The Winter Palace (30 page)

When the Grand Duke Peter visited, the Empress allowed him to hold his son for a few moments, until the first whimper, then sent him away. He didn’t mind, he had told Catherine. Infants belong to the women. His time would come. His son would grow up a soldier. “His son,” Catherine said to me, bitterly. “As if I didn’t count.”

“The pride of Their Highnesses, their greatest achievement and mighty Russia’s hope,” the Chancellor of Russia had called Grand Duke Paul Petrovich in his speech at the baptismal feast.

In the Empress’s antechamber, my conversations with the Chancellor followed the usual court exchanges of vague illusions. It is easy to be distracted from what is important, but awakening always comes in the end. In Russia one takes what looks like the worst road and it turns out to be the best.

“I have something for you to take to the Grand Duchess, Varvara Nikolayevna,” he said, when I was alone with him. “My own elixir of gold, tincture
toniconervina Bestuscheffi
. A remedy for catastrophes of love and strewn nerves. Indispensable in such trying times.”

When he’d left me to retrieve what turned out to be a small bottle filled with a yellow liquid, I took a quick look at his desk. There was a large folio sheet there with headings printed in bold type:

Sergey Vasilyevich Saltykov … age: 26 … handsome physiognomy … a lecher who has had Madame … Countess … Princess … amiable character … inclined to pedantry … for his mission received 6,000 rubles from the Empress and a promise of an appointment at the Court of Sweden
.

I visited Catherine each day. She was still feverish, staring for hours out the window at the river, Bijou at her side. My assurances that Paul was thriving did not ease her worry. “Go back to him, Varenka,” Catherine would plead. “They wouldn’t tell me even if he were dying. You know they wouldn’t.”

In the Winter Palace, Catherine’s bedroom was three doors away from the Imperial Suite, close enough for the Empress’s spies to keep an eye on her. This is where she stayed most of the time, in the company of her maids-of-honor. Sometimes I slipped in there at dawn, sometimes in the middle of the night. I cultivated opportunities that allowed me to be alone with her, even for an instant, enough to whisper a quick reassurance.

Once or twice I could smell a man’s scent around her, snuff and wet leather of the road. “Serge was here. No one saw him,” would be all I could get out of her.

Outside the Winter Palace, the first snow fell on the city, blanketing the frozen roads, the roofs, and the Neva. The sun set early. By afternoon only the torches burning in wall brackets and the bonfires of the sentries made the palace yard visible. Darya had just turned four, and she liked to finger through old books, looking for pictures. “Is it me, Maman?” she’d ask if she spotted a child in them, relieved when I assured her she was not among the innocents slain by Herod’s soldiers and that the mother throwing her hands out in despair was not me.

At the end of November, at the churching ceremony when Catherine was allowed to take Communion for the first time after giving birth, she could stand without pain. She was healing, I told myself. All poison has an antidote. She would soon forget Saltykov.

At the beginning of December, Serge Saltykov left St. Petersburg for his country estate. His departure, surprisingly, was not by the Empress’s order. “Too many women chasing him here,” the Chancellor told me. His eyes were full of malice.

What did I tell Catherine in these last weeks of the year?

That fortune is not as blind as people imagine; it requires a long series of well-chosen steps.

That the Shuvalovs had not yet triumphed. For now that she had her heir, Elizabeth might turn her back on Peter.

“She has choices now she didn’t have before,” I reminded Catherine. “If she chooses Paul Petrovich over his father, you will be Regent.”

“Is that what Elizabeth says?” Catherine asked. There was a flicker of hope in her eyes.

“No,” I said. “But that’s something to think about.”

“I don’t need such consolations, Varenka,” Catherine said with a frown of disappointment. “I need to know what the Empress says.”

The last days of the old year demand the settling of debts. In the Church of Our Lady of Kazan, the Empress gave thanks for the blessed year that had brought her the infinitely precious Imperial Heir.

Her gifts were worthy of a Romanov: a new
oklad
for the Holy Icon, studded with pearls, diamonds, rubies, and sapphires; a jeweled gold altar cross; an engraved censer. In the final days of 1754, we were all summoned to admire her offerings, to exclaim over the clarity of the fat stones, the perfection of silk needlework, the intricate patterns etched into the blue enamel.

