Kitty watched her, wondering what it had been like to live under Communism in Czechoslovakia. That era had only ended in 1989 when student protests brought about democratic elections. Hana did not remotely match her mental image of an Eastern European of the Communist era. She had a matronly figure but she was smartly dressed in a grey skirt and pale pink blouse, and she wore a pearl necklace and matching pearl stud earrings. She probably had to dress smartly for her job. There was no sign of a husband or children in the house and she wore no rings on her fingers. Kitty was curious but didn’t like to ask about her marital status. Instead she asked when her father had told her about Tatiana.
‘He told me gradually, over the years. I always knew he had been married to someone before my mum and bit by bit the rest came out.’
‘Did you never consider telling the story publicly? To the press, I mean?’
Hana shook her head emphatically. ‘Why would I want to bring a media circus down on my head? What purpose would it serve?’
Kitty considered. ‘Maybe the truth should be told for the sake of historical record, if nothing else. And your father’s role is so heroic that I would have thought you would want it to be acknowledged.’
Hana smiled. ‘No one who knew my father was in any doubt about his heroism. He needs no more accolades than those he received in his lifetime. But this is your story too, so I suppose if you want to publicise it, that is your prerogative. I would rather not be identified, but otherwise you can reveal what you like. I will let you have copies of some photographs, if that would help.’
After they’d finished eating, Hana cleared the table and brought out a worn photograph album. The first picture in the book showed a group of men in military greatcoats and hats against a snowy landscape.
‘That’s my father, on the left,’ she said. He was taller than the others, very clean-cut and handsome.
The next pictures showed a farm and in one there was a silhouette of a woman hoeing in a field. ‘That’s Tatiana.’ Kitty peered hard but could make out nothing except that she was willowy thin.
The following photos showed some kind of village party, with flags in the street, then Kitty turned the page and there was a woman looking down at a baby with utter adoration, in a classic Madonna and Child pose. Kitty raised her eyes in question.
‘That’s Tatiana with her son Jaroslav, my half-brother. He was born in 1922, three years after they arrived in the Czech Republic. By then, she had married my father and taken the name Irena to protect her identity.’
Of course! Irena Markova, the translator of Dmitri’s books, and Grand Duchess Tatiana were one and the same person. Kitty had realised there was a connection but hadn’t made that final step. So she had come to Albany to be with him.
Even wearing the clothes of a farmer’s wife’s, with a scarf tied round her hair, Tatiana was recognisable as the second daughter of Tsar Nicholas. The fine bone structure, the intelligent eyes, the distant, self-contained air – of course it was her.
‘What happened to Jaroslav? Is he still around?’ If he was, he would be the direct heir to the Romanov dynasty.
‘No, he died in 1943. It was awful. I don’t think either Tatiana or my father ever recovered.’ Kitty flicked through pages of photographs of the boy at different stages of his life: a toddler, a schoolboy, a handsome teenager, while Hana told his story. ‘Jaroslav was always a headstrong boy. He’d been brought up to hate repression so when the Nazis marched into our country in 1939, he joined a partisan guerrilla group that sabotaged supply chains and helped to smuggle Jews out of the country. For four years he dodged capture but all the time his parents lived with their hearts in their mouths. And then in 1943, his luck ran out. He was arrested, probably tortured, and executed.’ Hana sounded emotional recalling the death of the half-brother she never knew. ‘I can’t begin to imagine how Tatiana survived that period. It’s unthinkable for one person to lose so much.’
Kitty paused over a photograph of a simple grave with a tiny vase of flowers beside it, and a headstone carved with the boy’s name and dates. ‘I know she came to America with Dmitri in 1948. How did he find her?’
‘She found him. Just before the war she came across an article about him and she was astonished because she had been told he died in 1919. She showed it to my father and he says he knew from that moment that she would leave him one day.’ Hana rose to clear their plates. ‘They had been good companions for each other and she was grateful to him for protecting her but she never loved him the all-consuming way she loved Dmitri. Of course, the war intervened, and then she was in deep mourning for Jaroslav’s death, but one day in 1948, after they’d brought in the harvest, she told my father that it was time for her to leave. She thanked him for all he had done for her and wished him the very best. It broke his heart but he didn’t try to stop her. He knew she was going to Dmitri.’
Kitty felt sorry for Vaclav. It seemed a shame after all he had done for Tatiana. ‘Did she not keep in touch?’
‘I think there were occasional letters. I don’t have copies of them. My father met my mother a few months later and I was born in 1949, so he didn’t hang around for long!’
‘Did he divorce Tatiana?’
‘I believe he had the marriage dissolved, because he married my mother when I was three. I got to be a bridesmaid at their wedding. As you can imagine, this was considered shocking back in the 1950s!’ She laughed and rolled her eyes.
‘I’m glad he had another family. He deserved to be happy.’
‘We were. The three of us had a good life. I hope Tatiana found happiness too.’
Kitty wondered about that. She knew little about Dmitri’s life in America, never mind his time with Irena. ‘I hope so too. But I wonder about the body found near his cabin. If it is her, and he was not responsible for the death – which sounds unlikely given how much they loved each other – then why would he not report it to the authorities in the normal way?’ She guessed the answer as she spoke but it was Hana who said it out loud.
‘Do you remember the furore over the bones of Romanov imposters? Anna Tschaikovsky’s remains were exhumed for further DNA tests several years after she died. I imagine he didn’t want that for Tatiana. It’s a shame it is happening now …’
Kitty was quiet. Hana had said the decision about whether to expose the truth was in her hands. Did she want them testing these bones? Or should she ask that they be buried in her great-grandfather’s grave and let the two of them rest in peace? It was a tricky decision.
The next morning a friend of Hana’s, a woman called Erika who looked roughly the same age, came to take them out in her car. When she arrived, she kissed Hana on the lips and Kitty realised they were lovers, although they did not announce it.
Erika drove them out to the karst lands and they caught a cable car over lush forested slopes down into a spectacular gorge with a river splashing through. They toured a collapsed cavern known as the Macocha Abyss, then some caves with elaborate stalactites and stalagmites, like spooky pointing fingers. There was a sense of ancient history that went back millions of years, long before the existence of man, and Kitty loved the otherworldly atmosphere.
As they walked around the footpaths of the gorge they talked a little more about Tatiana and Dmitri and Kitty realised Erika knew the story.
‘I admire the fact that she was able to adapt to being a farmer’s wife after an upbringing of such wealth and grandeur,’ Erika said. ‘Hana tells me she did the heaviest farm work without complaint.’