Princess Daisy (6 page)

Had he lived long enough for her to know him, Francesca might have used the same word to describe Stash’s father, Prince Vasily Alexandrovitch Valensky. That man of dauntless presence, high rank and great physical strength had been the veteran of half a hundred affairs with the exquisite ballerinas of the Marinsky Theater,
when, at the age of forty, he decided that it was time to take a wife. Quite dispassionately, he had chosen to propose to Princess Titiana Nikolaevna Stargardova because, of all the debutantes of 1909, she was most suited by birth to his own position. Now, incredulously, in the winter of 1910, he realized that in the most unexpected, undignified and irreversible way he had fallen totally in love with his own wife.

Before their engagement, Titiana was alluringly pretty though she had always kept her large blue eyes downcast whenever they met at a party or the opera. She had worn demure, rather high-necked ball gowns and she spoke in the softest voice which nothing more seductive than a pure gaiety was allowed to animate. From her simply dressed blonde hair and her habit of blushing when she spoke to him, Vasily Valensky had expected a wife who would be placid, correct, certainly conservative. And almost surely as boring as the wives of most of his acquaintances. But before their honeymoon was over, Titiana, who was as hot-blooded as she was clever, had utterly captivated her husband and he discovered that he had married an imperious and demanding mistress.

Today, less than a year after his marriage, as Prince Valensky left his marble-columned palace on the Moika Canal, he noted with amusement, barely touched with resignation, that once again everything and everyone in the palace was being turned upside down and inside out as Titiana prepared for another of her balls. She was reveling in her new position as one of the leading hostesses of St Petersburg. Freed by marriage from the splendid, but chaperoned, decorum of the
bals Blanc
, at which young girls danced a sedate cotillion, the newly vivacious nineteen-year-old princess lost no time in placing herself near the center of the sumptuous society of the Imperial city.

“To Denisov-Uralski’s,” Prince Vasily commanded the bemedaled and uniformed doorman who guarded the entrance to the seething palace. Two footmen closed the heavy doors behind him and he stepped lightly into the back seat of the magnificent sledge, carved from ebony and lined with quilted glove leather.

Boris, the coachman, was wearing his winter uniform, a dark ruby-red velvet coat, completely doubled inside with thick fur and belted in gold, with a matching three-cornered hat. In common with all the coachmen of the nobility, he was an immense bearded man who enjoyed
nothing more than driving his team of four huge black horses as fast as if there were no one else on the crowded streets of St. Petersburg. Indeed, Boris, who discounted the Grand Dukes as merely decorative, was convinced that his master, who wore the decorations of the Alexander Nevsky, the Vladimir and the St. Andrew, was next in importance only to the Tsar himself. He prided himself that he had traversed the distance between the palace and the shop of Denisov-Uralski without stopping or even slowing for another sledge. To have done so would have insulted the Prince.

On that December day Vasily Valensky’s errand was to purchase a veritable menagerie. His wife still had a childish love of animal figurines and he had determined to overwhelm her this Christmas—If, he thought to himself with an inward smile of memory, she could ever be satisfied. Within a half-hour he had selected a number of precious animals, two of each so that Titiana would have a Noah’s ark to play with. There were elephants carved from imperial jade with Ceylon sapphire eyes, lions of topaz with ruby eyes and tails of diamonds threaded on gold and giraffes made of amethyst whose eyes were cabochon emeralds with diamond pupils. Next the Prince went on foot to Fabergé and added smaller animals to the collection: turtles fashioned of pink agate with heads, feet and tails of silver and gold, their backs studded with pearls; parrots of white coral; and an entire school of goldfish carved in green, pink, mauve and brown jade, all with eyes of rose-cut diamonds.

This pleasant business done, he directed Boris to drive him to his offices. In the eleven hundred years his family had been noble, their estates had spread over the vastness of Russia and it was only with the aid of a corps of managers, many of them German and Swiss, that Prince Vasily was able to keep his affairs in order. In the Urals his estates produced one quarter of the world’s output of platinum. In Kursk he owned the hundreds of miles of sugar plantations and dozens of sawmills, fed by still another hundred miles of forests. In the Ukraine he was the proprietor of immense tobacco plantations. But it was in the fertile province of Kashin that he had his favorite estate. There, on land blooming with orchards and dotted by dairy farms, he raised his winning race horses and invited parties of a hundred noblemen to shoot his fat deer, his wild boar and his thousands of game birds.

