The Passion of Marie Romanov

by Laura Rose

  “There is nothing to fear,” Mama told us. “Papa will return at six tomorrow morning.” Until then, we had the ultimate defense—God’s protection. Mama always invoked God. God would not desert Russia, God would not desert the tsar, God would protect us, his family. God had given the dynasty to the Romanovs and our family had ruled for three hundred years by divine right.

  “Everything is in the hands of God.”

  She spoke with certainty. I rested my head against the crimson cushions. I could feel the heat of the fire on my face.

  “Marie,” my mother said, “you must help.”

  Yes, of course. I sprang to my feet and did as I was told. I gathered the bedclothes against the drafts. By the fluctuant light of the fire and candles, we rearranged the furniture and set out more improvised bedding. Mama and Lili Dehn made up beds on the sofas and chaise longue in the Red Room. Mama set her favorite icon of the Virgin and Child by the divan, and a portrait of Lili Dehn’s baby son beside Lili’s settee. Lili thanked Mama. She doted upon her baby son, and he was still in the city. Lili Dehn had chosen to remain here with us, at least through this night.

  “This is the best room,” Mama said, “under the circumstances.”

  “The circumstances?” I asked.

  Mama did not wish to discuss.

  ***

  The Red Room was the best place for us to wait out such a crisis, if it could be “waited out.” The large hearth held a roaring fire that threw both warmth and light. Still, I shivered at the oddness of living in a formal salon where in the past we had gathered only to hear Mama’s favorite gypsy music. While we waited, and I lay, unable to sleep, on the settee by the fire, I conjured that wild music, those gypsy violins with their strings trembling as I did—as if anticipating a fateful finale. Mama’s music was always so sad.

  A tall vase of Mama’s favorite flowers, purple lilacs, the last of the daily shipments from the south of France, rested on the table beside me. The cold had preserved the flowers and each bloom appeared perfect. I inhaled their familiar fragrance.

  “Nothing has truly changed yet,” I told myself. “Our lives are still intact. The palace is guarded, the sick will recover, the storm and the mob will vanish.” Perhaps by morning, our world would be restored and the sun would shine upon us in the breakfast room. Papa would come home. That was what had to happen, what would happen, wouldn’t it?

  “Everything is in the hands of God,” Mama repeated. She fell to her knees before the icon of the Virgin Mother and Child and offered her prayers for the sick to heal. I watched, fearing Mama would collapse. She had aged a decade within days. As if struck by a killing frost, her hair and face had blanched, preternaturally whitened. Mama looked past me with a stare as glazed as the enameled martyr before whom she bowed in prayer.

  “How can I lead Russia in his place until he returns?”

  She knelt, her pale lips moving.

  AT MAMA’S SIDE

  On an ordinary day, Mama would have been confined to her wheeling chair or the chaise longue—the household had been arranged to meet her semi-invalid needs. For as long as I could remember, it had pained Mama to walk. Her legs had been weakened by a childhood accident and then age had further injured her nerves. She suffered so. Even her face was not immune to a fierce neuralgia. Her lower right jaw ached and she complained of lightning-like strikes across her face. She moaned that this was not endurable but God somehow gave her the strength to remain with us.

  It had long been understood that Mama must recline, sometimes in darkness, most of the time. The arrangement of our family quarters in the palace was designed so that she need seldom move. Mama and Papa’s nest of rooms was downstairs, our Children’s Wing directly above, connected by a short stairway. Most often, we children descended to her rooms. Mama usually remained below, in her boudoir, the Mauve Room.

  Our lives revolved around Mama, and I was most accustomed to sitting at her side, with my sisters. Every afternoon, we gathered in the Mauve Room to read, sew, play card games, just to be with Mama. She was the almost stationary point around which we orbited. We usually arranged ourselves in a semi-circle round her, by our birth order: Olga, Tatiana, me and Shvybz. We would take turns reading aloud to her—Scripture more often than novels. We would also help Mama with her many medications, administer the smelling salts when needed. I became accustomed to mixing her Veronal with a bit of water; the bitter white powder turned into a paste and I would give it to Mama as a chalky drink.

