“When do I leave?” he asked.

“Yesterday.”

Her brother’s cries split the night, echoing down the long marble corridors and sweeping staircases of the palace. Anastasia — or Ana, for short — sat up in her bed. Her sister Olga was already awake under her own pile of blankets. This had happened so many times before.

“Poor Alexei,” Ana said. “It’s getting worse again.”

“There’s nothing you can do,” Olga said. “There’s nothing any of us can do.”

“Dr. Botkin is here.”

“There’s nothing Dr. Botkin can do, either,” Olga said, wearily. “Go back to sleep.”

Olga lifted one of her plump pillows and stuck her head under it, but Ana could not fall asleep again. Alexei screamed, there were slippered footsteps running in the hall outside, and Ana had to go and see for herself. She got out of bed, put on a padded robe of Chinese silk — a gift from the always generous Emir of Bokhara — and crept out into the hall. When her little brown spaniel, Jemmy, tried to follow, she nudged her back into the bedroom with her foot.

Several doors down, she could see light spilling from the Tsarevitch’s suite of rooms, and she could hear voices in urgent consultation. As the heir to the throne of Russia, Alexei — or Alexis, as he was known outside the family — was the most precious thing in the whole empire, more valuable than Anastasia and her three sisters combined (a point that none of them disputed; it was just a fact of life). But he was also the only one of the five children afflicted with a mortal disease. Hemophilia.

The family had all come to the royal compound only a week before, hoping for some relief from the pressures and public demands of life in the Winter Palace of St. Petersburg. Just fifteen miles from the capital, and reached by a private railway line, Tsarskoe Selo — or, “the tsar’s village”—was comprised of eight hundred immaculately groomed and guarded acres, where peacocks strutted with their brilliant tail feathers fanning out and a pack of tame deer roamed free. Cossacks on horseback, with sabers at their sides, rode the iron-fenced perimeters at all hours, and from every window of the two hundred rooms in the palace a strutting sentry could be seen. An additional garrison of five thousand troops was stationed in the nearest village.

Inside the palace, commissioned by Catherine the Great in the eighteenth century, every room was adorned with crystal chandeliers and richly colored Oriental carpets; huge, porcelain stoves warmed the chambers and scented the air. Fresh flowers, from as close as the greenhouses on the grounds, or as far away as the imperial gardens in the Crimea, bloomed in vases everywhere. Scores of liveried footmen, in dozens of different uniforms, silently performed every function from opening doors to carrying bowls of smoking incense from one chamber to another; it was the duty of four in particular — Ethiopians whose skin, Ana thought, glowed as hard and bright as ebony — to precede the Emperor Nicholas, or the Empress Alexandra, into any room. The mere sight of one of these fearsome black servants, in his bejeweled turban, brocade vest, and shining scimitar, alerted everyone within that one of Russia’s imperial majesties was about to enter.

Two of these guards were standing now on either side of Alexei’s door, but gave no notice of the fourteen-year-old Grand Duchess Anastasia as she scurried into the anteroom. A couple of the young Tsarevitch’s consulting physicians were huddled in thought by the fireplace, stroking their chins nervously, while the inner chamber was dimly lighted by electric lamps with heavy, hooded shades. The Empress sat on the bed, her reddish-gold hair piled in a hasty knot atop her head, her long fingers smoothing her son’s brow; Dr. Botkin, a stout man who had never once been seen in anything but his black frock coat (he had even worn it on the beach at Livadia, to everyone’s amusement), stood beside her, holding a thermometer to the light. He did not look pleased, and when he spoke, Alexandra simply nodded.

Inching into the room, Ana finally could see her younger brother nestled down deep in the bed, with pillows piled up under his head and others raising his swollen leg. The day before, he had taken a spill off a swing — the kind of fall Ana and her sisters would have walked away from with no more than a scraped knee — but for Alexei any such accident could prove fatal. Growing up, Ana and her sisters had been warned a thousand times not to so much as jostle their frail brother. A cut or scratch that looked harmless on the surface could be causing deep and irreparable damage beneath the skin, as the blood — unable to clot — relentlessly hemorrhaged into the joints or muscles. His left leg was swollen now to twice its size, tightly swaddled in gauze that was changed every hour or two as the pooling blood seeped through the pores of his skin. His eyes, normally so bright and mischievous, were sunk deep in his head, surrounded by circles as black as soot.

Their father was in Poland on a diplomatic call, but Ana assumed that, as always, he had received a telegram by now and was hurrying back as fast as the trains and carriages could take him.

The question, each time something like this occurred, was, Would the young heir survive this latest attack?

Ana could not imagine such a terrible day. It would be as if the sky itself had fallen. She did not know how her parents — her mother, in particular — would be able to endure such an event. It was unthinkable … and so she tried, very hard, never to think about it.

“What are you doing up?” her mother said, suddenly taking note of her. “You should be asleep.”

“Will Alexei be all right?”

“Alexei will be all right,” Dr. Botkin put in. “We will see him through. You should go back to bed. There’s nothing for you to worry about.”

Her mother smiled faintly, but unconvincingly, and Ana took a step closer to the bed. Her brother saw her and tried to smile, but a sudden paroxysm of pain arched his back, set his eyes back even farther in his head, and caused him to scream in agony. The Empress clapped her hands over her ears, and then, as if ashamed at her reaction, quickly drew them away and reached for her son’s sweaty hands.

The gong on the grandfather clock rang twelve times, and as the last peal faded away there was the sound of sentries’ voices, then the clatter of hooves in the courtyard outside. Ana ran to the window and yanked back the heavy drapes, expecting to see her father the Tsar leaping from his carriage, but instead she saw a burly man in a black cassock, dismounting from a swaybacked mare.

It was Grigori Rasputin, the starets, or holy man, from Siberia.

Her mother, standing beside her and gripping the curtain with white knuckles, said, “Thanks be to God.”

And even Ana offered up a prayer. If anyone could save her brother, it was this monk with the long black beard and the broad hands and the pockmarked face. She had seen him do it before.

Minutes later, he strode into the room, and everyone else in it, even the Tsaritsa, seemed to recede into the shadows. Although his name alone — which meant “dissolute”—should have served as a warning, he was instead treated with civility, and even deference (which was common, as long as Alexandra, his most ardent supporter and friend, was present). His robes were secured by a frayed leather belt, his boots were covered with mud, and he gave off the aroma of a barnyard stall, but it was his eyes that commanded attention. Ana had never seen such eyes as Rasputin possessed — as blue as the Baltic and as penetrating as a dagger. When he presided over the evening prayers of herself and her sisters, she felt that there was nothing he did not know, nothing in her heart he could not see, nothing in her soul he could not forgive. And though he was roughly affectionate with all of the siblings, Ana had always felt that there was a unique bond between the two of them.