The Winter Palace (45 page)

“Orlov?” the Empress asked. “Handsome?”

“Yes, Your Highness.”

“Tall?”

“Yes.”

“A hero?”

The war was not yet over, but the Orlovs’ army career had proved a disappointment. “Still a Lieutenant, though others became Majors and Colonels,” his brother Alexei had said, bitterly, when he called on me at the palace. “Hiding from creditors and licking his wounds.” His own commission had ended, and he was back in St. Petersburg, at the Izmailovsky Regiment. He would not seek another. It was back to the palace duty for him.

“Lieutenant Orlov captured the King’s adjutant,” I told the Empress. “He refused to leave the battlefield in spite of seventeen slashes of a saber on his body. But then there was this scandal.”

“What did our eagle do?”

“He seduced his commander’s mistress. Princess Kurakina. Ran away with her, but then he gambled away all his money and the Princess went back to her parents. His brother had to pay his debts.”

“Tell me more,” the Empress said, and laughed.

A soldier, brave and reckless. Strong enough to stop a runaway horse with bare hands. Eyes brimmed with glee when he walked into a room, dulled with dismay when he left.

Just like the men she always wanted to hear about.

“Give it to him.” The Empress took a small ring off her finger and tossed it to me. The ruby, I noted, would not be worth more than two hundred rubles.

The limits of the imperial attention. “Advancement in the Russian army does not come on merit,” Alexei had said. “It is either favor or bribe.”

O
n the morning of March 8, the Grand Duchess Anna Petrovna woke up with a piercing scream. She would not suckle. She would not stop crying when the wet nurses carried her in their arms, and when they put her down she waved her arms and legs like a beetle stuck on its back.

She was fifteen months old.

The Empress rushed to the nursery, but even her favorite lullaby would not soothe Anna for more than a bewildered moment, a painful pause between wails. The doctor ordered a fresh chamomile infusion, but the baby vomited it all. Her eyes were glassy with fever. She was scratching herself until she bled; her face was covered with hot patches of raw skin.

When the nursery cat began to screech, the Empress ordered the room searched for anything suspicious. Nothing was found, no bones, no hairballs, but one of the wet nurses wept and admitted dreaming of a snake swallowing a frog. With its small legs, the frog clung to whatever it could grab, a stick, a branch, but the snake wouldn’t let go.

The Empress stared at the nurse, her hand tugging at the hem of her sleeve; her face stiffened, furrowed with dread.

Rain pelted the windowpanes. Water dripped from the cracked frame, staining the white wallpaper. I thought of Catherine in Oranienbaum, making plans for her new garden, in preparation for the Young Court’s annual move to the country. In the grayish stillness I saw Anna’s hand twitch, her tiny fingers clasping and unclasping the air.

“Send someone to fetch the Grand Duchess, Varvara,” I heard Elizabeth’s strained voice. “Tell her to hurry.”

What I recall next is a blur. I must have hurried to the guards’ room, for I remember my relief at the familiar sight of Alexei Orlov’s scarred face. Such a giddy feeling of relief it was, almost joy, as if one man could stop death, as if one man could make things right. I must have blurted something incoherent, for he asked me to repeat what I wanted before he understood. “Messenger,” I remember saying, “quickly.”

“I’ll go right away,” Alexei Orlov offered. He said something else, but, to me, his lips seemed to be moving without forming a sound. I sagged against his chest and cried.

When I got back to the nursery, the Empress sat by the cradle, dipping cloths in icy water to place on little Anna’s forehead, giving her attar of roses to smell. She rocked the cradle gently. She promised her angel child a diamond as big as her beautiful eyes, if only she would get well.

The baby gave no sign that she’d heard.

The wet nurses and the ladies-in-waiting were praying in front of the icon of the Lady of Kazan. I, too, joined in the prayers.

Anna died three hours later. She had closed her eyes forever before Catherine entered the nursery, her mantle soaked with rain. There was no need for words. The Grand Duchess took one look at the Empress’s frozen face and began to sob.

Dawn was breaking when I passed by the guards’ room again. Inside, Alexei Orlov paced from window to door, the massive frame of his body rigid with tension. Three other guards sat squeezed on a wooden bench, watching the spectacle of the Orlov rage.

