Then he laughed stupidly, leering out of his inflamed eyes at the five women who all wore the garbs of the Sisters of Mercy, their white coiffes and tabliers contrasting sharply with the sombre habits of the Russian nuns who had gathered in the candle-lit dusk behind them.
“What do you wish?” demanded the ex-Empress in a fairly steady voice.
“Answer to your names!” retorted the officer brutally. The other officer came up and began to fumble for a note book in the breast of his dirty tunic. When he found it he licked the lead of his pencil and squinted at the ex-Empress out of drunken eyes.
“Alexandra Feodorovna!” he barked in her face. “If you’re here, say so!”
She remained calm, mute, cold as ice.
A soldier behind her suddenly began to shout:
“That’s the German woman. That’s the friend of the Staretz Novykh! That’s Sascha! Now we’ve got her, the thing to do is to shoot her–––”
“Mark her present,” interrupted the officer in command. “No ceremony, now. Mark the cub Romanoff present. Mark ’em all––Olga, Tatyana, Marie, xxv Anastasia!––no matter which is which––they’re all Romanoffs–––”
But the same soldier who had interrupted before bawled out again: “They’re not Romanoffs! There are no German Romanoffs. There are no Romanoffs in Russia since a hundred and fifty years–––”
The little Tzesarevitch, Alexis, red with anger, stepped forward to confront the man, his frail hands fiercely clenched. The officer in command struck him brutally across the breast with the flat of his sword, shoved him aside, strode toward the low door of the chapel crypt and jerked it open.