‘Did she never consider trying to reclaim any of the Romanov fortune?’ Kitty asked.
‘Oh, no,’ Hana replied. ‘Once, when they had financial difficulties, Vaclav travelled to Prague to sell some jewels she had smuggled out of Russia and so many questions were asked that he ran away. In the end he sold them to a black marketeer who did not question their provenance, but he probably got far less than they were worth.’
‘She said she never wanted to be a royal,’ Erika added. ‘She liked a simple life.’
‘And your father: didn’t he want to be rich?’ Kitty asked Hana.
‘Never! Money had no importance for him.’ Hana laughed. ‘He was a wise man.’
‘Do you think the story would be worth a lot of money now?’ Erika asked Kitty.
‘Probably,’ she agreed, ‘but Hana and I have been discussing it and I’m not sure either of us wants to be in the media spotlight.’
‘But you are a journalist, are you not?’ Erika asked.
Kitty liked these honest, down-to-earth women and in answer to their questions she told them about her decision to change career and work as a carpenter. ‘There are plenty of journalists in the world, talented writers with drive and ambition, and I’m just not one of them. But I’m proud of the work I did on Dmitri’s cabin this summer,’ she finished. ‘If you ever want to borrow it for a holiday, you’d be more than welcome.’
‘What a lovely idea.’ Hana put her arm round Erika and gave her a squeeze.
Chapter Sixty-Five
Lake Akanabee, New York State, December 1968
Dmitri and Tatiana chuckled when they read in December 1968 of the marriage of Anna Tschaikovsky, the woman who claimed to be Grand Duchess Anastasia, to an American genealogist called Jack Manahan, who was twenty years her junior. She had made an entire career of her claims and had many influential supporters, although she had never been accepted by the living Romanov family members. Now Jack Manahan announced himself as the new ‘Grand Duke in waiting’ from their home in Virginia, a claim met with scorn by the Romanovs.
‘Don’t you want to go and visit your sister now that she is in America?’ Dmitri teased.
‘Goodness! Whatever for? She looks nothing like Anastasia, and she sounds rather a disturbed creature.’
‘No one would believe us if we announced that you are Grand Duchess Tatiana. It would be very hard to prove, although to me you look the same as the first day I set eyes on you.’
Tatiana had celebrated her seventieth birthday the previous year. She was still slender, with glorious cheekbones and the same intelligent grey eyes ringed with violet she’d had as a girl. She was careful to wear a straw hat to keep the sun off her pale skin and was not nearly as lined as Dmitri. At the age of seventy-seven, his cheeks hung in folds and his forehead was scored by deep furrows.
Tatiana leaned over to trace his wrinkles and frown lines with a finger. ‘I think I have been the cause of most of these,’ she smiled. ‘We didn’t choose the easiest paths in life.’
‘Do you ever think about leaving a record of the truth for future historians to find long after we are gone?’ Dmitri asked. ‘I would like my children to understand why I was unfaithful to their mother, even if they don’t forgive me.’
‘You can write it if you like. I don’t care what is said when I am gone.’
‘Why don’t we write it together?’ Dmitri suggested. ‘Starting from 1914 when you floated like an angel into the hospital ward where I lay with my wounded leg and we talked about dogs and then books.’
‘There are so many horrendous memories that would have to be included alongside the beautiful ones, I fear it might upset us to revisit them.’
‘It’s all such a long time ago,’ Dmitri said. ‘I think I can cope if you can.’
And so they began reconstructing their joint story. Dmitri wrote the first draft in Russian – he still couldn’t express himself as poetically as he wished in English – then Tatiana translated it, adding in her own perspectives. He knew most of her story already – she had even confided in him about the horrors she had endured at the hands of Anton – but now they looked back they could see how quirks of fate had played with them.
If only one of the many attempts to rescue the Romanovs had been successful, he and she could have led a life together in exile. They could have had children together. If Alexei hadn’t been ill in April 1918 and Vasily Yakovlev had managed to get them to Omsk; or if Armistead had arrived on the 13th of July 1918 and spirited them away … These things didn’t bear thinking about. There was no purpose in regret.
They realised they had missed each other by days after the murder of her family. When the Czechs entered Ekaterinburg in late July and Vaclav tried to find Dmitri, he was away in Verkhoturye, hunting for the Romanovs. If only Vaclav had gone to see Sir Thomas Preston, the British ambassador, he would have told him. ‘I should have suggested that,’ Tatiana sighed. ‘I wasn’t thinking clearly.’
When she received the letter from Dmitri’s mother saying he had died at Tsaritsyn in 1919, she should have stayed in touch, or asked to be put in contact with his sisters, then they could have been reunited the following year when he arrived in Constantinople.
‘All that time we wasted …’ Dmitri mused. ‘And yet we have each other now, and somehow this is enough happiness for one lifetime.’
‘Let’s not pretend that you weren’t happy with Rosa too,’ Tatiana smiled. ‘I regret I never met her. She was a remarkable woman.’
‘And Vaclav was a hero. I’m still amazed that he took such good care of you and asked nothing in return.’
‘It’s true. He was a gentleman who never tried to come into my bed until I invited him. We were both lucky in the people who rescued us – although I’m not sure they were quite so lucky.’
Both Rosa and Vaclav featured in the book they wrote together. Chapter by chapter they drafted, translated and polished, reading and commenting on each other’s work. It got to the stage that when Dmitri reread it and found a phrase he admired, he could no longer remember whether it was his or Tatiana’s, so intertwined were their words.
They spent all summer at the cabin and came at weekends in winter too, but they repaired to Tatiana’s Albany house during the height of bug season in May and June and during the coldest weather, when the lake was frozen and the damp ate into Dmitri’s elderly bones, making his leg injuries ache more than fifty years after they were inflicted. They transported their typewriter and the growing stack of pages to and fro in Dmitri’s new Pontiac motorcar, which had room in the back for Trina, the Borzoi.
‘Where should we end our story?’ Tatiana asked one day. ‘I think it should stop with me finding you at the Café Slavia in Prague.’
‘But then it will not answer my children’s questions …’ Dmitri mused. ‘I want them to understand that there was never any question of me leaving their mother, and that you agreed. I want them to know how sorry I am about the way they found out about you, and how much I miss being part of their lives.’
‘Marta might not like you writing for publication that she is no longer communicating with you,’ Tatiana said. ‘It paints her in a bad light.’
Dmitri pondered that. ‘Why don’t I send both her and Nicholas a copy of the manuscript, saying that I will be happy to cut anything they don’t want published? I hope they will be tempted to read it knowing it concerns their lives.’
They agreed on this plan and had two Xerox copies made. One was posted to Nicholas in California and Dmitri drove to Marta’s house in Albany to deliver the other, only to have the door answered by a stranger.
‘They moved to England years ago now,’ the woman said. ‘I had a forwarding address but I think they’ve moved on.’
Dmitri called Nicholas’s house in California and spoke to Pattie, who told him that Marta and Stanley lived in a suburb of London, where he sold insurance since the cutlery company had gone bankrupt. She gave him the new address.