The Empress lived for the next twenty days in a state of terrible dread. Alas! true to the Holy Father’s prophecy the boy, on the twentieth day, was seized with a sudden mysterious illness which puzzled the Court physicians who were hastily summoned from Petrograd. Indeed, a dozen of the best medical men in the capital held a consultation, but opinions differed regarding the cause of the haemorrhage, and the Empress again sent wild telegrams urging her pet Saint to return.
Little did she dream that her favourite lady-in-waiting had six hours before administered a dose of a certain secret Chinese drug to the young Tsarevitch and purposely caused the illness which the rascal had predicted.
Time after time did Her Majesty telegraph, urging her “Holy Father” to return and save the boy’s life, signing herself affectionately “your sister Alec.” Yet the wires were dumb in reply. An Imperial courier brought back no response. The doctors, as before, could make nothing out of the poor boy’s illness, and were unable to diagnose it. The charlatan was playing with the life of the Heir of the Romanoffs.
It has, however, been since revealed by analysis that the compound sold to Rasputin by the chemist—a secret administrator of drugs to Petrograd society named Badmayeff—was a poisonous powder produced from the new horns of stags, mixed with the root of “jen-shen.” In the early spring when the stags shed their horns there appear small knobs where the new horns will grow. It is from these that the Chinese obtain the powder which, when mixed with “jen-shen,” produces a very strong medicine highly prized in China and Thibet as being supposed to rejuvenate old persons, and to act as a kind of love-philtre. When used in strong doses it produces peculiar symptoms, and also induces dangerous haemorrhage.
It is evident from evidence I have recently obtained, that on the twentieth day after Rasputin’s departure the high priestess of his cult, Madame Vyrubova, administered to the poor helpless little lad a strong dose in his food.
Day followed day; she increased that dose, until the poor little boy’s condition became most precarious, and the deluded Empress was equally frantic with grief. At any moment he might die, the doctors declared.
One night Rasputin returned quite unexpectedly without having replied even once to the Tsaritza’s frantic appeals.
He made a dramatic appearance in her private boudoir, dressed in sandals and his monk’s habit, as though he had just returned from a pilgrimage.
“I have come to thee, O Lady, to try and save thy son!” he announced earnestly in that deep raucous voice of his, crossing himself piously as was his constant habit.
The distracted Empress flew to the boy’s room where the mock-saint laid his hands upon the lad’s clammy brow and then falling upon his knees prayed loudly in his strange jumble of scraps of holy writ interspersed with profanity, that curious jargon which always impressed his “sister-disciples.”