by Boris Akunin
All the time we were travelling to Sebastopol in the train, Endlung had teased me and mocked me in the presence of His Highness, but I had tolerated it, waiting for an opportunity to clarify matters face to face. Now the opportunity had presented itself.
I delicately removed the lieutenant’s hand (at that time he was not yet a gentleman of the bedchamber) with my finger and thumb and said politely: ‘Mr Endlung, if you have been visited by the fancy to define my soul, then it would be more accurate to refer to it, not as the soul of a “flunkey”, but that of a “house-master”, since for long and irreproachable service at His Highness’s court I have been awarded that title, which is a rank of the ninth level, corresponding to that of titular counsellor, staff captain in the army or lieutenant in the fleet.’ (I deliberately emphasised the latter title.)
Endlung exclaimed: ‘Lieutenants don’t wait on tables!’
And I said to him: ‘One waits on tables in restaurants, sir, but in the royal family one serves, each performing his duty as honourably as he can.’
After that incident Endlung became as smooth as silk with me: he spoke politely, told no more jokes at my expense, addressed me by my name and patronymic and always spoke politely.
I must say that for a man in my position the question of degrees of politeness is particularly complicated, since we court servants have a quite distinctive status. It is hard to explain why it is insulting to be called by your first name by some people, and insulting to be addressed formally by others. But the latter are the only people that I can serve, if you take my meaning.
Let me try to explain. I can only tolerate being called by my first name by individuals of the royal family. Indeed, I do not tolerate it, but regard it as a privilege and a special distinction. I would simply be mortified if Georgii Alexandrovich, Her Highness or one of their children, even the very youngest, suddenly addressed me formally by my first name and patronymic. Two years ago I had a disagreement with Ekaterina Ioannovna concerning a maid who was unjustly accused of frivolous behaviour. I demonstrated firmness and stood my ground, and the grand duchess took offence and addressed me in strictly formal terms for an entire week. I suffered greatly, lost weight and could not sleep at night. And then we clarified matters. With her typical magnanimity, Ekaterina Ioannovna acknowledged her error. I also apologised and was allowed to kiss her hand, and she kissed me on the forehead.
But I digress.
The card players were being served by the junior footman Lipps, a novice whom I had brought with me especially to get a good look at him and see what he was worth. He had previously served at the Estonian estate of Count Beckendorf and had been recommended to me by His Excellency’s house steward, an old acquaintance of mine. He seems like quite an efficient young lad and doesn’t talk a lot, but it takes a while to recognise a good servant, unlike a bad one. In a new post everyone makes a great effort to do his best; you have to wait six months or a year, or even two, to know for certain. I observed how Lipps poured coffee, how deftly he changed a soiled napkin, how he stood in his position – that is very, very important. He stood correctly, without shifting from one foot to the other or turning his head. I decided he could probably be allowed to serve guests at small receptions.
The game was proceeding normally. First Endlung lost, and Pavel Georgievich rode along the corridor on his back. Then Fortune turned her face away from His Highness and the lieutenant demanded that the grand duke must run to the lavatory, completely undressed, and bring back a glass of water.
While Pavel Georgievich was giggling and taking his clothes off, I quietly slipped out through the door, called the valet, told him that none of the servants must look into the grand duke’s saloon and took a cape from the duty compartment. When His Highness skipped out into the corridor, peering around and covering himself with his hand, I tried to throw this long item of clothing over him, but Pavel Georgievich indignantly refused, saying that a promise is a promise, and he ran to the lavatory and then back again, laughing very much all the time.
It was a good thing that Madamoiselle Declique did not glance out to see what all the laughter was about. Fortunately, despite the late hour, His Highness Mikhail Georgievich had not gone to bed yet – he was pleased to jump up and down on a chair and then swung on a curtain for a long time. The youngest of the grand dukes is usually asleep at half past eight, but this time Mademoiselle had felt it possible to indulge him, saying that His Highness was too excited by the journey and would not fall asleep anyway.
