The Winter Palace (13 page)

“Bankers are a happy lot these days,” the Chancellor told me merrily. “And I was beginning to think that our little
Hausfrau
would put up more of a fight.”

Debts can so easily be turned into reproaches, an accusation that the Empress has been niggardly with her allowance. Catherine was betrothed, but she was still not the imperial bride.

I looked at the Grand Duchess and thought,
There is nothing else I can do for you
.

But then everything changed.

In the middle of December the court was in Khotilovo, on its way from Moscow to St. Petersburg, when the Grand Duke fainted during supper. In his room, revived with salts, he complained of pain in his legs and arms. At first everyone suspected measles, but by the time the fever and vomiting started, the doctors had no doubt. It was smallpox.

Empress Elizabeth, who had been traveling ahead and had reached St. Petersburg already, hurried back to her nephew’s side.

We all held our breaths.

The bedside bulletins from Khotilovo spoke of long, feverish nights and of the Crown Prince’s will to live. In churches all over Russia, priests led prayers for Peter Fyodorovich and the safety of the Empress. Like a true mother to her beloved sister’s child, the Empress nursed the Grand Duke herself, sitting by his bedside day and night. She washed the sores on his face and body. She fed him broth and strengthening tonics. She quieted his cries of pain.

Hushed voices in antechambers considered the possibilities. Death might reshuffle the cards. What would become of that other heir, Ivan VI, the child who had been condemned to a prison cell on the day the Russian daughter of Peter the Great seized the throne?

I heard it evoked often in those days, the memory of that November night three years before when the Palace Guards brought Princess Elizabeth back to the Winter Palace on a sleigh, beautiful like a Madonna from an icon, a Russian cross in her hands, a leather cuirass over her shoulders—triumphant but in need of protection, strong but in need of love. One by one, the soldiers had knelt before her, kissed the hem of her dress, sworn to protect her with their lives.

Elizabeth could have had Ivan killed then, but she didn’t. Perhaps for a reason?

As the Grand Duke was fighting for his life, the whispers grew. The Empress was almost thirty-five. There was still time before she would go through the change of life. What if she made Ivan her husband? Perhaps he was soft in the head, but he would be fit to father a child soon enough. A true successor to Peter the Great!

With the Empress and the Grand Duke away from the Winter Palace, official duties were suspended, plans put on hold. Doors once flung open for visitors were kept shut; no music poured from opened windows. In the receiving room, cats were the only guests. They lounged on the ottomans or chased one another across the floor.

Idle footmen and maids sat for hours on the steps of the service corridors, chatting and giggling, scarcely bothering to make room for those who wanted to pass. By the stables, guards gathered to play cards. Fortified with good snuff and shots of vodka, they tried to pinch or fondle any palace girl who walked past.

Everyone waited.

Catherine and her mother had not been given apartments at the Winter Palace but had to take a house on Millionnaya Street. They were fast becoming insignificant, worthy of no more than a passing whisper. If the Grand Duke died, the Empress would have no use of them. The house was two-story, its windows always closed and curtains drawn. To the annoyance of Herr Leibnitz, a German cloth merchant, and the families of Guard officers who lived nearby, day after day creditors banged on the door, cursing their own foolishness in trusting these foreigners, complaining loudly how the mighty of this world did not care to pay their debts.

I thought of the two bees locked in the piece of amber Catherine had given me.
We are both foreigners here
, she had said.

She soon would be gone. What harm was there in showing her some kindness?

I walked to the house on Millionnaya Street and rang the bell. The day was cold and windy, threatening more snow. A sleigh passed by, its bells jingling. A narrow footpath cleared of ice had been sprinkled with sand and ashes.

The maid who asked me to follow her could not resist asking if I’d heard anything about the Grand Duchess moving back to the palace.

I shook my head. The hall smelled of wood smoke and mold.

“This way,” the maid said, showing me to a small parlor on the first floor.

The room seemed quite dark with its wooden paneling, its front windows hung with velvet curtains. Cheap cotton velvet, I noted, not silk. The only light came from a narrow window facing the backyard with its bare trees. A tile stove took up the whole corner of the room, radiating a pleasant heat. Beside a clavichord, on a side table I spotted a pile of books in plain bindings. When I opened them, they turned out to be tales of pirates, shipwrecks, and kidnappings.

