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‘You promised to take him in,’ argued Stefan. ‘What has he done to offend you, except to speak his mind?’

But Bolotov was already on his feet, a look of tired resignation on his face. He turned to Christiana, who by now could only stare at him in uncomprehending fear. ‘I thank you for the meal,’ he told her quietly.

‘You can’t just throw him out into the night!’ Stefan protested.

‘He is no stranger to the darkness, I assure you,’ answered Viktor.

As Bolotov left the house, Stefan followed him out.

It was raining and the air was raw and cold, although Bolotov barely seemed to notice.

‘Forgive my father, please,’ begged Stefan.

‘Do not blame him,’ replied Bolotov. ‘It is my fault for thinking that I could speak as one man of God to another.’

‘What was it in your words that angered him?’ Stefan asked, confused. ‘I’ve never seen him act like this before.’

‘I simply told him a truth which he did not want to hear.’

‘And what truth is that?’

They had been standing side by side under the eaves of the house, where they were partially sheltered from the rain. But now Bolotov turned to Stefan, and his gaze burned into the young man. ‘The truth is that only by freeing yourself of earthly chains can you enter the kingdom of heaven.’

‘That happens to us all when we die,’ said Stefan, ‘and it seems to me that he is well aware of that already.’

‘But what he does not know, or chooses not to see, is that the only way to prove yourself worthy of heaven is to cut through those chains while we still live. Only those who separate themselves from the flock will be saved.’

‘And the rest?’ asked Stefan. ‘What will happen to them?’

‘They will be swept away in a tide of blood.’ Gently, Bolotov took hold of Stefan’s arm. ‘Do not be afraid of what I’m saying. We all have a chance to prove our worth. But it takes courage. More courage than most men and women possess. It is not enough simply to acknowledge the suffering of Christ. Anyone can do that. What we must do is test the mettle of our faith by showing that we, too, are capable of suffering for what we believe. It requires setting out on a new path, instead of the one which has been chosen for us by those who think they know us better than we know ourselves.’

Stefan thought of the day his father had handed him over to the butcher. There had been no discussion. No words of comfort. Not even a hand on his shoulder to offer consolation. ‘I learned to accept it,’ he muttered, as much to himself as to the pilgrim.

‘But why should you?’ exclaimed Bolotov. ‘Why spend your life trying to meet the expectations of those who cannot even meet those same demands themselves? Why not begin a journey which only the bravest can make? No man is free until he has proven himself to himself.’

At almost any other time, Bolotov’s words might have rung hollow to Stefan Kohl but, in that moment, they struck him so profoundly that he felt as if he had been sleeping all his life and had only now awakened.

As they stood there, watching the rain pour from the roof like threads of mercury, and Bolotov went on to explain exactly what he meant by the severing of earthly chains, Stefan was appalled by his description of the bloody rituals, but also fascinated by such a brutal gesture of commitment. No one had ever asked him to sacrifice anything before, as if nothing he had was worth consigning to his faith. To his amazement, Stefan realised that he was not afraid, even if that sacrifice was to be paid in his own flesh. For the first time in his life, he glimpsed the possibility of a life filled with a purpose that was greater than the one for which he had been taught to settle.

‘Come with me,’ said Bolotov.

Those words seemed to snatch the air from Stefan’s lungs. ‘Now?’ he gasped.

‘Now or never!’ exclaimed Bolotov. ‘Your chance may never come again. Everywhere I go I hear talk of war with Germany. It may already be too late. The heritage of your forefathers, which you have struggled so hard to maintain, will be the doom of this place. Soon the Russians will drive you from this land and send you back where you came from.’

‘But this
is
where I am from!’ Stefan protested. ‘I have never known anything else.’

‘They don’t care about that,’ Bolotov told him. ‘In their eyes, you have already been tried and convicted. All that remains now is for the sentence to be served. But you should consider yourself lucky.’

‘And why is that?’ he asked.

‘Unlike them,’ Bolotov waved his hand out into the dark, where chinks of light shone through the shuttered windows of houses, ‘you have a choice. One way or another, you are about to become an exile, but which kind you become is up to you.’

