Enchantments: A Novel of Rasputin's Daughter and the Romanovs

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

Book: Enchantments: A Novel of Rasputin's Daughter and the Romanovs Read Online Free PDF
Author: Kathryn Harrison
Tags: Biographical, Fiction, Literary, Historical
appeared to dote on their charge and were gentle in spite of their military demeanor. Each had previously been a naval officer; now they took turns supervising all the tsarevich did, to make sure no harm came to him, and carrying him in their arms when, inevitably, it did.
    Alyosha gave me a push toward the stairs, and I pushed him back, just a little bit, because I hated that kind of thing in boys, especially in princes, who ought to know better than to boss people about, if only because they got all they wanted anyway. After slipping downstairs, I hurried to the drawing room’s double doors, which were left open into the corridor, one widely enough that I could hide myself behind it, my back to the wall. Even Father admitted that his little magpie had a talent for silence and for making herself as invisible as a scullery maid.
    I watched through the crack as Alexandra Fyodorovna receivedKornilov. By now, nearly a week after her husband’s abdication, she’d moved on from destroying official correspondence to incinerating private letters, diaries, telephone messages, bills from the wine merchant and from the purveyor of caviar and truffles, even the former tsar’s game book, in which was recorded every boar, buck, and bird he’d dispatched with his shotgun—any scrap of information that might fall into the hands of some malevolent someone bent on slandering her poor blameless Nikolay. The drawing room’s fire had burned all night, its flames licking, cracking, and smacking as it consumed leaf after leaf of creamy stationery bearing the gold-embossed Romanov crest. The flue must have needed adjusting. The ceiling over the hearth was blackened with soot.
    “Abridging history, I see,” Kornilov said, sniffing at the smoke-tinged atmosphere. He was a good-humored-looking man, with ears that stood out like handles from his shorn head and a mustache so robust it obscured his lips. The tsarina rose from where she had been sitting among emptied boxes. Her mauve-lipped pallor continued to unnerve me. On the cushion next to hers was a small bundle of billets-doux to her from her husband. This was all that remained of what had been thousands of letters to tens of recipients, her grandmother, Queen Victoria, foremost among them.
    Already I’d overheard servants talking among themselves about plans for the tsarina and her children to join Tsar Nikolay at Murmansk, the seaport on Kola Bay, where they’d find a ship to board for a journey west toward asylum. Because even if England’s George V, the tsar’s own first cousin, wouldn’t have them, surely somewhere would. America or Australia or whatever other continent invited thieves and outcasts and exiled dreams.
    But what of Varya and myself? I didn’t know whether we would be considered a part of the Romanov family and treated as such, or taken by the new regime’s police to be questioned about Father, or liberated with the rest of Russia and discharged into the chaosof Petersburg to make our way home to Siberia, and I didn’t know which would be worse or if we had any choice in the matter. And timing—there was timing to consider. I’d intended, before the tsar left for Mogilev, to approach and speak with him, to find out what he knew, or could control, of our fate, but each time I’d succumbed to my fear of taking up the topic at exactly the wrong moment. Though they’d encouraged us to befriend their children and, to all appearances, welcomed us into their lives, the tsar and tsarina were like two people poised on the crest of a breaking tidal wave, surveying the landscape against which they would be dashed. Each time I marched myself, like a responsible older sister, down the corridor to the tsar’s study, rehearsing my little speech in my head, I ended up turning right where I should have turned left, grabbing my coat, shoving my feet into Wellingtons, and stealing away as fast as I could to the one place I knew I’d find comfort.
    Just the smell of them and
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