The Winter Palace (26 page)

Serge Saltykov never mentioned Catherine.

His wife was fine, he said, when I asked him. In good health.

“Happy?”

“What is happiness?” Serge replied. “I haven’t found out yet. Have you, Madame Malikina?”

He is here
, I wrote to Catherine,
making sure no one has reason to blame you. He is keeping silent about his plans, but I’ll keep listening
.

It is so easy to lose a child
, I thought. Once she gives birth to an Imperial Heir, I’ll find a way to help her forget.

“The Grand Duchess is enamored with her new Oranienbaum garden,” the Empress answered all official inquiries. “I have no heart to summon her back to the city, when her cherished tulips are in bloom.”

The floor of the Imperial Bedroom was still strewn with architectural drawings. Monsieur Rastrelli had again been derided for the smallness of his vision. The new windows had to be far larger, the façade more imposing. One thing, however, was beyond dispute. Before the renovations of the Winter Palace could begin, the court would have to move to a temporary palace.

Not a moment too soon
, I thought. In our quarters the warped windows let in drafts, the walls were slimy with mildew. After our first week at the palace Darya began to cough, although she had no fever and the coughing eased when Masha gave her one of her infusions to drink. “No wonder Shuvalov wants this dump razed,” Egor grumbled, when a splinter from the floor lodged itself in his foot.

I spent long empty hours in the antechamber to the Imperial Bedroom, awaiting my summons. Other courtiers came and went, giving me unseeing looks, as if I would soon vanish and therefore did not merit closer scrutiny. I heard them inside, on the prowl, offering their clichéd praises, denouncing friends, asking for favors. Grabbing what they could get. When they left I heard the Empress call them good-for-nothing time-wasters or wonder how amusing it would be to let them in all at once, force them to hear their own treachery. I knew when Ivan Shuvalov read her yet another poem or a play; I knew, too, how often he dropped his voice to murmur something he did not want overheard. The Empress addressed her young Favorite as
my sparrow
. At every mention of the spring hunt, she vowed to give the most splendid chase in her lover’s honor.

Summoned at last, I’d watch the juicy bits of their intimacy, a show no doubt made sweeter for them by my silent presence. The Empress and her beloved, lying side by side, he with an arm behind his head, chest bare, his hair tied with a green ribbon. She with her nightdress loose, revealing the darkened hollows of her armpits, a lazy smile on her lips, her voice a soft purr.

I didn’t turn my eyes away. Of all Elizabeth’s sins, those of the flesh were not the worst.

At the end of my third week in the Winter Palace I noticed that the doors to the Grand Duke’s apartments were wide open. Surprised that he was not in Oranienbaum, I peeked through the doorway.

The Duke sat straddling an armchair, his long legs stretched out. He was complaining how the rotting beams of the Oranienbaum palace had forced him to move to the ground floor and eat his meals in a tent.

Two of his hounds sprawled on the carpet, asleep, their legs twitching in some imagined chase. The Duke’s companions, his maids-of honor, mostly, though I also spotted the blue uniforms of the Holsteiner officers, spread themselves throughout the room; two ladies sat on a divan, another half lying, half sitting on the floor. The carpet, I noticed, was already torn at the corners, no doubt chewed by the dogs. No one had opened the windows for some time, in spite of the warm weather, and the air was suffocating.

“Varvara Nikolayevna.” The Grand Duke waved his hand at me. “Come in, join all my pretty ladies.”

I walked into the room and curtsied.

“Where is your husband?” The smile that used to brighten Peter’s face had turned into a nervous smirk.

“I don’t know, Your Highness,” I answered. “He doesn’t tell me where he goes.” My reply brought a whistle of approval.

Egor Malikin, the Grand Duke announced, was a man of ambition and luck, a fine soldier who would go further if he stopped wasting his time in the
Ladies’
Guard. If he joined the cavalry instead. “That’s where the future is,” the Grand Duke declared. “No matter how much a wife might object.”

“I have no objections to my husband’s decisions,” I replied.

My answer brought another approving whistle.

“Take the best seat, Varvara Nikolayevna.” The Grand Duke pointed at a low chair covered with a bearskin. I hesitated. The head of the hapless beast with its jaws agape was positioned on the floor. I knew I could expect some crude jokes, if I covered it with my skirts.

