The Winter Palace (49 page)

“It’s all in Russian,” he complained.

I kept silent. Would he order us to keep the books in German? Or French?

He didn’t. He handed me a sheaf of papers instead. Letters, I noted, petitions. In one of them, Mr. Porter, a St. Petersburg cloth merchant, complained of not being paid for his last delivery. In another, a wardrobe maid asked for a silk chemise the Empress had promised her before she died.

I said I would look into them right away.

“Good,” Peter said. There was a broad grin on his face. I could see
Das Fräulein
lean toward him, her fingers picking something invisible from his shoulder. A hair? A thread?

The inspection was over.

I was waiting for the Emperor to leave, but he turned to me one more time.

“You were my friend once,” he said, in a subdued, boyish voice I recalled from the time I used to read to him.

“I am still your friend, Your Majesty.” I tried to make my own voice steady and firm.

He looked at me with sharp intensity, as if considering my answer, but his next question had nothing to do with me anymore.

“I hear that the Grand Duchess is still writing to Count Poniatowski? Is this true, Varvara?”

I muttered some elaborate protestation, only to see it dismissed with a snap of his fingers. When his eyes narrowed, my heart skipped a beat. When he spoke again, his voice had changed. It was prickly and sharp.

“Some call me a fool, Varvara. But it is safer to deal with honest fools than with great geniuses. My wife will squeeze you out like the juice from an orange, and then throw away the rind!”

It was her third baby, and it came out without fuss. “I’ve gotten good at it, Varenka,” Catherine murmured, as the midwife fiddled with swaddling clothes.

On Thursday, April 11, I held Grigory Orlov’s newborn son, red-faced, sucking on my finger, but falling asleep as soon as I handed him to his mother. He was the first of her children that Catherine had been allowed to hold.

Outside the birthing room, Grigory Orlov was pacing the floor, waiting.

I opened the door. Grigory rushed toward me and grasped my hands. “Katinka?” he breathed. “Is she well?”

I nodded. I tried to tell him he had a son, but my voice choked with relief. I merely stepped aside to let him in and stood at the door, waiting for Catherine’s sign.

They didn’t have much time. Enough for an embrace, a few endearments. The letters Catherine had written to be delivered in case she died in childbirth were now burning in the fireplace, their seals intact.

Alexei Orlov had promised to protect us, and he had kept his word. With a few fellow guards—all members of the conspiracy to put Catherine on the throne—he had set fire to an abandoned house near the temporary palace to prevent anyone from hearing Catherine’s screams. It was a grand fire, I heard it described later, flames leaping through the walls and out of the windows. The ceilings crashed, the beams fell among the sparks and billowing smoke. Chickens flew from a coop, their feathers singed; squealing pigs ran madly around the courtyard. The throng of onlookers guaranteed that no one leaving the palace on the Great Perspective Road with a bundle in her arms would be followed.

It was Catherine who named the baby Alexei Grigoryevich.

She kissed her second son on his sweet lips before giving him to me and turning away. I bundled him in a beaver skin and took him to the couple who had agreed to keep him. The former valet and his childless wife cooed with happiness when I placed the baby in their arms. “Until his mother can take him back,” I told them. “Only until then.”

As soon as Catherine had delivered safely,
révolution de palais
was all we thought about.

The Orlovs had been right. Five months into Peter’s rule, the conspiracy was growing bigger than the suspicions of the Palace Guards.

In May, the Russian army under Suvorov took the fortress of Kolberg. The victory was considered decisive. Everyone spoke of crushing the Prussian forces and occupying East Prussia.

At first Peter did not hide his displeasure at the Prussian defeat, but then he did something much worse: He offered Frederick peace. “The miracle of the House of Brandenburg,” the King of Prussia would call it. Peace without strings, without demands, a turnaround that saved Frederick’s tottering kingdom.

St. Petersburg tensed with disbelief.

Is this our payment for the husbands, sons, brothers slaughtered in the battlefields of Gross-Jägersdorf and Zorndorf?
people asked.

As more accounts of the Prussian rejoicing at their unexpected good fortune arrived, Alexei’s months of cajolings and promises began to pay off. Count Cyril Razumovsky, the brother of the former Emperor of the Night, pledged his support for Catherine. So did Prince Trubetskoy and Prince Repnin. Only Count Panin, the Imperial Grand Duke’s Governor, hesitated. He admired the Grand Duchess, he said, but he didn’t want another woman on the Russian throne.

