With joy akin to fearfulness he repeated, “Even so! Come, Lord Jesus! Amen.”
CHAPTER V
The Moscow inquiry ended on March 15. The verdict of the Tsar and ministers, given in the supreme court of Preobrazhensky, sealed the fate of the culprits.
The ex-Tsaritsa, Sister Helen, was to be sent to Old Ládoga and there shut up in a convent, the Tsarevna Marya to Schlusselbourg; both to be rigorously confined and closely watched. Abraham Lapoukhin was taken to the Peter and Paul fortress at Petersburg to await a fresh inquiry. The others were to suffer death.
The executions began that same morning on the Red Square. The iron pikes, on which had remained for twenty years the heads of the Streltsy, decapitated in 1698, were cleaned and made ready to receive other heads.
Stephen Gleboff, the Tsaritsa’s lover, was impaled. He was seated on a small board. The iron spike issued from his skull. To prevent his freezing, and to prolong his tortures as much as possible, he was given a fur coat and cap. There priests watched him day and night, in the hope that he would reveal some secret before his death. One of them reported: “From the moment that Stephen was impaled, he confessed nothing to us; all he did was to ask the arch-monk Marcellus to give him the communion secretly; and while receiving it he gave up the ghost, on March 16, eight hours after midnight, during the second watch.”
Demid, the unfrocked Bishop of Rostoff, was broken on the wheel. It was said that the secretary, to whom the execution had been entrusted, made a mistake. Instead of having the bishop beheaded and his body burnt, he had him broken on the wheel.
Kikin suffered the same death. He was tortured slowly, at intervals; his legs and arms were broken one after the other; his torture lasted for more than twenty-four hours. His agony was increased by the fact that he had been roped so tightly to the wheel that he could not move in the least: he cried and moaned, praying to be finished off. It is reported that the Tsar, passing by on horseback, stooped down towards him and said: