The Tsarina's Daughter (Reading Group Gold)

by Carolly Erickson

  “It says, ‘A message awaits. MM. Ivanovsky.’ ”

  “The Ivanovsky convent. But who or what is MM?”

  I had no idea. But I decided to ask the nuns. Adalbert and the commissar took me in their sleigh to the convent and waited while I made my inquiry.

  “Have you a message from someone named MM, or some group that might call itself MM?” I asked the sister who came out to greet me.

  “The starets?”

  “Perhaps. Just MM.”

  “There is an ancient starets who lives in a small izba on our grounds. She is a hundred and ten years old and she remembers Napoleon. She never leaves her izba. Would you like to meet her?”

  “Please.”

  “Come this evening, after vespers.”

  Once I was back in the Governor’s Mansion I sent a message to Michael to meet me in the convent basement at dusk. Just as it was getting dark I managed to make my way down into the basement of the mansion and then along the cold dark passageway that connected the mansion and the convent.

  Michael was waiting for me and I told him, full of excitement, all that had happened that day.

  “At last!” he burst out, nearly shouting. “Real help, at last! And a goodhearted commissar. Can it be possible?” He threw his arms around me and I hugged him tight.

  “I can’t believe that Adalbert would put his trust in a betrayer.”

  “It seems too good to be true. We must be very sure.”

  “That is one reason I wanted to come here, to meet this woman who has been sending notes to mama.”

  We were shown the way to the small log hut where the starets, whose name was Maria Michaelovna, spent her days. The convent grounds were quite large and the little hut was hidden within a wood, out of sight of the church and nuns’ quarters. Even though we had wrapped ourselves up as best we could against the cold, we shivered as we made our way along, lanterns swinging, through the snow. Finally we reached the door and knocked.

  “Come in, children.” The voice we heard was high and shrill.

  We went inside and shut the door quickly behind us. A single candle burned in the humble room, its light so dim we could barely make out the small, frail body of the starets, lying on her bed. I had never before seen anyone so old, her face as wrinkled and shriveled as a raisin, surrounded by its aureole of scraggly white hair. Yet when we brought our lanterns close and sat down beside the bed, we could see that it was a sweet face, the eyes young and shining, the smile benign and comforting.

  The starets held out her thin hand in blessing.

  “Be joyous uncrowned bride and bridegroom,” she said. “The war is ending, they are ending it. The good men. You will live, you will marry and have many children. You will not live in Russia.”

  She pointed to the locket I was wearing on a chain around my neck. I opened it and bent down to show her the two small photographs it contained—photographs of my parents, taken at the time of their engagement many years before.

  “The heavy cross is upon them,” she said, her voice faltering. “They need not fear it, but meet it with joy. It is their blessed fate.”

  At the old woman’s words my heart turned to stone.

  “No. No, you must be wrong. There is no heavy cross any more, no doom. We are going to be rescued, and very soon.”

  The starets’s eyes grew sad. She shook her small head.

  “They are the martyrs Nicholas and Alexandra.”

  I stumbled to the door of the izba and went outside. Michael soon followed me.

  “She’s just an old woman, Tania. She doesn’t know what happened today. How could she?”

  But I could only shake my head and repeat no, no again and again, in a vain effort to shake off and deny the force of the starets’s words.

  “Remember the stick, Tania. You thought it was special, blessed by Father Gregory, and so you got well. But it was only a stick. You cured yourself! Don’t give power to this woman’s gloomy visions by believing in them. Believe in yourself, and in me, and in your friend Adalbert and the commissar. Believe that you and your family will soon be out of Tobolsk, and on your way to freedom, and it will happen!”

  Fifty-seven

  Ilay awake all that night in the cold, turning over and over in my mind the events of that long day. The hope, the promise of rescue—and the chilling prophecy of the aged starets. I tried to force myself to think in practical, logical terms. How could I manage to smuggle my entire family out of the Governor’s Mansion and to some safe place where we could meet Adalbert and his soldiers? How could this be done without awakening our guards’ suspicions or alerting the mayor of the town to our plans?