Catherine was seldom seen in public. Claiming that she was still sore from her labor, and that migraines plagued her, she had obtained Elizabeth’s permission to abstain from attending court balls and masquerades.

The maids whispered that the Grand Duchess sobbed when she believed herself alone. The Empress was not concerned. All she wished from me was one thing: “If anyone dares to call the Grand Duke Paul Saltykov’s bastard, Varvara, I want to know right away.”

I found Catherine in bed, cradling little Bijou. “Is it you, Varenka?” she asked as I entered, her voice blurred with laudanum. “Have you got something for Bijou? The little darling has been waiting for you.” Bijou slipped his wet nose inside my palm, in search of a treat. I pushed him away.

“Varenka is so mean to my little Bijou,” Catherine murmured, picking the dog up and raising him. “So mean.”

I watched her smile at the sight of Bijou’s legs dangling helplessly in the air. The dog was staring down at her with big, astonished eyes, patiently waiting to be restored to dignity. “Don’t ever go to mean Varenka,” she crooned. “Stay with me.”

The bed smelled of camphor. Beside it, Catherine’s petticoats lay in a disorderly heap. She must have dismissed the maids in a hurry.

“Your son slept most of the day, without crying,” I told Catherine, picking up her silk underclothes. Her petticoat was yellowed and torn in a few places. I resolved to have a talk with her chambermaid.

Catherine lowered Bijou. The dog began licking her nightshirt, stained from the milk. Her breasts were still swollen. She didn’t move him away.

“The wet nurses change every two hours,” I said. “They pick him up the moment he starts crying. The Empress sits by the cradle. The nursery is kept very warm; the stokers have been ordered never to let the stoves cool. Little Paul is covered with a satin quilt filled with cotton wadding, and then with another, of pink velvet lined with ermine.”

I put the folded petticoats on the chair. I ran my finger over the night table, checking for dust.

“They carry him around too much,” Catherine murmured. “It’s not good for a baby to be always rocked to sleep.”

Serge Saltykov returned to St. Petersburg. I saw him in Elizabeth’s antechamber, awaiting summons. He did not come to see Catherine.

“Please, Varenka,” Catherine begged. “He knows I’m being watched. He doesn’t want to put me in danger. Let him know that I can get out of the palace. I need to see him, Varenka. Take a note to him. From me.”

My chest grew tighter.

“No need for a note. Let me talk to him,” I said.

I found Sergey Saltykov in the guard room, showing off a card trick to a young officer. With his impudent glee, smelling of vodka, snow, and juniper-scented smoke, Serge looked as if he had just risen from a bonfire at some winter hunt. As I walked in, he was motioning for the guard to lift the card on top of the deck. A sigh of bewilderment greeted the appearance of an ace.

“One word with you, Monsieur Saltykov,” I said. Our eyes met. I felt his assessing my low-cut dress.

“Will you excuse me, Grigory Grigoryevich?” he said to the guard, and rose.

“She is waiting for you,” I said through clenched teeth after he had followed me to the corridor.

“Is she?”

His hand was on my arm, and I felt his fingers brush the nape of my neck. Serge Saltykov believed no woman could resist his presence.

“Then why is she hiding in her room? I’d hoped to see her at the last ball.”

Catherine would ask me to repeat his every word, every excuse Sergey Saltykov could invent. She wanted to hear of confessions of disappointment, fear of the Duke’s jealousy, the danger to her. “Does the baby look like me at all?” she kept asking me. “Does anyone say he might not be Peter’s? Is this why Serge doesn’t want to see me?”

She knew what a stain on her son’s birth would mean. Any pretender could rise from the shadows and claim to be the forgotten Tsar, the true descendant of Peter the Great. Any pretender could gather the troops and proclaim Grand Duke Paul Petrovich Saltykov’s bastard. And yet she was still waiting for her lover’s visit. Passion had replaced reason, had made her desperate.

“She is alone now,” I told Saltykov. From another room I heard Egor’s voice commanding the guards to shape up. “I’ll take you to her. No one will see us. Please.”

Serge Saltykov gave my arm a gentle squeeze. His wrist, I noticed, was covered with a mat of fine black hair.

“I’m not the master of my time, or my affections,” he said. “Tell her that, Varvara Nikolayevna. It’s better for the Grand Duchess to know.”

In the streets of St. Petersburg, the fortune-tellers pointed to the double five in the coming 1755. It meant hope, openness to new experiences. Five is an adventurer, they said, pushing life to the limits. Five is “five senses.” Five longs for freedom.

