The Tsarina's Daughter (Reading Group Gold)

by Carolly Erickson

  Sighing and shaking his head, papa stood, looking down the long table. “Can’t we have peace and order within our family, at least, even if we have nothing but disorder and violence in the world at large? Can’t we come together as a family, in love, and support each other? Not so long ago Uncle Serge was among us, and now he is gone, blown to bits by a bomb. I have been shot at and threatened by bomb-throwers. We all know what it is to live in fear and uncertainty. Let us join hands and exchange a kiss of peace, and forget our petty quarrels.”

  He reached out and grasped KR’s hand on his right, and Uncle Sandro’s on his left. One by one the rest of us did as he asked, until everyone around the table was linked to everyone else. Then we each reached over to kiss the cheek of those to our right and left. I kissed old Uncle Vladimir and Petya, and heard KR cry out, “Long live the house of Romanov!”

  I will always remember that moment, the candlelit dining room, the gilded mirrors and shining silver and gold-rimmed plates, the white linen and bowls of flowers, the gleaming columns of rich green malachite around the walls, the sound of the thunder and the pounding rain.

  Papa gave the order for the stage at one end of the room to be illuminated and led us to our seats to watch KR’s play. I got up to leave the table but as I did so I glanced at Grandma Minnie’s place, and at Olga’s slippers. They had fallen into a neat “V.” Would she marry someone whose name began with V? If so, I thought, then there will be no betrothal to the crown prince of Romania, whose name, I had heard mama say, was Carel.

  Nine

  There was a great deal of food left over from the banquet, and I asked Sedynov to go down to the kitchens and put together a hamper of leftovers. Together we took the hamper up to the ironing workroom where I hoped to find Niuta’s sister Daria. Though it was long past midnight the room was brightly lit and several dozen women were hunched over their ironing boards, pushing heavy irons across lengths of fabric and lace. The ironers never stopped working, Niuta had told me. When some of them left to eat or rest, others were always waiting to take their places. The irons were kept hot, and the gowns, petticoats and yards and yards of trim kept arriving to be ironed, at all hours of the day and night.

  I found Daria at once as she was wearing the same bright red head scarf she had on the day she came to the palace fleeing the fire. She was startled to see me, yet her look of surprise quickly turned to suspicion as she took note of my pale green silk gown and carefully arranged hair, tied back off my face with a green silk ribbon. Around my neck were the gleaming pearls mama had given me on my birthday. I looked like someone who had just come from a sumptuous banquet or a lavish party, as indeed I had.

  The other ironers, seeing me, curtseyed and stood back from their boards, as a sign of respect. But Daria set her heavy iron down noisily in its metal cradle and stood where she was, confronting me.

  “What are you doing here?” she demanded.

  “See here, girl!” cried Sedynov angrily. “Remember who you are addressing! This is the Grand Duchess Tatiana!” He moved toward her, as if to strike her or grab her arm.

  “No, Sedynov,” I said. “Daria and I know each other. She is fully aware of who I am.”

  “Then why isn’t she showing you respect?”

  “For the same reason she chose to work in a factory rather than at the palace when she first came to Petersburg. She disapproves of my father and his government.”

  “And who is she to disapprove? A girl, nothing but a girl. A girl whose husband cannot provide for her, by the look of things. If he could, she would not be here, she would be at home, in her kitchen, or in the nursery.” His eyes swept Daria’s figure, pausing at her bulging belly. Sedynov rarely said very much. His sharp words surprised me, though his fierce loyalty did not.

  Daria turned toward Sedynov. “I have no husband,” she said. “I had a fiancé, but the tsar’s Cossacks killed him.”

  “No doubt he deserved it,” Sedynov replied with a sneer. “That wouldn’t happen to be a bomb under your skirt and not a baby, would it?”

  At this the other ironers shrieked and ran for the door. Before I could try to stop him Sedynov had grabbed Daria and begun squeezing her belly. She cried out in pain.

  “How dare you! Stop that! You’re hurting my child!”