I took it all in. The armchair with frayed covers, a watery mirror, a sewing box with a lacquered lid on which a beautiful firebird glittered, a woolen shawl draped over the chair by the window, two crossed sabers hanging on the wall above a bearskin. From the corridor came the noise of clanking pots, a patter of feet, the soapy smell of boiling laundry.

I recalled the house on Vasilevsky Island, Papa’s measured steps, Mama’s voice cheerful and brisk. The memory was so vivid that I could almost inch into her arms.

The door opened quite abruptly. In this house a visitor was clearly a rare treat.

“Oh, it’s you,” Princess Johanna said when she walked into the room. She didn’t try to hide her disappointment. “I hope I’m not intruding,” I said.

Catherine was right behind her, her hair hastily coiffed, half hidden under a lace cap. She smiled and made a step toward me, but Princess Johanna held out her hand to stop her. Did she think me common? I wondered. Or merely of no use to them?

“Any change in the Grand Duke’s condition?” Princess Johanna asked.

I repeated the words of the latest health bulletin: There had been another bleeding, but the fever had not come down. “All in God’s hands,” I said.

Catherine lowered her head.

“All in God’s hands,” Princess Johanna repeated.

The maid came with refreshments, slices of fruitcake and hot tea with plum preserves but no sugar. The Princess of Anhalt-Zerbst did not think me that important.

It was an awkward visit. Princess Johanna launched into an elaborate tale of her connections with the House of Brunswick, while Catherine kept motioning for me to have more tea and cake. Her fingernails, I noticed, had been chewed to the quick.

“Are you making progress with Russian, Your Highness?” I asked her.

“Not much,” she replied. “I have so few people to talk to.”

“Nonsense,” her mother snapped. “My daughter has made great progress.”

“Father Semyon is praying for Your Highness every day,” I said, keeping my eyes on Catherine. For her sake, I tried to sound cheerful as I recalled who at the palace inquired about her health and circumstances. The list was not that long, but Catherine blushed with pleasure.

Princess Johanna rose. She was losing patience.

I, too, rose, ready to leave.

“Could Varvara Nikolayevna come back tomorrow?” Catherine asked, giving her mother a pleading look.

“If you wish, Sophie,” the Princess replied. Her eyes slid over me, unseeing. “I don’t see what harm it could do now.”

I was already downstairs when I heard hurried steps and felt Catherine’s arms lock around my waist.

“Your Highness,” I gasped.

“Please don’t mind Maman,” Catherine said, her eyes fixed on mine, a frightened bird. “Please.”

I felt her slender body quiver against mine. I heard a sob.

“Will you come back, please?”

“Your Highness—” I began, but she stopped me.

“Just Catherine,” she said.

“Yes,” I told her. “I’ll come back.”

In the next weeks, every morning I prepared detailed summaries of newspaper articles Professor Stehlin had marked for me the day before, so that I could read them to the Grand Duke once he returned to his apartment at the Winter Palace. By mid-January as the summaries were piling up, unread, I began to arrange them into folders according to subject matter. The Grand Duke’s study, I vowed, would always be ready for the imperial lessons. I kept the quills sharpened, the inkwells full. I carefully dusted Peter’s model soldiers, making sure I did not upset their positions on the plaster-of-paris battlefield.

And all along I thought of Catherine’s joy at seeing me.

“Let’s find out if you look good in blue,” she would say when I arrived, making me try on one of her dresses, rushing to and fro through the room, in search of ribbons and shawls to adorn it.

Resigned to my presence at her daughter’s side, Princess Johanna left us alone. So I have many memories of the two of us in that dark-paneled parlor, two girls trying to ignore what we could not control. We would skip along the corridor, giggling, until the maid chastised us for our foolishness. We would curl up on an ottoman, arms pillowing our heads, whispering in the deepening dusk of a winter afternoon.

Tell me the funniest thing you have ever done
.

And the dumbest
.

And the thing that you would like to happen again and again
.

And the best. And the worst
.

But there were times when Catherine would grow solemn. “Tell me he’ll live, Varenka,” she would urge me. “Tell me now, quickly.”

“He will.”

I put all the hope I had into these words to brush aside her terror.

