Chapter 4: My Wonderful Life

Alexandra Feodorovna Romanova, wife of Nicholas II and Empress of the Russian Empire, was in a very foul mood.

The sight of the child standing before her, passed off as some distant relative of the Emperor, had brought back the nightmare of a few days past.

Feeling her head swim, she closed her eyes and replayed the memory.

“You… what did you just say?”

The first time she heard it, it had been so absurd that her brain simply refused to process the words.

“Sunny, my love, please hear me out. This is a trial God has set before me.”

“So… what I just heard wasn’t my ears playing tricks. It’s actually true?”

As usual, the exchange was carried on in English rather than Russian, pet names and all, but there was an unmistakable edge in the Empress’s voice.

Which was hardly strange.

Her husband had fathered an illegitimate son by mistake seven years ago, and now, on top of that, he meant to bring the child in and raise him at the palace.

What woman on earth could simply say “yes, dear” to that?

The mere fact that she hadn’t started cursing on the spot, the Empress felt confident, meant she had more than done her duty as a wife.

“Are you doing this to shame me because I can’t bear you a son? Because I’ve had four daughters in a row?”

“No, no, Sunny. Of course not. An illegitimate child couldn’t inherit the throne in the first place.”

“Then why on earth are you doing something this insane!”

“I told you, didn’t I? I’m the one who sinned, so why should the child bear the punishment? A boy of only seven says he’ll live as though he never existed, and asks only for enough support to stand on his own feet abroad. What would you do in my place?”

“What would I do? Give him exactly what he wants!”

The child hadn’t even asked to be accepted as a son; he had asked to be sent abroad. And her husband insisted, insisted, on bringing him into the palace?

She loved her husband, but she genuinely began to wonder whether something had gone wrong with his head.

The Empress loved her family, but she was nothing like her pushover of a husband.

She was ferociously stubborn, a woman faithful to her own appetites who would not give up a single advantage once it lay in her grasp.

And so she could never accept this foreign object called Mikhail.

Had it been a daughter, it might have been another matter… but a son.

She knew in her head that an illegitimate child could not inherit the throne, but that did nothing to stop the irritation from boiling up.

All the more so now, when she had just given birth to four daughters in a row.

“My name is Mikhail Andreyevich Odoyevsky.”

Empress Alexandra, still chewing over that old nightmare, was pulled back to the present by the clear, precise voice of a child.

Then Grand Duke Sergei Mikhailovich diligently recited the boy’s identity laundering, exactly as it had been fed to him beforehand.

“The male line of the House of Odoyevsky was recorded as extinct. But upon investigation, it turned out an unknown collateral branch had in fact been living quietly in the southern provinces. This child’s maternal family is that very branch. I traced the genealogy myself, so there can be no doubt of it.”

The House of Odoyevsky is of the direct bloodline of the illustrious Rurik dynasty, the line that produced the tsars of Rus.

With the main line extinct for decades, no one would come picking fights over a claim of collateral descent.

Where did they even dig up a house that fits so perfectly? It’s almost worthy of admiration.

“Your Majesty the Empress, I humbly ask for your kindness.”

The Empress’s gaze fell coldly upon the crown of the seven-year-old’s head as he knelt and offered his respectful greeting.

How commendable; the boy even has manners.

His speech is crisp, his eyes bright.

That he had her beloved husband’s eyes, she had no choice but to admit.

But.

However pitiable he was, however much he resembled her beloved husband, she would never, ever let herself grow fond of him.

Just wait and see.

* * *

And so began my new life at the Alexander Palace.

A room of my own with a servant attached was a luxury beyond any comparison to my slum days, but I couldn’t enjoy a scrap of it.

-Still, even when the sky is falling, there’s always a way out. Got it? You need to trust me completely.

“Trust you? Whose brilliant plan was it, again, that I tried to get to America and ended up locked in this palace instead?”

-Th-that was an unavoidable variable, okay? Anyway, listen. You know your position right now is dangerous, right?

As if anyone didn’t know that.

-Even with the Tsar going easy on you, you’re living under a fake identity. But there’s a bigger problem.

“Which is?”

-The Empress. Did you see the way that woman was looking at you back there? Like she was carving you up with her eyes. She’s a completely different type of bomb from Niki.

I dug through Seong-jun’s knowledge in my head for what sort of person Empress Alexandra had been in the original history.

