4. ST MARY’S INSTITUTE OF HISTORICAL RESEARCH INCIDENT REPORT
Competition entry by Jeff Hyler
The Lost Fabergé Egg
Extract from the Official (Impeccably Worded and Marginally Theatrical) Report of Ziggy Balthazar Fortescue-Smythe
History Department, St. Mary’s Institute of Historical Research
Subject: Observational Findings Regarding the lost Fabergé Egg Known as The Hen with Sapphire Pendant (1886)
Filed by: Z.B. Fortescue-Smythe, DPhil (Oxon), Owner of Several Excellent Waistcoats
Preliminary Context: The Investigator (That’s Me)
For the sake of proper archival transparency, I must clarify that I have been at St. Mary’s precisely one year. In that time, I have:
Survived three historically inconvenient weather systems.
Been nearly knighted in 17th-century Spain (long story).
Perfected the art of field-ready cravat deployment.
My academic focus is late-imperial symbolic transitions—how objects move from sentiment to propaganda to myth. In short, I study how small shiny things become Very Large Problems.
Thus, when Petrova arrived clutching a folder thick enough to stun livestock, the egg found its natural historian.
On Petrova
Anastasia Petrova is not dramatic. She is intense.
There is a difference.
She is a Moscow-trained historian with the posture of someone who has corrected senior academics in public and enjoyed it. She had spent six months dismantling Russian archival systems with the efficiency of a woman who does not lose to paperwork.
What she does not advertise—because she considers it academically vulgar—is that she is, by some distant and mildly convoluted branch of Baltic-German lineage, remotely related to Peter Carl Fabergé himself. Not close enough to inherit anything useful, mind you. More the sort of genealogical footnote that surfaces at weddings and makes elderly relatives nod meaningfully.
Still, one cannot entirely discount the poetry of it.
Somewhere in the 19th century, a cousin married another cousin, who relocated, misfiled a surname, and produced a line that eventually resulted in Anastasia Petrova standing in an English corridor demanding access to a missing Fabergé egg with the quiet authority of a woman whose ancestors may or may not have designed the thing.
When I delicately inquired whether this connection influenced her interest in the case, she fixed me with a look that could have reorganised the Napoleonic Wars.
“I am a historian,” she said coolly. “Not a sentimentalist.”
Which, of course, is precisely what someone with ancestral jewellery trauma would say.
I chose not to press the matter.
But I did note, privately, that when she first observed the egg in 1886—when it gleamed under candlelight in Maria Feodorovna’s hands—there was the faintest shift in her composure. Not pride. Not possession.
Recognition.
History is rarely inherited.
But occasionally, it circles back and taps you politely on the shoulder.
Petrova does not indulge speculation.
Petrova hunts it.
By the time she arrived in England, she had exhausted every archive in Moscow before surrendering to rumour. And she despises rumour.
Which made her arrival at an institution that occasionally bends chronology… delightful.
She expected dust.
She got me.
The Egg in Question
The “Hen with Sapphire Pendant,” crafted in 1886 by Peter Carl Fabergé.
A modest little object composed of gold, enamel, diamonds, and the subtle implication of imperial destiny.
Last recorded in the 1922 Kremlin Armoury inventory.
Then gone.
No revolutionaries waving it overhead.
No discreet Parisian auction.
No aristocrat funding a regrettable yacht purchase.
Which, frankly, feels off-brand for collapsing empires.
Historical Background (Because Context is Everything)
Originally commissioned by Alexander III as an Easter gift for Maria Feodorovna.
Early imperial eggs were expressions of personal devotion. Lavish, yes—but intimate. Alexander presents the egg. Maria laughs. The court politely pretends not to calculate its market value.
It is love—expressed in gold.
But then.
Nicholas II re-presents that same egg to Alexandra Feodorovna.
Not a new commission.
The same egg.
Now, as a man raised with both impeccable manners and a grandmother who weaponised etiquette, I must say: one does not re-gift heirloom jewellery unless fate is already drafting a memorandum.
And Rasputin was present.
History has never improved after the phrase “and Rasputin was present.”
Field Observation: 1886
The Winter Palace glittered.
Alexander gave the egg to Maria.
She was genuinely delighted. No symbolism yet. No tragic overlay. Just affection.
I recorded:
“Object currently operating at 100% marital charm.”
It was, for one luminous moment, simply a husband giving his wife something beautiful.
History had not yet attached weight.
Field Observation: The Re-Presentation: 1910
Years later.
Nicholas hands the egg to Alexandra.
“It belonged to my mother.”
Which is both romantic and faintly ominous.
The egg is no longer private. It is dynastic. It carries expectation.
Rasputin hovered nearby, radiating unsettling damp charisma.
Alexandra examined the sapphire pendant.
Nicholas stiffened.
“It was not my fault.”
Petrova initially interpreted this as defensive.
I suggested it sounded exhausted.
The burden of inheritance had already settled into the gold.
The egg had transformed—from love token to imperial continuity device.
Objects evolve. That is my speciality.
1922: The Disappearance That Wasn’t
Revolution sweeps through Russia like a catastrophic audit.
The egg appears in the Kremlin Armoury inventory.
A clerk amends the ledger.
Transferred. As directed by Czar Nicholas II prior to his abdication
We followed the paperwork. (Revolutions may burn palaces, but they file forms.)
The egg was concealed within a cathedral crypt. Hidden behind mortar.
Not stolen.
Protected.
Petrova stared at it in silence.
History had not discarded it.
Someone chose preservation over profit.
Which is, frankly, very moving and extremely inconvenient for dramatic lectures.
The Sapphire
The pendant was missing.
Further observation revealed that Alexandra, in captivity, removed the sapphire and pressed it into the hand of a loyal attendant.
“If anything survives, let it not carry all our sorrow.”
The egg and jewel were divided deliberately.
An act of defiance.
An act of mercy.
An act of symbolic weight redistribution.
I specialise in objects under pressure.
This was a masterclass.
On Petrova (Again)
Petrova does not cry.
She absorbs.
She stood very still after that final observation and said quietly:
“So, they refused to let it become only a tragedy.”
Precisely.
She came seeking theft.
She found agency.
She will publish in Moscow. She will present the egg as it deserves—beginning as an act of affection, evolving into inheritance, surviving revolution through deliberate human choice.
She will not mention our method.
Which is correct.
Final Reflection
The Hen with Sapphire Pendant began as love.
Became legacy.
Survived collapse.
Divided its burden.
All while being roughly the size of breakfast.
Which, in many ways, is the most concise summary of imperial Russia imaginable.
As for the sapphire?
Somewhere in Europe. Blue. Patient.
Possibly sewn into a hem.
Almost certainly alarming a tailor.
Filed respectfully,
With elegance, accuracy, and only moderate theatricality,
Ziggy Balthazar Fortescue-Smythe
Historian of Objects That Refuse to Behave
And Defender of Proper Jewelry Etiquette Across Centuries
Who also categorically does not re-gift jewelry
Even across centuries
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Beautifully describes the elusiveness of these Imperial eggs. Hard to believe that most of them survived a Russian revolution.
Love its style and content.