Mrs. Edwards had a perfectly good passport, obtained us the wife of James Edwards, whom she married at Tiflis sixteen months ago while he was an officer of the Near East relief. He went away on business, so he told her, and has not since returned.
When Georgia passed again into the hands of Moscow last March, after several years as an Independent republic, Mrs. Edwards fled with many others to Datum, but there decided to remain and take her chances.
She worked for a time as translator of English under the new soviet and then in August was arrested by the secret police, charged with being a foreign spy. Money was offered to her to go to Constantinople and work for the soviet. This she refused and so was sent to Tiflis and imprisoned.
In prison most of her clothes were taken away, ostensibly to be burned during the cholera epidemic, and those she had on were fumigated. She did not have a bed but was told to sleep on the floor. Her food, so she related later, consisted of a pound of bad bread a day, with hot water in the morning and thin soup at night. She scrubbed floors during the day. Also each day she was told she would be shot as a bourgeois.
What aroused the special hate and attention of the Bolsheviks was her maiden name of Romanoff. She states that her mother was an American, Liana Davenport, and that she was born in Tiflis, where her father was governor general. Because of the name Romanoff she was suspected of being related to the family of the late czar. 