The Winter Palace (36 page)

The Chancellor’s diplomatic failure had been the source of much merriment among the Shuvalovs’ supporters. The Old Fox was losing his famed touch. His rabid distrust of France had clouded his political judgment. Where were his spies when Russia needed them? How much had the British paid
him
?

Stories flowed of Bestuzhev’s servants dispatched to the taverns to search for their drunk master. Once, a hackney driver brought him home at dawn, half-naked and dripping with water, muttering curses about some Gypsy’s tricks. Ivan Shuvalov’s uncle called the Chancellor a “has-been” in the Empress’s presence, although she had pretended not to hear.

The Old Fox, I heard, was spent and tired.

He would stop me in the corridor, smelling of camphor and expensive musk, asking if the Grand Duchess was still infatuated with Naryshkin.

A sense of exhilaration was urging me on. A spymaster can be deceived, too.

“Oh, yes,” I assured Bestuzhev. I told him how the Grand Duchess and Prince Naryshkin sat together in the opera box, laughing at
Das Fräulein
’s derriere swaying as she walked. “Like a horse the Paris brewers would love,” I said in my best imitation of Lev’s crackling banter. “Not that Naryshkin has ever been to Paris.”

The Chancellor managed a faint, sour smile. Powder could no longer mask the bloated, ruddy skin of his face.

“He wears a blue waistcoat when they are to meet at the opera,” I continued. “Green for the Russian Theater. It’s not love, though the Grand Duchess likes to say she loves him. She is still young. She wants to dance. She wants to be told she is pretty.”

I met his eye.

I smiled.

The spymaster’s own lesson: Good liars look you in the eye and smile.

He’d taught me well.

“Talk to her of love if this is what she wants to hear, Varvara Nikolayevna, but keep reminding her that her husband does not know what it means to rule. The Empress is not going to live forever. Politics is Catherine’s game, and she knows that.”

“Tell her I’m on her side.”

“Tell her she only has to give me a sign.”

“Tell her she needs me.”

Among the daze of tulle, lace, and ribbons, I covered my lips with a fan and mouthed my promises before turning away.

For me, Sir Charles’s disgrace at the Russian court brought many discreet invitations to the British Embassy.

Sir Charles needed a go-between to carry his words to the Chancellor and Catherine. I needed stories about him to tell the Empress. For, having banned him from her sight, she now craved gossip that would justify her anger.

Our own private treaty, we called it. Our alliance.

The hours we spent together were rare islands of calm in these feverish days, for the Ambassador cared as much as I did for keeping Catherine and Stanislav’s secrets. In the Skavronsky palace he rented on the Great Perspective Road, liveried footmen came and went, carrying refreshments, while we talked.

He had made inquiries about me, I was to discover, for he kept referring to Egor’s military achievements and his prospects. “Field Marshal someday, perhaps?” he would say with a nonchalant gesture of his hand.

Listening to Sir Charles was like listening to a prophet who demanded that I follow him to the top of a mountain to see beyond what I’d ever seen before, to survey all the roads I could take.

“The Grand Duchess will not stay the Grand Duchess forever,
pani
Barbara,” he said. Like Stanislav, he now used my Polish name. “But she will always need friends.”

The court in St. Petersburg was but one player on the chessboard of Europe, he told me. Russia was like Lisbon before the earthquake—on the surface, people went about their business, but underneath, great forces were shifting, ready to collapse or explode. The outcomes could surprise us all.

“The land of your father is in need of a wise ruler, so that no one ever again will have to leave Poland in search of prosperity elsewhere.”

He knew how to find words that went right to my heart.

Catherine the Empress of Russia. Stanislav the King of Poland.

Some dreams are more seductive than love.

We hardly ever spoke of ourselves during this time, though Sir Charles did get me to confess the forced circumstances of my marriage, and he acknowledged the existence of Lady Frances, with whom he exchanged dispatches as if she were a business partner rather than his wife. In the cut-crystal tumblers, Hungarian claret shimmered ruby red as we drank to our ambitions.

To the future Empress!

To the future King!

To their friendship!

To their love!

“My political son,” Sir Charles called Stanislav. Saturn was in the ascendant when he was born. The sign of the return of the golden age, of triumph over obstacles. Some saw a crown over his head. A double crown.