  We would have to leave everything behind, I felt certain. But that ought not to matter—all that ought to matter was that our lives would be saved.

  I thought and thought, and every time I glimpsed a possible plan I also began to see reasons why it would not work. Finally toward morning I dropped into an exhausted sleep.

  I dreamed of freedom, of running through the woods on a warm summer afternoon with no one to stop me or restrict me. I dreamed of the old starets, lying on her bed, shriveled and dying. And then I dreamed of the revelers I had seen as Adalbert and the commissar drove me through the streets on our way to the convent. There were so many of them, people wearing fantastic carnival costumes—birds, fish, cows, mythical monsters, the fearsome witch Baba Yaga and other characters from folk tales. They wore elaborate masks, painted and decorated with feathers, spangles, grinning mouths and long pointed noses.

  In my dream these fanciful characters were playful, joyful wild creatures but then the dream turned into a nightmare and the costumed figures became pursuing furies, chasing me along the street, howling.

  Terrified, I awoke with a start.

  I sat up in bed, shivering, and looked around the room I shared with my sisters, assuring myself that what had frightened me was no more than a dream, and that all was as usual around me. A candle burned beside the bed on a little table where I kept my Bible and the photograph album I had brought with me from Tsarskoe Selo with my favorite pictures of our family.

  I picked up the album and leafed through it. There we were as small children, Anastasia on mama’s lap, Marie leaning against her chair, me sitting at her feet and Olga standing beside her, all of us looking very solemn. There was Grandma Minnie and Aunt Ella, and a photograph of the Standart at Cowes. One picture in particular caught my eye. It was of our entire family in medieval costume, dressed for a masked ball.

  All of a sudden I thought of a way we could elude our guards and join our rescuers.

  If we could be allowed to join in the festival for a day, or even a few hours, in costume (could the nuns make us costumes, I wondered?), then we might be able to slip away and lose ourselves in the crowd. But of course we would be too closely watched for that; the guards would never lose sight of us.

  Or would they? There was one place, I thought, where they would be reluctant to follow us. They would not want to enter the cathedral. Early in our captivity when we had been permitted to go to mass, the guards had walked along beside us to the church but had never gone inside. Was it because all revolutionaries were atheists? Were they showing contempt for the church authorities? I didn’t know. But it seemed reasonable to assume that if we entered the cathedral for a service, they would not follow us inside, but would wait by the door or on the steps until we came out again.

  Was there a way we could escape once we were in the cathedral? Georgy would know. I would have to ask him. Meanwhile I would have to think of a way for us to obtain our liberty to attend the Maslenitsa.

  I went back to bed and had no more bad dreams. Early the following morning I waited for the nuns to bring us our daily food baskets, expecting that Michael would probably be with them. I gave him a note to carry to the commissar at the mayor’s house. Next I sought out Georgy and found a place where we could talk unobserved. I told him that the commissar Yuri Pyatakov and his friend Prince Adalbert were
offering our family a way of escape.

  “The Brotherhood is against this, Tania. I’m sure your father is as well. A scheme thought up by two young idealists who know little of how cruel and treacherous the real world can be. It will be far better for your family to wait until the ice melts and our forces can seize the town as we have been planning all along.”

  “There isn’t time for that. Most of the ruling Committee in Moscow wants our family killed. Pyatakov is one of the few who wants to save us.”

  “So he says.”

  “I am going to follow his advice. And now I need yours. You and the Brotherhood know the cathedral better than anyone. Tell me, is there a hidden way out? A way our guards would not think to watch?”

  He thought for a moment. “There is an exit from the bell tower out onto the roof. Only the bellringers know of it, because it is hardly ever needed. There is also the coal cellar, but it would not be big enough for more than one or two people to hide in, and getting out would require help from outside, as the coal chute is steep. Why do you ask?”