Bolotov promised to wait until sunrise, in order to give the young man a chance to make up his mind.

‘You will have your answer before then,’ Stefan assured him.

As soon as he stepped back inside the house, he was confronted by his father. ‘Did you speak with him?’

‘Yes,’ replied the son.

‘Don’t believe a word he spoke,’ warned Viktor. ‘His people are a poison on this earth.’

‘What he said made sense to me,’ answered Stefan.

‘What?’ Viktor laughed angrily. ‘Then perhaps you should go with him when he leaves!’

‘Maybe I will,’ said Stefan.

Viktor had only been trying to scare him, but now he paused as he realised that his son was serious. ‘I cannot stop you,’ he said. ‘You are old enough now to make your own decisions. Choose that beggar or choose your family, but know that you cannot have both.’

At that moment, Stefan’s mother entered the room. She had been listening, as afraid of her husband’s anger as she was of her son’s unyielding temperament. ‘Why must you always be so cruel?’ she shouted at Viktor.

The man stared at his wife, amazed that she would take any side but his.

She made a fist and struck him on the chest. ‘You cannot abandon your son!’

‘It’s all right,’ Stefan told his mother. ‘He did that a long time ago.’

‘Stay,’ she begged him.

But it was already too late. Until the moment when his father had laughed in his face, Stefan’s mind had still been clouded with doubt. But his father’s mockery brought back to him the memory of every insult he had endured at the school in Krasnoyar, and the echoing pain of the beatings which had accompanied them. The sound of that laughter clarified his mind. There are times in a person’s life when they cannot know if they have made the right decision until after that decision has already been made. And now he knew.

‘Remain with us,’ pleaded his mother, ‘here where you know you are safe.’

Stefan shook his head. ‘No one is safe any more,’ he replied.

The next day, just as Bolotov had predicted, Russian soldiers arrived from the barracks at Krasnoyar. With them came a rabble of self-appointed militia, armed with old shotguns, sledgehammers and kitchen knives.

The inhabitants of Rosenheim were given an hour to pack one suitcase each. Then, clutching their bags, they were marched to a barge, which waited for them on the banks of the Volga at Pokrovsk. After being ferried across the Volga to the railhead at Saratov they were put aboard cattle cars and transported to the German border, a journey which lasted several days. At the border, the Kohl family were met by their eldest son, Emil. By Imperial decree, he had been dismissed from the University of Kiev, along with all the other students of German or Austro-Hungarian extraction.

As the people of Rosenheim crossed over into a country they had never seen before, Stefan Kohl was not among them. Even before the soldiers had arrived in Rosenheim, Stefan had set out in the company of Bolotov on the long journey to Siberia.

On the outskirts of the estate stood a small, flat-roofed cottage, flanked on either side by single-storey additions which gave to the structure the impression of a military bunker, with tall and narrow windows where gun slits might have been. The stonework of the house had been painted a warm orange yellow which, in the afternoon sun, glowed like the flesh of a ripe apricot.

Inside the house, whose rooms were small and crammed with mismatched furniture, sat the Tsarina Alexandra and her closest friend, Anna Vyroubova, to whom this cottage had been given as a gift, in order that she might be always close at hand.

For some minutes, there had been no other sound but the faint clink as their tea cups were lowered into saucers. Of the biscuits which Vyroubova had laid out on the small table that stood between them, only one remained. In what had become an almost daily ritual, there was always a single biscuit left untouched, as if by unspoken agreement.

It was the Tsarina who broke the silence. ‘I have just heard,’ she said, ‘that General Brusilov will soon begin a full retreat from Galicia. For all I know, it has already begun. Meanwhile, the Austrians are advancing.’

‘Can they be stopped?’ asked Vyroubova. She was a short, stout woman with a round face and heavy jaw. She wore her thick dark hair piled high upon her head. Her dress, with its simple, embroidered collar, had been carefully chosen not to outshine that of her benefactor, whose white feathered boa draped extravagantly across her shoulders and down into her lap.

‘Or could they even be slowed down?’ she added, glancing at the two walking sticks which leaned against her chair. Following injuries sustained in a train crash earlier that year, Vyroubova could barely move without those ugly canes and she hated the fact that she was now dependent on them. Even before the crash, there had been too many things on which she was dependent, including the woman who sat before her now.