  The room was scented—medicine masked by the fragrance of lilac. The sweet aroma and the beauty of the furnishings—charming English white wicker, an abundance of silken pillows and embroidered wall hangings—merged into an atmosphere of feminine English-style Victorian delicacy. We would keep the little dogs in there with us—Ortino and Jemmy—and they added to the diversions. Mama, resigned to her invalidism, managed it with such grace we were always glad to spend our time there with her. In fact, we missed her so when on rare occasions, when she suffered the most extreme of her headaches, she was so indisposed that she asked to retire alone and lie undisturbed in darkness.

  On this terrible night, with a ragtag army approaching and the children seriously ill, Mama was so fraught with pain, so frail, I feared that she would faint. Could she survive, let alone surmount, these catastrophes?

  I expected Mama to collapse but quite the contrary. She summoned a miraculous strength. She rose from the wheeling chair and pushed it aside. She stood, firm on her legs, and strode about the Red Room. She required neither sleep nor food. Her legs, which had been near useless, suddenly became strong, tireless.

  Dozens of times in the night, Mama hurried up and down the stairs to the Children’s Wing to tend the sick in the Green Room and Alexei in his own bedchamber. Lili Dehn tried to support Mama from behind, almost pushing her up the narrow steps, but Mama refused her help and took the stairs on her own—a miracle. As they ran back and forth between the upstairs and downstairs, Mama and Lili Dehn repeated a ritual exchange, as if rehearsing a new play.

  “Permit me to assist you,” Lily would say.

  “I cannot allow you,” Mama would reply.

  “But I must,” Lily would respond, and so they progressed to aid the sick upstairs.

  Mama took full charge and as she did, I felt released in some deep way.

  I should have known that my mother, the Tsaritsa, could overcome any force. She had powers. I had observed this queer strength of Mama’s in the past; when my baby brother, Alexei, was sick, Mama could suppress her own illnesses until he recovered. When Alexei was restored to health, she would collapse back onto her chaise in the Mauve Room and resume her own invalid existence. Until Baby recovered, Mama did not sleep but hovered with this same fierce energy, dosing him with herbal remedies and herself with Veronal. “The Veronal sustains me,” she often said.

  ***

  Now, I lay awake on the divan, in the red glow cast by the flames in the hearth and deepened by the crimson walls. I could not sleep; I was too frightened. How could our lives change so in a minute? Was it only two days before that our afternoons and evenings were a series of diverting pleasures—playing with the dogs, painting, embroidering, performing our family theatricals? Papa would have the dining table carried into the Mauve Room at tea time, and he would read aloud to us—Dickens, Tolstoy. We performed scenes from plays—Chekhov’s Three Sisters (our one extra sister, Tatiana, was always drafted to play Natasha). I was cast as my namesake, Masha, the middle sister who held the same position I did in the family constellation. Olga, too, played her namesake, and Anastasia, the baby of the family, portrayed the youngest sister, Irina.

  Would we ever be those carefree sisters again? Would I ever be in “The Little Pair” bedroom again with my beloved sister Shvybz looking up at our painted roseate skies, our etched butterflies? Descending to the Red Room only on celebratory nights, to hear wondrous music and nibble on fine cakes? How could our lives, so filled with pleasure, change with such suddenness?
Surely this descent could be reversed. I looked to Mama to restore life as I knew it. She had powers.

  “Now we must address the guards.”

  Mama spoke only in those directives, as if she had indeed assumed the role of tsar in Papa’s absence.

  “Marie, put on your warmest cloak and boots. You shall accompany me to the palace guard post. Papa would address the soldiers if he was here, and that is what we must do now.”

  Could Mama really intend that I should accompany her outside the palace? Out there, in the snow, to the soldier’s post? What of the approaching mob? My tremble resumed with such violence I felt my teeth chatter like one of my brother Alexei’s mechanical toys.

  Mama exchanged her dressing gown for her white Red Cross pinafore and the plain grey wool underdress, the Sister of Mercy medical habit she had worn three years ago, when she tended wounded soldiers in the hospital ward she had established on the palace grounds. Over this floor-length garment, she put on her heaviest cloak, the black sable. She removed the white nurse’s headdress and put on her black, fur-trimmed hat. She stood tall in the doorway. Her voice was calm but insistent.

