“I would be honored if the grand duchesses would take tea with us,” she said.
I turned and looked at the guards, who had stayed respectfully behind the crowd of girls. I said, “We would be delighted. Our friends will wait for us outside.”
Before we could be stopped, I took Mashka’s hand and stepped through the doorway into the simple dwelling. The girl brought two stools out and placed the samovar over the fire, measuring out something that might have been tea, but in these times of limited supplies might have been a substitute. Everyone else positioned themselves around on the floor, kneeling or sitting cross-legged.
That was when I heard what I thought was thunder. “The sky looked clear when we came in,” I said. “Do you expect rain?”
The girls suppressed giggles, and I suppose my naïveté must have seemed laughable to them. “It’s the German guns,” our hostess said. Everyone listened silently for a minute. “They are still far away, but no doubt we will have to flee like the others when they come too near.”
“If you do, I will make sure you are taken care of,” I said. I didn’t really know if I could, but Mama always seemed to promise such things and make them happen, and I would tell her.
“If only you could convince my papa that it would not be right for me to marry Grigor Ippolytevich,” Anyushka said, introducing the very subject I had hoped she would.
“Do you not love him?”
“Love? How can I love an old man from the next village! Papa only wants us to marry so he can have more land.”
“Our parents wanted our sister Olga to marry someone from another country.”
“But it must have been a prince!” said a little girl lisping through the gap between her front teeth.
“Yes, a prince.”
“And she did not marry him? How could she refuse?” Anyushka asked, wonder in her eyes.
I shook my head. “Our mama and papa would never force us to marry if we did not want to.”
“That’s enough, Anyushka! The cows need milking.” The voice startled me and I jumped involuntarily. I turned to see the girl’s father standing in the doorway.
“But we have not served tea! It is impolite! And I milked the cows this morning,” Anyushka pleaded.
I could see a cloud gathering in the man’s face, and I feared for the safety of Anyushka if we stayed. “Do not trouble yourself. You have been most hospitable,” I said. Mashka and I stood—Mashka had not said a word all this time, although she nudged me once or twice as if to warn me against something. Anyushka looked crestfallen.
“Wait!” she said, and went to a small coffer in the corner, below the one window. She opened it and removed a small piece of cloth. She held it out to me, and I saw that it was an elaborately embroidered handkerchief. “Please, take this.”
I accepted it from her gratefully. The cloth was a little coarse, but the work was very fine. “Thank you, Anyushka. It’s beautiful.”
“You are welcome, Grand Duchess.”
“Call me Nastya. Everyone does.”
She blushed. “I couldn’t.”
“Then Anastasia Nicholaevna, if you must. Farewell.”
As we left the cottage, I heard Anyushka call after us, “Farewell, Anastasia Nicholaevna. God go with you.”
CHAPTER 12
I think it was during our visits to Mogilev that I began to see why my mother might be distrusted by people who didn’t know her. Her shyness in large crowds, which I had always noticed, didn’t seem strange. But even in the comparatively small society of army headquarters, she was not capable of making easy conversation. I could see that many interpreted her behavior as arrogance. If she wanted to talk to someone at the luncheons my father gave at headquarters, she would send one of us into the crowd to bring that person back to her. I couldn’t understand what she was afraid of. She was beautiful, kind, and the tsaritsa. Nonetheless, it was how she behaved, the entire time we were in Mogilev.
She wasn’t really herself, the Mama I knew, unless she was in the privacy of her own home. It was a great relief to all of us to return to Tsarskoe Selo that autumn, after having been away for such a long time. We were going to celebrate Mashka’s sixteenth birthday, her coming of age. It was sad that it had to be during wartime, I thought, although Papa and Alexei said they would come back for it.
One late October morning as I had just started rereading David Copperfield, longing for something to take me away from the reports of battles and wounded soldiers and incompetent generals, Mashka waltzed and twirled into the schoolroom, her face glowing.
