The Winter Palace (19 page)

I made sure Egor’s uniforms were freshly brushed and mended, his boots shining, piles of white starched handkerchiefs always at the ready. I demanded to see the plates the cook swore were broken and had to be replaced. I chastised a maid for leaving ashes strewn around the fireplace. I sent back soup that was too salty, roast that was too dry. My new servants watched me uneasily, mourning the easygoing life they had had before my arrival, with a master who ate what they served and never questioned their industriousness. “Mistress is coming,” I heard them whisper in the kitchen, scattering to their duties with exaggerated eagerness.

The woman with a lazy eye who had greeted me with bread and salt on my wedding day was not a cook. Her name was Masha, and she was our housekeeper, the only one of our servants who faced me without apprehension. Judging by her wrinkled face, she had to be well past fifty, though no one knew her exact age. “Mashenka,
dushenka
,” Egor teased her, planting a loud kiss on her cheek every time she warned him he was ruining his health by drinking too much or cutting down on his sleep. “Don’t listen to me, and you will listen to a whip,” Masha grumbled, as if Egor were still a reckless boy climbing fences, upsetting cucumber frames, chasing partridges through the fields.

Egor’s father had found her years ago on some deserted northern road, a girl alone, starved to the bone, clad only in filthy rags. “I wouldn’t have lived to see the next day,” Masha told me, still awed by the miracle of the stranger’s mercy.

Master covered her with his own coat and took her home. Mistress, big with the child who would become my husband, fed her warm gruel and chicken broth. Thick and yellow with silky grease.

It takes a long time to get the chill out of the bones.

“Leave me alone, Masha,” I’d say as she trailed me with her stories.

But she wouldn’t.

“It’s not good to sleep so much, Varvara Nikolayevna.”

“Don’t stare into mirrors. It’s easy to get lost in there.”

In the world in which I’d once lived, rife with traps and lures, I had lingered in doorways and had not turned away from black cats. I’d paid no heed to the last thought that came just before sneezing. Had I been stubborn? Foolish? Or fatally careless?

I tried to hide from Masha. In my bedroom, I stuffed a handkerchief into a keyhole. I closed my ears to the sound of her shuffling feet. But nothing I did would silence the sharp clucks of her warnings.

The guards were known all over Russia for wild parties and gambling for dizzying stakes. Faro was their favorite game. When his emerald-encrusted snuffbox was pawned, I knew Egor had lost at cards. When he brought it back, I knew that he had won. There had been duels and drunken games of daring, a horse race that almost cost him a mare. I didn’t inquire where he spent his days or nights. I didn’t mind smelling other women on him. If you don’t love, you cannot be betrayed.

“Don’t you care,
kison’ka
?” Egor asked once.

“Would it change anything if I did?” I shot back.

Here a memory comes, and refuses to leave. Of Egor sitting on a kitchen stool, hunched up, a thick blanket over his broad shoulders. Of water dripping from his hair and his nose, a murky puddle gathering at his bare feet. Of Masha calling on the servants to stoke the fire and fetch a basin with hot water.

“Like a little boy … just like Old Master … act first, think later,” Masha grumbled as she was drying Egor’s hair with a towel, bemoaning the good undershirt, now torn, the town uniform soiled. The missing silver button.

“I’m not sick, Mashenka,” my husband insisted. “Just a bit wet.”

“What happened to you?” I gasped. “What kind of foolishness—?”

I didn’t finish. Masha shot a warning look at me with her good eye.
This is not the time for interrogations. The body has to warm up through and through
.

I didn’t give up.

The details came one by one, between hurried sips of scalding borscht. A walk by the river, a wager that grew. A fellow guard who said no one would swim to Vasilevsky Island …

Watch me
, my husband had said.

“Look at this,
kison’ka
.” Waving aside Masha’s protests, Egor demanded his shako. Inside, there was a leather purse. Bulky, heavy with his winnings.

There it was again, the conviction in his voice. A few more months was all he needed. We would leave this rented apartment, the smoky air of the city. Buy a country estate. Small at first, perhaps, but with a pond, and a meadow for the horses to graze. He already had an eye on a steed he would buy. The owner was broke. He would give him a good price.

In the memory that haunts me, the kitchen smells of wet wool and tar. His undershirt is drying by the stove. Egor looks at me, his eyes gleaming.

“There will be mushrooms to pick,
kison’ka
. Partridges to shoot. Masha could have her kitchen garden.”

“And how will you pay for it all?” I retort as I turn away. “With your gambling? Or do you still count on the Empress to open the door for you at night?”

In Russia one could acquire nobility, if one rose far enough through military or service ranks. It was Egor’s father who earned the right to be addressed as Your Nobleness. But a son of a provincial official could be only a
new
noble. No matter how high the gambling stakes, how loud the denunciations of heirs with ancient names and crumbling fortunes, in the corridors of the Winter Palace, the
old
nobles would still put him in his place.

Is this what Egor had thought of when he’d first seen me at the Empress’s side? A wife who knew the palace ways? A wife who would help him assure that his son—if God granted him one—wouldn’t have to defend his honor with fights?

I could’ve asked him, but such thoughts did not cross my mind then.

How tedious I thought it all, instead. Visits to pay and receive. Name days to remember. Soirees and concerts to attend. The dragging talks of rank and four-horse carriages, days reduced to bone-china cups steaming with tea, or watermelon ice melting on hot summer days. What did they know about me? What could they tell me, these “new” friends who praised the cut of my dresses and asked what the Empress was like when she was in her own chambers, away from the eyes of the court?

I answered their questions vaguely. If I could, I slipped away from these gatherings, pleading a fainting spell, or a migraine headache. If I couldn’t, I listened and kept silent until the whispers around me thinned and chipped away.

This is not the life I wished for
, I thought.
But nothing will change it
.

I had not forgotten Catherine.

When Masha arrived from the Tartar market, I followed her into the kitchen, praising the cut of the roast, the clarity of broth simmering on the stove. I asked for the servants’ gossip. Masha’s lazy eye almost disappeared inside her skull as she looked at me, but she did not disappoint.

There was trouble in the palace, she told me. Too many people were sniffing around the Grand Duchess’s bed. Didn’t they know that a watched pot never boils? Why not leave the young ones alone for a while?

They were under guard, Catherine and Peter. Their wing of the palace was like a prison. The Choglokovs, Masha said, were their jailers. Madame and Monsieur Choglokov, high and mighty now. No one can get past those two to the ducal couple. Acting as if they were royalty themselves, though everyone knows how they got their position. With a hefty bribe and their eight children. As if the Grand Duchess could get pregnant by watching a bunch of snotty brats.

At the Tartar market, Masha told me, there had been much laughter at the expense of the Choglokovs. Monsieur pinching every servant girl, while Madame is assuring everyone how her husband sees nobody but her.

At the end of each day the Choglokovs escorted Catherine and Peter into their bedroom and locked the door. Until morning.

“They say it is the Chancellor’s doing,” Masha said.

I didn’t doubt it. I could imagine his canny arguments. “Constant proximity, Your Highness. No distractions. Daily reminders of the Young Court’s supreme duty to their Sovereign. Your Highness has already done enough.”

Having exerted her will, I knew, the Empress would turn her mind to other things. Once again, pleasure would consume her—a new dance step, a shipment of French silks, a new Favorite. The “moon children” would be allowed to visit her from time to time, dressed in their finery, to declare their gratitude in front of the whole court before being dismissed.

I imagined Catherine alone with her husband, watching the Grand Duke arrange his soldiers into formations or reading to him, perhaps, just the way I used to from the book of Russian fortresses. Were the Choglokovs really that strict in following the Chancellor’s orders, I wondered, or would they take a letter to her if I offered them a bribe? Twice I even started to write to the Grand Duchess, just a few words of encouragement, but they both ended in the fire, these notes of mine. I was too aware of the many eyes that would read them before hers.

On Sunday, November 3, I woke up with a feeling that a warm stream was seeping out of me. I reached down between my legs. My hand came away crimson with blood. Then came a sharp spasm of pain. I screamed for Masha, but by the time she came running, all she could do was yank the drenched sheets from under me and take them away. Somewhere in them was the tiny body of a son who did not wish to be born.