“Not even as Regent for her son?” Alexei enticed him.

Every time I came to deliver my reports, Catherine looked more radiant. It didn’t matter that she woke up at dawn and stayed up late into the night. Her reading abandoned, she was sending requests for loans, negotiating securities, soothing the impatient with assurances of rewards. On Vasilevsky Island, a printer who had remembered my father and promised me utter secrecy was printing Catherine’s proclamation: … 
freedom from all dejection and offense … freedom from force and from fear
. The promise that her Russia would be ruled by reason and law. Count Panin—finally convinced that Catherine would rule as Paul’s Regent—had joined Catherine’s conspiracy.

My daughter spent every Monday afternoon in the Imperial Nursery, playing with the Grand Duke Paul. Masha or I would take her there, and the maids let us in without fuss.

Darya delighted in these visits. There were charades to solve, spinning tops, whistles, a big rocking horse to climb. She and Paul ran along the corridors of the palace or played hide-and-seek in the empty rooms around the nursery. Sometimes Paul asked her to read him a story; sometimes she taught him a dance step she had just learned.

“Did you tell the Grand Duke that his Maman misses him?” I asked Darenka whenever I could.

She did, but her words never merited more than a shrug of shoulders or an embarrassed look.

It did not surprise me.

Paul doesn’t need words but time, I thought. Time with his mother. Time together. The quiet time filled with childish trifles. The time that healed.

But there was no point in telling Catherine what she already knew only too well.

In June, with the white nights, impatience set in. By the embankment, sunlit even past midnight, stray dogs roamed, filling the air with their snarls, growls, and yelps of pain. On the Great Perspective Road, smells of frying lard wafted in the air at all times, mixed with the aroma of bread baking and of malted barley.

At the Imperial Wardrobe, Elizabeth’s gowns that had not been claimed by
Das Fräulein
or the ladies-in-waiting were being disassembled, turned into panels of fabric and trims. Dressmakers of St. Petersburg’s fashion houses were making their bids, assuring the best lengths of ribbons, lace, and embroidery for their outfits. What wasn’t bought vanished. Scraps of imperial fabric were already sold in the stalls of the Tatar market, and soon Elizabeth’s favorite pink would flash in the trims of dresses merchant wives wore to Sunday Mass.

In the temporary palace, Catherine’s maids began packing, but it was not for the annual summer move to the country. This year, the Emperor announced his intention to go to Oranienbaum with
Das Fräulein
and his son. If the Grand Duchess wished to escape the heat of the city, she could stay in the old Monplaisir Pavilion, on the grounds of the Peterhof palace. And in August, as soon as the court is back in St. Petersburg, Catherine would have to move to her four rooms at the Winter Palace, five corridors away from the Imperial Suite.

The temporary palace had been an eyesore far too long. It would be razed to the ground.

In our own rooms, Masha had swathed Egor’s portrait in old sheets; she had gathered Darya’s old toys and dresses, ignoring my pleas to make presents of the ones she had outgrown to the scullery maids. “Never know what becomes useful,” she muttered, her lazy eye sliding away as I looked at her. Besides, there was no need to be stingy with space. She had heard that in the new Winter Palace even
Das Fräulein
’s maids had quarters twice as big as those we lived in.

“Isn’t it where we are going?” she asked. “The palace?”

I didn’t say anything.

I didn’t believe in tempting fate.

The
révolution de palais
, I knew, was a gamble, like all palace games.

What would it be, victory or destruction?
I asked myself when I looked at my daughter at her lessons or at play. In the last months, her body began to reveal her grown-up shape. And yet she’d often give me a soft, pliable look, as if she were still a small child. On the table beside my bed lay a book of fairy tales, beautifully bound and gold-tooled, a present from Count Poniatowski. He was hoping for news, however trivial, asking if I reminded Sophie of his promise to come back.
Some dreams
, he wrote,
cannot be abandoned, without losing part of your soul
.

I shuddered and chased the future away.

I didn’t want to think of my daughter having to live with only the memory of my touch.

