Militza looked across the room, and there, behind a stall, was the pretty blond girl who had been at the Yacht Club.
“Ah!” He waved before turning briefly to face Militza. “Madame Ekaterina Ostrogorsky, the little doctor’s wife.” He smirked before he leaned over and whispered, “The only woman I have met who is wetter than you.” He laughed silently, his hot breath whistling in her ear, before he walked across the room, his first three fingers raised, ready to make the sign of the cross at whoever he felt needed it.
“MY DARLING,” SAID PETER, EXHALING BOREDOM THROUGH flared nostrils as he surveyed the scene. “Shall we at least take a look at the Fabergé? I am afraid I can’t bear to feign interest in another little piece of stitching.” Militza looked up at him in a state of confusion. “Fabergé?” he repeated.
“Oh, yes, yes,” she stammered, trying to gather herself as her head swam and her heart palpated. “Fabergé, why ever not?” She snatched at her husband’s arm.
“Are you all right, dear?” he asked giving her the briefest of glances.
“I am quite all right,” she replied. “It is just very hot.”
“It is always ghastly here,” he concurred. “There are far too many people. Frankly, I have never seen the appeal of it myself. It always feels like one large vanity trip for the Vladimirs—and as far as I can see they need no encouragement in that department.”
They began to walk through the crowd, past a stall of shawls and another covered in cloved oranges tied up with purple ribbons.
“I see the Dowager Empress has deigned to join us,” muttered Peter, smoothing down his mustache. “With Cousin Xenia.”
Militza felt him move in the opposite direction. Normally she would chastise him. Why should they give way? After all, they were the more powerful couple these days. But this time she felt too weak to say anything. She didn’t have the strength for a fight. Instead, she faltered along at his side, holding his arm tightly as they wove their way towards the other end of the hall.
Peter didn’t seem to notice his wife’s uncharacteristic unsteadiness. Had he heard Rasputin? she wondered. No, he admired Rasputin, thought him a man of God despite his little dalliances with the gypsies; he couldn’t suspect anything. She shivered. There would be no telling how he would react if he found out. Militza tried to steel herself. She was a good liar, she knew that; however, this was going to be a test even for her.
Peter chatted away to the stiff-looking gentleman manning the Fabergé stall as he riffled through the stunning collection of bejeweled trinkets, which included silver photograph frames, cigarette boxes, and necklace chains: portable knickknacks to make charming Christmas presents.
Meanwhile, despite her best efforts, Militza couldn’t take her eyes off Rasputin as he drifted from stall to stall, helping himself to whatever amuse-bouche he fancied. He alternately embraced or blessed any of the twittering females who crossed his path—and there were many. Cheeks flushed, heads cocked to one side, hands clasped in front of them, they giggled and smiled and touched the backs of their heads, patting their pinned hair as they flirted with him.
Militza found it hard to contain her emotion. She wasn’t sure if she was simply jealous or plain annoyed. But the confidence he exuded and the aura of physical power emanating from him was something to behold. His presence was magnetic, and it was obvious that most of the women in the hall thought so too.
“How is your Friend?” asked the Dowager Empress, standing right next to Militza and following her gaze.
“Oh!” Militza started. “Your Imperial Majesty, I did not see you there!”
“No.” She gave a half smile. “You appeared lost in your own little world. And what a world!” she continued. “You must be congratulated.” She nodded, her lips tight. “Who would have thought two women from such a ghastly little backwater, with so little breeding and so few connections, could rise so high. It’s as if you were made of wisteria. It climbs as high and as quickly as it can. Like a weed. Suffocating all in its wake. Funny plant,” she added. “I have never seen the appeal of it myself. It has to be trained and cut back, taught how to behave. It does flower, very beautifully, once, and then leaves such a terrible mess afterwards. Tell me”—she paused—“have you found a church in all of Russia where a brother can actually marry his own sister?”
“You make it sound like a sin,” said Militza, her heart beating. Even after all these years the Dowager Empress could still manage to make her feel as if she had just arrived in the city with thick black mud under her fingernails. All those insecurities, all the misery, came flooding back. She could feel herself flushing like a virgin at her first ball.