Intensely jealous, pathologically wary of outsiders, and once she marked someone as an enemy, she pushed to the bitter end.

Yikes… the absolute worst.

-Right? Then there’s only one answer. At times like this, you keep your head all the way down and play dumb. I’m a stupid little kid with zero ambition, that’s the vibe. And meanwhile you build yourself up behind the scenes. That’s the classic move.

Playing dumb, huh… well, it sounded plausible enough when he put it that way.

Though where exactly that counts as “the classic move”, I couldn’t say.

“Fine. Let’s try it.”

From that day on, I threw myself completely into playing the fool.

When a servant brought me water, I just bobbed my head with a vacant face instead of saying thank you.

When the French tutor came, I pretended I couldn’t memorize even the simplest greetings.

At meals, I never skipped the performance of holding my cutlery wrong.

About a week passed.

I was very definitely playing dumb, and yet I could feel the Empress’s eyes on me growing sharper and sharper.

She never addressed me outright, but every time we crossed paths in a corridor, the glare she shot me climbed another notch in intensity by the day.

“Hey, are you kidding me?”

-What?

“The more I play the idiot, the more the Empress suspects me.”

-Nah, no way. Aren’t you just being paranoid?

Proof that this ghost’s schemes were never to be trusted arrived two days later, at dinner.

When I deliberately spilled my soup, Nicholas laughed and said he’d been just the same as a boy, but I didn’t miss the faint twitch of the eyebrow on the Empress sitting beside him.

…That look was absolutely not an “oh dear, what a dim little thing” look.

Just how big a prize is he after, to be playing this dumb…?

And that feeling was coming through to my entire body, wasn’t it.

-Huh…? That’s not how this is supposed to go?

“‘Not how it’s supposed to go’, my foot! This plan is scrapped, effective immediately!”

-I don’t get it. In a situation like ours, isn’t the world supposed to revolve around the protagonist?

Then I guess I’m not the protagonist, you damn ghost.

The playing-dumb strategy ended in wretched failure.

The next plan Seong-jun brought me was actively winning the Empress over.

-Come to think of it, we drew suspicion because we were too passive. This time we go the other way. Show her how bright you are, and at the same time carry yourself with perfect courtesy toward the Empress. You show her you’re not a threat. In novels, this strategy…

“Enough. I’ll just try it.”

From the next day on, whenever I encountered the Empress, I greeted her with a respectful bow, following etiquette to the letter.

At meals I kept my table manners flawless, and I applied myself diligently to my tutors’ lessons.

When my pronunciation was praised in French class, I made a point of offering my thanks, politely, somewhere the Empress could hear.

“Your Majesty, my tutor praised me today. It is all thanks to Your Majesty allowing me such a fine education.”

When a seven-year-old is this well-mannered, the normal reaction is to find him adorable, or at least admirable.

But the lips of our dear Empress did not so much as twitch.

Damn, her eyes are narrowing even further.

“…Remarkable. For a seven-year-old.”

Her tone was a strange one, praise that somehow wasn’t praise at all.

Perhaps hiding her feelings didn’t come naturally to her, because the hostility aimed my way was nakedly plain.

Why is a seven-year-old this polite? Is he trying to win me over?

Her eyes were screaming it at the top of their lungs.

-Huh? Why is she like that?

Next came the erase-your-presence-entirely strategy.

-This time I’m really sure. Live like air. Do nothing, touch nothing. Become invisible. Usually in this kind of situation, the protagonist…

“Can you quit it with the useless novel talk already?”

Still, just in case, I gave it a try.

For three days I never left my room, quietly reading and nothing more.

The result?

“Her Majesty the Empress wishes to know what the Young Master has been doing.”

The message the servant relayed sent a chill down my spine.

She suspected I was holed up in my room plotting something.

-Whoa… this is brutal.

“What’s brutal is your ridiculous strategies.”

For the first time, Seong-jun was at a loss for words.

Honestly, by this point, my trust in that ghost had already hit rock bottom.

The knowledge that flowed into my head was undeniably useful.

Future history, people’s characters, the political lay of the land.

Things like that couldn’t help but be useful.

But it was now beyond all doubt that the strategies this guy rattled off with such confidence were of no help whatsoever.

Novels are novels and reality is reality, as they say.

There was nothing for it but to carve out my own life for myself.

