The Summer Queen

by Margaret Pemberton

  As they packed to leave, the children chattered happily about how different life would be for them in the Crimea.

  ‘Even if we are still held under horrid house arrest, the sun will be shining and however small a section of Livadia Palace’s gardens we are allowed in, we can put up a net and play tennis,’ Anastasia said as she squeezed a rag doll into one of the trunks they were packing.

  ‘And we won’t be under house arrest in the Crimea,’ Nicky said reassuringly. ‘Prime Minister Kerensky is sending us there because it is safe. There is no revolution in the Crimea.’

  ‘And lots of our relatives are there.’ Marie took another armful of clothes out of one of the cupboards. ‘Granny Minny, Aunt Miechen, Great-Uncle Nikolai and lots and lots of other Romanov aunts and uncles and cousins.’

  The mood was almost holiday-like as they selected favourite pictures and ornaments and keepsakes to take with them.

  Alicky coped by not taking part in the general packing. Instead she oversaw the stowing of Romanov jewellery into large portable jewel chests. The jewellery was the only kind of finance they were now left with and, whatever else was going to be left behind to be looted, she was determined it wasn’t going to be her family’s future financial security.

  The day before they were due to leave, Kerensky sent a message that they would not be going to the Crimea, as the railway line to the south was in the hands of the Bolshevik revolutionaries. Instead they would be travelling east.

  ‘And he said that we should pack warm clothes and furs,’ Nicky told the devastated children. ‘And he also said we should expect a journey of at least five days.’

  ‘Five days?’ Olga did the maths. ‘The only place five days’ train travel east is Siberia.’

  At Marie’s gasp of horror, Alicky said swiftly, ‘Grishka was born in Siberia, in a village called Pokrovskoe. Perhaps we will be able to see it from the train.’

  ‘And he once lived in Tobolsk, in Siberia,’ Tatiana said. ‘I know, because he told me that although Tobolsk is only a small town, it seemed a vast city to a village boy like him.’

  ‘Then if it is a town, perhaps the train line will run through it.’

  The difficult moment was over. The packing continued.

  They were to begin their journey in darkness, at one o’clock in the morning. Scores of steamer trunks, large chests and wooden boxes were piled in the lapis-and malachite-decorated entrance hall and the rooms leading off of it. Kerensky, who was overseeing their departure, had asked that they gather in the entrance hall with their luggage.

  The hours ticked by. Two o’clock. Three o’clock. Curled up in whatever comfortable chairs they could find, the girls dozed. Alexei struggled to keep awake, helped by his little dog, which thought it only reasonable that the two of them keep going for walks through the surrounding rooms.

  Nicky paced the marbled floor, smoking cigarette after cigarette.

  Kerensky was repeatedly on the telephone, furiously demanding to know what the hold-up was; demanding to know when the cars that should have been there hours ago, to ferry them to the waiting train, were finally going to arrive.

  Dressed in a wine-red travelling suit and with a matching hat tilted so that it shadowed her eyes, Alicky was seated on a chair that had once belonged to Marie Antoinette, her kid-gloved hands clasped tightly in her lap.

  Siberia. How ironic that the only place deemed safe for them was the place Grishka had come from.

  Finally there came the sound of cars and trucks approaching the palace.

  Kerensky said tautly, ‘The family will leave first. The household staff accompanying them will leave second, and only then will soldiers begin loading the luggage into the trucks.’

  The girls stirred and rose wearily to their feet.

  Alexei picked his little dog up in his arms.

  Nicky stubbed out his cigarette and held out his hand to help Alicky rise from her chair. ‘You will be able to sleep, my darling, when we are aboard the train,’ he said comfortingly.

  ‘Yes.’

  How she envied Nicky his calm and untroubled thoughts. He was a fatalist. It was how he had been able to cope with his enforced abdication; the humiliations of the last four months; this leaving in the night, for a journey of thousands of miles to heaven only knew where. For Nicky, whatever would be would be. Everything was in God’s hands, and railing against fate was pointless.

