Enchantments: A Novel of Rasputin's Daughter and the Romanovs by Kathryn Harrison

duty.
    Alyosha had, like me, watched the sun sink over a slow-flowing summer Neva, a few errant beams spraying off the gilded dome of Saint Isaac’s. Whenever it wasn’t frozen, the Neva’s flat surfacereflected sunsets of freakish beauty. Fuchsia-pink clouds streaked with violet and orange were a regular occurrence in a city ringed with factories exhaling smoke. Neighborhoods spewed smoke as well, dark plumes rising from fires in the harbor district’s slums, warrens of squalid cells connected by dirty passages so dark they seemed subterranean. Workers, stuporous with exhaustion or drink, or more likely both, dropped their still-burning cigarettes, and whole city blocks discovered the speed with which rotten timbers burst into flame. Across the wide river was the Peter and Paul Fortress, where would-be revolutionaries rotted away in solitary cells infested with rats—at least they did until Alexander II made the mistake of coming out from behind his bombproof carriage door and down its bombproof steps to tread on a grenade. After that, the ministers of his successor, who was Alyosha’s grandfather Alexander III, thought it prudent to remove prisoners and the plots they hatched to the old Schlusselburg Fortress, forty miles upstream from Petersburg.
    Whenever he was allowed, the tsarevich had stood at his father’s side, staring down from the balcony of the Winter Palace at endless bristling ranks of bayonet-bearing soldiers parading below them to collect their tsar’s—his father’s—blessing before they walked into battle. But that was all Alyosha knew of the city from which, he had been told, he would rule the nation he was to inherit, and for whose future he was being educated.
    He’d never seen behind the pink and yellow stuccoed façades of the great avenues, never been to the Haymarket to gasp in wonder at the city’s squalid soul, a tide of beggars, drunkards, and whores washing through the aisles of market stalls like debris loosened by one of the Neva’s dependably imminent floods, each a guaranteed-to-be-pestilential deluge of cholera germs and candelabra, of corsets, croissants, chapbooks, clocks, chopsticks, and—
    “Wouldn’t candelabra and clocks be too heavy for water to take away?”
    “You’d think so, but I’ve seen both in the street after it receded. As well as a drowned dog with a diamond collar being undone by a drunk Dutchman dancing by.”
    “Was that D, then?”
    “Yes. Along with doors and dumbwaiters and, um, drawing-room chairs. And dice.”
    “Now E.”
    “Egrets. Eggs. Electric lamps. Elastic. Epaulets. Elephants.”
    “F.”
    “Fire screens, feather beds, forks, foxes, anything French.”
    “Such as?”
    “French beans. French bulldogs. French toast.”
    “G.”
    “Garters, garden gates, greengages, grandmothers, and grandfathers. Glasses, those for tea and those to look through.” George V, I stopped myself from adding to the list. We’d only just learned that the offer of asylum in the United Kingdom had been rescinded now that King George had given his too hasty invitation enough thought to realize what a mistake it might be to expose his disgruntled populace, also suffering the privations of war, to living proof that emperors could be overthrown. We hadn’t had even a week to enjoy the fantasy of being freed before it evaporated.
    The early months of 1917 were the Romanovs’ purgatory, a state somewhere between death and judgment, in which they—we all—entertained hopes of escape from whatever punishment the growing strength and organization of the revolutionaries augured. The possibility of freedom was not much different for us than for souls in purgatory: it would depend upon sacrifices made by those who remained in a world to which we were barred return. Varyaand I were never told specifically to avoid the topic of our collective fate, but, living in the home of a tsar, we followed the example of our hosts, and politics wasn’t something I discussed