Madame Blavatsky: The Woman Behind the Myth by Marion Meade Page B

ahead. Fadeyev decided that he could no longer be responsible for his troublesome granddaughter.
    The problem, however, was what to do with her. An eighteen-year-old woman, married or not, could not be permitted to run loose. Shipping her back to Blavatsky seemed out of the question, and the ailing Princess Helena was in no condition to supervise her. By process of elimination, Helena’s father became the only alternative. Writing to von Hahn at St. Petersburg, Fadeyev outlined both the situation and the proposed solution in terms that did not brook refusal. Von Hahn, finally settled at fifty-one with his second wife, the Baroness von Lange, who was expecting their first child, could hardly have welcomed the news. But after a further exchange of letters, it was agreed that Fadeyev would have Helena sent overland to Poti, a port on the Black Sea, and from there she would travel by steamer to Odessa, where von Hahn would collect her. Having no trust in Helena, Fadeyev placed her in the custody of four serfs— one of them his personal steward—and dispatched this convoy, amounting to nothing less than an armed guard, in a capacious four-in-hand.
    Helena left Tiflis feeling “sick at heart.” 2 After years of phantasizing a reunion with her father, she realized that it was, of course, too late. If he had not wanted her before, she now discovered that she no longer wanted him. She felt sure that he would begin by moralizing and end by returning her to Nikifor. These were not unrealistic fears and by the time they approached Poti, her mind was hard at work on schemes to slip away from her escort.
    On the westward trip through Georgia, she had caused sufficient delays to make the party miss the steamer for Odessa at Poti. In the harbor was an English vessel, the SS Commodore, from whose skipper Helena learned it was headed first for Kerch in the Crimea, and from there would sail north-eastward to Taganrog on the Sea of Azov, before turning south again for Constantinople. She devised a two-stage plan: she would book passage to Kerch for the servants, and to Constantinople for herself. When she proposed this idea to the skipper, he at first refused to have anything to do with it. She succeeded in convincing him, she claimed, by a liberal outlay of rubles. But there were also other reasons for his change of mind.
    Kerch, viewed from the steamer, was an extremely pretty town which rose like an amphitheater surrounding the bay: the church cupolas were painted green and topped with immense gilded crosses, and on a steep hill to the left stood a museum modeled after a Greek temple. Telling them that she would join them in the morning, Helena sent the serfs ashore to find lodgings for their layover while they allegedly would await a ship to Odessa.
    That night the Commodore slipped quietly out of the harbor and Helena Petrovna Blavatsky finally managed to shake free of all restrictions. Hungry for life, she could plunge into the adventures and travels she had dreamed about. “My soul needed space,” 3 as she put it, but she did not bargain for the steep price she would have to pay. No sooner had they reached Taganrog than the skipper suggested it would be best if the harbor police, who would be coming aboard, did not see her. The reason remains obscure: either she had not paid for her passage, or there was some irregularity in her papers, or perhaps, as an unchaperoned female minor, she was a “suspicious person.” The skipper instructed her to conceal herself in a coal bin and, when she balked, he had her dress as a cabin boy and huddle in a bunk feigning illness.
    It should have been clear by now that more than respectful regard was motivating the captain to perform these services for a stowaway, and one wonders if she naively believed he would smuggle her into Turkey without asking recompense. She told Alfred Sinnett that “further embarrassments developed” once the Commodore dropped anchor in Constantinople harbor, and she