  He tucked her gloved hand into the crook of his arm. ‘I love you with all my heart, body and soul,’ he whispered, sensing her tension and fear. ‘Always and forever.’

  ‘For eternity?’ It was what they always said to each other.

  ‘For eternity.’

  For the first time since she had read Grishka’s letter, a feeling of peace flooded through Alicky. Whatever happened, they would always be together, of that she was absolutely certain. And with renewed courage and a heart full of the most passionate, burning love, she walked with Nicky into the all-enveloping, waiting darkness.

  Chapter Forty-One

  OCTOBER 1918, LONDON

  May was about to leave Buckingham Palace for another long day of hospital visits to wounded and maimed soldiers, when George hurried breathlessly into her sitting room. ‘The latest news from the Front is that the Germans are falling back! At last we have them on the run, May.’

  May sucked in her breath. Ever since August there had been glimmers of hope that the Allies were gaining the upper hand. Fifteen months ago America had entered the war and only three weeks ago had inflicted a heavy defeat on German troops at Saint-Mihiel in northern France. This, though, was the first time George had sounded so optimistic of overall victory being within sight.

  With a trembling hand he lit a cigarette. ‘And the rumour from Germany is that Willy’s Chancellor, Max of Baden, has formed a liberal government that just might be interested in an armistice. Wasn’t he an old suitor of yours?’

  ‘There was a time when Mama hoped he was, but it wasn’t a hope I ever shared.’

  ‘Still, he sounds a good man. Louis says he is.’

  Louis of Battenberg, Vicky’s husband and now Louis Mountbatten, since George – having got cold feet about his surname of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha – had changed it to Windsor and had anglicized all other German surnames in the family at the same time, had once been a close friend of Max’s.

  ‘I believe he is. Mama wouldn’t have considered him a suitable husband for me if he hadn’t been.’

  Oblivious to the fact that May was wearing a light tweed walking dress, one of her distinctive toque hats and had been in the process of putting on a pair of kid gloves, he sat down, wincing with pain as he did so.

  Three years ago, when making one of his self-imposed visits to the Western Front to bolster the spirits of the troops, the horse he was riding had been spooked by the sound of the men cheering and had reared up and fallen on him. The injuries he had received – one of which was a badly fractured pelvis – had meant that he had never fully recovered, and he still regularly walked with a stick. Combined with the crushing burden and griefs of the war, it had ensured there was nothing whatsoever left of the rosy-cheeked, joke-loving Georgie of those long-ago days when Eddy had still been alive.

  He was fifty-three, but he looked seventy-three. His always-trim Van Dyke beard was almost white. There were bags beneath his eyes, his face was deeply lined and even before the news that had come from Russia in late July, his eyes had held nothing but sadness for the hundreds of thousands of young men cut down in their prime on foreign soil.

  After July, stupefying grief had been yoked with crippling guilt – emotions that May knew he would carry with him for the rest of his life.

  Suddenly aware that she had been about to leave the palace, he said, ‘I didn’t mean to keep you, but I knew you would want good news from the Front. There is also a family letter for you from Irène, via Sweden. The Prime Minister is waiting to have a word with me, so you will have to update me on its contents later.’

  Whe
n he had left the room, May opened the envelope he had given to her. George’s first cousin, Daisy Connaught, was married to the Crown Prince of Sweden and, ever since the beginning of the war, Daisy had acted as an intermediary between family in England and Germany. Irène had written in hasty-looking handwriting:

  Dearest May,

  Things are moving at a great pace here. It is Heinrich’s opinion that the war is all but over – and that Germany will capitulate. Willy is still at military headquarters, but not in any kind of command. If the truth be told, Our Great Warlord has never been in command. He has only ever been a play-acting, sword-waving figurehead, and the word is that now reality has at last intruded he has had a complete nervous collapse. Revolution is on the verge of breaking out here, as it did in Russia, and Heinrich believes things can only end in Willy’s abdication. What will then happen to us (Heinrich and the children and me) when that occurs, I haven’t the faintest idea. And if Willy abdicates, where will he and Dona go? Ironically, the only country Willy has ever truly wanted to live in is England. If God is good, Heinrich and I will find ourselves at Hemmelmark, our estate in northern Germany. This is just to let you know how volatile things now are here, and for you not to worry too much if you don’t hear from me for a little while.

  Much love to Georgie, Irène

  With Irène’s letter in her hand, May looked unseeingly out of the window. Everything Irène had written indicated that George was right in his assumption that the war would soon be over. A world at peace again would be the greatest mercy imaginable, and the rejoicing and celebrating would no doubt go on for months, but although Georgie’s thankfulness would be bone-deep, it would not bring him peace of mind. Nothing was going to be able to do that ever again.

  Exerting all her mental strength, she forced herself to carry on with her day. When George had walked in on her, she had been on the point of leaving the palace to visit critically injured soldiers in Great Ormond Street Hospital, where their daughter, Mary, was doing a nursing course. No matter what the private nightmares, life had to go on and, picking up her gloves, May walked briskly downstairs to the courtyard and her waiting car.

  Over the last four years barely a day had gone by when she hadn’t spent the greater part of it in hospital or visiting convalescent centres or, with George, visiting a shipyard or a munitions factory, letting people know how at one with them they were. She had even accompanied George on one of his stressful visits to the Western Front, a visit of such unimaginable nightmare that only her lifelong habit of rigid self-discipline had helped her survive it.

  The strain of the war showed in May’s face. It was very seldom now that any of her natural merriment showed in her eyes. At fifty-one her distinctive hairstyle was still the same as it had always been, although her dark-gold hair was now flecked with white and, because George disliked change of any kind, her way of dressing had barely changed over the years. She still wore off-the-face toques that didn’t interfere with her poodle fringe, and she still favoured several-stranded chokers of pearls and, at the same time, invariably wore long, waist-length ropes of pearls. Her still-slender figure was always stiffly corseted and she had lost none of her ability to move gracefully.

  The Prime Minister, David Lloyd George – no lover of royalty – had been heard to say admiringly that never had any queen been as effortlessly stately as May Teck.

  The memory of the horrors she had seen on the Western Front were not ones that she wanted at the forefront of her mind when trying to bring a little cheer to badly injured men and she blocked it from her. She must think of the day ahead. A day when Marie-Louise would be acting as her lady-in-waiting.

  Since her divorce from Aribert, Marie-Louise had never remarried, but had always kept herself busy. At one time she had been the owner of a smart little hat shop in Knightsbridge, something that shocked the majority of her family just as deeply as her divorce had done.

  May hadn’t been shocked. She had thought it very enterprising.

  ‘There was a time, before my engagement to dear Eddy, when I thought of doing something similar,’ she had said, ‘although not in London, but in Florence.’

  On the outbreak of war, Marie-Louise had turned a Girls’ Club that she had established and run in Bermondsey into a hospital of one hundred beds and, under the direction of the government, she was its hands-on administrator.

  As they sat together in the back of the royal Daimler, Marie-Louise said, ‘When my father died a few months ago, Willy sent me a very kind letter of condolence via Daisy. Not a word about the war, of course; just family matters. Adalbert and his wife have had another daughter. Is Adalbert Willy’s second son?’

  ‘Third.’ May was never at a loss when it came to fathoming family relationships.

  ‘And Sissy and Ernst have had a daughter, Frederica.’

  May felt a pain in the region of her heart. Was it only five years ago that they had been at Sissy’s and Ernst’s wedding in Potsdam? All the royal houses of Britain, Germany, Austria and Russia, united in celebrating a happy family event? How could the unspeakable monstrosity of what had happened since then have occurred?

  ‘Willy asked to be remembered to you,’ Marie-Louise said as the Daimler drew to a halt outside the front entrance of the hospital. ‘He wrote that you were a kindred spirit. I thought it a very droll expression, but then there were always times when Willy’s English was droll. I remember him once saying he had a very gentle chair, when he meant to say he had a very comfortable chair.’

