The Last Tsar: Emperor Michael II (42 page)

WITH the war over, it was now the turn of the British to rescue Natasha. With German authority at an end it could only be a question of time before the Bolsheviks took control of Kiev and caught up with her. Knowing that, she and Tata together with her friend Princess Vyazemskaya fled to Odessa hoping to find some way to escape by sea. They found a room which they all shared at the
Hotel de Londres,
dreading the future. There was widespread looting and there were rumours that the only apparent exit route to safety, through Romania, had been closed.

As Odessa became blocked landward, and the sound of artillery fire could be heard in the distance, there came sudden and unexpected deliverance. A French battleship arrived and, after its marines and sailors stormed ashore, order was swiftly restored. However, the French showed no interest in evacuating anyone.

Then a British destroyer,
HMS Nereide
appeared in the harbour. Seeing it, Tata recalled, ‘our hearts stood still’.
⁴³
She ran up the gangway and asked permission to come aboard. Minutes later all three were being invited into the wardroom for tea with its captain, Lieutenant-Commander Herbert Wyld.
HMS Nereide
, just 772 tons, had a crew of only 72 including six officers. But having heard Natasha’s story, ‘they took us under their wing’, as Tata put it. ‘They came
en masse
for tea at our hotel, and we in turn were invited to meals on board.’
⁴⁴
And when the time came for the destroyer to leave, the captain told them, to their immense joy, that they would not be left behind — that despite the cramped quarters they would be evacuated aboard the ship, on the first leg of a journey which would take them to Britain.

At the beginning of 1918 Natasha had thought, as Michael had done as he toasted the New Year, that the year ahead might bring an end to their torment. Now, on the deck of a British destroyer, as Odessa faded into the distance, she found herself facing the coming new year as a refugee, fleeing prison or worse, and with a husband who had been missing for more than six months. Yet hope was not lost. Natasha still believed that Michael was alive and that somehow soon they would be reunited.

As Michael had said in the last letter he had written to her from his desk in the
Korolev Rooms
, and which she would clutch to her for the rest of her life,
My dear soul...I will hope that God will allow us to be together again....`

THE massacre of Nicholas and his family at Ekaterinburg and the following day’s massacre at Alapaevsk had been easily uncovered for the Whites had captured both towns relatively soon afterwards. Although they did not find the bodies of Nicholas and family, the bullet-marked walls and bloodstained scene in the basement of the Ipatev House told its own story, if not yet the whole story; at Alapaevsk they uncovered the mineshaft and removed the six bodies buried there. Interrogation of prisoners provided the evidence of what had happened and that in turn served to confirm that the Bolsheviks had also killed everyone in Ekaterinburg.

However, when the Whites reached Perm in December 1918 they found nothing which could solve the mystery of Michael. The Cheka men had fled, and the immediate witnesses to the abduction from the hotel room — Chelyshev and Borunov — were dead. There was no blood, no body, and no trace of where he had been taken, though there was no doubt that he had been forcibly abducted from the hotel by five men and taken away with Johnson in two carriages, for that much they could gather from servants at the
Korolev Rooms.
After what they had seen in the Ipatev House and the mineshaft, the presumption had to be that he was dead, though they could not be certain of that without finding his body, and as to that they had no idea where even to begin their search.

The Bolshevik story had never changed — that he had escaped — so could they have hidden him somewhere as hostage? The Bolsheviks had taken four senior Grand Dukes as hostages and they were being held in a fortress on an island in the Neva some miles upstream from Petrograd. The Bolsheviks had thought that the four — Grand Dukes Paul, Dimitri Konstantinovich, Bimbo and his brother George — might be useful pawns at some point; any idea of that vanished on January 15, 1919, when the two leading German ‘comrades’, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, were murdered after they attempted their own revolution in Berlin. In revenge for that, or such was the excuse, the four Grand Dukes were taken from their cells, shipped downriver to the Fortress of St Peter and St Paul, and on January 19 lined up against a wall and shot, their bodies thrown into a mass grave.

That brought the number of Romanovs known to have been murdered by the Bolsheviks to seventeen in the past six months. Michael would make it eighteen, but who was going to announce that without a body, and without a confession?

Nine months later, in September 1919, after a desperate letter from Natasha in London, Admiral Kolchak, signing himself as Supreme Commander of the White Army, replied that
all information I possess does not give any indication that the Grand Duke Michael Aleksandrovich is at present in Siberia or the Far East His destiny is quite unknown after he was taken away...and all attempts to find out where he is have not produced any results.
¹

In short, Michael was to be ‘presumed dead’ but the Admiral chose not to say that directly. He was trying to be kind.

NATASHA’S journey back to Britain with Tata had taken many weeks. The
Nereide
took her down the Black Sea only as far as Constantinople where later she was given passage in a British battleship,
Agamemnon,
to Malta; from there she went by merchant ship to Marseilles; by rail to Paris, and finally on to London.

It was not therefore until March 1919 that she reached Wadhurst, in Sussex, and the large comfortable Tudor house, ‘Snape’, which with Paddockhurst no longer available had been leased in Michael’s name in 1917 in expectation of his return at war’s end. Michael had then transferred enough cash to secure it for two years, so at least Natasha had somewhere to go. Johnson’s mother had gone there from Paddockhurst; like Natasha, she was desperate for news. Her son was also missing. Where Michael was, he must be. The arrival of Natasha raised her hopes that somehow all might yet be well.

