The Summer Queen

by Margaret Pemberton

  ‘Nothing on God’s earth is going to restore order in Petersburg, or in the rest of Russia, while Nicky remains Emperor. It’s over, Alicky. And if you won’t take my word for it – and if you won’t leave for the south and safety, while there is still a chance of you doing so – then you must pray your palace guard are still loyal.’

  ‘Of course they are still loyal! Why on earth wouldn’t they be?’

  ‘Because the troops in Petersburg aren’t. One last time, Alicky. Join my mother in Livadia, or join Miechen in Kiev.’

  ‘No,’ she said unhesitatingly. ‘Nicky will be here soon, and I must be here for him when he arrives.’

  Accepting defeat, knowing that he had done his best, which hadn’t been good enough, Misha hugged her, said his goodbyes and left.

  They had been talking in one of the marble-pillared, magnificently mirrored rooms of the palace, rooms that Alicky never normally ventured into, and suddenly she was aware of how quiet everything was. Where were the footmen who would normally be standing to attention and lining the walls of the room? Why, in a palace that had a staff of hundreds, was there no sound of movement?

  ‘The vast majority of the staff have either not shown up for work or have run away,’ Count Benckendorff, the Grand Marshal of the Court, said, when she made enquiries. ‘They are frightened the palace is about to be attacked.’

  ‘The palace will not be attacked! It is far too protected by loyal troops.’

  She made a mental count of them. There were two squadrons of Cossacks of the Emperor’s Escort, a hand-picked regiment of the Imperial Guard and a battalion of the marine regiment whose sailors manned the imperial yacht. More than enough to deal with a mob, however large.

  On impulse, accompanied only by Marie, she went outside to thank the troops for their staunch loyalty.

  It was dusk and the men were in battle order. Slowly, with a fur coat draped around her shoulders, she walked along the lines, stopping every now and then, telling them their Tsar would soon be with them. She made it clear to them that the lives of her children were in their hands and she had complete trust in them.

  In the morning she woke to the news that Nicky had left the Stavka and was on his way back to Petrograd.

  ‘Thank God!’ If she had been on her own when the news was given her, she would have wept with relief.

  ‘And because of revolutionary activity on the track,’ Count Benckendorff added, keeping the anxiety he felt from his voice, ‘the imperial train has had to make a diversion to Pskov.’

  ‘Pskov? Where is Pskov?’

  ‘It is south and west of Petrograd. A distance of one hundred and sixty miles.’

  A day later the palace water and electricity supplies were cut off, and the troops she’d had so much faith in deserted her.

  It was a blow of disloyalty so deep Alicky could scarcely comprehend it. ‘All of them?’ she gasped. ‘Even the sailors who so often served as crew aboard the Standart?’

  ‘All of them,’ Benckendorff said bleakly.

  Alicky held onto the back of a chair to steady herself. ‘Are you telling me that I and my children are now utterly defenceless, should the palace be attacked?’

  ‘Yes, Your Imperial Majesty.’ There were now white streaks in his hair, where days before there had been none. ‘As for the household staff, your two closest ladies-in waiting are still here, as are thirty of the footmen, approximately the same number of valets, a dozen chambermaids, a few cooks and a handful of kitchen staff. The girls’ tutor, Mr Gilliard, is still here, as are Dr Botkin and Dr Derevenko.’

  They were interrupted by the arrival of Nicky’s uncle, Paul.

  Dismissing Count Benckendorff, she ran towards him, saying urgently, ‘Have you news of Nicky? The last we heard, his train had been diverted to Pskov.’

  ‘Yes, I have news.’ His face was grey with fatigue.

  ‘Is he still at Pskov? Have you spoken to him on the phone? I haven’t been able to – all our lines are down. Please tell me he is all right and that he will be home soon. The children are so ill and . . .’

  ‘He’s all right, Alicky. And he will be home soon.’ And then, breaking the dreadful news as gently as he could, he said, ‘But when he comes home, it will not be as Tsar.’

  She stared at him, not understanding. Not even beginning to understand.

  ‘He’s abdicated, Alicky. Both for himself and for Alexei.’

  ‘Abdicated? Abdicated?’ She tottered backwards and he thought she was about to fall. As he reached out to steady her, she pushed him violently away. ‘How can Nicky abdicate?’ There was hysteria in her voice. ‘He is God’s anointed!’

  She was clutching at her heart and he was terrified she was about to have a heart attack.

  ‘He had no choice. Every regiment and battalion in the Army has joined the revolution.’

  ‘All of them? All? Even the Cossack Escort and the Garde Equipage?’

  ‘All of them. The Navy has mutinied. Not even the Duma is loyal to him any more.’

  ‘Oh, my poor darling!’ There was deep passion in her voice, and he knew she was referring not to him, but to Nicky. ‘To have had to undergo all this by himself! To have had to make such a decision with no one there to guide or to support him. It doesn’t bear thinking about.’

  Her legs gave way and she half-fell into the nearest chair. ‘How could Nicky abdicate on Alexei’s behalf? To be Emperor of Russia is Alexei’s birthright! That Misha is now Tsar is unbelievable.’

  ‘He isn’t Tsar, Alicky. Misha abdicated within the hour. And Kyril hasn’t become Tsar. Kyril,’ he added, ‘has thrown in his lot with the revolutionaries, even to the extent of flying a red flag on his car.’

  She stared at him, struggling to believe that a close member of the family could have behaved in such a way. Dazed, her head spinning, she said, ‘Then in the name of God, who is now ruling Russia?’

  ‘I’ve no idea, and I’m not staying around to find out. I’ve lived in France before, and I intend living in France again. For the sake of Alexei and the girls, will you now do what I know Misha has already asked you to do? Will you leave Petrograd and join either Minny in Livadia or Miechen in Kiev, before what is being called “the Soviet” puts you and the children under house arrest?’

  Alicky shook her head and, not for the first time, he was aware of her formidable inner strength. ‘No, Paul. I’m going nowhere until my poor, darling Nicky arrives. And then, when the children are fit enough to travel, we will leave for wherever it is Nicky wants to go.’

  ‘If you can by then,’ Paul said tautly. ‘If you are still able to.’

  Later that night a fleet of army vehicles swept up to the palace.

  Minutes later, an ashen Count Benckendorff informed Alicky that a general by the name of Kornilov wished to speak to her.

  Alicky clasped her hands together tightly. It was eleven o’clock at night – the kind of time when arrests were made.

  ‘I’ll speak to him in the Audience Room,’ she said, knowing that she had to fight down her fear; that she couldn’t allow it to show.

  Minutes later she was facing Kornilov, still dressed in her Red Cross nurse’s uniform.

  The first thing she noticed was that he was very young to be a general. The second was that his Imperial Army badge had been replaced by a badge showing a red star with a crossed hammer and sickle in the centre of it.

  For the first time in her life, a minion did not respectfully address her by her proper title.

  ‘Alexandra Feodorovna Romanov,’ he said, without preliminaries. ‘I am here to place you under house arrest. Your husband is also under arrest and will be returning to Tsarskoe Selo tomorrow. I am also here to tell you that as soon as your children’s health permits, the Provisional Government’s intention is for you and your family to be escorted to Murmansk, from where a British cruiser will take you to England.’

  Relief flooded through her so intensely that she thought she was going to faint. She wasn’t going to be tak
en away and incarcerated in the prison of the Peter and Paul Fortress, whose very walls were steeped with the blood of those who had been tortured and had died there. Nicky would be with her sometime tomorrow, and she now knew what their future as a family was to be. England was a land that was as much a part of her childhood as Hesse-Darmstadt had been. A land over which Georgie and Kindred Spirit May were constitutional rulers. A land of green fields and bluebell woods, calm common sense and sweet reason. One world had come to an end, but another world was waiting.

  In the seconds before the general left the room, and to his great amazement and discomfiture, she took both his hands in hers and thanked him.

  ‘What was the German bitch like?’ was the first question his aides asked, when he walked out to his car.

  ‘She was dignified,’ he said, trying not to show how much she had impressed him. ‘Unafraid and very dignified.’

  Despite the severe restrictions they had to live under – being unable to send or receive mail or make telephone calls, and forbidden to walk anywhere other than a restricted area of the palace park – after Nicky arrived, life settled into a routine that was bearable only because of Alicky’s determination that they would all find it so.

  In the mornings Pierre Gilliard gave the girls their French lessons, just as he had always done. Nicky gave history and geography lessons to Alexei, and Alicky gave him English lessons and undertook his religious instruction. In the afternoon they all took what exercise they could, and the girls and Alexei followed their parents’ example by behaving as if there were no guards leering at them, constantly making uncouth comments.

  ‘Close your eyes and ears to them,’ she said, time and again. ‘Soon they will be there no longer. Soon we will be in England.’

  Nicky and Pierre Gilliard spent their exercise time in clearing snow and chopping down trees, but as the weather warmed, the entire family took to digging a mammoth kitchen garden and, under the mocking eyes of the guards, planting vegetables.

  In the evenings they entertained themselves in the modest ways they had always done. In preparation for making England their home, Nicky read English novels to them: Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles. They did jigsaws and played Halma and dominoes. Whatever they did, wherever they went, the guards were present, always surly, always foul-mouthed, always listening in on their private conversations.

  Of all of them, Alexei found it hardest to bear the constant humiliations, especially the humiliations his father had to endure.

  ‘How can Papa bear it?’ he said between sobs, as he knelt with his head in Alicky’s lap. ‘He was the Tsar and now he is treated as if he were a nobody; as if he were a peasant.’

  ‘He bears it because he has no option,’ she said, her heart hurting for him. ‘He bears it in order that we keep the small freedoms we have been allowed. He bears it because at least we have a future to look forward to. In England we will be able to live as we want. Do you know that Papa has always dreamed of having no reports to read and no ministers to see, and he has always had a secret desire to be a farmer? I think Papa would be a very good farmer. Perhaps in England we will have a farm near the sea; a farm in Norfolk, close to Sandringham.’

  A new visitor began calling on them: Alexander Kerensky, the Minister of Justice in the Provisional Government that had been established on Nicky’s abdication. Oddly enough, Nicky quite liked him.

  ‘Your relatives abroad are taking a keen interest in your welfare,’ Kerensky said to him on one of his visits. ‘The English Queen especially asks that your wife is aware that all her thoughts are with her.’

  The knowledge that May was thinking of her, and doing her best to make some kind of contact, was balm to Alicky’s increasingly troubled soul.

  But the weeks turned into months, and still they weren’t told to prepare to leave for England. Her general health deteriorated, her sciatica becoming so acute that she could no longer walk more than a few steps unaided and had to use a wheelchair, when accompanying Nicky and the girls and Alexei as they took their outside exercise.

  It was summer when Kerensky, now head of the Provisional Government, had a long, difficult conversation with Nicky.

  ‘England is no longer possible,’ he said, constantly amazed at Nicky’s ability to take appalling news unflinchingly. ‘The fear of a left-wing revolution in Britain is such that the British Prime Minister has withdrawn his offer of sanctuary. It is his government’s belief that if sanctuary were to be given to a family who have ruled so autocratically and despotically, the very large number of British people in sympathy with revolutionary Russia would rise in protest and topple the monarchy, just as has happened here.’

  Nicky, who had never understood how limited George’s powers as a constitutional king and an emperor were, gaped at him.

  ‘But if not England, where?’ he asked, struggling to get his thoughts in order. ‘We can’t be kept under house arrest forever! My wife and daughters have no privacy. The soldiers wander in and out of our rooms as they like. Perhaps Denmark? The King is my cousin.’

  Kerensky didn’t have the heart to tell him that the Danish government had been approached and that their reaction had been identical to the British one.

  ‘I thought the Crimea,’ Kerensky said, ‘but wherever your destination, you will be leaving Tsarskoe Selo within days, for I can’t guarantee your safety here any longer. The Bolsheviks are now headed by a returned exile, Lenin, and there are rumours that he is plotting to overthrow the Provisional Government. If he does, it will be the end of me, as well as the end of you and your family. Begin packing, Nicholas. You will soon be leaving.’

  ‘The Crimea!’ It was the place they had always been happiest in, and Alicky could hardly believe that such good news was true. ‘And from there, when the war is over, we can quite easily be taken by boat to England.’

  He didn’t tell her that England no longer wanted them. He merely said, ‘You and the girls must begin packing – and not only clothes. If something has great sentimental value to you, then see that it goes into one of the chests or boxes.’

  It was when she was packing up mementos of Grishka that she came upon an envelope addressed to Nicky in the monk’s handwriting. Anything written by Grishka was to be treasured, for he had rarely written anything. As a peasant, writing had been something that he was uncomfortable with. The envelope wasn’t sealed and she slid the letter out, eager to read its contents.

  In heavy black ink, it was dated December, shortly before his murder, and at first Alicky thought it was a will:

  I write and leave behind me this letter at St Petersburg. I feel that I shall leave life before 1 January. I wish to make known to the Russian people, to Papa, to the Russian Mother, to the Children, to the land of Russia what they must understand. If I am killed by common assassins, and especially by my brothers the Russian peasants, you, Tsar of Russia, have nothing to fear and your children will reign for hundreds of years.

  But if I am murdered by nobles, and if they shed my blood, their hands will remain soiled with my blood. For twenty-five years they will not wash my blood from their hands. They will leave Russia. Brothers will kill brothers and hate each other, and for twenty-five years there will be no nobles in the country. Tsar of the land of Russia, if you hear the sound of the bell that tells you Grigory has been killed, know this: if it was your relations who wrought my death, then no one in your family – none of your children or relations – will remain alive for more than two years. They will be killed by the Russian people. I shall be killed. I am no longer among the living. Pray. Be strong and think of your blessed family,

  Grigory

  The blood thundered in Alicky’s ears. The ground felt as if it was shelving away beneath her feet. The world was spinning and she couldn’t breathe. Had Nicky ever received this letter? Common sense told her that he had to have done. The envelope had been opened. It had been in the same small box as
several icons that Grishka had blessed. And Nicky hadn’t shown it to her. How could he have shown it to her? Grishka never spoke a word that wasn’t true. If it was your relations who wrought my death, then no one in your family – none of your children or relations – will remain alive for more than two years. They will be killed by the Russian people. The words leapt from the page as if written in fire.

  She looked again at the date of the letter. It had been written in December. She read his second opening sentence. I feel that I shall leave life before 1 January. His murder had taken place on 30 December. It was a prophecy that had been fulfilled to the letter – and she had not a shadow of a doubt that his other prophecy would be just as accurately fulfilled.

  She slid down against the nearest wall and, trembling uncontrollably, hugged her knees to her chest. Nicky’s reaction would have been to assume that Grishka had been drunk when he had written his letter to him, but then Nicky had never believed in Grishka as fervently as she had always believed in him. And he hadn’t shared the letter with her because, although he would have discounted it, he would have known the very different effect it would have on her.

  She could feel that effect flooding through her like iced water from top to toe. All joy at the thought of the Crimea vanished. Wherever they went, she, Nicky and the children wouldn’t be safe. Because Grishka had died at the hands of their family, there would be a terrible price to pay.

  She never knew how long she sat huddled on the floor, coming to terms with the stark prophecy of Grishka’s letter, but when she finally rose to her feet, Alicky knew how she was going to handle the horrific knowledge she now had.

  She wasn’t going to let Nicky know that she had read the letter, and she certainly wasn’t going to burden her beloved children with the letter’s contents. Instead she was going to ensure that, under whatever conditions awaited them, their family life was going to remain as untroubled as she could possibly make it. And she was always going to remember that she was an empress. From now on, no matter the circumstances, no one was ever going to see her cry.