  I told him what I was thinking, that if our family, in costume, were to be allowed to attend the festival then we might have a chance to conceal ourselves in the cathedral, where we could be sure the guards would not be watching us, and then wait for an opportunity to escape by some obscure exit.

  He looked thoughtful.

  “I don’t think you ought to do this, Tania. I think you ought to keep to the original plan. But if you insist, then why not arrange to have others take your place? Then you could go in and out of the cathedral freely, and the guards would be none the wiser.”

  “How would that work, exactly?”

  “You would go in, wearing your costumes, and then others would put them on and go back out again, and the guards would follow the others, not realizing who it was that they were following.”

  “But that’s perfect!” I almost kissed Georgy, I was so pleased at his suggestion. Why hadn’t I thought of it myself?

  “However, I can’t imagine that you would be given any liberty, so this is only a dream.”

  Exactly, I wanted to say. This is precisely a dream, my dream of the night before. But I reminded myself that my dream had turned to nightmare.

  Despite Georgy’s misgivings and pessimism, the outcome I hoped for came about. In the note I sent through Michael to Yuri Pyatakov, I asked the commissar to order our guards to let us celebrate the Maslenitsa with the townspeople for one day. He did as I asked, and the Bayonet, sputtering with anger and much aggrieved by his temporary arrest on the day of the town hall meeting, informed us that our family, plus Daria and Iskra, would be allowed to leave the Governor’s Mansion on the morning of the final day of the carnival, with an escort of guards, and that we would have to return that evening by ten o’clock.

  “And if you do not return, I will order one hundred of the people of Tobolsk shot! I will shoot them myself!” He took out his pistol and waved it in the air. “Do you hear? Shot!”

  I had five days to make my arrangements. I started in at once.

  First there was the matter of our costumes. I sat down with my sketchbook and drew pictures of a harlequin, a firebird, an ice princess and so on—a costume for each of us. Then I spoke to our unfailing helpers, the nuns: could they make two sets of the costumes I had drawn, one for us and one for those who would take our places, keeping in mind our heights (they knew us well) and making the garments loose enough not to require any fittings? I was assured that they could, and that the costumes would be finished in time for us to wear them on the last day of the Maslenitsa. We would need masks to go with each costume, and I knew Michael could buy these in the marketplace.

  Georgy was both surprised and dismayed when I told him that we had been given one day of liberty; I could tell that he had been hoping my plan would not succeed. Yet he was sincere in his desire to see us free, and to be of use. He and his family would take our places, he said; he even had two grandchildren who were close to the sizes of Alexei and little Iskra.

  Alexei! Until that moment I had not really considered what difficulties his recent attack would present when it came to attending the festival. He had begun to recover, he was no longer completely unable to walk at all. But he could not walk far, and would have to be carried most of the time on the festival day.

  “Can your grandson imitate the tsarevich’s limp?” I asked Georgy. “And will he remember to?”

  “He is clever. And he knows how important his role will be.”

  All seemed to be falling in place, yet as the days passed I felt a nagging worry. The elderly starets had prophesied that my parents would be martyrs. I could not purge that woeful thought from my mind, no matter how hard I tried. I forced myself to remember Michael’s rock-solid, comforting rationality. He had been right to remind me that the old holy woman could not possibly know anything about Adalbert or his soldiers, nor of the commissar’s sincere desire that we be taken out of Russia to safety. Michael had good common sense, I told myself. I was being frightened by a chimera.

  Yet I was my mother’s daughter—and my credulous, superstitious mother had always put her trust in messages from the beyond. From birth I had been accustomed to having occult healers and seers around me, and to hearing mama talk of weeping icons and wondrous visions. Some were surely frauds, I had seen that for myself. But not all. And surely the aged Maria Michaelovna, lying in her dim hut, waiting for death, could have no reason to lie about what she saw in the future.

  I trembled, I said my prayers, and waited for our day of liberty to dawn.

