Far Flies the Eagle (29 page)

The following day both Wylie and Tarasov were summoned to Alexander's apartments, where they found him tossing with fever; Wylie, who knew his tendencies to run high temperatures, forecast another outbreak of erysipelas on his leg and ordered him to stay in bed. But Alexander refused; he insisted on reaching Taganrog by the seventeenth. He had promised the Empress, he said, and they dared not oppose him. He travelled the last miles to Taganrog in a closed coach, wrapped in rugs, and lay back dozing against the cushions, complaining that he felt very ill. Behind him, the body of the humble courier took the same road.

“You really shouldn't talk, when you're not well,” the Empress protested. She had been sent for, and was sitting by Alexander's bed; he had been back in Taganrog for several days; neither his wife's pleas nor the warnings of his doctors had prevented him from getting up each day and dealing with his papers. His fever continued and he complained of pain and sickness, but the erysipelas had not appeared and neither Wylie nor Tarasov could diagnose his illness.

“Elizabeth, sit down here beside me,” he said gently. He noticed how tired she looked, and for a moment he hesitated. A shock, Wylie had warned him.… So he had to protect her as well as enlist her help.

“Sit down, my dear,” he repeated. “I have something I must tell you.”

At the end of an hour he had finished and they sat together, Alexander smiling and holding his wife's hand, the Empress white-faced and trembling. She looked at him once and seemed about to speak, but he said quietly, “Now send Volkonsky and Sir James to me. And you had better go and rest now.”

Both men remained shut in with him for some time; then they left together and walked down the short corridor leading away from the Emperor's rooms. His lifelong friend, Volkonsky, spoke first.

“Where's Tarasov? Why wasn't he sent for?”

“Tarasov's busy,” Sir James replied. “He's been busy since we came back to Taganrog. He's been embalming the body of that courier who was killed.”

On November 21st the funeral of the courier, Maskov, took place in the local cemetery with military honours, and a large wreath with the Imperial Crown and the Emperor's initials was placed on the grave. Long afterwards the bearers remembered that the coffin was surprisingly light, for Maskov was a big man, as tall and of the same build as the Czar himself.

On the evening of the 26th a footman on duty outside the Czar's apartments saw the door of his room flung back with a crash. He recognized the figure of Prince Peter Volkonsky standing in the opening.

“The Emperor!” he shouted. “Get Sir James Wylie! Hurry, hurry, for God's sake!”

The terrified footman ran down the corridor and threw himself at the door of Sir James's suite, hammering on the panels with his fists. Within minutes the doctor had raced to the Emperor's apartments, followed by Tarasov, while members of the household gathered in groups, watching the Empress brought from her room and heard the door of Alexander's bedroom open and close every few minutes. Slowly the sounds of panic died away; the hurried footsteps ceased and the door remained shut, with a pale streak of light shining under it, blotted out by a shadow as someone moved in the room.

As dawn broke, a courier mounted in the courtyard and galloped out of Taganrog, taking the road to St. Petersburg. In less than half an hour another followed him, but turned off towards Poland. Word had spread through the town; already weeping crowds had gathered outside the little stone house, and they murmured as they watched the couriers go. St. Petersburg and the Dowager Empress Marie.… Mother of God, pity the mother in her grief! Warsaw, and the Grand Duke Constantine, the heir to his brother's throne.

Alexander Pavlovitch, Czar and Autocrat of All the Russias lay dying.

The morning of December 1st was cold and grey; Taganrog was empty, most of the population were attending Mass for the Emperor's recovery or standing outside his house watching the windows. There was only one ship in the bay; the rest had sailed before ice formations closed the entrance to the Sea of Azov. The lone ship was British, the private yacht of Earl Cathcart, who had been Ambassador to Petersburg and a friend of the Czar.

By half-past ten that morning a large crowd had gathered round the Royal residence; a door opened and someone posted a notice. There was a rush forward and someone who could read was pushed to the front. It was a few minutes before eleven, and suddenly a wail went up from the crowd. One old peasant lifted his voice above them.… “Far flies the Eagle to rest with God.…” The Czar was dead.

The Empress Elizabeth heard them as she stood by a window, looking down on the heads of the people, seeing them sink to their knees to pray for the flight of the White Eagle of legend and ballad, who had delivered his soul to God. It was the name his humble millions of subjects had given him after 1812.… She went to her dressing-table, opened her jewel-case and took out the miniature of Alexander in its frame of large diamonds. The painted face stared up at her, young, incredibly handsome; but it was a dead face; the artist had not been able to catch the expression. Neither had anyone else who painted him.… She fastened the miniature to her black dress and then walked slowly out of the room; Prince Volkonsky and Sir James Wylie were waiting to escort her to Alexander's suite, where the body, its face swathed in bandages, was laid out on the Emperor's bed.

