Like a sea-tossed ship, Kiev rocked back-and-forth between war and revolution. Since March, the city had changed hands eleven times. Ukrainian nationalists had mobilized within days of Nicholas’ fall. Now, Polish troops massed in the west and the Bolshevik Red Army prepared to invade from the north. Every night the earth rumbled with the heavy guns of the German-Austro artillery. Rumors raced of pogroms in Kharkov and other towns to the east. “The world has gone mad,” Herman Meyers muttered, kicking a rusty German helmet from his doorway into the street. “The world has gone mad.”
The Meyers invited them in when they saw the archbishop trying to construct a temporary shelter from empty petrol drums near Peremohy Square. “It is September,” Yullya said, “soon the cold weather will come. At least with us, you will have walls—as long as they last.”
Both the Meyers's sons were serving in different armies, Anatole with the nationalists, and Karl with the Bolsheviks. A German shell had obliterated the shop’s upstairs apartment. Downstairs, however, a parlor, kitchen and pantry still stood and—with the exception of broken windows and a gaping roof—remained relatively intact.
A week had passed since Archbishop Chenko departed, saying he was going to Pechersky Lavra, the “Caves Monastery,” to pray. The monastery was little more than two miles away; he should have returned in a few hours.
Anya pulled Lydia closer. They slept under her last good heavy coat. Through the partially collapsed ceiling, Anya could see the flare of heavy guns against the horizon. Higher in the night sky, stars gleamed in silent, incongruous, beauty. A dozen feet away, the Meyers stretched orange palms toward a small fire they’d built from splintered furniture.
Folding her arms across her chest, Yullya Meyers crossed the room to sit beside her. “We will have to leave soon,” she whispered. Rural anarchists had looted the Meyers’ small farm just outside Kiev. “They took all our chickens, even our cow. There won’t be any food. Herman says it’s all the fault of Kerensky and his damned ‘Land and Freedom’ speeches.”
Yullya moved closer. “You wait for this archbishop because he has something that belongs to you? This is what keeps you here?”
Anya nodded. She’d never laid eyes on the treasures sewn into the prelate’s frock, yet their possession obsessed her. Aside from a few broaches she’d hidden to pay for their journey, this was all that remained of Nicholas’ love for her, and it was all that remained of Lydia’s future.
The next morning Anya awoke with a clear sense of purpose. She could no longer wait for the archbishop, she must find him. She must go to Pechersky Lavra herself.
“When will you come back, matryoshka?” Lydia’s dark eyes were round with concern.
“Soon, little one,” Anya assured, kissing her daughter on the forehead. “It is only a short distance; I’ll be back this afternoon. Granmama Yullya will look after you until I return.”
She left in an icy rain, briskly walking nine blocks to Hrushevskoho Street, which paralleled the Dnieper River, rising southeast along a ridge to the monastery. Thick stands of maple, lime and oak trees covered the riverbank’s steep slopes.
For some reason, except for the “shushing” sound of rain, the morning seemed eerily quiet. She passed the Mariinsky Palace, built in 1750 as the tsars’ residence in Kiev. Canon shells had chipped the blue-and-cream façade, and most of the glass had been blown from the windows.
She reached the monastery’s main gates. Above ground, the site consisted of a sprawling ensemble of white-walled church buildings with green and gold rooftops. Below the surface, however, the Lavra became a virtual necropolis, an underground city whose “streets” were tunnels and caverns. For centuries these same passageways had provided burial places for monks and disciples. The monastery was also a destination for tens of thousands of devoted pilgrims, though the current fighting had slowed their numbers to a trickle.
“The archbishop was here,” said an elderly monk at the registration desk. “He came to pray and stayed for two days.”
“Did he say where he was going when he left?”
The monk’s voice was filled with sadness.
“Oh, Miss Putyatin, I thought everyone knew. The Bolsheviks. They killed him. When he first arrived, he said to give this to you if anything happened to him.” He handed her an envelope.
