Enchantments. Kathryn Harrison

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ 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’ Circus had presented as a gift to the tsarevich and his sisters after a private performance at Tsarsko Selo. As Botkin had forbidden me to ride as well as walk in the cold, I spent hours sitting in the hay, long enough that I’d seen Vanka do what she was famous for doing. Occasionally, the donkey entered a sort of fugue state in which she believed she was before an audience and, without any warning, ran through a repertoire of tricks that included running backward. The first time this happened, Alyosha told me, the tsarina had nearly fainted as the donkey swiftly (demonically, it seemed to Alyosha’s mother) approached him, the muscles of her hind-quarters pumping energetically. What would the nervous tsarina assume but that the animal was rabid?

      “I’m surprised she didn’t order that Vanka be destroyed,” I said to Alyosha.

      “Oh, she did. Of course she did. But Father showed her how Vanka wasn’t afraid to drink water from a bucket, and she had to admit the donkey was only confused.”

      “I don’t think she’s confused,” I said. “She’s happy remembering when she was performing, that’s all.”

      The tsarina’s voice was too low for me to hear her from behind the door, but Kornilov’s wasn’t. Although he characterized our arrest as precautionary, intended to protect us from the predation of revolutionary soldiers, he asked the tsarina to summon the palace guard and household staff so he could announce that their responsibility to the Romanovs had come to an end. Those who wanted to remain in the deposed tsar’s service, Kornilov explained, would be held under arrest with his family, confined to one wing of the palace, no longer free to come and go.

      Poor Gypsy. She was too small to be a cavalry horse. I imagined myself running to the stable before the Red Guard arrived, opening the doors to all the stalls, and shooing their occupants toward the woods, but the only likely outcome of that was getting myself shot. And it wouldn’t save the horses—even if they left, they’d come straight back. Tsarskoe Selo was the only home they knew.

      “What of Varya and me?” I asked the tsarina when Kornilov left the room to address the servants. I was so alarmed by this new turn of events, and by then comfortable enough with the tsarina, that I didn’t bother to conceal or even excuse my eavesdropping. As soon as Kornilov was out of sight, I rushed out from behind the door like a child and burst into the parlor. The tsarina looked at me and smiled, as might a hostess to a guest she didn’t know, a vague, perfunctory expression that betrayed no emotion.

      “I’ve spoken with Nikolay Alexandrovich,” she answered, her tone almost serene. “He is confident he can negotiate on your behalf. There are officials who remain faithful to his wishes even if they can no longer be called commands. And remember, Masha, you are a Rasputin. You are God’s chosen, safe in his providence.” I nodded, as I had when she’d said the same thing a week earlier, after we learned the tsar had stepped down.

      “May I send my mother word that Varya and I are all right?”

      “Of course. You must send her a telegram. I’ll call Fredericks—he’ll help you. It’s all God’s will, Masha. You know that. Nothing comes to pass that isn’t. How could it?”

      As I reported to Alyosha when I went back upstairs, only a few loyal and mostly ancient retainers were staying in the Romanovs’ service: two valets, half a dozen chambermaids, ten footmen, the kitchen staff, the butler, and old Count Fredericks, an unlikely source of help of any kind.

      The Old Guard and the New

      MASTER EMERITUS OF COURT LIFE, Count Vladimir Fredericks might well have been relieved by the contraction of his demesne. Disoriented by the imminence of a revolution that had declared his worldview not only myopic but also corrupt, for weeks the count had been continually lost in the palace corridors. Sent bearing a message from the tsarina to her confidante, Anna Vyrubova, the count would nod briskly, click his shiny heels, and return to the tsarina’s suite some hours later, his mouth and mustache quivering in anxious confusion and the message still on his salver, envelope unopened.

      “Why, Count …” the tsarina would begin, but then she’d trail off and smile. “How debonair you’re looking, dear Vladimir! No wonder poor Anna didn’t read my little note. She must have been overcome with shyness when she saw СКАЧАТЬ