by Staton Rabin
THE CURSE OF THE ROMANOVS
ALSO BY STATON RABIN
Betsy and the Emperor
Black Powder
Margaret K. McElderry Books
For my “troika” of great first readers:
Mark DeGasperi, Marian Natter, and Brandon Rabin. And for my agents Donna Bagdasarian and Lynn Pleshette, who give me that rarest of luxuries: the ability to make a living doing something I enjoy.
With grateful appreciation to my editor, Karen Wojtyla, a kind and supportive partner—and to Emma Dryden, for her faith in me, and for getting a happy case of the willies when I first told her this story.
Margaret K. McElderry Books
An imprint of Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing Division
1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, New York 10020
www.SimonandSchuster.com
This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2007 by Staton Rabin
All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.
Book design by Michael McCartney
The text for this book is set in Minion.
Manufactured in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Rabin, Staton.
The curse of the Romanovs/Staton Rabin.—1st ed.
p.©©cm.
Summary: In 1916, teenage hemophiliac and heir to the Russian throne Alexei Romanov escapes into the future to elude the murderous Rasputin, and meets his modern-day cousin, fifteen-year-old Varda, who is working on a cure for hemophilia and who wants to help change history by saving his family. Includes bibliographical references.
eISBN-13: 978-1-4424-0726-8
ISBN-13: 978-1-4169-0208-9 (hardcover)
ISBN-10: 1-4169-0208-2 (hardcover)
1. Aleksei Nikolaevich, Czarevitch, son of Nicholas II, Emperor of Russia, 1904-1918—Juvenile fiction. [1. Aleksei Nikolaevich, Czarevitch, son of Nicholas II, Emperor of Russia, 1904-1918—Fiction. 2. Princes—Fiction. 3. Time travel—Fiction. 4. Hemophilia—Fiction. 5. Rasputin, Grigori Efimovich, ca. 1870-1916—Fiction. 6. Russia—History—Nicholas II, 1894-1917—Fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.R1084Cur 2007 ✯ [Fic]—dc22 ✯ 2006014573
“SPASIBO!” TO ROMANOV HISTORIAN AND AUTHOR PETER KURTH, AND TO DR. REX A. WADE (AUTHOR, AND PROFESSOR OF RUSSIAN HISTORY AT GEORGE MASON UNIVERSITY)—WHO BOTH READ THIS BOOK IN MANUSCRIPT AND WERE INCREDIBLY GENEROUS WITH THEIR TIME, EXPERTISE, AND SUPPORT. ADDITIONAL THANKS TO NEIL FRICK AND DR. ANN-MARIE NAZZARO OF THE NATIONAL HEMOPHILIA FOUNDATION, FOR THEIR TREMENDOUS HELP IN ANSWERING MY QUESTIONS.
Portrait of Tsarevich Alexei Nikolayevich Mikhail Victorovich Rundaltsov
Portrait of Grigory Rasputin Elena Nikandrovna Klokacheva
Gilliard—
The people of the future must learn the truth. The fate of Mother Russia and the world depends on it! Give this book to your children, and they to theirs. In December 2010 they must deliver it to an American girl, Varda Ethel Rosenberg, living in New York. The will know what to do.
I must go, my friend, spasibo. May God grant us peace in this unbearable and fearful hour!
Alexei
2:03 am 17 July 1918
Ekaterinburg, Russia
—Grigory Rasputin, 1916
TSAR OF THE LAND of Russia, if you hear the sound of the bell which will tell you that Grigory has been killed, you must know this: if it was your relations who have wrought my death, then no one of your family, that is to say, none of your children or relations, will remain alive for more than two years. They will be killed by the Russian people!”
—Tsarevich Alexei Nikolaevich Romanov
“When I shall die, put up a small stone monument in the park to me.”
CHAPTER ONE
Spala, Poland, 1912
(Four years ago)
MAMA! MAMA!—it hurts! Please, God! Mama, come kill me!”