“It is, my dear. Incest.” She shivered. “It’s a hideous sin.”
“Well, as a matter of fact we have found a church. In Livadia,” Militza replied, despite herself. “In April. Such a pretty time of year.”
The Dowager Empress looked horrified, but only for a second and then she shrugged. “Sadly, I think I shall be in Biarritz, or Spala. Or somewhere far, far away.”
“I don’t think it will be a big wedding,” added Militza.
“No,” Maria Fyodorovna said, raising an eyebrow, “I imagine you’ll be struggling for witnesses.”
“Your Imperial Majesty.” Peter turned around from the Fabergé table and kissed the Dowager Empress’s hand. “Have you been buying Christmas trinkets in aid of the poor?”
“Just a few little biscuits,” the Dowager Empress replied. “Xenia and I are off to Cartier.”
“Excellent,” he said, turning back to the table.
“Cartier?” Militza asked.
“It’s a private invitation,” replied the Dowager Empress, looking her up and down. “Didn’t you receive one?”
There was something about the triumphant look on the old woman’s face, the hardness behind her pale eyes, that was depressingly familiar. Militza couldn’t stop herself from imagining what it would take to get rid of the woman. Just some sleeping water drawn after dark. Some dust from a dead man’s grave, worn as an amulet. It would be so simple. So quick. So final . . .
“I am not sure I need any more bibelots,” Militza replied eventually. “Sometimes a woman has enough sparkles. There are other ways to occupy one’s mind.”
“Very wise,” replied Maria Fyodorovna. “I imagine yours is quite occupied at the moment. The idea of your dear Friend coming to the palace after dark, filling the little boy’s head with stories of Siberia, bringing an icon with him that he says is all-powerful and then afterwards retiring for an evening tea with her. The German.” She paused, her dislike for Alix so profound, she was unable to pronounce her name. “That would occupy my mind. Actually. That, and his increasingly well-known fondness for carousing with actresses.”
“But he is a man of God!”
“Is he?” the Dowager Empress whispered before adding loudly, “Oh, look, there is my daughter. Cartier beckons!” And with a rustle of silk, she walked away.
“Has she gone?” asked Peter, joining his wife.
“I really hope your brother knows what he is doing,” said Militza.
“And your sister,” agreed Peter. “I don’t think I have ever seen the Dowager Empress so out of sorts.”
“Out of sorts?” Militza looked at her husband. “She is furious.”
“No. The day Nicky married Alix, then she was furious.” Peter nodded, watching the Dowager Empress make her way through the hall. “She disguised it as grief, copious weeping for the death of the tsar. But in retrospect, I am convinced it was because her beautiful Nicky, her favorite son, was marrying a provincial with no apparent sophistication at all.”
“She could have made an effort to like her daughter-in-law,” suggested Militza.
Peter turned and looked at her and laughed. “You really don’t know dear old Minny at all, do you?”
“Or maybe she simply hates her because she was the one who chose her?”
“Possibly,” agreed Peter. “What do you me
an?”
“Nicky married Alix at her behest—so dear old Minny introduced the ‘curse of the Coburgs’ into her own family!”
“What entertains you so?”
Rasputin was standing next to them. Beside him was the doctor’s wife, her little hand hooked through the crook of his arm.
“Nothing,” replied Peter, waving away the question, his mind spinning at Militza’s suggestion.
“I like jokes,” persisted Rasputin. “I like to be entertained.”
“There was no joke,” said Peter.
“What a shame.”
Rasputin smiled as he slowly stroked the back of the doctor’s wife’s hand. She smiled, and the ringlets at the back of her head quivered as she slowly turned her somewhat glassy gaze this way and that.
“Grisha is very fond of being entertained,” she said sweetly.
Peter nodded. “I hear the gypsies think all their Christmases have come at once when you arrive, you order so much champagne!”
“Champagne!” Rasputin looked shocked. “I thought you knew me well, brother! There is nothing I dislike more than those weak French bubbles!”
“And there was me thinking you’d shed your peasant’s coat!” replied Peter. “For those are fine silks you are wearing.”
