The Tsarina's Daughter (Reading Group Gold)

by Carolly Erickson

  “Whoever you are, I’m thirsty!”

  Avdokia came toward me with a pitcher in her hand and led me out of the apartment and back up the dim stairs to the courtyard where her cart waited. At the far end was a spigot. Above it a sign had been nailed in place. It read: BOIL ALL WATER BEFORE DRINKING.

  Avdokia showed me how to turn the spigot on and fill my pitcher, then filled her own.

  “Why must the water be boiled?” I asked her.

  “By all the saints, what an innocent you are! Surely you know that water makes you sick!”

  I did know that a lot of people in Petersburg got sick, thousands and thousands of them, mama said, but from drinking water?

  “The people in this building are lucky,” Avdokia was telling me. “They can come up here to this spout and get water whenever they want it. The poor wretches next door don’t have any. They have to go to the river.”

  I thought of all the times I had seen night soil and garbage and dead animals being dumped into the river—along with all those telegrams my father received. There were all sorts of awful things in the river. How could anyone drink from it?

  By the time we got back to the apartment and Avdokia had put the water in a kettle to boil over the blackened stove, someone had brought in vodka and bottles were being handed around.

  “Here, girl, take a sip. It won’t hurt you!”

  Feeling reckless, I let a little of the fiery liquid roll over my tongue—and immediately began coughing. A dozen arms patted my back.

  “There there, little palace-girl, little bath-girl. Take another sip. It’ll do you good. And here! Have some of this food! I’ll bet you never tasted anything so good in all your life!”

  With that, I took a piece of lamb and began to eat, while all around me toasts were drunk to the strike, to workers everywhere, and to Avdokia, who drank so much that she fell asleep on the drive back to Tsarskoe Selo and it was left to the tired grey horse Folya to find our way home.

  Eleven

  It was about this time that I began to see Grandma Minnie and our tutor Monsieur Gilliard talking together quite often. They walked side by side in the gardens at Tsarskoe Selo and she invited him to take tea with her in the summer house or the Chinese pagoda by the lake. I could not help but notice that they talked for a long time and Grandma Minnie looked very serious.

  I hoped they were not talking about me. I knew that Grandma Minnie thought I was a lazy slouching girl and that she was convinced I was not doing as well at my lessons as Olga was, which was true. Olga was much more clever than I, though Grandma Minnie was always criticizing her for having a big forehead and disapproved of her for being too bold in her manner.

  I began to worry whenever I saw Grandma Minnie and Monsieur Gilliard together. Was she planning some terrible punishment for me? Would I be given extra schoolwork, or confined to the schoolroom for extra hours every day?

  I suppose I felt nervous and guilty about my secret trip to Smokestack Town with the milk woman Avdokia. No one in my family found out about my few hours away from Tsarskoe Selo; only Daria and Niuta knew where I had been and what I had done, and they had every reason to be quiet about it. I was afraid that somehow Grandma Minnie might find out and try to confine me so that I wouldn’t wander away again. I even had a nightmare in which she chained me to my bed, and I woke up crying out to be freed.

  By this time my pleas to be given my own room had been heeded and I did have my own small pink and yellow bedchamber with my uncomfortable camp bed and a cot for Niuta, who slept nearby in case I needed anything during the night. My beloved wolfhound Artipo slept on my bed, whining a lot because of his sore and swollen paw. I did my best to comfort him, putting a healing salve on his paw and wrapping the paw in soft felt, but he went on whining and I knew he was in pain.

  Monsieur Gilliard was teaching us about the gods and goddesses of the Greeks and Romans. The palace gardens were full of classical statuary and he gave me the assignment to take my sketchbook outside and draw the statues, attempting to identify each one. I was preoccupied with sketching a marble Zeus with a bushy beard when I heard Grandma Minnie’s shrill, commanding voice and Monsieur Gilliard’s measured, lightly accented baritone. I ducked behind the statue and found a hiding place between two rows of rosebushes, hoping they would not see me. They walked by, passing quite close to me, and then sat side by side on a wrought-iron bench. I held my breath, dreading that they might discover me. But quite soon I became caught up in what Grandma Minnie was saying, and listened intently.