As if struck, Anya snatched the small rectangle of paper and spun away from the counter. She stumbled back into the rain and headed down the ridge. It was so bitterly ironic: she’d just been thinking of a treasure she and Lydia hadn’t seen. Now chances were they never would.
Bent against the storm, Anya almost stepped on the boy.
No more than seventeen or eighteen, he lay with his back curved against a fountain in Mariinsky palace’s adjacent park. Doubtless he was one of the hundreds of Kiev youths—most of them now dead—who’d risen against the Bolsheviks.
Wet maple leaves plastered his lower legs and feet. His shabby gray uniform was torn at the armpits. A dark orange circle stained his chest; apparently he’d been killed by a single shot. His finely featured face turned upward, long strands of yellow hair wisping from beneath his cap. Birds had devoured his eyes. In the empty sockets, the flesh was black and torn.
Recoiling in horror, Anya ran until she reached Tolstovo Street. It was still quiet—the rain had lessened. People scurried now, heads down, faces cramped with worry.
Holding Lydia in his arms, Anatole—the Meyers’s oldest son, who had come to visit his parents—stopped her before she could enter the house. He was sobbing.
“Both dead,” he blurted. “Anarchists. I took Lydia for a walk while you were gone. When I returned…” His voice trailed away, then resumed. “Father tried to stop them. They killed them with pitchforks.”
Anya cried out and covered her eyes. Then she peered around the weeping soldier in cracked boots. Drenched in blood, the Meyers lay across each other, just inside the doorway. Pinned to their chests were separate sheets of paper, each crudely scratched in charcoal with a six-pointed star.
Anatole wiped his eyes and put Lydia down beside her. “Anya,” he said, “the Red Army is nearly here. There is a train leaving for Warsaw and you may still be able to connect to Paris. This is probably your last chance.”
Anya scooped up her few belongings and hoisted Lydia onto her hip. Without saying goodbye, she began running toward the rail station. Not until they reached Poland did she open the envelope given to her at St. Sophia. It was a photograph, already worn at the edges, of a large, oval-shaped stone. On the back was scrawled a single name, “Mikhail.”
Chapter 4
Once again, Kate felt a powerful sense of her mother’s presence. How long ago, she wondered, had Irina recorded this tape? When she lifted the cassette closer to see if its label contained a date, Kate thought she smelled the passion flower notes of Irina’s favorite perfume. The scent had been a gift from Nicholas to Anya, specially made for the tsar in Moscow by A. Rallet & Co., whose chief perfumer later created Chanel’s famous No. 5. Anya brought seven bottles to America. Only two remained and Irina carefully meted out their last drops for special occasions. The night she made this recording must have been one.
Irina spoke slowly. “Katya, this recording is for your ears only. She paused, then continued in a slow, measured tone.
“To begin, we must go back to the early part of the century, and to Mother Russia. To the time of poor Nicky and Alexandra and their dear beautiful children.
“You recall how I told you why Grandmama Anya seldom spoke about the old days in Russia? Because it was too painful for her? Well, there was another reason, Katya. We were afraid. For ourselves. And for you.”
Tears began to fall at the sound of her mother’s voice. Stopping the tape, Kate nodded to herself, remembering the petite, lively great-grandmother who’d died at 85, when Kate was 12, marking another devastating family loss. She remembered, too, hurting her gr
eat grandmother when she blurted out why she did not bring school friends home. “We’ve got stupid icons all over the house,” she said, “they’d think I’m weird.” Anya turned her face away. When Irina heard of the outburst, her daughter ate dinner in her room for three days. The icons stayed.
Her name had triggered another battle.
“Who is this ‘Kate,’” Irina asked sharply, holding up Kate’s Ninth grade report card. “Do I know her? Does she live in this house? My daughter,” she said, glaring fiercely at her teenage offspring, “is named Katya.”
“But, mother, Kate means the same thing. And it doesn’t sound as strange.”
Irina looked at her, and Kate saw the sorrow and resignation in her eyes. “All right,” her mother said, “you can call yourself this name at school, and no more will be said. But to your family who loves you, and in this house, you will always be Katya.”