“Mishka won’t bite you,” someone said and giggled.

“Unless you wanted him to,” a woman’s voice added. She stood in the shadows, holding a battledore racket and twirling it in her hand. A shuttlecock, red and white, was lying nearby, too far for her to reach it with her feet, although she tried.

“If he dared,” someone else retorted amid more laughter. “But there are some women even Mishka may be scared to touch.”

A playing card landed at the toe of my shoe. The ace of diamonds. “Nosy Varvara went to market,” I heard a murmur behind me. “Nosy Varvara had her nose torn off.”

The woman with the battledore racket began reading aloud what at first I thought was the report of some military conquest. A distant and cold fortress had been stormed repeatedly; soldiers rushed up the hills, only to be repelled by strong defenses.
“Very resourceful defenses,”
she read, and giggled. “Very resourceful,” she repeated. The Grand Duke laughed heartily.

I recognized the woman. Countess Vorontzova, the homely, limping niece of the Vice-Chancellor Vorontzov.
Das Fräulein
, as she was called, was one of Catherine’s maids-of-honor. What brazen lies allowed this woman to abandon the Grand Duchess in Oranienbaum and come here?

The servants were pouring wine as soon as glasses emptied. A stack of empty bottles was piling up in the fireplace like logs ready to be lit.

“The fortress,”
the Countess continued her reading,
“has often been called proud and icy. Spies sent there spoke of jagged walls and a narrow tunnel.”

There was no doubt in my mind that it was Catherine she meant, a “fortress” finally conquered by her husband. Seven years after the wedding, if anyone in this room dared to count. Anger rose in me, searing hot, and I struggled to keep my look of indifference.

Das Fräulein
gave the Duke another impish glance, jabbing the air with her fist, a not-too-subtle promise that he acknowledged with a titter. This was not some Madame Grooth who could be paid off and sent away. This was a court lady on the prowl.
Das Fräulein
, plain and lame as she was, had been known to hunt down wild boars.

“Finally the fortress gave in and a torrent of blood flowed, while from the rear bastion a triumphant shot announced to all who watched and listened from afar the completion of the victorious and gallant deed.”

More laughter and a few loud farts followed these words. The Duke’s wineglass was filled again, and he tilted it over the carpet, spilling half of it.
Das Fräulein
clapped her hands.

“May I be excused, Your Highness?” I asked him. The grin of pleasure on his face sickened me. “The Empress awaits me.”

He waved me away.

Even before I closed the door I could hear
Das Fräulein
’s shrill voice, mocking my request.

The imperial habits had not changed. The Empress rose late. Days were still a passage of tedious time that led to the evenings, hours filled with endless chatter. It was Countess Shuvalova, the mother of the Imperial Favorite, who led the gossip circle now. Ladies-in-waiting sitting with the Empress in her inner rooms until dusk, embroidery idle on their laps, delivered their accounts of broken hearts and thwarted expectations. The miasma of glee and poisonous malice filled the rooms of the Winter Palace. It was as if the seven years I had spent away from the court were but a flicker of an eyelid.

The arrival of the Imperial Favorite was a sign for the ladies-in-waiting to pick up their work-bags hastily and leave the inner rooms. When Ivan Shuvalov visited, the doors to the Imperial Bedroom were closed. No one was allowed inside. The evening meal was delivered on the mechanical table, pulled up from the kitchen below. Musicians waited in the service corridor for the Empress’s summons. If she wished it, they played or sang loudly, so that the music could penetrate the wall.

My time came when Ivan Shuvalov had departed to his own apartment, when all the cats who slept on the Imperial Bed came back from their wanderings. The bedroom was always dark and smelled of smoldering wicks, for most candles were extinguished by then, except the two votive lights under the Holy Icon of the Virgin of Kazan.

The time of imperial unease, I called it in my thoughts. The time softened by old fears. The time that would soon yield under my fingers, like wax. As long as I remembered how thin the walls were, how many ears might be straining to hear what I would say.

The time of caution, of feeling my way. Of learning what had been hidden, revealing what should be revealed.

