The Winter Palace (16 page)

The Grand Duke’s face gradually lost some of its redness. But as the swelling subsided, one of his eyes seemed to hang lower than the other. It gave him an air of perpetual bewilderment. I tried not to think that it reminded me of a clown.

Catherine did not look away. She did not flinch when Peter complained that she was too skinny, that her chin was too pointed, or when he told her that the Princess of Courland was the prettiest woman he had ever seen.

She made him laugh with her cat concert. She drew for him the layout of Frederick of Prussia’s Berlin palace: the White Hall, the Golden Gallery, the Throne Room. She nodded and smiled when he said that the Prussian uniforms had better cuts and were made of sturdier cloth than Russian ones.

Her visits to the Grand Duke grew longer.

He let her read him his Holstein papers: leases about to expire, a table of fees for disposing of animal cadavers, petitions to lower the toll tax, to build another brewery. Gothic script, he claimed, was hard on his eyes. She offered to write his letters for him. All he would have to do was sign and seal them.

Women are clever that way, he said. They have more patience with what is trivial.

Once, when Catherine suggested he should cross himself more often during Mass—“To make sure the people see you do it, Peter. You’ll be their Emperor”—he agreed.

Hearing exchanges like this, I grew bolder. Elizabeth would not live forever. The Grand Duchess would one day be the Emperor’s wife.

With her I had a future.

By June, as the wedding preparations intensified, regular palace business came to a standstill. The Empress left documents unsigned; negotiations stalled, foreign diplomats awaited official audiences for weeks, without success. She had no time for such matters, the Empress responded in answer to the Chancellor’s pleas. There were guest lists to decide upon, seating arrangements to approve, the composition of corteges to discuss, favors to bestow or withhold. “Splendor is hard work,” the Empress said, sighing with exasperation.

I had never seen her in such high spirits. Russian steam
banya
replaced the portable baths. In the morning, she walked barefoot, swearing it improved her circulation. She insisted on keeping the palace windows open, even on the hottest of days, so her rooms held the permanent stink of cow dung from the Tsar’s meadow. The vases had to be filled with field flowers—wild daisies, goldenrod, chamomile—the scents, she said, of her childhood.

There was no escape from the planning frenzy. Soon the bushes and hedges around the palace were covered with linen bleaching and drying in the sun. From the kitchens came bad-tempered shouts, clanging of pots and saucepans. Maids rushed around with red-rimmed eyes and reddened hands. From the Oranienbaum orangery, gardeners sent blossoming lemon trees in thick silver pots to keep the palace air sweet.

The Empress’s cats were banished to the anterooms, for every inch of the Imperial Bedroom was covered with swatches of fabric, lace, ribbons, leather, skeins of wool. The five footmen the Empress often asked to sing for her were obliged to bring a long bench to stand on.

Pandoras modeling wedding clothes were presented and summarily rejected, as the new Chief Maid stood by, trembling with unease. Didn’t she know that frothy flounces were passé, too many jewels on silver cloth would make the gown stiff? Were there no softer hues of white? Watching her bow and withdraw, promising to do better next time, I, too, began to doubt if there was an outfit worthy of Elizabeth’s approval. But as the nights began to grow shorter, the Empress summoned Catherine and Peter to announce her decision.

Two big pandoras stood on the table. Catherine’s wore a gown of silver cloth, richly embroidered on all the seams and the hem. Over the dress flowed a cloak of web-thin lace. Peter’s pandora wore an ensemble of the same cloth, but its sword and trim glittered with diamonds. The Empress leaned the two dolls toward each other in an imitation of an embrace, beaming at the ducal pair.

Catherine touched the fabric of the dress, exclaimed at the intricate silver needlework. The Grand Duke poked his pandora stiffly with his finger.

“What do you think, Peter?” the Empress asked.

The Empress had ordered him to rub a concealing cream on his cheeks and forehead. From a distance it made his face look smooth enough, but up close the cream looked caked and crumbly, and it stained the collar of his jackets.

“Ask her,” he said, pointing at Catherine.

Catherine bowed. “The dress is beautiful, Your Highness. The most beautiful I’ve ever had.”

“The moon children,” the Empress said. “You will look like a pair of moon children.”