  Later, when they were once again in the Daimler, Marie-Louise said hesitantly, ‘I hope you aren’t thinking me as unfeeling for not having spoken of . . . of July . . . but I thought you wouldn’t want to be reminded. It was all so terribly, terribly ghastly . . .’ Her voice tailed off in awkward embarrassment.

  ‘No.’ May kept her eyes focused straight ahead on the traffic. They were nose-to-tail with an ambulance. A boy who was mercifully too young for army service cycled past them, his pannier piled high with fresh bread. ‘No,’ she said again. ‘You were quite right, Marie-Louise. Like the Battle of the Marne and Gallipoli, and Verdun and the Somme and endless other blood-soaked battlefields, there aren’t enough words in the English language for it, and so it is best not spoken of.’

  Not spoken of, but never for a moment forgotten.

  When Marie-Louise had been dropped off at the small Knightsbridge flat she lived in, in glorious independence, May massaged her aching temples. The nightmare best not spoken of had started after Nicky’s abdication eighteen months ago, when Russia’s Provisional Government had asked the British government if the former Tsar and his family could be given refuge in England.

  ‘Of course I have agreed,’ George had said to her at the time. ‘How could I not? Nicky is my doppelgänger. We are so alike physically that whenever we are together at any family event, we are constantly mistaken for each other. And besides, I like Nicky. He’s a grand chap. Always so sweet-natured and amiable.’

  The Daimler rolled into Buckingham Palace’s inner courtyard. Without betraying a flicker of her mental agony, May stepped from the car and thanked the driver, her thoughts going relentlessly over the terrible, fateful days in March.

  A meeting between the Prime Minister, George’s private secretary and the Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office had taken place in Downing Street. Agreement had been swiftly reached and a message sent to the Russian government, stating that Britain was prepared to offer asylum to the former Tsar and his wife and children.

  It had all seemed so straightforward. It had even occurred to May that once the family was domiciled in Britain, her eldest son might stop philandering with married women and become engaged to Olga or Tatiana, something she knew would delight Alicky just as much as it would her.

  But there had been a delay from the Russian end in putting what had been agreed into practice, and during those delays a huge swathe of the British public, sympathetic to the Bolshevik cause, had made their feelings known. The
revolution in Russia had sparked a countrywide revolutionary movement in Germany, as Irène had indicated in her recent letter, and the same kind of political unrest was happening in Britain. All over the country there were worker-led strikes, and trade-union leaders were loud in their support of Comrades Lenin and Trotsky. Buckingham Palace was deluged with letters from outraged members of the public, all expressing the belief that a dynasty that had ruled as autocratically and despotically as the Romanov dynasty had deserved all that it got and was most definitely not wanted on British soil. In Parliament, Labour and Liberal MPs vehemently expressed the same opinion. Labour clubs from Land’s End to John O’Groats let it be known that the Tsar and his family were most definitely not welcome.

  George had been appalled. ‘I thought my decision was simply a family decision,’ he had said to May, ashen-faced and bewildered. ‘And look at the outcry it’s aroused. In today’s Times a letter to the editor has suggested that all the ancient trappings of throne and sceptre should be done away with! By which I take it he means I should be done away with.’

  In the end George had decided that he could not risk inflaming revolutionary passions in Britain by giving Nicky and his family asylum. The risk of it triggering a wholescale revolution in Britain that would sweep him from his throne was too great for him to be able to do so. He had changed his mind and, without telling her, had withdrawn the offer of asylum.

  ‘It isn’t as if Britain is the only place Nicky can resettle,’ he had said when the regret-telegram had been sent. ‘There are other countries Nicky and Alicky have links to. Denmark, for instance. Or Sweden. Or even Maudie and Haakon’s Norway. Later, when the war is over and the dust has settled, that will be the time for them to come to England – assuming, of course, they still want to do so.’

  As she stepped inside the palace, May was greeted by a euphoric George.

  ‘Great news, May! Wonderful news!’ He nearly knocked her off her feet. ‘The German Navy has mutinied. The sailors are demanding political reform and Willy’s abdication. Your old boyfriend Max of Baden is talking of an armistice.’