Three hundred years of my dead Romanov relatives crowded around my bedside, staring into my bloodless pale face, wagging their ghostly heads with concern. Great-grandpa Alexander—missing a leg from the assassin’s bomb—held out his bloody arms to me in welcome. Peter the Great beckoned slowly, slowly, inviting me into the land of death. There was Ivan the Terrible, a pointy-toothed skull, grinning as if he’d love my company—in hell. “Yes, Alyosha,” he hissed into my ear. “Wouldn’t it be better for all to just let go? Your poor mother’s hair is turning gray. Your father worries, your sisters, too. Just let go. It’s so easy. So easy …”
My eyes grew heavy. The icon lamps around my bed flickered and faded. The light within my heart was flickering, fading, too. Why, why didn’t they call Our Friend in time to save me? Why? Where are you, Father Grigory! So tired, so tired …
Just let go, let go. Yes, Uncle Ivan, wouldn ’t it be better for all? I rolled to one side and let out a last sigh.
A sudden lightning bolt of pain shot through my leg. Like marbles forced through my small veins. Yanking me, jolting me rudely back to the world of the living.
And then I screamed. A milkman’s horse all the way in Tobolsk pricked up his ears at the sound.
Anxious clicking of shoes came down the hall. My mother burst through the door. The whites of her eyes red like borscht. Eyes staring at me in horror, ringed by the black of a thousand sleepness nights.
“God forgive me, baby!” she said, stuffing rags the color of snow into my mouth, muffling my screams.
You may think my mother cruel. But she was only protecting me. I shall explain. This will take time. I am not the author Chekhov, paid fifteen kopecks per line! You will have patience because I command it.
I was born in 1904, and on my nynok‡ the fate of Mother Russia was written. At six weeks of age I bled at the spot where I had once been joined to my mother. I bled, and I didn’t stop bleeding. Dr. Botkin was called. He peered at my nynok over his pince-nez, as though examining a strange new purple fruit.
“It’s the same thing that killed my dear Frittie, isn’t it?” my mama must have said, her skin turning gray like ashes from the fireplace. “The bleeding disease.”
Frittie was her brother, who got hemophilia from my Grandma Alice. Who got it from her mother, Queen Victoria of England.
“I have not seen this myself before. But … yes, I’m afraid so. It can only be hemophilia,” the doctor said.
And it was at that moment that I became my family’s biggest secret.
What a difference from the day I was born!
Not every boy is greeted into this world by the firing of 301 guns and a whole country’s rejoicing. And not every boy is given his own army regiment to command the moment he pops out of the womb. But not every boy is Tsarevich Alexei Nikolaevich Romanov, the future tsar of all the Russias, my family’s precious Fabergé jewel, born after my sisters: four useless lumps of coal we call Olga, Tatiana, Mashka, and Anastasia.
How my mama tried to have a boy!
First they visited Mitka the Fool—babbling, in rags, naked. Mama’s belly was already round. Mitka gave her a potion, made from special mushrooms that make the eyes see angels’ halos. Mumble, mumble.
“What did he say?” Mama whispered to Papa.
“I think he said, ‘You’ll have a boy.’”
“Lovey—Lovey, you really think so?” She often calls him “Lovey.”
“It’s hard to say. …”
Bu
t Mama had another girl.
Next there was the witch, Daria Osipova. She writhed on the floor as if she had ants in her drawers. She gave Mama another potion: ramson, thorn apple, witch’s grass. Mama drank, holding her nose. The room spun round in bright colors.
“Now swim in the river during a storm,” Osipova advised. “When the pocked golden moon is rising. That is certain to make a boy.”
Mama swam by the light of the moon, lightning storm raging. It’s a wonder she didn’t get herself electrocuted!
Instead Mama got herself … another girl.
Next, the weird Montenegrin princesses sent her Monsieur Philippe. Famous in France for his miracles. It was said Monsieur had special powers.
“Did you see me walking yesterday with Monsieur Philippe?” one of the Montenegrin princesses said to Mama.
“No, Militsa.”
“Ah, but of course not! He made us both invisible!”
Mama was soon pregnant again. Joy of joys! But, alas, only a false pregnancy. And then another girl!
