Rasputin by Frances Welch Page B

Later the boy twitched a lot, but Rasputin never took his hands off his chest. This huge man became paler and paler until finally the boy… got up and ran to his mother. It took about seven minutes in all.’
    After the cure, Hamilton recalled that Rasputin collapsed dramatically into a chair proclaiming: ‘All the good has gone out of me, and I must get new strength. I have been fighting the evil spirits in that poor boy.’ The story is slightly undermined by Hamilton’s recollection that the cure took place at Gorokhovaya Street when, in fact, Rasputin did not move there until 1914.
    Hamilton remained resolutely enamoured of Rasputin; he was not in the least put out when he heard that Rasputin did not care for the English: ‘I considered it a great privilege to have seen undeniable proof of his extraordinary gift of healing. It may seem profane to mention Jesus Christ in any connection with Rasputin but for all I know God may choose odd vessels to do his work.’
    As fresh attacks were launched in the Duma and atCourt, it may have struck Rasputin’s beleaguered supporters that some vessels could be too odd.

    B ut in October 1912 an event occurred which raised Rasputin’s stock at the Palace and, for a while, rendered him unassailable. He was on one of his frequent visits to Pokrovskoye at the time: ‘going for a little home’, as the Tsarina put it blithely. The purpose of these endless returns was twofold: he appeased his detractors by keeping a low profile while gratifying his weakness for creature comforts and soft furnishings. He may even have welcomed a respite from the dizziness of his life in St Petersburg, with its unending array of colourful characters.
    As he was walking along the River Tura with his daughter Maria, he suddenly clutched his head and told her something had happened to the Tsarevich Alexis: ‘He’s been stricken.’ A couple of days later he received a telegram from Anna Vyrubova saying that Alexis was mortally ill in a hunting lodge at Spala, in Poland.
    The Rasputins were in the middle of a family lunch when the telegram had arrived. Rasputin made one of his fierce gestures at the maid, Dounia, to stop doing dishes, while he left the room to pray. He was grey and sweating when he reappeared, but immediately set about composing a reply. He loved sending telegrams, not least because he could leave any awkward spellings to the telegraphist. He sent two messages: ‘The LittleOne will not die…. Do not let the doctors bother him too much.’
    Alexis had injured his leg while jumping onto a boat. He seemed to have recovered, but the Tsarina had then taken him for a drive and the violent shaking of the carriage had brought on a stomach haemorrhage. His subsequent cries of pain were so heart-rending that the more sensitive servants resorted to ear-plugs. None of them would have known, at this point, that Alexis had haemophilia. His anxious doctors met regularly in Mossolov’s room. As Mossolov recalled: ‘None of the remedies which they prescribed sufficed to arrest the bleeding.’
    The eight-year-old boy himself was prepared to die, instructing his despairing parents to bury him beneath a blue sky and build a monument. The Tsar reluctantly agreed to issue a news bulletin announcing that the Tsarevich was ill; bulletins were posted as far away as Siberia. A tent erected on the lodge lawn for worship was soon being visited by weeping Polish peasants. The fervent Father Vassiliev performed the last rites.
    Alexis began to recover the day Rasputin’s first telegram arrived from Pokrovskoye. The Tsarina was convinced that, without Rasputin’s prayer, her son would have died. As she said to Mossolov: ‘It’s not the first time the
starets
[Holy Man] has saved his life.’ The doctors were apparently confounded. One of them, Professor Federov, had at one point asked Mossolov’s advice, asking whether he should