The Girl Who Fought Napoleon: A Novel of the Russian Empire

by Linda Lafferty

  I focus on his face. I see it as if in a dream.

  Where has my life gone?

  The fire crackles, spitting a spark that embeds in the carpet and begins to smolder. A young man jumps up and smothers it with the sole of his boot.

  “The end of Tsar Alexander?” I say. I shake my head and the silence stretches out. “So you’ve heard the legend of Feodor Kuzmich? The hermit who was allegedly Tsar Alexander I, who lived in a hovel in Siberia?”

  The young man—my grandson!—shrugs. “I have heard of it. Is it true, Grandmama?”

  “True?” I say, shrugging. “What is truth? That I disguised myself as a man for a decade to fight against Napoleon? That I was a daughter and a mother, but also a son and a soldier?

  I press my fingertips to my forehead. I feel deathly old.

  “Please tell me.”

  I hear the clawing of the cat on the wooden door. “Just let my dear cat in. How she insists! I need my friend on my lap to tell you the rest of the tale.”

  Vladimir opens the door and Babushka runs in and jumps up into my lap. I stroke her fur and she purrs.

  “The legend is that Alexander staged his death. He was surrounded by only his most trusted confidants, who kept his secret and arranged his transport from the port. It is said he traveled to Palestine, where he took the name of Feodor Kuzmich and lived for years as a hermit and a monk, practicing his faith in God.”

  For a moment, I lose my way. I hear the sound of trumpets, the clash of sabers. The thunder of the cannons moving closer.

  “Grandmama?”

  I will myself to leave those shadows of war.

  “They say he returned to Russia and he was flogged in the small town of Kraznoufimsk, Siberia, for not having any identity papers. Neither tsar nor hermit has papers! He was deported into the far reaches of Siberia, where peasants sheltered him. There, his great knowledge of the Scriptures and his holy ways won him renown. They say he cured the sick by the laying on of hands, that a strange perfume emanated from his flesh and beard, that light illuminated his simple hovel without candle or flame.”

  “But was he really Tsar Alexander?”

  I shrugged.

  “Feodor Kuzmich was tall, blue eyed, slightly deaf in the left ear. He knew much about St. Petersburg and about the royal family. Impossible things for a simple hermit to know. He spoke several languages fluently. And the man who would become Tsar Alexander II—Tsar Alexander’s nephew—made the long journey from St. Petersburg to Siberia in 1837 to visit the hermit.”

  I search my memory for more details. I know they are there. How can I remember so much and still, somehow, have forgotten my son. My son!

  “When the coffin of Tsar Alexander was opened, years after his death—there was no body resting there. The sepulchre was empty.”

  “But … but what of Elizabeth? Did she follow him to Siberia?

  “I do not think so. Elizabeth was ill for a very long time. She would not have had the strength for that life. Some say that the tsarina took a vow never to speak and entered the convent of the province of Novgorod, where she was known as Vera the Silent.”

  “And Adam Czartoryski? What became of him?”

  “He never stopped fighting for his dream of an independent Polish nation. Let me remember … I think Czartoryski led a revolt, but Russia crushed the rebellion and he was sentenced to death. I heard Tsar Nicholas commuted the sentence to exile. He was his brother’s best friend, after all.”

  “Did he ever see the Tsarina Elizabeth again?”

  “No. No, I think they never met again. Czartoryski married a Polish noblewoman and moved to Paris. I know nothing more.”

  I shake my head, trying to clear all this—all these legends—away. Real life is right here beside me.

  “What do I know? I am an addled old woman who deserted her son to join the cavalry. Did your grandfather—my … husband—ever forgive me?

  “No, Grandmama,” he says. “He would never mention your name or allow it to be spoken under his roof.” He looks down at the carpet.

  I nod silently.

  “But I admire you!” my grandson insists. “After Papa died, I had to know who you were. My mysterious grandmother. I asked neighbors. I asked family. Eventually I found my way to Sarapul.”

  I blink, my eyes begin to tear. I have not heard that town mentioned in so very long. The town where I was raised. The town where I was given Alcides. The town I fled.

