Boris Akunin - The Coronation

So my great-grandfather put on a soldier’s uniform and took a payment in compensation from the miller, the richest man in the village, of seven hundred roubles in paper money, which he didn’t give to his father but put in the bank in his own name. That was in order to carry out his plan.

Emelyan was sent straight to the war, to fight in the Austrian campaign, and he fought for seven or eight years without a break – against the French and the Persians and the Swedes and the Turks and then the French again. He found his way into the very hottest spots and always volunteered for every desperate adventure. He was wounded many times and awarded medals, won a corporal’s stripes, and still that was not enough for him. And in the campaign of 1812, at the battle of Smolensk, when all the commanders in his company were killed, Emelyan won his cherished reward: General Bagration himself kissed him and promoted him to officer’s rank, something that almost never happened in those times.

After that Emelyan Ziukin fought for another two years and went as far as Paris with the army, but as soon as the armistice came, he asked for extended leave, although he was regarded most highly by his superiors and could have hoped for further advancement in the army. But my great-grandfather wanted something else – his impossibly bold plan was finally coming close to fulfilment.

Emelyan returned to his native parts not simply as a nobleman and a lieutenant in the grenadiers, he also had his own small capital, because in all those years he had not spent his pay, and when he was discharged he received bonuses and medical payments, and his initial seven hundred roubles had also almost doubled owing to accrued interest.

And in his home village everything could not have gone better. The estate had been burned by the French, so that the master and his familywere absolutely ruined and nowlived in the priest’s house. The young master, Emelyan’s former playmate, had been killed at Borodino, and the maiden who had inspired my great-grandfather to play his desperate game with fate had been left without a bridegroom, for he had laid down his life at Leipzig. All in all, Emelyan appeared to the object of his dreams almost in the guise of an angel sent to rescue her.

He presented himself at the priest’s log-built village but in his dress uniform, wearing his medals. The young lady came out in an old patched dress, and the trials she had suffered had spoiled her looks, so that he did not recognise her immediately. But that did not matter to him, because itwas not the young lady he loved but his own impossible dream.

Only nothing came of it. The young lady greeted him affectionately enough at first – she was delighted to see an old acquaintance – but she replied to the offer of his hand and his heart with an insulting amazement, and said she would rather live under sufferance with her relatives than ever become ‘Mrs Ziukin’.

These words clouded Emelyan’s reason. He had never drunk intoxicating liquor before in his life, but now he launched into a wild binge, and it ended very badly. In his drunken state he tore off his epaulettes and medals in public and trampled them into the ground, all the while bawling out an incoherent stream of words. He was tried for bringing disgrace on the uniform, stripped of his officer’s rank and expelled from the nobility. He would have been completely destroyed by drink but, by a fortunate chance, he was spotted by his former regimental commander, Prince Drubetskoi, who took pity on the down-and-out and for the sake of his former meritorious services found him a place as a manservant at Tsarskoe Selo.

And so the fate of our family line was decided.

When an individual of loworigins cherishes inadmissible dreams regarding a person of higher standing, this is deplorable and even perhaps outrageous, but not really so very dangerous for, as they say, a wicked cow has short horns. But an infatuation that runs in the opposite direction, not up from below but down from above, is fraught with far-reaching consequences. The case of Grand Duke Dmitrii Nikolaevich is still fresh in everyone’s memory. He defied the tsar’s will and married a divorced lady, for which he was banished from the empire. And we court servants also know that when the present tsar was still the tsarevich, he begged his august father with tears in his eyes to release him from succeeding to the throne and allowa marriage beneath his station to the ballerina Snezhnevskaya. That had everybody trembling, but any damage was prevented by the grace of the Lord and the abrupt temperament of the late tsar.

Therefore, the sense of alarm that came over me following that infamous game of tennis is entirely understandable, especially since Xenia Georgievna already had a fiancé in the shape of a Scandinavian prince with good prospects of becoming king (everybody knew that his elder brother, the heir to the throne, had consumption).

I needed urgently to consult someone who understood the workings of a young girl’s emotions, for I myself, as must be clear from what has already been said, can not consider myself an authority in such matters. After long hesitation, I decided to take Mademoiselle Declique into my confidence and I informed her of my apprehensions in the most general and delicate of terms. Mademoiselle nonetheless understood me perfectly well and – to my dismay – was not at all surprised, indeed she took what I said in a spirit of quite incredible frivolity.

‘Yes, yes,’ she said, nodding absent-mindedly. ‘I noticed that too. He is a handsome man, and she is at that age. It is all right. Let Xenia know a little love before they put her in a glass case.’

‘How can you say such a thing!’ I exclaimed in horror. ‘Her Highness is already engaged!’

‘Ah, Monsieur Ziukin, I saw her fiancé Prince Olaf, in Vienna,’ Mademoiselle said, wrinkling up her nose. ‘What was that folk saying you taught me . . . one of God’s own fools, yes?’

‘But if the elder brother should die – and everyone knows that he is consumptive – Prince Olaf will be first in line to inherit the throne. Which means that Xenia Georgievna could be a queen!’

Of course, the governess’s remark that I found so jarring should be attributed to her state of dejection. I had noticed that Mademoiselle was absent that morning and believed I had guessed why. No doubt, with her active and energetic temperament, she had been unable simply to do nothing and had attempted to undertake some searches of her own. But what could she do in a foreign country and an unfamiliar city when even the police felt helpless?

Mademoiselle had returned looking so tired and miserable that it pained me to look at her. And it was partly because of this that I began the conversation about the subject of my concern – in a desire to distract her from her thoughts about the little grand duke. In order to calm her a little, I told her the direction that things had taken and mentioned the responsible mission that had fallen to my lot – naturally without any undue inflation of my own role in matters.

I had expected Mademoiselle to be delighted by the news that now there was a glimmer of hope, but after hearing me out she looked at me with a strange, frightened expression and suddenly said: ‘But that is very dangerous.’ And turning her eyes away, she added: ‘I know you are brave . . . but don’t be too brave, all right?’

I was quite nonplussed by that, and there was a rather uncomfortable pause.

‘Ah, what bad luck,’ I eventually said to recover the situation. ‘It has started raining again. And the combined choir serenade for Their Imperial Majesties is set for this evening. The rain could spoil everything.’

‘You’d better think of yourself. You have to ride in an open carriage,’ Mademoiselle said in a quiet voice, pronouncing the final phrase almost perfectly. ‘It’s very easy to catch cold.’