The Coronation Read Free Page A

not witness Pavel Georgievich’s prank. Ever since St Petersburg she had locked herself away with a book, and I even know which one it was: The Kreutzer Sonata , a work by Count Tolstoy. I have read it, in case there might be talk about it among us butlers, simply in order not to appear a complete dunce. In my opinion it makes extremely boring reading and is quite inappropriate for a nineteen-year-old girl, especially a grand princess. In St Petersburg Ekaterina Ioannovna would never have allowed her daughter to read such smut and I can only think that the novel was smuggled into the baggage. The lady-in-waiting Baroness Stroganova must have provided it; it could not have been anyone else.
    The two sailors did not quieten down until it was almost morning, following which even I allowed myself the luxury of dozing for a while because, to be quite honest, I was really rather tired after all the bustle and commotion before we left, and I anticipated that the first day in Moscow would not be easy.
    The difficulties far exceeded all my expectations.
    As it happens, in all the forty-six years of my life I have never been in the ‘white stone capital’ before, although I have travelled round the world quite extensively. The fact is, in our family Asiatic manners are not regarded favourably, and the only place in the whole of Russia acknowledged as being even slightly decent is St Petersburg. Our relations with the governor general of Moscow, Simeon Alexandrovich, are cool, and so we have no reason to spend time in the old capital. We usually even travel to Miskhor Grange in the Crimea by a roundabout route, via Minsk, since Georgii Alexandrovich likes to shoot a few bison in the Beloverzhsk forest reserve along the way. And I did not travel to the last coronation, thirteen years ago, since I held the position of assistant butler and was left to replace my superior at that time, the now-deceased Zakhar Trofimovich.
    While we were travelling across the city from the station, I formed my first impression of Moscow. The city proved to be even less civilised than I had expected – absolutely no comparison with St Petersburg. The streets were narrow and absurdly twisted, the buildings were wretched, the public on the streets was slovenly and provincial. And this was when the city was making an almighty effort to preen its feathers on the eve of the arrival of the emperor himself: the facades of the buildings had been washed, the sheet metal of the roofs had been freshly painted, on Tverskaya Street (the main street of Moscow, a pale shadow of Nevsky Prospect) the tsar’s monogram and two-headed eagles had been hung everywhere. I don’t even know with what I can compare Moscow. It is the same kind of overgrown village as Salonica, which our yacht, the Mstislav , visited last year. Along the way we didn’t see a single fountain, or a building with more than four storeys, or an equestrian statue – only the round-shouldered bronze Pushkin and, to judge from the colour of the metal, even that was a recent acquisition.
    At Red Square, which was also quite a disappointment, our cavalcade divided into two. Their Highnesses set out, as befits members of the imperial family, to pay obeisance to the icon of the Virgin of Iversk and the holy relics in the Kremlin, while I and the servants went on to make ready our temporary Moscow residence.
    Owing to the division of the court into two parts, I had to make do with an extremely modest number of servants. I had only been able to bring eight people with me from St Petersburg: His Highness’s valet, Xenia Georgievna’s maid, a junior footman (the aforementioned Lipps) for Pavel Georgievich and Endlung, a pantry man and his assistant, a ‘white chef’, and two coachmen for the English and Russian carriages. The intention was that I would serve tea and coffee myself – that is by way of being a tradition. At the risk of appearing immodest, I can say that in the entire court department there is