The Winter Palace (12 page)

“No,” I answered. Too quickly, perhaps.

I had seen enough to know that nothing changed with more swiftness than one’s position at court. There were others as eager as I once was to move up in the world. Girls who smiled like cats in the pantry, lingered when ordered to hurry, growing sloppy and careless with their chores.

I saw them enter the Chancellor’s room; I heard their stifled laughter. I saw them leave, smoothing the folds of their skirts. I saw them married off so that the Empress—dressed in a peasant costume—could dance at their weddings.

Another day passed with Princess Johanna still refusing to listen to the surgeons’ pleas and rejecting the slightest suggestion to send word of Sophie’s illness to the Empress. Her daughter was strong. She was young. It was nothing.

In her own chamber, adjacent to her daughter’s sickroom, Sophie’s mother, her face paint smeared on her cheeks, rubbed herself against a certain Valet de Chambre. Through a spying hole I could see his lips nuzzling her neck. I could hear the Princess giggle.

I waited until they had their fill. I waited for the words that followed.

“That peasant’s daughter, happiest in the company of servants … fat, vain, jealous … must be on her knees praying now … asking the Virgin which regiment to choose her new lover from: the Kalmyks or the Cossacks … both, I would say … to make up for the lost time.”

The floor squeaked; the door opened and closed.

In the dusty darkness of my hiding place I watched when, her lover gone, Princess Johanna sat at her escritoire and began writing, hastily, without a pause, filling one page, then another. I watched her when she paused, wiped her forehead, and yawned before she folded her letter and hid it.

A smile stuck to her lips when she rose and left the room. Moments later, I heard her voice next door, scolding the maids. The air was too stuffy. Sophie’s pillows were flat and stained. Why was the chamber pot still not emptied?

The flimsy escritoire yielded its secret to me without much fuss.
This is a barbarian land
, the Princess wrote, assuring the King of Prussia,
not the Empire it makes itself to be
.

I recalled how Monsieur Mardefeld, the Prussian Ambassador, his belly quaking, kissed Princess Johanna’s hand with far too much ardor. Was he passing these missives to the Prussian King?
Soon
, the letter promised,
very soon, I should be able to inform Your Majesty of many auspicious decisions taken as the result of my direct intervention
.

Who did foolish Johanna fancy herself to be?

I see indolence and chaos, a country weak and petulant, demanding constant praise
, she had written.

I slid the letter back into its hiding place. In the corridor, I could hear someone sobbing.

I shivered.

Her child might die at any moment, but all Princess Johanna would ever mourn would be her own deluded dreams.

“So our illustrious Princess fancies herself to be a Prussian spy?” the Chancellor said, laughing at what I had just told him.

He had taken to wearing shorter wigs that revealed the nape of his neck as he walked. His eyes were set in livid rings and his cheeks sagged.

“You’ve done well, Varvara.” The Chancellor clapped his hands and leaned back in his armchair.

I thought of Sophie, rigid, waxy-faced with pain, gulping air through parched lips. I thought of the surgeon’s warning, “Only bleeding can break the fever.”

I went to see the Grand Duke.

He was building a wooden fortress, one of the models from his Cabinet of Fortification, his aunt’s gift.

He had spread out the directions for putting the model together and was gluing two pieces of wood, concentrating on making them fit perfectly. The tip of his tongue was sticking out as he contemplated his next move.

“Your Highness. May I speak bluntly, like a soldier?” I asked.

“Speak.”

“If Princess Sophie dies, the Empress will not forgive Your Highness for not telling her.”

“She won’t die,” he said, shrugging his shoulders. “She is stronger than you think. She will outlive me, and she will outlive you.”

“What if the Empress asks why you did nothing to save her?”

He hesitated. He, too, lived in fear of Elizabeth’s fury.

I had brought paper, quills, and ink.

I had brought a sander to dry the ink.

He sat down with a loud sigh and wrote a letter to the Empress. He sealed it with red wax, carefully, right in the very center.

I thought of the Empress, in a simple black dress, her head covered with a kerchief, looking up at the gilded face of the Virgin. I thought of the messenger’s journey along the Yaroslavl’ road, to the gold-and-blue onion domes of the monastery.