Just as I was steeling my resolve, an unexpected turning point arrived.

“Misha. Come to think of it, oughtn’t your mother’s house be put in order?”

The Tsar granted me leave to go out in the gentlest of tones.

“If there’s anything you failed to bring, gather it all up. You’ll be living in this palace from now on, after all.”

In his own mind, no doubt, an act of great, great generosity.

Of course, someone living under a fake identity like me might well draw suspicion for turning up out of nowhere in a slum like that, but he clearly wasn’t sparing that a single thought.

I wondered if I couldn’t just pack my things and skip town in the night, but that thoughtless emperor had attached guards to me, supposedly for my protection, leaving no room for escape at all.

When we reached the shabby old house in the slums, I asked the guards to let me be alone for just a moment.

“Please. I’d like to say a last goodbye to my mother.”

Fortunately, the guards seemed to pity me; they nodded and waited outside.

Creeeak.

“Hah… what am I supposed to do with this life of mine.”

The sigh burst out of me the moment I shut the door, but it wasn’t as if I had any clever way out.

For now, I began sorting through the things steeped in memories of my mother, one by one.

A worn shawl. Faded ballet shoes. A cracked teacup.

Each time one touched my hand, my nose stung.

Then I opened the keepsake box my mother had left behind once more.

The letter and the brooch had already been taken out.

I was about to fold up the empty box when I noticed the bottom was oddly thick.

“…Hm?”

Maybe it was the influence of having received Seong-jun’s memories.

On a hunch, I pressed a corner with my finger, and with a click, the bottom panel lifted.

A false bottom.

Looking inside, I found a small leather journal hidden there.

-What the hell, since when do keepsake boxes have false bottoms?

“This is my mother’s handwriting.”

I wondered if it might be a letter left for me, but if it were, would she really have needed to hide it in a place like this?

I started reading from the first page.

-October 3, 1897. Attended my first meeting today. Comrade Vyacheslav and Comrade A., whom Pavel introduced. What we must do is clear. Helping the workers, that is the only atonement a person named Natalya Gorchakova can offer this world.

-March 15, 1898. Heard the news that the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party has been officially founded in Minsk. Vyacheslav rejoiced, but I am uneasy. The police dragnet grows tighter by the day.

-May 1899. Moved again. Watching Misha grow makes my heart anxious. I must secure somewhere safe before this child gets any bigger. But there is no money. I want to ask Malya for help, but I cannot bear to see the sparks land on a friend as well.

-November 1900. They say a newspaper called Iskra is to be launched abroad. Vyacheslav has volunteered to join the organization. I have taken on copying leaflets at home. I will work only in the small hours, while Misha sleeps.

-August 1901. I am afraid. But there is no turning back. If it comes out that the woman who bore the Tsar’s child is copying handbills at the bottom rung of a revolutionary organization, there is no telling what would become of Misha. So all the more, I can lean on no one. Every time Malya’s name comes to mind, I am sorry.

The final entry was from early this year.

-February 1902. My health grows worse and worse. Will the day ever come when I show Misha this journal? I only hope this child, at least, does not live as I have. If the day comes when you read this journal, go somewhere no one knows you, and…

The strength went out of my hands, and I very nearly dropped the journal.

Why my mother never asked Mathilde for help.

Why she hid herself away in such a wretched slum.

At last, I understood all of it.

Seong-jun was jabbering on about something in my head without pause, but I couldn’t hear a word of it.

I just covered my face with my palms in silence and leaned against the old bed.

Father, a Tsar; mother, a socialist… and me, an illegitimate son?

My fantastic life. Is this seriously for real?

If things drift along as they are, I die with one hundred percent certainty.

The Bolsheviks hunted down and killed anyone with the blood of the Romanov imperial house with obsessive persistence; illegitimate or not, as a son of the Tsar, I’d be purge target number one, guaranteed.

But with the Empress and the nobles keeping their eyes peeled over my illegitimate birth, I can’t afford to stick my neck out any more than necessary, either.

In that case…

-Hey, hey, at times like this, the first thing is to stay calm…

“Is there any law that says I can’t mix Father’s background with Mother’s?”

-What?

Russia, revolution, the Tsar, commies.

Right. The only way I survive is to mix all of it together.

***

Author’s Note

-As many of you may already know, Nicholas II is said to have spoken with his wife in English when they talked privately, pet names included.