They both bowed and left the room together, holding hands.

The Empress sighed with pleasure, but my eyes were on the Chief Maid. She was wiping away a tear. There was nothing in her fresh, trim looks that resembled her predecessor’s, but suddenly I remembered Madame Kluge’s face, pale and terrified as the guards dragged her to the scaffold. To ward it off, I recalled the red welts on my shins, the lash of her derision, but these memories seemed like bits of fluff gathering under beds.

Her fall had been my gain and my warning. As soon as her back had healed well enough for her to sit up, she had been sent back to Zerbst. “Better than to Siberia,” the Chancellor had told me.

Later that day, in his own quarters, I heard the Grand Duke say that he wished his aunt would not insist on horn music for the wedding. Violins were far superior. He also wished Catherine smelled better. She should rinse her mouth with vodka, like he did.

Never mind
, I thought.

There will be a wedding
.

There will be a wedding
, I muttered, as I rushed about on one of my many errands. When the Empress called for me now, it was to look for some lost samples, or to write hastily dictated notes to her jeweler or perfumer. The pantry attendant had been caught stealing partridges. Half of a wine shipment had disappeared.

No task was too trivial for her. She demanded to see the polished tabletops, spotting scratches and chips that had to be filled. She decided which portraits needed to be washed with milk, which cracked windowpanes must be replaced. She interrogated the cooks, the wine merchants, the gardeners; assured herself that there would be no shortage of grapes, pineapples, oranges, or candied fruit. She fretted that the smokehouses were behind with their deliveries of smoked sturgeon and
balyk
. No foreign guest must have the slightest reason to deride Russian hospitality.

Not when the future Tsar married his bride.

Hurrying down the hallway, I heard the Chancellor’s voice behind me.

“There is something quite touching about young girls and weddings, Varvara, don’t you think?”

I stopped and turned toward him.

“The Grand Duchess is looking splendid these days,” he continued. I heard the sarcasm in his voice, a thin note of warning.

“Yes.”

“And the excitement has rubbed off on you,” he continued, blocking my way. “Well, well, who would have thought?”

He had not summoned me since the day of Johanna’s disgrace. Warding off unease, I pressed my lips together, sifting through what his words meant. But I knew. The spymaster of the Russian court had been watching me, and he was not pleased.

I made a step forward.

With a mock bow, he stepped aside to let me pass.

By July, the Empress sent for Catherine every morning, making her sit beside her and showering her with praise. She plaited colorful ribbons into her dark hair, made her try on a red
kokoshnik
adorned with fat pearls that had once belonged to her mother. She made her learn Russian dance steps and taste the dishes the cooks brought for approval. The Empress chose the church for the ceremony, the Church of Our Lady of Kazan, consecrated in the name of her favorite icon. The Kazan Madonna had healed the sick and turned near defeats into victories, crushing the enemies of Russia. Elizabeth craved miracles as much as she craved the embraces of her Palace Guards.

On the nights the Empress dismissed me, Catherine and I made plans. The Grand Duchess needed someone to trust.

She needed me.

“As soon as I’m married, I’ll ask for you,” Catherine told me. “I’ll say my eyes ache in the candlelight and that I need a reader who can read to me in French and in Russian.”

I nodded.

“As soon as I can, I’ll make you my maid-of-honor, Varenka. I don’t know how, but I will. We’ll always be together, then. You’ll always help me, won’t you?”

I pressed her hand to my lips.

Next door, Princess Johanna was ordering her maids around. “Not like that, you fool, be careful,” we heard through the thin wall.

I glanced at Catherine.

“Let’s not talk about her,” Catherine said, and looked away.

She was right, I decided. Her mother was her past, not her future. And the past mattered less and less.

Did I grow careless in these days? Heady with the thought that after the imperial wedding day I—a bookbinder’s daughter—might walk behind the Grand Duchess as one of her noble maids?

Did I become too caught up in Catherine’s joyful smiles and girlish fears?

“What will he do when we are left alone, Varenka?”

“Kiss you.”

“On the lips?”

“Yes.”

“And then?”

“On your breasts.”

“What do I have to do? Kiss him back?”

“Yes.”

“Will it hurt?”

“A kiss?”

