Curse of the Romanovs

CHAPTER ONE Spala, Poland, 1912(Four years ago) "Mama! mama! -- it hurts! Please, God! Mama, come kill me!" Three hundred years of my dead Romanov relatives crowded around my bedside, staring into my bloodless pale face, wagging their ghostly heads with concern. Great-grandpa Alexander -- missing a leg from the assassin's bomb -- held out his bloody arms to me in welcome. Peter the Great beckoned slowly, slowly, inviting me into the land of death. There was Ivan the Terrible, a pointy-toothed skull, grinning as if he'd love my company -- in hell. "Yes, Alyosha," he hissed into my ear. "Wouldn't it be better for all to just let go? Your poor mother's hair is turning gray. Your father worries, your sisters, too. Just let go. It's so easy. So easy..." My eyes grew heavy. The icon lamps around my bed flickered and faded. The light within my heart was flickering, fading, too. Why, why didn't they call Our Friend in time to save me? Why? Where are you, Father Grigory! So tired, so tired... Just let go, let go.Yes, Uncle Ivan, wouldn't it be better for all?I rolled to one side and let out a last sigh. A sudden lightning bolt of pain shot through my leg. Like marbles forced through my small veins. Yanking me, jolting me rudely back to the world of the living. And then I screamed. A milkman's horse all the way in Tobolsk pricked up his ears at the sound. Anxious clicking of shoes came down the hall. My mother burst through the door. The whites of her eyes red like borscht. Eyes staring at me in horror, ringed by the black of a thousand sleepness nights. "God forgive me, baby!" she said, stuffing rags the color of snow into my mouth, muffling my screams. You may think my mother cruel. But she was only protecting me. I shall explain. This will take time. I am not the author Chekhov, paid fifteen kopecks per line! You will have patience because I command it. I was born in 1904, and on mynynokthe fate of Mother Russia was written. At six weeks of age I bled at the spot where I had once been joined to my mother. I bled, and I didn't stop bleeding. Dr. Botkin was called. He peered at mynynokover his pince-nez, as though examining a strange new purple fruit. "It's the same thing that killed my dear Frittie, isn't it?" my mama must have said, her skin turning gray like ashes from the fireplace. "The bleeding disease." Frittie was her brother, who got hemophilia from my Grandma Alice. Who got it from her mother, Queen Victoria of England. "I have not seen this myself before. But...yes, I'm afraid so. It can only be hemophilia," the doctor said. And it was at that moment that I became my family's biggest secret. What a difference from the day I was born! Not every boy is greeted into this world by the firing of 301 guns and a whole country's rejoicing. And not every boy is given his own army regiment to command the moment he pops out of the womb. But not every boy is Tsarevich Alexei Nikolaevich Romanov, the future tsar of all the Russias, my family's precious Faberge jewel, born after my sisters: four useless lumps of coal we call Olga, Tatiana, Mashka, and Anastasia. How my mama tried to have a boy! First they visited Mitka the Fool -- babbling, in rags, naked. Mama's belly was already round. Mitka gave her a potion, made from special mushrooms that make the eyes see angels' halos. Mumble, mumble. "What did he say?" Mama whispered to Papa. "I think he said, 'You'll have a boy.'" "Lovey -- Lovey, you really think so?" She often calls him "Lovey." "It's hard to say...." But Mama had another girl. Next there was the witch, Daria Osipova. She writhed on the floor as if she had ants in her drawers. She gave Mama another potion: ramson, thorn apple, witch's grass. Mama drank, holding her nose. The room spun round in bright colors. "Now swim in the river during a storm," Osipova adviRabin, Staton is the author of 'Curse of the Romanovs ', published 2007 under ISBN 9781416902089 and ISBN 1416902082.