As if I’d swallowed my tongue, I stared at him, unable to speak.

“Don’t look so shocked, my dear Maria. It’s all very deliberate. Even the saints used to do this, stare at naked harlots in order to find purity of soul. This is the path I struggle so hard to follow as well, not the path of simple Believers but that of a real Christ. How else am I supposed to make my spirit strong unless I continually battle the flesh?” Looking right at me, he hit himself in the face with his own fist. “Besides, I find self-abasement very effective. It keeps me humble and on the right path.”

The joy of suffering. The eternal need to drive Satan out of one’s own body. The never-ending search for self-purification. Beating away sin with sin. All in the glorious quest of repentance and holy forgiveness. What could be more pagan? More Orthodox? And who, I sobbed within, could be more Russian than my very own father, Rasputin?

As I took Papa by the arm, I stole a glance over my shoulder and waved a quick farewell to Sasha, who was only just stepping out of the shadows.

By the time we returned home, Dunya and my sister were already waiting out front for us. Taking him by his arms, we rushed Papa upstairs and changed him into a fresh kosovorotka.

“You are coming with me, Marochka,” my father said, as we pulled the shirt over his head. “I’m so exhausted there’s no doubt I’ll need your help.”

Knowing that my father’s commands were every bit as absolute as the Empress’s, I obeyed silently, following him down the stairs and into the back of the royal limousine, which had just arrived. All at once we were racing toward Tsarskoye Selo, the vortex of Russian politics, gossip, scandal…and tragedy. But as we sat there in the rich leather seats, I didn’t speak or even look at my father for fear of the anger and confusion that would burst forth. Besides, the most important thing was for him to gather his strength for his duties ahead. And so I gazed out the window in thought.

The greatest attack on Papa had come three or four years earlier, when his former friend and ally in Christianity, the monk Illiodor, turned so rabidly against him. Whether or not Papa had in fact raped a nun, as was proclaimed, Illiodor began shouting everywhere that Papa was a holy devil set on destroying the very foundation of Holy Mother Russia-the monarchy-and that he was pandering to the Yids as well as aiding the new capitalists, who, the fanatic monk claimed, were hell bent on debasing the Russian soul.

To launch his famous attack, Illiodor released a letter that he had stolen from our home in Pokrovskoye, a letter tucked in my father’s little wooden desk and written by none other than Her Majesty the Empress, to my father:

My beloved, unforgettable teacher, redeemer, and mentor! How tiresome it is without you! My soul is quiet and I relax only when you, my teacher, are seated beside me. I kiss your hands and lean my head on your blessed shoulder. Oh, how light, how light do I feel then. I only wish one thing: to fall asleep, to fall asleep…forever on your shoulders and in your arms. What happiness to feel your presence near me. Where are you? Where have you gone? Oh, I am so sad and my heart is longing… Will you be soon again close to me? Come quickly, I am waiting for you and I am tormenting myself for you. I am asking for your holy blessing and I am kissing your blessed hands. I love you forever.

Yours, Mama

Not even the censors could stop the wide publication of this letter, and it caused a scandal of the greatest magnitude. People of every level of society were aghast at the thought of their Empress kissing the foul hands of that dirty peasant, and the worst rumors started running everywhere, even supposed eyewitness accounts of Khlyst activities in the cellars of the Aleksander Palace itself. Soon thereafter an even worse story started circulating as quickly as a hot fire in a parched forest-that Rasputin had molested the Tsar’s second daughter, Tatyana.

People didn’t understand. Or what they did surmise was wrong. I myself had received a note from the Empress written in such a florid manner, for that was her style. She was all emotion, all soul, and she gave herself completely to those she cared for. Those were the exact words the Empress wrote to my father-her Father Grigori-but no one understood where the words came from or what they truly meant for one simple reason: No one knew her secret, a secret that affected everything in our country, right down to the soft snowballs formed and handed to me that winter afternoon at the Aleksander Palace.

In fact, hardly anyone realized there was one, a state secret of such magnitude that it was carefully guarded even from many princes and princesses of the royal blood. I was one of the very few privy to it, and only then because I knew of my father’s activities. Unbeknownst to almost everyone in the nation, there was an explanation for the imperial family’s withdrawal from the whirling social world of the capital, there was logic behind their decision to retreat to the Aleksander Palace in Tsarskoye Selo and live there in near isolation, and there was most definitely a reason for the Empress’s lack of laughter and perpetually sad appearance.

It was that the Heir Tsarevich Aleksei Nikolaevich suffered from the English disease. He was a bleeder. And the Tsar and Tsaritsa, and even their most trusted advisers, had decided that no one should know that the future of the nation was in peril not just from the Germans but from a simple bruise or bump, any number of which most little boys encountered on any given day. It all came down to blood-royal blood, to be specific-that had been passed from Queen Victoria to her favorite granddaughter, a minor German princess who became our Empress Aleksandra Fyodorovna, and who in turn passed the condition to her first-born boy, Heir to the Imperial Throne of All the Russias.

The only time I ever heard Papa speak against the monarchy was when he had groused that we simple people took better care in breeding our pigs back home-where everyone knew you needed fresh stock from other villages to keep the herd strong and healthy-than these fancy nobles did in breeding themselves. But it was in this, the inability of the Heir’s blood to clot, that lay the true nature of my father’s extraordinary bond with our Empress.

Less than an hour later a pair of heavy black iron gates opened before us and the royal limousine carried us once again to the very steps of the Aleksander Palace. I thought of the boy’s pain, of the Empress’s misery…and of the terrible things constantly said about her. Even her own mother-in-law, the Dowager Empress Maria Fyodorovna, had called her a traitor, first because she had given birth to four daughters in a row and then because she had birthed such a sickly boy. To make it all worse, the court of the Dowager Empress was filled with evil gossips, highborn personages who spread the most wicked stories to all the courts of all the grand dukes and beyond. There was even tittle-tattle that Aleksandra Fyodorovna had a secret telegraph cable stretching from the mauve boudoir all the way to her native Germany and the offices of her cousin, Russia’s sworn enemy, Kaiser Wilhelm, with whom we had been at war for so long. Every time I heard that I shuddered, for I couldn’t help but think of the poor Marie Antoinette, daughter of the Austrian monarch, whom the French had labeled the Austrichienne, the Austrian dog.

But none of the incendiary stories they told about the Empress was true. Not one. And yet virtually every Russian believed them because the stories had been told and retold, heard and heard again so often, that eventually no one doubted their authenticity. There were supposed eyewitnesses everywhere.