‘Yes, sir,’ I agreed, hesitating for only a moment, wondering whether these were his own words or phrases he had overheard from his elders and which he was passing along now as his own. The frown on his face, however, suggested to me that he had been close to this bodyguard and regretted his loss.
‘My father believes strongly in the propriety of an equitable marriage,’ he continued. ‘He won’t countenance anyone who makes a match below their station. Before him, there was a fellow whom I did not like at all. His breath smelled, for one thing. And he could not control his bodily functions. I find such things vulgar, don’t you?’
‘I suppose so,’ I said, anxious not to disagree with him.
‘Although,’ he continued, biting his lip a little as he considered the matter, ‘sometimes I found it funny too. Like when Uncle Willy came to stay with Father and he made terrible noises when my sisters and I were brought in to say hello the following morning. That was comical, actually. But he was dismissed for it. The bodyguard, I mean. Not my uncle.’
‘It does not sound like very appropriate behaviour, Your Highness,’ I remarked, shocked to think that anyone could refer to Kaiser Wilhelm, with whom our country was at war, as Uncle Willy.
‘No, it wasn’t. It cheapened him in my eyes, but my sisters and I were told to ignore his vulgarity. And then there was the bodyguard before him. I liked him very much.’
‘And what happened to him?’ I asked, expecting another curious story of illicit love affairs or unpleasant personal habits.
‘He was killed,’ replied Alexei without emotion. ‘It was at Tsarskoe Selo. An assassin threw a bomb at the carriage I was riding in, but the driver saw it in time and drove on before it could land on my lap. This bodyguard was seated in the carriage directly behind us and it landed on him instead. It blew him up.’
‘That’s terrible,’ I said, appalled by the violence of it and suddenly aware of how my own life might be in similar peril while I looked after such an illustrious charge.
‘Yes,’ he agreed. ‘Although Father said that he would have been proud to have died like that. In the service of Russia, that is. After all, it would have been much worse if I had died.’
Coming from any other child, the remark might have seemed thoughtless and arrogant, but the Tsarevich delivered it with such compassion for the dead man and a thoughtful understanding of his own position that I did not despise him for it.
‘Well, I don’t plan on eloping, farting or getting blown up,’ I said, smiling at him, imagining in my naivety that I could speak plainly, taking into account only his age and not his position. ‘So hopefully I shall be here to guard you for some time to come.’
‘Jachmenev,’ said Count Charnetsky immediately and I turned to look at him, ready to apologize before noticing how the Tsarevich was staring at me, his mouth wide open. I didn’t know for a moment whether he was going to burst out laughing or call the other guards to have me hauled away in chains, but finally he simply shook his head, as if the common people were a source of endless interest and amusement to him, and in this manner we began our new roles.
In the weeks that followed, we developed a pleasant informality with each other. He instructed me to call him Alexei, which I was glad to do, as to spend my day referring to an eleven-year-old boy as ‘Your Highness’ or even ‘sir’ would have been almost too much for me. He called me Georgy, which he liked because he had once owned a pup by that name, until it had been run over by one of his father’s carriages, a fact that I considered a grim portent.
He had his regular pastimes and wherever he went, I went too. In the mornings he attended Mass with his mother and father and then went directly to breakfast and on to private tuition with the Swiss tutor, Monsieur Gilliard. In the afternoons he went outside to the gardens, although I noticed that his parents, busy as they were, kept a close eye on him and he was not permitted to indulge in any activity which might be considered overly strenuous; I put this down to their worry about anything untoward happening to
the heir to the throne. In the evenings, he ate dinner with his family, and afterwards he sat with a book, or perhaps we might play backgammon, a game he had taught me on our first evening together and at which I had yet to beat him.
And then there were his four sisters, Olga, Tatiana, Marie and Anastasia, whose rooms he invaded at every opportunity, and whose lives he tormented as much as they loved and fussed over him. As Alexei’s bodyguard, I was in the company of the Grand Duchesses throughout the day, but they mostly ignored me, of course.
Except for one, that is, with whom I had fallen in love.
‘Forget about the horses,’ I remarked to Alexei as I sat there, staring out of the window. ‘
I
could run faster than this train.’
‘Then why don’t you, Georgy Daniilovich? I’m sure the driver would stop and let you try.’
