Chapter 36: Man of God

The mad monk surfaced even faster than I had expected.

The name itself came up in the middle of a warm, easy meal with the imperial couple.

“Ah, that reminds me. Sunny, did you ever mention that business to Misha?”

“I don’t know what business you mean, but if you haven’t told him, there’s hardly any reason I would have, is there?”

“Haha, fair enough. That man Bishop Feofan promised to introduce to us. What was his name… again?”

“Rasputin. Grigori Rasputin. They say he’s been enormously famous in society for years now. And he has the gift of healing, too. He’s actually cured a great many sick people.”

Bishop Feofan was the inspector of the Saint Petersburg Theological Academy, a central figure in the Orthodox Church and closely tied to the imperial house.

So arrangements had already been made to present him to the Tsar?

-If it were only gossip drifting around society it might be blown out of proportion, but if Bishop Feofan is making the introduction himself, that carries real weight.

“Your Majesty, how did Bishop Feofan come to know him?”

“Hmm… well, apparently there had been a rumor going around the city for quite some time about a deeply pious monk who had come up from Siberia with the gift of healing. It wasn’t just one or two people who were cured, so the bishop met him out of curiosity, and he says the moment he laid eyes on the man he was certain.”

A desperate light naturally rose in the Empress’s eyes as well.

There was not an Orthodox believer in Petersburg who did not know Bishop Feofan.

No one had grieved more than he over how the Russian Orthodox Church grew more ritualized and more bureaucratic by the year, and a man like that had personally vouched for Rasputin as a believer worth trusting.

That was as good as staking his judgment as a clergyman on it.

“Niki, I think I simply must meet this man. Our Alexei….”

The Empress could not bring herself to say any more.

Speaking her son’s hemophilia aloud, even at the dinner table, could not have been easy.

But how could anyone fail to understand the heart of a mother who prayed in tears every night, terrified that the smallest scratch on her son might never stop bleeding?

“What do you think, Misha?”

The Tsar turned toward me as he asked.

Naturally, I was not so tone-deaf as to object here.

“A bishop of the Orthodox Church is introducing him himself. Who am I to dare judge?”

A stock answer first, to feel out the room.

“Only, I don’t think there’s anyone in the palace who doesn’t know how Her Majesty always prays and worries for His Imperial Highness’s health. So I only hope it turns out to be a good thing. I’ll pray every day too.”

Across the table, something in the way the Empress looked at me subtly changed.

She clearly did not trust me completely yet, but set against the early days, when her eyes had glistened with hatred for the illegitimate son her husband’s mistress had borne, even this felt like a different age entirely.

“…Misha, I am truly grateful for your kindness.”

And it was the first time.

The first time Empress Alexandra’s voice had held even a speck of genuine warmth.

“And… thank you for playing so well with the girls. Olga and Tatiana tell me the dice game you made for them is the most fun thing in all the world.”

Beside her, the Tsar laughed, pleased.

“Haha, that game? I’d like a round myself, Misha. You’ll have to let me in sometime.”

“It would be an honor, Your Majesty.”

The Empress’s guard, the only thing in this palace that had ever posed a real threat to me, had now all but come down.

If I handled this business well, there would be effectively no one left in this palace who was not on my side.

“Your Majesty, Your Majesty the Empress, I have relief work for the poor scheduled today. May I be excused first?”

“Oh, of course. Off you go.”

“Misha. Take care on your way.”

I rose from the table, bowed politely, and left the audience chamber.

-The way those two look at you, the pride is practically dripping off them.

Well, obviously. Where else would they find a child as admirable and upstanding as me?

Once I had slipped away from the meal and stepped outside the palace, the cold air stabbed into my lungs.

The priest who had agreed to help with the work in the slums was already waiting at our meeting place.

“Father Gapon, how have you been?”

“There you are. I’ve been wondering when you would come.”

“Sorry. I was at a meal with His Majesty. It’s about the Trotsky matter, isn’t it?”

Gapon nodded easily as he shifted the bread meant for the poor.

“Yes. He made contact, just as you predicted. A clever man. But his appetite for showing off is enormous, exactly as you said.”

“Isn’t it, though?”

“You’ve never once met the man, and yet you read him this precisely. Your eye for people gives me chills, Young Master.”

“It isn’t as remarkable as all that. It’s all right there in the books and the sentences he writes.”

