A Very Dangerous Woman: The Lives, Loves and Lies of Russia's Most Seductive Spy (4 page)

When Ignatiy Zakrevsky returned to Russia with Margaret, it was intended that she be employed for twelve months and that her duties would consist simply of teaching English to the twins. But she was soon drawn into the heart of the family, and the original plan was forgotten. Margaret ended up spending the rest of her long life with the family.
¹²
Having had little education, Margaret was no teacher, and aside from English, the Zakrevsky children were taught other subjects by tutors.

Moura was born within weeks of Margaret’s arrival, and she became nursemaid to the infant, and later her companion, friend and a kind of surrogate mother. All the Zakrevsky children adored her. While the parents knew Margaret formally as ‘Wilson’, the children called her ‘Ducky’, which later evolved into ‘Micky’. The name stuck, and she was Micky for ever after. Regarding herself as part of the family, she never took a wage; instead, she simply had to mention anything she needed, and it would be provided. Her tastes were simple and her needs few.

Micky had a great influence on the children – especially Moura. Never learning to speak Russian properly, she made the children (and the rest of the family) speak English. The result, it was said, was that Moura grew up speaking better English than Russian, and spoke her native language with an English accent.

Confined to Beriozovaya Rudka during her early teens, Moura was frustrated by the isolation and dullness of the place, and gradually began to exhibit the waywardness and sensualism that would mark the whole of her adult life. Had Micky been her real mother rather than just a surrogate, one might have said that the trait was inherited.
¹³

But Moura had gifts that Micky had not – prodigious gifts that were uniquely hers. And she had strong desires to go with them. Her need to be at the centre of a fascinating social whirl became more intense as she approached womanhood, and her talent for getting and holding people’s attention grew and grew. She could charm, delight and seduce. Her glittering, sly eyes would fix themselves on a person, and she would make whoever she talked to feel, in that moment, as if they were the most important person in the world to her. And as she matured physically, she discovered the power of her sexual attractiveness. She became a dangerous young woman; a danger not least to herself. A contemporary said of her:

Her face radiating peace and calm, and her large, wide-set eyes sparkling with life . . . her bright quick mind, her profound ability to understand her interlocutor after hearing only half a word, and her reply, which would flash across her face before she spoke . . . gave her an aura of warmth and rarity . . . Her lightly pencilled eyes were always eloquent, saying exactly what people wanted to hear: something serious or funny, sad or smart, soft and cozy. Her body was straight and strong; her figure was elegant

But at the same time:

There was something cruel in her face, which was a little too broad, with her high cheekbones and wide-set eyes, but she had an unbelievably endearing, feline smile.
¹⁴

Few could resist her, and not many wanted to.

The first man she was said to have bedded – or the first whose name is known – was Arthur Engelhardt. The circumstances were confused, entangled with myth and rumour. Engelhardt appeared on the scene in 1908, when Moura was sixteen. At around this period a baby girl also appeared, named Kira. It was alleged later that Kira was Moura’s child by Engelhardt, but there was good reason to believe that she was the child of Moura’s elder sister Alla, who also had a relationship with Engelhardt. An unusual situation, in which the paternity of a child was known, but its maternity was in doubt.

Whatever the truth of Kira’s parentage, it was Alla who married Engelhardt, and Kira was recorded as their daughter.
¹⁵
It was a doomed marriage, and Alla’s life would be dogged by strife and drug addiction.

Meanwhile, Moura put the Engelhardt affair behind her, and finally escaped the social wasteland of the Ukraine in 1909. Her other elder sister, Alla’s twin Assia, was married to a diplomat and living in Berlin, one of the most exciting cities in Europe for wealthy socialites. Assia was a typically wayward Zakrevskaya girl, her marriage having begun with an affair and an elopement. She invited Moura to come and stay with her. ‘Bring your smartest clothes,’ she wrote, ‘as there will be plenty of parties, Court balls and other functions to go to.’
¹⁶
How could Moura resist? She packed her dresses, said farewell to Micky, and – aglow with excitement – set off for Germany.

It was just as Assia had promised: a life of society, sparkle and intense experience. It was also the beginning of a new epoch in Moura’s life. In Berlin she was introduced to a friend of her brother Bobik, who was also in the diplomatic service. Assia thought this man – a young nobleman who was ten years older than Moura – would be a good escort for the seventeen-year-old. Moura thought so too.

Djon Alexandrovich von Benckendorff came from a branch of a large Estonian aristocratic family. Along with the other Baltic provinces, Estonia was part of the Russian Empire, and there were several Benckendorffs in the imperial Russian diplomatic service. Djon had been groomed to be part of the next generation, and was already well on his way, having recently inherited his father’s large estate at Yendel. On top of his other advantages, Djon was an intelligent young man, coming almost top of his year at the Imperial Lycée in St Petersburg.

Moura set her sights on him. She had the aristocratic connections, the bearing and personality to attract a conventional, conservative member of the nobility such as Djon. He probably failed to realise that she was not at all conventional, had a mind of her own, and was thoroughly independent in spirit. When he met her, she turned the full power of her charisma on him, and he soon came under her spell. Their courtship began.

She was never in love with him, but his wealth and position appealed to her, and her mother considered him a suitable match. With such a man Moura would want for nothing, and have a wonderful social life. Mixing with the aristocracy at parties night after night suited her, and she quickly decided that as long as she lived she was never going to be ‘ordinary’.

At a Court ball at the Sanssouci Palace – the flamboyant Rococo marvel at Potsdam belonging to the German royal family – Moura and Assia were presented to Tsar Nicholas, who was visiting as a guest of his second cousin, Kaiser Wilhelm. It was a ball comparable to the ones given by the Tsar himself at the Winter Palace in St Petersburg, which were renowned for being unbelievably lavish, with as many as three thousand aristocratic guests flaunting their wealth, dressed in colourful uniforms and magnificent gowns, sparkling with jewels and decorations. At the Sanssouci ball the Zakrevskaya girls, ‘in their beautiful Court dresses, with gold studded trains and traditional Russian head-dress studded with pearls’, made such an impression that the Crown Prince was heard to exclaim, ‘Quelle noblesse!’
¹⁷

This was the kind of intense, giddy society that Moura had been craving since childhood. She agreed to marry Djon, and the wedding took place on 24 October 1911. Moura was finally liberated, and would never have to return to life in the stultifying atmosphere of Beriozovaya Rudka and the cloying clutches of her mother.

For the next three years the couple lived in Berlin, where Djon had a rising position at the Russian Embassy. Djon adored his bride, and Moura’s magnetic charm must have made him believe that the feeling was returned. It wasn’t, but neither was there any ill feeling – not yet, anyway. Moura’s status rose, and she became a focus of attention within the Embassy and Berlin’s wider diplomatic circles. She spent days out at the races, and weekends away at house parties.

Their life was not confined to Berlin. Djon had a luxurious apartment in St Petersburg, where they would stay when he was given leave. There were great balls at the royal palaces; the Tsar and Tsarina opened these evenings by dancing a formal polonaise, and at midnight the dancing would stop for a huge sit-down supper.
¹⁸
Many years later, Moura recalled one of these events:

Inside it was suffocating, what with all the candles and the flowers and the fires, everybody wore pads under their armpits to soak up the perspiration, and outside it was twenty or thirty degrees below zero, one arrived in sleighs bundled up in furs, and shawls and robes, and there were bonfires in the palace courtyard so that the grooms and coachmen could warm themselves up while they waited. It was all very beautiful, and I remember the poor Tzar staring down my bodice when I curtsied, and the look the Empress gave him! So silly when you consider she was already spending her afternoons with Rasputin.
¹⁹

For just over a year the couple lived the carefree life of young aristocrats without responsibilities. Then the children began to appear. The first was Pavel, born on 29 August 1913. With the wealth of the Benckendorffs at their disposal, they were barely inconvenienced by the baby. Micky was summoned from Beriozovaya Rudka, and continued her work caring for the second generation of children.

With her came Kira. Alla’s marriage to Arthur Engelhardt had been an unhappy one, and they had divorced in 1912. Alla, erratic and drug-addicted, had been unable to care for Kira; the little girl was sent back to Beriozovaya Rudka. Thus, when Micky came to take up her role as nurse to Moura’s new child, Kira came with her and joined the nursery of the Benckendorffs. She was treated as one of the family, further obscuring the truth about her parentage.

Moura had everything – wealth, an august husband who adored her, a place in the high society of two of the most cosmopolitan cities in Europe, and the first of her beloved children. It couldn’t last. The young couple’s lavish lifestyle was curtailed by the coming of war in 1914. Germany and Russia joined the conflict on opposing sides, and Russia’s diplomats were withdrawn from Berlin.

Shortly after the outbreak of war, Djon joined the Russian army, and became a staff officer at the headquarters of the Northwest Front, and spent long periods away from home.

Moura had lost the society of Berlin, but she still had the imperial glamour of St Petersburg – or Petrograd as the Russians now patriotically called it, eschewing the old Germanic form. For more intimate socialising, she could retreat during the holiday seasons to the country estate at Yendel. She had Micky to take care of the children – now including baby Tania, born in 1915 – and little changed in her social life. All that was really different was the absence of Djon, and that was an absence Moura could easily bear.

Micky was having difficulty getting Pavel out of the sledge. He had lost the toy soldier he’d insisted on carrying in his little hand all the way from Petrograd, and wouldn’t get out until it was found.
Another absent soldier
, Moura thought. Just like the boy’s father; but this one’s absence seemed to be more regretted. Setting Tania down, Moura joined in the search, turning over rugs and feeling in the cracks between the seats. Eventually the errant soldier – a hussar with a sword – was discovered; he had retreated to the floor and concealed himself among a tangle of furs. Pavel snatched the soldier from Moura’s hand and held him up triumphantly to be admired by Micky.

The nurse smiled – a little tightly, Moura thought. Was Micky also reminded of a real-life soldier – her dead lover, the cavalry colonel? From time to time letters postmarked in Ireland would arrive for Micky; everyone knew that they came from Eileen, her daughter. She was a grown woman now, and had made Micky a grandmother. Whenever one of her letters came, Micky would be irritable and out of sorts for the rest of the day.
²⁰
But she always brightened up afterwards. Nothing could keep Micky’s spirits down for long.

Moura turned back towards the house, squaring her shoulders in anticipation. There was a lot to do. The kitchen staff to shake up after their months on hiatus; parties to plan; guests to invite; outings and jaunts to conceive. She would certainly invite her friends from the British Embassy. Moura, with her anglophone upbringing, had a special affection for the British. And then there were her friends from the war hospital, where she had been serving as a nursing volunteer. And a whole host of relatives and society friends.

The Benckendorffs would be represented by Djon’s brother Paul and his wife, and probably by Djon himself for a while, but hopefully not by his mother, and especially not the other female relatives. The Benckendorff aunts were like a private not-so-secret police, noting every fault in Moura’s character and behaviour; and they never shrank from giving an opinion. Even Micky, who was fond of Djon, learned to loathe the Benckendorff aunts. In the troubled years that were approaching, she would be forced to spend her energy protecting the children from their influence and Moura’s reputation from their wagging tongues.

Some might say that Moura’s reputation was beyond protecting – already she had become a legend in Petrograd, and not just for her social brilliance. Intriguing, titillating rumours were forever springing up and circulating, attributing all manner of nefarious activities to her, including the remarkable claim that she was a German spy.
²¹
How much was the product of overheated imaginations and how large a kernel of truth the stories might have (if any) was impossible to discern, and so people tended to believe what they wanted to about Madame Moura von Benckendorff. And so it would always be.