I made a face at him and he giggled, a sure sign that he may have been many things – educated, well-spoken, intelligent, the heir to a throne, the future leader of millions – but at his heart he remained what every Russian man had been at some point in his life.
A little boy.
The Tsaritsa, Alexandra Fedorovna, had been opposed to this trip from the very beginning.
Of all the members of the Imperial family, she was the one with whom I had enjoyed the least contact since my arrival in St Petersburg. The Tsar himself was always friendly and personable, even remembering my name most of the time, which I took as a mark of great honour. He suffered greatly over the progress of the war, however, and this was reflected on his face, which was lined and dark-eyed. His days were spent in his study in consultation with his generals, whose company he relished, or with the leaders of the Duma, whose very existence he seemed to loathe. But he never allowed his personal feelings on any given day to spill out
into his dealings with those around him. Indeed, whenever I saw him, he always greeted me courteously and asked how I was enjoying my new position. Of course, my awe of him never lessened, but I also found that I was presumptuous enough to like him personally and I took great pride in being near his side.
Alexandra was different. A tall, attractive woman with a sharp nose and enquiring eyes, she considered a room to be empty if it was populated only by servants or guards, and conducted herself at such times, both in action and in conversation, as if she was alone.
‘Never talk to her,’ I was told late one night by Sergei Stasyovich Polyakov, a member of the Leib Guard with whom I had become friendly owing to the proximity of our quarters, which were adjacent to each other, our beds separated only by a thin wall through which I could hear him snoring in the night. At eighteen years of age, he was my senior by two years but was still one of the youngest members of Count Charnetsky’s elite regiment, and I was flattered that he had adopted me as his friend, for he appeared much more worldly and comfortable about the palace than I. ‘She would consider it a great mark of disrespect if you tried to engage her in conversation.’
‘I never would,’ I assured him. ‘But sometimes we catch each other’s eye in a room and I don’t know whether I should greet her or bow.’
‘She might catch your eye, Georgy,’ he told me, laughing a little, ‘but trust me, you don’t catch hers. She sees right through people like us. We’re ghosts, every one.’
‘I am no ghost,’ I insisted, surprised to find myself insulted by the charge. ‘I’m a man.’
‘Yes, yes,’ he said, extinguishing half a cigarette on the heel of his boot as he stood up to leave me and placing the unsmoked portion in his jacket pocket for later. ‘But you must remember how she was brought up. Her grandmother was the English queen, Victoria. Such an upbringing does not make you a sociable
person. She never speaks to any of the servants if she can avoid it.’
Of course, I believed this to be perfectly reasonable. I had no kings or princes in my genealogy – I did not even know the names of some of my grandparents – so why should the Empress of Russia deign to hold discourse with me. Indeed, my trepidation for the Imperial family was such that I never expected any of them to notice me at all, but when I took into account how gracious her husband was, and her son, and her daughters, I wondered at times whether I had done anything to offend her.
I had seen her on my first night in the palace, of course, although I had not at the time realized who the lady kneeling at the prie-dieu with her back to me was. I could still recall how feverishly she prayed, how devoted to her God she seemed to be. And I had not forgotten that terrifying vision of darkness who stood before her, the priest who grinned his malevolent smile in my direction. Although our paths had yet to cross again, his image had haunted me ever since.
The downside of her refusal to notice me was that she thought nothing of behaving in a less than regal fashion while I was in the room, something that embarrassed me on occasion, such as two days before I boarded the Imperial train, when the Tsar had proposed taking Alexei to Army Headquarters in the first place.
‘Nicky,’ she cried, marching into one of the parlours on the top floor of the palace where the Tsar was lost in thought, working on his papers. I was sitting in a darkened corner, for my charge, Alexei, was stretched out on the ground, playing with a group of toy trains and tracks which he had assembled across the floor. Naturally, the trains were plated with gold and the tracks were made of thin steel. Father and son were ignoring me entirely, of course, and engaged in intermittent conversation with each other. Although he was lost in his work, I had noticed that the Tsar was much more at ease when Alexei was near by and he looked up and grew anxious whenever he left the room for any reason. ‘Nicky, tell me I have misunderstood.’
‘Misunderstood, my darling?’ he asked, looking up from his papers now with tired eyes, and for a moment I wondered whether he had in fact dozed off while he was seated there.
