The Romanov Sisters (Four Sisters) (66 page)

either that or be taken by force – Alexandra was faced with the most agonizing of decisions. Aghast at the thought of what might happen

to her husband if taken to Moscow (visions of a trial by a French-

Revolutionary-style tribunal), she went through hours of mental

torment, trying to decide what to do for the best. Her maid Mariya

Tutelberg tried to comfort her but Alexandra said:

Don’t make my pain worse, Tudels. This is a most difficult

moment for me. You know what my son means to me. And I

now have to choose between son and husband. But I have made

my decision and I have to be strong. I must leave my boy and

share my life – or my death – with my husband.17

It was clear to the four sisters that their mother could not travel

without one of them to support her. Olga’s health was still poor and

she was needed to help nurse Alexey. Tatiana must take over the

running of the household; even Gibbes asserted that she was ‘now

looked upon as the head of the Family in the place of the Grand

Duchess Olga’.18 After discussing it among themselves, the girls

agreed that Maria should accompany their mother and father, leaving

court jester Anastasia to ‘cheer all up’.19 The hope was that in about three weeks’ time, when Alexey was stronger, they would be able

to join their parents.

Nicholas and Alexandra spent most of that afternoon sitting by

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Alexey’s bed while the most essential items for their journey were

packed. Tatiana asked Yakovlev where they would be taken – was

her father to be put on trial in Moscow? Yakovlev dismissed the

idea, insisting that from Moscow her parents ‘would be taken to

Petrograd, and from there out through Finland to Sweden and then

Norway’.20 That last evening everyone sat down to dinner, at a

properly laid table complete with menu cards, just as they had always done. ‘We spent the evening in grief’, Nicholas confided to his diary, Alexandra and the girls frequently weeping. Alexandra’s stoicism

completely gave way as she faced the prospect of leaving the son

she had watched over so obsessively for the last thirteen years. Later, when everyone sat down together to take tea before bed, she appeared

composed. They all ‘did their best to hide [their] grief and to main-

tain outward calm’, wrote Gilliard. ‘We felt that for one to give way would cause all to break down.’ ‘It was the most mournful and

depressing party I ever attended,’ recalled Sydney Gibbes, ‘there

was not much talking and no pretence at gaiety. It was solemn and

tragic, a fit prelude to an inescapable tragedy.’21 Many years later

he insisted, ‘They knew it was the end when I was with them’; that

evening, though the words remained resolutely unspoken, everyone

had a clear sense of what might lie ahead.22

Nicholas retained his outward steely calm to the very end, but

‘to leave the rest of the children and Alexey – sick as he was and in such circumstances – was more than difficult’, he admitted in his

diary and ‘of course, no one slept that night’.23 At 4 a.m. the following morning, 26 April, Nicholas ‘had a handshake and a word for

everyone and we all kissed the Empress’s hand’, recalled Gibbes,

before, wrapped in long Persian lamb coats, Alexandra and Maria

accompanied him out to the waiting tarantasses.24
*

‘When they left it was still dark,’ recalled Gibbes, but he ran for

his camera, and ‘by a lengthy exposure I succeeded in getting a

picture of the Empress’ tarantas – though it was impossible to take

* Alexandra and Maria were allowed the luxury of a hooded tarantas, but Nicholas and the others travelled in a local Siberian form of transport, a
kosheva
– a low-slung wheel-less carriage suspended on long poles – the interiors without seats spread with straw.

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one of the departure.’25 The sisters sobbed as they kissed goodbye;

but it was the timorous maid Anna Demidova who was travelling

with the tsaritsa (along with Dr Botkin, Dolgorukov and servants

Terenty Chemodurov and Ivan Sednev), who had been the one

finally to voice everyone’s innermost anxiety. ‘I am so frightened of the Bolsheviks, Mr Gibbes. I don’t know what they will do to us.’

Her fright as the mournful row of carriages and their escort of

mounted Red Army guards drove away into the cold grey dawn was

‘pitiable to see’.26

From her window at the Kornilov House, Tatiana Botkina

watched them go:

The carriages passed the house at breakneck speed, swerved

round the corner, and disappeared. I cast a glance at the

Governor’s residence. Three figures in grey stood on the steps

for a long time yet, watching the distant ribbon of the road; then

they turned and slowly walked back into the house.27

*

After the departure – destination unknown – of Nicholas, Alexandra

and Maria ‘a sadness like death invaded the house’, as the valet

Volkov remembered. ‘Before, there had always been a certain live-

liness, but after the departure of the imperial couple, silence and

desolation overwhelmed us.’28 ‘The feeling was noticed even in the

soldiers’, Kobylinsky noted.29 Olga ‘wept terribly’ when her mother

and father left but she and her sisters kept themselves busy and their minds distracted fulfilling an urgent task entrusted them by

Alexandra.30 Although many of Alexandra’s large pieces of jewellery

had already been smuggled out for safe-keeping at the Abalaksky

or Ivanovsky monasteries, from where they were to be used by

monarchist sympathizers to raise funds for a possible escape (the

money never arrived), the girls had recently been helping Anna

Demidova and the maids Mariya Tutelberg and Elizaveta Ersberg

‘dispose of the medicines as agreed’.31 This was Alexandra’s code for the concealment of pearls, diamonds, brooches and necklaces in the

family’s clothes, undergarments and hats, with larger stones being

disguised under cloth buttons. With their departure perhaps only

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three weeks away they frantically worked to complete the task in

time, supervised by Tatiana, who despite advice to leave the jewels

in safe-keeping in Tobolsk had insisted on following her mother’s

instructions to the letter.32 With Alexey still sick there was no thought of lessons. Everyone was too preoccupied with keeping him amused

and raising his morale, as he ‘toss[ed] and moan[ed] on his bed of

pain, always sighing for his mother, who couldn’t come’.33

Although word that the family was safe came from one of the

drivers who had taken them as far as Tyumen, it was several days

before any letters arrived. Because the rivers were still ice-bound

the party was having to travel overland and the roads were terrible

– ‘horses up to their chests in water crossing rivers. Wheels broken

several times’, as Maria later reported.34 On the 29th the first letter arrived, written at their first overnight stopover at Ievlevo. ‘Mother’s heart is hurting very much as a consequence of the awful road to

