The Winter Palace (51 page)

“
Added the calm
 …” Darya prompted, but Count Panin didn’t let her finish.

“Please, Your
Majesty
,” he said, his plump hand descending on the Grand Duke’s bony shoulder.

Paul cast him an uneasy glance.

“Did I make a mistake?” he asked.

“No, Your
Majesty
.” Panin’s voice took on the solemn, affected note of a courtier. “There is no time for poetry now. I have something very important to tell you.”

I tried to warn him. “Perhaps his mother should be the one to do it,” I said softly.

“Will you let me decide what is proper, Varvara Nikolayevna?” Panin snapped.
The bookbinder’s daughter should mind her place
, his eyes warned.

I fell silent.

Paul’s shoulders hunched. He looked at me. A child does not understand silence, cannot yet sift through what has been left unsaid.

I turned my head away. Darya curled deeper into the shadows, bewildered.

We sped toward the Winter Palace. Beside me, Panin was explaining to the Grand Duke what a coup was. And what the difference was between an Empress and a Regent.

It was well past six when our carriage finally rode through the streets of St. Petersburg, past the cheering crowds. Shouts of “Victory!” and “Long live the Empress!” flooded the evening, a white night, as bright as day.
A tidal wave
, I thought, recalling Alexei’s promises. Once set in motion, a wave so great it sweeps everything and everyone with it.

Count Panin’s restless gaze swept over the crowds. The children had been silent for hours. I was glad when we reached the yard of the Winter Palace and it was time to part.

The carriage door opened. Paul turned to me.

“Go, Your Highness,” I told him. “Your Mama is waiting.”

He scrambled out of the carriage. A step followed by another, still hesitant but irreversible now. Count Panin went right after, fast, as if he feared I would overtake him.

In a few moments the Grand Duke would be in his nursery, guards from four regiments stationed at the door at all times. Safe.

A hard lump formed in my throat, and tears stung my eyes. Darya and I, too, got out of the carriage. The air was freezing, and I shivered.

In Our Lady of Kazan, Catherine was taking her oath as Empress and Sole Autocrat. She would be nobody’s Regent. The Grand Duke would have the time to grow up before he took the throne after his mother’s death. As it should be.

I stood in the palace courtyard, suddenly not knowing what to do next.

“Why are you crying, Maman?” Darya asked.

I put my arms around her, too tight, for I could feel her squirm.

I saw Catherine an hour later, on the Great Perspective Road, wearing the Preobrazhensky greens. Saber in hand, oak leaves on her tricorne hat, she was riding Brilliant, her gray stallion, along the cheering street, from the Kazan church toward the Winter Palace.

People fell to their knees as she passed by, imploring her for her blessing, raising their children up in the air so that they would be closer to the Empress, could touch her black jackboots. The old and the sick were helped to the windows so that they, too, could see the miracle of the new reign.

I knelt on the ground, recalling that first time I saw her, a child of fourteen arriving in Moscow, unsure of her fate. I thought of the young woman she became, branded by injustice and pain, singed by humiliation. Much had been taken away from her, and yet her heart had not been broken.
My Empress
, I thought.

Catherine’s voice, loud and resonant, rang in the air: “I swear to Almighty God to make Russia greater than it has ever been before.”

Alexei and Grigory Orlov were riding right behind her, in the Izmailovsky’s steel blues trimmed with gold ribbons. Two brothers-in-arms, big, silent, and vigilant, their sharp eyes constantly surveying the crowd.

Around me hands rose, a sea of hands, waving, pounding the air: “Long live our
Matushka
! Long live our Empress!”

Weeping, I added my voice to these cries.

The streets of St. Petersburg filled with the aromas of roasting pigs, sauerkraut simmering with wild mushrooms, potato pancakes fried in lard. Vodka and wine were offered free in all city taverns. Soon the day of revelry turned into the white night of dancing and love-making, the time when more children were conceived than at the end of Lent.

The June children, I’d hear them called in the months to come.

“The great warrior hid behind the hooped skirts of his mistress.” Alexei Orlov laughed as the news poured in.

In Peterhof, Peter, by then the Emperor in name only, could not believe what stared him in the face. With growing annoyance, he surveyed the new orchestra pit, the rows of giant pots with citrus trees along the paths, lanterns hanging on the branches. It was his name day. Why was Catherine not greeting him upon his arrival?

