The Winter Palace (38 page)

“Does she buy anything?”

“Oh, yes. She likes big stones. She wants them noticed.”

“Is she still borrowing money?”

“Monsieur Bernardi has advanced her more credit.”

“What else does she do all day?”

“She has started writing a Russian play, but this is still a secret. A surprise for Your Highness. It’s about the Time of Troubles, but I don’t think it’s very good. Far too long, and there are too many speeches. She also wants to give a big party at Oranienbaum this summer. For the Grand Duke. She wants all the ladies to wear white taffeta with flowing tulle and the gentlemen blue velvet with white.”

“Does the Grand Duke lie with her?”

“He does.”

“And she is still not pregnant?”

“No. She has put on weight, though. The maids complain that it is harder and harder to lace her properly. And her right shoulder is crooked. Her teeth are beginning to hurt again, but she refuses to let the dentist see her. She says that all doctors do is cause more pain, so she chews cloves instead.”

“Who else comes to see her? Bestuzhev?”

“Yes.”

“What does that old bastard want from her?”

“They close the door when they speak, but I know she wants him to find her a new lover.”

Among all the Grand Duchess’s visits to Tsarskoye Selo that summer, one stays in my mind.

In the garden pavilion, dahlias and nasturtiums spilled out from stone planters, and flowering vines climbed on wrought-iron grilles. In birdcages suspended from the ceiling, canaries and parakeets chirped and hopped about, breaking into song. Embroidered shawls covered the tables and shelves, on which lacquered boxes, birch-bark baskets, and candy bowls crowded. In the corners, in big copper watering cans, red and yellow begonias bloomed. The iron furniture had been replaced by gilded armchairs and cushions embroidered with images of the firebird.

On the trays that footmen carried about, many colored vodkas glittered in crystal carafes: beet, cranberry, lemon, horseradish, plum, cherry. The guests were offered
sushki
, pirozhki stuffed with cabbage and wild mushrooms, smoked pork-belly slices arranged in the shape of a horn of plenty, adorned with grapes.

Such were the Empress’s wishes. “Just like in a
skazka
,” she had demanded. Elizabeth always craved the simplicity of fairy tales, good triumphant, a wise cat fooling a conniving magician, an overlooked princess rewarded with the throne.

“Another grand delusion,” the Chancellor had quipped. I rubbed the place on my arm where he had held me before I wriggled away. In Warsaw, Stanislav was still awaiting the King’s orders. The Old Fox was not trying hard enough, Catherine had told me. Last time he pleaded with her to be given more time, she told him that if he could not bring Count Poniatowski to St. Petersburg, perhaps the Shuvalovs might be of more use to her.

Sprawled in her gilded armchair, chewing on a pork-belly slice, the Empress surveyed the scene of her making. Her feet rested on an embroidered footstool; folds of her purple dress framed her like soft drapery. “Keep everyone away from me, Varvara,” she had ordered. Her red-rimmed eyes were nobody’s business. Even a sleepless night, I thought, had become a state secret.

I hovered behind the Empress, a guard dog and a spy, knowing that what she wanted from me was a story to her liking. A bad mother and a good aunt … a foolish prince unworthy of his inheritance … a blessed baby who would save the Empire.

The Grand Duke, having taken a seat underneath a birdcage, to the Empress’s right, clasped his hands tightly to stop them from fidgeting. Catherine had persuaded him to wear the Preobrazhensky greens. He had been with her to the nursery once—a reluctant visit, for, as he told Catherine, what can a father do with a child who is not old enough to march?

The Grand Duchess praised everything. The flowers, the birds, the breeze coming from the garden carrying the scents of roses and honey. Her dress was plain, a summer dress of white muslin and satin ribbons, but all eyes naturally turned toward her. Even Ivan Shuvalov leaned to whisper something, words Catherine acknowledged with a graceful nod and a flutter of her fan. As she moved from one group of guests to another, she offered nods and smiles, a touch of her hand, a kind comment.

It was only the Chancellor whom she visibly ignored, her eyes sliding past him when he bowed to her, darting in the opposite direction if he made the slightest effort to move closer.

He frowned. He shook his head.

He tried again, and again was snubbed.

