Enchantments: A Novel of Rasputin's Daughter and the Romanovs by Kathryn Harrison Read Free Book Online

restrict their once-exalted prisoners without touching their persons, so once the soldiers had corralled all of us onto one floor of the family’s private apartments, they no longer could take any liberties requiring privacy. Cramped as we were, there was that to be grateful for.
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    D EREVENKO, WHO HAD CARED FOR A LYOSHA for eight years with a devotion that appeared sincere, had either feigned that love or lacked the character to resist what appeared to him as an immediate existential promotion. In the hours before he abandoned the tsarevich, he tested his new agency by sprawling on Alyosha’s bed and ordering him about.
    “You!” he barked. “Light my cigarette. Polish my boots and shine my buckle. And when you’ve done that, go to the kitchen and get me something to eat.”
    In silence, without betraying any resentment, Alyosha did all these things while his sisters and I looked on, none of us daring to protest. Dina, as Alyosha called him, sprayed crumbs over the bedclothes and wiped his greasy fingers on the satin wall covering while the tsarevich went to find the “good big traveling trunk” the sailor asked for.
    “That,” Derevenko said when Alyosha came back. He pointed at Alyosha’s scale model of the family’s yacht, Standart , on which they sailed the Baltic Sea each fall. “And that. And all of those. Into the trunk with the rest of it.” Derevenko watched as Alyosha did as he was told, filling the trunk from his shelves and drawers and closets. The railway cars and sailing ships; the battalions of minuscule soldiers that marched—some of these playthings had been made by Peter Carl Fabergé and were worth inestimable rubles; the clothing the tsarevich wore for court appearances; his ikons and saints’ medals; his boots; his hairbrush and comb: whatever the sailor imagined would fetch a good price, especially those things that bore Alyosha’s initials or some other proof of their ownership, went into the trunk. When it was filled, he stood from the bed and brushed the crumbs from his shirt onto the floor.
    “There it is,” he said to the tsarevich. He picked up an ornamentalsword, its hilt engraved with the Romanov crest, and used his shirt cuff to polish the ruby set into the pommel. “Severance pay.” He threw the sword back onto the pile of plunder and kicked the trunk’s lid shut.
    Perhaps Alyosha’s forbearance had been, as he said when we spoke about it that afternoon, more the result of shock than noblesse oblige, but I saw him differently after Derevenko’s departure; I stopped calling him “your highness.” If the rumors had been true, if he had once been a child who threw tantrums and behaved shamefully, he was no longer that overweening boy, and it was wrong to tease him as if he were.
    N O ONE SLEPT that first night. The tsarina dismantled Tsar Nikolay’s dressing room and found where he had saved the letters she’d written him during their courtship, and at three in the morning had set to work burning any that seemed prudent to destroy, as her children looked on. They, as well as Varya, gave the impression of being too stupefied to comment, but I was tantalized by the letters, enough that I insinuated myself into a corner from which I could make out the words of the one the tsarina had been reviewing before she turned to poke the fire. “It’s cold, isn’t it?” I said to Tatiana, pretending I’d moved to be closer to the hearth, but neither she nor her sisters gave any indication they noticed my trespass, only a replica of their mother’s vague smile, which they had perhaps been trained to summon in response to any social awkwardness.
    I would never be able to summon the tsarina’s face without seeing it as it appeared while she destroyed her own carefully preserved history, letters so passionate I had to remind myself to keep my features composed while I read what I could of them. It was the first time I’d encountered that kind of thing—a love