The Tsarina's Daughter (Reading Group Gold)

by Carolly Erickson

  I gasped.

  “She is ill,” I heard papa say. “She is not here.”

  “Liar! Produce her, or you will all be shot!”

  I pulled my arm free but Michael quickly grabbed me again. “No! You must not! You must wait for Adalbert, on the roof, with me and Daria!”

  In the long, suspenseful moment that followed—it may have been the longest of my life—I saw Daria take off her mask. Her face was surprisingly composed. She began descending the stairs.

  “I am here,” she said. “I am coming down.”

  “Daria?” I whispered, but Michael put his hand over my mouth. “No! Let her go! Let her go!”

  Daria turned to me. “I know Iskra will not come now,” she said, her voice low. “But I can’t leave here without her. I will go in your place. God be with you Tania. Thank you.”

  I cannot describe the anguish I felt, hearing her footsteps as she went down the stairs. Too much had happened, too quickly. I let Michael lead me noiselessly to the trap door and out onto the roof. The bitter wind tore at my face, and I buried it in Michael’s chest as he guided me to the lee side of the tower and we took refuge together from the wind and the unfolding horror inside the church. Gradually I went numb, until I could no longer feel anything at all. I could not bear to let myself react to what was happening. I could not bear even to weep as I watched, from the roof, while the Red Guards tied the hands of their new prisoners—my beloved family—and led them away into the night.

  Sixty-one

  Inever saw my family again.

  Michael and I took shelter with the nuns, in the tiny izba where the starets Maria Michaelovna was living out her extraordinarily long life. But we did not dare to stay there long. Within a few days we were taken by Georgy Kochetkov to a barn in a small village beside the Irtysh where we stayed, hidden in the hayloft, through the Lenten season.

  It was in that village, on a sunlit day in early spring, that we were married.

  We had no ring, I had no wedding dress, but Michael made me a bridal wreath out of hay from the manger and I wove some snowdrops into it—the first flowers of that fateful spring. We knelt before the village priest—who had no idea he was joining in marriage Michael Gamkrelidze of Daghestan, whose distant ancestor was the King of Imeretia, and Tatiana Romanov, daughter of the former Tsar Nicholas II.

  On our wedding night, spent amid the lowing cows and snuffling horses, Michael and I embraced with a passion I had not known I possessed. I had often enjoyed blissful nights in Michael’s embrace, but there was something new in the fire that awoke between us after we became husband and wife.

  Having been a captive for so long, I was suddenly free; having been forced to hide and suppress my emotions while living amid guards and soldiers, I now unleashed them, indulging my desire for Michael, my joy in our lovemaking, as never before. He felt the same abandon, and when after many pleasurable hours we lay side by side, watching the first faint colors of dawn light the sky, we turned to each other, flushed and exultant, laughing and embracing for sheer delight.

  How could I feel such pleasure knowing that my family was in the brutal hands of the Red Guards, their future uncertain but their present danger very real? I have no answer for that, though I have searched my heart again and again. All I can say is that I was a young, happily wedded woman in love, and that when I lay in my husband’s arms, lip to fervent lip, heart to fast-beating heart, limb to searching limb, I found balm for my wounded self, and we both found hope.

  It was a hope we were to need in coming days.

  By the end of the Lenten season we knew that my father and mother, my sisters and brother had been taken to Ekaterinburg and handed over to the Ural Regional Soviet.

  The story was making its way throughout eastern Russia, for it was a sensational tale: the escape of the former tsar and his family and the dramatic recapture of these so-called traitors by the heroic Red Guards.

  But it was an incomplete story. I knew it to be incomplete. For nothing was said about my escape. I had not been recaptured. Instead Daria had taken my place, just as I at that time took her name, Daria, and coupled it with my husband’s adopted name of Gradov.

  I repeated my new name, my new identity, a hundred times a day. I am no longer Tatiana Romanov. I am Daria Gradov. As long as I clung to this new identity, I told myself, and the real Daria continued to play the role of Tatiana, the former tsar’s second daughter, I was safe.

  No one would come after me. No one would find me.

  But the fearsome Ural Regional Soviet was implacable in its judgments, as we continued to discover from the scant news reports that reached us. The Bolsheviks in Ekaterinburg were merciless to all those they perceived to be traitors. In my worst hours I feared that in time the Red Guards would indeed come after me, find me and kill me, and Michael too. I suppose it was this fear, in part, that made our time together so pleasurable and so precious.

  We were hearing that Ekaterinburg was in turmoil. Russia was indeed in a state of civil war, just as the Bayonet had insisted when he shouted at the top of his lungs in the Tobolsk town hall. The Bolshevik revolutionaries were attempting to hold onto their newfound power and the monarchists, the Whites, were attempting to take back all that had been lost since the revolution began. By that summer, the summer of 1918, a White army was approaching Ekaterinburg.