‘Anna Vyrubova tells me that you are travelling to Mogilev on Thursday, to visit the army?’
‘That’s right, Sunny,’ he replied, invoking the pet name by which he called her, a name which seemed in complete contrast to her often dark and fragile demeanour. I wondered whether their youth and courtship had been conducted in a very different manner to the one in which they lived now. ‘I wrote to Cousin Nicholas last week and said that I would spend a few days there to encourage the troops.’
‘Yes, yes,’ she said dismissively. ‘But you are not taking Alexei with you, surely? I’ve been told that—’
‘I had intended on it, yes,’ he said quietly, looking away from her as he said this, as if he was only too aware of the argument that would follow.
‘But I can’t allow it, Nicky,’ she cried.
‘Can’t allow it?’ he asked, a note of amusement entering his gentle tone. ‘And why ever not?’
‘You know why not. It’s not safe there.’
‘It’s not safe anywhere any more, Sunny, or hadn’t you noticed that? Can’t you feel the storm clouds gathering around us?’ He hesitated for a moment and the ends of his moustache rose a little as he attempted a smile. ‘I can.’
She opened her mouth to protest, but that comment appeared to confuse her for a moment and she turned her head instead to look at her son, seated a few feet away on the floor, who was looking up from his trains now and watching the scene unfold before him. She smiled at him for a moment, an anxious smile, and wrung her hands together nervously, before turning back to her husband.
‘No, Nicky,’ she said. ‘No, I insist that he stay here with me. The journey itself will be intolerable. And then who knows what
the conditions will be like when you get there. And as for the dangers at Stavka, I need hardly tell you! What if a German bomber locates your position?’
‘Sunny, we face these dangers every day of the week,’ he said in an exhausted tone. ‘And we are nowhere more easy to locate than here in St Petersburg.’
‘
You
face those dangers, yes. And
I
face them. But not Alexei. Not our son.’
The Tsar closed his eyes for a moment before standing up and walking to the window, where he looked out across the River Neva.
‘He must go,’ he said finally, turning around and staring directly into his wife’s face. ‘I have already told Cousin Nicholas that he will be accompanying me. He will have issued a bulletin to the troops.’
‘Then tell him you’ve changed your mind.’
‘I can’t do that, Sunny. His presence at Mogilev will offer them great encouragement. You know how low their spirits have been lately, how morale has been slipping away. You read as many of the despatches as I do, I’ve seen you with them in your parlour. Anything we can do to encourage the men—’
‘And you think an eleven-year-old boy can do that?’ she asked with a bitter laugh.
‘But he is not just any eleven-year-old boy, is he? He is the Tsarevich. He is the heir to the throne of Russia. He is a symbol—’
‘Oh, I hate it when you talk about him like that!’ she snapped, pacing across the room now in a fury, passing me by as if I was nothing more than a strip of wallpaper or an ornamental sofa. ‘He’s not a symbol to me. He is my son.’
‘Sunny, he is more than that and you know it.’
‘But Mother, I want to go,’ said a small voice from the carpet, Alexei’s, and he stared up at the Tsaritsa with honest, adoring eyes. Her own eyes, I noticed. They were very alike, the two of them.
‘I know you do, my darling,’ she said, leaning down for a
moment and kissing his cheek. ‘But it’s not safe for you there.’
‘I’ll be careful,’ he said. ‘I promise you.’
‘Your promises are all well and good,’ she replied. ‘But what if you should trip over? What if a bomb explodes near by and you fall? Or, God forbid, if a bomb should go off where you are?’
I felt a desperate urge to shake my head and sigh, thinking her the most over-protective of mothers. What if he should fall over? What a ludicrous thought, I decided. He was eleven years old. He should be falling over a dozen times a day. Yes, and picking himself up again.
‘Sunny, the boy needs to be exposed to the real world,’ said the Tsar, his voice growing more firm now as if he was resolved in his decision and would allow no further debate. ‘All his life he has been cosseted in palaces and wrapped in cotton wool. Think of this: what if something should happen to me tomorrow and he had to take my place? He knows nothing of what it is to be Tsar. I barely knew anything of it myself when our dear father was taken from us, and I was a man of twenty-six. What hope would Alexei have in such circumstances? He spends all his life here, with you and the girls. It is time he learned something of his responsibilities.’