“We are the best of friends,” he said, with feigned indignation, “that’s why. But he can have a wicked tongue on him, and I’ve just been curious to know if my name ever came up behind the closed doors of the imperial apartments.” His eyes, deep and dark and penetrating, were staring into hers, and she felt as if a wolf were sizing her up for dinner.
“I think I need to sit down,” she said, suddenly feeling unsteady on her feet.
The prince, without missing a beat, swept her from the floor and onto a gilded divan framed between a pair of floor-length mirrors. Two other ladies quickly moved to make room for their royal addition.
“Forgive me,” the prince said, bowing at the waist with one hand folded behind his back. “I fear my conversation has proved tiresome to Your Royal Highness.” Anastasia still had the sense that he was somehow mocking her. Mocking a grand duchess! “I’m sure our mutual friend will turn up any minute. Wherever the champagne is flowing, Father Grigori cannot be far behind.”
As he retired, the other ladies fluttered their eyes and tried to catch his attention, but to no avail. He was already hailing Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich and gesturing toward one of the buffet chambers. And so the ladies set their sights on Anastasia, instead.
“You look very lovely tonight, Your Highness,” one of them gushed, and the other said, “But where has your mother gone to? Her dress was quite beautiful and I was eager to study it more closely.” She leaned closer with a smile and said, “That way I can get a better copy made when I leave for Paris.”
Flattery was something Anastasia, like any member of the royal family, was inured to. Her mother and father had brought her up, as best they could, to ignore it. For an honest opinion, there were family members one could turn to, and certain confidantes and retainers, such as Dr. Botkin, the French tutor Pierre Gilliard, or Anna Demidova, her mother’s maid who had served the Tsaritsa forever and whose loyalty and love were undoubted. And even though Jemmy was just a cocker spaniel, Anastasia knew that the little dog would love her just the same whether she was a grand duchess or a peasant girl. She wished that people could be more like dogs.
A servant offered her another glass of champagne, and with her mother nowhere in sight, she saw no reason not to take it. She was done dancing for the night — her left foot already ached a bit — and she chatted amiably with the two ladies, both of whom turned out to be the wives of ministers of something or other (ministers came and went so routinely that Anastasia never bothered to get their names straight) and began to wonder at her mother’s absence. The Tsar himself was holding court at one end of the ballroom, but it was beginning to dawn on Anastasia that if her mother had already disappeared — and Father Grigori had not shown up at all — there could only be one reason.
Alexei must have taken a turn for the worse.
Excusing herself, she skirted the dance floor, waved good night to Count Benckendorff, and lifting her long skirt a few inches, scurried down one of the vast galleries lined with towering columns of jasper, marble, and malachite. Some late-arriving guests swiftly stopped to bow and curtsy as she passed, then she was hurrying up the main staircase and down several more corridors, decorated with rich tapestries and gloomy oil portraits, until she reached the family’s private quarters in the East Wing. Comprised of only twenty or thirty rooms, most of them overlooking an enclosed park, this was the Romanovs’ sanctuary, the place where they could live a relatively normal, uninhibited, and unobserved life. The Ethiopian guards silently opened the doors as she approached, and just as silently closed them behind her a moment later.
She was running toward her brother’s rooms when she happened to notice that the door to her mother’s private chapel was ajar. Candlelight flickered from within, and when she peered around the open door, she saw Rasputin standing before the altar, surrounded by votive candles and dozens of holy icons — portraits of the Virgin Mary, or various saints, daubed in gold and silver, on resin wood or bronze. He did not hear her as she entered, so absorbed was he in his prayers, and though she did not wish to startle him, she needed to know if her brother was in danger.
“Father Grigori,” she murmured, and as if he had known she was there all along, he said, without turning, “I have comforted the Tsarevitch, and he will live.”
She waited, relieved — what kind of Christmas would this have been if he had not? — and wondering if she should leave the starets to his prayers.
“But my own time is fast approaching,” he said, the candlelight glinting off the pectoral cross.
He turned his head without turning his body, and despite her reverence for the holy man, Anastasia was reminded of a snake sinuously twisting its neck around. His eyes were smoldering in their sockets.
“I shall not live to see the New Year,” he said. “I have written it all down in a letter I have given to Simanovich.”
Simanovich, Anastasia knew, was his personal secretary, a slovenly man who reeked of tobacco juice and sweat.
“But it is for your father to read one day. If I am killed by common assassins, by my brothers the peasants, then you and your family have nothing to fear; the Romanovs shall rule for hundreds of years.” Then he raised a finger in warning, his beard bristling as if with electricity. “But if I am murdered by the boyars — if it is the nobles who take my life — then their hands will be soiled with my blood for twenty-five years. Brothers will kill brothers. If any relation to your family brings about my death, then woe to the dynasty. The Russian people will rise against you with murder in their hearts.”
The blood froze in Anastasia’s veins. She had never heard him speak in such apocalyptic tones, and for the first time she drew back from him in fear.
“That is why you must take this,” he said, grasping the emerald cross on its chain. “You must wear it always.”
He lifted the cross over his head, then draped it over hers, turning it so she could see the back. Their heads were so close she could smell the liquor on his breath and see the dead-white skin beneath the zigzag part in his long black hair. “It was to be my Christmas present to you. Look, my child, look.”
There was an inscription now, but in the flickering light of the votive candles, it was too hard to read.
“See? See what it says?” he implored. “ ‘To my little one.’ ” Malenkaya. “ ‘No one can break the chains of love that bind us.’ ”
It was signed, she could see now, “Your loving father, Grigori.”
“It is time you knew,” he said. “Although I will not be here in body, I shall always be watching over you in spirit. This cross shall be your shield.”
“But why me?” Anastasia said, her voice quavering to her own surprise, “and not the others?” She wished that her mother — or anyone, for that matter — would intrude on the private chapel and break this awful spell she felt being cast. “Why not my sisters? They’re older and”—she hesitated, ashamed, then blurted out what she was thinking—“more beautiful than I’ll ever be.”
Rasputin scoffed and reared back. “You are the one most beautiful in the sight of God,” he said, raising his own gaze toward the stained-glass ceiling.
“But what about Alexei? He’s the one who will rule Russia one day.”
“Hear me,” Rasputin said, before lowering his own voice and eyes. “The blood of your family is poisoned; the Tsarevitch is poisoned. It was matushka who carried the taint.”
He often called the Tsar and Tsaritsa by the traditional endearments matushka and batushka, terms that suggested they were the loving mother and father of their people. And though Anastasia had indeed learned about the curse of hemophilia being hereditary — she had heard her own mother one night wailing in her boudoir that it was she who had brought this suffering upon her son — she had never heard the monk utter anything so blunt and damning.