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As head of this circle of ascetic followers the monk had, with the connivance of Badmayev the herbalist, invented an expedient to deaden the flesh so as to render it benumbed as with cocaine. Hundreds of weak-minded women were flocking about him.

As for poor Yakowleff, he was, as Rasputin had plotted, prosecuted in London for fraud, and sentenced at the Old Bailey to a term of imprisonment. As the months went on, in the first half of 1914, I noticed that the acquaintanceship between Rasputin and his well-paid chemist-friend, Badmayev, became closer.

I knew of that miracle, an outrageous fraud which had been perpetrated upon an assembly of ignorant peasants by means of a clever conjuring trick in which Rasputin's friend, the chemist Badmayev, and another, had assisted. Stürmer had been laughing heartily over it at Rasputin's house on the previous night. "God hath given me strength," replied the monk simply, and with much humbleness.

I left Peterhof with Rasputin at about three o'clock that afternoon, and on our return to the Poltavskaya I spoke over the telephone, at the monk's orders, to Doctor Badmayev, the expert herbalist who prepared those secret drugs with which Madame Vyrubova regularly doped the little Tsarevitch, keeping him in a constant state of ill-health and in such a condition that he puzzled the most noted physicians in Europe.

This, on being examined, was discovered to be a most subtle and dangerous poison one evidently prepared by that diabolical poisoner, Badmayev. The young man had been forced by his master to swallow some, and had died in great agony.

Badmayev held the formula of the poisonous concoction which at intervals Anna Vyrubova secretly introduced into the food of the Tsarevitch, causing the poor lad those mysterious illnesses which were puzzling the physicians of Europe. That some fresh plot of a diabolical nature was in progress I felt confident, but of its actual motive I could ascertain nothing.

Stürmer, Fredericks, Protopopoff, the poison-monger Badmayev, Anna Vyrubova, and half-a-dozen others, who formed the dark and sinister forces that were rapidly hurling Russia to her doom, were that day as anxious and terrified as the Empress herself.

Badmayev, a small, ferret-eyed man, his features of Tartar cast, came and dined with us, after which Rasputin signed a cheque for twenty-eight thousand roubles, a sum to which "the doctor" was entitled under an agreement. Well did I know that the sum in question was payment for his active assistance in supplying certain drugs of which the monk in turn declared that he himself held the formula.