The Mysterious Alexandra Tarasova-Yusupov

by Carl Douglass

  Kyle looked at Alexandra with a question. She shook her head.

  “No thanks,” Kyle said. “May we just have the dinner menu, Mate?”

  “Of course, Sir. May I recommend the WH barramundi?”

  “Sounds great to me,” said Alexandra.

  “Yes, let’s have it. Is it still the best fish in Australia? Better than the John Dory? I mean the fish and not the gossip?” asked Kyle not sure that Gerard knew Aussie talk sufficiently well.

  “Indeed, it is. Are you hungry tonight?”

  “I certainly am,” said Alexandra.

  Kyle liked that. She was no shrinking violet, more of an Aussie girl than he had expected.

  “Me, too. What do you suggest, Mate?”

  “A side of tuna tartar. It goes well with the mashed potatoes and mixed vegetables.”

  “Bring it on.”

  “Some wine?”

  “You choose. That all right with you, Alexandra?”

  She nodded.

  “I think you would like our local shiraz-based sparkly from the old Auldana winery in the Adelaide foothills, I’ll bring a chilled bottle.”

  “I’m thirsty, too,” Alexandra said quietly to Kyle. “The wine or local champagne sounds like fun, don’t you think?”

  While they waited, Alexandra decided to get out a question that had been bothering her.

  “Kyle, should we share the costs? I imagine this will be pretty expensive.”

  He started to speak but damped down a sharp reply deciding that she was just trying to treat him as an equal—one of those inbred Australian customs.

  “No,” he said, “let me play the gentleman this once.”

  Enough said. She nodded and smiled at him, acknowledging his place as the man. He appreciated that and smiled back to let her know that he understood her interest in equality and all that Aussie stuff.

  The basic rules of Australian social etiquette do not relate to which spoon to use or how a fork should be held. It was considered arrogant to be identified as the one who should be served first. From the beginning in a country whose main first white inhabitants were convicts, most of Australia’s rules related to expressing equality. Australians wanted to be treated as equal irrespective of their social, racial, or financial background. Otherwise, almost everything else was acceptable and that appealed to Alexandra after her upbringing in stuffy Russian society.

  The tuna tartare came first as an appetizer, and the two hungry mates wolfed it down and quaffed their first goblets of the local bubbly. Alexandra had eaten barramundi before, but this was the best in her experience. She was hungry and all but licked her plate which made Kyle laugh out loud.

  She said, “Well, Mate, you handle those big mitts for hands pretty well for a carpenter.”

  He laughed and came back with a rejoinder, “And you, wee matey, seem to be able to drink a pub crawler under the table. Pretty good for a Chinee.”

  They both laughed somewhat conspiratorially. She had passed the standard test of Australian society.

  “Alexandra you are a good old girl. You give as good as you get when you take the piss.”

  “Takin’ the piss” is a quintessentially Australian phrase applied to making a usually crude joke about someone at the table or an ethnic group. For example, had her Russian friends been present, they might have asked her, “Why ever would you want to marry such a low-life bugger?” when that man was present. Of course, the friends wouldn’t actually mean that he was a low life bugger. On the contrary, they would just be trying to say that they think he is a good bloke.

  Alexandra felt herself to be glowing, just a little. Whether it was the wine, the heat of the room, or her excitement over being asked out to a dinner with a strikingly handsome and fetching man, she was unsure. She muttered to herself that she was acting like a girl. And she rather liked the idea.

  For dessert they shared a large New Zealand Pavlova made with a meringue shell, whipped cream, and fruit–one of New Zealand’s national desserts. Kyle also ordered a dessert wine for them to share.

  “What is your suggestion for a dessert wine?” he asked Gerard, the head waiter.

  “Are you feeling adventurous, Mate?” Gerard responded and gave a fulsome smile to Alexandra.

