Sam Eastland - Red Icon

Rasputin was not the first mystic to have been welcomed into the gilded halls of the Romanovs. First there was the Blessed Mitya, hobbling on bowed legs and hiding his acne-scarred face beneath a hooded cloak. Next came Matryona the Barefoot, who howled like a dog and prophesied in languages which no one understood. Matryona’s place was soon taken by a carnival side-show hypnotist named Monsieur Philippe. In time, all were dismissed or else retreated into obscurity.

Only Rasputin had endured.

‘Russia will drown in blood,’ said the Tsarina. ‘Those were Grigori’s words to me before this war ever began. He tried to warn us.’

‘He tried,’ agreed Vyroubova.

‘He begged us not to wander down this path,’ continued the Tsarina, ‘and now it is too late to turn back, so we must press on regardless of the losses. The Germans have a word for this predicament, you know. Ausharren . Strange that no such way exists in Russian to sum up our misfortunes so precisely.’

Vyroubova, struggling to pay attention, set down her tea, picked up the pot, and refilled their cups. She added precisely the same amount of milk and sugar to each one. Vyroubova had taken great care to tailor her own habits to those of the Tsarina, to whom she handed one cup before settling the other in her lap. For a moment, they resumed their gloomy silence.

If, at that moment, Vyroubova could have spoken honestly to the Tsarina, she would have said that she was weary of the war, and weary of talking so incessantly about it, and that she would have liked nothing more than to return to the days when such topics were far from their minds as they sat down to tea in this cosy little parlour. The whole purpose of their meetings, at least as far as Vyroubova was concerned, was to shut out the world, even if only for a while, usually by whispering of the intrigues of the court. For topics like these, Vyroubova had inexhaustible amounts of energy. But this chatter of the war fatigued her. Perhaps it was the psychological effects of the train crash, and the extraordinary pain it had brought to her daily existence, which left her without the necessary reservoirs of sympathy to dwell upon the suffering of others. Mostly, though, it was that she simply couldn’t imagine it. One death, she could imagine. Five deaths. Ten. But a thousand? Ten thousand? A million? Faced with such staggering numbers, Vyroubova simply went blank, and her mind would wander aimlessly about the room, like a bird that had flown down the chimney and was now searching for an open window to escape.

Anna Vyroubova studied the framed photographs hanging on her wall. Many were of herself in the company of the Tsarina. The best of these had been hung where the Tsarina could see them. Her most recent addition, a large, oval photograph in a gold-painted frame, had been taken in this very room. It showed the Tsarina sitting in her usual chair and Vyroubova herself kneeling beside her, hands resting upon the Tsarina’s knee. Both women faced the camera. Vyroubova was smiling. Indeed, from the moment she had received the Tsarina’s blessing to engage a photographer for their portrait, she had practised that smile for hours in the mirror. It was only two weeks later, when the printed picture arrived in its frame from the studio, that Vyroubova glimpsed the expression the Tsarina had worn at the moment when the shutter clicked. Vyroubova had not expected her to smile. The Tsarina seldom smiled, because her teeth were bad. Predictably, her lips had remained tightly pressed together. But it was the look in the Tsarina’s eyes which dismayed Vyroubova. In the dull haughtiness of her stare, the Tsarina had failed to convey their sacred pact of comradeship, from which, Vyroubova believed, the Tsarina drew the strength to defy the angry voices of a country which did not love her, and never had. Instead, the Tsarina looked bored and intolerant, like someone doing a favour for which no excuse to decline had been available at the moment of its asking. The reason, Vyroubova knew, was quite simple. It had not been the Tsarina’s idea to take the photo, and even by suggesting it, Vyroubova had tangled the cat’s cradle in which their friendship hung suspended. Her role was not to lead. Only to follow. To approve. The photograph had been Vyroubova’s attempt to bring this lopsided acquaintance into balance. For Vyroubova, it was to have been a declaration of equality in their feelings towards each other, in spite of the abyss of social rank which lay between them. The eyes in the photograph put an end to that; bluntly, silently and permanently. It would never be spoken of. It would never be attempted again. Neither, in Vyroubova’s mind, would it ever be forgiven, and that was why she hung the photo where the Tsarina could not help but see the portrait every time she came to visit.

‘I have come to a conclusion,’ the Tsarina said slowly, and then she paused, as if suddenly unwilling to give voice to her thoughts.

‘What conclusion, Majesty?’ asked Vyroubova. Is this about us? she wondered. Does she mean to throw me out into the street?

With her voice barely above a whisper, as if afraid the portraits on the walls might lean their frozen faces from the frames and overhear, the Tsarina began to speak again. ‘Russia cannot survive this war against Germany. Not without a miracle.’

Vyroubova’s first reaction was one of relief. It is not about us, after all, she thought to herself. But her next thought was that, if anyone else had said such a thing, with the possible exception of Rasputin, the Tsarina would have accused them of treason.

‘It’s in God’s hands,’ said Vyroubova, not so much because she believed it but because she knew it was what the Tsarina wanted to hear. ‘There is nothing to be done, Majesty.’

The Tsarina’s mouth remained open for a second, her teeth turned glassy yellow by the tincture of Sweet Vernal, which had been prescribed to her as a heart medicine and which she now took regularly, along with numerous other powerful tonics to combat stress. ‘It so happens,’ said the Tsarina, ‘that something is being done. Even as we speak. Something that may bring an end to this slaughter.’

Vyroubova blinked in astonishment. ‘But what is it, Majesty?’

The Tsarina reached out and rested her fingertips upon Vyroubova’s knee. ‘All you can know for now is that it has the full support of our dear friend, and therefore the blessing of God.’

The Forest of Malevinsk, west of Stavka Headquarters at Mogilev

Pekkala stood on the train tracks, hands in the pockets of his coat. A breeze rustled the coin-shaped leaves of the poplars that grew beside the tracks, keeping the blackfly temporarily at bay. He smelled the sun-heated creosote of the heavy wooden sleepers, laid out like the rungs of a ladder beneath the shining steel of the rails.

At two o’clock that morning, Pekkala had been wakened at his cottage near the stables on the Tsarskoye Estate. The visitor, a member of the Tsar’s Household Guard, was a humourless Cossack named Ostrogorsky, whose long moustache and drooping, bloodhound eyes gave him a permanently melancholy expression. He handed over a telegram, from which Pekkala learned that his presence had been requested by the Tsar.

He knew at once that this was not to be a short drive across the Estate. These days, the Tsar was seldom to be found among the comforts of Petrograd, renamed after St Petersburg was found to be too Germanic for wartime Russian tastes. Instead, he had moved to the remote settlement of Mogilev, home of Russian Army Headquarters, known as STAVKA.

In an attempt to rally the country’s flagging support for the war, the Tsar had taken over direct control of the military, replacing his uncle, the bearded and imposing Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich, who stood almost seven foot tall, so dwarfing the five-foot-six-inch Tsar that, on those rare occasions when they were photographed together, the Grand Duke was stooped almost double, so as to speak face to face with his nephew.