My sister caught my boy as I squatted silently, clinging to a bed post, while my doctor smoked cigars with Sergei in the next room until the baby’s cries hurried him in, and she and I whispered to each other, It’s a boy, it’s a boy. And though she shared in my delight, she did not know the whole truth of it. Look at his fingers, look at his feet, look at his face, his beautiful round face. My son had the wide Russian face of most Romanov babies, and a widow’s peak of hair that lapped at his forehead. My sister held him to me so I could kiss him there. By age six, he would retain only the broad forehead; the rest of his face would narrow, chiseled into a long triangle. I whispered lyubezny, my dear, and milenki, my little darling, to the son I had dreamed of having. If I were married, I would have lit then for him the candles I saved from my wedding, as a symbol of his parents’ love to light his safe passage through the world. If I were married, I would wrap my child in the shirt his father had worn just the day before today, another old Russian custom to symbolize the father’s protection offered to his newborn. But there were no candles or shirts for my son.
And when the doctor ran from the room to tell Sergei that the baby was a boy and, no, quite robust and certainly full term, Sergei, my sister said—for she had followed the doctor with the baby in her arms—blanched, for he could count backward as well as I to the summer he was gone. He put out his cigar and, without even looking at the baby she held, went to the stables, and to my sister’s amazement, saddled his horse and rode away from the dacha, from Strelna, from me. I suppose I had thought nothing could take him from my side. The doctor’s a liar, I railed to my sister, he’s trying to ruin me, as I struggled up from the bed in time to watch from my window as Sergei rode his horse through the garden and, I worried, might ride it into the sea. It looked as if God would punish me, after all.
My mother came to visit me at Strelna for the first time the day after my son was born. She had never come to my dacha before or to English Prospekt, out of moral principle, but when my sister reported I was sick and all alone, having been abandoned by Grand Duke Sergei, my parents’ worst fears were realized and my father dispatched my mother to nurse me and then bring me home. For now, Sergei still paid the expenses of my house and dacha, but who knew how long he would continue to do so and how could I afford either on a dancer’s salary? My parents wanted to move me back to Liteiny Prospekt with my illegitimate son, whom they said my sister and her new husband would adopt. For Julia had married her beau, Baron Ali Zeddeler, that very year and she had become a baroness, and I, for all my conniving, was nothing but my parents’ disgrace. My mother sat by my bed, and in my sickroom I breathed in her soft skin and her lilac scent. Too ashamed to look at her, I slept or pretended to. I was too weak to talk or to eat. My mother had to feed me by tipping a spoonful of broth into my mouth as I lay there, just as Alix had done for Niki. Then my mother tucked my son into bed with me and crooked my arm around him, cinching us so close I could not help but inhale the intoxicatingly sweet smell of him. I was lucky, she told me. I had a healthy son. And whatever shame his birth caused me could not compare to the pain of a stillbirth or a dying child. I’ve told you she had thirteen children. What I didn’t tell you was that she buried five of them, my brother Stanislaus when he was four years old, and four other children in their infancies, children from her first marriage. She had had to place each little child in a box in the ground and let the rain pour over him, let the sun bake the earth but leave him cold. That, she said, was unbearable, not this. And I suppose it had been, for looking at this round-faced infant, his mouth working as if to suck even in his sleep, I could not imagine him in a box or anywhere but in the crook of my arm. Niki’s father, on the twenty-first anniversary of the death of his second son, Alexander, an infant who had not been even one when he died, wrote to his wife of his intolerable pain that their boy was not with them, that he was not there to enjoy his days with the other children, their other boys, that they would never have their angel with them in this life, that this was a wound that would never close. Alexander III. The bear with a trunk like a barrel, a forehead like a stone wall.
Sergei, too, had lost what he thought was his child and his grief was so great it drove him over the hedge in my garden and onto the High Road. Ali had told my sister that Sergei had wept to the tsar that I had betrayed him, that I had given birth to a son of another man and that he was now lost, and that the tsar had held him and said nothing. But Niki must have known then that I had given him what he had wanted. At times it seemed the tsar and then Sergei appeared at the foot of my bed on horseback, thundering over me, and then like Hades, one of them swept up my son, and, cloak flying, made off with him while I wailed and walked the empty ground they left behind. I left a damp mark wherever I lay in my bed, and when eventually I recovered, the bed was thrown out, the mattress burned, and every piece of furniture and each wall wiped down with disinfectant.
When I was well enough to lie on the couch, Grand Duke Vladimir began to walk to my dacha each afternoon to visit me, to stroke my hair, and when I could sit up, he read to me, and when I could hold cards, we played mushka, and when it came time for the baby to be christened and I had no name for him—I could not call him Sergei, and I could not, though I wanted to, call him Nicholas—the grand duke said, Give him my name. On that day, July 23, he presented my son with a cross hung on a platinum chain, the crucifix itself a dark green stone hacked from the Urals and polished in a Petersburg shop. And so I knew Vladimir would protect me and that I would be able, despite my disgrace, to return to the stage. His attentions to me, of course, did not go unnoticed, and the rumors began that my son was his, and Miechen tightened her lips whenever someone whispered my name. Would she tighten her lips still further if she knew Niki was my son’s father, my son’s paternity pushing her yet one square further from the throne?
During this time, also, my sister told me Sergei had begun an affair with a woman he had known a long while, Countess Barbara Vorontzov-Dashkov, who had married into an old and important family of Moscow boyare, long associated with the court, and at this news my heart shrank like a desiccated old nut in its shell and it rattled there in its place behind my rib cage. Niki’s father had years ago bought the old Vorontzov estate in the Crimea, with its waterfall, its pine tree forests, its view of the Yalta harbor, and its French château, done Third Empire–style, and Sergei and Niki had played there and at the Winter Palace and Gatchina with Barbara’s future husband, Vanya. They, along with the other Vorontzov-Dashkov children, the Sheremetiev children, the Dariatinsky children, had run on the palace lawns, ridden the miniature railways, taken tea at the Huntsman’s Lodge. Niki and Vanya had each married, but Sergei had not. And now Vanya was dead and his wife was a widow and in her Sergei found another vulnerable woman to love. I did not know whether the countess visited Sergei at his palace or he called on her at her mansion on the English Embankment. I did not know if their lovemaking involved a bed or a garden bench, the sound of a clock chiming or the smell of crushed rose petals, but in 1905, the countess went to Switzerland, where she quietly gave birth to Sergei’s son, whom she named Alexander. At his birth, he was adopted by the countess’s friend Sophie von Dehn. Why did the countess not keep her son? Why did her liaison with Sergei not end in a marriage? Wait, and I will tell you.