The Girl Who Fought Napoleon: A Novel of the Russian Empire (41 page)

Epilogue

Merchant Khromov and his daughter attended the body of Feodor Kuzmich. Khromov had given the starets his little cabin outside Tomsk, Siberia, for many years. He had always seen that the mystic had wood for his fire and enough food to keep his old body alive.

“Sonia,” he said. “Heat water on the stove. I shall wash the starets and make him ready to meet God.”

The young woman poured water from a bucket into the dented pot on the woodstove. She watched as he father knelt silently by the dead man’s body and prayed. After he had crossed himself three times and risen to his feet, she touched his shoulder as he wept for the good man, a devoted servant of God.

Khromov drew a deep breath.

“Here. Help me remove his clothes so we can prepare his body for burial.”

Sonia bent over the stiff body, reverently untying the starets’s shirt.

“Papa!” she said. “Look here!”

She drew back the linen shirt, exposing the dead man’s chest. There around his neck was a small cloth bag on a leather cord.

Khromov unknotted the string.

“It’s a message of some sort,” he murmured. “But it is gibberish.”

“Let me see, Papa,” said Sonia. “
Da
,
da.
The only thing I can make out is an
A
and a
P
 . . . and numbers. It makes no sense at all.”

Khromov looked out the window at the driving snow. “It only made sense to one person, I suspect. And that soul now resides with God.”

Author Notes

For the reader who is perplexed at the meaning of the message written in numbered code, so were the Romanovs for more than a century. In 1927, two code breakers working separately came up with this solution to the mystery of the message:

Anna Vasilievna [Gargarina], we have discovered an incredible flaw in our son. Count Pahlen informs me of AP’s [Alexander Pavlovich’s] participation in a conspiracy. We must hide tonight, wherever it is possible.

PAUL

St. Petersburg. March 11, 1801

Anna Vasilievna Gargarina was Tsar Paul I’s mistress who lived in Mikhailovsky Castle with him.

Like Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Tsar Alexander was forever haunted by his father’s death. While he may not have had anything to do with the actual assassination, he was most probably privy to the plot to force his father’s abdication.

Nadezhda Durova was a complex character. She was startlingly brave and unconventional—and she detested the menial role nineteenth-century society forced on women. Her memoir,
The Cavalry Maiden: Journals of a Russian Officer in the Napoleonic Wars
, is a rare insight into the daily life of a Russian cavalry soldier and officer during this era and clearly illustrates her valor.

But there is a striking conflict in stated facts.

The main points of Durova’s story, as told in her memoirs, are true. Nadezhda Durova fought in many of the great battles of the Napoleonic Wars. She was in the midst of the fighting at Heilsberg, Guttstadt, Friedland, Borodino, and Smolensk. She received the St. George Cross for her bravery, and from Tsar Alexander I personally. Durova had a special relationship with the Tsar, who essentially “sponsored” her later career, even knowing she was a woman. Tsar Alexander sent Durova money and promoted her to an officer’s rank, sending her to serve with the elite Mariupol Hussars. He gave her his name “Alexandrov,” son of Alexander—an astonishing honor.

Russia’s most notable poet, Alexander Pushkin, encouraged Durova to publish her memoirs, taking the time to edit them himself. Her story was published in Pushkin’s literary magazine
Sovremennik
,
or
The Contemporary
.

Clearly, Nadezhda Durova was an extraordinary woman.

There was, however, another side of Nadezhda. Her memoirs state she was sixteen years old when she ran away from home to join the cavalry. But official records show she was in fact twenty-three. There were seven years consistently subtracted throughout her memoirs (including for her horse Alcides’s age).

In October 1801, desperate to escape her mother’s influence, Nadezhda married Vasily Chernov, a judge in Sarapul. The possibility exists that her mother arranged the marriage to tame her rebellious daughter. Nadezhda had a son, Ivan, in 1803.

Nadezhda soon abandoned her husband and returned with her son to her family home in Sarapul. However, she could not abide living with her mother and fled, disguised as a Cossack. It was rumored that she had fallen in love with a Cossack and pursued him, subsequently joining the cavalry.

