“And what about the future? Do you believe in it too?” I wish I’d only thought the words, but I said them aloud, with a tart tone in my voice.
BULLETINS ARRIVED AT TSARSKOE SELO; the tsar was apprised of each new disaster, but weeks passed and he did nothing—nothing of a political nature. He marched through the woods, he swam in the saltwater natatorium, he hunted, and he rode his horse, until, on March 10, he made the mistake that cost him his crown—well, not the mistake, as there already had been too many to count, but the last and most egregious one. He ordered that the capital be returned to its former state of relative calm, no matter what was required. To accomplish this, his police tore around the city in armored cars; his Cossacks galloped along the avenues, cracking whips and brandishing bayonets; his soldiers fired Chauchats imported from France that spat out 240 bullets every minute. But not only was it too late, order no longer possible; the actions he took against the rioting citizens inspired the Bolsheviks to organize themselves and prepare to challenge his authority.
“How much does my father understand of revolution? Anything?” Alyosha wanted to know. “Can it be a concept he refutes, one he finds heretical, the way Pope Urban the Eighth insisted the sun revolved around the earth and called Galileo a heretic?”
“I should think you know him better than I,” I said, answering what was probably a rhetorical question. We were in the schoolroom, occupied with our separate studies—Alyosha’s directed by his tutor, whose head was bent over the second volume of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall while Alyosha force-marched himself through the first. I was rereading Jane Eyre, in English instead of Russian, allowing me to call it a scholarly occupation rather than the pleasure—the escape—it was. Varya was with the Romanov girls, learning the correct way to put stalks in a vase, a lesson I’d dodged as Admiral–Dr. Botkin, having detected a wheeze while listening to my back with his stethoscope, wouldn’t allow me to walk through the cold to the greenhouses.
Tsar Nikolay didn’t talk about politics. He had four uncles filled with opinions and would have been, by everyone’s account, happy to hand them the empire. He wanted only to be allowed his exercise and to travel to his army’s headquarters in Mogilev, where he could sleep, eat, and march among his soldiers. As far as I could tell, he spent more time with his army than he did with his family, and I’d heard it said he would have had trouble deciding between the life of a soldier and that of a farmer, had he escaped his heritage.
But, as all the world knows, he did not escape, and on March 21, 1917, General Kornilov, who had lately presided over the Petersburg garrison, arrived at the Alexander Palace to inform the tsarina that, as there wasn’t any empire left, she and her family were under arrest. The former tsar, his abdication extracted from him as he traveled in his imperial train, had yet to return home from Mogilev to Tsarskoe Selo because the railway workers had received the news of the tsar’s having been toppled as an invitation to stop service for all Romanovs and their retainers.
“Go down. See what’s happening,” Alyosha said, after Kornilov had been announced. He got up from where he was sitting with his bodyguard Derevenko, playing yet another game of dominoes, a game I hated and refused to join. Alyosha had two bodyguards, Derevenko and Nagorny, both of whom appeared to dote on their charge and were gentle in spite of their military demeanor. Each had previously been a naval officer; now they took turns supervising all the tsarevich did, to make sure no harm came to him, and carrying him in their arms when, inevitably, it did.
Alyosha gave me a push toward the stairs, and I pushed him back, just a little bit, because I hated that kind of thing in boys, especially in princes, who ought to know better than to boss people about, if only because they got all they wanted anyway. After slipping downstairs, I hurried to the drawing room’s double doors, which were left open into the corridor, one widely enough that I could hide myself behind it, my back to the wall. Even Father admitted that his little magpie had a talent for silence and for making herself as invisible as a scullery maid.
I watched through the crack as Alexandra Fyodorovna received Kornilov. By now, nearly a week after her husband’s abdication, she’d moved on from destroying official correspondence to incinerating private letters, diaries, telephone messages, bills from the wine merchant and from the purveyor of caviar and truffles, even the former tsar’s game book, in which was recorded every boar, buck, and bird he’d dispatched with his shotgun—any scrap of information that might fall into the hands of some malevolent someone bent on slandering her poor blameless Nikolay. The drawing room’s fire had burned all night, its flames licking, cracking, and smacking as it consumed leaf after leaf of creamy stationery bearing the gold-embossed Romanov crest. The flue must have needed adjusting. The ceiling over the hearth was blackened with soot.
“Abridging history, I see,” Kornilov said, sniffing at the smoke-tinged atmosphere. He was a good-humored-looking man, with ears that stood out like handles from his shorn head and a mustache so robust it obscured his lips. The tsarina rose from where she had been sitting among emptied boxes. Her mauve-lipped pallor continued to unnerve me. On the cushion next to hers was a small bundle of billets-doux to her from her husband. This was all that remained of what had been thousands of letters to tens of recipients, her grandmother, Queen Victoria, foremost among them.
Already I’d overheard servants talking among themselves about plans for the tsarina and her children to join Tsar Nikolay at Murmansk, the seaport on Kola Bay, where they’d find a ship to board for a journey west toward asylum. Because even if England’s George V, the tsar’s own first cousin, wouldn’t have them, surely somewhere would. America or Australia or whatever other continent invited thieves and outcasts and exiled dreams.
But what of Varya and myself? I didn’t know whether we would be considered a part of the Romanov family and treated as such, or taken by the new regime’s police to be questioned about Father, or liberated with the rest of Russia and discharged into the chaos of Petersburg to make our way home to Siberia, and I didn’t know which would be worse or if we had any choice in the matter. And timing—there was timing to consider. I’d intended, before the tsar left for Mogilev, to approach and speak with him, to find out what he knew, or could control, of our fate, but each time I’d succumbed to my fear of taking up the topic at exactly the wrong moment. Though they’d encouraged us to befriend their children and, to all appearances, welcomed us into their lives, the tsar and tsarina were like two people poised on the crest of a breaking tidal wave, surveying the landscape against which they would be dashed. Each time I marched myself, like a responsible older sister, down the corridor to the tsar’s study, rehearsing my little speech in my head, I ended up turning right where I should have turned left, grabbing my coat, shoving my feet into Wellingtons, and stealing away as fast as I could to the one place I knew I’d find comfort.
Just the smell of them and the sound of their breathing and all the other noises I knew so well: their soft whickering, the swish of a tail after a fly, and the accompanying stamp of a hoof. Just to press my face into the soft flesh of their necks, run my fingers over the ridge of velvet nostrils, feel the gust of their warm breath hit my face, my neck and chest. I would have petitioned to live in the stable had the idea not struck me as one my hosts would find preposterous.
Peering through the crack at Kornilov, I wished I’d had the nerve to approach the tsar while there was still time to act, before Kornilov and his soldiers came for us. But I hadn’t, and perhaps because it was simpler to contemplate their fate, I found myself worrying about the horses before the people. What would happen to the old ones, long retired from the harness? I hoped the groom would think to end their lives mercifully before soldiers took over the stables. And the others, who were fit for work, accustomed as they were to tranquil bridle paths and the affection of all who cared for them, what would happen to such animals were they commandeered by the gathering Red Army and forced into the pandemonium of civil war?
There was one horse I particularly liked, Gypsy, a black mare compact enough that a bareback rider—the only kind I knew to be—was comfortable straddling her withers. She shared a loose box with Vanka, an aged donkey the Cinzelli Brothers’