The Winter Palace (44 page)

That evening everyone in the palace who passed by the Grand Duchess’s rooms heard her anguished sobs. Her maids-of-honor rushed in and out, fetching laudanum and smelling salts. The Grand Duchess fainted, I heard. The Grand Duchess asked for her confessor.

Someone was trying to destroy her reputation, Catherine sobbed when Father Semyon arrived. Someone was trying to drive a wedge between her and Her Majesty, Her Benefactress.

Her voice wavered and broke: “If only Her Majesty would hear me out.… I cannot live like this anymore.… I want to fall asleep in a snowbank .… I’ve heard that it doesn’t hurt to die from the cold.”

Before Father Semyon left her room, he made a sign of the cross over her and ordered the maids-of-honor to pray for the souls in despair.

At midnight on April 13, a month after Bestuzhev’s arrest, I heard the Empress dismiss her ladies-in-waiting and her maids.

I thought of Catherine, about to receive her summons. I thought of the power of gossip. I looked at the ceiling. Even above the Empress’s rooms, the carpenters had not been too thorough. After the summer heat, the cracks in the floorboards had grown wider. Enough moonlight would come through attic windows for me to see my way.

In the service corridor I dipped a handkerchief in a bucket of water. Then I took off my shoes and crept up the narrow steps to the attic.

I lay on the dusty floor, my nose covered with a wet handkerchief to stop myself from sneezing. I did not move. Below me, I could see the marble tabletop lit by two candelabras, unfolded papers spread between them. The Empress was sitting in her armchair, a fan in her hands. I could tell she was not alone. In the dark, behind screens brought in for the occasion, shadowy figures crouched.
Some of the Shuvalovs?
I guessed.
The Grand Duke?

I didn’t have to wait long before the door opened and the guard announced the arrival of the Grand Duchess.

Before Catherine had time to utter her greetings, Elizabeth pointed to the papers on the table.

“What do you have to say about these?” she asked.

Catherine made a step toward the table. Her skirts rustled.

“These are my letters,” she answered, a moment later. In her voice there was no hesitation and no fear.

“Letters to whom?”

“To General Apraxin.”

“You have no right to send letters to my general. I expressly forbade you to concern yourself with politics.”

“I merely congratulated the general on his victory, Your Majesty. I wished him a successful campaign.”

“Bestuzhev says there were other letters.”

“The Chancellor is wrong. There were no other letters.”

“Should I have him tortured for lying?”

“If Your Majesty wishes.”

I held my breath. In the cellars of the Secret Chancellery, there were many ways of ensuring confessions. Its chief, one of the Shuvalovs, had bragged of blows that left no traces on the skin. Elizabeth could order Catherine tortured, too. She could, like the Great Peter had once done to his own son, grab the knout from the executioner’s hands to strike the first blow.

Behind one of the screens, someone moved.

I heard Peter’s voice. “Don’t believe her, Your Majesty. She knows how to twist the truth so that everyone believes she is right.”

So the Grand Duke, too, had been summoned. What had the Shuvalovs promised
him
? A triumph over his wife? A triumph he feared was slipping out of his grasp?

The Grand Duke emerged from his hiding place, his movements jerky and agitated. “
Elle est méchante
,” he stammered, and stamped his foot.

He was calling his wife mean and deceitful.

Catherine fell to her knees. “I displease you, my Benefactress. I displease the Grand Duke, my husband. Your Highness can see it for yourself. There is nothing for me here. No one at this court will speak to me. No one trusts me. All I do is wrong. Every day I pray for Your Majesty’s health and for the health of my children. I pray for Russian victory in this war. I don’t know how else to please you and my husband. Let me go back to my family. Let me do some good with what is left of my life.”

Was it Peter’s clumsy abruptness that tipped the scales? Or was it Catherine’s ultimate act of surrender that Elizabeth could never resist?

I heard a softening in the Empress’s voice. “How can I send you back? What will you live on?”

“Anything my family can spare. I have no great needs. There is nothing here for me.”

“You have two children.”

“They are in excellent hands, Your Majesty. I’m not allowed to see them, anyway. Please let me go. It’ll be best for me to go.”

“You won’t go anywhere. This is your home.”