Before the celebrations began, the Empress—her evening gown stiff with diamonds and bristling with golden thread—blessed baby Paul and presented him with a large crystal pendant. Hung in the window, it would delight his eyes with bouncing rainbows.

The Empress decided to greet the new year in the Amber Room. She wished to feel its healing powers one more time, she announced, before Monsieur Rastrelli moved the amber panels to Tsarskoye Selo, the first step of the renovations that would begin soon.

Lit by five hundred candles, the walls of the Amber Room, a gift from the Prussian King to Peter the Great, glowed with golden and brown flecks. The air was thick with perfume, snuff, and spirits. A small army of footmen hovered by the door, like crows on carrion, swooping on the slightest traces of sawdust carried in from the restrooms. Darya had watched with rapture as I dressed for the ball. She made me promise I would let her dry the flowers of my corsage. Now, in my tightly laced court gown, I stood beside my husband, making plans for the future. Egor’s transfer to the army had finally been approved; his new commission would soon follow. It would mean long absences Darya was not yet aware of. It would be just me and Masha for her for a long time.

Catherine had once again asked the Empress to be excused from a public appearance. The request had been granted with a few caustic comments about her haughtiness. “What is she moping about now, Varvara?” Elizabeth asked me. “She doesn’t think herself mistreated, does she?” The mockery in her voice made me cringe.

Radiant and sumptuous, the Empress scrutinized the courtiers. Ivan Ivanovich Shuvalov stood at her elbow, whispering to her from time to time. I saw him kiss her hand and press it to his chest with a triumphant grin. In the last weeks he had kept to himself, praising the Imperial Heir loud enough for everyone to take note, mocking those dim-witted enough to believe that the Shuvalovs’ star might be fading. To the Chancellor’s annoyance, Ivan Ivanovich had chased away the dark-eyed beauty Bestuzhev had sent to seduce him. “You can’t touch me,” the Imperial Favorite had told the woman. “And neither can he who sent you here.”

At midnight, fireworks exploded with sparkling cartwheels, shooting stars, and turning wheels. Molten wax was poured over cold water to reveal the future. When the wax hardened, we turned it in our hands, looking for clues in its shape or the shadow it cast. A sword for the Empress, a horseshoe for the Grand Duke. A letter for me.

War? Journey? Good news? Or bad?

Right after midnight the Empress asked the Crown Prince to open the ball. She was pleased when he danced with Countess Vorontzova.
Das Fräulein
burst into giggles of delight every time Peter looked at her.

I danced and lingered in the antechambers, among tinkles of epaulettes and roars of laughter, collecting gossip the Empress would demand from me the following day. Who had to use the reviving salts? Whose dress needed last-minute letting out? Who still looked plebeian in spite of the latest change of wardrobe?

In her room Catherine was waiting, but Serge Saltykov had no intention of going to her. I watched him dance with Princess Lenskaya, two times in a row. Then I saw him slip out with Prince Naryshkin. “I think the gentlemen are a bit merry,” a chambermaid whispered to me with a sly grin.

The thought of Catherine alone, still believing Sergey would come, was too cruel. I slipped out of the ballroom and knocked on her door. She opened it quickly, too quickly, her French dressing gown of pale blue silk opened at the front, revealing the curve of her breasts. A soft scent of birch leaves from the
banya
was floating in the room.

“Oh, it’s you, Varenka,” she said, her voice flat. I resolved to check how much laudanum was still left in the last bottle.

The wind was howling outside. The Winter Palace was never more aptly named than at this time of year, when all its windows froze into crystal ice gardens. Outside, the cannon shots boomed.

My mother used to say the first person who entered your home in the new year foretold your fate. A dark-haired man brought good luck. A woman was always the harbinger of bad news.

I thought:
Forget Sergey. He is not worthy of you
.

“May I stay here?” I asked.

“If you wish,” she said, looking away.

I pulled Catherine down on the rug by the fire. Bijou gave us a tired look and curled into sleep at her side.

“I still remember seeing him for the first time, Varenka.” Catherine’s voice was slow, lingering. “At the stables. I had just come back from a long ride. The horse stopped and neighed. Serge was bending over something the groom was showing him. Then he straightened and looked at me. Just an instant, and I knew that he knew.”