Anastasia and Her Sisters (9 page)

“Of course I’ve heard about it. The newspapers say it was because he felt guilty about Lyosha’s injuries, but that’s not the case. He did it because of that stupid girl.”

We stared at our aunt, open-mouthed. Mama would never have told us such a thing.

“Here’s what really happened. His flirtation with Belyaevna began at the bazaar and continued after we returned to Livadia for Easter. By the time we left, the girl had fallen madly in love and she followed the admiral to St. Petersburg. He decided that the honorable thing was to marry her, but as an officer in the imperial navy he needed the tsar’s permission. By then it was October and you were all in Spala. When Chagin finally arrived at Spala, he found Lyosha deathly ill, and he decided to return home without speaking to the tsar about his problem. The girl was waiting for him, insisting that he marry her. But he could not bring himself to go on, and he killed himself. When she found out what he had done, she tried to kill herself, too.” Then Aunt Olga added, “Best if you keep this to yourselves, my darlings. Don’t let your mother know what I’ve told you.”

I glanced at Olga, who was studying her hands and did not look up. What was she thinking? I waited for the chance to read her notebook, but when it came, I was not prepared for what I read there.

I am so wretchedly unhappy. Father and I had a confidential talk today. He and Mother are very worried that Lyosha, because of his illness, may not live to adulthood—we were both in tears as we discussed this—and this leaves an enormous problem: Who will become tsar after Father? The son of Catherine the Great changed the rules and women are no longer allowed to inherit the crown. By law I cannot succeed Father. I am deeply grateful, because I can’t begin to imagine the burden he must bear! The logical person to become the next tsar is Uncle Misha, but he removed himself from the line of succession by marrying Mme. Brassova, a commoner and twice divorced.

Father then asked if I would consider marrying Dmitri Pavlovich. Father is fond of him, and he believes the Russian people would accept Dmitri as the next tsar if he married me, because he’s the son of Papa’s uncle, Grand Duke Pavel Alexandrovich.

“Please think about it, Olya,” Father said, and I said I would.

Mother strongly opposes the idea. She says Dmitri is fast living and has already been involved with many women. She intensely dislikes his friend Prince Felix Yussoupov; she calls him dissolute and says the two of them go to disreputable places and do unspeakable things. Father admits that Dmitri’s reputation is bad, but he believes all that would change if we were married and he were under Father’s guidance. “Remember, Alicky,” he said, “I was no saint as a young man, before you agreed to marry me.” Mother blushed and rejected that argument.

It doesn’t matter. The gossips are already saying that I am, or will soon be, engaged to Dmitri Pavlovich. But I will not marry him, not even for the sake of the succession. And I have decided that I must not try to contact darling Pasha. No letters, nothing. Father would never consent to the marriage, and if we continue with this, it will only end in more heartache.

I was sorry that I had ever begun to read Olga’s secret notebook. But how could I possibly stop now?

CHAPTER 6

Celebration

ST. PETERSBURG, WINTER AND SPRING 1913

I
n January, our family moved to the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg to get ready for the huge tercentenary celebrating three centuries of Romanov rule.

Every Russian knows the story, going back to the year 1547 when a seventeen-year-old prince named Ivan proclaimed himself tsar of Russia and announced that he was looking for a wife. Ivan ordered two thousand young girls to appear before him, and out of the crowd he chose Anastasia Romanovna. That was the first Anastasia! When she died ten years later, Ivan went crazy and did such awful things that he became known as Ivan the Terrible.

After Ivan’s death and a period of unrest, a national assembly chose a new tsar—one of Ivan’s distant relatives, a sixteen-year-old boy named Mikhail Romanov. On the twenty-first of February, 1613, Mikhail was informed that he’d been chosen. The first
Romanov tsar was crowned in Moscow on the eleventh of July. Now, three hundred years later, Russia was going to celebrate.

None of us wanted to leave Tsarskoe Selo, because none of us liked the huge and drafty old Winter Palace. It was supposed to be the tsar’s main residence, though no tsar had actually lived there for years and years. We did not look forward to the ceremonies and religious observances and dinners and receptions we’d have to endure—Mama especially dreaded them, but it was her duty, and ours.