‘Slowed down?’ echoed the Tsarina. ‘I doubt it. I have read in the official reports that, for every ten thousand of our wounded, we can provide only a single doctor. No wonder the men are dying in such numbers.’

‘But is it not true,’ Vyroubova offered, ‘that we have more men to lose? Surely, for every enemy soldier who dies in battle,’ she said encouragingly, ‘we can spare ten, perhaps even twenty men!’

‘We cannot afford to lose
any
!’ shouted the Tsarina.

Vyroubova flinched, as if she had received an electric shock. The Tsarina seldom raised her voice during these afternoon meetings and now Vyroubova felt a sudden sense of panic that she had finally said something which would lose her the use of this cottage, along with all the privileges to which she had become accustomed in her years of friendship with the Tsarina.

‘What good is our numerical superiority,’ continued the Tsarina, ‘when the enemy has thirty-six heavy machine guns for each battalion, and ours must manage with only two? And what hope do our sixty artillery battalions have against the three hundred and eighty battalions of those who now wage war against us?’

Vyroubova stared at her blankly. She did not know what a heavy machine gun was. She imagined that all machine guns must be heavy. And she had no idea what an artillery battalion consisted of. One gun? Ten? Ten thousand? ‘Our dear friend was right,’ she muttered. This friend, whom they rarely referred to by his full name, was Grigori Rasputin. His influence over the Romanovs, and the shrinking numbers of those who remained loyal to the family, was now so powerful that questions had been raised, even by members of the Russian parliament, as to whether the Tsar, or Rasputin, was truly in control of the country.

Fearing that the privacy of their correspondence had been compromised, Nicholas and Alexandra had taken to using code names to describe those in the inner circle of the Romanovs.

Their son Alexei was known as ‘Sunbeam’, while their youngest daughter Anastasia, had earned for herself the nickname of ‘Imp’. The Tsar himself had been christened ‘Blue Boy’, after a character in a children’s fairy tale. Vyroubova had been dubbed ‘the friend’, whereas Rasputin had become the ‘dear friend’.

But the enemies of the Romanovs had coined names of their own for the Tsarina and her chosen band of followers. They called her ‘Nemka’, ‘the German’, refusing to believe that her loyalties could lie anywhere but with her blood relations who were killing Russian soldiers in their tens of thousands every month. Despising Vyroubova almost as much as the Tsarina herself, they dismissed her as ‘La Vache’, and, among the Okhrana agents who shadowed Rasputin on his nightly visits to the bars, he was quietly referred to as ‘The Dark One’.

Rasputin was not the first mystic to have been welcomed into the gilded halls of the Romanovs. First there was the Blessed Mitya, hobbling on bowed legs and hiding his acne-scarred face beneath a hooded cloak. Next came Matryona the Barefoot, who howled like a dog and prophesied in languages which no one understood. Matryona’s place was soon taken by a carnival side-show hypnotist named Monsieur Philippe. In time, all were dismissed or else retreated into obscurity.

Only Rasputin had endured.

‘Russia will drown in blood,’ said the Tsarina. ‘Those were Grigori’s words to me before this war ever began. He tried to warn us.’

‘He tried,’ agreed Vyroubova.

‘He begged us not to wander down this path,’ continued the Tsarina, ‘and now it is too late to turn back, so we must press on regardless of the losses. The Germans have a word for this predicament, you know.
Ausharren
. Strange that no such way exists in Russian to sum up our misfortunes so precisely.’

Vyroubova, struggling to pay attention, set down her tea, picked up the pot, and refilled their cups. She added precisely the same amount of milk and sugar to each one. Vyroubova had taken great care to tailor her own habits to those of the Tsarina, to whom she handed one cup before settling the other in her lap. For a moment, they resumed their gloomy silence.

