The Winter Palace (43 page)

“He says it’s because of the breakdown in supply lines?” Ivan Shuvalov’s voice soared with a thespian flourish. “How can a victorious army be short of supplies?”

I described it all to Catherine. How when Apraxin’s reports were read aloud to the Empress, Countess Shuvalova raised her eyebrows. How her brother sucked in air through his blackened teeth. “Why is Field Marshal Apraxin giving the Prussian King a break? Is it incompetence or treason?” he asked. “And who is telling him to? Bestuzhev and one of his new friends?”

He means you
, I warned Catherine, but she did not look concerned. She had nothing to hide, she assured me. Bestuzhev was forever trying to interest her in some of his schemes, but she always refused to take sides.

“Let the Shuvalovs talk, Varenka,” she said. “There isn’t much more they can do.”

She was right, I thought. St. Petersburg was preparing for Prince Naryshkin’s wedding. The bride was his mother’s choice, for the son had been taking too long to make up his mind whom to propose to. In the Imperial Bedroom the government papers awaited Elizabeth’s signature, reports lay unread. The Empress sent back dozens of pandoras that modeled her ceremonial gowns before she settled for a sky-blue silk gown with wide hoopskirts, on which garlands of muslin vines sparkled with diamond grapes.

“You can always count on our help,” Alexei Orlov had assured me in these painful days after Egor’s death. He repeated his promise every time he called on me during his visits to the capital.

He would bring gifts for Darenka, a china tea set for her dolls’ house, a silver brush set for her hair. He’d stay to a simple dinner. “Uncle Alexei,” Darya agreed to call him.

Very proper visits they were, chaperoned by Masha’s mute presence, her good eye catching mine when the subject of our conversations strayed to what she didn’t understand, warning me against what she judged to be too much joviality, a gesture too free. For no matter how she liked Alexei Grigoryevich Orlov of the Izmailovsky Regiment, how often she called him Master Egor’s true friend, she would not allow me to become a target of malice.

“People talk,” she grumbled, refusing to tell me what she had heard. “This is how people are. You are a widow.”

One such evening, for Darya’s amusement Alexei Orlov was coming up with one outlandish story after another. The scar on his face, he assured my daughter, came from a unicorn’s horn. It gave him special powers.

“Close your eyes and count to five,” he told her. “And I’ll go to the moon and come back.”

I watched Darenka fight disbelief when our guest presented various proofs of his moon trips: a stone, a feather, a smooth piece of driftwood.

“Is it true, Maman?” she asked. “Do birds fly that far away? Are there trees on the moon?”

“How would I know,
kison’ka
?” I asked her back, not wishing to extinguish the sparks in her eyes. “I’ve never been there.”

Amid all this merriment, I waited for the conversation to turn to Catherine. I never forgot that the guards were called “the makers of the Tsars.”

The Grand Duchess handled her horse superbly. Her command of Russian was a source of marvel; so was her poise and good humor, especially in
Das Fräulein
’s presence.

There was no need for words more direct than these. The winter freeze had suspended the hostilities, but Russia was still at war. The time was not right, but that did not mean that it was being wasted. The Shuvalovs were not the only ones making plans. In the games of the court, there were those who—in the hour of need—would stand at Catherine’s side.

On the morning of February 13, Stanislav came to my rooms at the temporary palace shaken and distraught.

“Bestuzhev has been arrested,” he told me, once I’d sent Masha away. “Yesterday. Right outside the Imperial Bedroom.” Fear made his voice waver and break.

I could not believe his words. I’d been at the palace all day. I saw no one running, no signs of agitation that would indicate an event of such magnitude.

“Keith told me,” Stanislav continued, trying to steady his voice.

The new British Ambassador had kept Sir Charles’s allegiances, but he didn’t tell Stanislav much beyond the basic facts. Bestuzhev had been stripped of his office and his rights, and questioned about his friendship with Field Marshal Apraxin. Bernardi, the jeweler who carried Catherine’s notes to Sir Charles and to Stanislav, and Abadurov, Catherine’s Russian tutor, had been arrested as well.

The old spymaster beaten at his own game?

I felt a thump of fear as my mind rushed to consider the consequences. My heart was racing. The Shuvalovs were no fools. They knew I was Catherine’s friend. Bernardi used to carry my letters, too.