“No, you know what! Maman says that it’ll hurt, but that it is my duty to endure it.”

“It might hurt.”

“Much?”

“Not much.”

It’ll be over quickly
, I thought, a groan of his pleasure, his release.

“Soon there’ll be a child there,” I said, gesturing at her belly. “And then nothing else will matter.”

In these nervous days Catherine burst into sobs for the most trivial of reasons—a torn ribbon, a broken tortoiseshell comb she had brought with her from Zerbst. Once she bit her hand so hard that she drew blood.

Diversion was the remedy I sought, a quick walk in the garden, faster and faster until we ran out of breath, a litter of kittens I found in the attic and brought down in my arms, the mother trailing me suspiciously as I put the warm wriggling bodies in Catherine’s lap.

I tried not to think how bemused the Chancellor’s smile looked.

On the wedding day, Friday, August 21, the Empress herself assisted with the bride’s makeup and wardrobe. She dabbed a touch of rouge on Catherine’s cheeks, placed the ducal crown on her freshly curled hair, and embraced her before the dressmaker was allowed to do the last fitting.

“A joyful day,” Elizabeth declared. “A new beginning.”

It was a day of trumpets and kettledrums, of one hundred and twenty coaches leaving the Winter Palace for the church. Palace Guards in rich new uniforms stood at attention. Cheers rose above the din of voices in the teeming crowds. Catherine and Peter rode with the Empress in the
berline
, which looked like a small castle. It was pulled by eight white horses in golden harnesses, tall feathers dancing in their manes.

The wedding was splendid. The priest chanted, “O Lord, our God, crown them with glory and honor,” as two glittering crowns were switched over the heads of the bride and groom, crowns that would be placed in a display case over their marriage bed. The rings of plain gold were blessed and exchanged.

The bride and groom fell to the floor to ask for the Empress’s blessing. The cannons roared, bells clanged in all the churches of St. Petersburg. Father Theodorsky spoke of the miracles of Providence that united the offspring of Anhalt and Holstein and would protect them as they reigned over the Russian people. The Chancellor of Russia offered his congratulations in a flowery speech, praising Elizabeth’s womanly intuition and evoking the legacy of the other Catherine Alexeyevna, Peter the Great’s beloved wife, the Empress of Russia. He spoke of the Grand Duke’s tenacity of spirit, a clear sign that the blood of the Romanovs was in Peter’s veins. This is a momentous day, the Chancellor said, one that filled him with pride and hope for Russia and profound gratitude to His Sovereign.

“Old flatterer,” the Empress muttered under her breath.

She was beaming.

There had been no omens. The groom was first to step on the piece of white cloth on which the couple were to stand. The rings did not fall to the floor; the flames of the candles did not falter and die.

From the flurry of balls and amusements that followed on that magical night, I recall an odd array of incidents—a drunken Frenchman insisting that in his travels he had seen a witch that would not burn, a morose-looking Austrian choking on greasy chunks of sausage, the stink of urine coming from the fireplace in the great hall, someone’s too eager hands groping my breasts, a cat chased by a squealing piglet across the courtyard.

I remember Catherine’s face, her eyes wide with belladonna, her gleaming white dress smudged with soot at the hem. She had a giddy bout of hiccups that wouldn’t go away. And I recall Peter’s huffy protestations when anyone mentioned his
understandable
impatience for Cupid’s den.

Princess Johanna made a show of praising everything around her in a loud voice. The wedding dress is breathtaking. The Empress is most merciful and kind. My daughter is in excellent hands. Russia is a country with a glorious future, a mighty Empire with no equal.

She was grateful, she repeated, for her time in Russia, but now she was looking forward to going back home.

The huge silver disk of the moon hung above the Neva, right behind the Petropavlovsky Fortress. The chill in the air was a faint reminder of the northern winds that would soon come. In the streets, jugglers had long exchanged balls and rings for flaming torches. Fireworks exploded with showers of sparks.

The two wedding crowns had been placed in a sturdy case and nailed to the wall above the marriage bed.

It was the Empress who led the newlyweds to their bridal chamber that night and closed the door.

In the morning, I snatched a bowl with ice from the chambermaid. I knocked softly on the door of the bridal chamber.