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  To the two loves of my life:

  To Garance

  To Frank

  Where she loved, there was her world, and her philosophy of life had made her mistress of all the consequences. She was an aristocrat. She could have been a Communist. She could never have been a bourgeoise.

  R. H. BRUCE LOCKHART, British consul general and unofficial ambassador to the Bolsheviks in 1918

  Moura was the most intelligent woman of her time.

  HAROLD NICOLSON, politician and husband of Vita Sackville-West

  She… has become somehow even sweeter. As ever, she knows everything and is interested in everything. A superlative person! She wants to marry some baron, but we’re protesting vociferously. Let the baron pick himself another fantasy!

  This one is ours!

  MAXIM GORKY, author of Mother and The Lower Depths

  And Moura is Moura, as ever. Human, faulty, wise, silly, and I love her.…

  When all is said and done, she is the woman I really love. I love her voice, her presence, her strength and her weaknesses.

  H. G. WELLS, author of The Invisible Man and The War of the Worlds

  Note to Readers

  A list of characters, an acknowledgments section, and a bibliography can be found at the end of the book.

  PRELUDE Invicta

  Unconquered

  Throughout Europe’s torments, from one war to the next, she accompanied them all: Stalin, Churchill, de Gaulle. And Maxim Gorky. And H. G. Wells. And many others who were less prominent, less known.

  She was the woman of a thousand lives. The woman of a thousand names. She was Maria Ignatyevna Zakrevskaya for some, Mrs. Benckendorff for others, Baroness Budberg for most. As for the nicknames her nearest and dearest bestowed upon her, she amassed a multitude: she was Marydear to her Irish governess; Mourushka to her mother, of Polish heritage; Marie to her two Baltic husbands; Baby to her British lover; Tyotka or Chubanka to her Russian lover; Moura to her friends, Moura with no last name but always prefaced by a possessive or an adjective: my Moura, my wonderful Moura.

  As time went by, in Russia, in Germany, in Estonia, in Italy, in England, in France, each of them had—or was convinced they had—a privileged relationship, an intimate and unique bond, with her.

  She was a seductress at heart.

  All the same, nobody in the myriad relationships she sustained had the same image of her. Of her close friends, her husbands, her lovers, her children, no two shared the same vision, no two deciphered her nature in the same way… And not one could take pride in having been privy to her secrets.

  Mysterious, secret Moura.

  Welcoming, voluble Moura.

  The woman of a thousand faces, the woman of a thousand facets: some sang of her tenderness, her unfailing affection, her fidelity unto death. Others denounced her constant lies.

  She was the personification of loyalty.

  She was the personification of deceit.

  She was adored by those she loved. She was hated by those who considered her far from straightforward: as destructive as she was elusive.

  Her admirers and her detractors all agreed on one point, however: Moura Zakrevskaya-Benckendorff-Budberg symbolized Life.

  Life in all forms. Life at all costs. Life against all odds.

  She was a survivor. This sentence recurs everywhere in the accounts and interviews, the word survivor encapsulating the imagery of battle and the idea of an ultimate triumph.

  She was determined to survive the upheaval of the October Revolution, which eradicated her social class and her peers. This is what Moura strived to be for her entire existence. She was determined to survive—and survive unscathed—amid the rubble of a destroyed world.

  But not only that.

  I, for one, would not choose her survival instinct as the most unique part of her temperament. There are other traits, more obscure or more prominent ones, that better illustrate her character.

  Her freedom of body, her freedom of mind, her freedom of heart and soul, her absolute freedom allowed her to love herself, to love her traveling companions, and, most unexpectedly, to reconcile the irreconcilable by finding an internal unity.

  It was this courage, of living in limitless freedom and loving limitlessly, that inspired me to bear witness to her incredible adventures.

  * * *

  What adventures did she go on? The texts devoted to her ever since her death in 1974 have consistently described her as a formidable spy. In the service of the USSR, or Great Britain, or even Germany, according to these authors. Some go so far as to call her a double agent, working for Russia and England at the same time.

  To stick to the facts, I should say that in the counterintelligence archives of the three nations she is supposed to have served or betrayed over half a century, I have found no evidence of her activities. The specialists I interrogated on this topic responded that this lack of any trace is exactly the proof I had been looking for: the greatest spies leave behind no fingerprints.

  Yet I do have to concur with this employee of the Deuxième Bureau, which investigated informants’ reports during the 1930s in Paris: in the margins of the reports discussing “la femme Budberg” he drew a long vertical line, then wrote at the bottom of the file with a red pencil, Maigre! Very little!

  * * *

  Too little: that is all her folders amount to. Or perhaps too much. Too much theatricality, too much emotion, too much playacting. And too many gray areas. The British historians who dreamed of forcing her to write her memoirs or, short of that, interrogating her about her past ended up, like the French police, throwing in the towel: she’s too much like a Russian novel! And rightly so… She embodied the novelistic form so thoroughly that she came to belong wholly to legend, myth, and fantasy. Facts and objective reality barely counted for her. She never owed anything to Truth. Except to her own truth.

