The Winter Palace (24 page)

On our birthdays and name days, Christmases and first days of a new year, Monsieur Bernardi brought gifts from the Grand Duchess—a pendant for me, an icon on a silver chain for Darya, a pair of earrings, an amber brooch set in gold. As if these were not enough, whenever I brought any jewelry for cleaning or repairs, the jeweler brushed off my requests for a bill with a gruff “Settled already.”

Please refrain, dear friend, from all these expressions of gratitude, for they only embarrass me
, Catherine wrote when I protested.
Let me be the judge of what I owe you
.

Nothing, no hopeful accounts of court amusements, no generosity so touchingly offered, could hide Catherine’s sorrow. Seven years after the imperial wedding, there was still no sign of an heir.

Regimental affairs began to occupy Egor more and more, peacemaking, resolving disputes that threatened to erupt and soil the regimental honor. Yet another of his officers was nursing duel wounds, the result of some drunken spat. Pointless, Egor called it, vile.

He had expected another promotion, another rise through the ranks, but it never came. He was still Lieutenant Captain while younger men were getting ahead of him, drawing on ancient family connections; once again, the old nobles had overtaken the new.

I’d watch my husband make another circle around the room, the heels of his boots drumming. The cane chair would crackle dangerously when he finally sat down.

“Angry, Papa?” Darya would ask, knowing he would protest with great force, and that soon he would sing her one of the funny songs he began making up for her then.

My little heart is full of mud
.
My little hand is full of sand
.
My little bed is full of lead
.
But I have daisies on my head
.

I have received an unexpected gift. I wish I could talk to you about it, but you’ll hear the rumors soon enough
.

In St. Petersburg’s salons, the mention of Sergey Saltykov’s name brought knowing looks. He was the master of card tricks, I heard, the sleight of hand, the cull, the break, the color change. Under Saltykov’s fingers a mixed-up deck straightened itself out, the same card was revealed no matter where the deck was cut.

St. Petersburg hostesses were all eager to have him as their guest. A few months before, the Divine Sergey had astounded the court by marrying one of the Empress’s maids-of-honor. He’d seen her on a garden swing and had been struck with desire. She rejected his advances again and again, until he grew desperate and proposed marriage. A month after the wedding, after some tearful scenes, the new bride had been dispatched to the Saltykov family estate. “Have I changed so much?” the rumormongers reported she asked. “What do I lack that others have?”

You let him win
, I thought.
A foolish mistake
.

I saw him many a time in those days. He was a coveted guest of honor at St. Petersburg salons, Serge with his hooded eyes, the raven-black thick hair he refused to cover with a wig, his husky voice. When he entered, the maids moved faster, tea was sweeter, the sour-cherry preserves he liked miraculously appeared on the tea tray.

He always greeted me with much flourish, inquired about my health. “What grace, what poise,” he murmured, planting a kiss on my hand. I took it for what it was. Serge Saltykov wished to remain in Egor’s good graces. Any man-about-town was in dire need of my husband’s betting tips.

At first Serge had declared himself merely the Grand Duke’s friend. The Empress, he bragged, thought him good company for her nephew, saying that he, a Russian, was “far better than Peter’s Holsteiner rabble.” This is why she ordered Bestuzhev to cast aside his rules and let the Young Court receive Sergey freely.

Saltykov was penniless, and yet in the spring of 1752 he never arrived in Oranienbaum without presents: an embroidered kerchief for Madame Choglokova, a box of sugared almonds for the Choglokovs’ children, a case of French wine for the Grand Duke, a book for the Grand Duchess.

I am being terribly flattered, and I do not believe a word of what I hear
, Catherine wrote,
but anything brings excitement into my days
.

Serge’s victories were small but significant, a deepening trail in Catherine’s letters. The Choglokovs invited him to yet another evening at their hunting lodge. They made him stay overnight, for it started to rain. They insisted Catherine join their guest, to take her mind off all that tedious reading.

She refused to walk with him in the garden, and he wished to know why. Was it because of Madame Saltykova, whom he had not seen for months? Was Catherine jealous, perhaps, and why was that? She wasn’t? So why was she blushing?

Then came a reckless horse ride through the fields. A ride where Catherine got so far ahead of him, he had to whip his horse to catch up, drawing blood from his mare’s flanks.

I’d guessed it, by then. There had been too many signs.

“It’s either freezing your ass in army tents or comforting a lonely
Hausfrau
,” I heard Serge tell Egor at one of the soirees. “Can
you
think of other ways?”

Someone must have whispered to the Empress that the Grand Duke had had more than enough time already, that perhaps it was her nephew, not Catherine, who was barren. The Chancellor, I decided, for the Shuvalovs would not wish for such a turn of events. Was Saltykov the only one Elizabeth considered for the honor of fathering the Imperial Heir? Did she order him on his mission herself?

A son by any means, I thought, was Catherine’s only salvation.

Soon the Grand Duchess was writing to me less often, and the letters—when they finally arrived—were brief and vague.
I want to live so much
, she wrote in one of them.
I want to run until I’m too tired to make another step
.

My husband had claimed a small alcove next to our bedroom, and each morning I would see him there, flinching as he lifted a thick metal pole above his shoulders or, his fists padded with layers of quilted cloth, punched a bulky leather bag, training for one of the boxing matches that had become such a rage.

The smell of disappointment around Egor lingered like the sharp odor of singed hair. “Waste,” he’d grumble. “So much damned waste.”

How tired anger made him look, hardening his features, sharpening his gaze.

Flattery got you everywhere
, I heard my husband’s voice boom at the nightly faro games. Not merit and hard work. Russia had once again given in to confidence tricks. To lust and wanton greed. In Russia, one could be a hanger-on, but one could do nothing of importance.

Sheer indolence kills the soul
.

What Russia needs is a war
.

The words I still hear mixed with the sounds of clinking glass and cards flipping, lingering like the smell of cheap tallow candles and sour breaths.

Nations steeped in idle luxury are like cattle led meekly to slaughter.… Nations need exertion, iron will.… War is like bloodletting … indispensable … our only cure
.

There is another memory from this spring, of Darya trying to slip her small feet into Egor’s boots.

“Do you want to be a soldier when you grow up?” I teased her, laughingly, but she didn’t laugh back.

“Yes,” she answered. “Like Papa.”

“But you cannot be a soldier, Darenka,” I protested. “You have to grow up to be a lady.”

She frowned as though I had given her a puzzle to solve.

“When?” she demanded to know, her hands pulling at the fringes of her dress. “Tomorrow?”

“No. Not tomorrow. Tomorrow you’ll still be a child.”

“After tomorrow?” There was a wistfulness in her voice that rang like the chimes of Russian bells.

I smoothed Darenka’s hair, plaited and tied with colorful ribbons. Curly like mine but black like Egor’s. Her body seemed to me so beautifully unfinished, so full of possibilities. No matter how I longed to return to the palace, I knew it would grieve me to clothe my daughter in a stiff court dress and watch her sink into a curtsy.

In the first days of April 1752 a case of claret arrived on our doorstep, the burlap cover soaked with the last of the melting winter snow. A gift from the Chancellor of Russia, the messenger said, when the maids carried it into the kitchen.

The following day the Chancellor’s footman delivered a note.

“It’s urgent,” he told Masha.

I broke the seal immediately.

The Chancellor hoped his humble gift of wine had not been an imposition. There were matters he wished to discuss with me, matters of grave importance concerning someone I cared about. If I agreed, the footman who delivered the note would take me to him right away. His carriage was parked outside my door.

I felt a flare of anger. I was no longer a palace girl, or his tongue. What gave him the right to think that I would drop everything and rush to hear what he had to say?

I held the note in my hand, thick vellum paper with watermarks and gilded edges. The night before, I’d heard Egor denounce the growing Prussian appetite for conquest. The King of Prussia had already swallowed Silesia. Where would he go next before he would have to be stopped? Vienna? Warsaw? St. Petersburg itself?

Someone you care about
.

Outside the window the air was misty, the sky leaden with heavy, dark clouds. Over the winter the cherry tree had lost half of its branches. I wondered if it would flower this year at all.

I told Masha to get my hooded overcoat and my gloves.

Chancellor Bestuzhev of Russia was waiting in a private woodpaneled room of an osteria by the Fontanka River, an aging man with sour breath who couldn’t hide his smile of triumph.