The Empress still liked the stories of her own grandeur, of who found her ravishing and full of grace, more elegant than Maria Theresa of Austria, lighter on her feet. But she also craved other stories, of the blind
dziad
at the Tartar market who sang the old
dumy
of Romanov glory, of beggars on the Great Perspective Road who blessed the Tsarina’s good heart when the alms arrived from the palace.

“You have a daughter, Varvara,” the Empress said to me unexpectedly on one such night. “I wish to see her in the morning.”

“Mais, elle est charmante,”
the Empress exclaimed when I entered the Imperial Bedroom with Darya—in her new yellow dress—holding my hand. “You must bring her to me often, now that you are all living here.”

“To play?” Darya asked with such joy that even Ivan Shuvalov smiled.

The Empress picked up a purring cat. “Naughty Murka,” she muttered into its face. “Where have you been all night? Where do you hide from me, you rascal?”

Before I could stop her, Darya had scampered to the Empress and was running her fingers through Murka’s fur, trying to guess the cat’s hiding places. “On the stove … under the bed … in the carriage … In there?” she finally said, pointing at the giant vase that stood by the door.

There she was, next to the Empress, my daughter, not yet three years old, utterly at ease.

I was right to return to the palace, I decided, delighting in a glimpse of my child’s future: a happy young woman with two or three pretty children about her feet. Behind her, an honorable man, his face still a blur.

Loved.

Safe, even if I died.

The maid entered with ice in a china bowl, for rubbing Elizabeth’s face. Behind her, the Chief Maid, followed by a footman carrying the basket with pandoras from the Imperial Wardrobe.

I took Darya’s hand and motioned for her to curtsy. My eyes were smarting from lack of sleep. I longed to be in my bedroom, with curtains drawn, to get some rest before the night’s summons.

“I’ll bring her as often as Your Highness wishes,” I promised.

Three days later, at dinnertime, a messenger arrived from Oranienbaum. The Grand Duchess had awakened with a sharp pain. The maid who had lifted her coverlet fainted. Catherine had been ordered to lie absolutely still on sheets wet with her blood until the doctor arrived and declared that there was no hope. The baby was dead.

They all blamed her. For her too frequent visits to the stable with its stench of animal excrement, for breathing in the smoke from extinguished candles, for letting the bad air penetrate the pores of her skin. The maids whispered that when a black cat dashed across her path, the Grand Duchess had refused to turn back, that she had laughed when the midwife brought her a pregnant stone—inside which small rocks rattled when she shook it—and told her to wear it on her arm. That she sat with her legs off the ground, that she’d played with newly hatched chicks.

No one talked of anything else. Even Darya wanted to know why the Empress was sad. “Does her tummy hurt, Maman?” she asked.

I hid my trembling hands, my voice that threatened to break.

The Empress’s inner rooms were crowded with visitors. The ladies from the gossip circle were clucking their tongues in disapproval, echoing one another’s vicious words. “Careless … Didn’t she know … How
could
she?”

The Empress sat motionless in a pool of light, her face flushed and creased with exhaustion. Beside her, Ivan Shuvalov shook his head in false amazement, his silver waistcoat shimmering. The maid who brought a platter of
zákusky
had been waved away.

The Imperial Surgeon was delivering his assessment of Catherine’s condition. Shifting from foot to foot, he denounced the marshes and the riverbanks exuding noxious miasmas, the legacy of a land not fit for human dwellings. The cold, the lack of light for so many months, they provoked miscarriages and the malformation of fetuses, he declared. He had seen it often enough.

“I cannot stay silent, Your Majesty,” he said. “Not anymore.”

The Empress gave the surgeon a disdainful look. The fan in her hand jerked.

“My father’s city,” she said, her voice seething, “is not killing babies in their mother’s wombs. It is the mother’s thoughts and fears that make them die.”

The surgeon attempted to say something, but the Empress was no longer listening. “He might as well start packing right now,” I heard someone whisper.

In the silence that followed, Ivan Shuvalov turned to Elizabeth. “The marshes? The lack of light?” he asked disdainfully.

I wished I could make him stop. I wished I could kill the words that followed, scrub his arrogant malice away. With turpentine and salt, I raged, just like the scullery maids wiped the bed frames where bedbugs hid.

“Is this what
she
is saying, perhaps? Are these
her
sentiments?” Ivan Shuvalov continued, as if he had forgotten Catherine’s name. “I wouldn’t be surprised.”