"I am staying at the Hotel Chatham, and have to go to London to-morrow," she told me. "Krivochein has left the Chatham with his wife, and I am to follow." "The Father and Azef have gone round to the Chatham," I said. "They are evidently hoping to find you there." "Ah! Then I will return and see if they are there," she said, and, rising, she left. I did not see her again. She went to London next day, according to Azef's instructions, and as a French governess took a room in that quiet hotel near Victoria Station--the room wherein she was afterwards found dead. At the time I had no knowledge of the tragedy, but later on I learned from Rasputin's own lips, while in one of his drunken, boastful moods, how he had introduced into the bottle of aspirin a single tabloid of one of Badmayev's secret poisons, made up to resemble exactly the other tabloids. With Azef he had gone to the Hotel Chatham on purpose to extract from her dressing-case her own bottle of aspirin--which she had purchased on the previous day from the same chemist in the Avenue de l'Opera--and replace it by the one containing the fatal dose. The latter she had swallowed in ignorance because of a headache, death ensuing in a few seconds, and the post-mortem revealed nothing. "Ah! my dear Feodor, that girl knew far too much! Besides, we discovered that, though she had been sent by our friend Azef to assist two of our friends to bring 'Krivochein's' career to a sudden end, she had actually warned him, so that he has succeeded in escaping to America to avoid us!" CHAPTER VII SCANDAL AND BLACKMAIL AS the power of the monk Rasputin increased, so also my own social position became advanced, until as the "saint's" confidential secretary, and therefore as one who had his ear, I became on friendly terms with half the nobility of Petrograd. The pious fraud declared to true believers, "If you do not heed me, then God will abandon you." Leading as he was, freely and openly, a life of shameless debauchery, wholesale blackmail and political intrigue, it is marvellous how his power became so unlimited. To those who disbelieved in his doctrine or in his divinity, he simply smiled evilly, and said: "If you fail to do my bidding you will be punished by my friends." Such warning was sufficient. Everyone knew that Rasputin's power was already, in 1912, greater than that of the Tsar Nicholas himself. Day after day ambitious men called at the house in the Gorokhovaya, to which we had now moved, all of them anxious for ministerial and clerical appointments, which he obtained for them at prices fixed by himself. The highest in the land bowed before the rascal, while any man who dared to belittle him, or attempt to thwart his evil designs, was at once removed from office. Through Madame Vyrubova, who received her share of the spoils and acted upon the Empress, Rasputin reigned as Tsar, the Emperor doing little but sign his name to documents placed before him.