The tsar issued a ukase forbidding newspapers to mention Rasputin’s name; the edict broke the terms of the 1905 manifesto and failed to gag the politicians. Kokovtsov warned Nicholas of the risks he was running by seeing the starets. Maria Rasputin claimed that the audience was overheard by her playmate, Grand Duchess Marie. In her version the tsar spoke of Rasputin’s “great service” to the throne; the premier replied that he knew of the heir’s miraculous recoveries but said that Rasputin gave the credit to God and not himself. “Ah yes,” the tsar said. “But why did God choose to act through him?”
The premier recollected only telling the tsar that the flood of stories of “orgies and disgraceful conduct” was no ordinary gossip. He said that “respectable newspapers call Rasputin a thief and swindler.” When the tsar said that the press was beneath contempt, Kokovtsov reminded him as gently as he could that it molded public opinion. “The public does not run the country,” the tsar retorted. “It is run for their benefit, and I am the one who decides what is best for them.” Nicholas concluded by asking Kokovtsov to see “the simple peasant” who, “by a strange power,” relieved the sufferings of his son.
Kokovtsov did so. The peasant strode into the premier’s study and sat himself down in an armchair. “I was struck by the repulsive expression of his eyes,” the premier wrote. “Deep seated and close set, they glued on me and for a long time he would not turn them away as though trying to exercise some hypnotic influence.” When tea was served Rasputin dipped a handful of biscuits into his cup and ate the soggy mass before again fixing his “lynx eyes” on the premier. “I was getting tired of his attempts at hypnotism,” Kokovtsov recalled, “and told him that it was useless to stare at me so hard because his eyes had not the slightest effect on me.” He thought Rasputin a “typical Siberian convict, a tramp who had cleverly taught himself to play the fool and who carried out his role according to a tried-and-tested recipe.”
It was a grave underestimate. This Siberian had seen off Stolypin, a man the British ambassador considered “the most notable figure in Europe”; though the same source thought Kokovtsov “the best type of the old bureaucracy,” he was easier meat and Rasputin knew it. Like his murdered predecessor the new premier demanded that the starets leave the capital for good. Rasputin told Vyrubova that he was offered a sweetener of 200,000 rubles—“a fortune beyond the dreams of avarice to a Russian peasant,” she wrote admiringly, “but he declined it, saying that he was not to be bought by anybody.” He agreed to return to Pokrovskoye for a while and did so a few days later. It was hardly a concession, for he regarded Siberia as his sin bin, a place to take to when a cooling-off period was needed.
He made sure it was the premier who would suffer by letting Vyrubova know that he did not enjoy the grace of God. Alexandra, so friendly when they had met in the Crimea a few months before, made a point of ignoring Kokovtsov the next time she saw him; she deliberately talked to minor officials and “passed Kokovtsov with averted face, thrusting out a hand for him to salute.” The premier was well aware of the implication. “From that time on,” he wrote, “though the tsar continued to show me his favor for another two years, my dismissal was assured.”
On February 26, 1912, with the starets already on his way back to Siberia, Rodzianko obtained an audience with the tsar. He thought his mission so important that he first prayed for strength in the Kazan cathedral. He was hot with shame that a royalist like himself should have to speak of such matters to his sovereign. “I beseech you, Sire,” he said, “as Your Majesty’s most loyal subject, will it be your pleasure to hear me to the end? If not, but say one word and I will be silent.” Nicholas would not meet his eye but murmured, “Speak.” He reminded the tsar that Hermogen’s career had been ruined for telling the truth about Rasputin, whom he was sure was a khlyst. “How can the Orthodox Church stand by in silence when Orthodoxy is being destroyed and defiled by this rogue?” he asked. Nicholas replied that he had nothing against Hermogen. “I think he is an honest and sincere archpastor … and a staunch man serving the dignity of the Church,” he said. “He will soon be taken back. But I had to punish him because he openly refused to obey my command.” Rodzianko thought it typical of the tsar’s weak character that he should have no personal argument with the exiled bishop. Nicholas asked him if he had read Stolypin’s report on the starets; he had not. The tsar suggested he do so and then prepare a further report.