It turned into a game, an amusement for the court: Catherine’s half-smiles, her swift turnabouts, the Chancellor’s persistence, Ivan Shuvalov’s chuckles.

The Empress wiggled in her chair. She didn’t like attention to flow away from her. I propped up her pillows. The one behind her back was damp with sweat.

I was relieved when the Imperial Favorite stood up and—hand resting on his chest—began reciting an ode to the Illustrious Minerva of the North:

May the Lord to the end of our days
Multiply your cherished years
To the joy and defense of the world!

A lively round of applause brought a smile to Elizabeth’s lips. When the applause faded, Count Razumovsky, his voice rich and low, intoned one of his Ukrainian
dumas
about lovers parting in sorrow.

The Empress tossed him a handkerchief. He kissed it before sliding it into his breast pocket.

The Chancellor stood next.

“A speech would be too long, Your Highness,” he said, “so I’ll be brief.”

He was brief. Russia was ready to teach Frederick of Prussia a lesson he would not forget. The troops reported their readiness; peasants gathered at the recruiting stations, singing songs to the Empress’s glory. Field Marshal Apraxin was waiting for the chance to prove himself to His Beloved Sovereign and his Motherland.

I stifled a temptation to laugh. A few words, maybe, but none idle.

At the mention of his beloved King of Prussia, the Grand Duke lowered his head. Beside him, Ivan Shuvalov winced when he heard Apraxin’s name. He was still hoping the Empress would not appoint the Chancellor’s protégé to the post of supreme commander of the Russian army.

“The whole nation, Your Highness, is ready,” the Chancellor continued. “We merely await your command.”

The Empress slapped her hand on the arm of her chair. In her eyes I saw a flicker of dark glee.

“If Russia has to enter the war,” she announced, the purple sleeve of her gown shimmering with diamonds, “I’ll lead the troops myself.”

There was a moment of uncertain silence, but it ended as abruptly as it began. Praises flowed, just as Elizabeth wished them to, lavish, exuberant. She would be magnificent. She would astonish the world.

Our little mother.

Beloved.

Merciful.

Virtuous.

I didn’t see the Grand Duke rise. His voice made me look at him. It was piercing and high-pitched, a shiver in the marrow of the bones. There is something deadly in foolishness that takes no notice of the dismayed faces, faces that hide in the shadows the instant your eyes touch them.

“How can Your Majesty even think it possible?”

The Empress cocked her head, puzzled, as if her nephew spoke some foreign tongue whose meaning had to be pieced together word by word. A patch of color appeared at the base of her neck.

“My father headed his troops,” she seethed. “Do you think I’m not as good as my father?”

I watched Peter’s scarred face turn crimson. He flung his long hands about him. Such is the bitterness of a foolish prince, I thought, the disappointment of the one less able. Like a marsh, deep and treacherous, reeking of rotting leaves.

“He was a man, and Your Majesty is a woman,” Peter shrilled.

Before the Grand Duke managed to say anything else, Ivan Shuvalov pulled at his sleeve so hard that the seam tore.

Too late.

I saw the footstool overturn; I saw the kick that sent it flying. I saw the Chancellor rise and lunge toward Elizabeth, as if his touch could contain her rage.

It was Catherine’s voice that stopped them all.

“Please, Your Highness! Promise us you will not put yourself in the path of danger. We beg of you, in our times of trouble, have mercy on your children.”

A voice soft and pleading but irresistible.

The Grand Duke opened his mouth again, but Catherine didn’t give him a chance to speak. “We may not be your soldiers,” she continued, throwing herself to her knees in front of the Empress, “but we need your guidance. Rule the generals who lead the troops, but stay with us here, we implore you.”

The Empress sank back into her cushions. Two tears rolled from her eyes. She let them trickle down her rouged cheeks.

The foolish prince from the Russian
skazkas
is always saved by a wise princess
, I remembered.

“Enough, my child,” the Empress said. “Get up.”

I rushed to help the Grand Duchess to her feet. I felt her hand squeeze mine. If she expected her husband’s gratitude, it did not come. “I’m not like Madame Resourceful,” Peter had said to me before he left, recalling his old name for Catherine. There was a dangerous note of resentment in his voice when he said it.