“You’ll never guess!” she said.
“Well, if I won’t, you had better tell me.”
She did another twirl. “I thought we were all finished with balls and state occasions because of the war, but Crown Prince Carol of Rumania is coming to visit, and I’m to go—it’s my first state function, now that I’m of age! I shall have my diamond necklace! And a long gown, of course.”
Prince Carol was the one who had been presented to Olga as a potential suitor. She refused him because she didn’t want to leave Russia. I couldn’t imagine why he was visiting again, but assumed it must have something to do with the war. I sighed. Now I was the only one of us left who was a little girl. At fifteen, I didn’t really feel like it. I thought that Mashka seemed younger than I was in many ways. Maybe it was because she was still slightly plump, and had wide, innocent eyes. Marie’s saucers, our cousins called them. But Marie’s looks were deceptive: she was so strong, we always got her to lift heavy things. Once, when we were bored with our English lessons, she lifted Mr. Gibbes right off his feet.
Mashka was so excited about the ball that I couldn’t help getting caught up in it myself. I would be allowed to watch her grand entrance from a balcony. Like a child. Accompanied by Trina. I almost declined, thinking I would pretend a headache, but for Mashka’s sake I knew I would have to go through with it. I hoped no one noticed me there—the last, extraneous grand duchess, waiting to come of age so she could attend a ball. I remembered when Tatiana had her first ball, and Mashka and I stood on the balcony watching her enter. She was so beautiful. But I couldn’t resist the temptation to make some mischief—I was only twelve, after all—and took great pleasure in dropping grains of rice on the coiffed and tiaraed heads below me. I always took care to step back from the railing when people looked up. It was all I could do to control my laughter. Mashka was beside herself with hysterics.
The day of the grand occasion, I helped Mashka prepare, assuring her that she was lovely in her pink gown and that she would outshine every young lady there with her beauty. I kissed her before she went away to be announced, and then made my way to my observation perch above everyone’s heads.
It was the tradition for the grand duchess who had come of age to be the last to enter. All the guests down below—there were well over five hundred of them, which was not as many as the two or three thousand who had attended Olga’s and Tatiana’s debut balls—were turned toward the door, waiting for the master of ceremonies to announce Mashka’s entrance. I held my breath, knowing how nervous Mashka was, hoping she would not faint on entering the ballroom.
Mama and Papa stood directly below me, greeting the guests—Princess This, Count That, General the Other—the titles tripped off the tongue so easily. I could hear Papa’s rich voice making polite conversation and see my mother’s hand shake as she held it out to be kissed. I had almost lost myself in a private reverie, imagining that I was about to make my grand entrance, and that Sasha was waiting to lead me out on the dance floor in a waltz, when I heard the master of ceremonies call out, “Her Imperial Highness, the Grand Duchess Marie Nicholaevna.”
I prepared to applaud her entrance, but my hands flew to my mouth instead, when for some reason—Mashka said later it was the fault of her heels—she tripped, at first seeming to float through the air before landing sprawled out on the floor, her tiara rolling across the parquet toward a group of crusty dowagers with their lorgnettes to t
heir eyes.
I gasped, tears springing to my eyes at the thought of Mashka’s embarrassment. The entire company hardly breathed. Papa said, “What was that?” and someone next to him whispered in his ear. He looked up and saw an officer helping Mashka to her feet and handing her the wayward tiara. “Hah! Of course! Fat Marie.”
I never thought of my father as unkind, but at that moment I realized how little his hopes and dreams were bound up in us, especially his younger daughters. It was only Alexei who mattered. We were simply the grand duchesses, with single adjectives to distinguish us from one another: Lively Olga. Beautiful Tatiana. Fat Marie. Mischievous Anastasie. We were doomed to be what he saw of us, nothing more.
Later that night, when she came in after the dinner and ball was over, Marie cried on my shoulder. I did my best to comfort her, assuring her that no one would remember. “Oh, Nastya! You know that is the only thing they’ll remember. I was mortified. I felt so silly and stupid and awkward.”