Philippe said it was Mama’s fault. That she didn’t have enough faith. Not enough faith! Mama, who prays day and night on her calloused knees for us? Mama, whose heart nearly broke when she gave up the German religion she was born with—so she could marry and embrace Papa’s?
Monsieur Philippe said that someday another man of faith would come to help Mama in all ways. A holy man with deep penetrating eyes that see into your soul—more powerful, even, than he. Monsieur went back to France, and then he died. Or was invisible, forever, I suppose.
Mama was nearing the end of being able to make babies. She was tired. My parents had four girls; they were desperate. Who wouldn’t be—with a palace full of chattering crows? Only boys can rule Russia. That is the law now—as it should be.
Then Father Ioann of Kronstadt told my parents of the miracle-worker, Serafim of Sarov, who’d died in 1833. Mama got Serafim canonized. She and Papa went to Sarov in the summer of 1903 to pray to the new saint—for the future me.
When I was born, my papa and sisters danced the mazurka! How could they have known then what was to come—that my diadkas‡ would sometimes have to carry me like a baby, long after I was one no longer?
“Give me a bicycle.”
“You know you cannot.”
“Mama, I want to play tennis like my sisters.”
“You know y ou dare not play.”
“Why aren’t I like everyone else!”
‡I have just asked my English tutor the word for “nynok.” He says “belly button”! I am writing this book in English in case it falls into the hands of spies.
‡ My sailor-nannies, Nagorny and Derevenko.
CHAPTER TWO
“THAT DAY AT OUR HUNTING LODGE IN SPALA in 1912—when my mother stuffed rags into my mouth—she was not granting my wish to die. She was only smothering my screams. No one must hear me, she said. It is dangerous to be a Romanov. Especially these days. “Remember what they did to Great-grandpa Alexander—and to Uncle Serge. No one outside the family must know the future tsar is ill.”
But my French tutor, Gilliard, knew. Mama says Papa knows everything. But Gilliard knows almost everything.
Here is an example of how much Gilliard knows (Gilliard says a writer who gives no examples is no better than a fool): It happened four years ago—several months after my crisis at Spala.
“Your Highness,” Gilliard said to my father one evening. “May I speak freely?” Gilliard does not bow. He does not believe in bowing—even to me. We were at Tsarskoye Selo, as always during the winter, ever since things got too dangerous for us in St. Petersburg. I sat on a stool near them on the balcony, my leg straight now and almost healed. I was pasting photographs of our elephant—a gift from King Chulalongkorn of Siam—into the album. But the special glue Papa had ordered from England kept sticking to my fingers.
My father nodded to Gilliard, then sighed.
“You may speak. Not about Rasputin again, I hope. You know that the tsarina—”
“No, not Father Grigory. It’s about the boy.”
Papa seemed relieved. Now they had my attention. I pretended not to be listening.
“Yes?”
“He jumps, and his sailor-nannies catch him. He reaches, but they do the reaching for him. Almost before the thought even crosses his mind! How can the boy learn to discipline himself if others do it for him?”
“You know his special needs. You know the dangers.”
Gilliard scratched his pointy beard impatiently.
“Yes, yes, I know the dangers. A bump, the merest injury, can mean suffering, months abed. Even death! But even more dangerous is this: a boy who will someday rule one sixth of the globe who cannot rule even his own impulses! A boy who never has a playmate except his doctors’ sons and his own sisters! He knows nothing of his people. He knows nothing of the world!”
“You are his tutor. It is your job to teach him.”
“What Alexei must learn to be a great tsar is not found in books. Not even in Tolstoy.”
“We are done with Tolstoy,” I said, forgetting that they weren’t supposed to know I was listening. “He is tiresome. Papa is reading Sherlock Holmes to us now.”
My father and Gilliard exchanged a smile. But Papa’s smile quickly faded.
“I am a plain, simple man. When my father died, I was less prepared to be tsar than Alexei is now. But I learned! He is bright, he too will learn. In good time.”
