The Winter Palace (17 page)

“Come in,” I heard.

Catherine was sitting on the floor by the bed. Through the opening of her cambric nightshift I saw the flash of white skin and the pinkish round of her nipple. There was no sign of Peter.

“What happened?” I asked.

She shook her head.

“I saw a rat,” she said, pointing at the corner near the fireplace. “It came from there.”

“It’s gone now,” I said. I took a chunk of ice and rubbed the skin beneath her swollen eyes. The ice had begun to melt, and a frigid stream made its way down my sleeve.

“I know,” Catherine said and sighed. She did not move.

I summoned the lively chatter that came so easy to me in those days. I rattled on about Countess Golovina stumbling on the dance floor, the beatific look on old Count Shuvalov’s face every time he caught a glimpse of a shapely ankle.

I let my voice sparkle.

I laughed at my own jokes.

She was not listening.

“It’s like a stone here,” she said, pointing to her chest. Her voice was anguished. She sniffed her arm, her sleeves, the inside of her nightshift at the cleavage. She looked up at me then, her face nakedly hurt.

I knelt beside her and took her strong, white hand, adorned now with her wedding ring, in my own hand.

“He had a flask of vodka hidden in the folds of his dressing gown. He gave me some to drink. He said that a wife had to listen to her husband, that if on a bright day a husband said to his wife, ‘Look how dark it is,’ she should say, ‘So dark that I cannot see a thing.’ And if, a moment later, he said, ‘But it is bright daylight,’ she should say, ‘Indeed, how silly of me not to have noticed.’ Then he drank more and more until he fell asleep.”

“Did he touch you?”

“No.”

“Kiss you?”

“No.”

“Not even when he woke up?”

“No. I don’t even know when he left.”

“Has anyone come in here today?”

“Countess Rumyantseva and Princess Galitsina. They took the sheets away.”

I lifted the coverlet. The mattress was bare.

She began to cry.

“It’s nothing,” I said, lifting her up from the floor, making her sit on the edge of the bed. “It happens all the time.”

“How do you know?” she wept.

“Men get scared. They grow soft and uneasy and ashamed of their own weakness. It is just one night. It doesn’t matter,” I told her. “It means nothing.”

At the time, I even believed it myself.

Princess Johanna left three days later, at dawn. I passed by her room and saw the doors opened wide. The room was empty but for a braid of straw, a few broken plates, and some torn lace that even the maids did not want.

Later, I would learn that the Empress gave Johanna a letter to the King of Prussia that demanded the immediate recall of the Prussian Ambassador. Rumor had it that in Berlin a Russian spy was to be beheaded. In St. Petersburg a Prussian agent was being sent to Siberia. As the Chancellor had wanted, there would be no more talk of closeness between Prussia and Russia.

Princess Johanna never said goodbye to her daughter. In a parting note she wrote that she didn’t wish to upset a happy bride with the sadness of separation.

Catherine read the note and threw it into the fire.

“Race me, Varenka,” she said, and ran down the corridor.

I followed.

A
s soon as the excitement of the imperial wedding died out, the Empress lapsed back into her irritable moods. Once again everything was an omen, and every omen was about her. A rattling window, a dead bird falling down a smoking chimney, a riding cloak that had gone missing. Hunts were called off, gowns sent back, questions dismissed with sulky shrugs. Only the cats made her face brighten. She carried them in her arms, called them “her babies,” tossed balls of yarn for them to chase. “You love me for myself alone,” I had heard her croon into Pushok’s silky fur.

The palace rumors swelled. Peter had called his aunt a mare in heat. Then a fat bitch. Words of little wit or imagination, but what can be expected from a half-witted Crown Prince who likes to pour his drinks over his servants’ heads? “Does she think I am her caged monkey?” he’d screamed. He brought a box of his model soldiers to the bedroom. He lectured Catherine on the intricacies of some battle for three hours. He fell asleep drunk.

A month after the wedding, the Grand Duchess was still a virgin.

The Empress was not amused. “Heartless ingratitude after all I had done,” she screamed. “I’ve been too good, too indulgent.”

They were the Chancellor’s words, I suspected, the sweet fannings of revenge, sticky and poisonous. In the Imperial Bedroom I spotted traces of his daily presence: Montpellier gloves scented with nutmeg, his brass spectacles forgotten on the pile of dispatches the Empress ordered me to read to her. Each time he walked into the Empress’s room, his eyes slid over me, narrowing slightly, as if I were made of mist and merely obscured his view.

He had still not sent for me. He no longer wished me to touch him. He no longer cared for my stories or for the news I brought to him.

What of it
? I thought.

If fear hovered in my defiance, I pushed it away.

The Empress still sent for me. I was still Catherine’s only friend.

To the Empress I pointed out how diligent the ducal couple had been with their official duties. I praised Peter’s patience and Catherine’s grace. In the past weeks they had been asked to become godparents, witnesses at weddings, guests at churchings and consecrations.

The Empress shrugged and pouted her lips.

“Did he come to her last night, Varvara?”

“Yes, Your Highness.”

“Did he get into her bed?”

“Yes.”

“So why didn’t he lie with her? What did she do to turn him away?”

“She is shy,” I said.

“Shy?” the Empress repeated, before waving me away. On her lips the word was laced with derision.

Outside, in the corridor, the guards were changing their stations. They were from the Preobrazhensky Regiment; their leafy-green coats were faced with red. The smells of snuff, vodka, and sweat floated through the air. Heels clicked, sabers clanked. Silver bandoliers glittered.

I hurried past, unseeing.

“Countess Rumyantseva wants to know why. What can I tell her, Varenka?”

Catherine was nibbling on a blade of grass. We sat in the palace garden, where I hoped no one could overhear our words.

The previous night, the Grand Duke had come to bed very late. He’d brushed her off when she tried to touch him. Then he turned his back on her and fell asleep.

“Was he drunk again?” I asked.

“A bit,” Catherine said, tossing the blade of grass down. Her eyes, I saw, were rimmed with red.

Everyone was plying her with advice. Countess Rumyantseva insisted she open her nightdress more, to show her breasts. The imperial perfumer swore by the essences of cinnamon and sandalwood. Only smell, he insisted, was capable of evoking turbulent reactions in the soul. Even the maids dared to suggest she drink tea brewed from dried oat straw.

It was time to stop all this talk.

I slipped a vial of dove’s blood into Catherine’s hand, the kind one can purchase for a few kopecks in the back alleys of St. Petersburg. A simple deception, a ruse to buy her time, to send the imperial tongues on another mission.

“Drink some wine with him, make him laugh,” I told her. “When he falls asleep, smear that blood on the sheets.”

“But he will know—” Catherine protested.

“He won’t be sure. And he won’t say anything. He, too, wants to be left alone.”

This is what they both needed, I believed then. A respite from expectations, from the eyes that always watched. All the Empress ever cared about were her own wishes, and now she wished for an heir to her throne. It didn’t matter how she got what she wanted. It mattered only that she did.

“Russia does not forget those who’ve trusted her, Varvara,” the Empress said when I entered the Imperial Bedroom that night and curtsied. “I remember your father’s wish.”

She was not alone. The Chancellor sat in a gilded armchair by the window, holding a roll of papers, striking it against his open palm. He turned his face toward me, giving me a bewildered smile, as if amused at a puppy trying to bite his shoe. I felt the muscles in my jaw clench.

The Empress ran her hand through her hair. It was still thinning, in spite of the birch-bark rinses and a hundred brushstrokes each morning and night. I could smell cherry brandy on her breath. The candle beside her flickered.

My heart was racing. Was it possible the Empress would make me Catherine’s maid-of-honor?

“It’s not good for a woman to be alone, Varvara.”

As soon as she said these words, the Chancellor clapped his hands.

I still didn’t guess, not even when I saw the door open and a young man come in, his leafy-green jacket lined with scarlet. A Palace Guard.

“What a fetching couple you two’ll make.” The Empress’s voice seemed to come from far away, a woman in another room talking to herself.

This is what a cornered animal must feel, the unforgiving harshness of rock at the dead end of the tunnel. Even though it is still there, the fluttering moment of disbelief that this is indeed the end. Even though the blood is still racing. Even though the mind still hopes for miracles—an opening in the wall, the hunter suddenly struck dead.