“Stanislav is not a dreamer. He knows the limitations of your country, Barbara. He wants an enlightened leadership, and an end to corruption. He is not alone. He has the support of his uncles, the Czartoryski clan. This is why he is here in St. Petersburg—to learn what is possible.”

To make sure the servants didn’t understand us, we always referred to the Empress as “the Great Obstacle” or “Yesterday.” Catherine was Colette, Stanislav “
Le Cordon Bleu
,” the Grand Duke “the Soldier.” The Chancellor was “the Old Fox,” or simply “the Devil.”

“The Dream” meant a strong Poland and an enlightened Russia walking together hand in hand.

In these tête-à-têtes it all seemed possible: Catherine becoming the Empress of Russia, using her influence to have Stanislav elected the King of Poland. The two of them, united in love, bound by trust, ruling two great nations, in unity and peace. We hardly ever mentioned Peter, as if his withdrawal into oblivion was already certain. Sometimes I could almost see him in Oranienbaum with
Das Fräulein
and his fiddle, building a model fortress or marching his Holsteiners in perfect formations, a child left to his own happy amusements.

How many times we drank to “the Dream,” buoyed by the signs that Providence itself supported us in these chilly days of winter! Empress Elizabeth was fading. Her shortness of breath was growing worse. Once I saw her surgeon’s assistant leaving her bedroom with a big bowl of yellowish liquid. I didn’t need to ask. Her swelling belly threatened to burst and had to be tapped.

Catherine told me that Ivan Shuvalov had come up to her and asked why she avoided him. “Let me take this very moment to express my admiration for you,” the Empress’s lover had said.

Stanislav told Sir Charles that the Polish King was dying, which meant another royal election. His uncles wrote from Warsaw that he should consider returning to Poland, “for such opportunities will not last forever.”

By March clouds swept in from the Gulf of Finland, dumping more snow on the streets and frozen gardens of St. Petersburg. Sir Charles and I were still carrying on our feverish conversations, the consultations of the demiurges bent over the blueprint of their new world.

Dangerous delusions, I say now, for we were merely trying to cover our own impotence with these plans for those we held so dear.

In the first week of March, Monsieur Rastrelli declared that the old Winter Palace—which only months before was still to form part of the new structure—had become an obstacle to his grand vision. The ceilings were too low, the foundations too flimsy. If he was to deliver what was expected of him, everything would have to be razed.

“Another year,” he said, pointing to the model two attendants carried into the Imperial Suite, drawing Elizabeth’s attention to the magnificent windows he envisioned. “Some might call it a significant delay, Your Highness,” he said, his vigilant eyes scanning Elizabeth’s face. “I would call it an unavoidable necessity.”

The Empress paced the room in anger.

Monsieur Rastrelli was not pleading for time. He pleaded for a chance to make the Russian palace grander than Versailles. Everything in it would draw a visitor’s attention. Quadratura techniques would “open up” walls and ceilings, turn flat surfaces into domes and galleries filled with golden light. Sculptures would capture movement in stone. Paintings and tapestries would entice with scenes of passions so grand that no eye could glide over them unseeing.

Rich, he promised. Golden. Bright.

Work would go on through the winter, he continued. Stoves would be installed as soon as the external structure was ready, so that the plasterers and carpenters could move in, come the first frosts.

“The jewel of Your Majesty’s palaces,” he crooned. “A tribute to Russia’s power. A setting worthy of the victories that will soon come.”

The silence that fell was long and tense. On the Empress’s face, promises of glory battled with her impatience; her hand flexed like a cat’s claws.

But then Elizabeth smiled, and I knew that the temporary palace would have to serve the court for a long time.

For Darya’s name day, Egor sent her a headdress embroidered with tiny pearls.
To adorn my dark-eyed flower
, he had written.

As hard as a helmet, I thought, as I watched my daughter put the headdress on, slipping it over her hair, as black and shiny as her father’s.

“Will you take me to the Empress?” Darya asked, holding the headdress in place with her hand. “I want to show it to her.” She was twisting her body in front of the mirror, trying to see herself from the side. Catherine had once told her that she had a Grecian profile.

“Why would the Empress wish to see it?”

