Curse Not the King (11 page)

“I love you more than ever, more than it is wise for any man to love a woman. In our meeting place I lived for the first time; here at Tsarskoë Selo, you have shown me that God's paradise exists on earth.…”

The phrases of flattery and passion ran on; he reflected quite impersonally that the writer had put into words all those emotions that he himself had never been able to express in speech or script. The signature at the end of the first letter stared up at him, black and bold and flourishing. “Your lover, André.”

The piece of paper slipped from his fingers and floated to the ground; he sat quite still, the blood roaring in his head, the thunderous pulsing of his own heartbeat reverberating in his ears.

“Your lover, André … Scarcely three hours since I left your arms …”

In the letter it mentioned Tsarskoë Selo. He and Natalie had gone there for the first time a few months after their marriage. He remembered clearly that his young wife had not been well during their stay … No, he corrected himself, that was the second time, when she was pregnant; she was always ailing then and calling for him. The letter could not possibly refer to that period. It must have been the first visit, when they were newly married. And she
was
ill, he said to himself slowly; she had headaches and used to send him away for hours on end.…

Very deliberately, he picked up the second letter and saw that it, too, was written from the Empress's Summer Palace.

“Natalia …”

The name occurred every few lines, that pretty diminutive that he used to her himself, written by the hand of another, spoken by alien lips. The hand that drove the pen had touched her also, for the writer dwelt upon some intimacies that left no doubt about the fact. Intimacies received and given.

Phrases of passion that were repeated, incidents recalled, laughter and tenderness, he read them all, letter after letter, noting how the places changed from Tsarskoë Selo to the Winter Palace at Petersburg and to Moscow, and that quite often the notes were written in answer to ones which had been sent. He could not see these, he could only imagine their contents, and already his imagination was supplying him with pictures. Natalie Alexeievna, beautiful and frail, lying in another's arms, doing and saying the things which the writer described so vividly; he saw the pavilion at Tsarskoë Selo, saw his wife and his equerry, one dead, the other out of reach, saw them as lovers and remembered how often she must have come to him, warm from the adulterer's embrace, and submitted unwillingly to his own.

They had often talked of him, it seemed. The handsome equerry quoted her sayings on the subject, recording her complaints of mental boredom and physical distaste. And at the end, when discovery and danger threatened, he cautioned his mistress to bear with “the monster”, since both their lives depended on his blind stupidity.

Paul sat very still and stared in front of him, the letters scattered at his feet. He felt curiously numb and disembodied as if nothing of himself remained but that strange bursting in his head.

His gentle, chaste Natalie, his companion, the mainspring of his life. His lips parted in a ghastly smile of irony. His idol had just been proved a slut, a liar, the mistress of a coarse young libertine. She had betrayed him and brought him to the verge of imprisonment and even death to save herself and Rasumovsky. And together they had laughed at him behind his back.

With difficulty he stood up and walked towards a large mirror that hung from the opposite wall. For some moments he regarded his reflection, his brain quite cool, his thoughts collected. He saw the short body and broad shoulders; they reminded him suddenly of an ape, an ape in satin knee-breeches and coat, with a grotesque flattened face, from which the great blue eyes stared back at him, terrible in their pain and humanity.

“She never loved you,” he said aloud. “Never. She hated you. Look at yourself, fool, and see how she must have hated you.…”

The lackeys on duty outside his door heard a sharp, tormented cry, followed by the shattering fall of glass.

When they entered, they saw their master kneeling by a chair, sobbing, with his arms over his head, and the blood running from a lacerated hand.

The wall mirror was smashed to splinters by a titanic blow from a madman's fist.

Three months later a crowd of several thousand lined the streets of Petersburg, watching the passing of a long procession of carriages and troops.

At the head of the line, preceded by an escort of Imperial Cavalry, the royal coach drove through the city, moving with the slow solemnity of a great gilded coffin, and he who sat in it remained as still and pallid as a corpse.

