The Romanov Bride Read Free Page B

wanted to go to Sankt Peterburg, the city of the tsars. Da, da, my Shurochka was the daughter of a priest and a true Believer, and she wanted to be nearer her Tsar, which was actually fine by me. Rumor had it that wages were higher in the capital, so I said to Shurochka, “Sure, let’s go.” But getting to Peterburg meant traveling through Moscow and then another night of travel, which was amazingly expensive, of course. And where was I going to get that kind of money, enough for two to travel so very far?
    In the end it wasn’t so difficult. I just had to steal more money. And this is what I did: me and a pal walked overnight to another village and snuck into three different huts. And that second time we made out pretty good. When the villagers were at church we stole a pile of money, and my half was enough for two tickets all the way to Sankt Peterburg and even enough to pay for our first few weeks in the capital. Oh, I didn’t tell my Shurochka where I really got the money. No, she would’ve killed me on the spot. So I just told her my rich uncle in a nearby village loaned it to me. Even then she was hesitant, but soon enough she was all right, she was, when I told her that Dyadya Vanya expected to be repaid within a year, no more.
    And so we packed bread and some dried fish, two meat pies from Mama, a few clothes, then kissed everyone goodbye and got a blessing from Shura’s Papa, the priest, and set off. Oh, I’ll never forget when, a few days later, our train pulled into the Nikolaevski Station in Peterburg. So many people! So many fine carriages! So many people on the streets selling meat pies and fruits and nuts and… and everything was, well, so exciting! The capital back then was amazing, a glittering heart of golden palaces right in the center and a great ring of smoking factories in the surrounding suburbs. At first it was so exciting because we were in the city of the tsars and we were young and, why, we had real… hope! Da, da, da, for the first time even I felt it, too, something good about the future. For the first time in the history of Mother Russia we were not bound to the land and our destinies were not controlled by our masters, and there we were, thousands of us flooding the cities, hope dangling right before us like a big carrot. It was unbelievable. I didn’t understand it then, couldn’t name it, but we were part of a new class of people, a new generation freed from serfdom, now able to seek a better life in the city, and we were known as the proletariat.

Chapter 3 ELLA
    I suppose I first began to realize that things were beginning to pull apart in that autumn of 1904.
    It was widely said that the mood of society had not been so bad in several decades, which I did not doubt. We were in that horrible war with Japan and as a consequence I was busy with my workrooms, organizing so many hundreds of women to roll bandages and pack medicaments. Determined to reach out to those in need, I even had my own ambulance trains to see after as well. However, this was Russia, a country ever so slow in awakening, which is to say I was shocked by the confusion, how poorly my instructions were obeyed and how such carelessness caused our help to arrive so slowly in the far east of the Empire. Heavens, there was such terrible, terrible waste as well.
    Early that December, Kostya-Grand Duke Konstantin-came to us for dinner. He was so distressed, as were we all, at the strikes and upheavals throughout the nation, and he went on and on.
    “Good Lord in Heaven,” said the stately man, who was widely known for his wonderful poetry, “it’s as if a dam has suddenly broken, flooding our Holy Mother Russia with the utmost turmoil.”
    “You speak the truth,” agreed my Sergei. “ Russia has been seized with an incredible thirst for change!”
    I looked upon my husband, so tall and thin, his narrow face so tight. It’s quite true, Sergei had a very severe belief of the way things should be, an opinion with