“I thought I might be needed,” he said, speaking slowly, trying not to slur his words.
“Yes, yes,” mama said. “You always know when I am weak and faint and in need of your blessing. Bless me now, please bless me.”
“But he has lost his powers, mama. You heard him say so. His blessings fail.”
She glared at me, and dropped my supporting arm. “God never fails,” she said, and opened the door into her suite, beckoning Father Gregory to follow her in and indicating that he should shut the door behind him. Dr. Korovin and I were left standing in the corridor.
“Not proper,” the doctor muttered. “Not proper at all. For an empress to be alone in a room with such a man. And what is he doing prowling through these halls? He doesn’t belong here.”
Father Gregory had always been given permission to come and go in and out of the palace as he pleased. The servants resented his special privilege, and glowered at him when they encountered him—when mama or papa were not watching, that is.
“I was going to give her a sleeping draft,” Dr. Korovin said. “Otherwise she will not sleep the night through. Now I suppose I’ll have to wait until that drunken creature comes out.” He looked at me searchingly. “What if he stays in there with her all night?”
“No,” I said firmly. “That doesn’t happen.”
The doctor looked at me for a moment. “Are you certain?”
“Yes.”
“Well then, I suppose we had better make ourselves comfortable while we wait.”
There were benches in the corridor for servants to sit on during the long night hours when they were on guard, or awaiting a summons to do some service for a member of my family. We sat on one of these, side by side, I in my lovely lace-skirted ball gown and Dr. Korovin in his black coat and trousers. We must have looked very odd, like a grandfather and granddaughter sitting rather incongruously together at a party, not conversing, both alternately nodding off and then jerking back to wakefulness.
At length Dr. Korovin took out his pocket watch.
“It is nearly three o’clock. I don’t think your Father Gregory is going to come out of that room tonight. I don’t want to know whether he does or not. I want to believe the best about your mother. I’m going to bed.”
He got up from the bench and went off down the corridor.
More and more uneasy, I went to the door of the suite and, feeling a little guilty, put my ear to the thick, highly polished wood.
I could hear the rise and fall of voices, a susurration, a silence, then Father Gregory’s voice raised in drunken anger. Concerned for mama, I tried to turn the door handle but it was locked.
“Get away! Get away, whoever you are!” came Father Gregory’s snarl. I heard him kick savagely at the door with his boot. Instinctively I backed away.
A string of harsh curses followed the kicks. “Stay away, I have a knife!”
I ran along the corridor and hid behind a carved pillar.
In a moment the door burst open and Father Gregory came out, a large knife in his hand, his long shaggy hair loosed from its restraining band and hanging around his face—looking for all the world like a thief or highwayman.
I held my breath and pressed back against the wall, hoping my full skirt was hidden. I felt for the revolver. If he hurts mama, or comes after me, I’ll shoot him, I vowed silently. I’ll shoot him and I’ll kill him.
But he did not come after me. Instead he went off down the corridor in the opposite direction, away from me, the sound of his boots on the floorboards gradually growing fainter with each step.
Twenty-six
It was when his footsteps had at last died away completely that I heard the dog begin to bark.
It was a high-pitched, yapping sort of bark, the bark of a lapdog, not a wolfhound like Artipo.
Then I heard a small child crying.
And in a moment I knew: it was Daria’s dog that was barking, and little Iskra that was crying. It had to be. I remembered in that moment that Niuta had told me Daria didn’t intend to go to Petersburg with the other servants to attend the celebrations of the Romanov dynasty’s three hundredth year. Daria was no monarchist, she was a revolutionary. She worked at the palace, but she despised everything about it, and my father too, and all of us in the imperial family. She made no secret of it. Niuta said she intended to work all that day, while the rest of us were celebrating, and to complete her ironing, as if this day was just another ordinary workday.
She had to be in the ironing room, I reasoned, with her dog and little Iskra sleeping in their basket nearby as they always were. But why was her dog barking and her child crying? Was it possible? Could Father Gregory have disturbed them? Or could there be others in the palace? Could thieves have broken in?