I’m convinced that Princess Johanna’s obstinacy is preventing her daughter’s recovery
, the Grand Duke agreed to write.
That Sophie needs a true mother at her side
.

A lone horse left the stable, its rider a messenger who would reach the monastery before dawn. The Empress could be back in Moscow by evening the day after.

Hurry
, I muttered into the night.

Hurry
.

If anyone can still save her, it will be you
.

The Empress did arrive, in the dark of midnight, jaws wobbling with mad fury, a sharp foxy smell trailing her as she swept toward Sophie’s room.

“Out of my sight, you slut,” she hissed at Princess Johanna, who wisely retreated into her room. The maids ordered to bring her meals from the kitchen and empty her chamber pot would later laugh at how she jumped every time they knocked on the door.

Selfishness and greed surrounded her, the Empress kept screaming. Fear and ignorance. If it weren’t for the Grand Duke’s presence of mind, she would have come home to a funeral.

The palace surgeon pleaded that Princess Johanna had refused to let him examine the patient, forbade him to bleed her. “And that was enough to stop you?” the Empress snarled, before dismissing him from her service.

Count Lestocq removed the coverlet from Sophie’s bed. The Empress’s old lover, once a surgeon at the court of Empress Anne, had been one of the conspirators in Elizabeth’s bid for power. On the eve of the coup, Lestocq had shown the hesitant Elizabeth two cards, one with a crown and another with the gallows. “You can choose only one,” he had told her.

Count Lestocq took out his lancet with an ivory handle, first sharpened on a whetstone and then honed on a leather strap, like a razor. As soon as the blade released a stream of blood, the Princess stirred and opened her eyes.

For the next hour Elizabeth sat by Sophie’s side. She wiped her moist forehead. “I’m here,” she murmured. “I’ll take care of you now.”

When the footman announced the arrival of a Lutheran pastor, the Princess rose on her elbows and murmured something, her voice soft and pleading.

We all watched the Empress bend over Sophie to hear her words.

And then we saw her turn back to us, tears rolling down her cheeks.

“This child … this blessed child,” she said, her voice quivering, “has just asked me to send the Lutheran pastor away. She wants me to call for an Orthodox priest.”

On June 28, 1744, in Moscow, the whole court watched the Princess of Anhalt-Zerbst walk into the chapel of the Golovin Palace to be admitted to the Orthodox faith. In her scarlet gown trimmed with silver braid, with a simple white ribbon in her unpowdered hair, she looked both resplendent and girlish. The Empress herself had put a thick layer of rouge on her face and vermilion on her lips.

The Princess was still weakened by her illness, but her steps were resolute as she walked behind the Empress, behind her mother and the Grand Duke.

She recited the Creed from memory and made no mistakes. When the time came to say the words
Simvola very
—symbols of faith—she said them almost without a trace of an accent.

I heard sobs from the crowd when the Archbishop placed salt on her tongue and anointed her forehead, eyes, neck, throat, and hands with holy oil. She kissed his hand and waited for the Mass to be sung, for the body of Christ to be placed on her tongue in the Holy Communion.

When she turned back to face us, she was no longer Sophie, a petty German princess with darned stockings and threadbare linen in her trunks. She had become Catherine Alexeyevna, an Orthodox believer. The following day, in the Uspensky Cathedral, she would be officially betrothed to the Grand Duke.

I watched the Empress clasp Catherine to her chest, call her her own darling, the solace of her days, her precious girl, her own little doll.

Catherine Alexeyevna. Ekaterina. Katia. Katinka.

The Empress had renamed her after her own mother. Not even an echo of her Prussian father’s name was to weaken Elizabeth’s claim on this girl whom she had taken as her own, whose life she had saved.

I noted Princess Johanna’s bitter face.

The bells were ringing; the flares were lit. On the day of betrothal, there was dancing in the streets. On the imperial orders, oxen were roasted on giant spits and beer flowed from the fountains. When the night fell, fireworks exploded in giant wheels and cascades of falling stars. Russia abandoned herself to pleasure.