“What is this about?” I blurted, as he stood to greet me.

I felt his hand on my elbow. Firm but with an unmistakable tremor in it. Behind the closed door, a fiddler plucked the strings of his fiddle. A girl’s voice intoned a song about a mother mourning her soldier son.

“A prediction, Madame Malikina,” Bestuzhev said, motioning for me to sit. “Mine, of course. Soon our lives will take a different route.”

I lowered myself into the chair.

“The Shuvalovs are already celebrating their victory over me,” the Chancellor continued. “They forget that a wise Russian proverb warns against selling the skin of a bear that is still roaming the forest.”

I stirred, impatient, thinking,
Why does no one but you matter
?

“Listen, Varvara Nikolayevna. Big changes are coming. Big, sweeping changes of constellations that cannot be ignored, not if you still care about where Catherine’s star could be heading. And you do care, don’t you?”

He didn’t wait for my answer. He knew I cared.

“The Empress is not well,” he told me. “This is still a secret but not for long. The Grand Duke is nothing but a foolish child, too easily manipulated. The Shuvalovs are already making him dance to their tune. Theirs is a gloriously simple plan: Peter will rule Russia, and they will rule Peter. And Catherine? The fools think she is irrelevant.”

The door opened. A skinny boy walked in with a tray, placing it on the table, the cups filled with tea rattling on their saucers. I tried to catch his eye as he served us, but he kept staring at his own hands. In the front room the girl had finished her song and the fiddler had been joined by two more.

The Chancellor waved our server away. I stirred the steaming tea, watching the chunks of sugar dissolve. I took the first sip.

“Saltykov did what he was told,” he continued. “Catherine is carrying an heir. The Empress is quite willing to settle for Serge’s bastard. ‘Not the first one in our family,’ were her words. ‘Saltykov is good Russian stock.’ ”

My expression must have darkened, for the Chancellor paused, delighted with the effect his words had on me. My thoughts whirled. So what I’d sensed had happened. Catherine was carrying her lover’s child. But why didn’t she write to me about it? Did she not trust me? How long had she known?

The Chancellor’s voice broke through these thoughts. He wanted me back at the palace. Not among the officers’ wives, but at the Empress’s side again, whispering into her ear, planting seeds of doubt about the Shuvalovs. He needed me in Catherine’s rooms, making the Grand Duchess see how Chancellor Bestuzhev could be of service to the mother of a future Tsar.

“Obscurity is not for you, Varvara Nikolayevna. The game has resumed. And the stakes are even higher now. Isn’t your husband anxious to rise through the ranks? Buy an estate? Surely he must be thinking of your lovely daughter’s future.”

I tried to ignore the sarcasm in his voice.

“Are you listening, Varvara Nikolayevna?”

The clock on the mantel softly struck two o’clock.

I asked, “Why would the Empress want me back at the palace?”

“Because you shall tell her something she doesn’t know. Something the wife of a guard could easily have overheard.”

“What would that be?”

I studied his face, animated with a radiance that shed years off his life.

“Saltykov swore the Grand Duchess was as good as a virgin.”

I must have gasped, for he put his finger on his lips.

“The Grand Duke never got deep enough inside her, and there was no ejaculation. His instrument is bent like a crooked nail. The surgeon swears an incision will take care of it, but we have to be quick before the Imperial Heir is declared the imperial bastard.”

Did Catherine not know? I wondered. All these years? Was there no one around her with enough wits to help her? Did our old deception with the bloodied sheets work too well?

Outside the osteria’s window, birds were pecking at a slice of lard the tavern keeper hung out for them. My face must have betrayed my confusion, for the Chancellor leaned forward and urged, “Ask to see Her Majesty, Varvara, and I’ll make sure she receives you in private.”

He rose to escort me to the door. His carriage was at my disposal. He would find his own way back to the palace.

Spring in St. Petersburg sears the eyes with light. The powdery April snow tumbles in the air, iridescent tiny diamonds. The Chancellor’s carriage, still on runners, slid through the streets, past soot-covered mounds of old winter snow. Soon icicles clinging to the roofs would begin to drip, although, in the shade, the breaths of passersby still turned to white mist.