I tiptoed in through the open door of mama’s sitting room and saw her lying on her favorite white chaise longue, with her crocheted blanket covering her legs. She had fallen asleep. I left her there and went down the corridor toward the wing where the ironing room was. Something told me to hurry. The dog was barking more loudly now, and the child was wailing without interruption.
I mounted the old, rickety stairs that led to the servants’ quarters and saw that the door to the ironing room was open. I stepped inside.
There, against the far wall of the large room, was Daria, behind her long ironing board, the heavy iron in her hand. And on the other side of Daria’s ironing board was Father Gregory, his back to me, reaching out clumsily toward Daria and laughing when she lunged at him with the iron, missing him. Save for the two of them, and the wailing Iskra, the room was deserted.
It was a grotesque scene. Father Gregory was twice Daria’s size. He loomed over her, massive, hulking, menacing. I remembered the police reports Grandma Minnie had read to us all, about the prostitutes, the midnight wanderings, the accusations of rape . . .
Staying where I was, at the opposite end of the room from where Father Gregory and Daria were now struggling, the little dog growling and biting at Father Gregory’s heels, I took the revolver out and shouted, “Stop! Stay there!” as loudly as I could.
He turned to face me, with a look, in that moment, more wolf than man.
I pointed the gun toward the ceiling—and fired.
The noise startled Father Gregory, who released Daria and, blinking hard, stared at me.
With a sharp scream Daria reached down and grabbed the basket with Iskra inside and ran around the end of the wide ironing board, evading Father Gregory’s snatching hands, and on toward me.
“Tania!” she called out. “Help me!”
“Run down to the surgery,” I told her. “Dr. Korovin is there. Lock the surgery door.”
She ran past me and out into the corridor, her little dog, still yapping, running along behind her. I stood where I was, determined not to let Father Gregory pursue her.
“Fool! Little bitch! Crazy daughter of an even crazier mother!” Father Gregory lowered his head and charged toward me.
I shot again, this time at the floor in front of him, barely missing his feet.
“Come closer and I’ll kill you. I swear it!”
I was shaking all over, more violently and uncontrollably than when I had the ague when I was eight years old. But my will was strong. I did not retreat from him. I did not waver.
“By all the saints, I order you to stop!”
He appeared to stumble, swearing loudly and incoherently, and then swayed and dropped to his knees, the way a drunken man will do when his legs cease to support him.
I heard doors opening, voices, cries of alarm. There were others in the palace after all. The sound of the shots was bringing them out to see what was going on. Without waiting to see who might come to my aid I ran out of the room and back down the rickety stairs, then along several hallways to the wing where Dr. Korovin’s surgery was. Before I reached it I encountered half a dozen police who, as it turned out, had come in response to Dr. Korovin’s telephone call to report hearing gunshots in the palace.
“Rasputin tried to rape a woman,” I told them, using the name by which Father Gregory was known to the public at large. “She shot at him.”
“I hope she killed the bastard,” one of the men said. “Where is he?”
“Either in the servants’ quarters or in the empress’s private rooms. He might try to take refuge there.” They rushed off and I went on into Dr. Korovin’s surgery, where I found Daria hiding in a cupboard, her little girl whimpering.
“The police are here. They will find Father Gregory and keep him from attacking anyone.”
As soon as I said the word police I saw fear in Daria’s eyes, and remembered that her fiancé, Iskra’s father, had been killed by my father’s police.
“Don’t let them take me,” she begged. I had never seen her this way. Always before she had been tough, defiant. Now there was pleading in her voice. Was it the stark fear she felt at Father Gregory’s attack that had brought out this terror, or something more? Had motherhood changed her?
“Of course I will do all I can to protect you from anyone who might harm you, or your child. Wasn’t I there when she was born? Didn’t I help you then? I’ll stay here with you until we can be sure Father Gregory has been taken away.”
But he was not taken away. He was not even jailed. Mama protected him from the police and would not let them arrest him, or even question him. And no doubt the chief of police Captain Golenishchev, whose daughter Father Gregory had healed, sheltered him also.
“But mama, he attacked one of your servants in the ironing room,” I insisted when I learned he had not been arrested or detained. “I saw him do it. He would have raped her if I hadn’t frightened him by firing my revolver.”
“Tania! You were given that weapon to use only in an extreme emergency, against a bomb-thrower.”
“I used it to frighten a criminal. Grandma Minnie is right about Father Gregory. He is a dangerous criminal.”
“Hush! I don’t want to hear any more!” She put her hands up to cover her ears.
“Mama! He came after me too! He threatened me!”
She took her hands down from her ears and a fixed look came over her face. Her mouth was shut very tightly, the lips compressed together.
“You must be mistaken,” was all she said, but it was clear to me from her tone that the real meaning of her words was that she could not bear to hear or even consider any more of the truth about Father Gregory. The unbearable truth that the man she depended on so completely was capable of wickedness.
“Now then, Tania, I know how you love stories,” papa said the following day when I tried to tell him what I had seen and experienced. “You have a strong imagination. You are like me in that way. Your mind is full of fancies. You say you were all by yourself in the palace in the middle of the night. It was dark. You were very tired. You heard noises. You went up to the servants’ quarters. And then—well, then, I believe, your imagination simply took over.”
“But papa, a woman was attacked!”
“What woman? Where is this woman now? Why hasn’t she come forward to tell her own story?”
On that point I was at a loss, for I had promised Daria I would not reveal her name to anyone as the victim of Father Gregory’s attack.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Perhaps she is frightened that if she does reveal what happened, he will come after her again.”
“If she is an honest woman, she will have nothing to fear.”
But Daria, as I well knew, was not an “honest woman,” of the kind my father envisioned. She was a woman who made inflammatory speeches, and who refused to acknowledge or attend the anniversary celebrations in Petersburg. A woman who feared to encounter anyone in authority, lest she be questioned and investigated and arrested.
I was angry—at my family, for not believing me, and at Daria, for not adding her voice to mine in what I revealed, though I understood why she couldn’t. Most of all I was angry at the two-faced, black-hearted Father Gregory, for being what he was: a fissured soul, his healing gift tarnished and corrupted by his untamed desires, his innocence shrouded in a darkness I had now seen face to face.
Twenty-seven
Constantin was more important to me than ever in the months following my frightening encounter with Father Gregory. Unlike the others (except for Niuta and Sedynov and a few of the other servants), he listened to me and believed me when I told him what had happened in the ironing room, clenching and unclenching his jaw in anger and smashing his large round fist into his palm. He even went to Father Gregory’s apartment on Roszdestvenskaya Street, taking a thick cudgel with him, only to be told by the housekeeper that the starets had gone to Pokrovsky in Siberia and would not be back for many months.
“I’d follow him there if only it wasn’t so many thousands of versts away, and I wasn’t needed at the hospital,” Constantin said when he returned. “That villain needs a good thrashing.”
There was an outbreak of typhoid in the city just then and all the hospitals were full and had to turn many typhoid victims away. Constantin was kept very busy at the St. Mary of Mercy hospital, though he came to see me as often as he could, or we arranged to meet at Aunt Olenka’s house on Sunday afternoons—Sunday being his one day off.
Aunt Olenka liked Constantin very much and was sympathetic to our need for privacy. Her own love affair with Nicholas Kulikovsky was her all-consuming focus at that time, and she was divorcing Petya, much to the dismay of the family. As Constantin had once remarked, Petya was an odd duck, and something of an embarrassment to all his relatives and in-laws—but divorce was a scandal, and Aunt Olenka was the tsar’s sister. It was a shocking fact that at that time, my Uncle Michael was in disgrace and married to a commoner, Aunt Xenia was contemplating divorce from Sandro—though they ultimately stayed together—and Aunt Olenka was going through her divorce proceedings to rid herself of Petya. What next, I thought: was it possible that mama might divorce papa, because of his carousing and his visits to Mathilde Kchessinsky?
