Page 23 of The Gathering Storm

CHAPTER FOUR

James had settled into a comfortable relationship with Tata, and Maman no longer came and knocked every half-hour. Tata took her tutoring very seriously, but James insisted on breaks every now and then, ‘To rest my poor brain. I’m not five years old, you know.’

‘Ça se voit!’ she said sternly. ‘Come, Shems, you must concentrate.’

‘But also I must get to know my teacher, to generate trust.’

Though she was immediately friendly, she was cautious at first about telling him anything about herself, but that caution was soon eroded. She said to him, in French, on their third day, ‘You are a man one perceives immediately to be honest.’

James smiled. ‘That’s because I am too stupid to be devious.’

‘Oh, I don’t think you are stupid at all,’ she said, looking at him thoughtfully. ‘Not at all.’

He soon found that she spoke English almost as well as French. ‘We spoke it at home,’ she said. ‘And German, a little. I had an English nanny, and a German governess. And French, of course, everyone speaks. It is the language of the ballet, and the ballet is in our blood.’ After that, their conversations drifted impartially between French and English, and their relationship became friendship.

At tea-time one Friday James got up and walked about, looking at the photographs on the walls. He stopped in front of one showing a scene in a hospital. A bare-chested man was sitting up in a bed, with a bandage round his head and one arm splinted and held up by a string-and-pulley device. A handsome middle-aged woman was holding the arm as if about to adjust the sling, and three other younger women stood around the bed. All four were in white nun-like nursing uniform and stared at the camera. ‘Where’s this?’ he asked.

Tata came and joined him. ‘That is the war hospital at Tsarskoye Selo. That’s Sister Chebodarev, the head of the hospital. Those two are Natalie Karaulov and Nina Berberov – they’re cousins – and that one is Grand Duchess Olga, the Tsar’s eldest daughter.’

‘What connection do you have with the hospital?’ he asked. ‘You must be too young to remember the war.’

‘How old do you think I am?’

‘I thought about twenty-three?’

She laughed. ‘Come, I’ll show you.’ She led him to another photograph on the wall, a larger one of a hospital ward, showing several occupied beds, and a number of other people standing and sitting, crowding together to be in the picture. The men were all in dressing-gowns, some with bandages, all with the large moustaches of the time. The women were all in the same nursing uniform. Standing to one side was a solemn little girl of, he guessed, about ten, in a white dress, white ankle socks and white shoes, with dark ringlets and large dark eyes. ‘That’s me,’ she said. ‘I lived in Tsarskoye Selo Before.’ It was clear that ‘Before’ had a capital letter. It did not need to be specified, before what. He had come across it already, with some of Charlie’s Russian guests. ‘Before’ was back then, in the golden time, the lost pre-revolution time that could never be revisited. It might not have been a perfect world, but it was the world you knew, and nothing would ever be like it again.

It meant, James thought, that she must be twenty-eight or twenty-nine. ‘I thought Tsarskoye Selo was a palace,’ he said, from some vague idea he had gleaned God-knew-where. ‘Where the Tsar lived.’

‘There were palaces, but lots of other houses too. Tsarskoye Selo means the Tsar’s Village. I lived there with Papa and Mama. But then Papa went away to the war, and didn’t come back. And when Mama got sick and died I went to live with Aunt Masha who was Sister Chebodarev’s deputy. So I was often around the hospital. I knew them all,’ she said, with a wave of the hand at the nurses in the picture.

He had picked up another photograph, in a silver frame, sitting on one of the many small tables. In what seemed to be a Victorian-style drawing room, very dark and cluttered, three women were in nursing uniform, one seated, the other two standing behind the chair. One of those standing was holding the hand of the same dark-haired little girl.

‘That’s me and Aunt Masha, in Sister Chebodarev’s sitting-room at the hospital.’

James recognised the second standing woman as the sister from the previous photograph. ‘And who’s this?’ he asked, pointing to the seated lady. She had a beautiful, sculpted face and sad eyes.

‘That’s the Tsarina. She and the two elder grand duchesses were all trained nurses and worked very hard there, but her other three children came too, and visited the soldiers and read to them. Olga was my favourite. She was so quiet and kind, and I think she was fond of me.’ She sighed. ‘I felt so sorry for her, poor Olichka.’

‘Why?’

She led him to another photograph, a family group. James recognised them from newspapers and magazines: the Tsar and Tsarina, four Grand Duchesses and the Tsarevitch. But this was no studio portrait – the Tsar was digging in a vegetable patch, the children were helping, while the Tsarina leaned on a stick and watched. There were other people in the picture: a man in the background, who looked like a servant, holding the handles of a wheelbarrow, and another to one side, a tall, dark-haired man, who was watching and smiling.

Tata pointed to the latter. ‘There,’ she said. ‘That is Thomas Ivanovitch. He was an aide to the Tsar, and he and Olga were in love. But she would never have been allowed to marry him. She was the daughter of the Tsar, and he was only an earl.’

‘An earl? Do you have those in Russia?’

‘Oh, no, he was an English earl. A rich one, too. But it would never have been allowed. Poor Olichka.’ She sighed again, then became brisk. ‘Now we must get back to work. Come, we shall talk of travelling – ships and trains and motor-cars. And you must concentrate, Shems,’ she added, as he was still staring at the photograph.

‘I’m sorry. Seeing them all so happy and laughing here, I was just thinking how terrible and tragic it is, how they all died.’

‘Oh, but they didn’t die,’ she said matter-of-factly. ‘Everyone knows that. That was just a story to cover their escape. They were all got away. But where they are has to be kept secret, because the Reds would come after them and kill them if they could find them.’ She stopped, looked gravely at him. ‘Everyone knows, but we don’t speak of it, so don’t say anything to anyone. You won’t, will you?’

‘Of course not,’ he said, a little mystified. The story of how all the Imperial Family was killed in that cellar somewhere beginning with a K, or an E, or something, was so well known that it made him blink and inwardly shake his head to clear it. Well, she ought to know better, having been there … And, of course, everything coming out of Russia had always been shrouded in mystery. Who knew what had really happened? And – an English earl? Why did that strike a chord with him? He was not, to be truthful, much interested in the Imperial Family. But it did make him much more interested in her. He gazed at her with new enthusiasm, and she reddened a little.

‘Come, we must work,’ she said firmly, and led him away towards the books.

It was cold down in the crypt, the work was hard, and the boxes were dirty. While Basil cultivated a raffish air, he was fastidious, and hated to have dirty hands. Working in the crypt was one of the Circles of Hell, all right. Since he felt like a fraud beside the others working there, he supposed it was the Eighth.