“But you say you danced every dance!” I said. “Tell me about your partners.”
She sniffed and shrugged, wiping her eyes on her lacy handkerchief. “Most of them danced with me because they felt obligated, I think.”
“But not all of them?”
“No,” she said, looking shyly down to where she traced the outline of a flower on the counterpane. “One of them danced with me three times.”
“Who was it?” I asked, wanting to enjoy her night secondhand at least, even if I could not have been there myself.
“It was a young guard. In the Semyonovsky.”
I froze. I had not seen Sasha there. With his eye patch, he was easy to spot. But he could have been in the back somewhere. I braced myself. “What was his name?”
“Count Boris Alexandrovich Volkonsky.”
I let out my breath. It wasn’t Sasha after all. That would have been unbearable. “What did you talk about?”
“Nothing much. But he asked if he might call on me.”
“Oh, Mashka! How exciting! What did you say?” The idea of Mashka having a suitor was too strange and wonderful.
“I said I would ask Mama. And I did.”
“Well?”
Mashka looked away again. “She said, ‘perhaps when the war is over, or when I’m feeling better, or when the moon turns blue.… ’“A note of bitterness crept into her voice. I took her hand.
“It doesn’t seem fair.”
“No. But she’s right. What right have I to happiness when so many are suffering?”
I couldn’t answer her. I too felt the gathering threat around us. I thought then that it was just the war, just the enemy outside Russia that pressed so on my heart. I would soon enough learn otherwise.
Soon enough turned out to be little more than a month later, when we traveled to Novgorod that December. The reception we got was not just lukewarm, it verged on being openly hostile. I didn’t really know why just then. But I could see by the expression in Isa’s eyes that everyone except Mama noticed. No one made an effort to talk to her at the tea we were given, which suited Mama because she was so shy. There were no happy crowds waiting to greet us—again, my mother was not disappointed about that since crowds always make her nervous. Toward the end of our visit to the ancient city of churches, we went to call on a staritsa, an elderly mystic, over one hundred years old. On seeing my mother she said, “Here is the martyr Empress Alexandra.” Her words sent a chill down my spine. Mama and my sisters didn’t seem to hear her, though, and I never brought it up.
When we returned to Tsarskoe Selo, things really became strange. It started with well-meaning letters to Mama. I was on hand to witness her response to one in particular that arrived while her guard was down because she was worried about Alexei, who had fallen ill again. A servant brought in an envelope on a salver late one afternoon while we were all gathered with her for tea. She must have been too exhausted to consider whether she should accept it, and opened it without thinking in front of us all.
I watched her face pale and the blood drain from her lips as she read it, a lengthy letter scribbled on scraps of paper. Before reaching the end of it, she let the sheets fall from her fingers to the floor and covered her mouth. Tatiana was at her side in an instant, followed by Olga and Mashka. I went too, but my goal was to pick up the letter—my sisters were doing a good enough job comforting our mother, who in any case would rather be tended by them than by me. I quickly took in what I could before having to return the letter to Mama.
… As one who has remained faithful to the Imperial Crown, I felt it my duty to inform Your Imperial Majesty of the deep resentment and anger against you that is prevalent throughout society and among the people. You are reviled not only for your haughtiness and lack of concern for the state of the government, but for your evil influence over the tsar’s decisions, caused largely by your infatuation with the charlatan, Rasputin, whose partisanship for Protopopov is well known …
The letter continued in this vein, accusing my mother—or rather, telling her she had been accused by others—of the most disgusting and debasing crimes. My initial reaction was anger. Mama had not a wicked bone in her body, and had always tried to serve her family and Russia. And yet, I couldn’t help remembering what Sasha had told me of the way her actions and behavior had been misinterpreted by those who didn’t know her. It was unfair, but sadly understandable.
