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.
“This curse you carry in your veins will be your own salvation one day. A plague shall overwhelm the world, but you shall be proof against it.”
Anastasia thought he was babbling now, caught in the throes of some holy trance, and all she wanted was to break away. She deeply regretted ever leaving the ballroom.