  * * *

  All the same, the archives’ documents underscore that this woman belongs to History.

  My quest to retrace her footsteps has led me, over three years, through the libraries of Russia, Estonia, France, England, Italy, and America: all the lands where Moura left behind written traces.

  My story relies upon this immense corpus of letters, reports, and accounts, the entirety of which has fed my imagination.

  Her letters in English to H. G. Wells have been reproduced here. And her Russian correspondence with Gorky has been translated for the first time in these pages. I hope with all my heart that the tone and the spirit of these two great writers shine all the more brilliantly within their context.

  * * *

  The greatest irony is that after all this extensive academic research, I ultimately came back to the form of fiction, the form Moura herself had always instinctively lived through. In my eyes, it is the most suitable tone for slipping into the contradictions of her soul, for striving to bring her back to life.

  But readers can presume that all the protagonists, all the places, all the dates, all the words, and all Moura’s acts of which I am aware have been rendered with as much accuracy as I can provide within this novel. Any reader keen to learn more may turn to the end of the book to find a brief bibliography covering the Russian Revolution, the works of the writers with whom she spent portions of her life, and the details of international espionage between the two wars.

  There is no risk of exhausting the multitude of topics touching on the life she lived and the fate she met.

  * * *

  With her strength and her weaknesses, Moura personifies all the audacities of the twentieth century, as well as its sufferings and paradoxes.

  With her strength and her weaknesses, in my eyes she tragically, magnificently embodies the human condition.

  BOOK I The First Life of Marydear

  A Silver Spoon in Her Mouth: Love with a Thousand Faces

  March 1893–April 1918

  CHAPTER ONE Ducky

  1892

  The attachment governesses feel for the children they rear may bear some relationship to their past personal disasters. Those of the Zakrevsky children’s Irish nanny were the result of a succession of tragedies that nobody in Russia would ever learn about.

  Her name was Mrs. Margaret Wilson, or Ducky.

  Moura owed everything to her nurse’s love: her calmness, her kindness, and her thorough willingness to indulge—which would come to charm so many men.

  * * *

  Ducky had kept her maiden name, Wilson, even though she was married. She wasn’t Irish by origin but British. She was descended from a middle-class Protestant family in Liverpool, where her parents owned a grocery shop. They had instilled in their only daughter a grasp of proper conduct, a sense of good manners, and an understanding of upright morals. In all other domains, Margaret Wilson’s education was thoroughly abbreviated. She knew how to write, of course, and even how to count. To read, certainly. But she had little acquaintance with general ideas, much less knowledge itself; she never found herself absorbed in novels, much less the p
oetry that filled ladies’ magazines. Still, she was preternaturally gifted with intuition and shrewd common sense. Tall, svelte, instinctively elegant, Margaret garnered the admiration of everyone in the area. Her reserve and her dignity pleased them. Nothing in her childhood dreams had prepared her for falling in love with an Irish rebel—a Catholic, at that—nor for the heartbreak of her father’s opposition, the aspersions cast on her honesty, their elopement, and least of all life in absolute penury in Dublin. She had nothing but her passion and her will to live.

  Her husband’s alcoholism, his frequent disappearances into unsavory bars, and the birth of a child swiftly sounded the death knell for their marriage. One night he did not come back home, and he never showed his face again.

  Abandoned, indigent, bereft of any information about her husband—who could just as easily be dead as alive, for all she knew—the young woman fought against catastrophe. After several jobs, and ensuring the education of her little boy, Sean, as best she could, she struck out on her own. She was eighteen years old.

  The austerity this “Mother Courage” underwent would have lasted the rest of her time on earth if she had not met the second man of her life: Colonel Thomas Gonne, a soldier of the British army. He had lived in the Indies and in Russia, and he was now living in Dublin. A widower and a father of two girls of marriageable age, as well as a rich man, the colonel was, like Margaret, in love with the land where he had been posted. This last attribute—his passion for Ireland—seemed to be the only commonality he had with Mrs. Wilson. On all other fronts, they seemed to be not of the same world.

  Still, Colonel Gonne courted her properly, inundating her with flowers and attention, waiting respectfully and patiently for her to give in. Mrs. Wilson’s innate dignity had seduced him. Even if he never had any intention of doing more with her than he might do with a mistress, he saw in her a charming companion with whom he might while away a small portion of his life. And maybe, who knew, even the rest of his time on earth.

  Margaret was twenty-two years old at the time. The colonel was thirty years her elder. Unstinting in his affection, generous, courteous, he succeeded in reassuring her. She glimpsed a promise of happiness, and ended up acceding.

  Which was a mistake, because this fall reduced her to nothing more than a loose woman. Their relationship quickly grew complicated: immediately after their first tryst, she learned that she was expecting a baby. He promised to support the mother and the child. But Colonel Gonne’s swift death from typhoid fever meant that their adventure took a tragic turn.