  A storm was brewing, a terrible storm.

  When Michael’s fellow-soldiers in the newly reconstituted Fifth Circassian regiment swept through Tobolsk on their way eastward we decided to leave the safety of our remote village and join them, despite the risk we knew we were taking, hoping that the forces of the Whites would recapture the town and that my family would be freed.

  We were too late. Before we could arrive in Ekaterinburg the Bolsheviks, among them the fearsome Bayonet, decided to act.

  I can hardly bear to write what happened. But the world knows. The world has known for many decades. My father and mother, my sisters Olga and Marie and Anastasia and my brother Alexei, along with some of our servants, were all shot in the basement of the house where they had been imprisoned.

  It was merciless, pitiless slaughter of innocent people and I know that those who carried it out are burning in hell, every last one of them.

  What the world has never known until now is that Daria, Niuta’s sister and my friend, was massacred too, because the Red Guards believed she was Tatiana.

  I can only hope that when they died, my family cherished in their hearts the knowledge that I was not with them and the trust that I was free and alive.

  Michael has told me so often that I must not feel guilty that I survived and those nearest to me did not. If your father were standing right here, Michael tells me, he would say Tania, my dearest Tania, you were right to go on ahead, to save yourself. I meant to follow. You must not mourn for me. Papa would be glad for each day of life that I have had. He would say, dearest Tania, all is in the will of God.

  I try my best to remember this, as I look at the icon of St. Simon Verkhoturie that hangs on my wall, and imagine that he weeps for all that has happened, and as I look down at the gold bracelet that I wear on my wrist, the bracelet I have never taken off since the day mama gave it to me when I was nineteen years old. I have worn it, and will always wear it, in memory of my beloved mama, even though my wrist has thickened and become the fleshy wrist of a stout old woman.

  From that day in July of 1918 when my family died I have carried their blood and their hopes. All the evils that were unleashed in Russia when I was a girl have now played themselves out, and the Russian people, still my people despite all my years of living in Canada, can breathe free. I rejoice in their freedom, as I have rejoiced all these years in my own. My hope is that my children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren will take pride in who they are, the descendants of emperors, and will remember with love the family they never knew. My family. The family of Tatiana Romanov, also known as Daria Gradov, daughter of Tsar Nicholas II of Russia and of Tsa
rina Alexandra.

  And now I write to whoever reads this account of my life, remembering always my dear family, and in thankfulness that I was spared,

  All is in the will of God.

  EPILOGUE

  When my Aunt Niuta died, I found Tatiana Romanov’s story about her family and her own escape among her papers, and after much thought I decided that it should be given to the world.

  I do not know exactly how or when the former grand duchess sent her story to my aunt, or how she even knew that my aunt had survived. Perhaps they corresponded. Or it may be that others from Pokrovsky who escaped the revolution and its bitter aftermath made their way to Canada and contacted the woman who called herself Daria Gradov.

  Whether Tatiana would have wanted her story to be widely shared I can’t say. The time she writes about seems so very long ago now, and the story itself is not easy to believe, though I believe it, every word. But my aunt often talked about the family she served—she was proud of having been a member of the tsar’s household, though she did not dare say so to anyone but my Uncle Nikandr and me. Many of the small details in the story were things Aunt Niuta told me about. And the icon, the gold bracelet and the small velvet box of jewels that were bound up with the manuscript are all from the time before the revolution. I know, I had them all authenticated before returning them to Tatiana’s—I mean Daria’s—relatives in the town of Yellow Rain.

  I do not know whether the world will care that one of the last tsar’s daughters survived, but I care. For after all, as she says in her manuscript, she helped to bring me into the world, in that long-ago time before the revolution, in the Workers’ Clinic in Smokestack Town, and I am grateful.

  Iskra Melnikov

  NOTE TO THE READER

  Though in this historical entertainment the heroine Tatiana survives to a ripe old age and tells her remarkable story, the real Tatiana Romanov, sadly, did not. She was executed with her family in Ekaterinburg in 1918, and all her hopes, plans and loves died with her.

  The Tsarina’s Daughter is an imaginative retelling of Tatiana’s story, with many invented characters and events added to the historical background. Fiction and reality intertwine in this narrative; Michael Gradov is an imagined figure, as are Daria and Constantin and others. But what I hope emerges from this congeries of invention is an image of Tatiana Romanov’s world, and of the darkness that closed over it at her brief life’s end. The real Tatiana was not allowed to escape that darkness, but the fictional one overcame it, and lives, in these pages and in our hearts.