Catherine didn’t know anything of these events, Stanislav continued. He’d wanted to warn her himself, but her maids told him she was with the Grand Duke. In the temporary palace, the Grand Duke’s room was next to the Imperial Suite. Stanislav didn’t want to go there himself. He didn’t want to cause Catherine more trouble. He pressed a folded note into my hand and closed my fingers tightly around it. His fingers were sweaty and cold. “You have to warn her, Barbara,” he urged me. “Please, hurry.”

I asked him to wait for news at the Saxon Mission.

I slipped the note into my pocket. Darya was calling me from the other room. On my way out I motioned for Masha to go to her.

Before we parted, Stanislav put his hand on my arm.

“Tell Sophie that all will be well—in the end.”

I walked along the corridor in measured steps, anxious to hide my own terror. I recalled the Shuvalovs’ contempt for Apraxin’s reports. “Let them talk,” Catherine had said. She was wrong. I knew that now. The Shuvalovs had the Empress’s ear.

As I moved along the hallway, I passed old tapestries depicting familiar hunting scenes: A stag pierced by an arrow. A bear, upright and bloodied, tearing dogs off its chest. Through the window, I saw a water carrier rolling a large barrel through the path cleared of snow, whistling a loud tune. By the palace kitchen a beggar woman with a bandaged face and two slits for her eyes stood patiently for her share of stale pies and hardened bread.

I recalled the anguished face of Madame Kluge, her loud screams, her limp body dragged to the scaffold.

When would the guards come for me? At dawn, so that no one would see? No one but my child.

Before the Grand Duke’s suite I pinched my cheeks to get some color in the pale face I glimpsed in the ornate mirror.

The Grand Duchess was having a private breakfast with the Grand Duke. The papers they had been working on still covered part of the table. She brightened at the sight of me.

“It’s Varenka, Peter! What a lovely surprise.”

“I told you she would come by.” The Grand Duke brushed bread crumbs from the front of his silken waistcoat. “We were just talking of Lev Naryshkin’s wedding feast. Have you heard that the bride’s mother demanded twenty barrels of oysters?”

“Twenty-five,” Catherine said, laughing.

I walked toward her. When Peter motioned for one of the footmen to bring more coffee, I slipped Stanislav’s note into her hand.

“My stockings are ruined again,” Catherine complained, bending, so that the table would hide her from her husband’s sight. I saw her unfold the note and scan it quickly before slipping it underneath her garter. Her face did not change.

“How is sweet Darenka?” she asked. “Will you let her stay with me in Oranienbaum this summer? Tell her she can help me take care of the birds. She’ll like that.”

The servants brought another plate for me. Would I have
bliny
with caviar? Cucumbers with honey? There was no hurry in Catherine’s voice, no note of alarm.

It was only when we reached her room that I saw the white knuckles of her clenched fists.

For the next hour, in silence, we fed the fire with her papers, all of them, no matter how innocuous. Letters, receipts, pages of her writing. Notes on her readings. She opened her drawers one by one and handed me the contents.

I recognized Stanislav’s handwriting, but mostly I recognized that of Sir Charles. Many of the letters from him were pages long. Catherine had not destroyed them, as I had urged her to.

How slowly paper burns, I fretted, as the flames licked the edges of the sheets, as singed words turned from brown to black, soot flowers I shattered with the poker until only ashes were left.

There would be no sudden change of plans, we agreed. Catherine and Peter would go to Naryshkin’s wedding. There would be no note for Stanislav. Just a message I was to pass to him in utter secrecy:
Keep silent at all cost
. Deny everything, until she learns more.

“Tell him there is nothing he can do to help me. Tell him not to do anything without word from me. Tell him to trust me, Varenka.”

I hurried to the Imperial Bedroom. It seemed to me that the guard at the door gave me a vacant but irritated look, as if struggling to recall who I was.

I tried to pay him no heed.

The chambermaids informed me that the Empress had left for the day, and that she had taken the baby with her. Ivan Ivanovich Shuvalov was with Her Majesty. They didn’t know more than that.

Awaiting the Empress’s return, I couldn’t keep still. Restless, I ordered a thorough cleaning of the fireplace in the Imperial Bedroom. I sent the footmen outside with the carpets, to spread them on the snow and beat the dust out.