Both men looked down at Rasputin’s crimson silk trousers, gathered loosely at the waist.
“Another present from an admirer!” Rasputin laughed, shaking his right leg a little to show them off. “The shirt was embroidered by the empress herself!” He flung his arms wide-open for it to be admired. “But the trousers were a little present after a healing.”
“A healing?” Militza’s mouth was dry.
“The empress embroidered you a shirt?” asked Peter.
“Yes.” He nodded.
“Grisha heals so many women,” interjected the doctor’s wife. “Hysteria, sadness, woes—they all come to him for help. Some are so desperate, they are on their knees, praying; sometimes there is a queue. And he heals them all.”
Militza’s dark eyes darted back and forth between Rasputin and Ekaterina Ostrogorsky. Was the woman aware of what she was saying?
“Those whom he can’t cure by laying his hands on them come into the back room for a more in-depth healing,” she continued. “And they leave with their cheeks flushed and a light in their eye. It’s amazing!” She turned slowly to look at him, gently stroking his hand. “He really is a man of God.”
“Yes,” concurred Militza, her eyes narrowing. “A man of God, indeed.”
Chapter 26
April 10, 1907, St. Petersburg
RUMORS OF RASPUTIN’S SPECTACULAR “HEALING” POWERS swept through the city, tormenting Militza at every turn. He’d ignited a fire within her that she could not control. Every meeting she had with him, every party they spoke at, every time they prayed together in the freezing chapel at Znamenka, all she could think of was the long, lapping length of his tongue, the rough thickness of his powerful fingers, and the pleasurable enormity of his shaft. She could not bear it. The slightest giggle from a general’s wife, the warm smiles of a compliant debutante, the high-pitched squeal from a countess sent her heart pounding with jealousy and her blood coursing with rage. And the worst was Anna Alexandrovna Taneyeva.
That plump little nobody, whom she’d met the year before sitting on the sofa in the Grand Duchess Vladimir’s salon, had managed to ingratiate herself with the tsarina to such an extent that Alix herself had asked Militza to introduce Anna to Rasputin.
It was not the easiest of carriage rides. The fallout from that afternoon in the Maple Drawing Room had carried on for months. Despite the intervention of Rasputin and the agreement of the tsar, the atmosphere hanging between Militza and Alix was as cold and dank as a crypt. As the horses took their well-worn route around the park at the Alexander Palace, Alix defiantly did not bring up the subject of Stana’s wedding plans. She’d never been the sort of woman to back down in an argument or to knowingly change her mind, so she preferred to remain silent on such unpleasantries. And Militza studiously followed suit. Children and the weather were topics that filled the afternoon affably enough, so when Alix did eventually ask Militza to make the introductions between Anna and Rasputin, she agreed with alacrity. Apparently, it had been Anna’s abilities as a nurse that had impressed Alix. One of her older ladies-in-waiting had been taken ill, and Anna had made herself absolutely indispensable at the bedside. And there was no quicker way to Alix’s heart, according to Alix, than devout and devoted selflessness. Plus, the little woman was all atwitter about her impending marriage to Alexander Vasilievich Vyrubova, and it was all she could talk about. Should she marry the naval officer, decorated in the Russo-Japanese War? Or should she not? Militza would watch her plain moon face looking for answers around the Mauve Boudoir. She and Stana found her a dreary irritation and were more than a little annoyed that Alix had taken her so easily into her confidence.
However, with Stana’s marriage just over two weeks away, any straw was to be grabbed with both hands.
Militza, therefore, reluctantly shared “Our Friend” with the foolish little woman, inviting her to tea at her mansion on the English Embankment. Rasputin was late. It was an hour before he arrived. An hour during which time Militza had discussed God and Anna’s unswerving faith since she’d escaped the jaws of death and been blessed by John of Kronstadt, no less, who’d cured her from a mortal typhus by sprinkling her with holy water. Apparently, she’d seen him in a dream and begged her father to call for Father John, and he’d come and cured her the very next day with a blessing and a splash of water.
“The Lord is indeed kind,” said Militza, nodding her jaded head.