Peter grunted in disbelief. The floorboards squeaked under his shifting feet.
It is over
, I thought, as I watched the Empress motion for Catherine to stand up, extending her hand to be kissed. Catherine had won. She would again be welcome in the Imperial Bedroom, asked to soirees and games of cards.

Behind one of the screens, someone stifled a cough.

“You can see your children.…” I heard Elizabeth pause, negotiating the extent of her magnanimity. “Every other day.”

There is distraction in relief. Time to notice the smudges of dust on my sleeves, to feel how my hands grew stiff from cold. To hear something move, scurry along the wall, underneath the white sheets hanging on strings, like giant sails.

The Grand Duke had been dismissed. Below me, Catherine was explaining something to the Empress, but I couldn’t hear what she said. Once or twice it seemed to me that she uttered Stanislav’s name.

Every time the Empress laughed.

There were more night summons to the Imperial Bedroom, sudden, urgent, unpredictable. Elizabeth did not like to give warnings. She trusted tears, confessions by candlelight, oaths on the Holy Icons. Catherine took to sleeping in her clothes, shoes by her bed, a basin with cold water nearby to wash the sleep from her eyes.

I didn’t dare climb to the attic again. During the days that followed, I didn’t seek Catherine’s company, either, but when I did see her, she seemed calm and composed. We didn’t talk about much other than our children and books, though she did mention Sir Charles. He did not write to her. She knew he had reached London only from his daughter’s brief note of thanks. The presents the Grand Duchess of Russia had sent Lady Essex through her father were exquisite, and she was very grateful for them. Sir Charles was not well, she wrote, quite exhausted after his long journey and unable to hold a quill.

Neither of us mentioned Stanislav’s name.

I didn’t know if Stanislav had tried to see her, or had even tried to smuggle a letter. Once, passing by the Saxon Mission, I thought I saw him looking through the upstairs window. I stopped the carriage and told the driver to wait, thinking Stanislav might send his servant for me, but no one came.

In the Imperial Bedroom I was again ordered to massage Elizabeth’s feet.
A good sign
, I told myself. After relaying the choicest of the palace gossip, I regaled the Empress with the rumors of the streets. The Chancellor’s fate was the source of many wild speculations. Was he a Prussian spy in Frederick’s pay? An English toady? An old courtier past his prime trying to force her hand?

The Empress hardly listened.
Not as swollen as he had hoped
, her eyes mocked, as she twisted the rings on her fingers, her hand holding an emerald ring she had slid off her finger as if it were a die to be cast.

Once she ordered me to stand by the window and tell her what I saw there. The Palace Guards marched in formation. A carriage sped by.

“Nothing else?”

“Nothing, Your Highness.”

Sometimes it seemed to me that we were not alone, that behind one of the screens that now always stood in the bedroom, someone was hiding, listening to my every word. But I never saw anyone.

Soon the news from the Prussian front replaced the rumors of the Chancellor’s fate. After Apraxin’s arrest, the imperial soldiers were again beating the Prussians, proving to Europe that Russia was not to be ignored.

Catherine was back in Elizabeth’s favor, and the court took notice. The bows that greeted her deepened; the smiles grew wider; the inquiries about her health became loud enough for everyone to hear.

It was a muted, gray morning in early May when I entered her room, the day’s sudden chill signaling the annual breaking up of the ice fields on Lake Ladoga. In a few days the whole city would turn out to watch the ice floes noisily grinding against one another as they piled up on their way to the sea.

Catherine was hugging Bijou in her arms, letting him lick her hands. Old faithful Bijou, wheezing and smelly, more and more wobbly on his feet.

She had bad news.

Two letters from Stanislav, Catherine told me, had been discovered among the former Chancellor’s papers. They were formal letters of little significance, yet they reminded the Empress that it was Chancellor Bestuzhev who insisted on bringing Count Poniatowski back to St. Petersburg as the Saxon Envoy.

Stanislav, she said, had been ordered to leave.

“When?” I asked.

“Before the end of August.”

“Could he not resign his position and stay?” I asked, knowing it was impossible.
Poor Stanislav
, I was already calling him in my thoughts.

Catherine gave me an unseeing look and lowered Bijou, letting him settle on his velvet pillow.

