The Romanov Sisters (Four Sisters) (34 page)

allowed to join the girls on mushroom-foraging expeditions in the

forest and became restless and disgruntled; to pacify him, on 2

October Alexandra took him out for a carriage drive. The sandy

road was very bumpy and uneven and before long Alexey was

complaining of a sharp pain in his thigh. Alexandra ordered the

driver to turn back, but by the time they reached the lodge he was

screaming in agony and was carried into his bedroom in a state of

semi-consciousness.12 The juddering of the carriage had caused the

still healing haematoma in his upper thigh to rupture and start

bleeding again.

Dr Ostrogorsky was immediately sent for from St Petersburg,

closely followed by Alexey’s paediatrician Dr Fedorov. But nothing

could calm him or alleviate the unremitting agony caused by the

swelling, which was now spreading across his groin to his abdomen.

On 6 October his fever rose to 102 degrees F (38.9 degrees C) and

his heartbeat became irregular; the last strength in Alexey’s body

was being drained away by the pain and all the child could do was

fretfully draw his left leg up tightly in an attempt to ease it. Dr

Fedorov feared that an abscess would develop and blood poisoning

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might set in, leading to peritonitis. For the next four nights,

Alexandra barely left Alexey’s bedside – with Olga and Tatiana both

taking turns to sit with him – refusing to rest or eat, forced to listen to him crossing himself and crying out over and over again with

each contracting pain ‘
Gospodi pomilui
’ – ‘O Lord have mercy upon me!’ – as the intensity of his screams faded into a hoarse cry and

he slipped in and out of delirium.13 ‘Mama,’ he called out in one of

his lucid moments, ‘don’t forget to put a little monument on my

tomb when I am dead.’14

In the midst of this crisis Pierre Gilliard watched in horrified

fascination as Nicholas, Alexandra and the girls made heroic attempts to act as though nothing was seriously wrong, for they were

surrounded by visitors: ‘one shooting party succeeded another, and

the guests were more numerous than ever’.15 On one particular

evening Maria and Anastasia performed a couple of scenes from

Molière’s
Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme
for a party of visiting Polish nobles. During the performance Alexandra had sat there, smiling

and chatting with steely determination, as though nothing was amiss,

but the minute the performance ended she rushed upstairs, as Gilliard recalled, with ‘a distracted and terror-stricken look in her face’.16

With guests to entertain out shooting, at luncheon and at dinner

she and Nicholas struggled to maintain their composure, while

upstairs, out of sight, their son’s cries of pain echoed along the

corridors – all, as Gilliard observed, in a last-ditch attempt to maintain the secret of his condition.

By 8 October and unable to do anything at all to help the stricken

child, the doctors had given up hope. Fedorov had considered and

quickly abandoned the idea of ‘drastic measures’ – surgical interven-

tion to cut open the swelling, drain it and release the agonizing

pressure in Alexey’s abdomen – for even the incision would have

been enough for him to bleed to death.17 ‘I do not have the strength

to convey to you what I am experiencing’, Dr Botkin wrote to his

children that day. ‘I am in no condition to do anything but walk

around him . . . in no condition to think about anything except him

and his parents . . . Pray, my children, pray daily and fervently for our precious heir.’18

The tsarevich was dying and the Russian people had to be

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prepared. Until now Alexandra had been adamant about any bulle-

tins being issued but she finally relented. On the evening of the 9th, Federov and Dr Karl Rauchfuss, another leading paediatrician and

head of a children’s hospital in the capital who had arrived with

him, composed a brief announcement was to be published in the
St Petersburg evening papers.19 The children’s religious instructor,

Father Vasiliev, administered the last rites. Faced with the imminent death of her only son, Alexandra had no options left: she must appeal to Grigory for help. On her instructions, Anna Vyrubova sent a

telegram to Rasputin in Pokrovskoe. His daughter Maria remem-

bered it arriving the following morning, upon which Rasputin had

prayed for some time in front of an icon of the Virgin of Kazan.

Then he had gone to the telegraph office and sent word back to

Alexandra: ‘The Little One will not die. Do not allow the doctors

to bother him too much.’20 Later a second telegram arrived telling

her ‘God has seen your tears and heard your prayers’; Alexey, Grigory again assured her, would recover.21 A strange calm came over the

tsaritsa from that moment; perhaps this transmitted itself to the

stricken child and in turn calmed him, for his temperature dropped

and he began to settle. At last reassured, Alexandra went down to

dinner for the first time since the crisis had begun; ‘she was radiant in her relief from anxiety’, as General Mosolov recalled. The doctors, in contrast, ‘seemed in utter consternation’ at this dramatic turn-around.22

On the 10th Alexey was given Communion again: ‘the poor thin

little face with its big suffering eyes, lit up with blessed happiness as the Priest approached him with the Holy Sacrament. It was such

a comfort to us all and we too had the same joy’, Alexandra later

told Boyd Carpenter. For her, Alexey’s miraculous recovery was

down to ‘trust and faith implicite [
sic
] in God Almighty’.23 He had not deserted her. And now, across the churches of Russia, the people

too were praying for the heir’s recovery.

On the afternoon of the 10th Nicholas noted in his diary that

Alexey had at last slept soundly. The following day the doctors issued a press bulletin saying that the crisis was over. Dr Botkin was relieved to write and tell his children that ‘our priceless patient’ was ‘undoubtedly significantly better . . . God heard our fervent prayers.’ But the
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anguish for everyone had been terrible; it would be a long time

before Alexey would be fully well again, and yet even now Botkin

found himself wondering ‘how many more occasions like this might

there be along the way’.24 In the interim, Dr Fedorov had summoned

from St Petersburg his young assistant Dr Vladimir Derevenko,

who would now become a permanent fixture in Alexey’s care.