It was so good to talk like that, sitting side by side on the squeaky ottoman, sipping hot tea, eating cucumbers smeared with honey, her favorite dish. Like sisters.

“I’ve never had a home, Varenka, a true home where I felt I could be myself. I’ve always had to think how others see me.

“I’m always a guest, Varenka. A Lutheran among Lutherans, an Orthodox among the Orthodox. German among Germans, Russian among Russians. But who am I when I’m alone? I don’t know anymore.”

I turned my face away to hide my tears.

“Varenka?” she said, taking hold of my hand.

“I had a home once,” I began.

As the health bulletins from Khotilovo became shorter and grimmer, I heard Catherine’s name mentioned in dismissive tones. In the corridors of the Winter Palace, the courtiers recalled the days of Empress Anne, spoke of the hated rule of the Germans. The time when an old noble might find himself ordered to cluck like a hen. Or, like Prince Galitsin, be forced to marry a Kalmyk maid and spend his wedding night in a palace made of ice.

Why would this German princess be any different?

Catherine knew of the rumors. “They don’t want me here, do they?” she asked me.

“The Russians don’t give their trust very freely,” I replied. “They want to watch you first for a long time. They want to be sure.”

“I think of him so often,” she said. “He liked running with me, all the way across the meadow. He didn’t even mind when I won. But now, even if he doesn’t die …”

She took a deep breath before bursting into tears. I drew closer and held her, but the sobs did not stop.

Did the Grand Duke consider closing his eyes and taking his leave in these dark Khotilovo days? Did Elizabeth, always by his side, trick him into returning to life? Did she soften his fear when he woke from nightmares in which his father was pushing him away or his Eutin tutor was whipping him and forcing him to kneel on hard peas? Did she convince him that he could still be loved?

“You have to eat,” Elizabeth coaxed him, a spoonful at a time, her ears deaf to Count Razumovsky’s pleas that she must spare herself, deaf even to the warnings about what smallpox scars do to a woman’s skin.

“One more sip, darling.”

“One more bite.”

“My beloved child.”

“My falcon.”

If he had died then, in Khotilovo, in his aunt’s arms, there would have been a grand state funeral and a public mourning. The whole of Russia would have imagined what the good Peter would have done for his subjects and for the glory of the Empire. His name would be lovingly evoked for years to come.

A carriage would have taken Catherine and her mother back to Anhalt-Zerbst, across the plains of Russia, loaded with presents and memories of splendor that had passed her by. If Peter had died, where would Catherine be now? Married to some princeling, an empress of a crumbling castle and a herd of cows? And where would I be, without her?

But Peter didn’t die.

By the end of January, six weeks after his collapse, the Grand Duke made his first wobbly steps, each of them—the Empress declared—a proof of God’s mercy. She held Peter’s hand when the surgeon removed the bandages from his face. She promised him that the ugly red patches would soon fade.

In the first days of February, the Grand Duke was allowed to return to St. Petersburg and slowly resume some of his duties.
The Crown Prince of Russia has fought bravely
, the last official bulletin on the state of his health read,
like the most valiant of soldiers. He battled the illness with fierce determination and courage until the Lord granted him victory
.

But victory is not everything. It’s just as crucial to consider what has been won.

When Grand Duke Peter returned to the Winter Palace, the Empress ordered Professor Stehlin to put aside all the foreign newspapers and military history books at once. “Let Varvara read him something light,” she commanded. “Something to take his mind away from death.”

In the palace library, I pushed aside the French novels and history books. No star-crossed lovers, no Tacitus, no stories of ancient Rome. The Grand Duke was not to think of plots and murders. I chose the travelers’ tales for him. Sir John Mandeville’s stories from the islands of Andaman. Stories of people without heads, who have eyes in each shoulder, and those whose upper lips are so big that when they sleep in the sun they cover their faces with them.

For many evenings, I sat in the corner of his bedroom, illuminated by a single candle, reading aloud while Peter rested on his bed. The curtains were always drawn; not even moonlight was allowed to come in from the outside. Every time I lifted my eyes away from the book, I could barely see his lanky body sprawled in the thick darkness, his face covered with a gauze kerchief. If I stopped reading, he banged his fist and demanded I continue.