  Sedynov shrugged and let Daria go. “We can’t trust anyone, not any more,” he said. “Only the other day there were twelve bricklayers arrested here at Tsarskoe Selo. Two of them had bombs in their carts instead of bricks.”

  “Daria,” I said, “I’ve brought you some food. From the banquet my family held tonight. I thought you might want to take it back with you to the quarter where you used to live. Niuta says you have friends there who are in need of food.”

  With obvious reluctance, Sedynov brought the hamper over and set it down in front of Daria. She barely glanced at it.

  “And how many starving workers did you imagine could be fed from that puny basket? Five? Ten, if they took small bites?”

  “Isn’t it a good thing if even a few are fed?” My voice rose as I spoke, for Daria’s rebuke stung me and made me feel both contrite and irritated at the same time.

  She did not answer, but picked up her heavy iron and resumed her work. Sedynov moved to pick up the hamper.

  “Leave that, Sedynov. She may get hungry in the night.”

  We approached the door. Just before we reached it I heard Daria’s voice.

  “If you really want to be of use, bring ten hampers to the milk door of the pantry at dawn. Find the milk woman called Avdokia. She will take them. She will see that they are given out.”

  “I will if I can,” I said, and went through the door Sedynov held open for me.

  Only the candles beneath the icons on the walls lit the nursery when I returned to it. The servants had gone to bed, Niuta was presumably in her attic room and only one of the sleepy young maidservants was waiting up to help me undress.

  “Wake me at dawn,” I told her as she slipped my gown over my head and helped unfasten my petticoats. I asked the weary Sedynov to make up some more hampers and leave them near the milk door.

  “It’s no use, Your Highness,” he said to me. “You cannot do much, no matter how hard you try. There are too many hungry mouths. And this girl, this sister of Niuta’s, she is filled with hate.”

  “Good night, Sedynov,” I said politely but dismissively. “Please do what I have asked.”

  He went, grumbling, and I lay down to get what sleep I could.

  I was awakened before dawn and quickly washed my face in the marble basin. As rapidly as I could I put on a peasant costume my father had bought for me the previous summer; he had outfitted all of us in colorful embroidered skirts and vests and flowered blouses from an outdoor market on one of our rare expeditions into the countryside. He had bought himself a pair of bright red pantaloons and a green shirt made of some coarse material. In it he looked every inch the earthy, goodhearted farmer fresh from his sunflower fields. I braided my hair and tied a bright kerchief under my chin, then, doing my best not to wake the sleeping Olga, I slipped out of the room and down into the kitchens and the adjacent pantries.

  There was no one in the cool, dim milk pantry, with its big earthenware jars and churns around the walls, and I went to the high wooden double doors and opened them a crack—just wide enough to peer out into the courtyard beyond.

  It had been raining, and the black ground was soggy and full of rivulets of dirty water. Puddles here and there reflected the pinkish light in the sky, as birds swooped down to peck at bits of straw, only to rise in a flurry of wings when carts came and went, loaded with baskets and sacks of goods for the palace.

  Sedynov had followed my orders and I counted ten hampers stacked just inside the doors of the milk pantry, waiting to be picked up.

  Presently a ramshackle cart rolled into the courtyard, pulled by a broken-down speckled grey horse.

  “Whoa there, Folya! Not so fast!”

  The driver of the cart
pulled on the reins and grunted.

  “There now, stay there!”

  Slowly, so as to accommodate her great girth, she climbed down from the cart and stepped into the mud, her boots sinking deep beneath her. She is as big and tall as a man, I thought, and she has a man’s voice too. Yet her broad, ugly face, with its jowly cheeks and large nose, its deepset eyes and small, almost prim mouth was unmistakably a woman’s face, and there was just a hint of coquetry in the way her lank thick black hair curled around her ears with their small gold earrings.

  Hoisting two large containers of milk out of the cart she stomped rather than walked toward me, splashing through the puddles, completely heedless of the dark splotches the water left on her grimy yellow skirt. When she reached the doors she pushed them open forcefully, nearly knocking me over, and set her burdens down. She hardly gave me a glance, however, before spying the hampers and reaching for them. She took as many as she could carry and, having put them in the cart, came back with more milk.

  “Are you Avdokia?” I asked, with a slight tremor in my voice, for she really was formidable, especially to me as I was then, still a child.

  “Avdokia Stepanovna Novy,” she said in her deep, husky voice, lifting the rest of the hampers and stomping back to her cart.

  “Wait! I want to—I want to go with you.”

  I hadn’t planned to say it, indeed I hadn’t planned to say anything. Just why I did say it I never knew.

  “Daria told me to look for you. To wait for you,” I added.

  “Daria? You are a friend of my Daria?”

  “And of Niuta,” I said, only too aware that Daria would certainly not have called me a friend, and that Niuta was my mother’s servant.

  Avdokia took full notice of me now for the first time, taking in my peasant clothing, my braids and head scarf—and my satin slippers. I owned a pair of felt peasant boots but no leather ones, and so I had simply put on the slippers I had worn to the banquet the previous night.

  I saw suspicion in the milkwoman’s deepset black eyes, and was aware that she was coming to a decision about me. At last she said, “Get in,” and indicated that I should climb up onto the cart with her.

  “I will take you to the Vyborg, little daughter,” she said. “I will show you things you have never seen before.”

  Ten

  Freight wagons clogged the road as we approached the outskirts of the city, and the air was thick with a choking dust and smoke. I rode in the back of the cart, behind Avdokia’s looming form on the driver’s seat, and I felt increasingly small and lost amid the slow-moving traffic all around us.

  We were in Smokestack Town, as Olga and I called the factory suburbs we had often glimpsed from the windows of the Winter Palace. I had seen Smokestack Town from a distance many times, but had never been near it, nor had I traveled along its narrow streets as I did now, with Avdokia shouting and swearing at the other cart drivers and lashing her broken-down horse with her whip in a vain effort to make him go faster.

  There were no fine carriages along these roads, as there were on the broad, wide Nevsky Prospekt on the palace side of the river, and we passed no fine shops or hotels, only row after row of featureless, rundown ugly tenements pressed together, with here and there a tavern or a low house of pleasure, the women displaying themselves in the dingy front window.

  There were thin dogs slinking along the streets, and drunks lying along the ditches where a stinking stream of water ran, and here and there a dead horse, covered in flies and blocking the road, that no one had bothered to haul away.

  Near the Shchukin market we passed through an area where all the buildings had burned down and only blackened timbers remained. I thought of what Daria had said about the terror of the fire, how the workers locked in the factory had panicked before being released to run outside into the heat and smoke and blazing flames.

  Presently we came to a massive building that looked as though it had been partially burned but repaired; the word Phoenix was painted in thick uneven black letters above two massive doors. A dozen or more guards stood at these doors, armed with rifles, and I counted seventeen police and mounted soldiers standing by, watching a milling crowd of ragged-looking people that had gathered in the street, some holding signs that read “Workers Unite” and “Brotherhood.” Thick grey ash showered down on us from two tall smokestacks that loomed above the roofline of the building, turning the people in the crowd, the guards, the police and soldiers, even the horses a uniform shade of dull grey.

  Avdokia flourished her whip and we passed on, through ever narrower streets where mounds of garbage rotted and human and animal waste were heaped. Where were the nightsoil men, I wondered. Why hadn’t they collected all this foul matter, as they did in the streets around the Winter Palace and at Tsarskoe Selo?

  The stench was overpowering. I held my nose and tried to tell myself, it’s only for a little while. Soon we’ll be out of this dreadful place. For the first time I began to feel frightened. What if I never got out? What if I was trapped here, forced to work in a factory the way Daria had, locked in and never released? Would I grow old in this terrible place and die? Would anyone in my family know where to look for me?

  Suddenly Avdokia turned the cart sharply and passed under an archway to enter a dingy courtyard. She pulled the weary horse to a stop and got down from the cart, saying “Here we are then” and reaching for several of the hampers, which had become covered in grey ash.

  I followed her down a steep set of narrow stone stairs, tottering and nearly falling as there was no handrail to cling to. There was no light to see by either, and as we descended it became harder and harder to discern the steps, though we could hear voices—many voices, some of them raised in sharp argument—and they became louder and louder. Finally we reached the bottom of the steps and, without bothering to knock, Avdokia threw open a heavy wooden door.

  Inside was a scene of indescribable squalor. More steps led downward into a filthy room where a few dim candles burned in sconces on the grime-streaked walls. A dozen people stood, some up to their ankles in reeking water, carrying on a loud debate while in an alcove beneath the stairs a man and woman tried to sleep on a narrow cot, a tiny child between them.

  I had thought the streets outside nauseatingly foul, but the stench in this dark room was much worse. The sour smell of old cabbage soup mingled with the sickly sweet tang of alcohol and the stink of unwashed bodies and unemptied chamber pots. In one corner of the room a woman was washing clothes in a tin bucket, in another a man smoked a long pipe filled with cheap tobacco of the kind Sedynov favored.

  Avdokia stood in the open doorway, holding out several of the full hampers.

  “Food!” she shouted. “I have brought food!”

  A cry arose, a startled cry of surprise and disbelief.

  One of the men, ruddy-cheeked and thick-set, sprang up the stairs clumsily in his wet boots and tried to embrace the milk woman.

  “Avdochka, sweet Avdochka, give me a kiss! Uglier than ever, aren’t you my girl! Come here!”

  “Guard your nuts, Mihailik! I have a knife!”

  Both laughed and the man, taking one of the hampers, went back down the stairs as the others crowded around him.

  The food was set down on a low bench and all present tore into the hamper greedily, their former talk and argument forgotten. Avdokia went back outside for the rest of the hampers and her goings and comings attracted attention. Soon other residents of the building were swarming into the basement to share in the feast.

  I stayed close to Avdokia, who ignored me, and stared at the faces of the people who were devouring the delicious food we had brought. Food from the tsar’s table, if only they had known it.

  They were grey, haggard faces for the most part, the eyes over-bright with greedy hunger, the cheeks pinched. Of the men, only Mihailik, the one who had spoken to Avdokia, had the filled-out frame of a mature man; the others had the stature and limbs of boys, though their faces showed that they were clear
ly much older.

  “Where’s the vodka, Avdokia?” shouted one of the men. “We must have a toast!”

  “It’s water for you, Drozya. Water is all you deserve!”

  “I deserve only the best!”

  “Somebody get some water!”

  “Here, girl, run upstairs and fetch water!” I felt a pitcher being thrust into my hands. I did not know what to do. In the palace, it was the servants who fetched all the water, I did not know from where.

  “Don’t just stand there, girl, bring us some water!”

  I opened my mouth to speak, but before I could say anything the man who had given me the pitcher was shouting to Avdokia.

  “Is this one of yours, Avdokia? I hate to tell you this but she’s a bit of a sluggard.” He looked at me again. “No, she can’t be one of yours. She looks too clean.”

  Laughter followed this remark and I realized many of the people in the room were looking at me.

  “She came with the food,” Avdokia said gruffly. “From the palace.”

  The man next to me bent down toward me, pretending to glower. “Maybe we should roast her then,” he growled.

  “No. She’s too skinny.”

  I realized I had to say something, but of course I did not want anyone to know who I really was. Besides, I thought, if I tell them I am the tsar’s daughter they will only laugh at me again and think I am mad.

  “My mother works in the ironing room at the palace—with Daria,” I said. “In the palace we are required to bathe at least once a week.” I realized that my voice, thin and reedy with nervousness, must sound too prim to be the voice of an ironer’s daughter. “I hate the bath,” I added insincerely, thinking just the opposite, that I would give anything, at that moment, to be able to step into the silver tub I shared with Olga and smell the almond-scented soap we used.