It was March and snowing in Russia when Niki left for Coburg. My life, at twenty-one years, was over. I lay like a frozen corpse in my bed that week, watching the white blur the wind made outside my dark bedroom window, the ring of Count Krassinsky, which I had found, too late, a tiny bit of ice in my fist. In Germany that year, though, March brought with it an early spring, lilac blossoms, pendulous and heavy, making soft purple bows as Niki strolled through the palace park with his consort, Alix, on his arm.
Later that March, Niki dispatched his cousin Sergei, one of those Mikhailovichi cousins, to my house to tell me that Alix had at last accepted his proposal. Niki had written all the family from Germany of his jubilation that his prayers had been answered, of how Alix had wept for three days, saying, I cannot, I cannot, before finally agreeing, Yes, I will marry you. If I had been there, I would have slapped her. What could possibly be her hesitation?—not that I was sorry she hesitated. But, apparently, according to Sergei, it was only when Alix apprehended that her brother’s new bride would replace her as the first lady of Hesse-Darmstadt and that Alix would now become the spinster sister-in-law that she changed her mind. How better to upstage the bride, Victoria Melita—and oh, I must tell you this, she was not long the bride, for she later divorced Alix’s brother to marry one of Vladimir and Miechen’s sons (is that not unbelievable?)—what better way to upstage the bride than to become the future empress of All the Russias? Niki and Alix’s engagement, Sergei told me, immediately became the talk of Coburg. Even Niki’s mother wrote to dear Alix to ask if she preferred diamonds, sapphires, or emeralds. Why, Alix liked diamonds, sapphires, emeralds, and pearls, apparently: to honor their engagement, Nicholas gave Alix a matching ring and necklace of pink pearl, an emerald the size of an egg dangling from a bracelet, a sapphire-and-diamond brooch, and a sautoire created by Fabergé of so many ropes of pearls Alix could drape them from her bodice to her hem. Niki could not have paid for this—any of this. That last piece alone cost 250,000 rubles. The money had to have come from his father. The first of many imperial rubles spent on Alix of Hesse.
I walked the floors of my Petersburg house, the house I hated now, and as I walked I could hear the pistol-shot sounds of the ice of the Neva cracking and breaking up, and soon enough the cold water would begin to move again, blocks of ice hurtling along with the current from Lagoda and the current bringing with it Alix of Hesse-Darmstadt. Sergei followed me awkwardly in his overpolished boots, his voice a trail of vapors, the syllables breaking apart as soon as he uttered a word. Poof. Poor Sergei, following a madwoman through her rented home, trying to reason with her. I did not want to be reasoned with. I believe I actually pulled at my hair. I ran through the austere reception rooms, their octagonal tables crimped with gilt, their feather-stuffed settees, their dark-wood rococo-revival chairs with backs like laced antlers, all the artifacts of that old grand duke’s ambition and the artifacts of mine, and then circled back into the private rooms, the Russian rooms, with their mustard and lime walls, their bloodred oriental rugs, and the framed photographs of my parents, who had warned me not to leave them. Sergei followed me all the while, his high, broad forehead all twisted up and his gentle eyes full of pity—no jokes to tell me now! No, instead he tried to tell me how Niki planned to settle on me 100,000 rubles and the house on English Prospekt. I knew the tsarevich did not have unlimited funds. The 100,000 rubles represented his entire appanage of a year, the only money whose use he did not have to account for. The house itself, at 400,000 rubles, would have to be bought for me, as I found out later, by the Potato Club—for Niki’s cousins each earned a grand ducal appanage of 200,000 rubles a year, as well as income from their own and their father’s enormous estates. Yes, Niki was quite the stepchild, in comparison, as tsarevich. So in an act of brotherhood to help the tsarevich wash himself clean of me, the Potato Club made a great fountain of its money. Apparently, the tsar Alexander III, who had seated me with Niki on my graduation day and who now hung ropes of pearls on Alix, would not put up a single kopek to pay off Niki’s little Polish whore.
As I sat stonily on a chaise, Sergei drew a sheaf of papers from a leather satchel and made as if to explain them to me. All I needed to do, Sergei said, was to sign a few documents transferring the title and agreeing to the settlement, how lucky was that? How lucky? This lucky. I spat on the papers like a peasant woman from Borjomi and he folded them up at once and apologized. This could wait a few days, he said. A few days? How quickly they wished to settle accounts! Did they really expect me to capitulate so immediately? Perhaps they hoped to knock me over with their generosity. After all, it was no small sum, even though that day I spat on it. I have to confess, even as I spat, I felt a small thrill of pride at the amount. My salary at the theater was a thousand rubles a year. So Niki thought me worth a hundred years, five hundred years if one counted the house. But if I signed the settlement, I knew I would never see Nicholas alone ever again, and that I could not bear. And so I did not sign. But it wasn’t until Sergei had bowed once again and left that I found the great big tears of self-pity I could not locate earlier.
It was through Sergei that I extorted a last meeting with Nicholas. As Niki was now engaged, it would not be proper for us to meet at the house where we had conducted our affair, and yet Niki wanted the meeting to be secret. I can see now, of course, that he did not want to meet me at all, but courtesy was a cardinal virtue for him, so he agreed to my request and Sergei arranged a rendezvous for us near an old barn out on the Volkhonsky High Road, halfway between Petersburg and Peterhof, that grand country retreat Catherine the Great had built in imitation of Versailles. By then it was May, the time the Neva had been declared open for navigation and the imperial family traditionally left the city for the country. The High Road allowed glimpses of the sea between the trees and occasionally those trees thinned out to reveal fields where cows wandered grazing. The High Road terminated at the Grand Palace, its gilded cupola topped by a crowned triple-headed eagle so that from every angle the bird had two heads. But I would not travel so far.
I rode out in my carriage with the same Russian coachman who had driven me two years earlier on my afternoon promenades along Nevsky Prospekt and Morskaya Ulitsa, driven me in circles around Petersburg in my desperation to surprise the tsarevich in his carriage. I studied the back of the elaborate costume worn for the last hundred years by all the old Russian drivers—the green blouse closed by silver buttons under the left arm, the belt embroidered with gold thread from which hung a hunting dagger, the low hat with a long flap that shielded the back of the neck from the sun. What did this man think of me, this little girl who had flung herself like a fleck of mud at the tsarevich and was now about to be scraped off by his fingernail? That I was lucky to have flown so high? Or that it was time I learned my place? Society would be so divided—some would pity me, others would grow slippery with pleasure. But no longer would anyone envy Mathilde-Maria Felixovna Kschessinska unless I could effect a great feat. I touched at the orchids I had pinned in my hair and reviewed what I would say. I had a plan, concocted over these long two months during which Alix began her study of the Russian language and prepared for her conversion to the Orthodox Church and during which I alternated between hysteria and despair. My behavior terrified my family—and then, when I hatched this idea, I became suddenly calm—which worried them still more. They begged me to return home to Liteiny Prospekt and to resume my old life with them, with my sister, but I knew if I did that, within a few months, whatever comfort home provided would pale and then I would be plagued by longing, for Niki, for the world of the Romanovs whose slice of this life was so much tastier in every way than the life of anyone else on earth. I wanted to keep eating from their golden plates. And so I intended to persuade Niki to keep me as his mistress after his marriage—after all, his grandfather had had both wife Marie Alexandrovna and mistress Ekaterina Dolgorukaya. Why should Niki not do the same? I could think of no reason why not, and once I suggested this to him, I was certain he would slap his forehead and say, Mala, I should have thought of that myself!