In our Green Court the children are not raised strictly, unlike in the Blue Court of the Kirilloviches, where they maintain the family traditions of the Emperor Nikolai Pavlovich. There boys are raised like soldiers: from the age of seven they learn campaign discipline, are toughened by sluicing with cold water and put to sleep in folding camp beds. But Georgii Alexandrovich is regarded as a liberal in the imperial family. He raises his sons leniently in the French manner and, in the opinion of his relatives, he has completely spoiled his only daughter, his favourite.
Her Highness, thank God, did not come out of her compartment either and did not witness Pavel Georgievich’s prank. Ever since St Petersburg she had locked herself away with a book, and I even know which one it was: The Kreutzer Sonata, a work by Count Tolstoy. I have read it, in case there might be talk about it among us butlers, simply in order not to appear a complete dunce. In my opinion it makes extremely boring reading and is quite inappropriate for a nineteen-year-old girl, especially a grand princess. In St Petersburg Ekaterina Ioannovna would never have allowed her daughter to read such smut and I can only think that the novel was smuggled into the baggage. The lady-in-waiting Baroness Stroganova must have provided it; it could not have been anyone else.
The two sailors did not quieten down until it was almost morning, following which even I allowed myself the luxury of dozing for a while because, to be quite honest, I was really rather tired after all the bustle and commotion before we left, and I anticipated that the first day in Moscow would not be easy.
The difficulties far exceeded all my expectations.
As it happens, in all the forty-six years of my life I have never been in the ‘white stone capital’ before, although I have travelled round the world quite extensively. The fact is, in our family Asiatic manners are not regarded favourably, and the only place in the whole of Russia acknowledged as being even slightly decent is St Petersburg. Our relations with the governor general of Moscow, Simeon Alexandrovich, are cool, and so we have no reason to spend time in the old capital. We usually even travel to Miskhor Grange in the Crimea by a roundabout route, via Minsk, since Georgii Alexandrovich likes to shoot a few bison in the Beloverzhsk forest reserve along the way. And I did not travel to the last coronation, thirteen years ago, since I held the position of assistant butler and was left to replace my superior at that time, the now-deceased Zakhar Trofimovich.
While we were travelling across the city from the station, I formed my first impression of Moscow. The city proved to be even less civilised than I had expected – absolutely no comparison with St Petersburg. The streets were narrow and absurdly twisted, the buildings were wretched, the public on the streets was slovenly and provincial. And this was when the city was making an almighty effort to preen its feathers on the eve of the arrival of the emperor himself: the facades of the buildings had been washed, the sheet metal of the roofs had been freshly painted, on Tverskaya Street (the main street of Moscow, a pale shadow of Nevsky Prospect) the tsar’s monogram and two-headed eagles had been hung everywhere. I don’t even know with what I can compare Moscow. It is the same kind of overgrown village as Salonica, which our yacht, the Mstislav, visited last year. Along the way we didn’t see a single fountain, or a building with more than four storeys, or an equestrian statue – only the round-shouldered bronze Pushkin and, to judge from the colour of the metal, even that was a recent acquisition.
At Red Square, which was also quite a disappointment, our cavalcade divided into two. Their Hig
hnesses set out, as befits members of the imperial family, to pay obeisance to the icon of the Virgin of Iversk and the holy relics in the Kremlin, while I and the servants went on to make ready our temporary Moscow residence.
Owing to the division of the court into two parts, I had to make do with an extremely modest number of servants. I had only been able to bring eight people with me from St Petersburg: His Highness’s valet, Xenia Georgievna’s maid, a junior footman (the aforementioned Lipps) for Pavel Georgievich and Endlung, a pantry man and his assistant, a ‘white chef’, and two coachmen for the English and Russian carriages. The intention was that I would serve tea and coffee myself – that is by way of being a tradition. At the risk of appearing immodest, I can say that in the entire court department there is no one who performs duties of this kind, which require not only great skill, but also talent, better than I do. After all, I did serve for five years as a coffee pourer with Their Majesties the deceased emperor and the present dowager empress.
Naturally, I could not count on being able to manage with only eight servants, and so I sent a special telegram requesting the Moscow Court Department to appoint a capable local man as my assistant and also to provide two postilions, a ‘black chef’ for the servants, a footman to serve the senior servants, two junior footmen for cleaning, a maid for Mademoiselle Declique and two doormen. I did not ask for more than that, since I realised perfectly well how scarce experienced servants would be in Moscow owing to the arrival of such a large number of exalted individuals. And I had no illusions concerning Moscow servants. Moscow is a city of empty palaces and decaying villas, and there is nothing worse than maintaining a staff of servants without anything for them to do. It makes people stupid, it spoils them. For instance, we have three large houses in which we live by turns (excluding the spring, which we spend abroad, because Ekaterina Ioannovna finds the period of Lent in Russia unbearably dull): during the winter the Family lives in its St Petersburg palace, during the summer in its villa at Tsarskoe Selo, during the autumn at the Miskhor Grange. Each of the houses has its own staff of servants, and I do not allow them to loaf about. Every time we move from one house to another, I leave behind an extremely long list of instructions, and I always manage to visit every now and then to check on things, and always without warning. Servants are like soldiers. You have to keep them busy all the time, or they will start drinking, playing cards and behaving improperly.
My Moscow assistant met us at the station, and while we were riding in the carriage he had time to explain some of the problems that awaited me. In the first place it turned out that my extremely moderate and rational request had not been met in full by the Court Department: they had only allocated one junior footman, they had not given us a chef for the servants, only a female cook, and the worse thing of all was that there was no maid for the governess. I was particularly displeased by this, because the position of governess is fundamentally ambivalent, lying as it does on the boundary line between service personnel and court staff; exceptional tact is required here in order to avoid offending and humiliating a person who is already constantly apprehensive for her own dignity.
‘And that is still not the most deplorable thing, Mr Ziukin,’ my Moscow assistant said with those distinctive broad Moscow ‘a’s when he noticed my dissatisfaction. ‘The most lamentable thing of all is that instead of the Maly Nikolaevsky Palace in the Kremlin that was promised, you have been given the Small Hermitage in the Neskuchny Park as your residence.’
My assistant was called Kornei Selifanovich Somov, and at first glance I did not take to him at all: a rather unattractive, skinny fellow with protruding ears and a prominent Adam’s apple. It was immediately obvious that the man had already reached the peak of his career and would not progress any further but remain stuck in the backwoods of Moscow until he retired.
‘What sort of place is this Hermitage?’ I asked with a frown.
‘A beautiful house with a quite excellent view of the Moscow River and the city. It stands in a park close to the Alexandriisky Palace, which the emperor and empress will occupy immediately before the coronation, but . . .’ Somov shrugged and spread his long arms ‘. . . it is dilapidated, cramped and it has a ghost.’ He giggled but, seeing from my face that I was in no mood for jokes, he explained. ‘The house was built in the middle of the last century. It used to belong to the Countess Chesmenskaya – the famous madwoman who was incredibly rich. You must have heard about her, Mr Ziukin. Some say that Pushkin based his Queen of Spades on her, and not the old Princess Golytsina at all.’
I do not like it when servants flaunt their erudition, and so I said nothing, but merely nodded.
Somov obviously did not understand the reason for my displeasure, for he continued in even more flamboyant style.
‘The legend has it that during the reign of Alexander I, when everyone in society was playing the newfangled game of lotto, the countess played a game with the Devil himself and staked her own soul. The servants say that sometimes on moonless nights a white figure in a nightcap wanders down the corridor, rattling the counters for lotto in a little cloth bag.’
