The Romanov Stone

by Robert C. Yeager

  He touched her nose and continued. “Whenever a bleeding attack threatened, Grigori would put Alexis under. His success, especially at the beginning, was quite remarkable. I have long suspected that Empress Alexandra was a virtuoso as well. Certainly that would explain Rasputin’s extraordinary hold over her. And it would follow the theory held by some that extreme hypnotizability is hereditary.”

  The man rose, stood next to the cot and again looked closely at his companion. Employing “shock induction,” a technique used by stage hypnotists and occasionally in hospital emergency rooms to control hysterical patients, he’d needed only seconds to place her in a deep trance. Her head had dropped forward and she’d slumped defenselessly against his chest.

  Now, the great-grandson of Rasputin again sat beside her. Gently, he traced a line along her cheek to her forehead. He smiled as her eyes glided high in their sockets.

  The young woman moaned and turned, exposing a breast. Groggily, she pulled the straps of her chemise back over her shoulders. Unwanted thoughts flitted at the edges of her consciousness. She shuddered and clutched the gold crucifix. She felt her will slip away like surf sliding off a shore.

  The man placed his hand at her waist, then shaped his palm to the roundness of her belly. He moved his hand lower, molding his palm to her warmth. His mouth covered hers, and her lips softened, surrounding him.

  Her limbs felt heavy as he rolled her over. He secured her wrists and ankles to the cot’s frame using four short lengths of cord he drew from his pocket. She did not resist. Her mind filled with unspeakable images of copulating satyrs draping themselves over the flanks of mares.

  Feeling a surge at her own loins, she pictured the rusted icon that hung above her bed at the convent. “Oh mother of Vladimir,” she prayed, “deliver me.”

  The man stood, and began removing his garments, stripping down to a string-tied black bikini. His body was lean and muscular.

  He tugged one of the strings, and the garment fell away.

  She moaned again as he pulled down her pantaloons. In the cool air, her rounded bottom flushed pink, as if her flesh were gathering the last colors of a fading sun.

  Later, the man would cross the darkened room, thread a single light bulb back into its socket and open a steel door. He would speak softly into the corridor. “Guard, my visit with Sister Adriadna is over now. I feel much closer to God. Please see that sister gets home safely.”

  Behind him, the young woman would pull on the bulky garments that proclaimed her calling as a Rassophore, finally donning the klobuk, or veil, of a Russian Orthodox nun.

  Chapter 6

  “My Dear Katya,” Anya’s letter began, “if you are reading this, you must be as strong as I know you can be. You will already have learned the truth about Tsar Nicholas and me, and I will almost certainly be dead. The rest of the story is this: just as Nicky established bank accounts for his children with Alexandra, he also set up an account for Lydia, our daughter.”

  Kate read on:

  As with the other accounts, the funds were deposited at the Bank of England. It was to be Lydia’s dowry and came to five million English pounds, the same amount given to each of Nicky’s other children: Tatiana, Olga, Anastasia, Marie, and Alexis. Upon Lydia’s death, that money rightfully became Irina’s. When she dies, it will be yours.

  Some said Nicholas repatriated all the Romanov deposits to pay for the war. Indeed, following World War I, Sir Edward Peacock, director of the Bank of England, declared there were no Romanov funds left in his or any other bank in Britain.

  Either deliberately or innocently, however, Sir Edward misspoke. In fact, in 1986—after seventy years—Baring Brothers, a private London bank, released sixty-two million pounds of Russian bonds. The bank later insisted none of it belonged to the Romanov heirs, but who knows? Anna Anderson, who claimed to be Anastasia, produced sworn court testimony—some of it quoting Alexandra herself—that money existed in England and France. Nicky did start repatriating foreign accounts at the beginning of the war, but the fact that he was still calling in money in 1917 should tell you something: there were still funds to bring back. And there was the money in Berlin, although those funds later expired as worthless due to inflation. In any case, I will never believe that Nicholas touched the children’s accounts. After all, they weren’t his.