And then, on the eve of the court’s departure to Oranienbaum, a troubling incident took place.

A the state banquet, Peter began the celebration with a toast to the Imperial Family. Everyone at the table rose with boisterous enthusiasm, ready to drink. Everyone except Catherine.

“To the health of the Imperial Family,” Peter repeated, staring at his wife.

Guests and courtiers froze, unsure of what they were witnessing. Did the Tsar want Catherine to stand up when he himself was seated? Weren’t they drinking to her health as much as to his? Surely he was not telling Catherine that she didn’t belong to the Imperial Family?

The silence that fell was long and uneasy.

“To the health of the Imperial Family,” the Emperor repeated, finally taking a sip of the wine, and everyone drank with relief.

The banquet continued, cups skating in their saucers, napkins soiled with trickles of butter and dark mushroom sauce, glossy lips opened wide. But as soon as the toast was complete,
Das Fräulein
had turned toward the Emperor. She shook her head and stroked his arm. He leaned toward her, craning his neck.

Moments later, one of the Emperor’s generals made his way toward Catherine. In a voice loud enough for everyone to hear, he said, “His Majesty wishes to know why Your Highness did not rise from your seat.”

“Doesn’t the Imperial Family consist of Your Majesty, myself, and our son?” Catherine had become very pale, but her voice showed no trace of hesitation. Everyone fell silent.

“
Dura
!” the Emperor screamed.

Fool
. The Emperor had called his wife a fool.

I learned all this a few hours later, in Catherine’s room in the temporary palace, from Alexei Orlov, who had begged me to help his brother calm the Grand Duchess. “He’ll pay for it, Katinka, I swear.” Grigory Orlov’s enraged voice broke through Catherine’s sobs. “I won’t let him humiliate you like this.”

She was still in the same mourning dress she’d worn to the banquet, the milky-white skin of her shoulders gleaming through the black lace. Her sobs were muffled by Grigory’s broad shoulder.

“That coward. That milksop.” Her lover’s voice bounced off the walls freshly stripped of draperies. “He’ll beg for your pardon. For your mercy. You’ll see, Katinka. You’ll see.”

I added my voice to Grigory’s.

“Your friends are all behind you,” I told Catherine. “We are watching. We won’t forget anything.”

But Catherine would not be consoled.

“You’ll go to Peterhof, Katinka. You’ll wait there until we get everything in order. I’ll come to you with news every week.”

I saw Grigory’s big hand caress Catherine’s back, slide down the shiny taffeta of her mourning gown, linger at the base of her corset. “At the end of August, when he comes back to St. Petersburg, we’ll arrest him at the gates. We’ll bring him to you in chains.”

When she still did not raise her eyes, I prayed that we wouldn’t have to wait that long.

In the morning of June 28, the eve of the Feast of Saints Peter and Paul, the name day of the Tsar and his son, Alexei Orlov burst into my parlor at the temporary place with the news: Our Lieutenant Passek had been arrested.

The Emperor was staying in Oranienbaum with
Das Fräulein
and the Grand Duke. Catherine was in the Monplaisir Pavilion on the outskirts of the Peterhof gardens, where, on the following day, the splendid feast would begin.

In his well-worn riding trousers and a tight-fitting jacket, Alexei looked like any young veteran of the Prussian War, unsure of what to do with himself. I smelled vodka on his breath.

“There is no more time left, Varvara Nikolayevna,” he told me. Passek knew the location of the printed copies of Catherine’s manifesto announcing her accession to the throne. One round of torture might be enough to expose our conspiracy. Catherine must be brought to the capital immediately. She must claim the throne now, while the Emperor was still in the dark.

Sweat was moistening the crease of my underarms and beneath my breasts. Through the crack in the curtains the morning light was streaming into the room as it might into a prison cell.

I studied Alexei’s face, the jagged shape of the scar across his cheek. A memory came of his joking explanations for its presence: a Prussian saber, a touch of the unicorn’s horn.

“I’ve taken him where he is safe,” Alexei said.

He meant Grigory’s son, his little nephew, who gurgled with pleasure when I bent over him. Last time I visited I’d heard his wet nurse call him “our golden
Tsarevitch
.” She’d given me such a pained look when I told her to watch her tongue.