At the rare moments when we found ourselves alone that summer, Catherine questioned me about Elizabeth’s fluttering heart, the smell of rot coming from her womb. Was there any truth to the rumors of fainting spells? Had she started avoiding stairs?

“She’s been like this before,” I answered. “Don’t believe all you hear.”

Catherine’s face sharpened in disappointment.

“It’s all this talk of the war,” I continued. “She is afraid.”

The imperial terror of reckoning, I called it. The judgment card of the monarch’s tarot deck. This is what brought drops of sweat to Elizabeth’s forehead, darkened the puffed skin under her eyes. In the Empress’s mind, God decided a nation’s fate by weighing the sins of its ruler. Which would matter more—French sloth, Prussian greed, or Russian pride? “Have I not been merciful?” I heard the Empress mutter as she prayed.

In one of the letters Catherine showed me, Sir Charles urged her to give up the part of a friend and take up that of heir of Russia.
You are more powerful than you think
, he had written.
You can have all you want
. At night, with Darya tossing in her sleep, still grinding her teeth in spite of Masha’s wormwood infusions, I savored the promise of his words.

In the sparsely furnished guest suite at Tsarskoye Selo—a reminder of the Grand Duchess’s position at court—Catherine continued her questions.

“Does she sleep at all, Varenka? Is she often in pain? Does she talk about me?”

I looked at the room: two gilded chairs, a small table, a bed, a chest of drawers. A window overlooking the kitchen garden, from where a scent of something unexpected floated in—cinnamon and cloves, as if it were Christmas.

Catherine, in her light summer gown, stood by the open window, her fingers twisting the gold tassels of the curtains.

“You miss him,” I said softly. “Have you not had a letter?”

She turned her head toward me, and I saw the glitter of tears. “I don’t want to talk about Stanislav. Please, Varenka. I can’t.”

So I spoke of the Imperial Bedchamber instead. Of peasant singers, bandura players, children with voices the Empress might call “angelic.” A roster of ladies-in-waiting eager to amuse her with gossip until suppertime, when the Imperial Favorite arrived. Well rested, glowing, like her cats.

“The Empress refuses to be alone,” I continued, pleased when my words made Catherine smile. “So I make sure she isn’t.”

At night, when Ivan Shuvalov was sent back to his rooms, when the palace slumbered, I found the Empress leafing through the
St. Petersburg Gazette
, scrutinizing the caricatures of the Prussian King through her magnifying glass. Frederick II on a stool, a sack between his knees, packing the lands of Silesia, Bohemia, and Saxony into a grab bag with one hand, picking bits that have fallen to the ground with another. Frederick, in his scanty frock coat, licking his lips as he peered through a spying hole at the naked flesh of reclining Austria.

“What do they write of him now?” the Empress asked, pushing the newspaper into my hands.

A bandit and a thief
, I read,
treacherous … conniving … insatiable … claims that his army of two hundred thousand men can be at his enemy’s throats in three weeks
.

Elizabeth bit her fingernails when I read, and then rubbed at them, as if she could make them longer. Underneath her dressing gown, a frill of Belgian lace revealed the etchings of blue-green veins under the paper-thin skin.

So that Frederick might rob a neighbor whom he had once sworn to defend, black men are fighting on the coast of Coromandel and red men scalp each other by the Great Lakes of North America
.

I spiced the essential with pinches of the trivial.
In the Prussian army, officers eat on tinplate. Silver spoons are forbidden
.

“A miser,” Elizabeth muttered. “A highway robber with no conscience.”

There was hatred in the Empress’s face, hatred like fire to be fanned and kept burning. She would never forget that the King of Prussia had once called her “an illiterate cunt ruled by pricks.”

In spite of the Shuvalovs’ displeasure, the Empress granted Field Marshal Apraxin full command of the Russian army. The orders that followed brought many changes. My husband had assumed the duties of a receiving officer for new recruits. It would be harder for him to get away, he told me when he came to Tsarskoye Selo for a week, a harried week of rushing about.

We, too, talked about the war.

The price of salt soared from
twenty
to
fifty
kopecks per
pud
. The price of liquor doubled. The Russian treasury was raising money.

“Not fast enough,” Egor said.

Now that the Prussian King had the backing of the British, the Prussian army would go on the offensive. “Russia doesn’t have much more time to get ready,” he said.