“Don’t worry. Moses told me that violators would be boiled in oil. So we get it,” Luke said. “Not to mention he plans to stick to me like glue to make sure I get pictures of everyone you want photographed. Sophie’s going to take candids, as well as the detail photos of the party, like those ice sculptures and the roses and urns with the red and gold feathers.”
Seth nodded. “Excellent. In that case, how about a tour?”
The shadows in the museum had lengthened as the light from the skylights faded and became opaque. Now only spotlights illuminated the sculptures and paintings, and the gallery lighting took on a lambent, dreamlike quality. We followed MacDonald into the East Garden Court. In the center of the room golden light poured onto a fountain in which two cherubs played on a lyre and backlit the arcade behind a row of Ionic columns. Rosebushes of every color surrounded the fountain, and in each corner of the room a small garden area was heavily planted with ferns, palms, and other greenery whose branches arced over the walkways. Benches, wrought-iron chairs, and small tables had been placed around the perimeter of the room. In a far corner, a grand piano was cordoned off behind red velvet ropes.
“It’s beautiful,” Ali said.
“The lighting reminds me of an Impressionist painting,” I said.
“I thought you would appreciate it.” Seth smiled. “I come here when I get a free moment, just to sit and enjoy the tranquillity. That fountain used to be on the grounds of Versailles, along with the one in the West Garden Court.”
Ali pointed to the piano. “Do you hold concerts here?”
He nodded. “We also have a terrific summer jazz series in the outdoor sculpture garden across the street. It’s just wrapping up for the season, but I’ll make sure you get a schedule before you leave. I think you’d enjoy it . . . I believe you’re a professional singer?”
Ali was wearing another vintage outfit—fitted chartreuse skirt and matching bolero jacket, her thick, dark hair pulled up in a chignon, smoky eyes, and kiss-me red lips. I’d watched Seth noticing her as we’d toured the museum, her surprised reactions and comments giving away that this was her first visit ever to the National Gallery. A potential convert for Seth, someone he could perhaps win over and persuade that this beautiful building wasn’t just a series of rooms filled with old paintings by dead men.
Ali looked surprised that he had taken the time to find out about her. “I am,” she said, blushing. “And I’d like a copy of your concert schedule.”
“I’ll see that you get one,” he said. “Come. Please follow me.”
We walked past a scarlet banner suspended between two columns with
EMPIRE OF THE FIREBIRD: THE REDISCOVERED TREASURES OF THE IMPERIAL ROMANOV DYNASTY
written on it in gold calligraphy. The exhibit was laid out in a series of interlinked rooms connected to a central octagonal room. Though the imperial eggs had received the lion’s share of media attention and hype because of the dramatic way they’d been discovered and the fact that one of them had never been heard of until now, the exhibit also comprised an eclectic collection of art and icons whose common thread was that everything had once belonged to the Romanovs and had vanished for nearly a century, lost in the chaos and turmoil of a revolution that disdained—and even tried to destroy—anything the royal family had owned. The exception, as homage to the Firebird egg, was a series of paintings from the Firebird fairy tale by Viktor Vasnetsov, a Russian artist known for his mythological and historical subjects and a contemporary of Nicholas and Alexandra. According to Seth, the curator of the Vasnetsov Museum in Moscow was a close friend of Katya Gordon’s and this was the first time the paintings had ever been exhibited outside Russia. In the smallest room hung half a dozen never-before-seen oil paintings by Alexander III’s wife, Maria Feodorovna.
“Not many people knew the empress was an amateur artist,” Seth said as we stood in front of a still life of a table set for a meal. “These paintings are valued, of course, because Maria did them.”
He saved the octagonal room, with its specially built cabinets displaying Fabergé’s ruby-red Firebird and sapphire Blue Tsarevich Constellation imperial eggs, for last. In the pure white light of dozens of tiny spotlights they glittered, dazzling baubles created to please two empresses but ultimately symbolizing the brutal and merciless end of the Romanov’s decadent empire.
I heard Ali’s sharp intake of breath as Luke muttered, “Jesus.”
“Exquisite, aren’t they?” Seth said. “Fabergé created fifty-two imperial eggs that we knew of, until the discovery of the Firebird egg. So now there are fifty-three.”
“Why fifty-three?” Ali asked. “And why eggs?”