It didn’t seem possible—yet the impossible was happening all around me, all the time. I told myself it was the way of the world and did my best to put the more sordid aspects of it all out of my mind.
Constantin and I had been becoming more passionate with each other as the months went by. When riding in his carriage with the shades pulled down over the windows, or whenever we could find a dark alcove in the interior of a house we hid there, kissing, exploring each other’s bodies tentatively, then more and more eagerly. Knowing that we might be seen by others only made us more excited.
We were both virgins. Constantin confided to me that he had not yet been with a woman, though his father, impatient and embarrassed by his son’s lack of experience, had tried taking him to expensive brothels, expecting that he would lose his virginity with a sophisticated older woman.
I dreamed of surrendering myself body and soul to Constantin, my heart was eager to join with him in the most intimate way possible, but in truth I knew so little about sex that my fantasies were very vague. All I knew about the male body I had learned from my attempts to draw the classical statues in the garden at Tsarskoe Selo. I had seen animals coupling, but I did not associate that rough, brief and rather mechanical act with love, merely with a physical urge like the urge to eat or sleep or urinate. Besides, animals did not choose their partners, they mated with whichever of their kind was nearest them.
When Constantin and I were together I was aroused yet modest, shy about revealing my nakedness to him. I felt myself drawing back from him in what I supposed was a perfectly natural response—the response of a girl in love, but a well-brought-up girl who kept her self-respect.
In truth I was nervous about displaying my young body, my small breasts, slender waist and hips. I was not voluptuous like Niuta or the curvaceous Countess Orlov, whom all the men of the court gawked at when they thought their wives and mistresses were not looking. I did not have a full bosom like Aunt Olenka, who thrust herself forward as she walked, proud
of the deep curves her Oriental Pills had given her. I did not have the round, full bottom of a mature woman. I did not fully appreciate then—I could hardly appreciate it, given my age and inexperience—the allure the slim body of a young girl can have for a man, her very freshness and budding curves a magnet for his lust.
I was nervous, and Constantin knew that I was. I didn’t dare say what I was nervous about. If he saw me naked, I wondered, would he like what he saw? Would I be able to please him? How did wives please their husbands? I had heard whispers, rumors, I had seen the salacious posters depicting Father Gregory and my mother doing unspeakable things. Yet I felt ignorant, and as time went on my inexperience was creating a barrier between us.
“My dearest Tania,” he said on one of our afternoons together, his voice kind as he took my hand in both of his, “we have reached an awkward point. You know how very, deeply fond I am of you, and I believe you feel the same way.”
“Oh yes, dear Constantin, I do. You are all I think about.” Which wasn’t quite true, but there were times when it was, and besides, I didn’t know the right words to convey my strong feelings.
“The last thing I would ever want to do would be to hurt you or take advantage of you, especially since you have never been with a man. If you tell me you want to stay a virgin until you marry, I will not touch you or kiss you again.”
“But I want you to, you know I do.”
He looked at me fondly, knowingly.
“Some men try to trick young girls into sleeping with them. They try to convince them that they are being cruel in withholding themselves. ‘Ah, my dear, you are causing me pain,’ they say, or ‘you are cruel to tease me, to torment me.’ I would never do that. I leave it to you to decide what you want—for both of us.”
“I want to follow my heart,” I said. “I want to be like Aunt Olenka, and be modern.” To be modern, in my aunt’s progressive social circles, meant sleeping with a lover, ignoring old sexual taboos and looking on marital fidelity as something of a nuisance or even a joke. My promiscuous family did not offer me examples of fidelity or purity, except mama, and she was accused (wrongly, I felt sure) of sleeping with Father Gregory. Aunt Ella was the only relative I had who was not promiscuous, and she was the head of a religious order!
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