Let me try to explain. I can only tolerate being called by my first name by individuals of the royal family. Indeed, I do not tolerate it, but regard it as a privilege and a special distinction. I would simply be mortified if Georgii Alexandrovich, Her Highness or one of their children, even the very youngest, suddenly addressed me formally by my first name and patronymic. Two years ago I had a disagreement with Ekaterina Ioannovna concerning a maid who was unjustly accused of frivolous behaviour. I demonstrated firmness and stood my ground, and the grand duchess took offence and addressed me in strictly formal terms for an entire week. I suffered greatly, lost weight and could not sleep at night. And then we clarified matters. With her typical magnanimity, Ekaterina Ioannovna acknowledged her error. I also apologised and was allowed to kiss her hand, and she kissed me on the forehead.
But I digress.
The card players were being served by the junior footman Lipps, a novice whom I had brought with me especially to get a good look at him and see what he was worth. He had previously served at the Estonian estate of Count Beckendorf and had been recommended to me by His Excellency’s house steward, an old acquaintance of mine. He seems like quite an efficient young lad and doesn’t talk a lot, but it takes a while to recognise a good servant, unlike a bad one. In a new post everyone makes a great effort to do his best; you have to wait six months or a year, or even two, to know for certain. I observed how Lipps poured coffee, how deftly he changed a soiled napkin, how he stood in his position – that is very, very important. He stood correctly, without shifting from one foot to the other or turning his head. I decided he could probably be allowed to serve guests at small receptions.
The game was proceeding normally. First Endlung lost, and Pavel Georgievich rode along the corridor on his back. Then Fortune turned her face away from His Highness and the lieutenant demanded that the grand duke must run to the lavatory, completely undressed, and bring back a glass of water.
While Pavel Georgievich was giggling and taking his clothes off, I quietly slipped out through the door, called the valet, told him that none of the servants must look into the grand duke’s saloon and took a cape from the duty compartment. When His Highness skipped out into the corridor, peering around and covering himself with his hand, I tried to throw this long item of clothing over him, but Pavel Georgievich indignantly refused, saying that a promise is a promise, and he ran to the lavatory and then back again, laughing very much all the time.
It was a good thing that Madamoiselle Declique did not glance out to see what all the laughter was about. Fortunately, despite the late hour, His Highness Mikhail Georgievich had not gone to bed yet – he was pleased to jump up and down on a chair and then swung on a curtain for a long time. The youngest of the grand dukes is usually asleep at half past eight, but this time Mademoiselle had felt it possible to indulge him, saying that His Highness was too excited by the journey and would not fall asleep anyway.
In our Green Court the children are not raised strictly, unlike in the Blue Court of the Kirilloviches, where they maintain the family traditions of the Emperor Nikolai Pavlovich. There boys are raised like soldiers: from the age of seven they learn campaign discipline, are toughened by sluicing with cold water and put to sleep in folding camp beds. But Georgii Alexandrovich is regarded as a liberal in the imperial family. He raises his sons leniently in the French manner and, in the opinion of his relatives, he has completely spoiled his only daughter, his favourite.
Her Highness, thank God, did not come out of her compartment either and did 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 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.