“Let me see him,” I begged Masha, but she refused. It was not good for a mother to see a fetus yet unformed. “Nothing wrong with him,” she assured me, when she saw my frightened eyes. “Just not ready for this world.”

But I would not be soothed. As I lay feverish, racked by pain, it came back, the memory of the Kunstkamera monsters in Peter the Great’s museum.
Why did you come
? their voices taunted me.
To spy on us? To see what is not meant to be seen?

Laudanum didn’t help. I lost weight and grew pale, for I would not eat. The servants tiptoed around me with grim faces, crossing themselves as if I were already dead. Masha tried to force some bitter-tasting teas into me, muttering that I needed to cleanse my blood, but I spat them out.

I do not recall much of the weeks that followed. Whispers and distant screams, and a wormwood taste on my tongue. Once it seemed that my mother was sitting by the window, bent over her embroidery hoop. She turned her face to me, but when I lifted myself up from my pillows to reach out to her, I saw she had Madame Kluge’s eyes.

I heard Egor’s voice in the corridor, ordering the servants. I heard his hurried steps and the sound of doors closing. Once I woke to the feeling of his presence. He was sitting on the edge of our bed, his fingers stroking my hand, but I kept my eyes closed until he sighed and went away.

It was Masha who placed the birch box into my hands. “Master said to give it to you,” she told me. “The Grand Duchess herself sent it.”

“Catherine?” I whispered through parched lips.

On the Empress’s birthday, when the official banquet ended, the Grand Duchess had walked up to Master Egor, Masha said, and had asked about me. When he told her I was not well, she gave him this gift to take to me.

Tears stung my eyes.

“Master said you would like it,” Masha continued. She must have noticed how I frowned when she mentioned Egor, for she adjusted the nightcap on my head and clucked her tongue, her lazy eye retreating into her skull.

I struggled to gather my thoughts, to break through the fog that muddled them. The Empress’s birthday meant that it was December already, that I had been ill for a whole month. Hoping to amuse me, Masha repeated what she had heard of the banquet. The Empress, the Grand Duchess, and the Grand Duke had been seated at the head of the table like three jewels in a crown from which four long tassels trailed, each leading to one of the Guard regiments. The table was adorned with confections made entirely out of sugar, gates opening to wide sugary avenues, wondrous miniature palaces complete with terraces and gardens. “Who gets to eat it afterward?” she wondered, licking her lips. “The Empress herself?”

I held Catherine’s gift in my hands. My fingers took pleasure in the smoothness of birch bark, in the shape of a flowery design pressed into it. With Masha’s help I sat up. I never would have thought sitting could require so much strength. I felt another welt of pain in my belly and suddenly remembered my dead baby brother, buried in some Warsaw cemetery.
No one
, I thought,
will light a candle for him on All Souls’ Day, and my own unformed child will not even have a grave
.

“Open it,” Masha urged.

I opened the birch box and breathed in the scent of wild mushrooms, the scent of an autumn I had no memory of because of my illness. Outside, the snow was piling up along the streets, carriages had long been replaced by sleighs. I thought longingly of a ride through icy, silent fields.

Inside the box there were sharpened quills and a crystal inkwell with a silver lid. Catherine’s mute invitation for me to write to her.

“I’m thirsty,” I said to Masha. “Bring me some hot tea.”

Masha turned her beaming face away, to the corner, where a Holy Icon hung, and crossed herself, bending to touch the floor.

“Praised be the Lord’s mercy,” she said.

For the next months I drank Masha’s concoctions without protest; I began eating, and my gaunt cheeks filled with flesh. On the first days of the new year, 1746, I was able to stand up and walk in my room. In April, in the Kazan cathedral, the Empress would celebrate the fifth anniversary of her coronation. Catherine and the Grand Duke would surely be there. I was the wife of a Palace Guard, entitled to witness such a grand occasion.

If I was strong enough to stand through the Orthodox Mass.

In March, Anna Leopoldovna, the mother of the imprisoned baby Emperor, died. The news was repeated in hushed voices, for any mention of Ivan VI’s name was forbidden. “Prisoner Number One,” I heard him called, or simply “Ivanushka,” though even these references were dangerous. Only months before, a wine merchant had been arrested when a dismissed servant denounced him for hoarding old coins with Ivan’s image.