Enchantments: A Novel of Rasputin's Daughter and the Romanovs Read Online Free PDF Page A

I’ve caused her so much worry, you see. It’s made her nervous. And she … she believes …” Spots of color appeared on his cheeks.
    “What does she believe?”
    “In the grace of God,” he said after a moment.
    “And you?”
    “I believe in history,” the tsarevich said, with a gravitas I wasn’t ready to accept as genuine, coming from a boy who wasn’t quite fourteen. I hadn’t yet learned—witnessed—how life had taught him fatalism.
    “And what about the future? Do you believe in it too?” I wish I’d only thought the words, but I said them aloud, with a tart tone in my voice.
    B ULLETINS ARRIVED AT T SARSKOE S ELO; the tsar was apprised of each new disaster, but weeks passed and he did nothing—nothing of a political nature. He marched through the woods, he swam inthe saltwater natatorium, he hunted, and he rode his horse, until, on March 10, he made the mistake that cost him his crown—well, not the mistake, as there already had been too many to count, but the last and most egregious one. He ordered that the capital be returned to its former state of relative calm, no matter what was required. To accomplish this, his police tore around the city in armored cars; his Cossacks galloped along the avenues, cracking whips and brandishing bayonets; his soldiers fired Chauchats imported from France that spat out 240 bullets every minute. But not only was it too late, order no longer possible; the actions he took against the rioting citizens inspired the Bolsheviks to organize themselves and prepare to challenge his authority.
    “How much does my father understand of revolution? Anything?” Alyosha wanted to know. “Can it be a concept he refutes, one he finds heretical, the way Pope Urban the Eighth insisted the sun revolved around the earth and called Galileo a heretic?”
    “I should think you know him better than I,” I said, answering what was probably a rhetorical question. We were in the schoolroom, occupied with our separate studies—Alyosha’s directed by his tutor, whose head was bent over the second volume of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall while Alyosha force-marched himself through the first. I was rereading Jane Eyre , in English instead of Russian, allowing me to call it a scholarly occupation rather than the pleasure—the escape—it was. Varya was with the Romanov girls, learning the correct way to put stalks in a vase, a lesson I’d dodged as Admiral–Dr. Botkin, having detected a wheeze while listening to my back with his stethoscope, wouldn’t allow me to walk through the cold to the greenhouses.
    Tsar Nikolay didn’t talk about politics. He had four uncles filled with opinions and would have been, by everyone’s account, happy to hand them the empire. He wanted only to be allowed his exercise and to travel to his army’s headquarters in Mogilev, where he couldsleep, eat, and march among his soldiers. As far as I could tell, he spent more time with his army than he did with his family, and I’d heard it said he would have had trouble deciding between the life of a soldier and that of a farmer, had he escaped his heritage.
    But, as all the world knows, he did not escape, and on March 21, 1917, General Kornilov, who had lately presided over the Petersburg garrison, arrived at the Alexander Palace to inform the tsarina that, as there wasn’t any empire left, she and her family were under arrest. The former tsar, his abdication extracted from him as he traveled in his imperial train, had yet to return home from Mogilev to Tsarskoe Selo because the railway workers had received the news of the tsar’s having been toppled as an invitation to stop service for all Romanovs and their retainers.
    “Go down. See what’s happening,” Alyosha said, after Kornilov had been announced. He got up from where he was sitting with his bodyguard Derevenko, playing yet another game of dominoes, a game I hated and refused to join. Alyosha had two bodyguards, Derevenko and Nagorny, both of whom