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That was simply the style of his diary.

He was secretive and reticent. He wrote about conversations with Avdeyev and Ukraintsev, about the painted-over windows. And just as briefly, in passing, mentioned: “this morning and evening, as on all days here, read the proper in the Holy Gospels aloud.”

That was the main thing.

——

Their forced arrival in Ekaterinburg coincided with Holy Week.

The bloody Easter of 1918 was approaching. The country was drenched in blood—“Russia washed in blood.”

During these great days of the Lord’s Passion, as the hour of His Crucifixion was approaching—they entered the Ipatiev house. For the mystical Nicholas, the family’s arrival in the Ipatiev house at that particular time was replete with meaning. He had to have felt a flutter of foreboding.

On the third day of Easter, Alix’s sister Ella was sent out of Moscow. At first the new authorities had not touched Ella or her Cloister of Martha and Mary. She wrote in one of her last letters: “Obviously we are not yet worthy of the martyr’s crown.” Her favorite thought: “Humiliation and suffering, drawing us closer to God.”

So her path to that crown had begun. At Eastertime, the arrested Ella was brought to Ekaterinburg, where she stayed in the same Novotikhvinsky monastery that would soon be bringing food to the tsar’s family. But by the end of May Ella would be sent even farther, 140 versts (93 miles) away, to the small town of Alapaevsk, where the Romanovs sent from Petrograd were gathered: Sergei Mikhailovich, the companion of Nicky’s childhood games; Grand Duke Konstantin’s three sons; and Grand Duke Paul’s son by his second marriage, the seventeen-year-old poet Prince Oleg Paley.

On Easter the tsar and his family received gifts from Ella.

The martyr’s crown was Ella’s main theme. During those days she must have written to them about this. Ioann of Kronstadt, whom Nicholas respected, as had his father, had said in his sermons: “The Christian enduring misfortunes or sufferings must not doubt in God’s goodness and wisdom and must guess how much of God’s will is manifested in them.… May every man bring his own Isaac to God’s sacrifice.”

“Guess how much of God’s will is manifested in their sufferings”—that is what he had to be contemplating during those days.

A notable event linked with these thoughts then:

“6 [19] May.… I have lived to 50; even to me it is strange.”

Romanovs did not live to fifty very often. The tsars of this dynasty had lived little, and here the Lord had given him this age. Why had He given it to someone whom his own country had rejected?

A martyr’s crown? A reward of suffering?

The land was burning, towns were in flames, brother had gone against brother, and the people God had entrusted to him were creating evil. He himself had been at the beginning of the evil. He had assisted at its birth.

A redeeming sacrifice? Perhaps his whole life had been for this? “Guess how much of God’s will….”

The days dragged on slowly, identically, as did the “bull’s” slow, persistent contemplation … or was he a lamb?

Alix spent her days in the pale yellow bedroom between her four lime-washed windows—in that white fog—in her wheelchair, her head bandaged (a migraine). The former tsaritsa went out for walks only rarely. She daydreamed, read her holy books, embroidered, or drew. Her small watercolors were scattered around the house. How she disdained those little men who dared guard them, God’s anointed. But the guards respected her, feared her even. “The tsar, he was a simple man … not much like a tsar. But Alexandra Feodorovna was a severe lady and an absolutely pure tsaritsa!” (as their guards would later say).

As before she awaited her liberation. The holy man would protect them; it was no accident that his village had appeared on their journey. Indeed, legions of deliverers were already approaching. She knew that all Russia was in flames. In the north, the south, the east, and the west there was civil war. And in her correspondence