He sent his footmen to the Monplaisir Pavilion with a message that she should hurry. When the footmen came back saying that the Grand Duchess begged for more time to get ready, Peter stood on the terrace of the Peterhof palace and watched the fountains of the grand cascade.

Half an hour later, when Catherine still did not come, he decided to fetch her himself.

Alexei’s booming voice rose and thinned when he imitated Peter’s cries, “Where are you? Where
are
you?” as the deposed Emperor ran from room to room of the Monplaisir Pavilion cursing the cowering maids, looking under the bed, in the wardrobes, even in the water closet, as if Catherine were a child playing hide-and-seek.

In the Throne Room, everyone desired Catherine’s attention. The giant mirrors reflected the silk court jackets and embroidered gowns, the uniforms, the sea of waving hands, the necks craning to get a glimpse of the new Empress.

Victory
, I heard.
Blessed day
.

Catherine the Second, the Empress of All the Russias. She had put on a gown of plain ivory silk, decorated with the blue ribbon of the Cross of St. Andrew, reserved for the Sovereign. Beside her, Grand Duke Paul rubbed the green sleeve of his Preobrazhensky uniform, looking unhappy and confused.

I marveled at Catherine’s patience with the elaborate petitions thrust into her hands, with the long lines of courtiers jostling to kiss the hem of her dress. When Grigory Orlov tried to push them away, Catherine told him not to stop friends from expressing their joy.

I, too, knelt before her.

“Varenka,” she said.

Triumph made her eyes sparkle. Her hair shone; her cheeks glowed.

A throng of people behind me were pushing to get closer.

“Varenka,” she repeated.

She raised me and kissed me on both cheeks and then, placing her hand on mine, she asked, “Will you be of even more help to me now?”

I nodded, my voice caught in my throat. Catherine’s next words rose over the din of whispers.

“It is thanks to such friends as
Countess
Malikina,” she said to the crowd, “that I was able to deliver Russia from the perils of autocracy.”

A cheer resounded, then another.

She had made me Countess, and I didn’t even have time to thank her, for I felt an impatient pull from behind, a tug of my sleeve reminding me I was not the only one wishing to approach the new Empress. Beside me, Alexei Orlov repeated a plea that Catherine must show herself to the people.

In the streets of St. Petersburg, rumors flew: that Peter had come to the city in disguise to gather support, that the King of Prussia had already sent his troops to help him, that he was planning to kidnap Catherine or even that he had already kidnapped her.

“Right now, Your Highness,” Alexi Orlov kept saying, his voice hoarse from strain but still booming. “Please, Little Mother. They need to see you and the Grand Duke. To know that you are both safe from this
monster
.”

I remember how harsh this word sounded, and how unnecessary. For a brief moment I even waited for Catherine to chastise him, but then the sparkling, unbelievable happiness at our victory claimed my thoughts.

A coup is a debt, and after it, debts multiply.

Catherine, in the Preobrazhensky uniform, appeared everywhere. She hardly slept; she ate on the run, on the way to inspect the troops or meet yet another delegation. She was graceful and gracious, distributing rewards, bestowing titles, estates, and medals, granting petitions and recalling the banished.

I await you as soon as your horses can bring you here
, she wrote to the former Chancellor Bestuzhev. Count Panin—reconciled by then that she would not be Regent for her son—sported a red, sliver-lined ribbon of his newly received Order of St. Catherine.

Grigory Orlov was named Adjutant-General. All five Orlov brothers became Counts. The top conspirators were offered six hundred peasants and a pension of two thousand rubles or twenty-four thousand rubles in lieu of land. I, a bookbinder’s daughter turned Countess, too could make my choice.

In the corridors of the Winter Palace, courtiers swirled, their numbers doubled and trebled by the giant gilded mirrors. They bowed when our eyes met, waiting for a chance to assure me of their longtime devotion. Count Panin walked about with brisk, determined steps, his rouged lips creased into a smile. What position had
he
been promised? A Chancellor?
Will he replace Vorontzov?
I heard.

But even the most generous rewards were not enough. Not a day passed without some guard attempting to return the Order of St. Alexander with which he had been decorated, calling himself the unhappiest of men, refusing to be consoled until Catherine took the petition he thrust into her hands, promised to reconsider a past judgment or restore old privileges.