The Stolypin material was with a synod official, Mikhail Damansky, who handed it over with great reluctance. The next day he called on Rodzianko to demand it back, saying that he had been sent by a “very exalted person.” Rodzianko asked if that was Sabler, the synod procurator. Damansky replied that the person was incomparably more important; it was, he snapped, the empress herself. If that was so, Rodzianko said, then she should be reminded that she was as much her husband’s subject as Damansky was. Rodzianko had been told to prepare a report; he would do so. He refused to hand back the material—provoking a hysterical outburst by Alexandra, who thought he should be hanged for his impudence—and included it with further details of Rasputin’s Siberian youth in a second report. The tsar did not so much as glance at it. Rodzianko asked for further audiences. They were refused on the ground that Rasputin was a personal matter for the family, not politicians.
A debate on the budget for the synod was held in the Duma on March 9. Alexander Guchkov took advantage of it to thunder an accusation: “I feel like saying, like crying out that the Church is in danger and the State is in danger too. You all know what serious drama Russia is experiencing. In the center of this drama—a mysterious tragicomic figure, a ghost or survivor through the darkness of centuries, a strange figure in the light of the twentieth century,” he said. He did not mention a name; if he had the new ukase would have prevented his speech from being reported. In any event such detail was superfluous to the person who obsessed all St. Petersburg. “In what ways has this man reached such heights that the senior holders of Church and State power bow to his influence? You must ask—who is playing the master at the top? Who is wielding the ax that fells some policies and people, and promotes others?” The man was not alone, Guchkov warned; he was surrounded by “unnoticed individuals greedy for distinction … obscure tradespeople, shipwrecked pressmen, contractors.”
It was the first attack on Rasputin by a public figure in a public place. A single deputy criticized it, an old reactionary who shouted: “These are old wives’ tales!” Inevitably, the tsar took the taunt that the ax of power was carried by another as a personal insult; he ordered the interior minister to have secret police agents shadow Guchkov as a potential enemy of the state. “Conduct of the Duma is profoundly outrageous,” he wrote, “and especially disgusting is the speech of Guchkov.… I will be very glad if my displeasure reaches these gentlemen. It’s not always that one should bow and smile to them.” He told Kokovtsov, “I simply suffocate in this atmosphere of gossip, inventions, and malice.”
Guchkov did not let the matter rest. The moderate Octobrist party he led commissioned Vladimir Bonch-Bruevich to research the allegations that Rasputin was a khlyst. Bonch-Bruevich, who had already observed Rasputin in a St. Petersburg salon in 1905, was an expert on sects who had studied Dukhobors, the “Siberian Quakers,” in emigration in Canada; he would be a Bolshevik commander during Red October and nationalize Russia’s banks. His report concluded that Rasputin was an Orthodox believer, although he showed sectarian habits of speech and thought; Guchkov claimed that Bonch-Bruevich wrote him a private letter in which he described Rasputin as a scoundrel and a practitioner of his own brand of sectarianism but not strictly speaking a khlyst.
Metropolitan Evlogi, another Duma member at the time, read the dossier that Damansky had reluctantly handed to Rodzianko. It did not prove Rasputin to be a member of the sect—in particular, a case against him in 1902 had been dropped by the prosecutor for lack of evidence—but Evlogi found that parts of the dossier appeared to be missing. After the murder the Commission of Inquiry made a final attempt to decide the issue. There was firm evidence that Rasputin took baths with women, and Professor Gromoglassov, who held the chair of religious sects at the Moscow theological academy, was asked to comment on it. He found that in parts of Siberia it was “common practice for men and women to take baths together” and that there was no definitive proof of khlyst activity.
Villagers found Rasputin uncharacteristically meek on his arrival in Pokrovskoye; no fashionable women came with him, and no bathtime frolics were recorded. A Siberian Duma member, Sukhanov, found that he seemed chastened by the scandal and that the villagers mocked him. He was soon protesting his innocence and warning of Duma “revolutionaries” in cables to the palace. “Dearest father and mother,” he wired. “See how the devil gains in strength the evil one. The Duma serves him it is the fault of revolutionaries and Jews. And what is it they want? To get rid of the Lord’s anointed as soon as they can. And Guchkov is their ringleader he speaks slander and mindless rebellion. Father the Duma is yours do as you want with it.” Rasputin was later to show considerable sympathy to the Jews; for now he was severely rattled, and he chose his words to appeal to the anti-Semite and the reactionary in the tsar. In another cable, he urged: “The rebel Iliodor must be broken. Or this cur will eat us all up.… He will stop at nothing. File his teeth. Be harsh with him. Lock him up good. Yes. Grigory.”
Alexandra recalled the starets to St. Petersburg a few days after Guchkov’s speech. The two met at Vyrubova’s cottage; Rasputin also had talks there with Witte, who was hoping to use him to make a political comeback. The imperial family left for a holiday in the Crimea on March 16. Rasputin smuggled himself aboard their train, probably with Alexandra’s help, but the tsar had him put off before it reached Moscow. He made his own way to Yalta, arriving there on March 20, 1912. The local paper, The Russian Riviera, carried a news item. “Yesterday, at two in the afternoon, Grigory Rasputin arrived in Yalta by automobile from Sevastopol,” it ran. “He is staying at the Hotel de Russie.” The newspaper was correct—he was indeed staying at the resort’s finest hotel—but it was fined for breaking the ukase in mentioning his name.
The interior minister, Makarov, arrived in Yalta the same day and was astonished to find that the starets was no longer in Siberia. Police removed Rasputin’s name from the hotel register, but a local news photographer had taken his picture outside the hotel, and this was printed as a postcard, which fashionable visitors to the resort sent to their friends. The city mayor, Ivan Dumbadze, a bustling, excitable Georgian, was persuaded by right-wing friends that Rasputin’s presence was a provocation. They urged him to “drown the dirty adventurer” in the Black Sea. Dumbadze sent a cable to the Okhrana suggesting that he have him thrown overboard from the tourist steamer that ran between Sevastopol and Yalta. He received no reply. Stefan Beletsky, director of the police department, said later that Dumbadze had another plan, to lure Rasputin to a clifftop near the town, rob him, and throw him into the sea “as if he were the victim of brigands.”
Rasputin returned unscathed to Pokrovskoye after Easter. He was now escorted by a konspirativnykh filverov, a team of undercover agents. The premier had asked Beletsky to maintain surveillance on him at all times, partly for protection and partly to note his activities. Beletsky stationed a plainclothesman in the village; since Rasputin was friendly with the postmaster, the agent had to travel to the next telegraph office to send his reports. Rasputin was not inhibited by his shadows; he enjoyed his time with his family, singing psalms around the samovar in the evening and taking them for a steamer trip down the Tura River to Tobolsk, where they prayed before the relics of St. Ivan.
Far to the east in Siberia, miners in the Lena goldfields went on strike. As they marched in an orderly demonstration to the manager’s office, a drink-sodden police officer told his men to fire on them. Two hundred were massacred. A young deputy, the radical lawyer Alexander Kerensky, made a name for himself by heading a Duma inquiry into the killings; a wave of strikes followed this “second Bloody Sunday.”
In August the Romanovs gathered outside Moscow to celebrate the centenary of the battle of Borodino during Napoleon’s disastrous invasion of Russia. There was a reminder of the distant Siberian. The tsar cut Rodzianko when he passed him on the battlefield. “He looked askance at me,” the politician complained, “and did not acknowledge my salute. I understood that the cause of his dissatisfaction with me was my report on Rasputin.” Kokovtsov was alarmed that the tsar’s belief in divine right was degenerating into a mysticism that was impervious to advice from working politicians. He had suggested that some of the many restrictions on Jews—barred from some schools, universities, and professions, and from living in many Russian regions—should be lifted as part of the celebrations. Nicholas agreed that the arguments were convincing. “An inner voice keeps insisting more and more that I do not accept responsibility for it,” he said, however. “So far my conscience has not deceived me.… I know that you, too, know that the tsar’s heart is in God’s hands. Let it be so.” Guchkov’s speech had already confirmed Nicholas’s conviction that the Duma, despite its large royalist majority, was implacably hostile to the dynasty.
The premier feared that the tsar’s “intimate circle”—by which he meant Alexandra, Rasputin, Vyrubova—had only a dwindling interest in a government as such. “In its place,” he wrote, “emerged with increasing force and clarity the purely personal nature of the emperor’s rule, while the government increasingly came to be considered as a wall cutting off the ruler from his people.” The comment was the more damning for the dapper, loyal, and hardworking man who made it.
The imperial trains—there were two, one a decoy to confuse terrorists—rumbled west after Borodino. Alexis, now eight, his hair auburn, his features delicate and handsome, was so well that there was a false hope of recovery. The train stopped at Smolensk for a reception with local worthies; the boy got hold of a glass of champagne and chattered away to the ladies before complaining that he could “hear my tummy rumbling.” The girls were perfecting their German and French to add to their English and Russian.
They stayed first at Bielovezh, a hunting lodge set in forests rich in game in eastern Poland. The girls rode along woodland paths with their father. Alexis was not allowed to ride for fear he would fall. But he slipped while jumping into a boat to go rowing on a lake and hit his left thigh. The bruise hurt for several days, but he appeared to recover. The family moved on to Spala, a rustic hunting lodge set in magnificent forests cut by streams and sandy paths. Guests rose at seven each morning to the notes of a hunting horn and picnicked in glades while a military band played hunting airs. In the afternoon the men hunted—stags, all of ten points or more, elk, bison—and shot snipe and partridge. At dusk the day’s bag was laid out on the lawns in front of the lodge for the guests to examine the ranks of antlers by the light of flaming torches. The forests were dark, the paths narrow and yellow under the tangled trees; the windows in the wooden lodge were so small that lamps were left burning through the day. Pierre Gilliard had begun tutoring the heir in French. He was struck by the pallor of his charge, who was carried everywhere by the sailor Nagorny.
At the beginning of October 1912, Alexandra took her son for a carriage drive to get him some fresh air. She cushioned him between herself and Vyrubova. The paths were rough where roots cut through and rains had scooped out the sand. “Before we had gone very far we saw that indeed he was very ill,” Vyrubova recalled. “He cried out with pain in his back and stomach, and the empress, terribly frightened, gave the order to return.” He had begun to hemorrhage. The return drive was “an experience in horror.” Each jolt brought the boy “the most excruciating torture,” and he was almost unconscious with pain when they reached home. Eugene Botkin, the stout court physician, found telltale swelling in the upper thigh and groin. As the blood continued to flow unstemmed, the leg drew up to the chest until there was no longer space to fill and the swelling became as tight as a drum.
For the next eleven days, “dreadful sounds” echoed down the dark corridors outside the heir’s room. A stream of doctors—the surgeons Fedorov and Rauchfuss, the hemophilia specialist Vladimir Derevenko, the pediatrician Ostrogorsky—worked without success to stem the bleeding. No painkillers were given to the child; his parents did not wish him to become addicted to morphia. The screams were so penetrating that some of the household staff put cotton wool in their ears. Though normal life seemed impossible, it continued; the secret of the imperial blood was maintained. “One shooting party succeeded another,” Gilliard wrote, “and the guests were more numerous than ever.” The tsar hunted with Polish nobles each day.
One evening, the two youngest grand duchesses performed two scenes from Molière’s Bourgeois Gentilhomme for the visiting hunters in the dining room. Gilliard watched Alexandra chatting gaily to her guests before suddenly running upstairs, holding the long train of her dress in her hands, her face “distracted and terror-stricken.” She returned a few minutes later, her smiling mask intact apart from a single despairing glance she threw at the tsar. The scene brought home to Gilliard “the tragedy of a double life” in which the condition of the heir to the great empire was concealed from his future subjects, for fear it would encourage the millions who wished the dynasty ill, and depress and confuse the loyal.
All night Alexandra sat beside the bed where her son lay on his side, his left leg drawn up so sharply toward his chin that he could not straighten it for almost a year after. His face was “absolutely bloodless,” Vyrubova said, “drawn and seamed with suffering while his almost expressionless eyes rolled back in his head.” Alexandra “never undressed, never went to bed, rarely even lay down for an hour’s rest.” She dozed fitfully on a sofa next to the bed, woken by his cries to soothe his forehead, her golden hair becoming streaked with gray. Nicholas could scarcely stand the strain; Vyrubova noticed that once, seeing his son’s agony and hearing the screams, “the poor father’s courage completely gave way” and he rushed to his study in tears.
The parents, and the doctors, expected the boy to die at any time. On October 6, Dr. Fedorov examined him and warned that the stomach hemorrhage was likely to bring on a fatal abscess. “The days between the 6th and the 10th were the worst,” Nicholas wrote to the dowager empress. “The poor darling suffered intensely, the pains came in spasms and recurred every quarter of an hour.” Alexis stirred in his delirium, and when he sat up the movement brought a rushing recurrence of pain and he cried to God to have mercy upon him. He also thought he would die; “when I am dead build me a little monument of stones in the wood,” he begged his mother, asking for his grave to be in the light under a blue sky.
