 |
| Nikolai II and his family. |
One hundred years ago today, on July 17 1918, the deposed tsar, Nikolai II, was murdered, along with his wife, his son and his daughters, at the 'House of Special Purpose' in Yekaterinburg, Russia. In my novel The Last Rite, our hero, Mihail Konstantivich Danilov meets Nikolai earlier that year, and has a vision, through the tsar's own eyes, of his approaching fate.
Instantly I was in a different place. A narrow stairway leading
down to a cellar. It was night – the early hours. In my arms I was carrying a
boy. He was thirteen years old, but small for his age, weak, ill. There was a
queue of us on the stairs, but soon we were in the cellar. There wasn’t much
room, not for eleven of us. I looked at the faces around me. My wife was there,
and my four daughters. The four others were the only ones who had remained
loyal to us; my physician, a footman, a maid and a cook. Around my ankles
scampered my little spaniel, Joy. She had remained loyal too. I turned round,
back towards the stairs. They’d said we were being evacuated. Evidently we
would have to wait here some time.
‘Could you bring
some chairs?’ I asked.
The man standing
at the bottom of the stairs, our gaoler, shouted up. Moments later three hard
wooden chairs were brought down. I placed my fragile son in one and offered the
second to my wife. I took the third. Then the room began to fill, with more men
coming down the stairs. Soon the little cellar was preposterously crowded. I
had to stand up again, just to see what was going on. There were eleven of
them, not counting our gaoler, the same number as there were of us. That in
itself was suspicious. They tried to spread themselves through the room, each
pairing off with a single member of my family or our entourage, as if
fulfilling the promise made on some fantastical dance card. But in the cramped
space it was impossible to move anywhere.
The gaoler
cleared his throat. He had a piece of paper in his hand which he read from.
‘In view of the
fact that your relatives are continuing their attack on Soviet Russia, the Ural
Executive Committee has decided to execute you.’
I turned quickly
to look at my family. ‘What?’ I whispered. ‘What?’
The gaoler
repeated the sentence, reading it again, though it was short enough for him to
remember by heart. I wondered where they would take us to perform the act, how
much time we had, whether they would separate us – the men from the women, the
adults from the children. I began to pray that in the coming hours we would
have time properly to say goodbye.
But the gaoler
had scarcely finished speaking when his hand emerged from his pocket holding a
revolver. He was standing just two feet away from me. He fired and I felt a
thump against my chest. My legs grew weak and I began to fall. The gaoler fired
again, but not at me. I heard my little boy scream and then fall silent. Until
then I had felt no pain, but now every agony shot through me. I could not move,
I could not speak, I could only perceive, and I knew that that would not last
more than a few moments.
The other
assassins had rifles rather than pistols and they began to fire. Bullets
ricocheted across the cellar. Bodies fell – I could not see who – and the
monsters finished them off with bayonets. I tried to breath, but could not. Nor
did I want to. My heart had been still for seconds now, blown apart by the
bullet. My eyes gazed out across the cellar floor, across the pools of blood to
where the spaniel pawed at the dead face of my beloved son. I tried to reach
out to him but I knew there was no point. My only consolation was that we had
died in the same moment.