Of course it was Seong-jun’s knowledge, but letting a little slip in this fashion would only make him lean harder on my intuition and my insight.

“And one more thing. Among the socialists, there are definitely people beginning to line up against M’s course. Some of them suspect me, and I hear there are others who claim outright that M is the Tsar’s puppet.”

“Might I have their names?”

“It will take some sorting… but I can pick out the most prominent figures for you.”

“Please do, Father.”

Having finished my request, I turned to go, then a thought struck me and I called him back.

“Father, one moment.”

Then I gave him the brightest, purest, most childlike smile I could manage.

“How’s this? Do I look like a child?”

“…What’s brought this on?”

“We’re expecting an important guest at the palace. I want to look like a pure, innocent child. Do you think it’s working?”

Gapon studied me for a long while with a strange expression before he opened his mouth.

“Speaking frankly, a pure and innocent child does not ask for a list of the socialists who oppose him.”

“But that’s all in service of building a purer world. Now I’m the one being wronged.”

Since Gapon’s reaction was less than encouraging, I adjusted the smile without so much as a mirror.

Eyes bright, the corners of my mouth lifted just so, the look of adoration a child wears when he meets a grown-up he admires.

“…Who on earth is coming, that you need to rehearse a smile that terrifying?”

I snorted.

Who else would it be?

“A conman, obviously.”

* * *

Grigori Yefimovich Rasputin was a peasant, born into a poor family in Tobolsk, Siberia.

And now that same man had risen to become the hottest name in Petersburg society, and had won the privilege of an audience with the imperial couple themselves, the very summit of the nation.

From childhood, Rasputin had possessed two talents.

The insight to read a person’s anxieties, and the tongue to burrow into those anxieties until the person could not do without him.

Born in a Siberian farming village, honed through Kazan, these gifts had been sharpened to something close to the miraculous by the time he reached Petersburg.

The first thing he did in the capital was win the favor of the Church’s leaders at the Alexander Nevsky Monastery.

Clergymen weary of the Orthodox Church’s creeping formalism saw, in the rough prayers of a Siberian peasant who still smelled of soil, the traces of a true spirituality.

It was a delusion, of course.

Rasputin had read exactly what they wished to see and simply performed the figure the bishops wanted.

But Bishop Feofan, sick to the teeth of a bureaucratized Orthodox Church, heard this country peasant’s artless prayers and was swept clean off his feet.

And having succeeded in making followers of several noblewomen, he set out to land the catch of a lifetime.

The son of a poor peasant takes the imperial house, the pinnacle of this nation and its most exalted presence, into his own hands.

What a stirring true story of a life turned around that would be.

The moment he set foot in the Alexander Palace with Bishop Feofan’s letter of introduction in hand, Rasputin put every nerve on edge.

When he entered the audience chamber, the imperial couple were seated side by side.

He concentrated first on reading the Tsar’s expression.

“Your Majesty, Grigori, servant of the Lord, comes before his most exalted Emperor.”

“Ah, Bishop Feofan speaks very highly of you. Be seated, be at ease.”

Kind-hearted.

Simple, good-natured eyes.

Recommended by a bishop or not, to let a stranger into his audience chamber with so little hesitation.

“Your Majesty has won a war and won the hearts of your people besides; the Lord has surely blessed your reign.”

The corner of the Tsar’s mouth ticked upward.

Even the weakness for praise was exactly as reported, a pushover of a man, ripe for the plucking.

If there was a problem, it would have to be the Empress seated right beside him.

In this woman’s eyes there glimmered a dark emotion nowhere to be found in the Tsar’s.

Anxiety, and not just any anxiety, but the deep, chronic kind.

He could feel it pooled in her gaze, that particular tension of a person who cannot rest easy in one corner of the heart even when good things come.

Rasputin swiftly ran back through the information he had gathered beforehand.

The palace, they said, had shown a deep interest in the gift of healing he had been noising about.

Add to that his memory of how the court-connected noblewomen he had met in society were conspicuously sparing in their words about the Tsesarevich, and the timing of Bishop Feofan’s haste to arrange the introduction, and the conclusion came out fairly simply.

‘The newly born Tsesarevich has a health problem.’

Had the trouble been with the daughters, they would have summoned him far sooner.

It was the son who would inherit the throne, a son they had waited years to receive; that was surely why they were this desperate.