I was praying the Empress would allow me to stay with her that night, to entice her with my stories. I would tell her of a woman on Moskovskaya Street, her swollen breast flattening, the ugly tumor melting into nothingness after Blessed Ksenia touched her. The same Blessed Ksenia, I would tell her, who had given away all she owned to the poor and now walked barefoot through the streets of the city, dressed in rags. Then I would mention Bestuzhev’s name and watch Elizabeth’s face, read the shape of her frown.

But the Empress did not come back. That evening one of her ladies-in-waiting dropped by for the brushes and combs. I arranged them on a silver tray, adding a jar of Elizabeth’s favorite cold cream. The lady-in-waiting took the tray and said that the Empress would stay in Count Shuvalov’s suite for the night.

When she left, I sat down at the Empress’s dressing table. My body felt as though it were made of stone. In the gold-framed mirror, my own face stared back at me, haggard-looking and strange. My black mourning dress was speckled with ashes from the fireplace.

I thought of the Chancellor, locked in some room, answering or refusing to answer questions. I thought of Catherine’s calm and of her clenched fists.

The chair underneath me moaned as I rose.

I walked to my own rooms swiftly, through the long corridor of the temporary palace, my black-clad figure duplicating in the mirrors as I passed.

The rumors ranged from plausible to ridiculous. The accusations were vague but serious: misrepresentation of imperial orders, conspiring with the enemy, treason. The most serious ones spoke of the Chancellor ordering General Apraxin to stall the Russian offensive against the King of Prussia. Someone had heard him say that the Empress had only weeks to live, that it was now up to the Young Court to secure Russia’s future.

Depending on whom one listened to, Bestuzhev had acted at Catherine’s request or out of his own conceit. He was tortured or he was not tortured. They’d found incriminating papers or they’d found nothing. He’d confessed or he’d insisted on his innocence.

The rumors grew wilder, but there were no more arrests.

We had no choice but to think of this time as a time of trial.

We were watched. We had to act our parts.

Stanislav stayed home, feigning illness. Catherine and Peter went to Lev Naryshkin’s wedding, where she laughed heartily when Count Nebalsin rejoiced that he would not have to pay Bernardi for the necklace the jeweler had delivered to him the day before he had been arrested.

The Empress returned to the Imperial Suite two nights later. She paid no heed to the brightness of the freshly brushed carpets. She did not wish me to massage her feet. When the evening came, she sent me back to my rooms.

Countess Shuvalova, she told me, would stay with her at night from now on.

I went about my daily duties and held my daughter close every night. The Grand Duchess and I kept our conversations brief and trivial when we met. A week later, I saw her in the corridor with one of her maids-of-honor. When I passed her, Catherine murmured, “It’s not as bad as I feared, Varenka.”

I stopped.

Catherine motioned for her maid-of-honor to move on.

The news was vague, but vagueness, too, could bring comfort.

Catherine had asked Prince Trubetskoy, the Procurator-General charged with conducting the inquiry into the affair, what the charges were against the Chancellor. The old Prince had a soft spot for the Grand Duchess ever since word reached him that she had cried when his youngest son was killed at Gross-Jägersdorf.

He told her, “The Shuvalovs had Bestuzhev arrested. Now I’m supposed to find out why.”

The message from the Chancellor came hidden inside a snuffbox. The messenger who brought it insisted on handing it to the Grand Duchess herself. She was not in her rooms, and he didn’t want to ask any of her maids-of-honor where she could be. The person who trusted him with the note mentioned my name, so he came to me.

In the palace chapel, where I took him, Catherine was bowing in front of the icon of the Lady of Kazan, touching the ground with the fingers of her right hand, the Orthodox way.

The messenger placed the snuffbox in her hands. As soon as he left, she opened it and extracted a note from the double lid, reading it quickly.

I saw the relief on her face.

“The Chancellor managed to burn his papers before they came for him, Varenka,” she murmured. “The Shuvalovs have nothing but gossip.”

She rolled the note and used it to light a candle of thanksgiving for a favor granted.

I nodded, but I could not coax a smile onto my lips. In Elizabeth’s bedroom, gossip could still maim.

“Cheer up, Varenka.” Catherine squeezed my hand. “Now I know what to do.”