The Romanov Bride

Chapter 22 PAVEL

When I first heard the story, I couldn’t believe it, it was too incredible. They said she wished it kept secret, that no one was supposed to learn of her hush-hush trip. Russians feasted on gossip, though, and it wasn’t long before word of her bizarre actions spread to every corner of the Empire. The guards were perhaps the ones who leaked it, maybe first to their wives, then over tea or beer at the corner traktir. None of which was a surprise, because stories of the tongue were the way those who couldn’t read have always passed news from hut to hut and village to village. I’d even heard some of our educated masters say, “Who can trust the papers and their censors, anyway?” Right, what better way was there to get information than gossip?

But the trouble was, which story was true?

One fat droshky driver told me that one of the guards personally told him she was allowed all the way into his cell, but when Kalyayev recognized her he went crazy and leaped at her and nearly ripped out her throat-and she would have been killed on the spot had not two loyal guards pulled her away. Another, a charwoman at the prison, swore that with her own eyes she saw Kalyayev fall to his knees upon seeing her, that they talked of God and mercy, and that in the end he kissed her hands and feet and begged for mercy. Yet someone else, a herring man at the market, said he’d heard that she had arranged for Kalyayev to be transferred to a monastery lost in the farthest parts of Siberia, where he was to be walled into a cave with just a window for food, buried alive like a forgotten hermit. Still another story claimed that she begged the Emperor for clemency, but that one I didn’t believe at all. She couldn’t be that crazy, could she?

So why did she do it? Why did the Grand Duchess take it upon herself to visit Kalyayev, the man who’d murdered her husband, the very next day? It made not a bit of sense to me.