Any number of diagnoses came to mind, but they remained guesses for the time being, so the best course was to throw out some bait first and watch how the other side reacted.

‘Make it as convincing as possible… vague, easy to talk my way around, and layer on plenty of details.’

Rasputin rose slowly from his seat and closed his eyes.

Silence settled over the audience chamber.

After a moment, a trembling voice spilled from Rasputin’s lips.

“…I see it. The Lord is showing me.”

He felt the Emperor and the Empress stop breathing at the same instant.

“The young Tsesarevich… he is not well, is he. I see something red flowing out and never stopping, and a bright yellow cloud lying over the little one. The air is thick with a deep blue mist, and Your Majesties’ grief must be great, but do not be afraid. The Lord has not abandoned him.”

“Merciful heavens….”

The Empress’s lips quivered.

He had put his finger squarely on her son’s illness, a thing she had told no one, so it could hardly appear as anything but a revelation from God.

In truth he had used nothing but phrasing vague enough to fit any illness at all, but judging by the reaction, something had caught.

“…How, how can you know? Even….”

“God revealed it to me, Your Majesty. And this along with it.”

Rasputin sank to his knees and took the Empress’s hand.

“The Tsesarevich will grow up strong and well, without fail. So long as this Grigori prays to the Lord, the Lord’s blessing will remain at His Imperial Highness’s side.”

Tears spilled from both of the Empress’s eyes.

It was the moment when the dread she had swallowed alone and wept over every night since her son’s birth collapsed at a single word from Rasputin.

“Man of God….”

Those words, escaping between her lips, rang in Rasputin’s ears like a trumpet of victory.

‘Good. I can learn the precise name of the illness slowly, once I have the run of the palace.’

And a man who has just watched the woman he loves find relief has no choice but to let his own guard melt away.

“Bishop Feofan was not mistaken! Rasputin, you must come to this palace often and lighten our cares.”

“How could this unworthy servant defy the will of His Majesty the Emperor?”

As Rasputin bowed his head, the Tsar beckoned toward the door.

“Ah, Misha. Come here, you too.”

The boy who had been waiting in the corridor came into the audience chamber with small steps.

“Rasputin, this child is called Mikhail. He prayed to God for the Tsesarevich to be born, offering dawn prayers every single day. It would be no exaggeration to call him the most devout believer in this palace.”

The boy looked up at Rasputin with shining eyes.

It was a reverent, innocent smile, brimming with adoration.

“Hello, Father Rasputin. Thank you so much for coming to help Alexei. I’ve been praying every day too.”

Rasputin stroked the boy’s head gently and offered a merciful smile.

“You are a child in whom the Lord delights. Your prayers will have been a great strength to His Imperial Highness.”

“Really? Thank you!”

The kind of bright, guileless laugh that only boys of that age can produce.

The joy of a young believer meeting a Man of God was written plainly across his face.

“Ah, and this child is so clever that he is already learning intelligence work. He will be a great man one day.”

At the Tsar’s proud addition, Rasputin barely contained the triumph surging up in him and steadied his breathing.

A young boy learning the intelligence work of the imperial house?

And a child pious enough to offer dawn prayers every day, no less. Where would he ever find better prey?

However bright he might be, a child was a child.

The more devout the child, the stronger the tendency to lean on a Man of God, so if he set about the conditioning patiently from now on, by the time the little thing had grown he would be Rasputin’s creature entirely.

And with the imperial house’s intelligence in his grasp as well, what corner of this palace would remain beyond the reach of Grigori Rasputin’s hand?

Savoring the triumph welling up in him, he stepped out of the palace and looked back.

The majestic face of the Alexander Palace stood steeped in the light of the setting sun.

The corners of Rasputin’s mouth rose slowly.

The Empress was already halfway won.

The Emperor, whatever the world said about a wise ruler, was nothing but a kindly fool, so he would follow his wife,

and the children took after their parents, innocent to the last, so there was no need to exert himself there at all.

Add the little one who would come to handle the imperial house’s intelligence, tamed from childhood, and there would be nowhere in this palace that Rasputin’s will could not reach.

There was no need even to look so far ahead.

‘Easy.’

One year.

In exactly one year, this Rasputin would make himself the true power in the Russian imperial house.

It was the perfect conclusion, reached by the greatest conman in Russia, a man who by then had left dozens, hundreds of victims in his wake.

~~~

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