Natasha still believed she would see Michael again. In Paris there had been the exciting news that the French Colonial Office had received a ‘top secret’ report that Michael was in French Indo-China, and asking for a visa. The French wanted photographs for identification. Bitterly, the man turned out to be a fraud
²
. There were other false alarms. Michael was in Japan. Michael was in Siam. Each time, desperate hope was followed by despair.
³

It was torture — and in all this, one comfort was that little George had been brought back by Miss Neame from Copenhagen, and that after a year of separation she at last had her two children safely back in her arms. ‘
Where is Papa?’
George had asked plaintively in a letter he had written in August 1918 on his eighth birthday;
⁴
it was still his question now, and there was still no answer.

The only moment of joy for Natasha was when Grand Duke Dimitri walked back into her life. Wearing British uniform he had been brought to Britain from Persia by the British ambassador there, Sir Charles Marling, in defiance of the rule that no male Romanov was to be allowed into the country. The ambassador would be rapped over the knuckles for that, but that was as far as it went. Dimitri would be the sole exception; the other surviving Grand Dukes would make France their home, for the door remained shut in Britain.

Dimitri would be a constant visitor for the first weeks and they teased each other as before. Thirty months had passed since their last meeting at Gatchina in October 1916, expecting that they would then meet again at Brasovo for Christmas, not as now in England — Dimitri penniless, his father Paul executed that January by a firing squad, Natasha not knowing whether she was wife or widow. But although he was as flattering as ever, Natasha was so tormented by her fears for Michael that she could hardly talk about anything else. By the summer he had drifted away, trying to pick up the pieces of his own life.
⁵
As a sign of just how much the world had changed, on July 26, 1919, Natasha travelled up to London to Marlborough House to meet the Dowager Empress Marie. The British had sent a battleship to Odessa to rescue the Dowager Empress, her daughter Xenia and a swollen entourage of fellow refugees who had sheltered with her in the Crimea under German protection. Arriving in London she had gone to stay with her sister, the Dowager Queen Alexandra. The meeting was the first since she had given Natasha a dressing-down there six years earlier in 1913.

Nervous at the prospect, Natasha took Mme Johnson along with her as moral support, as well as little George, the grandson the Dowager Empress had never seen in Russia, nor had wanted to know about. Now the Dowager Empress made a great fuss of George; her beloved Michael’s only son, and with looks that reminded her of his father at that age.
⁶

As for Michael, she brushed aside Natasha’s fears for him, adamant that he was alive and well; indeed she went much further than that: she refused to believe that anyone in her immediate family had been killed by the Bolsheviks. She would persist in so saying until her own death nine years later in Copenhagen. Natasha came away heartened, but vaguely disturbed. Everyone knew that Nicholas had been killed, except it seemed his mother. What value, then, her confidence that Michael was alive?

As the months went on, other worries crowded in. There had been some cash left in the Paris bank account set up when they left Russia in 1912, and £3,000 was transferred from Michael’s Danish account to her London bank,
⁷
but her main asset was the jewellery she had smuggled out of Russia. Piece by piece she sold them to meet her bills, school fees for George and Tata, and her rental costs as she moved from Snape in 1920, firstly to a country house near Richmond, Surrey, and then to a smart apartment in West London. Natasha was beginning to worry about making ends meet.

There was nothing surprising in that. Europe was awash with poverty-stricken royals — Germans, Austrians, Greeks as well as Russians and others. The collapse of old Europe brought devastation in its wake as crowns were kicked into the gutter with no one to pick them up again. The Duke of Mecklenburg-Schwerin shot himself; so did the Kaiser’s desolate youngest son Joachim. A British gunboat sent up the Danube rescued the ex-Austrian emperor Karl from mob revenge in Hungary, though he died shortly after being sent with his wife and eight children into exile in Portuguese Madeira, arriving with just £320 in his pocket. A British cruiser snatched Prince Andrew of Greece from a firing squad in Athens, after he was court-martialled as scapegoat for the humiliating defeat suffered by Greece in its war with Turkey; unwelcome in Britain, in 1944 he would die penniless in Monaco — and thus never to know that four years later his only son Philip would marry the future Queen of England.

In London, Dimitri’s sister Marie was reduced to knitting sweaters for a living. When in desperation she wrote to Queen Mary for help, she received in reply a letter which did not contain the hoped-for cheque, but merely a list of people the Queen suggested might buy her sweaters.

Dimitri gave up on London as too expensive and went to Paris where he ended up in the arms of Coco Chanel, the famed perfumier. She kept him in style in the Ritz, though by chance he amply repaid her: testing out six new perfumes, she asked him to tell her which he liked most; he sniffed all six then pronounced the fifth to be the best. Chanel No 5 would prove to be one of the most successful brands of all time. Fortunately for Dimitri, he went on in 1924 to marry an American heiress, Audrey Emery of Cincinnati; their son — born in London and thereafter known as Paul Ilyinski, would become a US marine, and end up as Republican mayor of Palm Beach, Florida.

Otherwise, the reality for those who had lost everything was that empty titles were matched by empty pockets. It also concentrated minds. Natasha’s financial problems would go on, but inevitably there came a time when she had to face the fact that Michael was dead. Coming to terms with that was also a practical necessity: Michael’s assets had to be recovered and his affairs sorted out while they still could be. To achieve that he had to be declared dead by a court, and six years after he had disappeared without trace, that was what happened. On July 5, 1924, the High Court in London granted her letters of administration of the English estates of the late Grand Duke Michael Aleksandrovich of Russia who ‘died on or since the 12 day of June 1918, at a place unknown, intestate’.
⁸
The value of Michael’s assets in England were given as only £95, but it was the order not the money which mattered.

Michael was legally dead. And nowhere was the news received more gladly than in a little fishing village across the Channel. For here at last was the opportunity Grand Duke Kirill had so long been waiting for, to take what he had not dared to take before. He would now become the next Emperor.