  This was getting to be more fun than she could remember for a long time

  “We have a delicious sweet little something which is made from grapes infected with what is called ‘noble rot’ a grape grown in the Riverina Vineyard in New South Wales. It is like a sauterne from France. Ours is called De Bortoli Noble One Botrytis Semillon.”

  “That’s a mouthful, Mate,” said Kyle, who had probably already had one too many.

  “Are you game?” asked Gerard.

  “Aye, Matey, I think we are. All right with me and my sheila.”

  Alexandra nodded agreeably.

  They finished off the bottle, and Alexandra was certain that she had had more than she should have. She still had her wits about her, though. She prepared herself for a possible test to come. Kyle was more than a little drunk and would believe that her defenses were down. She determined to put an end to any advances that might be coming her way that night, even though she was not altogether certain that she wouldn’t welcome them. It had been a long time. A very long time.

  She need not have concerned herself. Kyle–though unsteady and tipsy–was a perfect gentleman. He drove home at a sensible speed; fortunately, the horses were not impaired; and they maintained a straight route back to The Hotel Windsor on Spring Street without the slightest incident. Kyle pushed himself out of the curricle and struggled to walk around the carriage to the other side to help his new mate out, like a gentleman should. The ruts in the road, and the severe distance around the entire coach proved to be too much; and he faltered half way around and had to lean on the side of the carriage.

  Alexandra tried not to laugh at his slapstick performance, but it was too much for her; and she laughed until tears rolled down her face. Kyle looked at her forlornly, but could not help himself; so, he sat on the road and laughed until his belly hurt. Alexandra walked herself up to the lobby and arranged for one of the valets to drive the poor man home.

  That night she slept like a proverbial log and awakened the next morning with a nasty hangover headache. She ordered a beer as ‘the hair of the dog that bit you’ to lessen the effects of her night of indiscretion. She took a long shower, rubbed her skin to a definite pink with a rough Turkish towel, and made a game effort to get down a solid breakfast. It was still early enough for her to make a try at a bit of self-analysis.

  She sat in the lobby with an hour to go before Kyle came to escort her to the real estate office. She made an effort to read The Argus newspaper but found the combination of double vision and inability to concentrate too much for her efforts to glean any news. She was able to ponder what she seemed to be getting herself into. She liked Kyle but admitted that she did not really know him or that much about him. She resolved to remedy that starting that very day. She knew she was harboring serious secrets, and she thought about the possibility of informing this man of her past if they became serious. She quickly dropped that idea. Her most important thought was about how she would convey to him what she wanted out of a marriage—a status she had to have in order to prosper in Australia—and how he might take it. She would eventually be proposing a highly unusual marriage arrangement if their relationship got that far.

  For the time being, she decided just to roll with it and have some fun, something lacking in her experience the last several years.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE

  ANOTHER MARRIAGE?

  Bigamy is having one wife too many. Monogamy is the same.

  —Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde

  Bigamy is the only crime in America where two rites make a wrong.

  —Bob Hope

  National Archives of Australia, Victorian Archives Centre, 99 Shiel Street, North Melbourne, Victoria State, Australia, November 8, 2015

&
nbsp; Newcomers to the Mission–Elder Samuel and Ethyl Breckinridge from Toronto–were avid genealogists on their own time, working for Ancestry.com as professionals before being called on a mission for the church. They were a perfect fit—everything good that everyone said about Canadians–their affability, calm temperament, slow to anger, eager to please, good education, conservative devotion to their church, and an avid curiosity about the world around them. Someone told them about the research project to find out all that could be found regarding a mysterious woman called Alexandra Tarasova-Yusupov. They never watched television and were not particularly keen readers; so, they settled right in to the search.