The secret police discovered who had written the letter, and I heard later that the lady was sent away from court to her country estates. But there were other letters and even more dreadful insinuations. While it might have been easy to disregard one or two bitter attacks, they became so numerous that eventually members of our own family came to plead with Mama and Papa to pay more attention to what the people thought, and take measures to act differently.
We hadn’t seen our Grandmama, the dowager empress, since the beginning of the war. She was a great favorite with us and with all of Russia. She was able to do everything Mama was not. She was charming and sociable, and knew just what to say to everyone so that they would not gossip about her or get the wrong idea. I don’t think she ever really liked Mama. I believe every time she came to visit she criticized her in some way or other.
In any case, things had reached such a terrible state that Grandmama swept in one day unannounced and stormed into Papa’s study. She was always lecturing him about something, but usually she took him on long walks or was discreet and quiet so that we would not hear. Not this time, though. She didn’t even close the door to Papa’s study before she tore into him in a way that only his mother would have dared. I, of course, stood near enough to hear but far enough away so as not to be noticed.
“How can you remain so blind, Nicky!”
“Blind to what exactly, Mama?” Papa’s voice was always a little pinched when he had to respond to Grandmama’s criticism.
“Oh, honestly! Can you not see that Alexandra is ruining you? Everyone at court hates her. They think she has you wrapped around her finger, and that all the decisions you make are at her behest.”
“Sunny? No one would credit such a vile rumor!”
Grandmama began to pace up and down. I could hear her petticoats swish. “But they already do! Can you not see it? You must give in to some of the demands of the Duma, show that you are willing to compromise, or all will be lost.”
“Mother!” Papa’s voice sounded shocked. “I cannot believe that you of all people would suggest that I should yield to the radical elements and relinquish my power into the hands of …”—he struggled to find the words—“petty revolutionaries. Bolsheviks. Anarchists!”
“The Duma, my son, is your last chance for survival. You will not have this choice next time.”
“Thank you, Mother. I have always known I could count on your support.”
I had gradually crept closer so I wouldn’t miss a word. I didn’t expect their interview to end so quickly, but obviously Grandmama decided she could make no more headway with Papa, and strode toward t
he door. I hid around a corner as quickly as I could so that she would not see me as she flounced out of Papa’s study.
Despite their disagreement, we all had dinner together that night. From Grandmama’s expression and lively conversation no one would ever have known the real reason for her visit. Only Papa gave any hint that there had been the slightest unpleasantness. He seemed remote from us, and even if I hadn’t heard their conversation, it was easy enough to guess from long experience that he had received a stinging lecture from her.
Grandmama wasn’t the only one who tried to talk Papa into granting some of the Duma’s requests. The British ambassador, Sir George Buchanan, visited Papa one day. He had always been a good friend to Mama and Papa, and they liked him well enough to invite him to family occasions once in a while. We all liked him too. He was funny and enjoyed playing tricks on us. He also always let us win when we played draughts or cards—a sure way to recommend himself to us.
But that day when he arrived and was shown to Papa’s study, he didn’t stay very long. That was quite unusual. Normally he would have been asked to tea at least. What’s more, he left without even greeting Mama. I couldn’t imagine what had happened.
After supper, it all became clear.
“I had a visit from Sir George today,” Papa said, putting his napkin on the table and pushing his chair back a little—a sign to the waiters to clear the dishes. “I regret to say that, to my complete surprise, he is no longer loyal. He admitted to me quite brazenly that he treats with our enemies!”
“Surely he has not been conspiring with the Germans!” Mama said, her hand clutching the diamond pendant at her throat.
“Not our enemies abroad,” Papa said, “our enemies at home. He admitted as much to me. He has had discussions with the most radical factions of the Duma. How can I trust him anymore?”
A gossiping, ambitious society hostess might well exaggerate and be untrustworthy. But Sir George? I exchanged a look with Mashka. We liked Sir George. I could not believe that he would deliberately mislead Papa or work against our family.
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