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

letter. Ihadn’t known they existed outside of novels, and I wondered if my mother would have written such things to my father if he’d known how to read.
    That she might have was strangely fascinating to me. I contemplated the idea the way I did the exhibit of birds of the new world at the zoological garden. Here was plumage the color of which I’d never seen before.
    The tsarina read quickly, but I could tell she wasn’t skimming the words, she was reading each one, her eyebrows drawn into an anxious V, her lower lip caught between her teeth, and her eyes wholly focused on the work before them, one page after another bearing her excitable penmanship, line after line punctuated by nothing save dashes and exclamation points. In contrast, the tsar’s hand was so regular a typewriter might have produced it.

The Tea-Tray Toboggan

    V ARYA, OUR BROTHER D IMITRI , and I grew up as Father had done, in that part of Siberia where spirits walk the forests and swim the rivers and apparitions of the Holy Mother are not unheard of. Our flesh-and-blood mother, Praskovia Fedorovna Dubrovina, hailed from Yekaterinburg. A city girl when she arrived, the daughter of a merchant who retired to the country, Mother didn’t believe in what she called country superstitions, the kind held by people who lived in a town like Pokrovskoye, little more than the intersection of two roads, one to Tyumen, the other into the wild.
    I spent my childhood in Pokrovskoye, knowing nothing of cities, until Father told Mother about the young ladies he met at court and she responded as if to a direction from on high. Providence had arranged a means of securing an education for her daughters, one we could never receive at home, and so I was enrolled in the Steblin–Kamensky Academy for Girls and sent to Father in St. Petersburg, labeled by my mother like a package to be handed from wagon to barge to train. Varya came two years later, when she turned ten. I was excited to be in so grand and important a place, where I could hardly sleep at night for all the carriages and automobiles I heard in the street, their wheels turning over the cobbles. My father might know the future, but I did not, and Iwelcomed what appeared to be good fortune without wondering the cost.
    Some of the girls at the academy were not allowed to speak to us. Their parents thought Grigory Rasputin a charlatan, either that or the devil. Because no one knew what it was that Father did, that it was he who stood between the tsarevich and death, and because Father was so often closeted with Alyosha and his mother while Tsar Nikolay was off waging war, gossip had it that he and the tsarina were lovers, that he and the tsar’s daughters were lovers, that he and the tsarina’s ugly confidante, Anna Vyrubova, were lovers. What else could explain the frequency of his visits to Tsarskoe Selo? Rasputin had mesmerized all the women around the tsar; the tsarina herself was his puppet; the two of them conspired to lead the tsar to make disastrous decisions. Father Grigory was the Antichrist in disguise, the skin hidden under his tunic bearing occult letters and symbols—Marks of the Beast—and he intended to destroy the motherland. Some days we would walk to school and, alert to such things, I’d see that a new inflammatory drawing had been printed and plastered on one wall after another we were forced to pass. Most were cartoons of Father and the tsarina, usually unclothed and locked together in positions that defied human anatomy if not some scoundrel’s filthy imagination.
    “Keep your eyes down,” I told Varya. “You walk. I’ll hold your hand and guide you.”
    And so we made our way to the academy, with obedient Varya’s innocence intact. Varya was like that when she was younger, untroubled by the kind of curiosity that forced me to look at everything, no matter how gruesome or depraved. There was never a month without a rumor, often printed by what pretended to be a reputable newspaper,