I leaned against the doorframe, my eyes smarting from crying, from sleepless hours of prayers.

Alexei lurched toward me. I felt the floor shake. I smelled the acrid foxy odor of his sweat. A tale came to me, an old Orlov family story I had heard once. Alexei’s grandfather, condemned to death for mutiny, stepping on the scaffold and kicking the head of the man beheaded before him out of the way. Earning Peter the Great’s pardon.

“She should’ve been sent for sooner. Who keeps a mother away from her child at such a time, Varvara Nikolayevna?”

My eyes trailed the scar across his cheek, the open collar of his tunic, hands clenched into fists. For a moment I, too, longed for a simpler world, where all wrongs could be avenged. An eye for an eye, swift and sure.

“I made the Grand Duchess leave the carriage behind and mount a horse. We rode like the devil. Still, we were too late.”

Behind me, at the end of the corridor, something stirred. A maid in search of the secrets of the morning? I put my finger on my lips.

Alexei raised his voice. “I’m not afraid.”

Inside the room, one of the guards cheered. Another one clapped his hands.

“I have to go,” I said. My heart was heavy with the memory of Anna’s waxy face, a child of such perfection. I needed to hold my own daughter in my arms. But before I could leave, Alexei Orlov caught the ruffle of my sleeve.

“The Grand Duchess has many friends, Varvara Nikolayevna. Let her know that, will you?”

Catherine and Stanislav’s daughter was buried in the Alexander Nevsky Monastery, Peter the Great’s gift to Russia. At the funeral, the Empress, in a plain black taffeta dress, without her jewels, ordered two of the strongest footmen to stand by her side, to hold her up if she began to falter.

Catherine had hidden her face under a thick black veil. She lifted it only once, when she kissed Anna’s cold hand before the priest closed the lid of the tiny coffin. After the funeral she was silent and pensive, preoccupied with her grief. I tried to console her, but nothing I did dispelled her pain.

There was more bad news in the weeks that followed Anna’s death. First a letter came from Paris, to inform the Grand Duchess that Princess Johanna had died. Catherine had been writing to her mother for some time, so she knew of the Princess’s most recent illness and her growing debts, but the news was still a blow.

Then another letter, this one from London, announced the death of Sir Charles Hanbury-Williams.
My beloved father
, his daughter wrote Catherine,
did not find peace after his return from Russia. Nothing here satisfied him; nothing could compare with what he had left behind
. In the antechambers the rumors were less reticent:
a fine mind ravaged
, I heard,
syphilitic confusion … an actress attacked with a knife
.

The end of old dreams
, I thought, hurtful but necessary. Like purgings, like drawing dark blood away from the body, the only way to let the healing begin.

After Anna’s funeral, Monsieur Rastrelli ordered thick canvas curtains hung to block off unfinished sections of the Winter Palace. Day and night, his workers painted, laid carpets, and moved furniture. Stoves were always banked up to the full, so that paint would dry faster. By the time the Empress was brought to see her new bedroom, only a scent of varnish bore witness to the frenzy that had ruled there mere hours before.

“Here it is, Your Highness. The jewel worthy of you and of new Russia. May it bring you everlasting pleasure.”

Sculptures wrapped in burlap still crowded in the smaller ballroom. In what would become the servants’ quarters the carpenters stored lumber and glass panels. But Monsieur Rastrelli made sure the imperial eye did not miss the precious wood floor, the gilded walls, the crimson upholstery.

The Empress gave her architect a faint smile.

It won’t be long now
, I thought.

She was breathing hard, each breath drawn painfully out of her lungs. Her hands were too swollen for her favorite rings. Her feet were spilling out of even the most comfortable shoes.

When the Empress moved to her newly finished suite, only five of her twelve ladies-in-waiting followed. The chambermaids slept on cots in the alcove. Everyone else left the Winter Palace at the end of their shifts.

In the grand bedroom the old Imperial Bed looked small, a ship cast adrift on the sea.

When did I know the Empress of Russia was dying?

Was it at
Kanun
of 1761, the time of fasting and prayers after the January freeze, the preparation for the midnight Baptism of the Lord? The day before,
poslushniks
who serve the Nevsky monks cleared the snow from the river and cut a
Jordan
, a hole in the ice shaped like the cross, where the faithful would plunge, naked, to purge their bodies of sin.

