The Romanov Bride (4 page)

Sobbing, one of my ladies came in and told me the horrid news, and as soon as I heard it I rushed from my boudoir. Wasting not a moment, I scurried down the grand staircase, my dress dragging behind me, and burst through the doors of Sergei’s cabinet. Hurrying in, I found him not at his desk but gazing out a window at the Kremlin grounds, his hands clasped behind his back. Standing a few steps away was the military governor of the city, our very distinguished Count Shuvalov.

“Oh, Sergei!” I exclaimed. “Salvos were fired upon the marchers-I’m told many were killed!”

“Yes,” he muttered slowly. “Count Shuvalov himself has just brought me the news. I’m told nearly a thousand have died.”

“Oh, Lord!” I gasped, crossing myself. “Were they just workers, or-”

“Women and children, too.”

“No…!” I said, bursting into tears.

Sergei turned around then, his face paler than I had ever seen, his eyes red, for we both sensed what this meant for the country and what darkness it would bring.

He said, “Come, child, we must pray for the dead.”

We did just that. Leaving the Count, we headed directly to the attached church, where we were on our knees the rest of the afternoon and well into the night, offering blessings for the newly departed.

Sadly, only later was it proven that the vague rumors were actually true, that the workers had meant the Emperor no harm, that they had merely intended to gather at the Palace and present him with a petition requesting his help. Just think if it had been so… if the Tsar had met directly with his lowest, neediest subjects! Just think what wonderful things we could have done for our beloved country!

Instead, all went from bad to worse, and the strikes spread like a terrible fire, leaping from factory to factory.

That was how my path started, right then and there on that Bloody Sunday as I reached for my beautiful Shura and found her lifeless. That was the day my sweet wife and unborn child died and that was the day the Tsar died, too. From then on I dedicated my life to revenge… and swore my life and soul to the Revolution. Day and night my cry was: Workers of the World, Unite! Down with the Autocracy! All Power to the People! So many innocents were killed that day, which proved to be the dress rehearsal for the Great October Revolution twelve years later. Yes, for decades if not a century Russia had been a boiling cauldron just waiting to explode, and explode it did with vicious power.

It was true, in a matter of moments all that I lived for was cruelly taken away, and there was no bottom to the depth of my pain. I do remember collapsing in the red snow and sobbing as I never had, I do remember a Cossack coming by and beating me with the flat of his sword, but… but suffice to say that, I don’t know, three or four days later I found myself hiding in an attic with a group of revolutionaries, for my transition to hatred was just that quick.

Of course, Father Gapon survived as well. But his bodyguards did not. Those men who had volunteered to protect the priest did just that, acting as a human shield and taking the bullets and falling for the Revolution. If only I’d thought to do likewise, to stand before my wife and protect her. But I didn’t, and to this day I still don’t understand how those bullets could have missed me, how I was not even grazed, and how my Shura, standing right next to me, could have been killed so quickly and cleanly. But that was what happened and that was how I lost my faith, for if there had been a God he would have spared her and our unborn baby and taken me instead. Or, perhaps best, taken all three of us together.

As for Gapon… within moments after the shooting had stopped a group of his ardent supporters rushed over and whisked him away. I vaguely remember seeing this, somehow remember watching as they hustled him down a lane, shaved his familiar beard, pulled his priestly garments from his body, then dressed him as an ordinary worker and sent him scurrying into hiding. I didn’t see him again or cross his path for almost two years until that one day when he was murdered in a dacha outside the capital. Hung from a hook, he was. No, it wasn’t the Tsar’s secret agents who did that. It was our people, revolutionaries who were so displeased with him for his betrayals, for it turned out that all along he’d had secret contacts with the police. I actually helped kill him, and I was glad to do so: four of us hung him from a hook on the wall, and when the hook proved not high enough from the floor, me and another comrade pulled on Gapon’s shoulders until he was strangled. The police didn’t find his body for a whole month.

With the murder of my own wife, I turned freely to hatred and seized the opportunity to murder any Romanov I could. We were determined to get rid of our oppressors and their capitalist dogs, we were determined to turn a page in history and make sure there was no going back. And that was how and why of course we decided to go after the Grand Duke Sergei, that bastard who had ruled Moscow with an iron fist for, what, some fourteen years. There was no question, he was the worst Governor-General that Moscow had ever seen. After all, it was he who ran the Zhidki out of town, and he who made those few Zhid boys who stayed in the city to register as stable boys and the few Zhidka girls as prostitutes.

