The secondary hemorrhages spread, and the young prince was gravely ill. The doctors gave up hope and told the tsarina to prepare for the worst. The royal couple were frantic and desperate. And this time, Rasputin was nowhere in sight. He was back at his home in Pokrovskoye, too far to attend to the tsarevich in the flesh.
I was in Spala, of course. With my device. Waiting.
We had planned everything to deal with such an eventuality. Rasputin had prepared me as well as he could, but there were many unknowns. I had felt a grave trepidation at what we were doing. We were placing the young heir in mortal danger.
“He will be fine,” Rasputin had assured me, his unendurable gaze anchoring his words in my consciousness. “You will see to that.”
I was too perturbed to mention the fear I felt for my own safety. I would, after all, be stalking the royals on their own grounds.
Rasputin had previously visited the castle on one of the royals’ hunting trips, and knew it well. With a primitive hand, he had sketched out a plan of its layout for me and pointed out the location of the nursery. It was on the first floor and had a large window, which would suit our purposes reasonably well.
I took the train to Spala, shadowing the royals. Once there, I acquainted myself with the clerk at the town’s telegraph office before venturing into the forest at dawn one morning to take stock of what might await me if I needed to act. It would not be easy. My device was rather bulky and difficult to carry, especially through the dense, overgrown forest. Bison and boar roamed the land, and I was not much of an adventurer. At least, I wasn’t until I met Rasputin. I think that has all changed.
Still, if anything did happen to the tsarevich when they were there, it was a golden opportunity. And when the empress sent Rasputin an urgent telegram, imploring him to save her son, I was ready to step in.
The next dawn, I ventured into the forest again. This time, I had my machine with me. I managed to reach the periphery of the castle undetected, and huddled under cover, behind some bushes. I set up my machine and directed it at the tsarevich’s bedroom, and activated it when I saw the messenger riding in with the mail pouch.
Rasputin had sent back a telegram from Pokrovskoye. In it, he told the tsarina, “God has heard your prayers. The little one will not die. Just tell your doctors to leave him alone.”
I crouched in the bushes for three days, shrouded by an unnerving quiet due to the protective wax pellets in my ears, I lived off the meager supplies I was able to carry with me, wary of the wildlife scurrying in the wilderness around me, hoping the guards wouldn’t spot me, hoping even more that my machine would be just as effective as it had been before without having Rasputin’s own healing powers to complement it.
At first, I could hear the young child’s wails of pain and his screams of “Mama, help me!”
But after the first few hours, the cries stopped.
Much to the astonishment of the doctors, the tsarevich soon recovered. And lived. Just as Rasputin had predicted.
He had cured the heir to the throne without even being there.
No one could ignore that miracle.
Rasputin was now truly untouchable.
RASPUTIN COULD NOW DO anything he pleased and was impervious to criticism. He strutted around the city in his leather boots and coats with splendid brocade lining and expensive silk shirts embroidered by the tsarina, brazenly reveling in his adoring circle of aristocratic beauties and prostitutes while openly steering the tsar and the tsarina’s affairs of state. Akilina, his secretary, was taking in piles of money from all the supplicants who rushed to his doorstep, asking him to exert his influence with the royals on their behalf. I now had the resources, and the peace of mind, to carry on with my work and perfect my device. I rented a new laboratory and was advancing in leaps and bounds. My mentor, Heinrich Wilhelm Dove, who had first discovered the magic I was exploring, would have been most proud.
The festive year celebrating the Romanov dynasty’s three hundred years on the throne came and went peacefully. And then the calamities starting raining down on us again.
I had just discovered a frightening potential for spreading the effect of my device using a piezoelectric transducer and a dynamo. The potential was truly terrifying-and it was then that two separate catastrophic events occurred on consecutive days, two assassinations that would affect the lives of countless millions and redraw the map of the continent.
In Sarajevo, on a Sunday in June of 1914, a young Serb murdered Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne. A monstrous war now seemed inevitable. As before, the tsar, the military, the old aristocracy, and the young bourgeoisie were all aching for battle. And as before, the tsarina didn’t want it. Rasputin intervened once again and sent the tsar several urgent missives, only this time, the dire prophesies of God’s emissary were rebuffed by the tsar. Even worse, Tsar Nicholas, now firmly on a war path, refused to see Rasputin and instructed him to go back to his village, “for the sake of social calm,” as he put it.
And it was there, on the very next day, in Pokrovskoye, that the mad woman knifed him.
I wasn’t with him, of course. I had to remain in St. Petersburg, in case the tsarevich fell ill again and needed our help.
“I was walking back from church when this disfigured beggar approached me, asking for help,” he told me. “I reached into my pocket to give her a coin, and the devil woman just pulled out a dagger through a slit in her shirt and stabbed me in the stomach while shouting, ‘Die, Antichrist, die!’ I pushed her away and ran, my mind not registering what she had done to me. She followed me, still brandishing her knife and yelling at me like a Cossack warrior. I felt my legs weaken and decided to turn and face her. I spotted a thick wooden stick by my feet and used it to beat her back until fellow villagers arrived and took her away.”
The woman was an ex-prostitute whose face had been ravaged by syphilis. She had no regrets and likened her attack to a holy duty, saying she had decided to kill him because he was a false prophet and an agent of the devil. Rasputin suspected she had been sent by one of his biggest enemies, the monk Iliodor, and I must say I agree with him on this. Regardless, her act would have consequences as dramatic and far-reaching as that of the assassin in Sarajevo. Her blade would incapacitate the one man in all of Russia who could have kept our great nation out of this savage war.
The nearest doctor was a six-hour ride away. Rasputin hovered between life and death for days. And when he finally recovered, after weeks of care, he was not the same.
The tsar ignored the telegrams Rasputin sent from his hospital bed, in which he implored him to avert the war. In his last plea, my master warned the emperor of “an immeasurable sea of tears” before concluding that “everything will drown in great bloodshed.” The tsar didn’t listen. Russia went to war, a war that would engulf the entire continent and beyond.
Rasputin was now a changed man. In constant pain from the attack, he took to heavy drinking-not just Madeira and Champagne, but vodka, and lots of it-and his character turned foul. He was now shamelessly taking vast amounts of money from all kinds of unsavory supplicants on whose behalf he intervened with the government. The chronicles of the police agents charged with his surveillance now referred to him as “The Dark One.” As his strength returned, the wanton debauchery resumed with a vengeance, now combined with drunken revelry and violence. And as the empire sank further and further into war, he sank with it.
He couldn’t speak out against the war when everyone seemed fervently delighted by the bloodletting. The tsar was away running the campaign, while, back at the palace, the tsarina needed constant uplifting prophesies to keep her spirits up. The public outcries against Rasputin across all of Petrograd-for that is what the capital is now called, St. Petersburg having been deemed too German-resumed with a new ferocity. He feared for his life, and he was plagued by doubt and disillusionment.