The Coronation Read Free Page B

no one who performs duties of this kind, which require not only great skill, but also talent, better than I do. After all, I did serve for five years as a coffee pourer with Their Majesties the deceased emperor and the present dowager empress.
    Naturally, I could not count on being able to manage with only eight servants, and so I sent a special telegram requesting the Moscow Court Department to appoint a capable local man as my assistant and also to provide two postilions, a ‘black chef’ for the servants, a footman to serve the senior servants, two junior footmen for cleaning, a maid for Mademoiselle Declique and two doormen. I did not ask for more than that, since I realised perfectly well how scarce experienced servants would be in Moscow owing to the arrival of such a large number of exalted individuals. And I had no illusions concerning Moscow servants. Moscow is a city of empty palaces and decaying villas, and there is nothing worse than maintaining a staff of servants without anything for them to do. It makes people stupid, it spoils them. For instance, we have three large houses in which we live by turns (excluding the spring, which we spend abroad, because Ekaterina Ioannovna finds the period of Lent in Russia unbearably dull): during the winter the Family lives in its St Petersburg palace, during the summer in its villa at Tsarskoe Selo, during the autumn at the Miskhor Grange. Each of the houses has its own staff of servants, and I do not allow them to loaf about. Every time we move from one house to another, I leave behind an extremely long list of instructions, and I always manage to visit every now and then to check on things, and always without warning. Servants are like soldiers. You have to keep them busy all the time, or they will start drinking, playing cards and behaving improperly.
    My Moscow assistant met us at the station, and while we were riding in the carriage he had time to explain some of the problems that awaited me. In the first place it turned out that my extremely moderate and rational request had not been met in full by the Court Department: they had only allocated one junior footman, they had not given us a chef for the servants, only a female cook, and the worse thing of all was that there was no maid for the governess. I was particularly displeased by this, because the position of governess is fundamentally ambivalent, lying as it does on the boundary line between service personnel and court staff; exceptional tact is required here in order to avoid offending and humiliating a person who is already constantly apprehensive for her own dignity.
    ‘And that is still not the most deplorable thing, Mr Ziukin,’ my Moscow assistant said with those distinctive broad Moscow ‘a’s when he noticed my dissatisfaction. ‘The most lamentable thing of all is that instead of the Maly Nikolaevsky Palace in the Kremlin that was promised, you have been given the Small Hermitage in the Neskuchny Park as your residence.’
    My assistant was called Kornei Selifanovich Somov, and at first glance I did not take to him at all: a rather unattractive, skinny fellow with protruding ears and a prominent Adam’s apple. It was immediately obvious that the man had already reached the peak of his career and would not progress any further but remain stuck in the backwoods of Moscow until he retired.
    ‘What sort of place is this Hermitage?’ I asked with a frown.
    ‘A beautiful house with a quite excellent view of the Moscow River and the city. It stands in a park close to the Alexandriisky Palace, which the emperor and empress will occupy immediately before the coronation, but . . .’ Somov shrugged and spread his long arms ‘. . . it is dilapidated, cramped and it has a ghost.’ He giggled but, seeing from my face that I was in no mood for jokes, he explained. ‘The house was built in the middle of the last century. It used to belong to the Countess Chesmenskaya – the famous madwoman who was incredibly