The morning of the twenty-first of February in 1913 dawned cold, windy, and rainy. We climbed into motorcars, trying to keep our court gowns from being splashed with mud, and were driven slowly down Nevsky Prospect, past wet flags and drooping banners. It looked so different from the fashionable avenue where my sisters and I loved to stroll with Aunt Olga on our Sundays in St. Petersburg. Guns boomed a salute from the fortress. Huge, enthusiastically cheering crowds ignored the foul weather and had to be held back by cordons of soldiers. Red-coated Cossacks rode at the head of the procession, escorting Papa and Alexei in the first motorcar. Mama and Grandmère were in the second.

“I wonder what they’re talking about,” I said.

“Mother is probably grinding her teeth,” Olga said. “It just kills her that Grandmère Marie will take precedence at all the events.”

“They’re probably not talking at all,” Tatiana said. “You know how it is, Olya. The dowager empress always goes ahead of the empress, Grandmère Marie takes it for granted, and Mother resents it.”

“It’s a stupid rule,” I informed them. “Mama should go first. She’s the wife of the tsar.”

“It may be stupid, but it’s tradition,” Tatiana said. “In Russia, you don’t challenge tradition.”

“Our mother resents a lot of things,” Olga said, peering out the rain-smeared window. We were nearing the Cathedral of Our Lady of Kazan. “She resents calling her Motherdear. She really resented it when Grandmère Marie wouldn’t turn over the crown jewels when she and Papa were married. Mama embarrassed her into doing it.”

“You can’t blame Mama for being upset! How do you know that?”

“Gossipy servants. How else do we get to know anything?”

“Well, I think it’s all very exciting,” said Marie the peacemaker, trying to change the subject. “Just listen to all those church bells ringing and everyone cheering like mad!”

The cathedral was thronged, everyone standing with no room to move. Mama and Grandmère Marie maneuvered into position with Papa between them at the very front. They wore gold-embroidered court gowns with huge trains and long open sleeves, jeweled
kokoshniks
on their heads, and gobs of jewels on their fingers, wrists, waists, and necks. My dress didn’t have a train, but I did wear a
kokoshnik
, and when I posed for a formal photograph I thought I looked wonderfully
Russian.

Marie nudged me. “There’s Father Grigory, and he’s standing at the front among all those noblemen!” she whispered. “I’ve never seen him so dressed up!”

I recognized the crimson silk blouse that Mama had spent hours embroidering for him, and the fine gold cross Mama
had given him on a chain around his neck. Mama and Papa, their eyes on the Orthodox patriarch at the high altar, didn’t see the shocking thing that happened next. One of the officials decided that Father Grigory didn’t belong there and quietly ordered him to leave. When he refused, the official grabbed him by his shirt and literally shoved him out. I gasped. How could they do such a thing? I was glad that Mama hadn’t seen it, because it would have upset her very much, but she would certainly hear about it later and be absolutely furious.

The service went on and on—they were always very long—but in the afternoon after it was over, we rested while Papa went off to deliver a speech to the members of the Duma. He was in a bad mood when he left, as he always was when he had to meet with the Duma. Mama thought he should have refused even to go speak to them. He was the tsar!

“I won’t be telling them anything they want to hear,” he growled, and marched off.

That was the first day of the tercentennial. The days that followed were a blur of boring ceremonies and dinners and receptions. At events where my sisters and I required escorts, Dmitri Pavlovich was assigned to be mine. He wore the uniform of his regiment and looked very dashing. I was thrilled to be with him, remembering how we had danced the Boston at Aunt Olga’s and shocked everyone, and I hoped he wouldn’t find me dull and tedious.

I could not believe that Dmitri was as awful as Mama said, dissolute and fast living, consorting with loose women and disreputable men, because he was always so nice and polite to me. He didn’t treat me like a child but spoke to me as though
I were a grown-up lady, and I tried hard to behave like one.

When I asked him about the Olympics in Sweden where he’d competed the previous summer, Dmitri rewarded me with that gleaming smile.

“I’d hoped to bring home a gold medal for Russia,” he said. “But the Swedes took all three medals in dressage, and a Frenchman and a German took the medals in jumping. I did place seventh in the combination, where a rider has to be good at everything.”