Egor Dmitryevich Malikin, Second Lieutenant in the Preobrazhensky Regiment, was to be my husband. “A great honor,” the Empress continued, certain of my gratitude. I was to marry one of the proud guards of Peter the Great, the elite corps with two-rank seniority over the regular army, the makers of the Tsars who had brought Elizabeth to the pinnacle of power.

A noble, just like my mother had wished.

“He is an orphan, like you. Look at him, Varvara.”

I did look. At the mop of his black hair, the thick brows, the row of even teeth his smile revealed. One gloved hand rested on his hip, cradling a plumed shako; the other one, bare, hung loosely. I raged at the thought of this hand touching me. I imagined my escape, dressing in men’s clothes, sneaking out of the palace, away from the marriage I had not sought and did not wish. But alone and on the run, a man, like a woman, would end up dead or a slave to masters yet unknown.

“A handsome man, Varvara, wouldn’t you say?” Elizabeth asked.

“Yes, Your Highness.”

From the murky shadows came a tapping sound. The Chancellor was drumming a cheerful beat on his knee with his rolled papers. Some memories do not want to recede:
I protect and provide, Varvara, you listen and obey.… Lie to everyone else, but never to me
.

I cast my eyes down. I tried to make my face show nothing at all.

“You don’t remember me?” I heard Egor’s voice. Too eager, too pleased.

“No,” I said, although of course I had seen him at the palace. Like the other guards, he had teased me and tried to stop me on my way. Why hadn’t I seen the danger in the grip of his fingers on my wrist when I’d passed him by? “You won’t escape me that easily,” he had once shouted after me.

So wrapped up was I with the lives of others that in the corridors of the Winter Palace I had forgotten the choking grip of revenge.

Clad in benevolence, aimed at the heart. This was my punishment. Punishment worthy of a spymaster, punishment for which I had to thank the Empress on my knees. Now I had to praise my mistress’s generosity, call her my Benefactress, Russia’s “Little Mother” who knows best what is good for those entrusted into her care.

A woman is a vessel to be filled. Her husband’s responsibility if she threatens to believe herself important, clever, irreplaceable.

I burned with anger. Anger at myself, at my own foolish complacency. How easy it must have been for the Chancellor to make Elizabeth do his bidding! A few words of doubt dropped in passing to feed her suspicion, a little sigh of warning to make it linger. Isn’t the world rife with ingratitude, Your Highness? Isn’t loyalty fickle, spoiled by betrayal?

Everyone knew how the Empress liked to marry off her maids, even if only to dance at their weddings. In a simple peasant dress, just like her own mother, who had once bewitched a mighty Tsar, Elizabeth was happiest in the soldiers’ barracks, among dairymaids and stable boys.

If I had paid heed, I could’ve at least fought.

It was too late now. I was to be Egor’s reward for services to the Empress. “Exemplary services,” she had said. There was no chink in her words, no secret passage I could sneak through to escape.

“A son, Varvara.” Elizabeth held out a Holy Icon for me to kiss. “Come back here with a son nine months from your wedding day.”

My hands had gone cold, for it was only at that moment that I realized I would have to leave the palace.

Leave Catherine.

How stiff my lips were when I shaped the words of thanks. How weak my knees when I knelt beside Egor Malikin to thank the Empress and to receive her blessing.

In one of the books in the Imperial Library, I found a traveler’s account of an Indian king much skilled in the arts of treachery and deception. From among his subjects, the king selected men who looked like simpletons or could pretend they were deaf or blind. A partially clouded eye was a treasure, a maimed earlobe an asset, reassuring to those who were too foolish to look beyond appearances. Trained in the ancient skills of remembering, these spies were ordered to frequent shops, places of amusement, pleasure gardens and parks. They were to live among beggars and vagabonds, to watch and take note of all the weaknesses of the human heart.

The Indian king also sent out holy spies, trained in enduring hunger and thirst. Taking residence on the outskirts of the city, these men fasted and prayed, read palms, and offered their blessings. To help their fame spread, other spies disguised as merchants and rich men begged for their advice and left praising their insight and divine powers. Soon people thronged to have their fortunes told and to confess their innermost secrets to the king’s spies. What better way, the barbarian monarch bragged, to know who among his subjects were the breeders of discontent?