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

the sound of their breathing and all the other noises I knew so well: their soft whickering, the swish of a tail after a fly, and the accompanying stamp of a hoof. Just to press my face into the soft flesh of their necks, run my fingers over the ridge of velvet nostrils, feel the gust of their warm breath hit my face, my neck and chest. I would have petitioned to live in the stable had the idea not struck me as one my hosts would find preposterous.
    Peering through the crack at Kornilov, I wished I’d had the nerve to approach the tsar while there was still time to act, before Kornilov and his soldiers came for us. But I hadn’t, and perhaps because it was simpler to contemplate their fate, I found myself worrying about the horses before the people. What would happen to the old ones, long retired from the harness? I hoped the groom would think to end their lives mercifully before soldiers took over the stables. And the others, who were fit for work, accustomed as they were to tranquil bridle paths and the affection of all who cared for them, what wouldhappen to such animals were they commandeered by the gathering Red Army and forced into the pandemonium of civil war?
    There was one horse I particularly liked, Gypsy, a black mare compact enough that a bareback rider—the only kind I knew to be—was comfortable straddling her withers. She shared a loose box with Vanka, an aged donkey the Cinzelli Brothers’ Circus had presented as a gift to the tsarevich and his sisters after a private performance at Tsarsko Selo. As Botkin had forbidden me to ride as well as walk in the cold, I spent hours sitting in the hay, long enough that I’d seen Vanka do what she was famous for doing. Occasionally, the donkey entered a sort of fugue state in which she believed she was before an audience and, without any warning, ran through a repertoire of tricks that included running backward. The first time this happened, Alyosha told me, the tsarina had nearly fainted as the donkey swiftly (demonically, it seemed to Alyosha’s mother) approached him, the muscles of her hindquarters pumping energetically. What would the nervous tsarina assume but that the animal was rabid?
    “I’m surprised she didn’t order that Vanka be destroyed,” I said to Alyosha.
    “Oh, she did. Of course she did. But Father showed her how Vanka wasn’t afraid to drink water from a bucket, and she had to admit the donkey was only confused.”
    “I don’t think she’s confused,” I said. “She’s happy remembering when she was performing, that’s all.”
    The tsarina’s voice was too low for me to hear her from behind the door, but Kornilov’s wasn’t. Although he characterized our arrest as precautionary, intended to protect us from the predation of revolutionary soldiers, he asked the tsarina to summon the palace guard and household staff so he could announce that their responsibility to the Romanovs had come to an end. Those who wanted to remain in the deposed tsar’s service, Kornilov explained, wouldbe held under arrest with his family, confined to one wing of the palace, no longer free to come and go.
    Poor Gypsy. She was too small to be a cavalry horse. I imagined myself running to the stable before the Red Guard arrived, opening the doors to all the stalls, and shooing their occupants toward the woods, but the only likely outcome of that was getting myself shot. And it wouldn’t save the horses—even if they left, they’d come straight back. Tsarskoe Selo was the only home they knew.
    “What of Varya and me?” I asked the tsarina when Kornilov left the room to address the servants. I was so alarmed by this new turn of events, and by then comfortable enough with the tsarina, that I didn’t bother to conceal or even excuse my eavesdropping. As soon as Kornilov was out of sight, I rushed out from behind the door like a child and burst into the parlor. The tsarina looked at me and smiled, as might a hostess to a guest she didn’t know, a vague,