“Because in the Russian Orthodox faith, it’s common practice to exchange eggs at Easter,” he said. “These were Easter gifts. Alexander III began the tradition in 1885 when he went to Carl Fabergé, who was a well-known jeweler in St. Petersburg, and asked him to design an Easter egg for his Danish wife, Maria Feodorovna.
“Fabergé’s design appeared to be quite simple, a plain white enamel egg. But inside the egg was a pure gold yolk and inside the yolk was a tiny hen. And inside the hen was a diamond miniature of the imperial crown and a ruby pendant. Maria was enchanted, as you can imagine. And so began a tradition that would continue for three decades. When Alexander died, his son, Nicholas II, continued the gifts. Though by then Fabergé was designing two eggs, one for Maria and another for Nicholas’s wife, Alexandra. It ended, of course, in 1918.”
“What happened in 1918?” Ali asked.
Seth said in a bland voice, “As you probably remember from your history classes, the Bolsheviks assassinated the entire royal family—Nicholas, Alexandra, and their five children—by firing squad in the basement of a home in Ekaterinburg. The czar’s mother, Maria Feodorovna, had escaped earlier to the Crimea, and later to Britain. But the others were mowed down in cold blood, believing they were going to have their photographs taken.”
Ali absorbed that information in shocked silence, but I knew this story only too well. Nick’s grandmother’s family had also fled Russia as Maria had done, a terrifying trip on an overcrowded boat with no food and almost no water for four thousand people. The ship barely made it out of Sebastopol, those on board watching weeping friends and family members abandoned on shore as gunfire from the approaching Red Army grew louder. My heart still pounded every time I thought about that harrowing trip, heard Babushka’s raspy voice as we sat in the tiny kitchen of her Paris apartment drinking tea that she’d insisted on making in a samovar. Nick would translate for me as a curl of acrid smoke from her favorite Gitanes Maïs—she used a Bakelite cigarette holder, which seemed so glamorous—enveloped us.
“Are you okay, Sophie?” Luke asked me.
I looked around, momentarily convinced I’d caught the wisp of a scent of black tobacco and yellow corn paper. “I’m fine,” I said. “Just thinking about what Seth said.”
“The display card says that neither Maria nor Alexandra ever saw these eggs,” Ali said. “Was it because Alexandra had been killed and Maria was gone?”
“Yes and no. In the case of the Constellation egg, you’re correct,” Seth said. “But the egg was to be Alexandra’s had she lived, not Maria’s. The Firebird egg was also supposed to be for Alexandra, until Fabergé decided not to give it to her.”
“How do you know they were meant for Alexandra?” Luke asked.
“Come. I want to show you something,” Seth said as we walked over to the Constellation egg. “You see the beautiful detailed etching on the blue stone? It depicts the night sky on the date Alexis, Nicholas and Alexandra’s son, was born. It was the last imperial egg Fabergé ever designed. Until it turned up in that trunk in England, we believed he never finished it because it was supposed to be Alexandra’s gift in 1918. It probably explains why there’s no surprise inside, as there was with all the other eggs.”
“What about the Firebird egg?” Ali asked. “If nobody even knew about it, how do you know Alexandra was supposed to get it?”
“We don’t know for sure,” he said as we moved to the other case. “But the egg is red, the color of blood. Alexis, who was the heir to the throne, had hemophilia, meaning a fall or a bruise could cause him to bleed to death. The odds of him living to adulthood were poor and his death would change the Romanov line of succession. So his parents tried to keep his illness a secret for as long as possible. By now, though, Fabergé had become the imperial jeweler. He was known and trusted by the royal family, so we presume he knew about Alexis. And from 1906 on, Fabergé never designed an imperial egg in any shade of red, so as not to remind Alexandra of her son’s bleeding.”
We stared at the exquisite ruby-and diamond-studded Firebird egg, perched on a gold stand on top of a white velvet pedestal. The tiny surprises, a jeweled gray wolf and a golden-maned horse from the Russian fairy tale, sat at the base of the pedestal.
“When do you think it was made?” I asked.
