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

about my father’s demonic control over the fate of Russia. Political power, rather than the tsar’s daughters or their mother, was the prize he allegedly sought. The ludicrous natureof such reports had one benefit, in that I never worried any of them might be true. My father might have been a libidinous man who took every opportunity to gratify his desires, but he wasn’t so brazenly disrespectful, or such a fool, as to cuckold the tsar.
    Even if Varya and I didn’t receive so many invitations to teas and birthday parties as did our schoolmates, a city like St. Petersburg offered endless distractions. Window-shopping was a thing we could do all day, wandering up and down the Nevsky Prospekt with Dunia, who had come from Pokrovskoye to keep house for Father, all of us entranced by objects as ordinary as brooms and washboards so long as they were in a bright window. We had to hurry Dunia past the Singer building, though, as she had a helpless attraction to sewing machines and could stand all day staring at the models on display, and heaven help us if there was a demonstration. For Dunia, that was better than Shakespeare.
    Being a crown prince has its rewards, of course, but, like most with royal blood, Alyosha paid with his freedom. There was much of the world, almost all of it, he had never seen. What did he know of his own birthplace? Oh, he’d been taken like a tourist to all the sights, the Bronze Horseman and the Alexander Column and the little cottage from which Peter the Great had issued his decrees while he waited for his metropolis to assume proportions befitting his majesty. Alyosha had slept through a ballet at the Mariinsky Theatre; he’d stuffed his fingers in his ears while one or another of Antonina Nezhdanova’s arias transformed the same theater’s stage lights into a rain of broken glass that fell past the imperial box and, as if it were a planned effect, landed like glittering bits of ice on the proscenium. More than once he’d been allowed to meander among the shops at Gostiny Dvor, as much as a boy accompanied by an imperial guard can meander. In the shining black bombproof carriage presented by Napoleon III to his great-grandfather Alexander II—and what more suitable gift from onetyrant to another?—he’d toured the Nevsky Prospekt and its fine shops filled with pastries and furs and haute couture fashions. With their English governess, he and his sisters had taken tea in a tea shop, just like a more average set of aristocratic siblings, and he’d strolled with their French tutor and repeated after him the word for store ( le magasin ), for window ( la fenêtre ), for police ( les gendarmes ), for cheese ( le fromage ), for horse ( le cheval ). ( Trés bon! said the tutor.) Under the watch of Derevenko or Nagorny, he’d seen the showrooms of Fabergé. Peter Carl Fabairzhay, who made a fashionable French name of his Russian one and from whose atelier came the jeweled eggs presented by tsars to their tsarinas, each egg worth more than most people’s houses. Fabergé, whose hands had strung the tsarina’s long ropes of pearls. Aloysha’s mother wore her pearls every day.
    “They die if you don’t,” Tatiana had told me.
    “What do you mean, die?” I said, having no idea they were alive. The ropes moved as the tsarina walked, swayed and tapped against one another, their clicking distinct from the whisper of her slippered feet on the floor.
    “They go gray and their luster disappears. All the light goes out of them.”
    I nodded, as I always did when Tatiana offered me such splinters of information. They weren’t casual asides. She spoke intently, as if bit by bit she was imparting a kind of code that, with practice, I could use to accomplish great things. I liked it. Not for the wisdom she volunteered—it wasn’t of a type I considered useful—but for the earnestness in her eyes, which was maternal. I could tell she was edifying me as she did her sisters and Varya, out of a sense of