I can still hear her voice, terse and somewhat stiff, as if she had practiced her reply for too long and had grown tired of it already. “The Empress cannot do anything else, Varenka. The Empress must consider the future.”

In the spring, the newly laid ceiling stuccos in the Winter Palace had begun to crumble and would have to be replaced. The long-promised move had been postponed once again. The Empress raged. Rastrelli was declared an incompetent liar, his workers a bunch of deceitful thieves. For weeks we all tiptoed around her, mindful of every word. Catherine and Peter were relieved when the time came to move to their Oranienbaum palace for the summer. I was not that lucky. When the Empress departed for Tsarskoye Selo, I was ordered to go with her.

The aftermath of Bestuzhev’s fall was felt in St. Petersburg for some time, even though his interrogation yielded no results. Bestuzhev was not tortured. He would have said too much, gossips said.

After months of Apraxin’s interrogations there were no proofs of treason, but no exonerations, either, only suspicions allowed to fester. Then, at the beginning of August, the Field Marshal died of a stroke. Bestuzhev was stripped of his position and banished from court to his country estate. He was forbidden from contacting anyone in the capital.

He left St. Petersburg in the second week of August. No one dared to see him off. His name would never again be mentioned in Elizabeth’s presence. It was not the first such banishment. Nor would it be the last.

After a few postponements blamed on illness, in the third week of August, in Tsarskoye Selo, the Saxon Envoy presented his final report to the Empress and offered his profound thanks for the Russian hospitality.

The Empress presented Count Poniatowski a snuffbox with her portrait on the lid, studded with sapphires and rubies, and wished him a safe journey home. That same day, Stanislav traveled to Peterhof. Catherine had slipped out of Oranienbaum to be there with him for a few stolen days. They stayed in the Monplaisir Pavilion by the sea. Alone.

I saw Count Poniatowski at the Saxon Mission in St. Petersburg on the morning he left.

It was the last day of August. The day promised to be beautiful, in spite of the chill brought by the northern wind. In the courtyard of the Saxon Mission, two of Stanislav’s servants were checking the straps on the coffers and trunks. Another was spreading a travel rug on the carriage seat.

I walked past them, into the mission.

Stanislav was waiting for me in the parlor. The portrait of Augustus II was in its usual place, but darker patches of color marked places from which paintings from Stanislav’s own collection had been removed.

“This is not how I imagined leaving,” he said.

“No,” I replied, fighting an urge to place the palm of my hand on his forehead, the way I did with Darya when I wanted to test for fever. He was wearing the cambric shirt Catherine had given him when he came back last December. It had a letter
S
embroidered on the collar. No one else called her Sophie.

I had brought him presents. A basket holding Masha’s preserves, and a drawing Darya had made for him, a cat in a velvet outfit, bowing in front of a Queen.

“Tell Darya that I’ll put it in a gold frame when I get to Warsaw.” Stanislav’s voice was strained.

“I will.”

“I’ll be back, Barbara. I’ll be with her when she needs me most. Don’t let her forget that, will you?”

I walked with him to the yard. The horses neighed when they spotted him. He had a chunk of apple for each of them.

The carriage door was opened, the step extended.

How can you help her?
I thought.
What can you do for her? What can she do with your love? Go. It’ll be easier for her if you are not around
.

Stanislav put his foot on the carriage step, a polished tip of a black jackboot with silver trim. Inside the carriage I spotted an open trunk filled with books for the long journey to Warsaw.

In the end, he couldn’t stop himself. Some thoughts are like aching teeth one probes with one’s tongue.

“She wants me to come back, doesn’t she?”

“Yes,” I lied.

It was not for me to reveal Catherine’s hand.

“Will you let me know if anything changes?”

“Of course.”

I waited until the carriage started to roll away into the busy street before I walked back to the palace. I thought I would never see him again. Nothing else—no other future—seemed to make sense.

In the streets of St. Petersburg the beggars who sang war ballads and ditties were filling their pockets with coins.
Old Fritz, who lost his wits. Can’t beat the Russians, he admits
. At the Tartar market vendors hawked battle scenes on which the paint had not yet dried, studded with miniatures of the new war heroes: By the fall of 1758 Grigory Orlov was among them. A hero from the Battle of Zorndorf.