The Secret Wife(62)
During the day, the discipline of military life kept him occupied: they rose at a set hour, tended their horses, ate breakfast then broke camp, before continuing across the Ural Mountains in pursuit of the Red Army. The terrain was steep and rough and already there was a hint of winter in the air. If they did not get to the other side of the vast range before the first snowfall, they could be stranded for months with no food or shelter to speak of, so they rode from dawn until well beyond dusk. He did his duty in a daze – riding reconnaissance, poring over maps, giving orders to his men – but all the time the shocking disappearance of Tatiana hammered on his consciousness.
One evening a newcomer rode into camp, and Dmitri was astonished to see a familiar face from Tobolsk: ‘Vasily Yakovlev! What on earth are you doing here?’
Yakovlev leapt from his horse and came over to greet Dmitri. ‘I couldn’t bear to watch what the Bolsheviks were doing to our people. The Red Army is a hornets’ nest of suspicion and backstabbing. If I’d stayed, I would probably have been executed by now. So I switched to the side whose cause I believe in and am fighting for the Whites.’
Dmitri regarded him with suspicion. Their camp was no stranger to spies and all had been warned to be wary about what information they passed on. Still, this man had once been a friend of sorts – and perhaps he had news of the Romanovs. Dmitri poured him a coffee and invited him to sit, introducing him to Malevich.
‘Last time we met, you were trying to save the royal family by diverting their train to Omsk. Whatever went wrong?’ he asked.
Yakovlev shook his head sadly. ‘I did my best but the railway workers took orders directly from Moscow and the matter was out of my hands. I bitterly regret that I failed, especially since the rumour is that all have now been killed.’
Dmitri’s face blanched and he sat very still. ‘What did you say?’
‘That I hear it wasn’t just Nicholas who was shot in the Ipatiev House …’ Yakovlev seemed surprised at Dmitri’s shocked reaction. ‘I’m only repeating what I’ve heard, mind. I wasn’t actually there.’
Malevich joined in. ‘I have heard the same rumour but cannot believe it. This government would lose the sympathy of all its supporters and would be condemned the world over. Perhaps Nicholas is dead – even that is in doubt given that they have not produced the body – but I’m confident we will discover the rest of the family as we march on Moscow.’
Dmitri stood and excused himself from the group, stumbling into the woods at the edge of the camp. Once out of sight he bent over and threw up violently, the bitter taste of bile scorching his throat. They can’t be dead. They simply can’t. If they were, he had failed utterly. He was directly responsible for the fate of the farm girl Yelena. He had bungled all his attempts to rescue the family. It was possible their deaths were his fault because the guards panicked when they realised that Tatiana had been freed.
Malevich appeared behind him and flung an arm around his shoulders. ‘Don’t listen to him. Stay strong.’
Dmitri looked up in despair: ‘If I discover Tatiana is dead, I cannot go on living.’
Malevich spoke sternly. ‘First of all, I simply don’t believe the Bolsheviks would be so stupid as to kill them all. And even if they did kill those in the Ipatiev House, you have no proof Tatiana was there. I firmly believe she is out here somewhere, and she’s waiting for you to find her. You owe it to her to carry on looking.’
Dmitri turned and smashed his forehead against a tree. ‘I miss her so badly. I can’t bear this agony.’ He drew his head back to smash it again and Malevich caught him by the shoulders.
‘You can and you will,’ he said firmly. ‘Imagine she is watching you, and do as she would want you to do.’
Dmitri felt the sense of his words and they gave him the strength to pull himself together. One day, if he found Tatiana, she would ask what he was doing in this period, and he hoped to be able to say he behaved with courage. He vowed he would never give up searching until he found her, wherever she might be.
At first, momentum in battle was with the White Army. With the help of arms supplied by the British government, and with a ragtag band of recruits from various different factions who were disenchanted with the Bolsheviks, Admiral Kolchak’s men marched steadily towards Moscow. As they went they liberated villages from Bolshevik control, freed prisoners and overturned socialist reforms that had been imposed. White Army morale suffered a blow in November when the British withdrew their support after signing an armistice with Germany, but the advance continued and soon Kolchak’s troops reached the River Volga, only a hundred miles east of Moscow.
By now the snow lay deep and temperatures were dropping daily. All the men stopped washing because to expose bare skin in such cold would be a sure way of catching frostbite. They requisitioned food for men and horses from farms they passed. Dmitri felt ashamed to be depriving the occupants of their winter stores, but there was no alternative if they were to free the country from the lunatics who had taken charge.
In December Dmitri’s division was dispatched further south to the strategically important town of Tsaritsyn, which the Red Army refused to abandon, and straight away there were fierce clashes. The Soviet 10th Army they faced had twice as many men, dozens of machineguns and artillery placements, but still it seemed the White Army was creeping into the suburbs, winning over the town street by street. Dmitri took a few men with him on daily reconnaissance missions to check where the big guns were placed before each assault. They needed their wits about them in the hostile terrain, but his superlative training took over. He knew he was more capable than these Bolshevik opponents, who could spout socialist rhetoric but knew nothing of military tactics. It would not be long before they drove them back.