I congratulated him, and he promised that someday he would give me lessons in dressage. “It’s like ballet on horseback,” he said.

That was such a fascinating idea that I decided not to confess that I wasn’t much of a rider and horses seemed to dislike me. I would try to overcome that before the dressage lessons began.

On the third night, the Romanov grand dukes and grand duchesses—Papa’s sisters and aunts and uncles and cousins, close and distant, and their respective husbands and wives—gave a grand ball in honor of Mama and Papa. Hundreds of people would attend. Marie and I were not invited, but Olga and Tatiana were, even though they were not yet eighteen and weren’t officially out in society. I was disappointed to be left out. I had never attended a grand ball and begged to be allowed to go, not mentioning that I hoped Dmitri would be my escort.

Mama said no. “You’ll attend enough balls in your life, Nastya. Be glad you can miss this one.”

Watching my older sisters being laced into their corsets, I told myself that I was just as happy not to be going. Olga and Tatiana had bosoms, and Marie and I did not. It seemed that
having a
bosom
was a requirement for being allowed to attend big, formal balls.

Tatiana admonished me not to use that word—“Much nicer to say
figure
, Nastya.”

Their white satin gowns were trimmed with pink velvet and gold. I envied them the gowns, not the corsets, which looked awfully uncomfortable. Marie and I weren’t yet allowed long ball gowns and jewels; Mama thought short white dresses and pearls were quite enough for girls who did not yet have
bosoms.

Mama hated the big formal balls, but of course she had to go, whether she wanted to or not. I saw her before she and Papa left. She was wearing dark blue velvet with pearls and diamonds, and I thought I had never seen her look so beautiful. But she felt so miserable, so tired and ill, that she nearly fainted. One had to pity Mama—she always felt so poorly. Papa got to her just in time to help her out of the huge ballroom before she collapsed, and they had all come back to the palace before the supper was served.

“You’ve never seen so many jewels,” Tatiana told us as the maids undressed her and Olga. “So much glitter that they hardly needed to turn on any lights.”

“Was Dmitri Pavlovich there?” I asked, trying not to sound overly interested.

“Oh yes, of course,” Olga said. “He was paying a great deal of attention to our cousin Irina. She is quite beautiful, with those big blue eyes, and she looked absolutely ravishing! Her rose-colored gown positively shimmered with tiny pearls.”

I wished I hadn’t asked. I didn’t want to hear about Dmitri’s attention to blue-eyed Irina.

•  •  •

The next night all of us went to the Mariinsky Theatre. The opera was
A Life for the Tsar
by Mikhail Glinka, a famous composer, and in the second act the dancers came on stage and performed a polonaise, a waltz, and a mazurka.

“Look who’s the principal dancer,” Olga murmured to Tatiana. “Kschessinskaya.”

I knew who they were talking about. Kschessinskaya had once been the prima ballerina assoluta at the Mariinsky, the highest position a dancer can achieve.

“The one who was Papa’s mistress,” I whispered knowingly. I’d heard Aunt Olga and my older sisters talking about her, but I didn’t know exactly what a mistress was.

Tatiana gave me her fiercest frown. “Don’t call her a mistress,” she scolded. “She was Father’s good friend, and that’s all you need to know about her.”

Mistress
was apparently a word like
bosom
that I was not to use.

I made up my mind to ask Aunt Olga. She always explained things to me that no one else would. Days later, when the celebrations in St. Petersburg were over, I had a chance to speak with her. “Why must I not call the dancer Kschessinskaya a mistress?” I asked.

My aunt looked startled. “Where did you hear that?” she asked, and I told her.

“Well, it’s not a good word to use,” Aunt Olga explained. “Mathilde Kschessinskaya was your papa’s friend, but she was also in love with your papa.”

“Was he in love with her as well?” I wanted to know everything.

“He was certainly fond of her. But they both knew it would end, because she was not an appropriate wife for the future tsar, because she’s not of noble birth and your grandfather would never have given his approval. Besides, your papa had already met your mama and fallen in love with her, and that was the girl he wanted to marry.”

“Was Kschessinskaya’s heart broken when he and Mama married?”