Those upsets, of course, were of little consequence compared to the big trouble, the trouble that spread a stain over her college career, the trouble that caused Irina to lock herself in her bedroom, where she sobbed uncontrollably for a week. Kate would never forget her mother’s expression when she emerged. Pain carved her face like the sun carves lines in a desert. “Katya,” she said over and over, “he was a married man. How could you? How could you shame us so?”
It was then that Kate Gavrill left home.
Now, however, Irina’s disembodied voice resumed, and she spoke of another family’s tragedy, one that had taken place long ago. “What happened at Ekaterinburg in the Spring of 1918 can never be forgotten,” Kate’s mother said on the tape. “But God knows there was more. Much more.”
Kate stretched out her hand. It was as if they were still in the hospital and she were stroking Irina’s pale temples. “Mom,” she wanted to say, “let’s talk about this when you feel better.”
But Irina’s voice continued.
“Anya’s hair was famous,” she said. “A mane fit for a lioness. Pushkin wrote about its beauty. Even Nicholas, who’d always been faithful to Alexandra, couldn’t resist her. They all had their ballerinas, of course. Most of the female contingent of the Imperial Ballet served as mistresses for Russian noblemen. They kept the House of Faberge in business.
“Before he married Alexandra, Nicholas had a long affair with a ballerina, Mathilde Kschessinska. Alix knew about Mathilde, but she was also wise enough to let sleeping lovers lie. Alix was secure in Nicky’s feelings for her and she was right to be. Among all of Europe’s royals, theirs was the truest—perhaps the only—love match. It’s really the saddest story of the last century, isn’t it? Those poor people, well-meaning, but so naive in their own way. And all dying in that dirty cellar.”
“Mother, I know all this,” Kate interrupted the steady drone of Irina’s recorded words. Before her great granddaughter grew rebellious, Anya had infused Kate with Russian culture and history, often before bedtime.
“If Alexandra hadn’t begun seeing so much of that disgusting monk,” Irina went on as if in answer, “Nicholas would never have strayed. The Russian people hated Rasputin—with good reason. He was a world-class debaucher, a cultist and a clerical con man. But he was also a gifted hypnotist who could control their son’s bleeding.
“In any case, it had become a fragile balance. Nicholas, the Empress, and that devil—all of them devoted to the boy, but one of them also using the boy to serve himself and his dark pleasures. It was a witch’s brew, and sooner or later it was bound to boil over.
“One night, in the winter of 1911, when they were to attend the ballet, Alexandra instead stayed at the palace in St. Petersburg to see Rasputin about the boy. And if Alix hadn’t met with the ‘mad monk,’ Nicky… and Anya… well, there might never have been any need for secrets.
“Anya was just sixteen, and already the fastest-rising ballerina in Moscow. When Grand Duke Alexander introduced them, the tsar’s gentle eyes immediately drew Anya. And she was no innocent—she flirted outrageously with him. From his standpoint, she was pretty, available, and a desperately needed diversion from his wife’s intense involvement with Rasputin and Alexis’s hemophilia. He pretended he saw Anya for her art, but the truth was he saw Anya for Anya.
“What happened physically between them didn’t last long, but it burned intensely. For a brief time that winter, they were seldom out of each other’s arms.”
Kate couldn’t believe her ears.
Again she spoke aloud: “Mother, what are you saying?”
And again Irina Gavrill’s recorded voice answered. “Your great-grandmama Anya and Nicholas II had a love affair. And my mother Lydia—the grandmother you never knew—was their child. You and I, Katya, are their progeny. And when I am gone there will be only you—the last tsar’s only direct heir.
“And that brings me to what I must ask of you.
“When I die, the treasure that Nicholas bequeathed my mother will rightfully be yours.”
Irina’s voice intensified now. Kate could feel her mother’s energy lifting the barrier that death had placed between them.
“I urge you to find our fortune and use it for the good of Russia and the restoration of the Romanov name. It is our birthright. More than that, it is a chance to atone. Anya and I could do little while the Communists were in power. But things are different now. Such a treasure could help make up for the bloodshed and suffering that has gone before. Please promise you will do this, Katya. Nicholas and Alexandra made many mistakes, but their children and descendants suffered far beyond any requirements of justice. This is a chance for you too, to right the past, perhaps to make a new start.”