“Because she is my friend.”

“Who told you that?”

“She did.”

“When?”

“When I was playing in the yard. She called me. She gave me a sweet apple. She said I could come to see her if I wished.”

“Did she say it, or did you ask?”

The signs of impatience: eyes cast to the ceiling, fingers clutching at the hem of her dress.

“I didn’t ask. But I
wanted
her to say it.”

“You must never bother Her Highness, Darya. The Empress has little time for trifles.”

A moment of calculation, doubt, washed out of my daughter’s eyes as swiftly as it had appeared. “Papa’s gift is not a trifle.”

“No, it isn’t. But you are just a child.”

“I’m older than baby Paul. And I don’t cry as he does.”

“You cried when you were his age.”

“That I don’t remember.”

“But I do,” I said, wishing for Egor’s presence, for his words to add weight to mine.

The headdress, carefully wrapped in twill, went back into its box. I tried to think how soon Darya could wear it. On Sunday, perhaps? To church?

I hid a smile as my daughter made a stern face. “You are just a child,” she murmured in imitation of me, a finger raised in the air. “When will Papa come back?”

“Soon.”

“Tomorrow?”

“No, not tomorrow.”

She turned away quickly, to hide childish tears, her hand clasping mine, and I suddenly remembered my mother’s tapered fingers curling around mine.

To make the temporary palace habitable for at least another year, carpenters reinforced the weakest walls, added a few partitions, replaced boards crusted with mold.

There was much grumbling at the announcement of the delay in construction, but I liked anything that made it easier to hide Catherine’s love. I blessed the chaos, the constant flutter of plans, abandoned and resumed. Orders were forgotten almost as soon as they were issued. The hairballs gathered in the corners; half-packed trunks stood abandoned in the attic; rooms were reassigned at an hour’s notice to escape leaky walls.

The Empress may have granted her permission for the delays, but that did not make her less irritable. For days after Monsieur’s Rastrelli’s visit, anything could trigger a vicious fit of temper. She dismissed a chambermaid who tarried with teacups. She slapped a hairdresser who took too long curling her hair.

I, too, felt her anger when I could not come up with instant answers to her constant questions. A pinch of my arm. A shove. “Is
she
still with Naryshkin?”

“Yes, Your Highness.”

“She goes to see him at his palace?”

“Yes.”

“Does he think I might make her Regent? Does he want to rule with her, that clown?”

“I don’t know, Your Majesty.”

“Then find out, you fool. Are they plotting against me? Is this British traitor helping her? I want to know what she is thinking.”

I ducked to avoid a snuffbox hurled with a scream.

“Hurry up! You are not the only tongue I have!”

Some stories pacify more than others: lowly horseboys leaving the British Embassy at dawn with cheeky smiles, goldplate under their coats. Sir Charles cursing his own king. Saying that Britain was making a big mistake by kissing the Prussian Frederick’s ass.

Anything, I thought, to hide those near-misses that Catherine would tell me about with such reckless amusement. Stanislav took her for a ride in his sleigh. A sentry in Peterhof stopped them. Stanislav said he was a musician the Grand Duke had hired, while she, in man’s clothes, could hardly stop herself from laughing. Their sleigh hit a stone, and she was thrown out into a snowbank. She had been knocked unconscious, and he despaired over her senseless body.

Catherine let me see the bruises on her ribs from that fall. A deep purple patch I touched with my fingertips, fearful she might have cracked her bones.

It was nothing, she said.

She was strong.

Stronger than I’d imagined.

“I saw Stanislav cry, Varenka,” she told me that day. “He vowed he would’ve killed himself if I died. He swore he didn’t want to live without me. He promised that if there is ever a choice between his happiness and mine, it’s my happiness he’ll choose.”

And then, at the end of April, Catherine’s dog, Bijou, showed me how easy it was to expose the truth. Stanislav and Count Horn, the Envoy of the Swedish King, arrived at the palace to pay their respects to the Grand Duke. It didn’t take them long to find a plausible excuse to visit Catherine’s rooms.

“I hope this is not an intrusion, Your Highness,” Stanislav said, with an elegant bow.

“A welcome intrusion, dear Count,” Catherine replied sweetly. “We rarely do anything of importance here.”