That day for luncheon he came with his father and his brothers, but soon enough we made a date for him to come again alone, late one evening, on his mother’s name day, July 22, when the rest of the family would be occupied. He rode over from Ropsha, the Vladimir country estate, leaving behind his mother’s annual party in her own honor, chairs filled with Romanovs, leaving behind the Gypsy musicians fiddling in the garden, the food spoiling on tables set among the flower beds. Petersburg was hot that month, the walls of the buildings glowing red with the sun, the Neva thick and still. But Strelna was part of a constellation of islands at the mouth of the Gulf of Finland, and here the heat mellowed into a dreamy warmth as the Neva surged toward the Baltic Sea. I waited outside on my terrace for Andrei, pacing just as I had once paced at Krasnoye Selo while waiting for the young tsarevich to take me for a ride in his troika, reluctant to sit down, for I didn’t want to crease my starched summer dress. When Andrei finally arrived in the late evening’s dusk, he brought on his boots the yellow sand of the roads and on his clothes the scent of the flowering jasmine and the lilies of the valley that grew at the sides of them. We lingered on the terrace listening to the nightingales, which are silenced only by the light, and it seemed when eventually he went to my bed we took the birds and the lilies of the valley there with us where Andrei, almost a virgin, made love to me as the tsar had once made love to me, with soft surprise. And it was as if the tsar, a fairer, blonder version of him, had been returned to me, and I could continue, through this proxy, to live the life I should have had with him.
Soon after that, Andrei bought his own palace on the English Embankment, No. 28, so that we would have a place to meet privately, out of the sight of Sergei and out of the sight of Andrei’s mother—who had been horrified enough by my friendship with her husband and was enraged now by his forbearance at my friendship with their youngest son. Andrei’s palace had belonged to Baron von Dervis, who had made his fortune in railroads, and his widow, in the few years left to her, had remade all the rooms in high style alternately rococo and Gothic, reminiscent of the Winter Palace. Andrei changed nothing about the mansion, did not even remove the von Dervis monograms and coats of arms, did not, in fact, even live there, but used the place as a stage set for our parties and our trysts. Yet Sergei, of course, knew about this purchase and knew also that I visited Andrei secretly there, and he endured this as penance. He had abandoned me when my son was one hour old, still coated with yellow wax, and he had heard me cry after him as he galloped through my garden and jumped my hedge. It had taken three years and my father’s death for Sergei to offer me a word. Did I think of the deceit I offered him the day I told him I carried his son and all those days after when still I kept silent? Conveniently, I did not.
Andrei and I were nevertheless discreet. We conducted our affair in a different neighborhood or we went abroad, to the French Riviera, where Andrei, in a gesture to rival Sergei’s, bought me a villa in Cap D’Ail. In Russia, too, we stayed out of sight, as the von Dervis mansion stood where the English Embankment faced the Neva as it curved south, away from the Winter Palace and the New Mikhailovsky Palace, and from it one had a different view, that of Vasilievsky Island. The Rumyantsev Mansion stood at No. 44. The Vorontzov-Dashkovs at No. 10. Countess Laval at No. 4, where Pushkin himself read aloud his Boris Godunov in 1828. Diaghilev lived at No. 22. All of these mansions serve some other purpose now. The great noble families are long gone—some of their houses are museums. The Laval mansion is a historical archive. Andrei’s home became first a Ministry of Agriculture under the Provisional Government. I hear in 1961 it became the USSR’s first Palace of Weddings. I like to think of the young couples arriving there, perhaps the girl with orange blossoms tucked behind one ear, a little unsteady on her heels. Perhaps out of some prescience of what this palace would one day become, Andrei was driven one late afternoon to announce he wished to marry me, and he threw off our sable coverlet to dress and, leaving me there in the bed, rode immediately home to announce his intentions to his parents. And I thought, How delightful, how perfect. Let me make trouble in the palace of every Romanov!
Miechen, of course, railed at him that he had been bewitched into destroying his future. She was already maneuvering for her daughter, Elena, to marry a king and for her son Boris to marry Niki’s eldest daughter, and she did not want Andrei to throw away his chances of a great match, as had his brother Kyril, who just that past year eloped with the divorcée Victoria Melita and as a consequence had been stripped of his titles, income, and country. Perhaps Kyril’s recklessness had inspired Andrei? Grand Duke Vladimir admonished him that I was a pleasant enough diversion but nothing more. He should know. No, he could not marry me, Andrei said, returning to me, sheepishly. I laughed and snapped my fingers at him. How very like the young tsarevich! I knew I was unmarriageable. It was not only Andrei who could not marry me. No man of any real rank could, nor would one of lesser rank want to, I had been so well used. No, the tsar could not marry me, Sergei could not marry me, even Andrei could not marry me. When Princess Radziwill congratulated me later that year on having two grand dukes at my feet, I forced myself to laugh and reply, And why not? I have two feet.
What I did not have was the tsar, who had turned his face from me and my son no matter what trouble I stirred up in the beds of his capital.
When Vova saw me going off those afternoons to Andrei’s, he was jealous and, as he assumed I was going off to rehearse at the theater, he said he was old enough now to come with me. He wanted to see the stage, he cried, he wanted to see me dance, he wanted to take lessons at the theater school, and as I had once done to my father—until, exasperated, he took me to Lev Ivanov, who watched me pose and dance and said, All right. Let her come to the school straightaway!—I was seven!—so Vova also launched an elaborate campaign. He would live at the school, he said, and I could be his teacher. They will not take you until you are ten, I told him. Until then you will study with your tutors. By the time he was ten, I figured, he would forget all this, and so I hoped, for at ten or twelve, boys could enroll not only at the Theater School, where I had no intention of enrolling him—where my brother Josef ’s children Slava and later Celina attended—but also at the prestigious Corps des Pages, where, just before Vova’s birth, Sergei had, at my urging, placed his name on a list. For after all, the young tsarevich still lived—Alix’s uncle, Leopold, had lived to thirty-one before a hemorrhage from a minor car accident claimed him—and Vova must have a life. The Corps des Pages admitted only the sons of grand dukes, lieutenant-generals, vice admirals, and privy councilors, and my son, as far as they knew, was the son of Grand Duke Sergei Mikhailovich. The old Vorontzov palace, designed in the 1790s by the same Rastrelli who had created the Catherine Palace and Peterhof for Empress Elizabeth, had housed the school for over a hundred years, and on its grounds were both an Orthodox and a Catholic church. Within the palace were rooms for dormitories and classrooms and a ballroom with a great gallery where the school hosted its seasonal balls.