Despite abandoning her son, Ivan, leaving him with his grandparents, Nadezhda did not forget him. She arranged an excellent education for the boy through her friendship with Tsar Alexander. Alexander saw that Ivan was enrolled in the Imperial Military Orphanage in St. Petersburg. Nadezhda visited him at least once while he was enrolled in the military academy. Ivan was a good student but not in robust health. He remained in the military but not as a soldier, serving instead as a bureaucrat in St. Petersburg.

In my novel, Nadezhda’s grandson comes to Yelabuga to ask for her blessing for his marriage. In real life it was her son Ivan who asked her benediction for his pending vows. Her son deeply admired his mother despite the fact she abandoned him as a child.

Beyond her bravery on the battlefield she demonstrated great courage—and took many risks—in other parts of her life. Taming a wild and notoriously aggressive horse with sugar-sprinkled bread is not a simple task! Nadezhda’s gift with horses seems to have passed through the generations. Her descendants became famous animal trainers and circus performers of great renown in Russia.

I chose to follow Nadezhda’s memoir closely and not divulge the additional information (that even Pushkin did not know) until the end of the novel. This gradual denouement (the inconsistencies in her age, the omission of both her marriage and the birth of her son) reflects how Durova’s life story unfolded to the Russian public.

Tsar Alexander I was a deeply elusive character, as indicated by his moniker “Sphinx of Russia.” Even before his father’s murder, he proclaimed he was unsuited for the role of tsar and repeatedly declared his intention to abdicate. He struggled to fill the role of “strong man” of Russia. His ideals, though repressed, ran more toward democracy, education, and social reform, as espoused by the philosophers of the Enlightenment.

Though egotistical and susceptible to flattery, Alexander was a humanitarian at heart and deeply spiritual. A true Francophile, he grew to hate Napoleon. It was his decision alone to pursue Napoleon into Paris and force the French emperor’s abdication.

Tsar Alexander I “conquered” Napoleon Bonaparte.

The legend of Feodor Kuzmich, the starets whom many believed to be Alexander I in disguise, remains pervasive in Russia. The empty sepulchre of the Tsar, the conflicting autopsy reports (the rumor that the courier Major Maskov’s body may have been substituted in the imperial coffin transferred back to St. Peterburg), and the mantle of secrecy that swirled around Alexander’s remains fed the rumor and speculation. Witnesses say they saw a British yacht in the treacherous Bay of Taganrog pick up a sole passenger dressed in peasant clothes the day of Alexander’s death. The vessel then immediately lifted anchor and sailed on to Palestine.

Years later a mysterious starets with a strong resemblance to Alexander I appeared in Siberia.

Thus grew the lore of the hermit tsar.

The fact that two subsequent tsars made the long and arduous journey to visit Kuzmich’s grave in a remote post in Siberia attests to the Romanov’s family intense interest in the obscure starets.

Both Nadezhda Durova, known during her later cavalry career as Alexander Alexandrov, and Alexander Pavlovich Romanov were fascinating human beings. These two Alexanders were eminently worthy of their places in Russian history.

Acknowledgments

I owe a great deal of gratitude to Nadezhda Durova herself. Her journals,
The Cavalry Maiden: Journals of a Russian Officer in the Napoleonic Wars
,
gave me a solid story and a unique opportunity to see into this extraordinary woman’s life.

Mary Fleming Zirin made the journals accessible to me as an English speaker. Zirin’s translation of Durova’s book was indispensible to my story line and character development. Also her extensive research into how Nadezhda Durova’s memoirs conflicted with the truth became the skeleton of my novel.

I read many documents and books on Tsar Alexander I. Particularly useful to me were
Alexander I: The Tsar Who Defeated Napoleon
,
by Marie-Pierre Rey;
Alexander of Russia: Napoleon’s Conqueror
,
by Henri Troyat;
Memoirs of Adam Czartoryski and His Correspondence with Alexander I
, by Adam Jerzy Czartoryski; and yes,
War and Peace,
by Leo Tolstoy. Obviously I owe much credit to author Alexis S. Troubetzkoy’s
Imperial Legend: The Mysterious Disappearance of Alexander I.
I highly recommend this book for fascinating reading on Tsar Alexander and the legend of Feodor Kuzmich.

I read a stack of books on Napoleon, but these particular tomes gave me a good grounding:
Napoleon: A Life
by Andrew Roberts, and the three-book series
1812
, by Paul Britten Austen:
The March on Moscow
,
Napoleon in Moscow
, and
The Great Retreat.
Also,
A Military History and Atlas of the Napoleonic Wars
,
by Brigadier General Vincent J. Esposito and Colonel John R. Elting, was very useful in writing battle scenes and helping me with the geography of Russia and the rest of Europe.

In Russia

I had a lot of help from my new Russian friends both in St. Petersburg and Moscow. Expert guide Ludmilla Kolesova kept up a jam-packed schedule of museum visits and heritage sites. She crammed in almost all of the sites mentioned in the novel, from St. Petersburg palaces to Tsarkoe Selo and Gatchina.

Alexey Le Porc, art historian and curator, gave my husband and me a private tour of the Hermitage concerning objects mentioned in this book. At Mikhailovsky Castle, Francuzov Vladimir Evgenievich showed us the actual apartments where Tsar Paul, Alexander’s father, was murdered.

Tatiana Grigorieva guided us through Moscow and to the battlefield of Borodino, sharing her incredible knowledge of history. At the State History Museum, Matvey Katkov showed us fascinating inventory of the Patriotic Wars, including Napoleon’s camp bed and the sleigh he used to escape to Paris. We had a thorough education at the museum of Borodino: uniforms, weapons, maps, and a three-dimensional battlefield replica that lit up the troop movements of both the Russian and French army.

In the United States

Dasha Harrison and Mariana Fisher of Exeter International arranged our extensive research tour in Russia.

Nancy Elisha, my beloved sister, has always encouraged my writing and helped through twenty-seven years of relentless rejection.

The breathtaking Strang Ranch of Carbondale, Colorado, provided a fount of inspiration every day. I conjured up battle scenes from the pages of research books and mapped them in my mind as I rode over the magnificent spread of open fields and rolling hills. Thank you to Bridget Strang and Maree McAteer, who inspire me daily with their horsemanship.

Thank you to Marina Beadleston for her enthusiasm for my writing career. Perhaps my living next door to Romanov descendants years ago subconsciously led me to this subject matter. (At any rate, I know the exact shade of Romanov blue eyes!)

Gratitude to other Roaring Fork Valley residents, especially Sarah Kennedy Flug! Also thanks to Lucia Caretto, Emily and Bel Carpenter, and Sandy MacKay, for their important support in mind and spirit.

Thank you to my great Amazon team: Gabriella Dumpit, Brent Fattore, Tyler Stoops, and Dennelle Catlett, among others. Special appreciation to Danielle Marshall, my acquisitions editor at Lake Union. Thanks for being there right on the spot when we had “snags,” no matter the day or time of night.

To Lindsay Guzzardo, former Amazon editor and now screenwriter. I will never forget you.

To my copy editors Katherine Faydash and Sharon Turner Mulvihill. What a vast list of international characters, places, battlefields, dates to check! (Especially as my heroine was notoriously freehanded in her timeline.) I’m deeply grateful for your hard labor on this novel.

To my hardworking proofreader, Leighton Wingate. What a formidable team I have in production!

Melody Guy, my developmental editor, is an incredibly sensitive editor who draws my best work from me. I love working with her. I have been blessed having her guide all five of my published books.

My gratitude to Shasti O’Leary-Soudant for her remarkable cover art. 

Gratitude to Jeff Belle. This is my fifth novel published with Amazon! Thanks for your support.

To my foreign rights team at Curtis Brown, especially Betsy Robbins and Sophie Baker, thank you for shopping my book rights around the world.

The team at Gelfman Schneider/ICM Partners has guided my contracts and all matters of business, looking out for me all along the way. And thank you, Cathy Gleason and Victoria Marini.

To my friend and agent Deborah Schneider, who first contacted me in 1993. We’ve come a long way together.

To my beloved parents, Betty and Fred Lafferty. We all miss you, Mommy. I remember how you always wanted to visit St. Petersburg, how the history of Russia fascinated you. You and Daddy raised all your girls to love books, storytelling, and world travel. We will always love you both.

Finally, my profound gratitude to Andy Stone, my husband, research assistant, and first (and constant!) editor. You are the love of my life. I don’t know if I ever could have written all these books without your love, encouragement, and help—especially reading and editing early drafts. I am blessed to have you as my partner.