The Girl With The
Crystal Soul
Barbara Dargan
“They always say that nothing good or happy endures for long, or rather doesn’t last; but I also think that even awful things must come to an end sometime. Isn’t that so?”
Olga Nikolaevna Romanov
December 1917
Author’s Note:
This novel is based on the true story of a crime that took place in Ekaterinburg, Russia on 17/18 July 1918.
The names of the characters whose lives the crime claimed or influenced are real; their thoughts, perceptions and conversations are imagined. While I have attempted at all times to maintain historical accuracy, I acknowledge that the events portrayed as taking place in 1991 actually took place over a period of time from 1991 to 1998.
This book is dedicated with love to my Mum; Valerie and my daughter Amy, who have never stopped believing in me.
And to Olga, who has never stopped walking with me.
Copyright © 2019 Barbara Dargan
All rights reserved.
ISBN:
ISBN-13:
Sources:
I could not have written this book without the guidance of my all things Romanov go to expert; Helen Rappaport, and in particular the following:
Four Sisters, The Lost Lives of the Romanov Grand Duchesses by Helen Rappaport 2014
Ekaterinburg, The Last Days of the Romanovs by Helen Rappaport 2008
In addition to:
The Fate of the Romanovs by Greg King and Penny Wilson 2003
Additional information used throughout this book has been sourced from:
Tatiana Romanov Daughter of the Last Tsar Diaries and Letters 1913-1918 by Helen Azar and Nicholas B.A. Nicholson 2016
Journal of a Russian Grand Duchess, Complete Annotated 1913 Diary of Olga Romanov, Eldest Daughter of the Last Tsar 2015 by Helen Azar.
One
Ekaterinburg, Russia.
17 July 1917
The leader was angry. The whole thing was a disaster from start to finish, despite his meticulous planning. The squad of men chosen for the task were depleted, because he had been forced to discharge the ones who had arrived on duty drunk, and then the ones who, at the very last minute balked, saying that they did not have the stomach for killing the women and girls and in particular the young boy.
The truck hadn't arrived, he was still waiting for it hours after he had ordered it to be there, and most of the night had gone before they had even started the job.
The prisoners had taken over an hour to get dressed and assembled, but now finally stood in front of him, looking confused, but not panicked at their early morning rousing.
He looked at them dispassionately, Nicholas, the ex-ruler of Russia, now a broken man, yet still dressed in his ridiculous threadbare khaki uniform, acting as though he was still in charge of what had once been the mighty Russian army, and his stubbornly incredibly proud and arrogant wife, Alexandra. She had nothing to be proud of now, he thought. She looked old, her grey hair straggling about her face as in her hurry to get ready she had tried but failed to tie it back into her customary bun.
And their four daughters, Olga, the eldest, then Tatiana, their faces gaunt, both skin and bone in his opinion, any appeal they may have had as young women were now well and truly gone. He doubted that his men would want to touch them, even if he gave his permission.
The two youngest daughters were a different story, though. Anastasia and Maria still had the bloom of youth, their hair shiny, cheeks still rosy, although they too had lost weight in the short time he had known them. They smiled cheekily at him as if they thought that this was some joke; some game he was playing. Well, it wasn't, and they'd find that out soon enough.
He had nothing against them apart from the bloodline they carried. And the boy, the apparent heir, Alexey, who had arrived from Tobolsk sickly and half-dead anyway. Whenever he had seen the boy, he was either sitting or in bed or else someone was wheeling him around the place in his mother's wheelchair. He hadn't seen him on his feet the whole time the boy had been in the house. He had no idea what was wrong with him and didn't give a damn either. There was an electric shock contraption in his office used by the doctor to stimulate the boy's muscle, and he doubted its effectiveness, because despite its use, the boy seemed to be in pain all of the time.
Their four servants stood with them. Stupid bastards should have got out when they could, he thought coldly. He wouldn't be sorry to see the back of the doctor though, interfering old bastard, always coming to his office, questioning him about things, ever complaining about something or the other. The stupid man had even asked if he could arrange for flowers from the Crimea to be delivered once a week to the house for the woman and girls because he thought that they would cheer them up and remind them of home! The sheer bloody idiocy of it, as though they thought they were staying in some luxury hotel instead of a prison, which was precisely what this was.
It drove him crazy. Like the other day, when he took the kitchen boy Leonid away. What a bloody performance that was! Alexey was upset because the two boys used to play together. Was it his fault if the boy couldn't amuse himself? Hardly. He wondered what they would have done if they had known that the only reason he took the boy away was that he felt sorry for him and didn't want him to suffer the same fate as this lot would very soon. He had a vision of them falling on their knees, weeping and wailing, begging him for mercy, and the thought pleased him. They wouldn't be so high and mighty then.
The Doctor kept going on about how sick they all were and how they needed better food and more medicine, yet none of them ate anything that had been prepared for them. The woman, Alexandra, was a vegetarian and would touch nothing that even resembled meat. And he had seen the bottles and vials of pills and potions she had stashed away, he sure as hell didn't think she was short of anything.