Tyumen – they had to travel over 200 versts [140 miles/225 km] by

horses along a horrible road’, Tatiana wrote to a friend.35 The journey improved thereafter, and Alexandra sent a telegram: ‘Travelling in

comfort. How is the boy? God be with you.’36 They were now on

a train but still did not know where they were headed. ‘Darling,

you must know how dreadful it all is’, Olga wrote to Anna Vyrubova

as they waited for news.37 But it was not till 3 May – a week since

their parents’ departure – that the children finally learned, by telegram, that Nicholas, Alexandra and Maria were now not in Moscow

– as they had all imagined – but in Ekaterinburg, a town in the

Western Urals, 354 miles (570 km) south-west of Tobolsk. The

three girls and their brother now could do nothing but wait out the

long anxious days till they could join the others there.

The girls kept themselves busy, taking it in turns to read and

play games with Alexey, who was making a very slow recovery. If

the weather was fine they took him outside in the wheelchair.

In the evenings Olga sat with him when he said his prayers; after-

wards the girls joined Nastenka in her room rather than sit upstairs

on their own and then went to bed early. ‘Mama, dear soul, how

we miss you! In every, every way. It is so empty’, Olga wrote to

Alexandra in a long letter spread over several days. ‘Every now and

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then I go into your room and then I feel as though you are there

and that is so comforting.’ Easter was approaching and they were

doing their best to prepare for it, though this was the first time, as a family, that they had ever been separated during this the most

important festival in the Russian Orthodox calendar. ‘Today, there

was an enormous religious procession with banners, icons, numbers

of clergy and a crowd of faithful. It was so beautiful with the glorious sunshine and all the church bells ringing.’38 Zinaida Tolstaya had

sent painted Easter eggs, a cake and some jam, and an embroidered

napkin for Alexandra. But Good Friday brought wind and rain and

a temperature barely above zero. ‘It is terrible not to be together

and not to know how you really are, for we are told so many different things’, wrote Olga.39 But together the girls had decorated their

field chapel, arranging branches of velvety, scented pine on either

side of the iconostasis – its smell reminding them of Christmas –

and bringing pots of flowers and plants from the greenhouse (though

they were struggling to keep the three dogs out in case of their

trying to ‘water’ the pots). ‘We would so like to know how you have

celebrated this Feast of Light and what you are doing,’ Olga

continued on Easter Sunday, ‘the Midnight Liturgy and Vigil went

very well. It was beautiful and intimate. All the side lamps were lit, but not the chandelier, it was light enough.’ That morning they had

greeted the staff and handed out Easter eggs and little icons, just

as their mother had always done; and they had eaten the traditional

kulich
and
pashka
.40

When a letter finally came from Maria, briefly describing their

new environment at the Ipatiev House in Ekaterinburg, it was deeply

disconcerting: ‘We miss our quiet and peaceful life in Tobolsk’, she

wrote. ‘Here there are unpleasant surprises every day.’41 Their own

Easter had been extremely modest: food was brought from the

communal canteen in town and many of their belongings were in

a terrible state, dusty and dirty from the bumpy journey. There was

a poignant postscript for Anastasia from Nicholas: ‘I am lonesome

without you, my dear. I miss you pulling funny faces at the table.’42

The three sisters were intensely relieved when the letters from

Ekaterinburg finally began to arrive. Alexandra and Maria wrote

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daily but many of the twenty-two or so that they sent never reached

Tobolsk. ‘It was truly dreadful to be without news all that time’,

Tatiana wrote on 7 May:

We see from the window that the Irtych [sic] is calm here.

Tomorrow we expect the first steamer from Tioumen [sic]. Our

pigs have been sold, but there is still the sow which had six

piglets . . . Yesterday we ate our poor turkey, so now there is

only his wife . . . It is deadly boring in the garden. No sooner

are we out there than we are looking at our watches to see when

we can go back inside . . . We suffer a great deal in our souls

for you, my darlings; our only hope is in God and our consola-

tion in prayer.43

Even the resolute Tatiana was finding it hard to keep going: ‘I

am so afraid of losing courage,’ she told her father, ‘I pray a lot for you . . . May the Lord God guard you, save you, protect you from

all evil. Your daughter Tatiana who loves you passionately for ever

and ever.’44

With the ice melting, the Irtysh was in full flood and the boats

began to sail to Tyumen once more. The girls could hear their sirens

in the distance and hopes lifted that they would soon be able to

travel.45 At Ekaterinburg Maria was eagerly anticipating their arrival.

‘Who knows, perhaps this letter will reach you just before you leave.

God bless your journey and keep you safe from all harm . . . Tender

thoughts and prayers surround you – all that matters is to be together again soon.’46

Being reunited was the one and only preoccupation of all the

letters sent between Tobolsk and Ekaterinburg in those final, inter-

vening days – along with messages of love. ‘How are you surviving

and what are you doing?’ asked Olga, in what would be her last

letter from Tobolsk. ‘How I would love to be with you. We still do

not know when we shall leave . . . May Our Lord protect you, my

dear beloved Mama and all of you. I kiss Papa, you and M. many

times over. I clasp you in my arms and love you. Your Olga.’47