“Every guardsman can say, ‘I made that woman,’ when he looks at me,” Catherine said to me in one of those rare moments when I found myself close enough to speak to her. “How long until they will start saying, ‘I can undo her’?”

She didn’t say,
I want you to watch them, Varenka. I need you to listen to what they say
.

She didn’t have to.

Here is what I heard in those fevered days.

From Oranienbaum the spies brought reports of a boat waiting, packed to the brim with supplies. The Holsteiners, they warned, were charting the shortest route to Prussia.

“No harm will come to him.” I still hear Alexei’s thunderous promise as he left to arrest the former Emperor and escort him to the Schlüsselburg prison, where it had been decided Peter would stay until Catherine decided his fate. “And he will cause you no harm, Your Majesty.”

The dispatches flooded in, as beaming messengers rushed in and out of the staterooms, heroes of their own stories.

A Schlüsselburg cell was not yet ready, so Alexei took Peter to the Ropsha palace, thirty-six
versty
away from St. Petersburg. He vowed to spare no effort to keep the former Emperor comfortable.

Yet Peter had complaints. His room was too small, his bed too narrow. He had no place to take his morning walk, and without exercise, his legs swelled up.

He was drinking. He refused to eat his breakfast and his dinner. He cried and asked for
Das Fräulein
’s presence.

I’ll go away and never come back. All I want is my dog, my flute, my Negro, and my mistress
, he wrote to Catherine.
I renounce the throne of Russia. I willingly swear allegiance to Empress Catherine II. I beg her forgiveness for all I have done wrong
.

Amid the giddy promises of those first days of Catherine’s reign, I tried to push away the memory of the lonely wigless figure in his blue housecoat walking down the Oranienbaum corridor.

Peter has surrendered
, I told myself.
He is a better man than he is an emperor
. A few months in prison will pass quickly. He will be happier for it in the end.

I still refused to admit that justice might merely be another name for getting even.

On the third day after the coup, at five o’clock in the morning, I waited for my Empress with a pot of fresh coffee, the coveted privilege I claimed as my right. From her new bedroom I heard Grigory Orlov’s voice: “Don’t think about it, Katinka. Push it from your mind.”

At the Winter Palace, Catherine had taken the Imperial Suite: the state bedroom and six adjacent inner rooms, all gold and white. Grigory Orlov moved into the apartment right above hers.

I heard a dog yelp. Old Bijou was no more. Sir Tom Anderson, an Italian greyhound, was now chasing away the palace cats, the few scraggly ones that still kept showing up, in search of Elizabeth. I no longer recognized them, though some had Bronya’s tortoiseshell fur and Pushok’s eyes.

Sir Tom began to bark.

“Stop it,” Catherine shrilled. The dog whined, and stopped.

Catherine said something I could not hear.

The sounds of her steps, fast, circling the room, were followed by Grigory’s booted stride.

“You
have
to stop the rumors, Katinka,” I heard him urge her. “Alexei says that he will turn his back on you and bite your hand.”

In the antechamber to the Imperial Bedroom, I straightened the tapestry on the wall. I picked up a soiled glove from under a chair. It gave off the odor of jasmine blossoms mixed with sweat.

I waited.

It was a quarter past five by the time Catherine walked in. She gave me a wan smile when she saw me. I could tell she had been crying.

“Everyone wants something from me, Varenka. I cannot please everyone.”

Before I could say anything, she put her finger on her lips.

The letter from Ropsha arrived on the fifth day of Catherine’s reign. The Empress was in the Throne Room, surrounded by courtiers. The messenger threw himself at her feet, bringing with him the rank smell of the road, the rot of the marshes, and rain.

Catherine broke the seal and read quickly, in silence. Her lips tightened. I saw her wipe her fingers on the silken folds of her skirt. She crushed the letter in her hands.

“I’m shocked and dismayed,” she said, raising her eyes.

I will never forget a single word on the crumpled sheet.
Little Mother, your husband is no more
. There had been a skirmish in Ropsha, an unfortunate skirmish, wished by no one. An argument turned into a quarrel, too swiftly to extinguish or control. Everyone who was with the former Emperor at that time was guilty, worthy of death. But it was Alexei, Count Orlov, who wrote, begging Catherine’s mercy, a pardon or a quick end.