The sun shone brightly on the day of the funeral, transforming the freshly fallen snow in the empty churchyard into a blanket of diamonds. Mamma had chosen this spot as Father Grigori’s final resting place—this secluded corner of Alexander Park, near the skeletal bones of a half-built church commissioned by Anna Vyrubova. Here, Mamma had gathered only those she considered most loyal to pay their respects to her fallen priest.
The chaplain finished his reading beneath the swaying branches of a larch tree and Mamma knelt before the zinc casket, her black veil billowing in the breeze. Though Mamma had insisted on seeing the body earlier, the casket was now sealed and Olga was thankful for it. Father Grigori had died in pain, bullet holes riddled throughout his torso; one arm still raised, frozen, in an agonized benediction. And though the morticians had done what they could to prepare his body for burial, nothing had prepared Olga, when she placed a signed icon atop his chest earlier that morning, for the sight of his frostbitten face, haggard and contorted in a grimace of dismay.
Mamma pressed a kiss to the casket’s lacquered lid. Behind her mourning veil, she wept as Papa, his greatcoat banded with a stripe of black, helped her to her feet. He nodded, and the undertakers began lowering Father Grigori’s coffin into the hole they’d chipped in the frozen ground.
He led Mamma back into the thicket of trees where Olga and her sisters stood, Tatiana’s arm wrapped around an inconsolable Anna Vyrubova. It was murder—that much had been evident from the outset, when Father Grigori’s daughter, who’d moved to the capital to act as a social secretary for her father, had called the palace to tell Mamma that he’d not returned after a night out.
Father Grigori had survived many attempts on his life over the years, Tatiana had reassured Mamma as they waited for news. He was a survivor with the luck of an alley cat. But as they kept a silent vigil with Mamma throughout the day, Olga was certain that Father Grigori’s luck had run out, a suspicion that became ever more undeniable after she learned that Father Grigori had been bound for Felix Yusupov’s palace on the night he disappeared.
The undertakers finished lowering the coffin; Papa held out a handful of earth over the grave. He let it fall, the dirt hitting the coffin with a hollow thud before turning away: Olga flinched with the horrendous thought that the noise was Father Grigori himself, clawing to get out. According to the coroner, he’d survived even this assassination attempt, at first: he’d lived through the poisoning, then the gruesome shooting that followed. Frostbite, it was said, had killed him in the end, after the conspirators had dumped his still-breathing body into the canal.
Papa turned away as the priest recited the Trisagion, rubbing his wearied eyes. Father Grigori’s death had been a shock for Mamma, and a betrayal to Papa: he would never have believed his own blood capable of such a vicious crime. The news had ripped Olga’s extended family apart as they tried to plead for clemency: clemency, for Felix Yusupov and Dmitri Pavlovich, who’d lured Father Grigori to Felix’s home; clemency, for the princes who’d murdered a priest. But Mamma had been set on vengeance. Papa, caught in the middle, had exiled Felix from the capital, and sent Dmitri to serve on the Persian front.
Dmitri. Olga still couldn’t quite believe the role he’d played in it all. Dmitri Pavlovich, capable of murder? She tried to picture him wielding the pistol, shooting Rasputin in the lamplight glow outside Moika Palace’s buttered walls; carrying the body to Kretovsky Bridge and throwing it over, with no sympathy, no remorse for Father Grigori or his family. Was Papa’s favor worth so little to him? Was Olga’s friendship so easily thrown aside?
And yet, Dmitri hadn’t been alone in his bloody convictions. Hadn’t Mitya, too, seen no way forward but Father Grigori’s demise? He’d offered such violence out of loyalty, out of love, viewing his actions as the service of a soldier, rather than a murderer.
Perhaps Dmitri viewed his own deeds in a similar light.
She thought back to her last conversation with Dmitri: his increasingly despondent outlook on the war; his frequent allusions to Father Grigori. He’d always known more than he let on, it seemed: had he resolved to do it, that night she danced with him at Alexander Palace? Had he already been making plans to murder the one man who could save Alexei from himself? Perhaps if Olga had spoken to him more directly—if she’d listened, if she’d looked a little closer—she might have been able to warn Dmitri off his destructive path.
Mamma let out a ragged sob; beside her, Alexei took his hand in hers as he stared down at the grave. At twelve years old, he’d begun to grow out of the chubbiness of childhood. With his newly hollowing cheeks and lanky frame, he’d begun to resemble Papa.
Alexei’s face tightened, and Olga could tell he was trying not to show the grief he felt for the man who’d been his friend as well as his healer. Whatever Father Grigori was to the rest of the world, he’d been important to Alexei. Olga thought of the priest smiling at her little brother, lost within the white expanse of his sickbed; telling him that such agony was a test to bring him closer to the people he would one day lead.
Had Father Grigori told Alexei what he’d told Mamma: that his death would mean Alexei’s ruin in turn?
They’d done it for Russia, Dmitri had said in the feeble letter he’d sent to Papa from the front: they’d murdered Father Grigori to keep Russia from tearing itself apart.
Little did he know they’d assured the end of the Romanov dynasty.
The burial ended shortly afterward, Mamma letting fall a small bouquet of baby’s breath into the grave.
“My dearest martyr,” she murmured. “Forgive us.”
“It’s an awful business,” Tatiana murmured as the gravediggers began to cover the casket in frozen earth. From the other side of the burial site, Anna Vyrubova watched the casket disappear, suddenly, curiously stoic. “Awful. I hope this puts an end to the anger. Perhaps there’s some peace that will come from it, in some way.”
Olga watched Mamma, her pale face set beneath the black of her mourning veil. The myth of Father Grigori—the myth of Rasputin—had grown in recent years, grown so large that it had eclipsed the glittering legends of tsars and heirs, grand duchesses dancing beneath the glow of a chandelier.
Her family had survived this long on a myth of their own: a myth of their power, a myth of their divine right to rule.
That myth was no longer enough to sustain itself in the real world. It had faded beneath the unstoppable tide of the all-too-real struggles that plagued Russia and its people.
Whether Olga believed Father Grigori’s final prophecy or not, that much, at least, was true.
“No, Tatiana,” she murmured. “Whatever comes next, I’m afraid it isn’t peace.”