“Oh, Nicky, dusha moya!” My soul, said the Empress, clasping her husband.

“You see, my love. As you’ve always said, after the rain-”

“Sun.”

“After the darkness-”

“Light.”

“And after the illness-”

“Health.”

“Exactly,” said the Tsar. “We mustn’t give up faith.”

“No, my love. Never.”

But the luck of Nikolai and his brood was like an ocean liner, very difficult to turn around. At that particular moment Anastasiya Nikolaevna took it upon herself not simply to poke her head out the window, not simply to stretch outside as far as she could, but to actually climb up on the windowsill. A character, she was. Full of energy and mischief. One of her royal cousins had long ago taught her to climb trees, a habit that she could never be broken of, no matter her rank or gender.

“Careful, Nasten’ka!” chided number three sister, Maria Nikolaevna.

“Oi, Mashka, stop your worrying! I just want the air all around me. I want it to lift me up, to carry me away, far away!”

Her father, the Tsar, turned from his wife, saw his daughter perched on the ledge two floors above ground, and shouted, “Bozhe moi!” My God! “Anastasiya Nikolaevna, you get down right this moment!”

“But, Papa-”

“Now!

“Oh, all right. I-”

But just as she turned her back to the endless world beyond, just as she readied herself to jump back into the hole of our existence, a blast rang out. More specifically, a shot. The next instant the wall of the house, not but a few centimeters from Anastasiya’s head, was struck by a bullet, and bits of stucco and brick exploded into the air. As much by fear as anything else, the poor child was thrown into the room, where she landed upon two of her sisters. They all screamed and came crashing down onto the floor, collapsing in a terrible heap of arms and legs. Before I knew it, before I could even think what to do, the Tsar grabbed the wheeling chaise from me, jerking his son from the environs of the window and pulling him back against the far wall.

Terrified, Aleksandra Fyodorovna cried out and threw herself forward, grabbing for her youngest daughter, screaming, “Anya!”

All of a sudden a huge wail rose above everything else, a terrified cry as the girl replied, “Mama!”

I stumbled back, plastering myself against the wall. Before my eyes Aleksandra made a frantic examination of her youngest daughter – limbs, head, torso – but, no, Anastasiya was not wounded, she was unscathed, merely terrified. As the girl broke into a flow of tears, Aleksandra clutched her daughter to her chest, cradling her and sobbing as well. A moment later the three other grand duchesses fell upon them, and this heap of womanhood shook like a volcano until finally, for the first time, they erupted. All this time, all these months, not one of them had broken down, not one of them had let go, and now… now they bellowed forth.

“My babies!” cried Alix, poring over her three other daughters – Olya’s hand, Tanechka’s head, Mashka’s cheek. “My precious babies!”

The Tsar turned the wheeling chaise around, pushed his son to this mass of family, and they all melded into a heap, mother and daughters on the floor, son slightly higher on his chaise, and father standing firmly above them. They all clutched and grabbed for one another, Alix hanging onto her Nicky’s leg. For the first time, the only time, I saw amazing pain boil in the Tsar’s body. He closed his eyes, bit his bottom lip. Strong, he had to be strong for family, for Russia, for God. But he couldn’t. No more. He had reached his limit, and for fear of totally falling apart, he dared not move; he simply let his terrified family drape from him like a defeated flag. With every bit of courage he had left, he pinched his lips lest he cry out, clenched his eyes shut lest he spill his fear, and his face passed from white to crimson. And yet there was only so much he could control. A tear emerged in his right eye. Two tears. They were huge and round, and slowly, quite slowly, they began to travel down his cheek and into his beard.

Everyone came flooding into the room, Demidova, Trupp, Kharitonov, the guards, and, of course, finally the komendant himself.

“What have you idiots done!” Avdeyev yelled at the family. “You, Citizen Romanov, were you trying to escape? We open a window, and what do you do a minute later, try to run away? Is that it, hey, Nikolashka, you coward, trying to get away from us?”

I thought the Tsar was going to rip off the man’s head. I saw his body quiver, his fists curl into knots of rock. But Nikolai Aleksandrovich didn’t move. No, ever-fatalistic, he silently bore the insult as he had always carried everything, crown and all.

“I… I…” he said, barely able to speak, let alone control himself, “would never… never leave my family.”

“Well, that’s not what the guard down below said. He said he looked up and saw one of you ready to jump out!”

“That fool nearly killed my daughter!”

“They have strict orders to shoot upon-”

The Emperor flung his arm out, pointing at the doorway as he screamed, “Leave us!”

“Shto?” What? coarsely replied Avdeyev. “Let me remind you that you blood drinkers are the prisoners here! In case you don’t yet understand, I am the komendant and I give the orders around-”

“Get out!”

“But-”

The Tsar’s eyes flared, his entire face flashed red with fury, and, fired with the spirits of his ancestors, he shouted, “Get out now!”

Such a moment I will never forget. For the first and only time did Nikolai Aleksandrovich seem like a true Russian tsar, an ironfisted one. He was Ivan and Peter and Catherine all in one, and Avdeyev crumbled in a second. The komendant all but started shaking, all but bowed to the ground, for in the end of ends this was his Tsar, and at the very least he would grant him this, the few square meters upon which the august family was now huddled, as their territory and theirs alone. With no further protest, Avdeyev withdrew. And so did we, the rest of their meager attendants. Kharitonov fell away. Demidova. Trupp. Even Botkin, who had come at the last moment, ill though he was. I made my way out of the room as well. I slowly walked to the passage to the dining room, the door of which had been removed, of course. And the last I looked back, Nikolai was dropping to his knees. They were all coming together. All seven of them. Holding hands, they formed a tight circle, bowed their heads in prayer. Aleksandra and Tatyana started chanting a hymn, Nikolai spoke a prayer and… and…

7

Such a kind man was Nikolai II. So sweet. So tender. And gentle. He loved nothing more than his family and his country. He hated disagreements, either within his vast, squabbling house or among his ministers, both great and small, or anywhere else, for that matter, within his enormous realm. That was the Tsar I knew then, and the Tsar I’ve since grown to know in my books. Bloodshed was not at all what he wanted… and yet any fool would admit that that was his legacy. When Batyushka, the Dear Father, departed this world, he left behind a vast sea of blood, his own, his family’s, his country’s. Up until the ironfisted, totalitarian rule of the Red tsars – the kommunisty, who made the terrible Ivan look like a choir boy – his reign was one of the most violent in all the history of Russia. One must not forget that it was during the reign of Nicholas II that two disastrous wars, two bitter revolutions, and countless pogroms befell Holy Mother Russia. And though Tsar Nikolai wanted nothing more than to avoid violence, though many of the disasters were not of his doing, virtually all of them were his fault because he was Tsar, Russian Tsar, absolute Tsar, Orthodox Tsar. When you look back through the decades, it now seems utterly obvious that there was no way it could be done, no way an autocrat could rule so vast a country, at least not without complete terror and oppression. Why, during his arrest the former Tsar read the anti-Semitic, Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which he found “very timely reading matter.” He never learned, however, that the book was an entire fabrication, composed by his own tsarist secret police, whose duty it was to maintain order for their master, but who instead incited the hate and riots that toppled him. So in the end this is how Nikolai II must be viewed: a very caring man of moderate abilities who, although utterly devoted to his country, was unable to transform the unworkable autocratic system thrust upon him. Period. That simple.