  Based on the formula used to settle the Baring Brothers matter, the five million pounds Nicholas initially deposited in Lydia’s name would now be worth approximately seventy million U.S. dollars. There was money all right.

  As proof of Lydia’s birthright, Nicholas gave me incontestable physical evidence of our daughter’s bloodline—a huge alexandrite, discovered in Russia in 1831. The gem had been in the Romanov family ever since. For the sake of discretion and as a favor to the crown, Faberge himself quietly finished the stone and personally designed its container, a trademark jeweled egg. The base of the stone was etched with the Romanov “double-eagle” coat of arms. It was said to be the largest gem-quality alexandrite ever found.

  Additional important materials have been secured in a safe deposit box your mother and I have at Chase Manhattan bank in New York. The number and address are taped to the key you found in my picture. You must go there and review the contents. Do not delay.

  Kate turned the notepaper face down in her lap. “My God, granmama,” she said aloud, “Why didn’t you and mother tell me? Are there other secrets? What will I find in New York?”

  Lifting her eyes from the page, she took a sip of wine. The papers dropped into her lap. Her tears came without warning and in a flood.

  April, 1933

  Fists. First, Anya heard the fists. Heavy fists against heavy wood—the thick oak of their entry door. Splintering sounds. Shouts. The startled voices of Lydia and Sergey, her husband.

  Beside her on the floor above, Lydia’s daughter still slept.

  Anya clapped her left hand over Irina’s mouth. With her right, she seized the seven-inch long hatpin on the nightstand beside the bed.

  “In the name of the Revolution,” bellowed one of the intruders in Russian. Even in Montmartre in the dead of night, even in the shadow of Le Sacr`e Coeur, the Basilica of the Sacred Heart, they seemed not to care about the noise they made. It was as if, Anya later thought, they wanted all the world to hear.

  By now Irina was fully awake, her four-year-old eyes round with terror above her grandmother’s clasped hand. On the floor below, drawers scraped open and closed as the invaders searched for valuables. They wouldn’t find much. Even when she slept, Anya kept the photo of the alexandrite, along with the little money and bits of jewelry she still had, in a flat pouch tied around her waist.

  Later, Anya and Irina would refer to what happened only as “that night.” Nothing more. But Anya would never forget Lydia’s piercing screams—as shrill as any factory whistle—as the Reds slit Sergey’s throat. Nor Sergey’s pitiful moans as he lost consciousness before dying. Nor the shock of hearing the single assassin’s shot that killed Lydia. The police would not permit her to see the bodies, or photographs of the killings. But Anya read their reports. While still alive, Sergei had been disemboweled.

  Anya grabbed Irina’s arm and dragged her to the small door, partially disguised by paneling that led to the attic. She pulled the child into the narrow stairwell, then halted for fear of being heard.

  Too late. Boots creaked on the stairs from the main floor.

  Anya gripped the long hatpin in her right hand.

  More ransacking noises. Closets thrown open, clothes and drawers flung. Footsteps. Closer. Fumbling sounds.

  The door opened, framing a hulking figure in the moonlight. Anya lunged forward, arm extended like a matador’s final estoque.

  The man groaned and fell, rolling over on the floor, an open shirt flap exposing his round hairy belly. A crimson wreath bloomed below his chest.

  More footsteps.
Starting up the stairs.

  Anya again grabbed Irina with one hand. In a single motion, they brushed past the fallen terrorist. Anya dashed a chair through their bedroom window, then pulled the girl through to the tile roof.

  Momentum carried them another 50 feet. Anya dropped to her haunches and clutched Irina close. Reaching the eaves, they leaned forward like a pair of tobogganists and slid off the roof. Flexing her dancer’s muscled legs, Anya managed to absorb the shock of the narrow cobblestone street below.

  Then Anya Putyatin ran, dragging her precious granddaughter behind her, through the winding canyons of Montmartre.

  * * *

  “You cannot go back,” Nina Berberova said. “They will be watching the house. My Andre knows a police officer. He will go for your clothes. You and the child must leave Paris as soon as he returns.”

  Like Anya, Nina, a portrait artist, had thrived thanks to La Vogue Russe, painting oils of local aristos and embroidering French names on wide Siberian hats. Along with thousands of other Russian refugees, they’d ridden the cultural wave that swept Paris in the early 1920s after the final defeat of the White Armies. For a bright, tinkling decade, all that was Russian was “avant” and the city’s large expatriate colony flourished, enjoying a social and official status not afforded other immigrant groups in France.

  Indeed, France had taken in her former Great War allies as if they were lost neighborhood children. Russian immigrants like Nina and Anya could expect special treatment under tsarist laws. Parisians, meanwhile, flocked to performances of Ballets Russes—Anya mentored several of the company’s ballerinas—and worshipped displaced Russian celebrities like film star Ivan Mosjoukine, playwright Nicolai Evreinov, and artist Alexandre Iacovleff.

  Everything changed on May 6, 1932, when tall, powerfully built Pavel Gorgulov, a deranged Russian émigré shouting “To die for the Fatherland!” fired his Colt into the brain of Paul Doumer, France’s genial, 75-year-old President.

  “We have much to lose,” Nina told Anya after the shooting. “The French have been good to us. Imagine, after this, what it will be like if your name ends in ‘-off,’ ‘insky’, or ‘-ova’?

  A year later, Nina’s concern resurfaced. “Perhaps this is why your Lydia and Sergey were killed.”

  Anya shook her head. “No,” she said, her lips quivering at the recent memory. “These animals were not avenging the memory of France. They hoped to kill the memory of Nicky and his family.” She turned to glance at Irina, quietly reading a children’s book near the window.

  Nina patted her hand. “You know where you must go now,” she said.

  Anya nodded.

  “Denmark,” Nina said. “Grand Duchess Olga will help you. And then… for you and Irina… America.”

  * * *

  Kundsminde Farm clung to a windswept hillside a few miles outside Copenhagen. Even in spring, patches of snow splotched the frozen, sparsely grassed terrain.

  About twenty yards from the main building, two women greeted each other inside a weathered shed with large glass windows and a steel-and-wire skylight.

  At first, they spoke awkwardly.

  “You must realize, Anya Putyatin, how very reluctant I am to see anyone who claims to be part of our Imperial Family.” As if defensively, the plain, middle-aged woman circled away from her guest and sat on a simple wooden bench behind an artist’s easel.

  The comment did not surprise Anya. Eight years before, she’d read Paris newspaper accounts of the trip Grand Duchess Olga and her husband made to Berlin to visit Anna Anderson, who claimed to be Anastasia, the tsar’s daughter. Anderson’s supporters had seized upon the visit as evidence of her legitimacy.

  “The woman is a fake and I renounced her,” Olga said, reading Anya’s thoughts. “But I felt sorry for her. She is such a pitiful creature.”

  In an open hearth a few feet away, burning cedar logs popped like volleying rifles. Startled, Anya jumped. But the fire’s scent evoked fragrant memories of her Nicky’s cigar humidor, quickly soothing her.

  “You, on the other hand, come recommended,” Olga continued. Then she smiled and Anya glimpsed the caring aristocrat who’d been the tsar’s closest sibling, a front-line nurse in World War I, and now an increasingly successful artist.

  Rising, the older woman put down her brush, walked around the easel, and took both of Anya’s hands. “My Misha—Nicholas—wrote to me about you before they were sent to Ekaterinburg. He’d heard about the archbishop’s gruesome death and feared very much for you and Irina. He asked if there was any way we could help.”

  Anya sighed at Nicky’s memory—and with an audible sense of relief. As the tsar’s secret mistress, and the mother of his child, she’d journeyed to see his sister in Denmark with only a vague notion of what to expect when she arrived.

  “You needn’t be embarrassed,” Olga reassured her. “I am not easily shocked. After all, I divorced a Grand Duke to marry a commoner after a 12-year affair. We all tried to warn Misha about Alexandra’s dangerous liason with Rasputin. What was that about, really? Frankly, I am not surprised—I’m delighted—that he found someone to make him happy, even briefly.”

  Anya knew of the narrow escape Olga and her husband Nicolai made from the Caucasus in 1918. With the help of an aide de camp, they’d barely slipped out of the grasp of the Red Army. They made their way to Copenhagen, and lived with Olga’s mother, Dowager Empress Maria Feodorovna, until her death in 1928.

  “In his letter, Misha asked me to save two pieces for you,” Olga went on, taking a folded velvet packet from a nearby cupboard. “So I persuaded mother to hold these back from any sales.”

  Anya’d also been privy to the Paris gossip about Maria’s jewels. Rescued by her cousin King George V from the Crimea, the Dowager Empress managed to haul millions in Romanov gems aboard the HMS Marlborough, then stashed them in a trunk under her bed in Copenhagen. To little avail. Britain’s wily Queen Mary contracted for the desperate woman’s treasure at market prices. Then, during the Depression, she cruelly delayed payment until values fell to an even smaller fraction of their former worth. Most outrageous, England’s queen flaunted her spoils, delighting in publicly wearing baubles such as the Empress’s prized cabochon-sapphire brooch.

  Olga spread open the purple cloth. A pair of glittering virescent frogs, each about three-fourths of an inch in length, squatted in the folds as if ready to jump. “These pieces were initially made for my mother as a gift to Anastasia on her birthday. Of course, there wasn’t a chance to present them. Misha must have sensed there never would be.

  “They were meant to be worn as a pair,” Olga continued. “The setting is pure gold and the gems are very rare green garnets. One of them should cover both your fares to America. The other you should keep in a strong box, and perhaps make it into a pendant. It will grow more valuable in years to come.”

  Olga looked at Anya knowingly.

  “These will not replace the stone you lost,” she said, sympathy in her blue eyes. “Nothing could. But they can help you and Irina start a new life. These days that is all any of us from the old world can ask.”

  As she departed, the gray, foreboding sky reminded Anya of Elsinore, a bare 25 miles away on the Baltic coast. There, in Kronborg Castle, had dwelled that most melancholy Danish prince of all. His mood matched hers now. “For this relief much thanks,” Hamlet had said. “‘Tis bitter cold, and I am sick at heart.”

  Chapter 7

  Kate’s skin felt cool and fresh as she stood on the high board, more than thirty feet above the water. As Kate’s sanctuary of ultra-focus, diving helped her achieve a perspective and clarity she couldn’t find elsewhere. Of all days, this was what she needed.

  She especially loved a workout in the early morning, when no one else had been in the pool. Its surface untouched, the water lay smooth and quiet, so transparent it almost didn’t exist. Breaking that surface woul
d be like shattering a spell.

  In Marion State’s cavernous, Olympic-size swimming pool, Kate made a solitary figure. She had endured—and finally given up on—a restless night’s sleep. Indeed, at 6:00 a.m., she’d already been awake an hour and a half. In the darkened home, the truth had come to her with full force: she didn’t just feel alone, she was alone, totally alone, an adult orphan without a sibling or even a close friend.

  Besides helping Kate see things more clearly, physical exercise had always calmed her, even when her thoughts and emotions were churning. This morning should have been no different. As she did every day except Sunday, Kate began her exercise regime by wrenching her 125-pound frame through a dozen bedside “pikes”—the classic mid-air maneuver in which a diver bends at her waist and, legs straight, touches her pointed toes. Still in her pajamas, she’d followed with knee bends and sit-ups. Finally, donning sweats and a halter, she’d jogged two-miles to the pool.

  Today, however, even after a full workout, she felt overwhelmed. First, there had been Irina’s terrible accident. Next, her mother’s instructions about Anya’s picture. Then her death, and the tape and letter—literally voices from the grave. The enormity of their secret still reverberated. Like Kate herself, her great grandmother—her granmama Anya—had been a married man’s mistress. But Anya’s lover had been the ruler of a nation, and she’d given birth to his child. Kate’s closest relatives—most troublingly Irina—had actively concealed this from her for more than three decades. Not even at the heighth of her storm over Jack Nars had her mother breathed a word about Anya Putyatin and Tsar Nicholas II.