The people, cheering and shouting their loyalty, struggled to glimpse that silent figure in the foremost carriage, while lines of soldiers thrust them back with blows. The cries of the populace penetrated to the Empress herself, in the Summer Palace, so that she rose hurriedly from her desk and banged the window down. He was already out of sight; pray God, she thought angrily, he would soon be beyond earshot, and with that reflection turned once more to the affairs of State. The noise which distracted Catherine beat against the closed windows of the royal coach, but Paul Petrovitch sat upright, staring straight ahead of him, deaf to the tumult and blind to the sea of waving hands.

As always, the people acclaimed him; but for the first time he was unmoved. His expression was fixed and vacant, only the eyes glowed with life in his sallow face. He looked twice his twenty-one years.

He, whose wife was scarcely cold in her grave, was setting out publicly to bring home a second bride.

For some weeks after the revelation of Rasumovsky's letters, he had been ill with shock, physically ill, and tormented by sleeplessness and fits of weeping that gave place to periods of silent apathy.

Catherine's messengers had come to him during that time, demanding of the wretched victim whether he were prepared to obey his mother and take another wife.

“I will marry as soon as she pleases,” he told them, and turning to the wall, he wept.

The Czarevitch was sick, they murmured to their mistress, but he was ready to do as he was told. Before them all, the Empress slipped her hand through Potemkin's arm and smiled her thanks upon him. Then she sent her physicians to her son with orders to rouse him and expedite his recovery. There was to be no malingering, she ordered sharply, and no soft treatment. The second Grand Duchess was already chosen, Princess Sophia of Würtemberg, and the Empress wished her son to be married again before the year was out.

True to instructions, the doctors did their best. Paul was bled and physicked unmercifully, then the refuge of his rooms was finally forbidden him so that he must exercise and appear in public. His bodily symptoms disappeared, he obeyed promptly and without demur, and the snort-sighted among those who persecuted him assured the Empress that his stubborn will was broken.

There was a time in that period of his personal agony when all hope seemed dead within him, and with it the strength to resist his enemies.

Hour by hour, and day by day, Paul thought of Natalie and writhed with shame and fury. Phrases from those letters pursued him like hidden voices, whispering the hated words of love, conjuring up the visions which proved his short idyll of domestic joy to have been a loathsome farce. He had believed in her affection, trusted her word, defended her chastity with his own life in the delusion that in spite of his ugliness, she had found it possible to love him.

That faith had given him supreme happiness, confidence and health. His love for Natalie, and her imagined feelings in return, had been slowly dispelling the dark mental shadows of his appalling childhood and letting in the light of sanity and balance. Now, with one blow, Potemkin's action brought the precarious structure crashing into ruin.

The knowledge of deceit and inferiority stabbed at Paul's sensibilities like a sword, and his mind convulsed in the effort to withdraw from that probing point. But the wound was made, deep and quivering, and in the healing of that awful scar all that was sane and gentle was becoming warped.

The day came when no more tears of grief would flow, when the black indifference of despair gave place to a dull glow of inward fury, shot with streaks of murderous rage. Paul said to himself that he felt no sorrow, that even personal shame had vanished. An enormous anger possessed him, a sense of grievance so intense that only physical violence could bring relief.

Natalie Alexeievna. He said that dreaded name aloud, and clenched his fists, watching the scars on his knuckles whiten on the drawn flesh, and regretted bitterly that she had died the honourable death of motherhood when, had she lived, he might have strangled her.

And often when the image in his mind changed from his wife into his mother, and the avenging husband became the injured son, the ending to the fantasy was just the same.

Kindness was an error, mercy a mistake, and Paul resolved grimly that he would dispense with both these failings. If one wished to triumph in this world, even to survive, it was necessary to use the weapons of the enemy: harshness and fear.

The thought of marriage almost amused him and with a terrible, warped curiosity he asked about his future bride.

“Was she dark or fair,” he questioned. They told him she was very fair and, satisfied, he smiled in his strained mirthless way. The first, the darling of his heart, had been so small and dark, with rivers of shining black hair that used to be his joy. Obediently he set out for Germany to bring her back.

