Chapter 9
Danina was immensely relieved to return to their cottage to recuperate, and the Czarina was pleased to see her. Danina's recuperation was slow this time, and painful. And when they finally took off the cast after more than a month, the ankle looked weak and shrunken. She could barely stand on her left leg, and she cried the first time she walked across the room to Nikolai. Her limp was so severe, her entire body seemed distorted. The graceful bird she had once been seemed completely broken.
“It will get better, Danina, I promise,” Nikolai tried to reassure her. “You must believe me. You will have to work hard on it.” He measured both her legs and found that they were still the same length, the limp was due only to weakness. She would never dance again, but she would walk normally. And no one was more solicitous than the Czarina and her children.
It was several weeks before Danina could walk across the room without a cane, and she was still limping when she received a letter at the end of February that Madame Markova was ill. She had a mild case of pneumonia, but she had had it before, and Danina knew full well how dangerous it could be. In spite of still being unsteady on her legs, she insisted that she had to go to her. She still used the cane to cover distances, and could not walk far, but she felt that she should go back to stay at the ballet, at least until Madame Markova regained her health after the pneumonia. The older woman was frailer than she looked, and Danina feared for her life.
“It's the least I can do,” she insisted to Nikolai, but although he sympathized, he still objected. There had been riots in St. Petersburg, and in Moscow, and he was uneasy having her go back alone. And Alexei hadn't been well, so he didn't feel able to go to St. Petersburg with her. “Don't be silly, I'll be fine,” she insisted, and after a day of arguing back and forth, he finally agreed to let her go without him. “I'll come back in a week or two,” she promised him, “as soon as I see she's better. She would do, and has done, as much for me.” He understood all too well the power of the relationship between them, and he knew that Danina would have been agonized over not going to her.
He took her to the train the next day, warned her to be careful and not overtax herself, handed her her cane with a kiss, and put his arms around her. He hated to see her go but understood it, and made her promise to take a taxi directly to the ballet from the station. He was sorry not to go with her. And after all their time together recently, it felt odd to him not to do so. But Danina had promised him she would be fine alone.
But much to her surprise, when she reached St. Petersburg, she saw people milling about in the streets, shouting and demonstrating against the Czar, and there were soldiers everywhere around them. She had heard nothing of it in Tsarskoe Selo, and was amazed to find the atmosphere in the city unusually tense. But she forced it from her mind as she made her way to the ballet. Her thoughts were on Madame Markova, and she hoped her mentor and old friend was not desperately ill. And she was dismayed to find that in fact she had been, and as had happened once before, she had grown very weak and very frail from her illness.
Danina sat beside her every day, fed her soup and gruel, and begged her to eat it. And within a week, she was relieved to see some slight improvement, but the older woman seemed to have aged years in a few brief weeks, and she looked intolerably fragile as Danina looked at her lovingly and held her hand.
Nursing her, the days seemed to fly past her, and Danina fell into bed at night feeling utterly exhausted. And moving around as much as she had, had caused her ankle to swell painfully again. She was sleeping on a cot in Madame Mar-kova's office, her old bed having long since been assigned to another dancer. She was fast asleep on the morning of March eleventh, when crowds gathered in the street not far from the ballet. The shouting and the first gunshots woke her, and she rose quickly and went downstairs to see what had happened. Dancers in the long hallway had already left the classrooms where they'd been warming up, and a few of the bravest ones were peeking from the windows, but they could see nothing but a few soldiers galloping past on horseback. No one had any idea what had happened until later that day when they learned that the Czar had finally ordered the army to quell the revolution, and more than two hundred people had been killed in the city. The law courts, the arsenal, the Ministry of the Interior, and a score of police stations had been burned, and the prisons had been forced open by the people.
The gunshots had stopped by late afternoon, and in spite of the alarming news of the day, that night seemed relatively peaceful. But in the morning, they heard that the soldiers had refused to follow orders and shoot into the crowds. They had retreated, in fact, and returned to their barracks. The Revolution had started in earnest.
A few of the male dancers ventured out into the street later that afternoon, but they returned very quickly, and barricaded the doors of the ballet. They were safe there, but there was shocking news from beyond their little world, and it grew more horrifying day by day. On March fifteenth, they learned that the Czar had abdicated on behalf of himself and the Czarevitch, in favor of his brother, Grand Duke Michael, and was on his way back to Tsarskoe Selo, from the front, by train, to be arrested. It was impossible to understand, much less absorb, what was happening all around them. Like the others, Danina was unable to understand all that they heard. The information was conflicting and confusing.
It was fully a week later, on March twenty-second, when Danina finally got a hastily scribbled note from Nikolai, brought to her in the hands of one of the guards who had been allowed to leave Tsarskoe Selo. “We are under house arrest,” it said simply. “I am able to come and go, but cannot leave them. All of the Grand Duchesses have the measles, and the Czarina is desperately worried about them, and Alexei. Stay where you are, stay safe, my darling, I will come to you when I can. And I pray that we will be together very soon again. Know always that I love you, more than life itself. Don't venture out in the midst of this danger. Above all, stay safe until I come. With all my love, N.”
She read the letter again and again, and held it in trembling hands. It was beyond belief. The Czar had abdicated, and they were under house arrest. It was impossible to believe it. And she was desperately sorry she had left them. If they were to be in any danger, she would have preferred to be with him. To die with him, if need be.
It was late March when Nikolai finally came to her, looking exhausted and disheveled. He had come on horseback all the way from Tsarskoe Selo, but it had been the only way he could travel. The soldiers guarding the Imperial family had allowed him to leave, and promised he could return. But he had a look of desperation as he sat with her in the corridor outside Madame Markova's office, and told her in no uncertain terms that, as soon as they could arrange it, they would have to leave Russia.
“Terrible times are coming. We have no idea what will happen here now. I have convinced Marie she must take the boys and go home. They will leave next week. She is still English, and they will allow her safe passage, but they may not be as kind to us, if we stay here. I want to wait until the girls are well over the measles, and make sure that the family is safe. And then we'll arrange to go to America, to my cousin Viktor.”
“I can't believe this.” Danina was horrified as she listened. It seemed as though in a matter of weeks, their whole world had come to an end. “How are they? Are they very frightened?” She was so worried about them. They had been through so much in the past month, and Nikolai said, with a look of concern, “No, they are all remarkably brave. And once the Czar returned, everyone became very calm. The guards are quite reasonable, but the family cannot leave the grounds now.”