On 20 October Nicholas was able at last to write to his mother

‘with my heart filled with gratitude to the Lord for His Mercy in

granting us the beginning of dear Alexei’s recovery’.25 In a bulletin issued by the Minister of the Imperial Court, Count Freedericksz,

on the 21st a detailed description was finally given to the Russian

public of the ‘abdominal haemorrhage and swelling’ that had

occurred, the raised temperature and the ‘subsequent exhaustion

and severe anaemia’ which would need ‘considerable time to cure

completely’ as would the free use of the tsarevich’s left leg as a result of the ‘bent hip muscle’. Signed by doctors Rauchfuss, Federov,

Ostrogorsky and Botkin, the bulletin made no mention of haemo-

philia. For the Russian people, the cause of the illness would remain shrouded in mystery. The international press was, however, thick

with speculation. ‘Probably the illness of no child in the world is

fraught with so much political significance as is that of the eight-

year-old czarevitch,’ wrote the
Daily News
, ‘ his death eventually might lead to an upheaval in Russia that would shake the Romanoff

dynasty from its throne.’26

But what was
really
wrong with the tsarevich, everyone asked?

Tuberculosis of the bone, a tumour, an abscess, kidney trouble, a

fall from his pony, were all mentioned, with the American press

even circulating an absurd story that ‘during an unguarded moment’

Alexey had been attacked and stabbed in the grounds of Spala by a

‘nihilist’.27 The St Petersburg correspondent of the London
Daily
Telegraph
reported that the exact nature of the illness was ‘for unexplained reasons into which one is reluctant to pry, kept dark, not

merely from the general public, but from the highest state dignitaries, who are reduced to inference and conjecture’. The ‘incomprehensible

silence of the Court bulletins’ was causing considerable anxiety

among the Russian public, giving, as
The Times
observed, ‘free scope to the sensation-mongers’.28 On 4 November (22 October OS)
it
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ran a headline ‘Cause of the Tsarevitch’s illness’ in which its St

Petersburg correspondent wrote that ‘In medical circles the illness

of the Tsarevitch is attributed to a congenital condition of the blood, rendering reabsorption difficult in the case of rupture of the slightest vessel’.29 This in itself was a tacit admission of haemophilia to anyone in the medical profession, and it was the London press that finally

broke the story. On 9 November (27 October OS), the British

medical journal
Hospital
announced that the tsarevich had haemophilia, a fact picked up the following day in the
New York Times
with its headline ‘Czar’s Heir Has Bleeding Disease’, adding that this was

‘long a characteristic of European Royal Families and Still Persists’.30

*

When Alexey was finally fit to travel, the most careful preparations

were made for his return home to Russia. The sandy road from the

hunting lodge at Spala to the railway station was carefully smoothed

over, so that there ‘should not be the slightest jolting’ and the imperial train was driven no faster than 15 mph (24 kmh) so that the

brakes need not be suddenly applied.31 It was not until 24 November

(OS) that Alexey finally was able to take his first bath ‘in more than two months’, Alexandra told Onor. During the daytime he was being

‘wheeled around the upstairs rooms in my bath-chair’ and only later

did they finally begin carrying him down to her mauve boudoir.32

Alexey would be lame for a year, during the course of which he was

submitted to endless, rigorous treatment: ‘electricity, massage, mud

compresses, blue light bath with electric current on arm, & leg

bath’; Alexandra hoped he might be able to stand on his leg again

by Christmas.33 Professor Roman Wreden, a pioneering orthopaedic

surgeon, came from St Petersburg and fitted Alexey with a correc-

tive iron leg caliper. The tsarevich found it extremely uncomfortable and complained to his mother, but Wreden was firm; Alexey must

endure the discomfort if he was to be a future emperor. It was a

candid remark that hit home, for word was already out that the

Russian people had a cripple for an heir. Alexandra did not like

having to face this unpalatable truth. And so Nicholas thanked the

good professor, made him an honorary court physician, and never

called on his services again.34

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Alexey’s recovery went hand in hand with his mother’s. Alexandra

did not make her first public appearance until 1 December, having

been ‘too utterly exhausted’ for the last three months. But she took

comfort in her son’s compassion: ‘Sweet angel wants to have my

pains,’ she wrote, ‘says I can take his which are much less.’35 But it was clear that this latest crisis had taken an irreversible toll on her:

‘for seven years,’ she told Boyd Carpenter, ‘I suffer from the heart

and lead the life of an invalid most of the time.’36

Her precious boy had, however, recovered from almost certain

death, a fact that a still baffled Dr Fedorov confirmed was ‘wholly

inexplicable, from a medical point of view’.37 But the tsarevich’s

survival had come at a high price – the emotional enslavement of

his mother to Grigory Rasputin as the only person on God’s earth

who could keep her son alive. For after his return to St Petersburg

that winter, Grigory had assured her that her son would be safe – all the time that he, Grigory, was alive.

Now more than ever Alexandra’s daughters performed an essen-

tial role in the day-to-day care of their mother and brother, in a

family life that was increasingly lived in the shadow of the sickroom.

‘They are all 5 touching in their care for me’, Alexandra told Boyd

Carpenter; ‘my family life is one blessed ray of sunshine excepting

the anxiety for our Boy.’38 But the psychological effect of Alexandra’s chronic sickness was taking its toll: in their crucial formative years the four sisters, now more than ever, needed a mother’s time and

attention. But instead of living the carefree life of teenagers exploring the world around them, meeting new people and discovering new

places, sickness and suffering had come to dominate their everyday

lives, which they were learning to endure with extraordinary stoi-

cism. ‘My Mama darling,’ wrote Maria, herself in bed suffering with

a sore throat, on 14 December 1912: