Enchantments: A Novel of Rasputin's Daughter and the Romanovs by Kathryn Harrison Page B

winter long, his sisters’ shins were black and blue and covered with lumps under their wool tights, while poor Alyosha sat at a window and watched, or sat outside on a bench and watched, or, when he couldn’t stand it anymore, perpetrated some act of tomfoolery like the one that had recently lamed him. I hoped it was tomfoolery. When I looked at the stairs Alyosha had ridden down, I couldn’t see how he might have thought to avoid an accident. But if he had hurt himself on purpose, then why? What motive might excuse his courting disaster, plunging into it?
    It hurt him horribly, especially when Botkin forced the leg into its brace, but he never complained. Not to me. The only people he showed his tears were his mother and Nagorny, who had been relieving himself when Alyosha snuck away and boarded the tray. When he learned what had happened, the big man wept and wrung his hands. He went before the tsar and tsarina, and on his knees he begged to be allowed to keep his position as Alyosha’s protector. As if, trapped as we were under house arrest, there were a queue of applicants waiting for the job.
    O NLY THOSE WHO LIVED at Tsarskoe Selo, within the walls of the Romanovs’ carefully guarded privacy, could understand how suffocating was the pall of dread that descended in the wake of one of Alyosha’s injuries. No one raised a blind or pulled open the drapes; every light was left burning all night. Minutes, hours, days: they had significance only insofar as they tracked the progress of the tsarevich’s suffering. Servants walked hurriedly, wordlessly, withdowncast eyes. To an unknowing observer it would seem each had a dire piece of business to accomplish, and yet nothing happened when Alyosha was bleeding, nothing of consequence. His sisters played cards, not with one another but each with her own deck, laying out game after game of solitaire. No record on the gramophone, no fingers on the piano keys, no sound other than the ticking of clocks and the whisper of cards being laid down or picked up. And the screams, muted by closed doors and long corridors but still audible, as if the walls themselves were crying out.
    The tsar, who couldn’t sit still under benign circumstances, launched himself at one unnecessary physical task after another, chopping and riding, marching and drilling, inspecting and cleaning and firing his shotguns, bringing down game that would go uneaten. The tsarina wept desperate, guilty tears for the curse she’d unwittingly bestowed on the son she loved better than herself. She prostrated herself before her hundreds of ikons and begged God’s forgiveness. What had she done to deserve such a punishment?
    Knee or kidney or big toe: whatever Alyosha had bumped filled with blood that, unable to clot, went on flowing until the hemorrhage created enough pressure to stop itself. Until the blood had no place left to go. The result of an injury could happen quickly, as when larger vessels were involved, or it could manifest itself with insidious slow stealth, hours or even days after he’d tripped and fallen or stumbled accidentally in play, as much as he was allowed to play. Applying ice might slow the bleeding, but in the end the hemorrhage would still cripple the joint or, worse, engorge the organ to the point of rupture. Grave results from something as small as a burst capillary, no thicker than a strand of hair. And no matter how dreadful his pain (and it was bad enough some days that we all prayed he’d faint, and sometimes he did), Alyosha wasn’t allowed morphine—a precaution lest the crown prince develop a dependence on opiates.
    Not yet eleven when Father told me about this so-called precaution, I understood it as one of the routine cruelties adults commit against children in the stated interest of strengthening their characters while succeeding only in damaging certain individuals beyond repair. Even as a child I knew that to allow such agony to go unassuaged was barbaric, and on those