The Last Tsar's Dragons

Chapter 29

When the tsarina was told about Rasputin, it was her husband who broke the news.

He took her on his knee, as he had when the children were still young and asleep in the nursery, watched over by three different babushkas. “Old women never sleep well at night, so they will stay awake,” he had told her, as he had been told by one of his cousins when the first child was born.

He held her tenderly in his arms and whispered to her, as if a prelude to their lovemaking. “Sunny, my darling girl, I have news I can barely make my lips speak.”

She turned to him, eyes wide with fear. “Alexei….”

He shook his head. “Sleeping soundly. No, not about him.”

She named each of the children in order except—of course—their dead daughter, already out of the reach of such terror.

She stood. “Tell me standing. I am Victoria’s granddaughter; I am the child of Germans who was taught in the cradle to handle any bad news.”

He stood, holding her at arms’ length. “It is Father Grigori,” he said.

She shook her head. “No! No! He is not old. He has not been sick. He is on speaking terms with God.”

He looked down at the floor, before gathering the courage to look once again in her eyes. “He was murdered,” he said. “Foully murdered.” He couldn’t stop himself now, and the words came out in a flood. “Shot, stabbed, poisoned, drowned.”

She stared at him as if she had lost all reason. As if the world as she knew it had suddenly collapsed at the center. He wondered if she would look like that when he died.

Then suddenly, she said in a voice as fierce as Baba Yaga’s, “Which thing killed him?” As if she would bring the miscreant gun or knife or bottle of poison—or river—to trial for the deed.

“All of them,” he said, sounding as miserable as if he had been the one to raise a hand to the monk.

She nodded. “It would have needed them all to tear him from the side of the Romanovs,” she said.

He took her back into the cavern of his arms but didn’t mention the dragons. He didn’t dare.

She slept all night in his arms, something she hadn’t done in years, so there was one thing he could bless Rasputin for.

At the dawning of the day, the tsarina went into the children’s rooms to tell them about what had happened before the news leaked from unreliable sources, such as servants, into their innocent ears. When she returned from that awful task, the tsar was already in his own bedroom, where he was sequestered with his barber. She was not even out of her nightclothes, and her own hair seemed to have grown gray in places overnight.

“You bastard!” she shouted, but in German so the barber would not know what she had said. “It was your own bloody dragons in the end.”

He took a towel from the barber and wiped his face clean of the shaving soap. “The end of what?”

Luckily, she knew him for the guileless fool he often was, and her anger was becalmed, a ship in troubled waters still, but the sails not flapping dangerously.

She sat down on the nearest chair. “My saintly Father Grigori,” she said, her voice dangerously low and careful, “survived everything those bastards used on him.” She was still speaking in German, being careful that the barber did not understand what was being said. “And he had already made his escape, ’til the dragons came and drowned him in the Neva.”

“That cannot be,” the tsar remarked, way too casually to be believed. In fact, he had his answers well prepared. “The dragons are never released without my permission.” He tried to smile, feared it was a grimace. “You and I were at the theater….”

“Nevertheless, that is what everyone is saying,” she responded. Everyone being the servants, of course.

He was too upset to continue in German and roared out in Russian, “Who is everyone?”

She flapped her hands, too stunned to speak, for he had never before raised his voice with her. She turned and pointed to her rooms, where he could hear her women gossiping.

When he turned to speak to the barber, to calm things down, the man had already fled.

There’ll be no help from that quarter, he thought and looked back to his wife. She looked at him as cold as a St. Petersburg winter.

In the time it took for Nicky to turn to the fleeing barber and back again, the tsarina remembered who and what she was.

A German and a queen.

“You made me turn Father Grigori away,” she said, coldly. In Russian now, so he couldn’t misunderstand her, easily forgetting the truth of the matter. “I turned him away, and now he is dead.” Her newly restored strength faltered. “He is dead, and now who will look after little Alexei?” She knew in her heart that the doctors were useless. Only God and Father Grigori had ever been truly helpful to her son.

And now if he takes a turn for the worse? As he will, she thought wildly, as he always did. She shuddered to think of it, for there would be no one to help then. No one but God.

And then she knew what she had to say, had to insist upon. Her son needed it. Her kingdom required it. History demanded it.

“You will destroy them,” she said. She softened her voice, because soft words rather than shouted demands were the most effective tool with her husband. “Please, Nicky, you must.”

Nicky looked confused. “Who?” he asked, no longer shouting.

The tsarina knew that the Lord was a loving God, but a vengeful one, too. And if a servant of his had been killed—murdered!—then should not they be murdered in return?

We will make this sacrifice to the Lord our God, and Alexei will be spared.

She knew it was right and true and was shocked that Nicky could not see it as clearly. But she also knew how to handle him to get her way.

“The dragons, of course. They killed the only man—the holy man—who might have healed our baby boy.”

He stared at her for a long moment before saying, “I give you everything, my darling. My heart, my kingdom, our children. You lack for nothing. Please, please do not ask for this.”

“I am not asking. A tsarina does not beg,” she said. There were no tears in her eyes.

“When it is necessary,” he said, in a voice equally steely, one she almost didn’t recognize as his, “a tsar will. I ask, no I beg you to consider this: the dragons are our only protection. The family’s own protection.”

“They bring death to both the unholy and the holy,” she told him, her voice low, controlled. “They are indiscriminate. They will kill us if they can.”

“Never,” he said, but the shudder in his voice gave him away.