I felt as tall as my elephant. My father rubbed the place on his head that gave him headaches. The spot where a Japanese policeman had once sliced him with a sword. Cousin George had saved him, knocking the blade away just in time with his cane.
“But you will speak to Her Majesty about it?”
Even I was surprised to hear Gilliard challenge my father so boldly.
Papa sighed again and glanced at me, as if looking for some sort of sign. I winked at him.
At last, he nodded at Gilliard. Just then Papa’s face lit up in an angel’s smile. And I knew that my mother must have walked into the room.
Only she could make him smile like that.
Once, Grandpa Sasha held up the collapsed roof of a dining car, when his imperial train crashed at Borki. Twenty-one people died, and Grandpa held up the train’s ceiling all by himself. Long enough so that Papa and the rest of his family could crawl to safety. That’s what later killed Grandpa so young, the doctors said. The strain of holding up that car broke his kidneys. Well, sometimes it seemed that being tsar of Russia was like trying to hold up the roof of a train. And, lately, the roof was always caving in, with one revolution behind us, and talk of another to come. But my mama’s love gave my father the strength to hold up the roof. Like Atlas holding up the whole world.
Spala, 1912
“When I am dead, it will not hurt anymore, will it, Mama?”
“No, darling. Never again. But you must not think like that”
“Oh, my leg—my leg! Where is Father Grigory?”
“Hush! Please, baby, someone will hear you! Our Friend had to go away for a while. You know how the people are—jealous, suspicious of saints. But he is praying for you”
“Oh, Mama! It hurts!”
“I know, darling, I know. I would give my heart, my soul—anything to take away your pain. When I think that it was my blood—my blood!—that did this to you, I—”
“It’s not your fault, Mama!”
“Alexei—baby, you must promise me something.”
“Yes, Mama?”
“Always take care of your sisters. And your father.”
“Take care of him? But Papa is strong!”
“Papa is a good man, yes. But he is too kind—too kind for this cruel world! You are strong. Take my hand. There, that is good—such a fine, strong boy. Promise me, Alexei!”
“I promise, Mama”
Mama said my hand felt like a burning stove to her touch. Blood had pooled where my leg meets my body, forming a fiery, infected lump. Papa,
broken with grief, ordered a bulletin drawn up, announcing my death.
But a telegram changed all our lives forever that day in Spala. Yes, a telegram! Do you doubt the word of the tsarevich?
“It is from Our Friend,” my mother said, brow furrowing, reading it to herself. “In Siberia.”
“Father Grigory …,” I murmured gratefully through fevered lips as dry as buckwheat groats. “I knew he would! What does he say?”
“‘God has seen your tears and heard your prayers. Do not grieve. The Little One will not die. Do not allow the doctors to bother him too much.’”
The wrinkle in my mother’s brow flattened out. Like one of her chambermaids smoothing a sheet. By the next morning, my fever broke. I was on the way to being well again, though it would take a long time. And from that moment on, Mama needed Our Friend. Believing in him as she believed in the Holy Mother. We knew that Father Grigory was the man of God that Monsieur Philippe had promised would someday come help Mama and make us all safe again. With deep blue eyes that could penetrate deeply into our souls. From that moment on, my sudba and Father Grigory’s—yes, his destiny, ours, and Mother Russia’s—were all written in the same blood.
CHAPTER THREE
Tsarskoye Selo
December 1916 (now)
NEXT SUMMER I WILL BE THIRTEEN—about the same age Papa was when he saw his grandpa Alexander blown to little bits by an assassin in St. Petersburg. Grandpa’s belly was torn open, his legs were crushed. The grenade exploded with such force that broken pieces of his gold wedding band were imbedded in his hand. This is why Papa’s eyes look like they have seen too much.
They carried what was left of Grandpa from the street to his Winter Palace. Leaving a trail of red on the white marble stairs. Grandpa was still alive. The doctors plugged him with rags to try to stop the bleeding, but they knew it was hopeless. If only Father Grigory had known us then—he could have saved him!
The doctors rung out the bloody rags in water basins brought by the servants. People dipped their hands in the red water—like holy water.