“Silence!” the Empress screamed when we pleaded with her not to go to the
Jordan
that year. She stood there in the bitter cold when the bells tolled, when the monks led the procession to the ice hole.

In profile she looked as stern as her own face on a coin.

One by one, the faithful climbed out of the frigid bowels of the Neva, their hair frozen into icicles, and, shivering, joined the chorus of prayers. Swaddled in furs, cloaked in darkness, Elizabeth Petrovna, the daughter of Peter the Great, whispered, “Lord forgive me my trespasses as I forgive those who have trespassed against me.”

By
maslenitsa
, the last week before Lent, when eating meat is forbidden though cream and butter are still allowed, the Empress was no longer able to sleep.

Her favorite cats—brought from the temporary palace—lounged with her on the bed, tucked along the curves of her body, purring under her caresses. When Bronya began growing big with kittens, Elizabeth ordered a birthing box for her to be placed by the stove.

At night twenty thick candles were to burn at all times in every room where she went. She was rarely left alone—visitors, courtiers, lovers, old and new, kept arriving. If she sent them away, one of her ladies-in-waiting was always ready to take their place. If the chatter of voices tired her, she called for her Cossack singers.

For a time there was hope of new cures: kalgan roots, which resembled a tiny human; Marcial waters from the Karelia that had once cured Tsarina Ksenia’s barren womb; or the velvety black shungit rocks. Elizabeth chewed the roots, drank the waters, held pieces of rock in her hands. She prayed. On better days she even ordered a fitting for a new gown or asked to see jewels from the treasury. She’d dip her fingers in heaps of precious stones, caressing the rings and necklaces, recalling the balls or masquerades when she had worn them.

When Gypsy women and the soothsayers arrived, the Empress no longer wished to hear of her future. It was the Tsarevitch’s destiny she wanted revealed.

At seven years old, Grand Duke Paul was small and fragile, but no one ever said that to the Empress. His visits were scheduled for late afternoon, when she felt most alert. His gray eyes looked about her room without settling on anything. Sometimes he lifted his thumb to his lips and then dropped it before it reached his mouth. He called the Empress “Auntie,” and ran to hide in her arms if anything frightened him, a door banging, a crow shrieking in the courtyard.

The cards released from their wrapping of black silk were laid in semicircles or crosses. “Spit on your hand and touch this card, Your Highness. Put a coin on that one. Knock on it. Tap it with your index finger.”

The cards were elusive. One Gypsy woman saw Paul with a wife and children, many children; another saw him set off on a long journey that would reveal what had been hidden. Most often the cards merely spoke of forked roads, uncertain promises, periods of danger.

“What kind of danger?” Elizabeth kept asking.

“The kind that will pass,” the fortune-tellers replied carefully.

I, too, weighed my words with care.

I didn’t tell the Empress when I found Bronya’s whole litter of kittens dead in the birthing box. The maid swore they were all fine just hours before. Only one of them seemed to have had a runny nose, she wept in terror.

I didn’t tell the Empress that the Blessed Ksenia had disappeared. Hackney drivers no longer spotted the bent figure in red and green rags who used to bring them good luck every time they gave her a lift. She did not sit at the entrance to the church of Apostle Matvei, and bakers waited in vain with her favorite cinnamon-spiced buns. No one could tell where she had gone until a novice monk saw her in the open fields, outside the city, crossing herself and bowing in prayer.

Instead, I brought stories of miracles. I told the Empress of holy men whose touch shrank tumors, of monks whose blessing cleansed the blood, of holy relics whose very presence made the crippled throw away their crutches, rise from their sickbeds, and walk away in grace. I told myself that I needed to please her, just as I always had. For had she ever asked about Bronya’s kittens?

And then, on one moonless night lashed by the northern wind, the Empress ordered me to bring Anna’s clothes and toys to her bed. She kissed the folds of the tiny dresses, smoothed the lace of the white baptismal gown, lifted the dolls, one by one, and stared into their lifeless eyes.

“God’s will is sometimes so hard to bear, Varvara,” she said.

I bent my head in silence.

For a long while the Empress sat motionless, with folded hands, muttering a prayer for the dead.