If, at that moment, Vyroubova could have spoken honestly to the Tsarina, she would have said that she was weary of the war, and weary of talking so incessantly about it, and that she would have liked nothing more than to return to the days when such topics were far from their minds as they sat down to tea in this cosy little parlour. The whole purpose of their meetings, at least as far as Vyroubova was concerned, was to shut out the world, even if only for a while, usually by whispering of the intrigues of the court. For topics like these, Vyroubova had inexhaustible amounts of energy. But this chatter of the war fatigued her. Perhaps it was the psychological effects of the train crash, and the extraordinary pain it had brought to her daily existence, which left her without the necessary reservoirs of sympathy to dwell upon the suffering of others. Mostly, though, it was that she simply couldn’t imagine it. One death, she could imagine. Five deaths. Ten. But a thousand? Ten thousand? A million? Faced with such staggering numbers, Vyroubova simply went blank, and her mind would wander aimlessly about the room, like a bird that had flown down the chimney and was now searching for an open window to escape.

Anna Vyroubova studied the framed photographs hanging on her wall. Many were of herself in the company of the Tsarina. The best of these had been hung where the Tsarina could see them. Her most recent addition, a large, oval photograph in a gold-painted frame, had been taken in this very room. It showed the Tsarina sitting in her usual chair and Vyroubova herself kneeling beside her, hands resting upon the Tsarina’s knee. Both women faced the camera. Vyroubova was smiling. Indeed, from the moment she had received the Tsarina’s blessing to engage a photographer for their portrait, she had practised that smile for hours in the mirror. It was only two weeks later, when the printed picture arrived in its frame from the studio, that Vyroubova glimpsed the expression the Tsarina had worn at the moment when the shutter clicked. Vyroubova had not expected her to smile. The Tsarina seldom smiled, because her teeth were bad. Predictably, her lips had remained tightly pressed together. But it was the look in the Tsarina’s eyes which dismayed Vyroubova. In the dull haughtiness of her stare, the Tsarina had failed to convey their sacred pact of comradeship, from which, Vyroubova believed, the Tsarina drew the strength to defy the angry voices of a country which did not love her, and never had. Instead, the Tsarina looked bored and intolerant, like someone doing a favour for which no excuse to decline had been available at the moment of its asking. The reason, Vyroubova knew, was quite simple. It had not been the Tsarina’s idea to take the photo, and even by suggesting it, Vyroubova had tangled the cat’s cradle in which their friendship hung suspended. Her role was not to lead. Only to follow. To approve. The photograph had been Vyroubova’s attempt to bring this lopsided acquaintance into balance. For Vyroubova, it was to have been a declaration of equality in their feelings towards each other, in spite of the abyss of social rank which lay between them. The eyes in the photograph put an end to that; bluntly, silently and permanently. It would never be spoken of. It would never be attempted again. Neither, in Vyroubova’s mind, would it ever be forgiven, and that was why she hung the photo where the Tsarina could not help but see the portrait every time she came to visit.

‘I have come to a conclusion,’ the Tsarina said slowly, and then she paused, as if suddenly unwilling to give voice to her thoughts.

‘What conclusion, Majesty?’ asked Vyroubova. Is this about us? she wondered. Does she mean to throw me out into the street?

With her voice barely above a whisper, as if afraid the portraits on the walls might lean their frozen faces from the frames and overhear, the Tsarina began to speak again. ‘Russia cannot survive this war against Germany. Not without a miracle.’

Vyroubova’s first reaction was one of relief. It is not about us, after all, she thought to herself. But her next thought was that, if anyone else had said such a thing, with the possible exception of Rasputin, the Tsarina would have accused them of treason.

‘It’s in God’s hands,’ said Vyroubova, not so much because she believed it but because she knew it was what the Tsarina wanted to hear. ‘There is nothing to be done, Majesty.’

The Tsarina’s mouth remained open for a second, her teeth turned glassy yellow by the tincture of Sweet Vernal, which had been prescribed to her as a heart medicine and which she now took regularly, along with numerous other powerful tonics to combat stress. ‘It so happens,’ said the Tsarina, ‘that something is being done. Even as we speak. Something that may bring an end to this slaughter.’

Vyroubova blinked in astonishment. ‘But what is it, Majesty?’

The Tsarina reached out and rested her fingertips upon Vyroubova’s knee. ‘All you can know for now is that it has the full support of our dear friend, and therefore the blessing of God.’