“Very kind,” agreed Anna, adding another spoon of jam to her tea.
They sat in silence save for the scraping of Anna’s spoon round and round the bottom of her glass cup.
“Her Imperial Majesty says that Rasputin is a man of God,” she ventured, eventually.
“He is,” sighed Militza, despite herself. “Now,” she said, turning towards Anna, “don’t be shocked if I kiss him three or more times when he arrives. It is customary for him to greet those he knows well in a familiar fashion. It’s his way. He is a man of the people, a true man—a real man whose being is closest to the Russian soul.”
“Of course,” replied Anna, her small eyes widening. “Are you feeling well?”
“Yes.” Militza’s tone was irritated.
“Only your cheeks are a little red?”
“It’s the fire; I have no idea why the servants insist on a fire in April, when it is perfectly clement outside.”
Before she needed to explain any further, the door to the salon burst open and Rasputin strode in wearing a short black caftan, accompanied by a cloud of violet cologne.
“Mamma!” he exclaimed, his three fingers raised in a blessing. “How are you?” He turned briefly to glimpse Anna before planting a kiss very firmly on Militza’s mouth. “Bless you,” he said, holding her face in his hands before kissing her hard again on the lips.
Anna simply stood and stared. She had never seen anything like it before. Thankfully, Militza had warned her; otherwise she might have run from the room in indignation and shock.
“How are you, my child?” he asked, kissing Militza for a third time.
“Well,” Militza replied, before dabbing her lips with a handkerchief. The man was showing off; she knew he was. He had a new audience, and there was nothing he liked more than that. Torn between slapping him and demanding he take her now on her lilac buttoned divan, she inhaled and exhaled rapidly, trying to take control of her emotions. She knew she had to stop feeling like this. She’d been “healed” once, and she was not going to offer herself again, even if she wanted to. Desperately.
“May I introduce you to Anna Alexandrovna Taneyeva?”
“You may.” He turned to look at the lady-in-waiting.
“This is Grigory Yefimovich Rasputin.”
“Grisha,” he replie
d.
“I have heard a lot about you!”
Anna smiled, and Rasputin did what he always did when he did not know what to say; he stared. His piercing blue gaze had already unnerved so many at court, and Anna was not immune. She simply stood and smiled back at him, saying nothing more.
“Ask him to pray for you,” suggested Militza.
“Oh, yes,” said Anna.
“Shall I pray for you?”
“Yes,” she declared, more than a little flustered.
“What shall I pray for?”
“Pray, pray . . . um . . . that I may spend my whole life in the service of Their Majesties!”
“So it shall be,” he declared, before he turned immediately on his heel and left.
“Is that it?” asked Anna, her head twitching from side to side.
“Yes,” replied Militza with mild amusement. The poor woman had only garnered his attention for a few minutes. “Grisha has no need of incantations and incense. If he says it is done, then it is done.”
“But I wanted to ask about my marriage! About marrying Alexander Vasilievich.”
“Another time,” Militza said, smiling, placing her teacup down on the small occasional table in front of her. A signal for the woman to leave. Which she did. Eventually. A full forty-five minutes later.
A LITTLE OVER TWO WEEKS LATER, ON APRIL 29, THE SUN shone and the flowers bloomed for the wedding of Stana and Nikolasha. A small and intimate affair, it was the antithesis of the ruinous day she had walked down the aisle to marry George in a haze of heat and hatred, the cream of St. Petersburg looking on with their tight mouths and heavy jewels. There was no need for drops or little pick-me-ups; in fact, all she and Militza had before the ceremony itself was a glass of chilled champagne.
Stana was light and full of life; her dark eyes shone and a smile played on her lips. “Oh, Militza,” she declared, adjusting her Bolin diamond tiara, her hair piled graciously up on her head, “thank you!” She smiled, leaning over to kiss her sister. “Thank you for all you’ve done. I know it’s been difficult and I know you have sacrificed much for me, but I can’t tell you how much I am in your debt. When anyone has been as unhappy as I, she is glad to have a home with a kind husband and to be quiet.”
The Witches of St. Petersburg Page 29