He had hardly spared a thought about the other three servants; he wouldn't know them if he had seen them on the street. They did whatever it was they did for the family and kept their distance from him, which was just how he liked it.
He sighed heavily, running his hand across his chin, prickly with that morning's stubble; he'd be damn glad when they were all gone and not his responsibility anymore.
'You are no longer safe here,' he told them, 'this place will be in enemy hands within a few hours. I am taking you down to the basement to await transport. Once that arrives, you are to be moved from here to a place of safety.'
'Can you tell us where we will be going?' Nicholas asked politely.
'No, I can't tell you that, not at the moment anyway. Maybe later when the truck gets here.'
'What will happen to our things? Are we able to take anything with us?'
'Again, no. Anything that you might need will be brought to you at the truck when you are ready to leave. The rest will be forwarded on to you once you reach your destination.'
'I trust that will include the rest of our belongings we brought with us from Tobolsk that are still in our trunks in the storeroom that you have not yet given us access to?' Nicholas asked doggedly. The distribution of their belongings had been a bone of contention between them for weeks.
'Of course.' He replied tersely and was amused to see that Nicholas seemed satisfied at this and turned to give his wife a reassuring smile.
'Come now,' he said, 'It's time to leave, I need you to go down to the basement now.'
He tried to keep his voice calm; he didn't want them to suspect that anything untoward was happening, or for them to panic and start to cause trouble. He did not trust that his men would follow his orders if things did not go to plan.
They muttered and whispered a
mongst themselves, but did not attempt to disobey, and he followed after them down the stairs and through the ground floor labyrinth to a basement room. This room had been chosen in particular for the executions because its location was towards the back of the house, further into the hill on which the house had been built. He hoped it would be more soundproof there, the last thing he needed was nosey citizens or any of the family's supporters who remained in the city to hear anything and come snooping around. The disadvantage was that it was farther away from the courtyard where he had ordered the truck to be parked, and this would mean that it would take longer to take the bodies out. Again, he thought, not his problem. He wasn't going to be loading them, was he?
Once he had them all in the basement, the woman Alexandra had started up with her moaning again, bitching about the fact that she had to stand and questioning why there was no chairs provided so he had two brought into the room, and once her and the boy had seated themselves and the others had dispersed themselves around the room, and he was sure that they still did not suspect anything, he left them there while he and his men sat next door, making last-minute checks of their weapons and going over the plan one final time.
That was a mistake, he soon discovered, as the delay only gave his men more time to think about what they were about to do. They grew more agitated as the minutes ticked by, smoking and cursing incessantly until finally, fearing he was losing control over them, he led them back to the room.
He pulled the written order from his pocket and read from it. There were a lot of words, but the most important ones for him, and the ones he enjoyed saying the most were, 'therefore the decision has been made to sentence you to death.' He looked Nicholas straight in the eye as he said it, his voice loud and strong. The stupid man seemed to have gone deaf and asked him to reread it, and so he did. He was angry; Nicholas still didn't seem to understand who was in charge here.
He fired his pistol, his men followed his lead and immediately began firing into the room from where they stood, some in the doorway, others from just inside the room, beside him. They were firing so close to each other, and their bullets risked hitting each other. He felt a bullet rush past his ear from someone firing aimlessly directly behind him.
'Bloody idiots.' he muttered. He had wanted these deaths to be quick and easy, no fuss. Instead, there was utter chaos, the men were firing indiscriminately, forgetting their chosen targets, bullets were flying everywhere, the room filling with thick smoke, the noise of gunfire, screaming and shouting was deafening, and the whole thing was taking far too long.
'Get out!' he ordered, waiting for the smoke to clear before he could get a proper look at what resembled the slaughterhouse he had once seen as a boy with carcasses strewn across the floor, blood, and gore everywhere.
He could hear the sound of women’s voices still sobbing and crying for help from the far corner of the room, in front of the storeroom door that had been locked earlier in the day to prevent anyone from attempting to use it as an escape.
He could not believe that anyone was left alive after almost twenty minutes of shooting, and was consumed with anger that he was required to finish it, and that the killing was not yet over with.
He approached the sounds carefully, wanting to avoid slipping in the liverish like blood and body fluids that covered the floor like a river.
He saw the two youngest sisters, Maria, Anastasia and the maid, Anna covered in sheets of blood, huddled together in the corner, and he could not tell which of them was wounded or how badly.
"Please help us," one of the girls pleaded, raising her hand towards him, "please."
He half-turned away trying to avoid the tortured look in her huge blue eyes, as one of his men started hacking at the two girls over and over again with his bayonet, trying in vain to penetrate through their clothing to their flesh underneath.
'Get out of the way, man,' he snarled, pushing the other man aside, 'can't you do anything properly?' He stepped closer to the girls and quickly shot them both, one after the other, headshots. They collapsed to the ground, silent at last.
'Thank God, God has saved me!' He heard and spun around to see the maid, covered in blood, struggling to get to her feet. A man moved toward her, slashing with his bayonet, but again, as with the two younger girls, the blows appeared to have no impact on her whatsoever. She held two white pillows against her chest, as if to use them as a shield. The leader watched her fight to her last breath, twisting this way and that trying to get away from the blade, even grasping it until she too fell silent, her bare hands sliced to ribbons.
He continued around the room, checking each body to make sure they were dead, taking pulses, as he had been taught to do during his life as a medical orderly. Some of his men, drunk with blood-lust, slipped and slid around the room, raining bayonet blows on the corpses, in particular Nicholas and Alexandra.
'Search them for valuables,' he ordered once he had satisfied himself that the prisoners were dead. The men obeyed, lifting and turning the bodies, stripping watches, rings, and gold bracelets. He noticed that some of them were pocketing the items they found.
'Bring everything you have found here to me,' he snarled, 'including anything that you have pocketed. Do that again, and I will shoot you on the spot.' He held their stares, daring them to defy him. They slowly, reluctantly handed him the items they had recovered.
'Now, start loading them into the truck and let me know when you are finished.' he ordered his second in command, taking the gathered valuables upstairs to his office and piling them on his desk; wondering at the richness of the pieces; diamond pins and brooches, gold watches, wedding rings.
He felt exhausted and disheartened. He had done what he had been ordered to do, and indeed had welcomed doing for the cause he wholeheartedly believed in, yet somehow the manner of it did not sit well with him.
Back in the basement, the second in command was trying to direct the transfer of the bodies from the room to the truck, the logistics of which were proving difficult. He cursed at having to do this; it was evident that no prior thought or planning had gone into how the bodies of eleven people could be removed from the blood-soaked room.
'We need to make something to carry them on,' he said, 'go out to the yard and see what you can find,’ and motioning to one of the guards, ordered, 'you go up to their rooms and bring back bed sheets, blankets, anything that we can wrap them with. And hurry it up!'
They made a stretcher, roughly fashioning it by tying a blanket to the shafts of an old sledge found in the yard. The guard returned carrying bedsheets then they wrapped each body before loading onto the stretcher.
'Shit!' one of the men screamed, reeling back in horror as one of the girls, after having been laid on the stretcher for removal, suddenly sat up, put her hands over her face, and began shrieking unintelligibly. Someone ran forward and started stabbing at her with a bayonet, yet she continued to scream only becoming silent after the second in command himself fired a bullet into her brain. He found himself shaking uncontrollably.
'Why won't they die?' someone moaned, the fear and horror evident in his voice.
'Enough,' the second in command snarled, 'they are only human; there is nothing special about them, not now anyway, so of course they die just like everyone else. Now get on with it and get them in the truck!'
It was a long, difficult task; the truck had finally arrived and was parked, motor idling noisily in the courtyard at the north end of the house, which meant the bodies had to be carried one at a time the long way around from the southern end of the courtyard exit. Even wrapped, they left a messy trail of blood and body fluids from the basement to where the men waited to load them.
Someone had partially covered the side slats of the truck with a cloth found in one of the storerooms, and had the foresight to have spread sawdust in its tray. One by one, the bodies were unwrapped so that the blanket covering could be used again, and unceremoniously dumped there, limbs jumbled together.
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'It's not going to be big enough,' the second in command muttered. 'Shit!' But somehow, they managed to fit them all on, including the small body of the dog Jimmy, who had been killed by a bayonet thrust as she cowered under Anastasia's skirt.
The second in command walked upstairs to the leader's office, knocking on the door before entering.
'We've finished it, the truck is loaded and ready to go.' He said, and together they started back down the staircase towards the front door and the courtyard.
The leader paused at the bottom of the staircase and growled, 'someone needs to shut that dog up; it can be heard barking all down the street.' They looked back up to where Tatiana's French bulldog Ortipo stood on the top landing, his teeth bared, barking, racing backward and forwards in agitation, and one of the guards ran up the stairs and dispatched the dog with a blow from his rifle butt.
The leader didn't want to go with the truck to the forest where they had already planned to dispose of the bodies, however, given the shambles that the operation had been so far, worried that something else was bound to go wrong, and so decided it would be better if he was there to supervise.
'I'm coming with you.' He said, climbing in beside the driver. More men climbed into the cab of the truck, as well as into the tray, riding with the bodies. "Drive to Koptyaki Forest,' he ordered the driver. 'I'll tell you when to stop.'
The truck, grossly overloaded, struggled out of the courtyard of the house, and up the hill towards the forest. Dawn was fast approaching, and this worried the leader, as it increased their chances of being seen.
Back at the house, guards just coming on duty or who hadn't been involved in the slaughter, and hearing what had happened, slowly made their way to the basement, to see for themselves. Some wept, some reeled away in horror, and some vomited at the gruesome scene that met them.
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