Enchantments: A Novel of Rasputin's Daughter and the Romanovs Read Online Free Page A

quickly, hurrying the collapse of three centuries of Romanov rule and of tsarism itself.
    Hemophilia: for all it was spoken, the word might as well have not been invented.

House Arrest

    F EBRUARY 1917 BROUGHT TEMPERATURES so low a thousand locomotive boilers froze and burst, each stranding as many as fifty cars. And not one of the few trains left running could enter Petersburg; every track leading into the capital had been buried in drifts. The laborers who would otherwise have dug them out were dying at the front, a line that moved over the continent as fire does through the dry grass of the steppes, leaving smoke and ruin in its wake. No flour was delivered to the city, no butter, and no sugar. Without coal, lights dimmed and flickered. Newspapers went unpublished. The letters I wrote and mailed to my mother never reached her. The telegraph office was closed. Actors performed to empty houses, as did musicians and ballerinas. And vodka poured from water faucets and ran in the gutters—it must have, for never has there been, neither before nor after, such uniformity of drunkenness. Inebriated bands of looters broke into bakeries and smashed storefronts to make off with bread, while a few doors down the Nevsky Prospekt the windows of Fabergé remained intact, crusts suddenly more valuable than cabochons.
    Corpses piled up in the streets. Every so often, the wagon from the potter’s field would stop; then two men jumped down and picked up one body after another. The first man took the corpse by the hands, the second grabbed the feet, and together they swung itonto the growing heap. When they’d collected all they could, they drove the bodies to a pit, dropped them in, poured on the quicklime, and went back to the streets for more. It looked as if St. Petersburg was dying as she had been born, thousands of unknown and uncounted workers dumped in communal graves.
    “How strange and claustrophobic it must be for the dead who haven’t a private grave or even a coffin. I’m sure such things are as important to the dead as to the living.”
    “What peculiar things you say, Masha.”
    “I can’t not think of them, poor things, all heaped together on top of one another, having to molder next to strangers, the dust of one life mingling with that of another. And very lonely, as no one can come calling on a person without a headstone.”
    “There’s no point in thinking of them at all, as they are dead and you didn’t know them.”
    “I know you consider yourself very clever, your highness, but not all thoughts are undertaken with a purpose. They just arrive, that’s all.”
    “I wish you wouldn’t say that.”
    “What?”
    “ ‘Your highness.’ ”
    “I’m sorry, Alyosha,” I said, and I begged his pardon, as I’d had to do on several occasions since the day we were left in the schoolroom to get to know each other, an introduction postponed by my falling ill with quite the worst flu I’ve ever had. My head was aching when I left the tsarina in her boudoir, my eyes dry and hot. As soon as I was delivered to my room, I crawled under the counterpane in my street clothes and fell into a restless sleep from which I woke before dawn, worrying over Father’s body, which the coroner had promised to release by noon, and his burial, for which arrangements had yet to be made.
    There was no point trying to rest. I bathed, dressed, and securedpermission to return to the capital, and by the time I made my way back to bed, I’d missed another and another night’s rest and, thoroughly spent, succumbed to a fever that climbed and broke, climbed and broke, a hundred times it seemed, before I was well enough to sit up against my pillows with a tray on my lap.
    “You’d better eat something,” Varya observed from the chair by the window, where she was buffing her fingernails in the wan winter light. “You look like a ghost.”
    I felt like one too, when I made my way to the water closet, my head spinning with the effort of