The Secret Wife(38)
The letter Trina gave him the next morning detailed a little of life inside the house and no matter how hard Tatiana tried to be positive, Dmitri could tell she was miserable.
Malama sweetheart,
I thank you from the bottom of my heart for following us to this remote place. We have done our best to make a comfortable home, with all the photographs and nick-nacks we brought from Tsarskoe Selo, but the lack of freedom weighs heavily. Most of all I miss being able to walk in the woods and meet you inside the tower. It seems no such thing will be possible here. Did you know Dostoevsky was briefly imprisoned in this town, in 1850? I often wonder what he made of it.
Our days are spent reading, playing bézique or dominoes, exercising in the yard, praying, or eating meals, and the time drags interminably. I look at the clock, thinking an hour must have gone by and realise it is only minutes. We have one light on the horizon: we have been given permission to attend Blagoveschensky Church this Sunday, the first church service we have attended in six months, so all are very excited. Perhaps you could be there too? I would love that.
I know you will never abandon me but all the same do not think I am unappreciative of the sacrifice you have made in following me here, and the possible danger it could mean for you. I love you for it. I love everything about you. My sole happiness lies in daydreaming about a future in which we are together.
Dmitri made sure he was in the church well before the service, on a side from which he could survey the rest of the worshippers. To his surprise, the royal party were led in through a side door, which meant they had to pass directly in front of him. Tsar Nicholas was lost in thought but the Tsarina gave a slight nod of acknowledgement. Tatiana gave a quick smile, while Olga looked astonished as she glanced from him to Tatiana. Her sister obviously hadn’t mentioned that he was in town.
He watched Tatiana as she crossed herself then lit a candle. She was wearing a cornflower-blue dress with a high neck and her short hair was arranged in fetching waves, almost reaching her shoulders. She looked solemn as she stood alongside her mother and sisters, but as soon as the singing began she joined in, and she turned to catch eyes with Dmitri several times.
Orthodox services were always long but this priest seemed determined to impress his royal visitors with his stamina as one hour stretched to two. Dmitri would have liked him to preach all day just so he could stand and watch his beloved. It was wonderful to be under the same roof as her after the weeks of separation, and to see for himself that she was healthy.
At the end, the family walked in front of him once more and Tatiana let her hand brush his arm as she passed.
Dmitri had rented lodgings in town and that evening he sat and wrote to Malevich, telling him of the situation in which he had found the Romanovs (‘the cargo’). He described the layout of the town and the position of the guards around the house, but really he knew rescue from this place was impossible. Already, in early September, the temperature was dropping rapidly and in just a few weeks they would be unable to leave Tobolsk for the eight months of winter. Perhaps the following spring, the revolutionary government would relent and allow the youngest family members to go free. No one could possibly think them guilty of any crime, no matter what the sins of their parents.
Dmitri felt furious with both of them for their blinkered, outdated approach to monarchy. The Romanovs had made their vast fortune from the resources of the nation, yet Nicholas had not seen fit to open the coffers when his people were starving. Alexandra had been remarkably short-sighted in using Rasputin as an advisor when she was seen by ordinary Russians as allied to the enemy. Between them they had turned the once-revered imperial family into a hated institution. But the children were so young – Alexei only thirteen, Tatiana only twenty – surely they could not be blamed?
Yet again he thought of poor Marie Antoinette, the French queen, whose only ‘crime’ was to have been born Austrian in an era when Austria was France’s bitter enemy. Her eldest daughter, Marie-Thérèse, had been held prisoner for six years before being released into exile. Would Alexandra’s German roots and Nicholas’s imperious style yet count against them all? Could an accident of birth mean years under house arrest for the younger Romanovs?
Chapter Twenty-Two
Tobolsk, Siberia, winter 1917
On the 28th of October Dmitri bought his usual newspaper from a street seller and recoiled as he read the headlines: there had been yet another coup in St Petersburg. Three days earlier Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin and his comrade Leon Trotsky had led a successful coup against the provisional government in St Petersburg. It had begun at 9.45 p.m. with the battleship Aurora firing shots at the Winter Palace and ended at 2 a.m. with the taking of the Palace by rebels. The provisional government had been imprisoned in the Peter and Paul Fortress.
Dmitri was stunned. Both Lenin and Trotsky were lunatic extremists, who had been forced into exile after the 1905 Revolution. When Lenin arrived back in Russia in April 1917, everyone expected him to join the provisional government but instead he published his own radical agenda in Pravda. He believed peasants should seize land from rich landlords, that factory workers should take over the factories, and that manual workers should receive higher wages than office workers. Everyone Dmitri knew dismissed Lenin as mad. No one thought he could possibly succeed – yet somehow he had. The change had come over the summer, when Lenin announced his intention of withdrawing Russia from the war with Germany without delay. While the provisional government tarried, pressing for better terms, Lenin promised battle-weary soldiers that they could come home immediately, and finally they had switched allegiance. It was a short-term measure that would cost the country dear, almost certainly losing them control of the Baltic states.