the ministers’.49 Divinely groomed, Nicholas dealt briskly with them and proudly cabled Alexandra to say afterwards that ‘the conference passed off well. I told them my opinion sternly to their faces…50 Michael, in witnessing this political drama, was given little encouragement that his brother would make the kind of changes which he believed were now essential. Believing in constitutional government as he did, and which he had seen to be the norm in Britain, he could not understand why his brother was so opposed to it — until he realised that it was not Nicholas but his wife who ruled the roost.
But nothing that Michael said made any difference. Nicholas listened to him, thanked him, but then went back to his desk and to his orders piling up on his desk from his wife.
The day after the ministers left, Michael left also, knowing that there was nothing more he could say that would be of any use. Afterwards, Alexandra, blind to anything but her own conviction, wrote to Nicholas to say that ‘you must miss Misha now — how nice that you had him staying with you — I am sure that it must have done him good in every sense.’51
She was to be disappointed. Seeing things through his brother’s eyes had done Michael no good whatsoever.
6. RIVAL COURTS
MICHAEL, kept out of the frontline as he recovered from diphtheria, had settled very happily back into the domestic routine of Gatchina. Although his assets were still frozen, he had managed to extract enough money from his reluctant administrators to have the house at 24 Nikolaevskaya Street, renovated and improved. It was no longer the tumbledown it had been, with a rickety fence which the local police had complained about as a danger to passers-by. The courtyard had been covered with gravel, the summerhouse painted white, the garden filled with flowers, and a new tennis court built at the rear. Michael loved it and wanted nothing more.
He had, by imperial standards, only a handful of servants, some of whom lived in the house, and others with quarters in the one next door. They included his valet and chauffeur, Natasha’s long-serving personal maid Ayuna, a cook, the maids who cleaned and helped in the kitchen, and a washerwoman living above the washhouse in the back courtyard. There was also a new English governess, the redoubtable Margaret Neame — her predecessor, hired at Knebworth, having gone home. There were also two ADCs and an adjutant on his military staff, though they lived elsewhere in the town, as did his secretary Nikolai Johnson, who had taken an apartment on Baggout Street, near the Warsaw railway station, and close to the apartment where Natasha had lived with Wulfert.
But his household had no butler to wait at table, or liveried servants in attendance at formal dinner parties, and in that respect he did not live as grandly as at Knebworth, or could have done at Gatchina palace, where an army of retainers continued to preserve state rooms which in the main only they walked through. Michael made full use of the park, and he took advantage of the gymnasium sited in one of the quadrangles adjoining the main palace, but otherwise he was not seen there at all.
He took no precautions for his personal safety. There were no guards and apart from the low wooden picket fence, the house lay open to the front. When Michael returned home he simply parked his car on the short drive to the side of his house, walked through his front door and stepped into the living room — like every other owner of the villas and his neighbours in that suburban road.
In town, he was a familiar figure in the street and shops; he took his family to the palace church on Sundays. He spoke to the townspeople as freely as they would speak to each other, and regularly attended social gatherings and other like activities of a small community. Evening after evening was spent in committee work on various charities, and when he was convalescing stepdaughter Tata would ‘often remember him coming in dead tired’ after an exhausting round of lengthy meetings.1 He was a keen handyman, and when he got up in the morning he would often go first into the garden, to his workshop, and there ‘with his sleeves rolled up to the elbow, he would plane, chisel and saw. He loved working on a lathe’.2 In the evenings his favourite pastime was music, and often he noted in his diary that he had ‘played the guitar’, sometimes with his aide and fellow enthusiast Prince Vyazemsky, or with Johnson as accompanist on the piano.
One official posted to the garrison was ‘astonished by the Grand Duke’s approachability and simplicity’. He first encountered him when he went one evening to the local cinema — ‘a filthy hovel…a stuffy shed’, crowded with ordinary soldiers and townspeople. In the semi-darkness he asked one of the audience if the place in front of him was free; the man said it was. As the official settled down, he realised that the man behind him seemed to be in the uniform of a general. Astonished, he whispered to his neighbour, asking the general’s name. The man glanced round. ‘What, behind us? Why that’s Grand Duke Michael Aleksandrovich’, was the reply.3
Unusually good-natured, he surprised everyone when he lost his temper. On one occasion, his neighbours were startled to hear him yelling from his windows, and then to see him leaping into the roadway, half-shaved and still in his nightshirt, wielding a whip and bellowing as he broke up a dog fight in front of his house. ‘There were blows and curses…in his temper he was quite oblivious to his appearance or dignity.’4
In the best sense of the term, Michael was a simple man; sometimes he was too trusting of others. When beggars approached in the street, he would give them money; when asked to provide job references, ‘he never refused’. Inevitably his open trust was abused, as when he recommended a man who had been sacked three times for bad conduct.5 His own shrugging answer to that kind of thing was to say that ‘it was impossible to live if one could not trust anybody’.6
Other than on official business, Michael went to ‘detestable’ Petrograd primarily for the theatre, ballet or a concert. In the last three months of 1915, he visited the capital six times,7 but never to parties there, or to mingle with the bankers, diplomats, politicians, and businessmen who thronged Petrograd; he kept himself within a small circle of close friends. Natasha would go there regularly, for lunch and shopping, but invariably she went on her own.
In the year since her return, Natasha had established an ever-widening circle of friends as she had never been able to do when she had arrived there in 1911 as mistress. Marriage, and having a husband who was a war hero, opened doors that had never opened before. And, to the fury of Tsarskoe Selo, her circle now included three young Grand Dukes who had become regulars at her home in Gatchina. One was Dimitri, eleven years her junior, who had fallen in love with her at first sight in exactly the same way as had Michael. He had seen her on the platform at Baranovichi as she was returning from Lvov in December 1914, and he was returning from
Next day, having found out that she was his cousin’s wife, and discovering that she lunched regularly in the Astoria Winter Garden, he turned up there, and introduced himself.8 After that he became a regular visitor to Gatchina. A surprising new friend? In March 1915 the handsome Dimitri had followed her to Moscow, knocked on the door of her suite at the National Hotel, and then confessed that he was in love with her.9
It was very flattering to have a second Grand Duke in love with her — more than flattering, extraordinary — but also very awkward. She had come to be very fond of Dimitri, he 24 and she 35, but there could only be one man in her life, and that was, and always would be ever after, Michael. In accepting that, Dimitri told her that he ‘had decided to run away from me’, she wrote to Michael.10 Nonetheless, he kept in touch, writing to her regularly as ‘your devoted friend’ and coming to the Gatchina house frequently, though without saying anything again that might embarrass her.
Grand Duke Boris had also become a member of what a bitter Alexandra called her ‘bad set’. Meeting her for the first time when he came to Sunday lunch with his brother Andrew — an established friend of Natasha — in August 1915, he told Michael she was
Petrograd society was also left in no doubt that Madame Brasova, as she still was, seemed to be rising high. On October 18, 1915, it would have its first sight of Michael and Natasha together in public when they went to a