There, too, he and his wife rode together through the forest pathways and, as Prince Vasily was still astonished to remember, there they had made love often last summer, hiding in secret places deep in the woods, just like the peasants. It was hard to reconcile the tumbled, eager girl he took so urgently in the nest they had made of moss and leaves, with the great lady, crowned with his mother’s diamond-and-emerald tiara, who would receive eight hundred guests tonight, all of them noble and all of them dressed to her command in cloth of gold or silver. They would dance to the music of six orchestras and be served a midnight supper from gold and silver dishes presented by a hundred uniformed footmen while they were serenaded by both Colombo’s and Goulesko’s gypsy bands. As he had left the palace, Valensky had seen the heated carts arriving with the flowers Titiana had ordered from the Riviera. Their private train had been dispatched to Nice to be loaded with flowers still in bud. They were sped through the winter of Europe, unloaded at the station in St. Petersburg as they were beginning to flower. Half the blossoms of France, lilacs, roses, hyacinths, daffodils and Parma violets, opened for just one night in this city on the Gulf of Finland where the winters were endless and the winds were damp and freezing.

In November of the following year, 1911, Vasily and Titiana’s son was born. They named him Alexander after his paternal grandfather, and the young mother who had missed so many entertainments while she was pregnant was more determined than ever to dance every night. Valensky did nothing to dissuade his wife from her pursuit of pleasure as she graced the balls given by the Sherementevs and the Yousoupovs, the Saltykovs and the Vasilchikovs. She led all the other ladies of St. Petersburg in the élan of her waltzing, and she astonished them with her inventiveness at the costume balls of Countess Marie Kleinmichel.

The approach of Lent, which began on the Sunday before Ash Wednesday, signaled the end of dancing. During Lent, concerts and dinner parties replaced balls and, in the private opinion of Masha, Alexander’s wet nurse, it was a good thing that her mistress was going to be forced to go to bed earlier. Although the Princess only flitted in from time to time to watch Masha as she nursed the baby, the peasant girl, stout, plain and sensible, thought to
herself that in spite of her prettiness the Princess looked tired and too thin. Masha was only seventeen. She had spent all her life on the Valenskys’ Kashin estate where she had been unlucky enough to bear an illegitimate child the day before Alexander’s birth. However, Masha’s baby had not lived and the estate manager immediately sent her to St. Petersburg to nourish the newborn heir. Her homesickness had disappeared as soon as little Prince Alexander had claimed her milk.

On that last Sunday the Valenskys went to a lunch party on a country estate. Afterward they joined in a parade of galloping troikas and finished the afternoon with an especially boisterous snowball fight. When the last dance of the season stopped at the sound of the great clock in the hall striking midnight, Vasily found Titiana strangely willing to drive home. He had expected her to be in despair at the prospect of a temporary end to merrymaking, but instead she felt so tired that she went to sleep in his arms in their heated carriage and the next morning she slept late and woke up no more rested than she had been the night before. She complained, in petulant tones, that she must be getting old.

Vasily immediately sent for the doctor. He had never seen Titiana listless and fretful before, and he was frightened. The doctor spent an endless amount of time in Titiana’s pink and silver damask bedroom. When at length he emerged, he spoke of a minor congestion of the bronchi, of a tendency to overstrain the nerves, of a febrile condition.

“What is the treatment?” Vasily demanded impatiently, interrupting the man’s interminable medical obfuscation.

“Why, Prince, I thought you understood at once. It may be an inflammation of the lungs, in effect, although I am not a specialist, you must understand, in effect, it may be tuberculosis.”

Valensky stood as if he had been shot and was waiting to fall. Titiana and
tuberculosis?
Titiana, who galloped in breeches as in the time of Catherine the Great; Titiana, who only laughed when she was thrown into a snowbank from an overturned troika during a race; Titiana, who tobogganed fearlessly down the dangerous twisting slopes of the ice hills; who had given birth to their son in six hours without a whimper; Titiana, who would let him take her even in a field where the harvesters might have found them?

“Impossible!” he cried.

“Prince, I am not an expert. You must call Dr. Zevgod and Dr. Kouskof. I cannot be responsible.” The doctor edged toward the door, anxious to escape before the Prince realized that he had pronounced what, at that time, often amounted to a death sentence.

Zevgod and Kouskof agreed on the necessary steps to be taken. Princess Valensky had admitted to them that, for the last months, she had been troubled by night sweats and a loss of appetite, but she had refused, foolishly, to worry about them. Her lack of caution and her strenuous life had aggravated the condition and now no time could be lost. The Princess must go directly to Davos, in Switzerland, where the treatment of the disease was clearly superior to that found elsewhere.

“For how long?” Vasily asked sternly.

The two doctors hesitated, neither one willing to commit himself. Finally Zevgod spoke.

“There is no way of knowing. If the Princess responds to the treatment, she may be back within a year … or two. Perhaps a little more. But she must not return to this damp city until she is perfectly well. As you know, it is built on marsh and swamp. To come back would be suicide for anyone with a weakness of the chest.”

“A year!”

“That would be a miracle,” Kouskof said gravely.

“Then you really mean that it could be for many years—is that not what you are trying to tell me, gentlemen?”

“Unfortunately, Prince, yes. But the Princess is young and strong We must hope for an early recovery.”

Valensky dismissed the doctors and went to his study and closed the door. He could not possibly tell his sparkling, brave, treasured wife that she had to go away for even as long as three months or three weeks. There was nothing on earth which would make him sentence her to live in a sanatorium. The very word filled him with horror. No! She would go to Davos, that was essential, but they would take Russia with them.

Prince Vasily dispatched his chief male secretary to Davos to rent the largest available chalet. Three French lady’s maids were immediately put to work filling Titiana’s trunks. There was one which contained nothing but gloves and fans, three which held only narrow embroidered satin slippers, twelve for her dresses, four for her furs and five
for her underclothes. Pouting enchantingly over the clothes she had to leave behind, she told Vasily that it was a good thing that she was not overfond of her wardrobe, like the Empress Elizabeth who had owned fifteen thousand dresses.

Meanwhile, the other servants were packing the finest furnishings of the palace, under the direction of another of the Prince’s private secretaries, who chose only the best French pieces from the period of Louis XV and XVI. Valensky himself made the decisions about which works of art to take. He was an avid collector but since he didn’t know the dimensions of the chalet they were to inhabit, he took only easel paintings by Rembrandt, Boucher, Watteau, Greuze and Fragonard, leaving behind the vast canvases by Raphael, Rubens, Delacroix and Van Eyck.

In spite of the modern way in which they lived, the Valenskys, like all Russians, had never stopped venerating icons and the Prince stripped the separate rooms which had been kept as an oratory. There, rows and rows of icons, many of them so adorned with gold and jewels that they were literally priceless, stood with lamps burning before them day and night. Their protective curtains were drawn, they were laid in their own velvet-covered boxes, after which they were carefully placed in special crates. Certain icons, particularly personal, that were considered to be protectors of the household, would travel in the train with the family in their own compartments.

Nothing that was needed to reproduce the palace on the Moika was left behind, from kitchen pots and pans to three rock-crystal chandeliers that had once belonged to Madame de Pompadour.

Ten days later, forty servants, an adequate if skeleton staff in Vasily’s opinion, gathered at the station in St. Petersburg. Additional sleeping cars had been added to the Prince’s train to accommodate them all. All the baggage cars were fully loaded, and the two kitchen cars were so packed with food that the chefs had difficulty going about their tasks.

Prince and Princess Valensky, with Masha carrying little Alexander, drove to the station in a closed carriage accompanied by a most important servant, Zachary, the chasseur, in his dark blue uniform with gold epaulets and his formal cocked hat trimmed with white feathers. Zachary was in charge of the actual logistics of the journey; he was responsible for making sure that there would be no
frontier delays, no lack of fresh provisions, no lost baggage or any other problem that might disturb the smooth progress of the train on its long southwest journey.