could do for his illness—Alexei’s knee continued to swell, and within a few hours his entire leg was growing stiff and sore and the next day it was completely engorged with blood and he was moaning with pain.

  The nuns came to pray over him, and mama sent Sedynov to hold the icon of St. Simon Verkhoturie above his chilly bed. Michael told him funny stories and made him laugh, even as he winced with the pain and shivered in the cold. We all took turns sitting by his bedside. He was brave, and endured much. As usual when he had a severe attack, he had no appetite and he looked alarmingly pale.

  Although I tried to drive morbid thoughts from my mind, I couldn’t help remembering how, when he was much younger, a coffin was kept ready in his nursery at all times, lined with purple velvet and decorated with gold leaf. Then he had been heir to the throne of Russia, now he was just a prisoner of the Military Revolutionary Committee, a thin thirteen-year-old boy in pain, a boy whose life or death was no longer of much consequence outside of his family and who, if he died, would lie unregarded in a shallow pauper’s grave.

  Fifty-five

  Wake up! Get up! Get dressed!”

  The Bayonet had a voice that was an assault; his raw screech attacked us very early one dark cold morning and I could tell at once that something important had happened.