“It’s hard to know for sure since there were no records, but our best guess is 1904 or 1905, when Nicholas didn’t commission eggs for the empresses. If you recall, those were the years of the Russo-Japanese War, and Nicholas thought it was in poor taste to show such blatant ostentation during a time of hardship for his people,” Seth said. “Now, Alexis was born in 1904 and quite possibly Fabergé didn’t know about the hemophilia that early, so maybe he went ahead and designed the egg then. Once he found out about the little boy, though, he decided not to give it to Alexandra. But it was too beautiful to be destroyed and, for yet more unknown reasons, Fabergé didn’t sell it to one of his other wealthy clients.”
No one spoke for a moment. Finally Ali said, “That’s so sad.”
Seth gave her a kindly look. “Think of it this way: These eggs are the legacy of a gift of love from a husband to a wife and a son to a mother. They’ve outlived an empire. There was a time the Bolsheviks were so desperate for Western hard currency that Joseph Stalin sold ten Fabergé eggs to Armand Hammer, the American businessman, based on the weight of their jewels. Then, in order to drum up public interest—the United States was in the middle of the Depression and people didn’t care about a few Russian trinkets—Hammer took the eggs all around the country like a road show, displaying them in upscale department stores.”
Luke whistled softly as Ali made a final slow tour of the eggs.
“More than ten thousand people have tickets to this exhibit,” Seth said. “There’s an almost obsessive interest in the imperial eggs now. Not only because they once belonged to royalty but also because there’s so much tragedy and mystery surrounding their history after they came into the possession of the Bolsheviks. Each one has its own story, starting with the lives of the women for whom they were created to an eccentric cast of characters and wheeler-dealers who bought, sold, smuggled, and even stole the eggs.”
Luke met my eyes through the glass case of the Firebird egg, and I knew now that he understood what I had said to him about what the eggs symbolized the day he interviewed me.
“This was fascinating,” he said to Seth. “Thank you.”
“Especially for letting us see them like this,” I said. “It was sort of magical having them to ourselves.”
“I’ve felt that way, too, when I’ve been here by myself. Though it’s going to be a different story when the exhibit is open to the public.” He smiled. “And now, shall we have a look at my office and the storage closet?”
As he’d told us, the office and conference room were accessible through an unobtrusive door in the cloakroom, which adjoined the Founders’ Room. Seth pushed a recessed panel in the wall and the door sprang open.
“Open sesame,” Ali said, awed. “Is it a secret passageway?”
“Yes.” Seth nodded as we followed him down a corridor whose only lights were a few bare electric bulbs. We stopped in front of a door marked
PRIVATE
.
“There’s a metal security door just around the corner,” he said. “It leads to a subterranean corridor running the width of the museum, from the Mall to Constitution Avenue.”
Ali disappeared to check it out. “It looks like the door to a dungeon.”
“You’re almost right,” Seth said as we crowded into his small office. The walls and surfaces were covered with posters, photographs, sculptures, scale models, and architectural adornments that had been part of previous museum exhibits. The desk was a door set on top of a pair of Ionic columns, and a colorful foam topiary of fruit and flowers sat on top of a file cabinet. I instantly fell in love with the room, with its colorful random juxtapositions.
“I don’t know if you were aware that the gallery was built on the site of the old Sixth Street railway station,” Seth was saying. “It’s probably most famous for being the place where President Garfield was assassinated in 1881. There’s a plaque in the underground passageway commemorating the spot.”
“Why is there a passageway under the museum?” Ali asked.
“I can’t go into a lot of detail, but it leads to a climate-controlled vault. Something we might need in case we ever have to temporarily store some of our most valuable paintings in an emergency and there isn’t sufficient time to get them out of Washington,” he said.
“You mean like a terrorist attack?” Luke asked.
“Well, that’s the first thing you think of today, but don’t forget, John Russell Pope designed the building in the 1930s,” Seth said. “At that time the precedent was something less apocalyptic, but equally devastating: the War of 1812, when the British burned Washington—the White House and the Capitol being the two most prominent buildings damaged in the fire. And during World War II, the director of the Corcoran Gallery was so worried about the capital being bombed he secretly moved many of their finest masterpieces to the basement of a high school in Winchester, Virginia.”
“Can anyone use that tunnel?” Ali asked.
“It’s closed to the public,” Seth said. “But since the passageway has a door that leads to the kitchen of the Garden Café, which is our lower level restaurant, we’ve decided to leave the access door up here unlocked the night of the reception. That way Mr. Vasiliev’s chef and some of the waitstaff can get back and forth between the upstairs and downstairs without going through the Rotunda.”