The Journals

The story goes thus, Elizabeth the librarian has the journals of Rose Marie and of Nicholas, they came as a bequest of the woman Liz had come to think of as the dowager empress. The bequest doubled the size of the library. She had had more volunteers than she knew what to do with to help her catalogue the bequest. She understood when she heard that the rumor was the empress had hidden cash in her books asa hedge against the failure of banks. There had been a couple of days of enthusiastic participation, that dwindled away rapidly on the third and fourth days, since there had been no cash left in the books. It was three weeks since then and after steady effort of forty eight hours a week, nearly all the books had been shelved. There were still a number that would have to be catalogued at checkout, since getting them shelved had been the priority. Each uncatlogued book had note taped to it so that she could get them all catalogued whether they were checked out or not.

There were one dozen hand written journals tha she had held back, it wasn’t that she meant to keep them only for herself, it was a perquisite to be the first to read them, for her diligence in putting in the unpaid overtime to get the ‘new’ books out. She had read pioneer journals before and had found them quite interesting. Usually always kept by a woman, but not always. Very literate and yet fluent with the the frontier and its rawness and dangers.

It was the very first one that had grabbed her right away. The man claimed to be a banished Russian prince. It told of his arrival and successes and starting a family in England. In the second journal he told of his adventures with his brother Alexis, on a hunting expediton in America. He claimed to have made a pact with this brother, who was destined to become Alexander III Czar of All the Russias from 1881 to 1894. He was the father of the last Czar, Nicholas the II, 1868 - 1918, Czar 1896 - 1917. Please note the discrepancy of one year between AlexIII, 1894 and Nicholas II, 1896.

And further claimed to have part of a Russian treasure that he had later mixed with a small Masonic trove, plus the gold he had ammassed as speculator in some of the mines of Colorado.

Liz thought,fFor a Russian he has very good English and yet we have no examples of his Russian. But then at that time the three royal families in England, Germany and Russian were closely related and spoke the languages of the aforementioned countries as well as French. So it’s an 'I don’t know.'