Read Online Enchantments: A Novel of Rasputin's Daughter and the Romanovs by Kathryn Harrison - Free Book Online

few occasions when I happened to accompany my father on a visit to the Alexander Palace, I was frightened in a way that had nothing to do with shyness—I’ve never been shy—or the proximity of the demigods we like to make of royalty. I’d gotten it into my head that the Romanovs were a monstrous kind of family, insensible to the suffering of their most vulnerable member. I must have jumbled up what little I knew about them with stories from history books. My years of formal schooling had only just begun, and we’d been instructed to memorize the succession of all the tsars back to Mikhail of Rus , the name Mikhail gave the piece of land he’d carved away from the Golden Horde and taken for himself. Rus . And he called himself Tsar , for Caesar, as it was his intention to make Moscow a new Rome and from it rule his empire.
    It’s Ivan the Terrible, of course, who seizes hold of a child’s imagination, and I fell prey to dark fantasies of his hiding somewhere in the Alexander Palace. Ivan, who suffered seizures of rage and used his scepter to bludgeon the son he loved, only to fall to his knees, howling in anguish, while he rocked the murdered boy and cradled his broken head. Who other than Terrible Ivan could have summoned such noises from a tsarevich?
    The first time I heard Alyosha’s screaming, I was ten and a half years old and new to city life. Waiting for my father in the blue-and-gold parlor, I went down on the palace floor. Not that I keeled over, I just bent my body into the shape it demanded—folded my legs under me, pressed my face into my knees, and shut my eyes tight. I remained like that for I don’t know how long, learningwhat it means to be scared stiff. I heard footsteps in the corridor, servants passing, but no one inquired about my peculiar position there on the blue-and-gold carpet. Or perhaps no one noticed me. Perhaps whoever glanced inside the parlor mistook me for an ottoman.
    I never got used to Alyosha’s screams, not ever. When I was eighteen and heard them and remained on my feet, still I folded up inside. On nights I can’t sleep for thinking, my attention called back to the past, I hear those screams. Whose decision was it to give him no morphine? Why didn’t anyone prevail upon Tsar Nikolay, or the physicians, to revisit the question of drugging the boy, rescuing him from a torture he endured not once but over and over? What loving mother could have borne witness to her child’s begging for help, for release, for death even, and not insist he be given whatever it took to alleviate his pain?
    I was a coward. Tsarina or no tsarina, I fled at the sight of Alyosha’s face gone gray with pain and slick with the perspiration that soaked his hair and the nightshirt no one dared change, because at the touch of anyone’s hand his screams grew louder. His eyes were sunken and ringed with black circles, and he had the peculiar and pathetic ability to keep his leg absolutely still while the rest of him writhed. What answer did I have to so grave an injury as this? From the moment Alyosha had driven his knee into the newel post, blood flowed into the joint, until the swelling bent and paralyzed his leg, stretching the skin until it shone and, yes, wept red tears. The blood that no longer circulated died, and its cells broke down and flooded his body with chemicals that drove his temperature up. He vomited from the fever and the pain and screamed when the act of vomiting jarred his leg. So this was what my father had been summoned to treat. I hadn’t known such tortures existed. I might have heard the tsarevich scream when I was a child, but I’d seen him only when he was well, from a distance, andwhatever Father told me of Alyosha’s illness didn’t prepare me for what it was—how could it have?
    I think I might have stood it if he hadn’t screamed so. But I couldn’t stay by his side when he screamed, I couldn’t. Especially as there was nothing I could do to stop it. Suddenly, my