That was how, too, I ended up in Moscow a few weeks later. I traveled there to participate in the incredibly glorious plans to murder the Grand Duke Sergei. Within days of Bloody Sunday it was decided in the highest echelons of the revolutionary committee that, first off, the most reactionary and hated of the Romanovs should be executed. A kind of trial was held, and it was determined by all that the Grand Duke Sergei should meet his death. I think, actually, that after the events of Bloody Sunday not just me but the masses as a whole were crying out for revenge. On top of Russia sat the disgustingly rich Tsar, beneath him came those 1000 or so conniving titled families, then the merchants and little bourgeoisie people. Finally at the bottom came us, hungry peasants and weary workers who made up the biggest part of Russia, some said as many as 80%. We meant to change all that, we did, by whatever means necessary. We meant to turn society completely upside down and completely reverse the table of ranks so that we were on top and Nikolai the Bloody and his greedy family and all the others were smashed down there at the bottom beneath us. I volunteered to join these terrorists, and so some three weeks after the murder of my wife and unborn child, I traveled to Moscow and joined this secret group, which was determined to kill the Grand Duke Sergei Aleksandrovich.

And if in the process of killing that despicable oppressor we also killed his beautiful bride, well, so be it. What did I care? Nothing, that was what.

My heart had turned to cinder.

As I stood in front of my tall, triple mirror in my dressing room, I was not especially pleased with what I saw. Was the yellow silk dress, which I myself had designed, just the right one for tonight? Were the sleeves tailored snugly enough? Was the collar, which was decorated with seed pearls and petite diamonds, too extravagant in detail? Or was it the color, was it somehow all wrong?

Turning to my dressing maids, I asked, “What do you think, girls?”

“Lovely, Your Highness,” replied Luba, a trim gray-haired woman who had served me since my marriage some twenty years past.

The other, Varya, a plain short girl in my service for only a few months, practically whispered, “Beautiful, Your Highness.”

As the two maids began to tighten my whalebone corset and fasten the long row of buttons up the back of my dress, I continued to examine myself with great criticism. So many had told me how pleasing I was to the eye-the kind proportions of my face, my fairish hair, and soft gray-blue eyes-but I could never find that beauty in myself. Yes, I made quite a ceremony of dressing for the evening, but the truth was that I spent all those hours looking for problems, for I was all too aware how much my husband hated imperfections, from the curl of my hair to the cut of my dress. If there was so much as a crease or an uncomely fold in my gown, the wrong necklace or uncalled-for earrings, my husband would demand that I change.

Yes, Sergei was a difficult one, and though I loved him and remained ever dedicated to him, I could not deny that over the course of time we had pulled apart, in large part, of course, due to his sternness and demands. Too, the painful truth was that I had fully expected and hoped to bear a number of children, yet for his own reasons Sergei had made this not possible-though we shared a bed, I was forever denied more than a brusque kiss. Thus, in truth, a kind of tense fondness had come to exist between the two of us. From the bedroom to the stable, every decision, every choice, made within our household was his, with the strictest belief that we were all to obey and all was to run punctually and with great order. Even the smallest decisions, the petticoat type, were not mine to make, and in no way was I expected to busy myself with intellectual burdens. Almost as if I were his decoration, Sergei planned my life to be filled with painting and piano, social occasions, and, at most, participation in charitable activities. Yet such a carefree life was not entirely pleasurable, for among other things I could not deny that I was pained by the absence of little feet running about the Palace. And so it was that in my great disappointment and loneliness I longed to do more good for the people, the suffering ones, just as my own dear mother had taught me.

Heavens, as I readied myself for our public appearance at the opera that evening I couldn’t help wonder what gossip would make the rounds of tomorrow’s tea tables. On the subject of my married life, the most horrid things had been told and retold about my husband’s predilections, and over and over it came as a great astonishment that people could talk of such things. And while these stories hurt me, all I knew was that if one were guided by gossip scant good would get done in this world. Such was my life and my fate, however. I just had to keep in mind that my only duty was to obey the vows of marriage, which were sacred before God and could not be altered. As a member of the reigning family, it was up to us to set the best example for the nation… and yet as of late there had been a rash of unequal marriages, even a few divorces. Shameful, it was, not to mention simply immoral, all these morganatic unions. Even Sergei’s younger brother, the dear, dear Pavel, had broken this firm family law by taking a bride not from another ruling house but from a lower station-and not even a princess at that but a commoner-for which the Emperor had banished him from the Empire.

I had long held it dear to my heart that to live in amplitude one must have an ideal. Ever since my childhood in Germany mine had been to become eine vollkommene Frau zu werden. A perfect woman. And most definitely that was difficult because first one had to learn how to forgive everything, and to do so with full understanding. And could I do that? Could I achieve my ideal? I was always striving, but feared it would forever escape my grasp.

I loved Sergei, I truly did, but what I had never revealed to anyone was that the first person I had to forgive-and which was proving so very difficult for me-was none other than him, my husband, from whom I so craved kind word and soft touch.