  My grandson doesn’t see that I am crying. He has all the heedlessness of youth. Just as I once did.

  “I was so proud to learn that my grandmother fought the great battles against Napoleon. My grandmother! Can you imagine my pride? The friendship you had with Tsar Alexander. Your legend is cherished.”

  I focus my blurred eyes on Vladimir. He reaches out to stroke Babushka behind her ears. How much he looks like me.

  “You weren’t ashamed of me?” I ask.

  “Ashamed? You are Russia’s hero! Would I have made this long trip to see you if I was anything but proud of you, Grandmama?”

  “But I left you. No, I mean I left your father. Yes, I remember.” And, yes, now I do. I must. “I followed a Cossack. A tall man with green eyes. But a man who kept my secret, just as Tsar Alexander did.”

  Vladimir lifts his chin. I can see him struggle with his emotions.

  “What became of him? That Cossack.”

  “He died shortly after the great Battle of Leipzig, of the disease they call typhus. Despite all the bloodshed of battle, he died on a straw pallet. I have a letter somewhere,” I said. I swallowed hard as if I had a piece of cucumber stuck in my throat.

  I knew the letter by heart:

  Dear Little Alexandrova:

  I shall have this letter delivered to the Tsar. General Platov will see that the emperor receives it. Only he knows whether you live or not. To have these words read to you is my last request.

  They say you are dead. I do not believe it. I have looked out over the battlefields and in my heart I see one campfire among the thousands flickering in the night. You must be there. I know it.

  I am sorry that you chose to follow me after our night together. To leave your husband! A baby at home. Guilt has chased me ever since, more true than a bullet.

  You must forgive me but what could I do? I am a Cossack! To find a girl riding bareback in her thin nightgown in the mountains. Alone.

  And was I wrong? I sensed you loved me though you did not say.

  Forgive me for what I did to you that night on Startsev Mountain. If you have died on the battlefield I will never forgive myself. Nor will God.

  I have heard the battles you have fought—the same as I! Heilsberg, Friedland, Smolensk, Borodino. I have followed your legend and hold you close to my heart even now as I lie dying.

  Yet it is not a saber, bullet, or cannonball that now steals my life. I am dying of the disease that has killed so many of our soldiers—and the enemy’s too. My body is racked and I can feel my mind slipping away.

  An ignoble death is my curse.

  May God bless you, Alexandrova, my Nadya Durova. May you and Alcides find your way home safely.

  My eternal love and devotion,

  Anatoli Denisov

  I stretch my stiff neck, looking up at my visitor. Never have I felt so old and so lost.

  “Tell me why you are here again.”

  “To ask for your blessing of my marriage, Grandmama.”

  Marriage.

  “You have my blessing.” I rest my hand on the crown of his head as he kneels before me.

  We are both silent for a minute. We listen to the whine of the wind as the storm rages outside.

  “Do you ever regret anything?” he asks as he settles back into his chair.

  “I regret not traveling back to St. Petersburg one last time and thanking the Tsar Alexander for his trust. For keeping his word. For caring for your father and educating him in St. Petersburg.”

  I suppose he thought I was going to say I regr
etted leaving my family. But to his credit he only nods, contemplating.

  “Was it the Cossack that forced you to leave?” His voice is thick with emotion.

  “Nyet, nyet!” I say, waving away the words. “People might say that because they don’t understand me. Because that is sordid and tasty to foul-mouthed gossips.”

  I clench my teeth in anger.

  “Why must a man be the cause of everything a woman does in her life? I left because I wanted freedom. To ride my horse across the open steppes of Russia, to serve my Tsar. To fight Napoleon. Nothing else. The Cossack was only the spark that started the bonfire within me. But I built that fire stack stick by stick. I fell in love with the cavalry life, not with him.”

  Vladimir seeks my eyes.

  “You are a legend—as much as Tsar Alexander himself.”

  “Tsar Alexander promised me he would care for my family so that I could fight in the campaign against Napoleon. He gave your father the best education, the best care, as he promised he would. And I see that promise fulfilled by the fine young man that you are. Our great emperor—the Sphinx of Russia, they called him. Inscrutable. Who else could keep such a great secret and give a mother the freedom to serve Russia the same as a man?”