  “Hurry, Marie, we must go as soon as possible. Wear your warmest wraps. Now, Marie. We must go now. I am leaving and I will not go without you. Please get up and put on your cloak. Now.”

  I wanted to run upstairs, back to the Children’s Wing. I wanted to dive under the covers and hold on to my Shvybz. At the least, I needed to go up and see her dear face, and my other sweet sisters and brother to kiss their cheeks and whisper my goodbyes, in case.

  “I kiss you thrice,” I always said. “I kiss you thrice.”

  “There is no time,” Mama said when I expressed this wish. She picked up a lantern, and opened the door to the hallway. I drew on my heaviest furs, my sable cloak with the hood, and followed her. The dogs must have sensed we were leaving, for they bounded down the stairs—Tatiana’s bulldog, Ortino, with his crushed velvet face, and Joy, the long and loping tenderhearted springer spaniel, and bringing up the rear, Anastasia’s little Jemmy. The dogs leapt up, pawing to join us.

  “No, no, not now,” Mama said, pushing the dogs off her. The dogs whined their supplication but we left, shutting the door to the family apartments behind us. I heard the dogs’ cries and the scratch of their nails on the wood paneling behind us. Unbidden, the thought assailed me: Will I return?

  I knew the lights had failed, but I was unprepared for the absolute blackness that engulfed us once we stepped into the corridor. I huddled next to Mama as we walked through the darkened palace halls to the great rotunda. We passed through the center hall and paused in the Gold Receiving Room, under the life-sized portrait of Marie Antoinette.

  Marie Antoinette seemed to observe us from her gilded frame. Her painted face, so pretty under her powdered white coiffure, looked unperturbed. How long before her end had she posed for this frivolous portrait? Her lips were shell pink and held a secret smile; her blue eyes looked blank. Her skirts were pouffed and her three smallest children leaned in close, nestling among the satin folds. There was not a dent of concern between her brows, or a shadow in her blue gaze.

  She was beheaded, I knew.

  I wondered, could such a thing, the beheading of the royal family, happen in Russia? Surely not. We were not hated as the French monarchs had been. I’d always been taught that our dynasty held a sacred place—we were not mere rulers; we Romanovs reigned by God’s will. Our Church and State were the same entity. The people loved Papa, worshiped him. He was their “little father.” And Papa loved the people; both Mama and Papa loved Russia. Surely, the people would not turn upon us and cut off our heads?

  The most severe of the shivers struck and my body vibrated like a tuning fork. Surely such a massacre would not occur here in Russia?

  I held Mama’s elbow to steady her but perhaps I was the one who needed this support. In the hallway, we heard at once the terrible sound of the ice flood loosed by the cracked pipes—frigid water poured from the walls; a stream flowed underfoot, carrying ice chunks, large as diamonds. This half-frozen water cascaded down the corridor and down the stairs that led to the marble main entrance.

  “When you speak to the soldiers?” I dared ask. “What will happen then?”

  “Of course, they will pledge their loyalty, and defend us in the advent of…” Mama did not have to finish the sentence. In the advent of…a direct attack on the palace.

  We stepped with care but our shoes were soon soaked by the ice water coursing through the marble center hall. Once more I was startled by Mama’s strength as she pushed open the great doors. We had never opened the doors ourselves—they were so very heavy. And we had never left the palace without escort.

  Usually at least four honor guards in full regalia flanked these doors. Their absence was more profound than their presence—I had always taken the guards for granted.

  Braced against one another, and leaning into the blast of cold, my mother and I left the Alexander Palace and walked straight into the wind-driven sleet—toward the guard post, not knowing who or what we should find there.

  Then, from behind us, we heard voices calling out our names. We turned, startled to see two gentlemen. Through the snow, I could not see their faces until they drew close—then I recognized the pale Count Apraxin and the elderly Count Benckendorff.

  “You are too gallant,” Mama told the men. “You must return to the apartments.”

  Both men refused and insisted on accompanying us to the gates. “It is out of the question that you walk unaccompanied at midnight outside the palace in this situation,” Count Benckendorff said.

  Mama and I exchanged a glance, our first as equals. I think we were similarly touched and rueful. What could this elderly man, hobbled and bent, do in an attack? Apraxin was younger and held his walking stick.

  “It is not necessary,” Mama said.

  “Please permit us,” Count Benckendorff said. Immediately upon uttering those words, Count Benckendorff slipped on the ice and fell backward. Apraxin helped him to his feet, and offered his stick for support. Count Benckendorff accepted the staff and he and Apraxin walked together. We resumed our trudge through the heavy, wet snow toward the guard post. For a moment, I thought how spectral we must appear—two women in black, two men, whitened as with frost, all moving slow as the snow toward the flames.

  AT THE GATES

  The snow flew into our faces. My eyes smarted as I strained to see ahead. I had walked this courtyard thousands of times, but never under such conditions. When I tried to see even the short distance to the palace gates, I stared into an opaque greyness. In the distance, I could just discern the orange and blue glow of a bonfire. Toward this fire, we walked, invisible as ghosts.

  The palace guards were moving round the flames in a circular dance that reminded me of our proudest soldiers, the Cossacks, but this was no spirited kazatski, dance of celebration or show of spirit. This stamping of their feet was to keep from freezing. Their horses stood tethered in the outer circle and their breath and steam rose up through the snow, drifting heavenward as mist.

  Inside the palace, I had been shaking with terror. What if the guard failed, and the mob overcame us right there at the gate? Would we be captured, killed outright? But now the cold revived me and I experienced an odd energy. The frigid air tasted sweet and I tightened my grip upon Mama’s elbow. She too seemed invigorated by the sharpness of the cold, the sight of hundreds of uniformed officers dancing round the fire. Holding her arm, I felt her determination and I knew no fear.

  ***

  The troops did not seem to notice us until we were upon them, and then there was a collective gasp, as on a single breath: “Your Majesties!”

  So many soldiers spoke, we heard as if one voice, “You must return to the palace; it is not safe.”

  An officer moved to escort us back to the palace. As if to emphasize his words, there came a retort—from a distance, guns fired. How far a distance? I wondered. The snow altered sound.
Then there was another noise—could that be the sound of the mob? Were they close? The sound of many voices is no longer human, I discovered; the collective voice takes on an electrical chitter.

  “Alexei Adronovich, Lieutenant of the Garde Equipage.” The first officer saluted. He bowed and offered to escort us back to the safety of the palace.

  “I shall address the company,” Mama told him. The lieutenant straightened. He would not contradict the Tsaritsa.

  Alexei Adronovich led us to the bonfire. As we approached, I felt the heat of the fire as it blazed and crackled, whipped upward by the wind, feeding on the frozen night air. Sparks ascended to the heavens. I walked, as if enchanted, drawn into that circle of soldiers. I noticed the silliest detail—they had relieved themselves; great yellow splotches stained the white snowpack. I noted too that a few of the men held flasks, and their voices roared above the flames.

  Upon seeing my mother, all the men became silent. Mama, observing this, narrowed her eyes to blue-grey flints. The men set down their liquor and assumed a pose of attention.

  My mother spoke to soldiers but by then I was in a state of hypnotic trance. I heard her without understanding. I picked out individual words—danger, loyalty and thankful. Later, I realized she had said, “We are aware of the dangers tonight and I have come to express how thankful we are for your loyalty.”

  The men seemed as stunned as I was. Mama thanked each guard as we moved among them. The officers bowed and murmured their allegiance.

  “We serve the tsar,” they repeated, one after the other. “We serve the tsar, we serve the tsar.”

  “Our little father,” a few whispered, “our little father.” These refrains seemed a song and I heard their rhythm in my numbed mind as I walked round the campfire on my frozen feet. ‘My father is their father also…. My father, their father… My father, ordained by God…

  Still, there were the gunshots, that distant cackle—the mob? I startled at each volley, and saw the soldiers reflexively start. Some held their rifles; others stood by the cannon. The gates were closed, locked, with more of our guards on the outer side. Outside the gate, regiments were posted in four lines, the first line bent at the knee, rifles ready.