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The Private Stable of the Gentleman’s Enclave<br />
9:02 PM<br />
Inside the carriage, Tatiana was ready to pound her fists with frustration. They had been sitting<br />
there for over an hour, while Ella had thought of one excuse and then another to delay their departure.<br />
When Filip had instructed her to leave the Winter Palace, Tatiana’s mind had reeled. The entire<br />
household was expected to pack and depart for the coast by the end of the week, so his insistence that<br />
she remain not even for that brief amount of time meant that something was brewing. She could not<br />
imagine what. She did not want to even try. She was already half in shock. Minutes earlier she had<br />
said goodbye to the only man he had ever loved, and now Filip was confronting her with the<br />
knowledge she was pregnant.<br />
“The noises from your toilette in the morning,” he’d said. “And little changes in your body.<br />
They tell a man what he needs to know, do they not?”<br />
She had numbly nodded. She would not have guessed he paid so much attention, but he did, and<br />
his plan was already in motion. He was making arrangements for her to leave St. Petersburg. Not<br />
tomorrow, nor the next day, nor the next, but now.<br />
And so Tatiana had gone knocking on Ella’s door for the second time that afternoon. Ella had<br />
listened to this new complication and then briskly nodded. They would both go, she said. If they<br />
arrived at the seaside villas before everyone else, it would be easier to create the fiction that Tatiana<br />
had miscarried. She could send a wire to Filip with the sad news that the carriage ride had unseated<br />
her pregnancy.<br />
“It is not a change of our plans, merely a small variation,” Ella assured her, and then she had<br />
rang for her maid and begun to pack. A carriage was called for and it was furthermore arranged that<br />
this would leave from the private stables, the one near the gentleman’s enclave. It was a part of the<br />
palace Tatiana had never seen, a part Ella had presumably never visited either, and as they walked the<br />
long halls, the men with their luggage trailing behind them, Tatiana had wondered at the secrecy of<br />
their leave taking. They were dashing off at a strange hour, from a hidden exit, as if they had<br />
committed some dreadful crime, as if their departure was not only unexpected, but illegal.<br />
Their husbands had each come down to the stable to bid them farewell. Tatiana had watched as
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