On December the 26th the Grand Duke Nicholas ascended the throne according to the terms of Alexander's will, and Constantine renounced his claim for ever. The body of the dead Czar remained in Taganrog until the funeral procession to St. Petersburg started on January 10th. By then there were no ships left in the harbour; Lord Cathcart's yacht had sailed suddenly after December 1st and was on its way to the Holy Land.

The candles were lit in the Czar's study in the Winter Palace, the red curtains drawn across windows covered by a crust of snow, and the portrait of Catherine the Great looked down on a new Czar sitting at the desk she had used more than fifty years before. The year was 1837, and the Czar was Nicholas. He was reading a long report and frowning; the room was very quiet except for the rustle of paper as he turned a page; the silver candelabra shed their light at his elbow, placed at the same angle as when his brother read and worked in that room and at that same desk. He put the report down and began to write a letter. It was addressed to the Governor of a Siberian province which included the penal colony of Bogoyavlensk. It was a terse letter, for Nicholas wrote and spoke in parade ground brevity.

‘A saintly hermit known at Feodor Kusmitch, who lived in Bogoyavlensk, came under the Imperial protection like all religious pilgrims, and was on no account to be pressed into labour gangs or supervised by the police. The Governor himself would be held responsible.…

‘Any person claiming to have seen the late Emperor Alexander living in the Governor's district, or that the said Feodor Kusmitch resembled him, was to be flogged, irrespective of age or sex, and deported to the mines.'

Eighty years afterwards, the great-grandson of the Czar Nicholas I was marched down a flight of steps into a cellar in a house in Ekaterinburg, the town named by Potemkin in honour of Catherine the Great. The little cavalcade moved slowly down into the gloom, for the Czarevitch was scarcely able to walk. A few moments later the Czar, his Czarina, their daughters and the little sick Czarevitch were shot dead. The Emperor Nicholas II was the last to die, after being forced to watch the execution of his family.

The last fusillade of shots ended the Romanov dynasty. Lenin and the Bolsheviks were ruling Russia from the Kremlin.

The Revolutionaries had been in power for some time before they heard rumours that the tomb of one of the greatest of the Russian Czars was full of priceless jewellery and valuables which had been buried with him. The order was given to open the grave.

The tomb was in the vault of the church of the St. Peter and Paul Fortress; it was inscribed with the name Alexander the First, and the date, December 1st, 1825. It took the efforts of a squad of men working with picks to dislodge the monument; when the hollow beneath it was uncovered, a gust of foul air rose in the stuffy vault. Ropes and tackle were lowered into the pit by torchlight and round the shell of a coffin lying at the bottom. With great care it was hauled to the surface, edged on to the floor, and the ropes untied. There was a long pause, while the men who had brought the dead out of his grave hesitated, their lights shining on the old stained casket, with the remains of gilding still gleaming on the sides.

The tombs of other Czars made high shadows on the walls. Peter the Great, the Empresses Catherine I, Anna, Elizabeth; the murdered Peter III and his wife, the Great Catherine … Paul I. The grave of the Empress Elizabeth Alexeievna, Consort of the Czar Alexander I with the date May 16th, 1826 … Nicholas I, Alexander II, the gentle Czar who liberated the serfs and was killed by a Nihilist bomb … the tyrant Alexander III. And the place where the last Nicholas should have lain. But his body, and those of his wife and their children had been burnt and thrown into a pit full of quicklime.…

“Open it!” The order echoed through the silent place. A blow from a pickaxe split the coffin lid. The Commissar in charge of the exhumation knelt by the casket and levered the lid off with a chisel; impatiently he pushed it aside and plunged his torch into the inside.

One of the men on the edge of the group stood on his toes to look, and then quickly made the gesture now forbidden by the new régime, the Sign of the Cross.

No one saw him; they were all staring at the coffin of the Czar Alexander. It was empty.

About the Author

Evelyn Anthony is the pen name of Evelyn Ward-Thomas, a female British author who began writing in 1949. She gained considerable success with her historical novels—two of which were selected for the American Literary Guild—before winning huge acclaim for her espionage thrillers. Her book,
The Occupying Power
, won the Yorkshire Post Fiction Prize, and her 1971 novel,
The Tamarind Seed
, was made into a film starring Julie Andrews and Omar Sharif. Anthony's books have been translated into nineteen languages. She lives in Essex, England.

All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 1955 by Anthony Enterprises, Ltd.

Cover design by Tammy Seidick

ISBN: 978-1-5040-2228-6

This edition published in 2015 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

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New York, NY 10014

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