In the streets of Moscow, I saw fire-eaters with yellowed tongues and singed fingers. I saw a dancing bear with a bleeding bald patch on its nose. I saw a parrot pluck at its feathers, twittering and squawking when its master ground the hurdy-gurdy. I saw a girl not older than ten balance her lithe body on a rope stretching between two houses. The crowd below gasped when she teetered. There were shouts of joy in the streets.
Long live Peter, the Grand Duke of All the Russias! Long live Catherine, our Grand Duchess!

I bought a wooden bird that clapped its wings when it was pushed. I would leave it by Bairta’s bed, I thought, so that she wouldn’t even know where it came from, her going-away present. Catherine had asked the Empress to send the child home to her mother, and the Empress had agreed.

Chancellor Bestuzhev was one of the first to kiss the Grand Duchess’s hand and to congratulate the Grand Duke. “Your Majesty was right,” he said to the Empress. “She is
charmante
. There cannot be a better choice.”

Once, in the midst of the celebration, I saw Catherine slip out into the corridor lined with mirrored panels. Briefly she leaned against the wall and closed her eyes. When I reached her a few moments later, she was fogging the mirrored panel with her breath and tracing a letter
S
. Then she wiped it clean and breathed on the mirror again. She wrote a C in its place.

She is alive
, I thought.
She is safe. The Empress will see to that
.

This was all I could do for her, and I hoped it would be enough.

“Curious how willingly some people dig their own graves,” the Chancellor told me, lifting his eyes from the pile of papers.
The Empress listens to me
, Princess Johanna wrote in one of her silly letters.
The Empress agrees on my assessment of the country’s vital interests
.

I knew that the messenger of the Prussian Ambassador had been intercepted on his way to Berlin and that an offer of a few hundred rubles for his silence proved far more attractive than the frozen expanses of Siberia.

“Let her write.” The gilded chair creaked under the Chancellor’s growing bulk. “Let her think no one is watching. I want to know who visits her and where she goes.”

I felt his hand trace the line of my neck, linger on the collarbone, before sliding down toward my nipples.

My eyes were still the best, I thought. My ears could still hear what others would have missed. Had I not been at court for almost two years, surviving when others had perished?

I
n Moscow the Grand Duchess Catherine Alexeyevna was buying presents.

A length of muslin for Countess Rumyantseva; a marble egg on a golden base for her mother.

A china vase, a porcelain figurine of a ballet dancer. A necklace of peacock feathers. A set of birch boxes, one nestled inside the other, smelling of mushrooms when you opened the lid to sniff them. A riding habit with tapered coattails and long, cuffed sleeves.

A musket for the Duke, a model cannon, a set of plaster-of-paris trees to put outside the fortifications he was constructing in his room. A helmet stand.

They lined up outside her bedroom, the tradesmen of Moscow, their attendants loaded with bundles and crates. They showed her wooden dolls dressed in the latest Parisian fashions, tempted her with ostrich feathers, lace trimmings, gauzes, and bonnets. They pointed out that Empress Elizabeth thought the world of the Parisian milliners. They coaxed her to touch samples of fabrics, spoke of the luster of pearls, of the stately sheen of rubies, of how the glitter of sapphires around the neck is as subtle as the flutter of butterfly wings.

Didn’t the Grand Duke like dark Prussian blue more than any other color? they asked as they spread shimmering fabrics on her floor. They spoke of a little help every woman needed to entice a man—to conceal and reveal. They offered pomades and perfumes, waters to moisten the skin, essences of rose, narcissus, and orange blossom.

“The Russian people are watching, Your Highness. They must not see Your Highness in the same dress twice. Simple straight sleeves are no longer in fashion.”

She could not afford to be outshone or thought of as stingy. Her new friends were expecting tokens of her affection. Her servants’ loyalty, too, had to be bought. If she didn’t do it, someone else would.

They made her buy bags for needlework, powder puffs, beauty spots, snuffboxes, sachets of perfumes, and white gloves by the dozen. It was not extravagance, they argued. It was necessity. Was it true that at the Prussian court King Frederick measured the cheese left after supper and wrote the measurement down in his notebook? That he melted the ends of candles and sold them?

A costly purchase can entice a merchant to wait a few more weeks for his payment. One creditor can be paid with money borrowed from another—but this cannot go on forever.