  “I shall never forget how good he was to my father.” He is on his knees now, beside my chair.

  “My son, my son,” I murmur, stroking his temples. My mind tells me he is my grandson, not my son—but these are the words I have to speak through him, through my flesh and blood, to the son I left behind. “Promise me never to forget the legacy of Tsar Alexander. For if he had not given me refuge in Russia’s cavalry and had he not given me his name, I would have been no more than a terrible mother.”

  “Neither of the two Alexanders will be forgotten,” he promises. “Russia will always remember our heroes!”

  He takes my hand in his. I try to smile at his kindness. History and heroes are too easily forgotten. The truth becomes a smudge on the page until it is erased forever.

  Where is he, the good tsar who gave me his name?

  I look out into the driving snow and feel a strange pain in my heart, as if I have been suddenly separated from a twin.

  Epilogue

  Merchant Khromov and his daughter attended the body of Feodor Kuzmich. Khromov had given the starets his little cabin outside Tomsk, Siberia, for many years. He had always seen that the mystic had wood for his fire and enough food to keep his old body alive.

  “Sonia,” he said. “Heat water on the stove. I shall wash the starets and make him ready to meet God.”

  The young woman poured water from a bucket into the dented pot on the woodstove. She watched as he father knelt silently by the dead man’s body and prayed. After he had crossed himself three times and risen to his feet, she touched his shoulder as he wept for the good man, a devoted servant of God.

  Khromov drew a deep breath.

  “Here. Help me remove his clothes so we can prepare his body for burial.”

  Sonia bent over the stiff body, reverently untying the starets’s shirt.

  “Papa!” she said. “Look here!”

  She drew back the linen shirt, exposing the dead man’s chest. There around his neck was a small cloth bag on a leather cord.

  Khromov unknotted the string.

  “It’s a message of some sort,” he murmured. “But it is gibberish.”

  “Let me see, Papa,” said Sonia. “Da, da. The only thing I can make out is an A and a P … and numbers. It makes no sense at all.”

  Khromov looked out the window at the driving snow. “It only made sense to one person, I suspect. And that soul now resides with God.”

  Author Notes

  For the reader who is perplexed at the meaning of the message written in numbered code, so were the Romanovs for more than a century. In 1927, two code breakers working separately came up with this solution to the mystery of the message:

  Anna Vasilievna [Gargarina], we have discovered an incredible flaw in our son. Count Pahlen informs me of AP’s [Alexander Pavlovich’s] participation in a conspiracy. We must hide tonight, wherever it is possible.

  PAUL

  St. Petersburg. March 11, 1801

  Anna Vasilievna Gargarina was Tsar Paul I’s mistress who lived in Mikhailovsky Castle with him.

  Like Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Tsar Alexander was forever haunted by his father’s death. While he may not have had anything to do with the actual assassination, he was most probably privy to the plot to force his father’s abdication.

  Nadezhda Durova was a complex character. She was startlingly brave and unconventional—and she detested the menial role nineteenth-century society forced on women. Her memoir, The Cavalry Maiden: Journals of a Russian Officer in the Napoleonic Wars, is a rare insight into the daily life of a Russian cavalry soldier and officer during this era and clearly illustrates her valor.

  But there is a striking conflict in stated facts.

  The main points of Durova’s story, as told in her memoirs, are true. Nadezhda Durova fought in many of the great battles of the Napoleonic Wars. She was in the midst of the fighting at Heilsberg, Guttstadt, Friedland, Borodino, and Smolensk. She received the St. George Cross for her bravery, and from Tsar Alexander I personally. Durova had a special relationship with the Tsar, who essentially “sponsored” her later career, even knowing she was a woman. Tsar Alexander sent Durova money and promoted her to an officer’s rank, sending her to serve with the elite Mariupol Hussars. He gave her his name “Alexandrov,” son of Alexander—an astonishing honor.

  Russia’s most notable poet, Alexander Pushkin, encouraged Durova to publish her memoirs, taking the time to edit them himself. Her story was published in Pushkin’s literary magazine Sovremennik, or The Contemporary.

  Clearly, Nadezhda Durova was an extraordinary woman.

  There was, however, another side of Nadezhda. Her memoirs state she was sixteen years old when she ran away from home to join the cavalry. But official records show she was in fact twenty-three. There were seven years consistently subtracted throughout her memoirs (including for her horse Alcides’s age).

  In October 1801, desperate to escape her mother’s influence, Nadezhda married Vasily Chernov, a judge in Sarapul. The possibility exists that her mother arranged the marriage to tame her rebellious daughter. Nadezhda had a son, Ivan, in 1803.

  Nadezhda soon abandoned her husband and returned with her son to her family home in Sarapul. However, she could not abide living with her mother and fled, disguised as a Cossack. It was rumored that she had fallen in love with a Cossack and pursued him, subsequently joining the cavalry.

  Despite abandoning her son, Ivan, leaving him with his grandparents, Nadezhda did not forget him. She arranged an excellent education for the boy through her friendship with Tsar Alexander. Alexander saw that Ivan was enrolled in the Imperial Military Orphanage in St. Petersburg. Nadezhda visited him at least once while he was enrolled in the military academy. Ivan was a good student but not in robust health. He remained in the military but not as a soldier, serving instead as a bureaucrat in St. Petersburg.

  In my novel, Nadezhda’s grandson comes to Yelabuga to ask for her blessing for his marriage. In real life it was her son Ivan who asked her benediction for his pending vows. Her son deeply admired his mother despite the fact she abandoned him as a child.

  Beyond her bravery on the battlefield she demonstrated great courage—and took many risks—in other parts of her life. Taming a wild and notoriously aggressive horse with sugar-sprinkled bread is not a simple task! Nadezhda’s gift with horses seems to have passed through the generations. Her descendants became famous animal trainers and circus performers of great renown in Russia.

  I chose to follow Nadezhda’s memoir closely and not divulge the additional information (that even Pushkin did not know) until the end of the novel. This gradual denouement (the inconsistencies in her age, the omission of both her marriage and the birth of her son) reflects how Durova’s life story unfo
lded to the Russian public.

  Tsar Alexander I was a deeply elusive character, as indicated by his moniker “Sphinx of Russia.” Even before his father’s murder, he proclaimed he was unsuited for the role of tsar and repeatedly declared his intention to abdicate. He struggled to fill the role of “strong man” of Russia. His ideals, though repressed, ran more toward democracy, education, and social reform, as espoused by the philosophers of the Enlightenment.

  Though egotistical and susceptible to flattery, Alexander was a humanitarian at heart and deeply spiritual. A true Francophile, he grew to hate Napoleon. It was his decision alone to pursue Napoleon into Paris and force the French emperor’s abdication.

  Tsar Alexander I “conquered” Napoleon Bonaparte.

  The legend of Feodor Kuzmich, the starets whom many believed to be Alexander I in disguise, remains pervasive in Russia. The empty sepulchre of the Tsar, the conflicting autopsy reports (the rumor that the courier Major Maskov’s body may have been substituted in the imperial coffin transferred back to St. Peterburg), and the mantle of secrecy that swirled around Alexander’s remains fed the rumor and speculation. Witnesses say they saw a British yacht in the treacherous Bay of Taganrog pick up a sole passenger dressed in peasant clothes the day of Alexander’s death. The vessel then immediately lifted anchor and sailed on to Palestine.

  Years later a mysterious starets with a strong resemblance to Alexander I appeared in Siberia.

  Thus grew the lore of the hermit tsar.

  The fact that two subsequent tsars made the long and arduous journey to visit Kuzmich’s grave in a remote post in Siberia attests to the Romanov’s family intense interest in the obscure starets.

  Both Nadezhda Durova, known during her later cavalry career as Alexander Alexandrov, and Alexander Pavlovich Romanov were fascinating human beings. These two Alexanders were eminently worthy of their places in Russian history.

  Acknowledgments

  I owe a great deal of gratitude to Nadezhda Durova herself. Her journals, The Cavalry Maiden: Journals of a Russian Officer in the Napoleonic Wars, gave me a solid story and a unique opportunity to see into this extraordinary woman’s life.