  Ethyl had learned that Alexandra had been married, although there were no certain records of a marriage yet documented that she could find. She laboriously scoured the New South Wales and Victoria provincial marriage records with the presumption that she must have married sometime in her late teens or early twenties as most girls did in the nineteenth century. She knew Alexandra’s birthdate: 5 April, 1861 in Balagansk, Far Eastern Russia. She did the math and began to search records in Victoria from 1875 to 1896 when she would have been thirty-five years old. Nothing. She looked in Irkutsk oblast in Russia during the same years. Nothing. She was about to give up; but she decided that their Alexandra may have been something of a nonconformist; so, she searched later years; and finally–in the records for 1899–she found a verifiable document. Verifiable because the missionaries already had a request for probate filed by a man stating that he was Alexandra’s husband, Kyle Dewit Herman Bradshaw, in 1931.

  The marriage date listed in the probate request for Bradshaw and Alexandra Yusupov was 4 September, 1900. The missionaries knew that this was one of the major milestones in her life, but it also brought up certain questions uncomfortable to the pious family-oriented Mormon missionaries: Did she ever get a divorce from her first husband? She had children by the first husband. What became of them? The missionaries dedicated themselves to finding the answers to those questions—or else they would have to conclude that their sweet Alexandra was a bigamist. That was unacceptable.

  The records experts were tired missionaries by afternoon on this P-day. They were determined to wake back up with their weekly walking tour through Melbourne. Their planning took them on a bus to East Melbourne to see the step back into the Victorian era with its enclave of Victorian homes, neat inviting streets, pubs, B&Bs, Darling Square, and for a stop at the graceful bluestone mansion of the Anglican Archbishop of Melbourne. They wanted to try to learn something about one of Australia’s mysterious sporting obsessions, cricket. They visited the MCG [Melbourne Cricket Ground] and were given a tutorial on the game in the library of the museum. They were all more confused about cricket when they came out than when they entered the building. They were pretty much lost after the first statement by the librarian, “Cricket is a bat and ball game.” Terms such as runs, innings, bowl and field, bowler delivering the ball, hitting the stumps, dislodging the ball, leg before wicket, Twenty20 (twenty overs), to say nothing of the labyrinthine Laws of Cricket would have to be fodder for study some other day.

  Elder Glen Gabler said, “I guess I’m just not smart enough to play cricket.”

  This said by an M.D., PhD.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX

  AUSTRALIAN ADVENTURE

  “You are forgiven for your happiness and your successes successes only if you generously consent to share them.”

  —Albert Camus

  The honest prenuptial agreement: I’ll do everything for you; you’ll become too demanding, fulfilling none of my needs. I’ll leave and blame you.

  —Cathy Thorne

  Number 1-8, Collins Street, Victoria Colony, Melbourne, January 3, 1898

  Alexandra described her successful year in Australia—1897—in a rare letter to her parents in Vladivostok as being the most successful financially and socially in her recent memory. She completed her new house with the able efforts of her construction foreman Kyle DH Bradshaw. She opened up her usually very closed personal life to Abram and Irina to let them know that she and Mr. Bradshaw were “seeing each other”. In fact, they had been a popular and well-known couple in Melbourne circles for nearly a year.

  She knew her father would be pleased to know that she had no debt associated with the construction and that her finances were sufficiently in the black to allow her to purchase a small race horse farm on the outskirts of the city, a share in the city’s opera company and its theater, its first telephone exchange and partnered with John Jones in the Sydney to Melbourne Stagecoach Line which was partially subsidized by the government of New South Wales. Unable to maintain her Australian façade of humility, she admitted to having purchased the latest and finest Cobb & Co. Brougham—the handsome four-wheel iteration–as her everyday vehicle. It was shiny black with gold trim, and a chauffeur kept it in mint condition. She noted parenthetically that she had six servants and a matched pair of the best black Friesian light but powerful draft horses from the Netherlands. Her closing remark was an expression of hope that everything was going well for them and would they write back to her at their earliest convenience.

  She never received a reply—not that she expected one given the dubious reputation of the Australian postal system and the even more questionable transoceanic delivery system. It also occurred to her that her parents had written her off entirely–as had her husband, and apparently, her children, by Boris. She wasted very little time feeling sorry for herself; it was the way of the world and the pressing needs they were experiencing in a precarious part of the world.

