The Winter Palace (37 page)

They talked for a while of the last ball, of the astounding progress of the renovations—the envy of the Swedish King, as Count Horn repeatedly declared.

The conversation between Catherine and her guests took its courtly turns, and my thoughts drifted toward Darya, who was next door, playing with Bijou. Recently my daughter’s questions had begun to worry me. “What does
uppity
mean?” she had asked, her smooth face pensive, fingers tugging at her black curls. “Why has Countess Shuvalova called you a bookbinder’s daughter?” She was almost seven, still just a child, so easy to hurt.

The door to the room swung open, and Bijou left Darenka’s side to greet Stanislav with a show of exuberant joy. The dog began barking wildly at the only stranger among us.

Count Horn said nothing, but his thin smile suggested that the significance of this moment was not lost on him.

I scooped Bijou up and carried him out of the room, taking Darya with me.

Count Horn was not deceived. Later, Catherine told me that he gave Stanislav a lecture on the usefulness of little Bolognese dogs in spying on their mistresses. He himself was in the habit of giving one to any woman with whom he fell in love. When a suspected rival appeared, all he had to do was watch the dog’s behavior.

Horn assured Stanislav that he was a discreet man and wouldn’t do any harm to him or the Grand Duchess, but neither Sir Charles nor I was comforted by this. Too many people knew the secret. Elizabeth would soon learn the truth.

“If anything happens to Stanislav,” I warned Catherine, “you will never forgive yourself.”

I armed myself with arguments. If Stanislav were accused of seducing the Grand Duchess, I reminded her, nothing would protect him from Siberia. A diplomat would be expelled, but the Count was just a private secretary, a foreigner at the St. Petersburg court. Stanislav must go back to Poland and return to Russia as a diplomat, protected by the Polish King.

“Couldn’t he stay one more week?” Catherine begged. “Or just a few days more?” But she knew there was no other way.

As soon as Stanislav departed for Warsaw, Sir Charles sought every chance he could to soothe Catherine’s grief. He entrusted me with his letters to her, and Catherine showed me some of them:
Your future is bright, and so is his. Love him with all your heart, and you’ll find a way to bring him back to your side
.

In May of 1756 French troops attacked a British garrison at the island of Minorca. The war had finally come to Europe.

England was Prussia’s ally.

The King of Prussia was Russia’s enemy.

Even an Empress’s tongue could no longer risk a visit to the British Embassy.

Once again jeweler Monsieur Bernardi began smuggling letters.

W
e were all holding our breath, waiting for Russia to declare war, for letters from a lover to arrive, for death to shift the treacherous balance of power. In the summer of 1756 I moved to Tsarskoye Selo with the Empress’s entourage, glad to get Darya away from the heat and noise of the city. In spite of Monsieur Rastrelli’s assurances, the rebuilding of the Winter Palace had not been smooth. Rumors swirled of thievery and chaos. Carpenters ran out of lumber, plasterers of sand and lime. Bills exceeded estimates twofold or more.

“Another curious inconsistency in these accounts, Your Highness,” I heard the Chancellor point out to the Empress. He spoke of deliveries accepted without checking against the orders, workers sitting idle for lack of supplies, sheets of gold leaf missing.

A mistake
, I thought.

Excess never offended Elizabeth. Frugality was good for the Prussian King, for his world of thin soups, melted candle ends, a round of cheese measured every evening. Inspecting the ledgers? Searching the workers as they left the site? “Petty actions, worthy of a monarch without vision,” Ivan Shuvalov said, sneering.

If he wanted the Empress’s attention, the Chancellor should have spoken of another winter spent in the cramped palace on the Great Perspective Road.

Of daring to keep the Empress of All the Russias waiting.

Of not trying hard enough.

In the garden of Tsarskoye Selo, Darya was running in search of butterflies through the unmowed patch of meadow behind the pea-tree hedge.

I heard uneven steps behind me, crunching the gravel.

I turned.

The Chancellor of Russia was coming toward me, limping, his right knee stiff, his swollen right hand gripping the handle of his cane. My daughter’s joyful voice trailed in the distance. I stifled the urge to warn her away.

“Proud of yourself, palace girl, aren’t you?” Bestuzhev muttered, with a dark glimmer in his steel-blue eyes.

Catherine has told him, I thought, as we began walking together along the hedge.

“There are some mistakes you cannot afford, Varvara. Underestimating me is one of them.”

I savored the bitterness in Bestuzhev’s voice. Catherine must have been blunt. My thirst for revenge tempted me with possibilities:
No, it was never Naryshkin.… Even the Chancellor’s spies can be tricked to sniff at the wrong path.… If you wish to be my friend, prove it
.

The Chancellor’s voice broke through my thoughts. “I can be of more use to her than your British fop who thinks he can teach her how to become Empress.”

I quickened my steps. “Sir Charles wants the Grand Duchess to be happy. As do I.”

“This is not about happiness, Varvara,” the Chancellor said, and sniggered. “This is about power. A British Ambassador has his reasons to wish for her rise. Do I have to spell them out for you?”

By then Bestuzhev was breathing hard, his face reddening, but he did not ask me to slow down. And he didn’t stop speaking.

“I did tell you once, Varvara Nikolayevna, that I wasn’t a man without a heart. Remember, we are backing the same horse. I’ve come to warn you. You are forgetting the lessons I’ve taught you. You’ve begun trusting people.”

“Leave me,” I said.

The fury in my voice startled even him.

“Please,” he said. “Not so loud. We are having a pleasant little stroll through the garden, not a spat someone on the other side of the hedge might want to report. And do slow down, will you?”

Darya was waving to me from the meadow, her butterfly net raised in triumph. I stopped and waved back.

“Remind the Grand Duchess that I’m trying hard to do what she wants,” the Chancellor wheezed. “Tell her to be patient. Tell her that what she wants is not easy to achieve.”

A flock of the palace peacocks passed us by, stately, indifferent, their folded tails trailing in the gravel. I stifled the urge to scare them into flight.

“She wants me to persuade the Polish King to send that handsome Pole of hers here as his Envoy. This is not hard to do. But it is Stanislav’s mother who also needs persuading. He fails to mention that in his letters, but my Warsaw spies have been more forthcoming. Countess Poniatowska doesn’t trust the Grand Duchess of Russia.”

His voice rose in a crude imitation of a woman’s plea: “Don’t go back there, I beg of you, my son. She is a manipulator. She cares only about her own pleasure.… She will trample over you once she has what she wants.…”

My thoughts clung to the memory of Catherine and Stanislav, the remnants of their supper pushed carelessly aside, tracing some imaginary journey over a beautiful old map of Russia.
Imperii Moscovitici
, I read the words on the hand-colored copper etching.
Why don’t we just run away?
Catherine had whispered to her lover.

“Countess Poniatowska is wrong,” I told the Chancellor.

“In one of those cozy moments when you mistake our Grand Duchess for your sister, Varvara, do whisper to her shapely little ear that I, her lowly servant, will do everything to bring her beloved back to her, but that she should still work with me, even if I fail. Tell her love is not that important, after all, in the scheme of things. She knows that already, even if she is not quite ready to admit to it.”

“Why should I help you?”

“Now?”

“Now or ever again.”

“Now, because she needs me to succeed. Later, because I know what you still don’t.”

I wondered what I hated him more for. The turns my life had taken from that day when I arrived at Elizabeth’s decaying palace, an orphan believing in the power of imperial grace? Or the doubt his poisonous words let creep into my heart?

I looked at his face, blank, inscrutable, aging.

“Maman,” Darya cried from behind the hedge. “Look what I’ve caught!”

As I hurried toward her, the Chancellor of Russia limped back to the palace, the cane that supported him making deep, hollow scars in the gravel.

The thespian side of Elizabeth’s soul! Hunger for the awe lighting up visitors’ faces when they reached her presence, having passed through the enfilade of staterooms connected through carved and gilded portals. Hunger for the gasps of astonishment at the soft browns and yellows in the Amber Room. Shades of ebony touching on the color of dark honey, through which she, the queen bee, floated in her luscious dresses, her high heels sliding on the polished mosaics of the floors. “How vulgar, Varenka,” Catherine had murmured. “She has the taste of the Russian peasant she will always be.”

When the Grand Duchess came to Tsarskoye Selo, the Empress greeted her with affectionate inquires: “Have you slept well? Is your migraine gone?” Catherine responded with compliments. The subtle grace of Elizabeth’s dance steps took her breath away. In her newest ball gown, the Empress looked as beautiful as she had on that winter day in Moscow when Catherine had seen Her Highness for the first time.

Elizabeth returned to calling the Grand Duke and Duchess her beloved children who had pleased her by giving her an heir to the throne. Now she was waiting for them to repeat the act.

Paul was almost two and still walked with cautious, wobbly steps. The nursemaids dressed him in loose smocks and tied his golden baby curls with a blue ribbon. Two of them always hovered over him, ready to hold him up if he merely tottered. Every morning Elizabeth made them bare their breasts for her inspection; any blemish, even the smallest one, was cause for instant dismissal.

And now, when the Grand Duchess came to Tsarskoye Selo, the Empress allowed her to visit her son.

Odd visits, cruel, I seethed, so unlike anything I wished for mother and child. The Empress laid out her conditions:
in the afternoon … not longer than half an hour … never when I am away
.

The nursery turned into a battlefield.

The stage of triumph had been carefully charted, the roles cast. Elizabeth walking into the nursery, the nursemaids shooting anxious glances at her, hoping she would notice their zeal. Behind her, Catherine, with downcast eyes, mindful of every step, every word she uttered.

“Tyotya,”
Paul shrieked, as soon as he saw the Empress, flailing his arms with excitement, like an awkward bird learning to fly.

He wriggled out of his nursemaid’s arms to rush toward her. Elizabeth swooped him up, tickled his belly, laughed when he reached for the pearls in her hair.

Every kiss, every word, measured and weighed, hurled at Catherine’s heart.

“My dove … my prince … Show me your little eye … your little nose … your little toe.”

Catherine stood motionless, in her pale yellow gown embroidered with flowers, hands clasped behind her, lips arranged into a faint smile. I saw her twist the rings on her fingers, as if one of them held a fairy-tale spell, would let her fly into the air, change into a mouse, a cat, a hawk.

Would render all poison harmless.

“Do you know who has come to see you? … Do you recognize your Maman … Where is she? … Where is your Maman? …”

“Maman,” Paul repeated, but the word was an empty husk. Coaxed to look at Catherine, he buried his face in his aunt’s bosom.

“You want her to go away, don’t you, little man.… You want her to leave you alone.”

I hoarded it all: the simpering imperial voice, the knowing smiles of triumph.
One day
, I thought,
you might come to repent what you are doing. One day those you have hurt might haunt you
.

That summer Elizabeth had commissioned a portrait of the Grand Duke Paul in the Preobrazhensky uniform, sitting on his rocking horse, a wooden sword in his hand. The painter had asked for only two sittings. He vowed, “A child with such remarkable features I can paint from memory.”

In the picture, Paul’s face looked bold and determined against the leafy-green tunic of his uniform. The Empress had been particularly smitten with the pink hue on his cheeks and the touches of silver paint that had rendered the wooden sword real.

She liked to hear the courtiers declare how Paul resembled his great-grandfather. How the Romanov blood flowed in his veins.

The portrait, its gilded frame studded with diamonds, hung in her bedroom, next to her own likeness as a round-faced little girl resting on an ermine throw, a miniature of her father in her right hand like a trophy, her white naked body curving gently, her hair adorned with pink flowers.

Two children, beside each other.

Would she name Paul her successor? I wondered. Would she pass Peter by?

At night when the Empress could not sleep, she called me to her side.

Unsure when these summonses would come, I took to sleeping in my clothes, the stays loosened, the hooks of my bodice half undone.

“Where have you been?” the Empress snapped, no matter how quickly I arrived. Often I noticed that cold glimmer in her eyes, the only sign of drinking I could detect then. Ivan Shuvalov was never there on these nights. He’d been dismissed, I presumed, to his own rooms.

“Who comes to see her, Varvara?”

In the shadowy darkness, stretched on her bed, the Empress wanted to hear about Catherine lost in the mazes of jealousy and lust, in the glitter of jewels, in the heat of summer nights. She still wanted stories that would justify taking a son away from his mother.

“Princess Galitsina is her best friend now, Your Highness. They see each other every day, I hear. Princess Dashkova, too. The Grand Duchess always sends everyone away when they come. Then the jeweler arrives, and they look at necklaces and earrings.”