He sat in the carriage, oblivious to the cheering crowds, clasping a miniature in his hands, a small faded picture in a frame from which the diamonds had been prised out years before, resurrected from the hidden drawer in which he kept his boyhood treasures. Peter the Third, Czar and Autocrat of all the Russias, betrayed by his wife and put to death at her behest.… It was the only portrait of his father that the Czarevitch possessed, and in the course of the first day's journey he looked at it earnestly.

“I will love what my father loved; I will live as he lived, and wait until the day comes when I can avenge us both.”

Several times he said this to himself, until the interior of the coach grew dim and the miniature became a blur in the fading light. Then Paul hid it in his coat, where it pressed against his heart, deriving a strange comfort from the knowledge that this dear talisman travelled with him and that though the living had betrayed and persecuted him, he was not alone, never alone again, for he had the company of the dead which no one could take from him.

A month later Paul and his suite crossed the frontier into Germany and proceeded to Berlin, where the King of Prussia, Frederick, who was already styled the Great, waited to receive them.

The meeting took place in Frederick's own apartments, and Catherine's greatest enemy rose from his chair and extended both hands in welcome to her son.

The King was taller than Paul; he was thin and upright, his features were sharp and his pale eyes cold and expressionless. Only his mouth belied the impression of freezing militarism given by his bearing and the tight Prussian uniform he wore. It was a sensitive mouth and it betrayed the nature of the man, for it was sad and twisted, a mouth that had more often been distorted by tears than lifted in laughter. Paul knew little about the Prussian monarch except that Catherine hated him, and since his view of all men was determined by their relations with his mother, he had come prepared to like him. He also knew that this strange, watchful man had been his dead father's idol, and that link with the past had determined him to enlist Frederick as his friend.

They sat down, one on each side of an immense fireplace eyeing each other over cups of wine, exchanging formalities of conversation. The King was a shrewd judge of human nature, and he very quickly sensed that for all his outward air of pride, the ugly Czarevitch was lonely, unhappy and pitifully insecure. Frederick watched him closely, noting that his fingers strayed continuously to the magnificent jewel in his cravat or smoothed imaginary wrinkles out of his brocade sleeve, and that his left cheek was twitching painfully.

The nervous habits were signs that the King recognized only too well, and while he asked Paul polite questions about his mother's health, he remembered the reports of bad feeling which existed between them, remembered also that the boy was said to revere his father's memory to the point of worship.

Frederick's judgment of Peter the Third as a foolish degenerate and a coward, who had lost his throne and his life through his own fault, was an opinion that he reserved from Paul, for he was very anxious to secure his confidence.

The tale of Natalie's adultery had reached his ears, and he was careful to avoid the subject. Instead, he wasted no time in probing Paul and finding out his interests. To his astonishment he discovered that they were very like his own.

The Czarevitch's face lit up at the mention of the Prussian army; his stiff shyness vanished in a glow of enthusiasm and a flood of questions. For almost two hours they talked soldiering and discussed different systems of drill and general manœuvring, until Paul's angry criticism of the Russian methods gave the King the opening that he had been waiting for.

“Your father had already begun the reorganization of the Imperial Regiments when he died,” he said calmly, and noted the deep flush that rose in his listener's sallow cheeks. “I always considered him a man of much ability. He would have been a great soldier. Had he lived …”

Paul leant forward, gripping the arms of his chair.

“I never really knew my father, Sire. I scarcely saw him and he died when I was nine years old. I, too, think he would have been the kind of sovereign that my country needs.…”

Frederick read the mingled grief and resentment in his face, and guessed that there was no need of subtlety.

“Though the Empress is German born, she seems to prefer the old Slavic system of sovereignty. She has destroyed all your father's reforms, and reduced the order he was trying to create into the former chaos. I have tried to advise her, but unfortunately she listens to nothing but her own will. And the counsel of this General Potemkin … Does she allow you any part in the government?”