  The rather casual nature of her relationship had to change if Kyle was to be the useful man Alexandra needed for her ambitious business ventures. Alexandra was determined to be the one governing the nature of her connectiveness with this man. She listed her basic requirements in order of priority as: Kyle’s usefulness as a man to serve as the titular head of the family in order to conduct business; her ability to obtain a contractual arrangement which allowed her to use her significant fortune to her own advantage but under Kyle’s name—as annoying as that would be at best; his appropriateness as a social partner; and last, his contribution as a…de facto husband in the physical realm of things. She—like her Victorian sisters around the civilized world–could not bring herself even to think of descriptions relating to the bedroom. Finally, she knew she had to have this conversation with Kyle soon and frankly before the courtship period began to wane.

  Alexandra arranged for two meetings with Kyle—the first, a formal business meeting complete with lawyers, and the second, an informal social—even romantic—“assignation” in the form of a rather lavish and private picnic.

  Kyle provided the segue for the business meeting.

  “Alexandra,” he said, “we are in business together on a loose—too loose—basis. It is apparent that you are the financial partner, and I provide the day-to-day work of making things happen. You and I get along well. I appreciate that you don’t treat me like a hired hand or a servant, but we are not yet actually partners. Don’t you think we should make some sort of contract?”

  “Thanks for bringing that up, Kyle. I have given the subject quite a bit of thought. I trust you to keep my confidences, and I am going to share one with you now that should probably lead us to make a formal business contract as you suggest. You know that I have money, but I am sure you are not aware of how much. I also know that you are aware of how difficult it is for a woman to function in a business world—a man’s world, which I hate. I have some very definite ideas about how my wealth and your expertise can be joined in a mutually beneficial business partnership. I would like us to meet with the lawyers at McInerny, Martin, and Neal, Solicitors and Barristers who have handled some of my important matters. Would that suit you?”

  “I guess we’re going to be partners; so, let’s be businesslike. But, Alexandra, I don’t know about you; but it’s more than that for me. You might not like to hear it, but I’ve fallen for you. I can
be just a construction bloke if that’s what you want, but I’d rather you’d be my sheila.”

  “I want that, too, Kyle; but it’s more complicated. We need to work out some things for the long term. Will you do that for me?”

  “Anything.”

  “Then I want to do something for you. Not to be businesslike exactly, but I want to be serious about our relationship. The feelings part; so, I have arranged for us to have a picnic—just the two of us. I’d rather do that after the business contract meeting, all right?”

  “Not to repeat myself, but ‘anything.’”

  Two days later, Alexandra and Kyle sat in the comfortable offices of McInerny, Martin, and Neal, Solicitors and Barristers. It was apparent that the firm was successful: the furniture was very comfortable and obviously expensive. The hardwood floors were polished to a gleam and partially covered with hand knotted Asian or African carpets; Alexandra guessed that they were from Morocco because of the signature pattern of the wooden windows of a harem. The receptionist’s desk was beautiful and obviously French. The receptionist was a stiff, middle-aged, fleshy, no-nonsense, matron who told them that they would be admitted to Mr. Martin’s office in a few minutes. She offered them Evian water and frog cakes shipped to Melbourne from Balfour’s Bakery in Adelaide.

  Quentin Martin invited them into his office which was a monument to clutter. If there was a filing system, neither Alexandra nor Kyle could decipher it. The man himself was the opposite—small, fussily neat, and dressed in a Henry Pool & Co. of Saville Row Regency suit, vest, custom white fine Egyptian cotton shirt, bark colored herring bone spats, and wing-tip shoes. His attempt at sporting a dapper Victorian gentleman’s mustache and beard failed for want of thick enough facial hair. The beadiness of his eyes was unfortunately accentuated by the presence of pince-nez glasses pinched onto his oversized nose.

  “Welcome, Mrs. Yusupov, your business reputation precedes you. I am not familiar with Mr…Bradshaw. I am Quentin Martin solicitor-at-law at your service, Sir.”