Somov giggled again, as if to make it clear that he, as an enlightened man, did not believe in such nonsense. But I took this news quite seriously, because every servant, especially if, like me, he happens to be a member of an old court dynasty, knows that ghosts and phantoms really do exist, and joking with them or about them is a foolish and irresponsible pastime. I asked if the ghost of the old countess did anything wicked apart from rattling the counters. Somov said no, that in almost a hundred years she had never been known to play any other tricks, and I was reassured. Very well, let her wander, that was not frightening. In our Fontanny Palace we have the ghost of Gentleman of the Bedchamber Zhikharev, a handsome Adonis and prospective favourite of Catherine the Great, who was poisoned by Prince Zubov. What is an old woman in a mob cap compared with him? Our otherworldly lodger behaves in the most indecent fashion: in the darkness he pinches the ladies and the servants, and he becomes especially rowdy on the eve of the feast of St John the Baptist. It is true, however, that he does not dare to touch the ladies of the royal family – after all he is a gentleman of the bedchamber. And then in the Anichkov Palace there is the ghost of a female student from the Smolny Institute who was supposedly seduced by Tsar Nikolai Pavlovich and afterwards took her own life. At night she oozes through the walls and drops cold tears on the faces of people who are asleep. It can hardly be pleasant to be woken by cold tears and confronted by a horror like that.
Anyway, Somov did not frighten me with his ghost. It was far worse that the house really did prove to be very cramped and lacking in many conveniences. That was hardly surprising – nothing in the property had been renovated since the Court Department bought it from the Counts Chesmensky half a century earlier.
I walked round the floors, calculating what needed to be done first. I must admit that Somov had coped rather well with the basic preparations: the covers had been removed from the furniture, everything was brilliantly clean, there were fresh flowers in the bedrooms and the grand piano in the large drawing room was correctly tuned.
The lighting was a great disappointment – there was not even gas, only antediluvian oil lamps. Ah, if only I had had just one week – I would have installed a small electric generator in the basement, laid the wires, and the palace would have looked quite different. Why did we need to skulk in the oil-lit twilight? It had been like that in the Fontanny Palace thirty years earlier. Now I would need a lamplighter to keep the lamps full of oil – they were English-made, with a twenty-four-hour clock mechanism.
On the subject of clocks, I counted nineteen table and wall clocks in the house, and they all told different times. I decided that I would wind the clocks myself – it is a job that requires punctuality and precision. One can always tell a good house kept in ideal order from the way that the clocks in different rooms all tell the same time. Any experienced butler will tell you that.
I disco
vered only one telephone apparatus, in the hallway, and immediately ordered another two lines to be laid: one to Georgii Alexandrovich’s study and another to my room, since I would probably have to talk endlessly with the Alexandrovsky Palace, the governor general’s residence and the Court Department.
But initially I had to decide which rooms to put people in, and that was a problem that really had me racking my brains.
There were only eighteen rooms on the two floors of the house. I simply cannot imagine how everyone would have been accommodated if the grand duchess and the other children and the entire court had been with us. Somov told me that the family of Grand Duke Nikolai Konstantinovich, including eight members of the royal family and a retinue of fourteen individuals, not counting servants, had been allocated a small mansion with fifteen rooms, so that the courtiers had been obliged to share a room between three or even four, and the servants had been accommodated over the stables. That was quite appalling, even though Nikolai Konstantinovich was two levels below Georgii Alexandrovich in seniority.
It was also inopportune that His Highness had invited his friend Lord Banville to the coronation. His Lordship was expected to arrive on the Berlin train early in the evening. The Englishman was unmarried, thank goodness, but I still had to allocate him two rooms: one for the lord himself and one for his butler. And God forbid that I should make any slips here. I know these English butlers: they are even more lordly than their masters. Especially Mr Smiley, who served His Lordship. Pompous and snobbish – I had had more than enough time to observe him the previous month in Nice.