  “What a state she is in, Pierre! I tell you, she is worse every day. She has such an odd look in her eye, haven’t you noticed? As though she distrusts the whole world. She stays in that room of hers night and day, won’t go out, always has a headache or a sore leg or else she’s staying up night after night with the boy, or doing God knows what with that filthy Siberian Novy. The one who calls himself God’s rascal, Rasputin. Now honestly, I ask you, Pierre, what do you think of him?”

  “I have never encountered anyone like him. I don’t really know what to make of him. It’s almost as if—he belongs to another race of men.”

  “Another race of thieves, more likely! Do you know the police are watching him? I asked them to.”

  “Has he done anything suspicious?”

  “He was in jail in Tobolsk, so they say.”

  “Are you certain of that?”

  “I am attempting to make certain of it, yes. I want to find out the truth, so I can make Nicky believe it, so I can break this hold she has over him, and that filthy Siberian has over her.”

  They were talking about mama, of course, and the Siberian, whom they called Father Gregory. I confess that my first reaction was, thank the Lord they are not talking about me! Yet as I listened to Grandma Minnie, I realized that what she was saying was quite true. Mama had become more withdrawn, and distrusted others more. But that was because she was disliked, because hardly anyone in the imperial family sought her out or wanted to be with her, indeed they went out of their way to criticize and insult her.

  “Do you know, the other day, when it was raining so hard, she started screaming when no one could find her waterproof cape. She kept at it for half an hour, shouting at her maids and throwing things. She was like a madwoman. Then it turned out she had given the cape away to her sister Irene, when she was here visiting, but she had forgotten that and blamed her dressers for stealing the cape and selling it! Imagine!”

  “She has become forgetful. I think it must be that medicine she takes to help her sleep. It leaves her groggy and clouds her mind.”

  I heard Grandma Minnie sniff.

  “Is it that medicine that makes her see her dead mother?”

  “What?”

  “Niuta told me. Alix claims she sees her dead mother, walking down the corridors of the palace.”

  There was a pause, then I heard Monsieur Gilliard say, “I wasn’t aware of that,” in a way that made me think he found this disturbing. It didn’t disturb me, as I had been hearing mama talk about seeing her mother for as long as I could remember. I thought it was normal, seeing ghosts. The servants were convinced that the ghost of Emperor Paul walked the hallways of the Alexander Palace and I heard them whisper other stories about spirits. I had never seen one myself.

  When Grandma Minnie spoke again it was in a different tone, a more cautious one.

  “Have you heard of a Jewish doctor in Vienna who treats unbalanced minds? Many people go to him, some of them quite well connected people, even royals. He’s not a quack like the Siberian, though some of his ideas do seem farfetched.”

  “If you mean Dr. Freud, yes. I have heard of him.”

  “I have been making inquiries. I believe I could convince him to treat Alix, if she would cooperate.”

  “But surely—you don’t believe the tsarina is insane.”

  “I believe she is unbalanced, yes. And so do others.”

  “What does the emperor say?”

  “I haven’t dis
cussed it with him. But I will. And I think I can persuade him that his wife is ill, and needs care.”

  They rose from the bench and walked on together toward the Children’s Island, still talking of this doctor and of mama. Was this a trick, I wondered? Was Grandma Minnie up to something? I did not trust her. I felt protective toward mama.

  No, I thought. I won’t let this happen. I knew that mad people were shut away in dark rooms and mistreated, maybe even tortured. I couldn’t let that happen to dear mama. I would protect her, defend her.

  After Grandma Minnie and Monsieur Gilliard left I tried to go on with my sketch of the bearded Zeus, but my troubled thoughts kept getting in the way. Instead of the statue of the god I kept seeing a Viennese doctor, a doctor with eyeglasses like Dr. Fedorov and a dark suit with a waistcoat like Alexei’s other doctor, Dr. Raukhfus. He had a big butterfly net in his hand and he was chasing mama across the lawn, only mama, with her bad leg, couldn’t run fast enough to escape from him.