  Fifty-eight

  It was the final day of the Maslenitsa, and one by one we emerged from the Governor’s Mansion, dressed in our carnival finery and shivering in the chill early morning air. Papa, dressed as a harlequin, came first, followed by mama all in red and gold, a fanciful firebird. I was a silvery snow maiden, Olga a furry Grimalkin, Marie a whimsical spotted dog, Anastasia a frog prince all in green. Little Iskra, dressed as a black kitten with a long tail and silver whiskers, bounded eagerly beside her mother—an ice princess all in white—and I was amazed to see that her weeks of confinement in the basement had not broken her childish high spirits. Alexei, in a brown bear costume with a gold crown on his head, was carried in Michael’s strong arms but was eager to get down and walk, and as we made our way along Freedom Street, surrounded by our cordon of uniformed guards, he slipped out of Michael’s grasp and stumbled along as best he could on his own, eager to watch the jugglers and buy hazelnuts and gingerbread from the street vendors.

  At every street corner, ventriloquists and comedians stood on hastily built wooden stages and entertained the crowd; they made fun of everything, even the revolution and its policy of giving land to the peasants and bread to the hungry. I saw our guards frown at some of these irreverent jokes, but more often they laughed, and ate butter-bathed blinis and washed them down with lemon-pepper vodka, all the while keeping us in view.

  In our costumes we blended in well with the hundreds of others strolling among the food booths and stages, the rides and decorated sleighs and crowded arenas set apart for dancing and music. There were many harlequins and firebirds and ice princesses and grotesque animals, many scaramouches like Michael. For disguise, after all, was half the fun of a carnival; hidden behind a mask, one could do what one liked. Inhibitions were laid aside, instinct took over. Except for the everpresent guards, we were free to shout, cavort, overeat, even fight.

  Fist-fighting in groups was a hallmark of the Maslenitsa and we stopped to watch young men, stripped of their costumes and sweating in their underwear despite the cold, brawling with one another, hitting, kicking and punching with abandon. Each time a telling blow was landed or a dizzy fighter lurched away bleeding or limping the crowd cheered. After looking on for ten minutes or so, two of our guards tore off their uniforms and joined in. In the free-for-all that followed, both men flailed away and managed to damage some of the other fighters, but in the end they crumpled and le
ft the melee, returning to where we were standing, one clutching his stomach, the other his bleeding head.

  The injured guards slapped and punched the others, demanding to know why they hadn’t come to their aid.

  “How could we? We have to watch these Romanovs.”

  “The hell with them. The Bayonet isn’t here now.”

  “What if they get away? We’d be blamed. We’d be shot.”

  “I say if they don’t pay us, they don’t have the right to shoot us.”

  “And I say you were brave fellows in there,” Michael broke in, handing tall glasses of vodka to the two guards who had been in the fight, “and you deserve to be rewarded.”

  They took the fiery vodka and drank it down.

  Alexei and Iskra clamored to go on the whirligig and we took them to find it, our wounded guards putting their uniforms back on and trailing behind. While we were watching the children gyrate on the fast-spinning mechanism mama complained that her leg hurt.

  “Then sit down, firebird!” one of the guards responded roughly. “Or just fly away!” The others sniggered. Papa helped mama to a bench where she sat, arms folded, frowning, until the whirligig stopped turning. Daria went to lift Iskra down from the slowing device. Iskra was holding her head.

  “She’s dizzy. She needs to lie down. I’ll take her to her Aunt Niuta’s house.” And without waiting for permission from the guards she walked away, holding Iskra by the hand.

  “Return in half an hour,” one of the men called out after her, but his half-hearted command was lost in the music of the carousel.

  We stopped to watch a dancing bear and I thought of Lavoritya and the night we had almost been rescued from Tsarskoe Selo. That night our carefully planned rescue had failed. Would we succeed this time? Was this our freedom day, so long in coming? I hoped so.

  Just past the whirligig an enormous ice mountain had been created and Marie and Anastasia climbed to the top and slid down. Alexei wanted to slide down it too.