The Witches of St. Petersburg

Militza and Prince Dmitry watched as Purishkevich, Lieutenant Sergei Mikhailovich Sukhotin and Dr Stanislaus de Lazovert, struggled to throw the corpse over the side of the bridge into the Malaya Nevka below. They removed the blue curtain but still they strained and pulled and tugged. Eventually, finally, they raised the body high enough to mount the barrier and they pushed it off the wooden railings into the icy water below. As the body fell through the ice, Sukhotin realized a galosh was missing. He scoured the bridge and, finding it, picked it up and, in a panic, he hurled it the air. It landed on the bank, missing the river entirely.

The body refused to sink. Prince Dmitry had forgotten to load the corpse with the heavy chains he’d packed into the car. So it floated. The fine fur billowed out in the freezing cold water, like some sort of sail.

Militza stared. Rasputin looked as if he were sleeping, his eyes closed as he lay on the surface.

‘God forgive me,’ said Militza. ‘Forgive me, Grisha.’

Her hand was shaking over her mouth as she stood, shivering, on the bridge. The relief, the loss, the horror of what she had done was so overwhelming that she ceased to feel anything. It was all too much to take in. She was numb. She looked down into the deep, dark water. Through the ripples, the cord around Rasputin’s wrists appeared to loosen, his pale grey eyes gently opened and stared up at her as he sank, finally weighed down by his fur coat, his right hand moving slowly up and down, making the sign of a cross.

Epilogue

Militza, Peter, Stana and Nikolasha and all their children survived the 1917 Revolution. They escaped off the beaches of the Crimea with some of their fortune, rescued by the British on HMS Marlborough in April 1919 along with Prince Felix Yusupov, his wife Princess Irina, plus his parents Princess Zinaida Yusupova and her husband Count Felix Yusupov, as well as Grand Duchess Xenia and her mother, the Dowager Empress Maria Fyodorovna.

After a somewhat protracted journey where they were deposited in Greece while the others continued on to Malta, all four of them and their children ended up living in the South of France where Grand Duke Nikolai eventually died in 1929, followed by Grand Duke Peter in 1931 and Grand Duchess Anastasia in 1935.

Militza lived on, only to become caught up in the Second World War. She left France for Italy to stay with her sister, Queen Elena. But the situation became very unstable and as the King and Queen went into hiding, Militza ended up seeking refuge at the Sacré Coeur nunnery at the top of the Spanish Steps. A few months later she managed to escape to the Vatican where she received sanctuary within the walls of Vatican City for three years. Eventually she escaped, along with her sister Elena and the rest of the Italian Royal Family, to Alexandria, Egypt, where she lived along with a myriad of other deposed royals including King Zog of Albania, as a guest of King Farouk of Egypt. Grand Duchess Militza died in Alexandria in September 1951, aged 85.

Several days after his murder, the body of Rasputin was found with a gunshot wound to the forehead. It was pulled out of the river from under the ice at Petrovsky Bridge. His lungs were said to be full of water, as if he had, in fact, drowned and his hands had freed themselves from the cord that tied them and were raised as if he had been scratching at the ice, trying to get out.

We hope you enjoyed this book.

Acknowledgements

About Imogen Edwards-Jones

An Invitation from the Publisher

Acknowledgements

Although this is a work of fiction, the majority of the story is true and I am deeply indebted to my dear friend, the journalist and ridiculously brave war correspondent, Nikolai Antonov, who first told me about the ‘Black Princesses’ all those years ago, in 1992, as we sat around his kitchen table in Moscow, drinking strong vodka and eating stronger pickles. His eyes shone as he wove a magical tale about these two beautiful young princesses, who arrived from Montenegro, married into the Russian Royal Family, introduced Rasputin to the Tsarina and brought down an empire. ‘Power, magic, sex!’ he laughed. We charged our glasses and I promised him I’d write it as soon as I got home.

I didn’t of course, I ended up writing other things, but Nikolai would not give up. He’d call me often from Moscow, sharing little bits of information he’d discovered. They were hard women to track down. Being neither the victors, nor male, they were usually consigned to the footnotes of history. But I do remember one telephone call from Nik, some ten years later and just days, in fact, before he died: he’d just found out the most fantastic fact and he had to tell me right away.

‘The reason they were called the Black Princesses,’ he said and paused for dramatic effect, static cracking down the line, ‘was not because they had black hair, or because they liked black magic, but because they had black eyes! Black eyes,’ he repeated.