* * *
Kate sat in the darkened room, staring at the now silent tape player. Irina’s words burned in her thoughts: A chance for you too, to right the past, to make a new start.
She was only six years old when Henri Gavrill disappeared, a week before her seventh birthday. Her French-born father had acted as a buffer to the Russian heritage of the household’s female members. A big, lively man, with dancing brown eyes and a graceful, almost dapper, manner, he gave Kate her first swimming lessons a few days after she turned five. Years after, she would recall big palms turned upward against her belly in the public pool, holding her in place while she paddled. Perhaps that explained why, just weeks after her future as a ballerina fizzled, Kate returned to the familiar world of aquatics. In any event, for months following Henri’s disappearance, Kate stood in their window, waiting for her father to come home.
Henri left behind a lonely, intense girl with only a partly formed notion of who she was. Her mother and grandmother insisted Kate remain inside the house, and offered vague replies when asked about her father’s absence. Kate’s early childhood companions were mostly on paper—cats, dogs and birds she created in crayon and ink and upon whom she lavished affection and attention. In the borders, she often drew the solitary figure of a man.
In providing an alternative to ballet, diving gradually assumed Henri’s role of balancing the cultural intensity of Kate’s home. What life experience, she often asked herself, could be more liberating? It was as if her tumbling body drew a sketch in the air. And in those few precious seconds—besides freedom—Kate felt something else: an exhilarating sense of self-control. “I loved dance,” she told her mother in explaining her decision to try out for the varsity diving team in high school, “but when I dive I come alive.”
Life out of water, however, was another matter. Falling for Jack Nars drove a stake in the heart of her athletic career. What once had been a clear path to All-American status and the Olympics instead became a bumptious road to shame and scandal. She’d survived, and even recovered enough to emerge with a cum laude economics degree from Penn State. She told herself the experience had made her stronger. But underneath it all, Kate Gavrill’s brusquely capable air was mostly a self-invented mask.
She shook her shoulders, and broke her r
everie. Her past was just that—her past. Whatever had happened before, somehow she knew her future lay in this tape cassette and the letter just a few inches away. Would Anya’s words add to the bombshell of her mother’s recording? Fingers trembling, Kate withdrew the pages inside and began to read.
Chapter 5
In a small, dimly lit room in Moscow, the man slipped off his wireless headset and studied the young woman who lay beside him. Her long brown hair spilled over the edge of the narrow cot, almost touching the floor. Against the sheets, her shoulders were as smooth and white as soap. In the hollow of her neck, she wore the Byzantine cross.
“You’ve been an excellent subject,” he said.
Her head rose from the pillow, then fell back. Her eyes looked glazed and vacant. The man smiled to himself. Even a concert violinist needed daily practice to stay at the top of his talent. This bodacious morsel would be his scales. He’d perform the full symphony later, in a different hall with a different subject, and before a very small, select audience. The concert would be held far away—on Threadneedle Street in London, to be exact.
“My great-grandfather Grigori Rasputin was the leading mesmerist of his time,” the man mused aloud, now staring at the ceiling and speaking as if to a student. If she comprehended, the young woman gave no sign. Her fingers curled absently around his thigh.
Adriadna’s parents had hoped their pretty daughter, a rosy-cheeked brunette with large eyes, long dark lashes and a lush figure, would marry a local farmer. But her mother died of tuberculosis, and a year later her father was killed fighting in Afghanistan. A month after his death, the girl, then fifteen, entered the convent of St. John the Theologian in central Russia.
“That was, of course, the secret of Grigori’s success in treating the child,” the man continued, as if speaking to himself. “He learned in their first meeting that Alexis was highly hypnotizable. Today some psychiatrists would label the boy an ‘hypnotic virtuoso,’ among that tiny percentage of the population most easily placed in a trance. He turned, and smiled at her. “Such as you, my lovely.”
The Romanov Stone Page 3