The next morning when I awoke, Anton had brought me a glass of water but I knocked it over. I wouldn’t take anything from him. ‘We are going to make a little trip today,’ he said. ‘I thought you would like to see where your family died before you join them.’ And it may sound strange but I was comforted by this. I believed him when he told me they were dead and all I wanted was to join them in the hereafter, the sooner the better. ‘You must behave as I tell you when we reach the house,’ he said, ‘or else I shall bring you back to this place and keep you here as my slave to use as I wish. Remember that.’ He wrapped me in a long cloak with a hood, which was stifling in the summer heat, then we rode through the streets until I could see the Ipatiev House. My heart was beating hard. Might Malama be somewhere nearby looking for me? Might Anton have been playing a trick and my family were still alive?
The guards were not at their usual posts but two of them were sweeping the yard, backwards and forwards in a scrubbing motion. Anton took me in through a side door and down a flight of steps that led to the basement. Twenty-three steps, I counted. ‘This is where it happened,’ he whispered, and straight away I could smell the salty metallic scent of blood. It turned my stomach. Anton had his arm through mine and dragged me along to a storeroom and as soon as I saw it I felt faint. Someone had tried to clean up but there was so much blood that their efforts had only served to smear it across the floor, up the walls. In places it had congealed into dark lakes. ‘This is where they died,’ Anton told me. ‘Your mama had a chair in the middle here’ – he stood on the spot – ‘and little Alexei beside her.’ My knees were collapsing and I leaned back on a wall as Anton demonstrated where each one had stood. I could feel their presence in the room and sense their terror, their screams. And then he told me that the girls had been slow to die so they were slashed with bayonets. And he showed me the slash marks in the floor, the bullet holes in the wall, and there was a buzzing sound in my ears. I must have collapsed because suddenly I was lying in the blood and it was all over me. The blood of my parents, the blood of my sisters, my baby brother.
Anton took out a gun. ‘Brace yourself,’ he said, pressing it into the back of my head, ‘because now you will join them.’ I prayed that he would hurry up, then I prayed that Malama would have a good life without me, then I prayed for the souls of my family, but still the shot did not come. I opened my eyes. Anton was leering down with sadistic enjoyment. ‘Perhaps I will not kill you yet,’ he sneered. ‘No one knows you are still alive so no one will seek you. I will keep you for a few more nights, until I get bored of you.’ I froze at his words. The thought of going back to that room was abhorrent.
‘Please … if you have any mercy, please shoot me,’ I begged, but that made him laugh.
‘I like to hear you beg,’ he said. ‘Tonight I will make you beg some more.’
He yanked me up by the hair and bundled me outside. I thought of screaming for help from the two guards sweeping the yard but Anton clapped a filthy hand across my mouth. I don’t think they knew who I was. I was stunned, incapable of action, and then we were back on Anton’s horse and galloping across town to the hovel and I sank into a state of utter hopelessness. No one knew I was there apart from Anton and his two acolytes. Did Yurovsky think I was free? Is that why he slaughtered my family? Was he looking for me even now?
That night was worse than before as Anton violated me in different ways, forcing himself into my mouth, biting my breasts and thighs and hurting me in every manner he could think of. I could hear the other two men next door and knew they must hear my cries but neither of them intervened. I was utterly alone.
Anton fell asleep at last and began to snore. I lay awake, every part of me in pain. I could not get the smell of blood out of my nostrils; it was caked in my hair, on my skin. The blood of my loved ones. Oh God, may no one else ever have to experience that.
The door to the room opened slowly and one of the men beckoned me to come. At first I thought he planned to violate me too but he put a finger to his lips and opened the door to the street outside. I staggered to the opening, grabbing what clothes I could, my legs barely able to support my weight. ‘You do not deserve this. Take a horse. Run,’ he whispered.
‘What is your name?’ I asked him, but he wouldn’t tell me. So I untied a horse and climbed on its back and I rode east towards the dawn.
Chapter Sixty-Four
Brno, Czech Republic, 16th October 2016
Kitty sat in silence while Hana was reading, feeling the horror of the words written almost a century ago. Goosebumps pricked her flesh. Hana stopped and fetched some beers from the fridge, flipped open the tops and poured them into glasses.
‘My father found Tatiana the day she escaped. He said she was raving like a madwoman and trying to hang herself from a tree but the rope kept slipping. When she told him she was a Romanov grand duchess, he thought she was delusional. It was only when she showed him the jewels hidden in the seams of her undergarments that he began to believe her. He took her back to his tent and fed her some broth, then persuaded her to rest a few hours while he decided what to do.’
Kitty tried to imagine Tatiana’s state of mind. She must have been in profound shock, but somehow this man had won her trust. ‘Your father was clearly a good person,’ she said.
‘The very best. They don’t often come like him.’ Hana smiled proudly. ‘Papa was a member of the Czech Legion fighting the Bolsheviks, but he took time away from the front line to nurse Tatiana. He told me he knew that if he left her for so much as an hour, she would have found a way to kill herself. She couldn’t bear to be alive any more, knowing what had happened to her family.’
‘Didn’t she want to find Dmitri?’
Hana tilted her head and nodded thoughtfully. ‘Sometimes she tore her hair with yearning for him then at other times she said she would die of shame if he found out what had happened to her. There were moments when she blamed him, saying if he hadn’t rescued her the rest of her family might still be alive, but then she would change her mind and cry out for him. As soon as the Czech Legion reached Ekaterinburg, Papa made enquiries but was told Dmitri had left town and no one knew how to reach him.’
‘So your father kept Tatiana with him?’
‘Of course. The Bolsheviks would have stopped at nothing to kill her had they realised she was still alive. She maintained she wanted to die and Papa had to coax her to eat. At night she woke screaming from terrible nightmares of men slashing at her with bayonets.’ Hana got up to check on the casserole bubbling in the oven and there was a blast of hot air then a fragrant meaty smell as she lifted the lid and stirred it. ‘To be honest, I don’t know how he managed. He says they followed along behind the front line and he kept Tatiana out of sight because once her face healed from the wounds that guard had inflicted, she would have been recognisable to any Russian civilian.’
Hana took out some gaudily patterned red and purple plates and heaped spoonfuls of casserole onto each then added slices of what looked like spongy white bread before passing one to Kitty. ‘Goulash with dumplings,’ she said. ‘A local speciality.’
Kitty inhaled the scent of paprika and garlic and her stomach rumbled. ‘How did they get back to the Czech Republic?’ she asked before taking a forkful. It was delicious, the goulash rich and flavourful, the texture of the dumplings soft and gooey.
Hana started her own meal. ‘The Czech Republic didn’t exist back then. When a declaration was made in October 1918 that the Czechs and Slovaks could form an independent republic from the old kingdoms of Bohemia and Moravia, the Legionnaires were overjoyed. It’s what they had long campaigned for. The civil war was not going well for the White Army and my father persuaded Tatiana to come back here with him, just until the Bolsheviks were defeated. Of course, everyone thought their downfall was imminent, that Communism was a passing phase people would get sick of. Who could have guessed it would last the rest of the century?’