There was no church at Spala; a big green tent was raised in the gardens and outfitted as a chapel. Cossack escorts, servants, and huntsmen begged the court priest Vassilyev to hold a Te Deum, and Polish peasants joined them, weeping through the service. Bulletins were sent to St. Petersburg confirming that the tsarevich was gravely ill. Prayers were said for him throughout Russia, and worshipers in the Kazan Cathedral in the capital maintained a vigil by day and night. The cause of the illness was not mentioned; people muttered that Alexis had been wounded by a revolutionary’s bomb, that he was mentally abnormal, an epileptic.
Alexandra was twice convinced that the end was imminent. At lunchtime on October 10 she sent a note to the tsar from the sickbed to say that the suffering had become so acute that she was sure the boy was dying. Though he pulled through that crisis, his condition the next afternoon was so alarming that Vassilyev administered the last rites as Nicholas and Alexandra prayed at the bedside. The medical bulletin dispatched to St. Petersburg for October 11 needed little amendment to announce the death of the heir. A single hope remained. “The empress declared that she could believe that God had abandoned them,” Vyrubova recalled, “and she asked me to telegraph Rasputin in his home in Siberia, to pray for the child.”
That the empress should wait so long before calling on Rasputin—allowing one apparently fatal climax to come and go—is significant. It suggests, strongly, that Alexis’s illness was not the basis of her obsession with Rasputin; it is another reminder that her need for a holy man, for a personal guru, for intercession with God, went back to Dr. Philippe and the days before the birth of her son. Rasputin had already survived public scandal, allegations of rape and lewdness, the criticism of two prime ministers, the contempt of the Duma, the hatred of churchmen, and a vitriolic press campaign—all this before he was called on as a last resort to save the heir. It was not Spala that made him inviolable; to the empress, if not to the husband she so dominated, he was already that. Her fatal attraction stemmed from the soul, from her hysteria, mysticism, and isolation; it was cemented by Rasputin’s skill and her own obstinacy and autocratic pride. Hemophilia merely—post facto—confirmed it.
On the afternoon of October 11, Rasputin was walking on the banks of the Tura River when he clutched his heart and said, “Oh, no!” Maria was alarmed for him, but he reassured her that there was no need for worry on his account. “It is the tsarevich,” he said. “He has been stricken.” A telegram from Alexandra arrived in the village that evening. He prayed in front of an icon, his face gray and sweating with effort, then went to the village telegraph office. He sent two cables to Spala. In the first he said that the illness was not serious but that the doctors should not be allowed to tire the boy. The second told her to have no fear. “God has seen your tears and heard your prayers,” he wired. “Do not grieve. The little one will not die.”
When Alexandra received them the tsar was discussing funeral arrangements with members of his suite. She relaxed immediately. “I am not anxious now,” she told Vyrubova. The next day the hemorrhaging stopped. “The pain subsided,” Vyrubova wrote, “the boy lay utterly wasted and spent, but it was obvious now that he was going to live.” Recovery was slow and involved the use of mud baths and a steel triangle to strengthen wasted muscles and straighten the crippled leg; his mother sat reading with him for days, his body slowly filling out and regaining color as Nicholas played tennis and went rowing with Vyrubova. But within a month Alexis was able to return to Tsarskoye Selo. The roads to the railhead were smoothed and sanded by hand, and the imperial train steamed slowly without once using its brakes on a track whose points had been specially oiled to prevent any jars or bumps. The tsarevich had survived.
The drama was quickly forgotten by the public; photographs of the heir were carefully composed to conceal the damaged leg. Her child’s survival merely deepened Alexandra’s existing conviction that Rasputin was a miracle worker, but Nicholas had had doubts. The main effect of the incident at Spala was to drive out his reservations.