  I shook my head, trying to dispel these awful images, but my fears for mama’s safety haunted me, and when I finally completed my poor sketch of Zeus and handed it to Monsieur Gilliard the next day he looked at me in surprise.

  “You have captured the fierceness of the great god, Tania, but where is his benevolence? Where is his wisdom?” He shook his head. “There is a statue of Daphne on the Children’s Island. Why don’t you try sketching her? You remember the story I told you, of how Daphne was pursued by Apollo and she prayed to Zeus to rescue her and he changed her into a laurel tree? The statue is well devised, the sculptor has created a woman who is being transformed into something else entirely. She is half woman, half tree. Let me see whether you can capture this transformation in your sketch.”

  I did as Monsieur Gilliard asked, and took my sketchbook out into the gardens again. But as I stared at the statue of Daphne, and tried to focus on the way her arms were turning into limbs, her legs into a tree-trunk, her tortured, open-mouthed face into the bark of a laurel tree, all I could think of was mama. Was she too in transformation, as Grandma Minnie seemed to think, from my beautiful loving mother into a screaming madwoman with an odd look in her eye, distrustful and afflicted, too frightened to face the world and haunted by the ghost of her dead mother?

  Dear mama, I thought, how can I help you? What can I do for you? I resolved, then and there, to do all I could to keep her from harm.

  Twelve

  The sparkling blue waters of the Solent flashed in the sunlight as dozens of sleek yachts rode at anchor in the gentle swells. Our yacht, the Standart, stood out among them for its size and magnificence, and for the large number of launches that came and went between it and the splendid pier that extended from the even more splendid Royal Yacht Squadron with its fanciful turrets and wide canopied porch facing the lovely view of the water.

  We had come to Cowes, on the Isle of Wight off the coast of southern England, at the invitation of mama’s uncle King Edward VII and Grandma Minnie’s sister Queen Alexandra.

  “You must come for the races, Nicky,” the king had written to papa. “You must watch me trounce that arrogant nephew of mine, that Willy! He may have a bigger navy than I do but by all that’s holy he doesn’t have a faster yacht!”

  The Standart was not a racing yacht, she was not going to take part in the race meet. Being much older and much heavier than the others, she had a tendency to wallow—so I heard the sailors say—and did not handle with the ease of the lighter, faster craft, which were, after all, built for speed and not for comfort or elegance. Besides, papa was not a sportsman like Uncle Edward was; he liked shooting but not competing. He would not have raced his yacht no matter how fast it went or how lightly it skimmed over the water. Uncle Edward, on the other hand, was always racing against somebody or something, as mama told me with a slight air of disdain. “Cousin Bertie is a man of shallow tastes—and he was a great disappointment to his mother, as she often told us when we were children.”

  Standing at the railing, looking out across the wide expanse of yachts and smaller boats, I could easily make out the two yachts belonging to Uncle Edward and mama’s cousin Willy, who was the German Emperor Wilhelm II, the much-talked-of belligerent little man whose face I recognized from the photograph in mama’s room, known for his angry outbursts and his withered left arm.

  “Willy always has to win,” papa said, standing beside me and smiling his sweet smile. “Look at that yacht! The newest, finest product of the Kiel shipyards. Bertie’s boat will never catch it.”

  Our visit to Cowes, in addition to being a family visit was, of course, a state visit and the newspapers were full of photographs of the three sovereigns, Uncle Edward, mama’s cousin Willy and papa, all looking friendly and cheerful and not in the least like rulers about to plunge their countries into war.

  But that was what the newspapers printed, below the convivial photographs: Relations Worsen, Kaiser at Odds with Great Britain, Russia and France. Isle of Wight Visit a Prelude to War. Marine Conclave a Failure.

  It did not matter what the headlines said; we were eager to have a good time. There was a ball every afternoon, it seemed, and one of the balls was in our honor. I wore a gown of blue and ivory striped silk, with puffed lace sleeves and rose-colored ribbon trim. It was my first gown with a fitted bodice, not the shapeless bodice of a little girl’s dress but a bodice made for a young woman, with added fullness for my new breasts, which were just beginning to emerge from my formerly flat chest. I was both proud and embarrassed by my changing body. I kept nervously expecting that any day blood would gush out from between my thighs, as mama had explained it would. Olga had begun experiencing her bloody days, and she was very superior about it, even bringing her stained underclothes into my room and flaunting them, which was extremely immodest.

  “Don’t worry, Tania, it won’t happen to you for ages,” she said. “You’re always behind. Behind in growing up, behind in your schoolwork, behind in your understanding of the real world. You’re still a child. You belong in the nursery.”

  But when Prince Adalbert asked me to dance at the ball, I did not feel as though I belonged in the nursery any longer. The prince was cousin Willy’s son and much better looking than his fidgety father, who when I was introduced to him barely looked at me and kept shifting his weight nervously from one leg to the other. The Kaiser had a small, comical gnome-like face and a huge dark upturned moustache, but Adalbert was fair, with lovely blue eyes and a soft-looking blond moustache that adorned his upper lip in a very manly fashion.

  He took my hand and led me out onto the dance floor with a smile that won my heart at once in a schoolgirl crush. The light touch of his hand on my waist, his fingers holding mine as we waltzed together, his kind words caught me up in mild confusion, so that I stumbled over my replies and forgot my dancing-school lessons about how to follow my partner gracefully. He appeared to find my clumsiness charming, and told me what a pretty girl I was.

  He took me aboard the Meteor, his father’s enormous yacht, pointing out its sleek design and feather-light balsawood decking and planking, its lightweight steel frame and its nearly eleven thousand feet of canvas.

  “My father’s boat is much faster than the king’s New Britannia,” he said with some pride. “Meteor won the Sultan of Johore’s challenge cup last year. She left all the others far in her wake.”

  “Do you race too?” I asked Adalbert, thinking how very handsome he was with his light blue eyes and curling blond hair, his pink lips and white teeth. I had never been kissed, but I wanted to be now. I had to remind myself that Adalbert was my second cousin, and much older than I was.

  “Of course. I have my own yacht, the Mercury. She is much smaller than the Meteor, naturally. Only a fourth-class vessel. But her sails are wings. She flies!”

  Adalbert was not present at the grand ball held on the following night in our honor at the Royal Yacht Squadron. Cousin Willy had declined his invitation on hearing that Uncle Edward had accused him of wanting to
be the “boss of Cowes,” and Adalbert had been forced to decline his invitation as well.

  “Not only am I the boss of yacht racing,” Cousin Willy said, according to Grandma Minnie, “but I will soon be the boss of all the world’s oceans besides.”

  “The braggart!” mama exclaimed when she heard this, as we completed our toilettes for the ball. “Who does he imagine he is, to speak so?”

  “His navy is the largest in the world, so I am advised,” papa remarked, reaching for his champagne glass. He was reclining in a soft chair in mama’s dressing room, smoking a cigarette and blowing smoke rings.

  “The largest perhaps, but certainly not the finest. That honor still goes to Uncle Edward’s fleet, surely.”

  “It certainly does not go to ours,” papa said with a sigh. “Not after all the damage we suffered when the Japanese attacked. So many good ships and good men lost!”

  “Never mind! The Russian navy will be great again one day!”

  Mama did her best to keep her voice bright with confidence, but it was evidently an effort for her, and I could tell she was under a good deal of strain. Her face was getting red and there were blotches on her cheeks that always appeared when she was tense. Her dread of public occasions was causing her anxiety. She smoothed her gown and patted her high-piled hair.

  “Olga! Tania! Come here, girls, and listen carefully. There are rules at Uncle Bertie’s court that are different from ours. First, never stare at his belly.”

  I burst out laughing. I couldn’t help it.

  “He is sensitive about his weight and likes to pretend he is still young and good-looking. Let him pretend. And when we sit down to supper, don’t touch the Bar-le-Duc jam. It is his favorite. Don’t ask him anything, or say anything unless he speaks to you first. Remember, he is a king.”

  “But we are grand duchesses!”