  Margaret only learned of her lover’s death and funeral the day after she gave birth, when, standing in the street with their little girl in her arms, she saw the shuttered windows of the empty house. The servants had already returned to England.

  She tried to fight again. But in vain. This time, she couldn’t recover from the blow. She collapsed.

  Her job, her respectability, her love: she had lost them all. In one last attempt, she mustered the energy to head to London. The colonel had a brother there whom he had once mentioned to her, a brother he had designated as his daughters’ guardian. She made the trip to gain some money, some time, so the baby could survive until she was able to find work again.

  The shame this journey left her with would stay lodged in her soul forever. The humiliation of hearing others say she was just a liar, a rogue who deserved to be thrown out the door, the shrieks, the threats…

  Only by sheer luck did the colonel’s legitimate daughter, Miss Maud, twenty years old, hear the insults her uncle was hurling at the young woman sobbing in the parlor. Maud had adored her father. She herself had taken the responsibility of sending the envelope he had entrusted to her on his deathbed: a letter and a check meant for a certain “Mrs. Wilson.” She knew without a doubt that the newborn being discussed was her half sister.

  And so a sympathy of sorts, bound to their memory of the deceased, was established between Maud and Margaret. As they were now both in their twenties, the two young women met again. One had inherited a fortune and offered to care for Eileen, her father’s child. The other was fighting against starvation and obstinately refused to hand her child over to anyone.

  Margaret dug in her heels for six years. Free, but in the bowels of misery.

  When her first child, Sean, had no choice but to start working as a ship’s boy at ten years old and she saw that her pride and egotism were ruining any chance her daughter had of a decent life, she came to her senses. Her temporary surrender consisted of accepting employment with a very wealthy Russian family. One year abroad would earn her a sum that would have taken a hundred years to make in Dublin. Her compensation would allow her to reestablish herself and, upon her return, to guarantee Eileen’s and Sean’s educations. The potential employer was a Ukrainian aristocrat who had known Colonel Gonne quite well when the Brit had come to work in Saint Petersburg. An Anglophile, he wanted his children, who were now living at his estate in the oblast of Poltava, to speak the language of Shakespeare fluently. When he visited Maud, the daughter of his old friend, in London, she suggested an Irish widow she knew. She presented Margaret to him as a deserving person, presently in need, who had been her tutor and lady’s companion in Dublin. A perfect nanny. Mrs. Wilson’s charm and dignity did the rest. He hired her.

  The scope of suffering Margaret endured in being so far away from her six-year-old daughter, the scale of her sacrifice, was immeasurable.

  * * *

  Margaret Wilson’s fate seemed to have been banal to the point that making a story of it would have made a melodrama of it, would have framed the personalities of all its protagonists as larger, each in his or her own way, stronger, more enduring than Life itself… like all those who were close to Moura.

  And so this Miss Maud, who mothered Mrs. Wilson’s child, would go on to be the muse of Ireland’s best poet, William Butler Yeats—the famous Maud Gonne, to whom Yeats would dedicate many of his works, who fought alongside him for Ireland’s independence.

  As for His Excellency Ignaty Platonovich Zakrevsky, who had brought back a practically illiterate governess, during one of his subsequent trips to Paris he would become a friend and accomplice of Émile Zola in his battle to rehabilitate Captain Dreyfus. Senator Zakrevsky, a legal expert at the tsar’s court, even took up Dreyfus’s defense against the entirety of Félix Faure’s government. In all the foreign papers that accepted his articles—most notably the Times of London—he attacked France’s monstrous treatment of an innocent man.

  This act would cost him his career. But it would earn him the respect of the woman educating his children.

  * * *

  The night before Zakrevsky’s departure for Ukraine, in those dark hours of December 1892, Mrs. Wilson sobbed to herself… She was going to the end of the world. A year’s separation from her children, a year in the farthest reaches of the globe—she presumed.

  She was wrong. Her adventure would last nearly half a century. Until 1938, the year she died.

  * * *

  During their interminable journey, His Excellency’s manservant had the opportunity to teach her about the history of the family she would be serving. His Excellency’s family tree led back to a Cossack chief who had been the great-nephew of Peter the Great. Or, more exactly, the nephew of Tsarina Elizabeth and her morganatic spouse, Kirill Razumovsky. His Excellency could thereby claim to be connected to the Romanov family—a distant relation of His Majesty Tsar Nicholas II.

  Whether or not this relationship was true mattered little: the Zakrevsky family needed no such legend to prove their nobility. Their ancestors were of such high birth that adding a title to their names hadn’t even occurred to them.

  The Zakrevskys were not princes, nor counts, nor barons, in contrast to their relatives and neighbors, the Naryshkin, Saltykov, and Kochubey princes. They didn’t have to be. In the Zakrevskys’ eyes, their lineage was even better.