The honor in which the rulers held Rasputin was extended to his family when he returned to St. Petersburg in the fall to put his daughters into school at the smart lycèe Steblin-Lamenska. The girls were sent for by the headmistress during morning school. They were told that they were to be presented to the empress and her daughters at Vyrubova’s cottage. Maria put on a frock with a sailor collar for the railroad ride to Tsarskoye Selo. The empress was dressed in black; she had a fixed look on her face, proud, gentle, and “profoundly sad.” A “vague fear or uneasiness” clung to her; it made Maria tongue-tied. The girl felt she had to say something. “Is it true, little mother,” she faltered, “that you have hundreds of servants?” She blushed deeply when she realized that it was a stupid question, but the empress answered sweetly: “Yes, my child, I have lots of servants, but I could do without them if necessary.” She patted her cheek.
Maria got on well with the grand duchesses, sitting primly on a sofa with them like “great ladies at a reception.” She felt that, as their parents with her father, they were intrigued by meeting an ordinary person. They were prisoners in the palace, bound by etiquette; the life of an ordinary girl “who went to school with other children, and once or twice a week to the movies, sometimes the circus, seemed to them the rarest and most enviable of wonders.” They talked of “their little preferences for this or that handsome officer, with whom they danced, played tennis, walked, or rode. These innocent romances were a source of amusement to Their Majesties, who enjoyed teasing the girls about any dashing young officer who seemed to attract them. The empress discouraged association with cousins and near relatives, many of whom were unwholesomely precocious.”
The demonstration of royal friendship was soon repeated when Rasputin and Maria were invited to dine at the Alexander Palace. They were asked to use a side entrance in a vain attempt to cover up the relationship. “He went upstairs by a small staircase,” Vyrubova commented. “He was received in the private apartments and never in the public drawing room.… More than once I pointed out to the empress the futility of the course pursued. ‘You know that before he even reaches the palace, much less your boudoir, he has been observed … by the police at least forty times?’ ” Alexandra agreed with her; she realized that there could be no palace secrets but continued to try to shield her visitor.
It was Maria’s first visit to the palace. She watched her father embrace the tsar and empress; Alexandra caught her in midcurtsy, hugged her, and, she recounted, “gave me a most motherly kiss.” The thirteen-year-old was introduced to the tsarevich, and the young grand duchesses made her feel at home at once. They ate from a table crammed with red and black caviar, meatballs, prawns and herring, with bottles of vodka and wine. At the end of the informal supper they had an ice cream so delicious that Maria asked for the recipe. She wrote it down under the heading “Ice Cream Romanov.” It suited her father’s sweet tooth; it was made of two and a half pounds of sugar, ten egg yolks, a quart of light cream, one large vanilla bean, and a half pint of whipping cream. She played with Grand Duchess Marie, who was nearest her age; “we became fast friends.” She recalled her father discussing Iliodor with the tsar, warning him that it was not in Iliodor’s nature “to remain within the walls of an ancient monastery while the world burns outside.”
He was right. Iliodor was not silent in his cell at the Florishchev Monastery. In September the government had forcibly closed his own monastery in Tsaritsyn. It sent him off into a new fit. He wrote a violent letter to Sabler: “You have bowed down before the licentious khlyst Grischa Rasputin as if he were the devil. You are a traitor and apostate. Your filthy hands are unfit to hold the most holy tiller of God’s church, the bride of Christ. They should be shining the devil’s boots in hell. I say this from a sense of priestly duty.” He followed it by detailing Rasputin’s depravity in a letter to Vyrubova.
Iliodor signed a letter to the synod on November 20 in his own blood. “Either indict Rasputin for his horrible crimes or unfrock me,” he challenged. Sabler and the synod duly expelled the monk from holy orders in mid-December. He was ordered to be held under house arrest in his native village, Bolshaya Stanitsa, in the Cossack territory of the Don. On his way he wrote in the space reserved in a hotel register for the guest’s religion, “My own. Iliodorian.” He resumed his secular name, Sergei Trufanov.
Back wintering in Pokrovskoye, Rasputin fretted that his enemy was no longer safely tucked away in a monastery. He sent a rambling telegram to Maj. Gen. V. N. Voyeikov, the palace commandant: “Now there are millions of wasps so believe that in matters of the soul we must all be trusted friends, a small group perhaps but all of one mind while they are many but scattered and their rage shall have no power.” He was more specific with the sovereigns. “Dearest papa and mama,” he cabled. “Iliodor is joined with demons. He is a rebel. They used to flog monks like him. Yes, the tsars flogged them. Now bring him to heel.” In another, he said, “The police must keep an eye on this accursed one.” He had good reason for that. Iliodor was obsessed with castrating him.