My secret group had been tracking the Grand Duke for weeks, and it was true, we were so confused by the way he darted from the Neskuchnoye Palace on the banks of the Moscow River to the Governor-General’s Palace on the Tsverskaya, next to the small Nikolaevski Palace within the Kremlin. We had no idea why he was moving around like a scared mouse, darting here and there. Some of us proudly convinced ourselves that he was dashing around because he was afraid of us and thus trying to lay no regular path, others had heard rumors that there was to be a shake-up in the government, still others claimed that all the stories were true, that the Grand Duke was no lover of women and was simply darting from boy to boy. And while I had no reason to doubt these tales-I had heard tell that there were a handful of other grand dukes inclined to stable and ballet boys alike-I really didn’t care where or with whom His Imperial Highness dabbled after dark. All I was certain of was that he was not so high and mighty, or so pure and noble, as he pretended. On account of his irregular movement, however, it was nearly impossible for us to pinpoint a time and place for our attack. It was so frustrating for us who were so ready to kill for the sake of our toiling workers and Mother Russia’s hungry peasants.

When, however, we saw in the Moskovskaya Vyedomosti, that major newspaper, that the royal couple would be attending the opera at the Imperial Bolshoi Theater on the night of February 2, well, we developed our plan almost instantly and quite easily, too. It was not far at all from the Kremlin to the Bolshoi, and there really was only one route for them to follow from that ancient, massive fortress-through the Nikolsky Gate, to the left across the end of Red Square, past the Aleksandrovski Gardens, and then onto Voskressenski Square and from there to the Bolshoi. So we decided that we would be waiting along the way, hiding in the shadows.

Of course, we all wanted to do the deed, none perhaps more than me. I had been admitted to this select group of revolutionaries because I had recently passed a test-I had slit the throat of a pathetic government fellow in Novgorod and stolen a big sum of money too. And because of this success I was allowed the honor of helping to kill the Grand Duke Sergei.

Heading our group was Ivan Kalyayev-“Our Poet,” we called him because he wrote beautiful words and always carried around worn books of poetry. He was an educated fellow, most definitely, and everyone knew he was eager to kill for the Revolution, and eager to hang for it too. But you’d never know his dark intentions by looking at him, for he had a girlish kind of face, so soft and tender, with a big forehead and dark hair and intense blue eyes that would sometimes fall with great sadness. He was the comrade chiefly in charge of our group, and because of his seniority, even though he was young, maybe twenty-five or -six, he was given the honor of throwing the bomb. This made sense, naturally. My only hope was that I would be caught along with Kalyayev and be allowed to hang with him too. Da, da, da, that was my secret wish, to avenge my wife’s death and then dangle, spinning in the wind, from the gallows.

Also in our group was Dora Brilliant, a smart Jewess, and a pretty one at that, who had abandoned her good home and easy life and become very dedicated to the Revolution. She was a trained chemist and she made good bombs, very effective, the kind packed in a tin container with kieselguhr. This Dora made the bomb, and my first duty was to pick it up.

It was promising to snow the day we planned to kill the Grand Duke, the sky a dark flinty gray, the wind strong and determined. Finally, the snow started sometime after six, just as I wound my way across Red Square and past the Upper Trading Row, a vast building of shops constructed in the old Russian Style with big arches and heavy windows. Heading into the small lanes of Kitai Gorod, I passed row after row of shops, each one given over to a specialty, this one selling lace, the next canvas, then honey, lanterns, furs, and dyes. Turning onto the Ilynka, I watched the snow blow this way and that up the street, and I thought how good it was. In fact, knowing what we were about to do, I was happy for the first time since my dear Shura had been gunned down by the Tsar’s command.

By this hour the many banks and trading and lending houses lining the Ilynka had long since closed, so there really weren’t that many people about, just a few lowly clerks and such scurrying through the cold, their heads bent. At the appointed time-seven o’clock-I reached the designated corner and glanced around as gently as I could, seeing no one. I was, it seemed, in front of some kind of money house, and I drew back into the deep, arched doorway, my collar pulled up, more to hide my face than to block the cold. Not two minutes later, I heard the dull clatter of hooves on the snowy street and peered out. A small sleigh was making my way, its driver huddled against the snow. As if I were greeting an old friend, I stepped out, smiling and waving to him. This was our Savinkov, who, I think, was born in Warsaw and who had long been dedicated to ridding his homeland of the tsars. He had a keen, intelligent face, and when he saw me he smiled, his teeth so white in the night. Really, no one ever took him for a terrorist. He looked much more like a minor aristocrat from Poland, with that medium-brown hair, that sharp face, his tall forehead.

The bomb that Dora Brilliant had so carefully made for us was wrapped in a handkerchief, and I accepted it from Savinkov as if it were nothing more than a pot of warm pelmeni. We exchanged a few stupid words, and then I trundled off toward the Kremlin. Glancing back only once, I not only saw Savinkov and his sleigh disappear into the dark-he had one more bomb to deliver to another of our conspirators-but could detect no one following me.

Yes, this was going to be easy, very easy. All we had to do was lob this bomb through the carriage window, and that, without a doubt, would be the end of a Romanov or two.