The Winter Palace (9 page)

“Prince Naryshkin says that the Princess is not too pretty.”

“And what does the Chancellor say?”

“He says that the Princess is very clever.”

“Cunning, he means,” the Empress said, rolling her eyes. “Meddling. And how does he know that?”

“He has received another letter from Berlin.”

The Berlin spies had been busy, and so I could paint for the Empress a picture of the young Princess from Stettin, a grim, black dot at the mouth of the Oder River, far away from anywhere important. I hinted at a dark-haired girl left to her own devices, playing with merchants’ children on the slippery cobbled streets, the daughter of a scatterbrained mother who had been disappointed that her firstborn was not a boy.

“Her father, Your Highness, is good at dispensing advice but lacks the means to act upon it. And her mother’s temper grows worse with each year.”

I told the Empress of the shabby poverty of the genteel, of threadbare carpets that underpaid servants washed with sauerkraut to coax back the color, chairs from which grayish filling always threatened to slip out, silverplated dishes revealing copper or tin at the edges, dresses that had to be mended and darned and were always out of style.

“Is that what Bestuzhev says about her? Does he think I’ll send the girl back if I hear about that?”

I could feel her feet tense. I could see the flash of anger gather in her eyes.

“The Chancellor says that poor princesses are not used to power. Elevated above her station, she will be grateful to those who put her there and will therefore be Your Highness’s most loyal subject.”

Under the pressure of my fingers, my mistress’s feet were again growing soft and warm. I rolled the toes between my thumb and forefinger, one by one.

“The Grand Duke,” I continued, “asks about the Princess every day.”

I was not surprised to feel Elizabeth’s feet stiffen again. I had already seen the twitch of her lip when her nephew mangled some Russian name. I had made note of a dismissive sneer after his awkward fall at one of her masquerades, when he tripped in his high-heel shoes.

I poured more oil on my palms. “The Grand Duke wants to know why Sophie is so slow to arrive.”

In his bedroom, Peter had spread a map on which a toy carriage moved a few inches every day. Two dolls were sitting inside, the bigger one with a chipped nose ever since one of the palace cats had knocked the carriage to the floor. I did not mention the fact that every time Professor Stehlin told him to stop rubbing his cheek and pulling on his ears, Peter seemed astonished, as if he were not aware of the wanderings of his own hands.

Elizabeth closed her eyes. I kept talking.

The Grand Duke used to worry that his fiancée would be skinny. But Professor Stehlin told him not to. The Princess would take on more flesh as soon as she started eating excellent Russian food. “Women,” Stehlin said, “should be plump and soft like our Empress.”

“Is that what the old flatterer really said?” my mistress asked, just as I knew she would.

“Yes, Your Majesty.”

“And what did Peter say to this?”

“He was pleased.”

The curtains let in the first light of dawn. I was keeping my voice low and steady, hoping Elizabeth would finally drift into sleep.

The Grand Duke had wanted to know what to do with a fiancée. Would he have to kiss her, he had asked me three times already. When I said that he would have to, he blushed crimson.

There were more questions: Would he still have to take dancing and deportment lessons when he was married? Or would he be allowed to concentrate on his regiment? Would Princess Sophie like to watch him drill his troops? Wasn’t she, too, a soldier’s daughter?

The Empress closed her eyes.

Everyone in Petersburg was waiting for the arrival of the Princess of Anhalt-Zerbst, I continued. Jugglers were perfecting new acts, fortune-tellers prophesied joy.

As soon as I heard the first light snore, I made sure the silver-fox-fur blanket covered the Empress’s feet. I wiped the oil off my hands and slipped out of the room. I knew better than to snuff the candle.

The Secret Chancellery’s dispatches about Princess Sophie’s progress on her monthlong journey to Russia came in hand-bound folders tied with green ribbons, their ends sealed with wax. They contained unflattering stories of darned stockings and chemises of coarse linen. The Anhalt-Zerbsts lived in a palace no one in St. Petersburg would look at twice.

When the invitation from Russia had arrived on New Year’s Day, it was reported, Sophie’s father hesitated for three full days before giving his consent for the trip. He objected to the change of religion that a marriage to the Russian Crown Prince would bring. “How can we risk our daughter’s salvation for earthly glory? Allow the worship of idols?” he had asked. “If I listened to you, we would still be in Stettin,” his wife replied, but even she attempted to hide the news of Elizabeth’s summons from her daughter. “So as not to excite her too much when nothing is certain yet,” she told her husband. There had been talk of Sophie’s secret engagement to her own uncle, but the Anhalt-Zerbsts were no fools. They knew a better match when they saw one. The Princess may have been too fond of sitting on her uncle’s lap, but she was still a virgin.

“They come in four carriages, and even that expense has to be paid out of the imperial coffers,” the Chancellor had scoffed, as he thrust the dispatches from his spies at me.

The spies reported on petty squabbles over lost combs and bedbugs. A German maid confirmed that Sophie had worn a corset to straighten her spine until she was seven. But there was no sign of dislocations now, the spies confirmed.

The Princess and her mother were traveling in unmarked carriages under the names of Countess Reinbeck and her daughter, Figchen—little fig—plump and sweet and filled with tiny seeds, Sophie’s childhood nickname. Her mother, Princess Johanna, complained ceaselessly that winter was a bad season for traveling.

The ruts in the roads were frozen solid. The bedchambers at post houses were often unheated. Figchen suffered from swollen legs and had to be carried during their stops. More than once, the travelers had to sleep in the postmaster’s room, with his children, dogs, and chickens. So much for the famed comfort of the Prussian inns, Princess Johanna grumbled.

For the spies watching them day and night, no detail seemed too trivial to report. Each tidbit made the Empress chortle with delight.

By the time the travelers reached Riga, the charade of incognito had been abandoned. The family’s unmarked carriages were sent back to Prussia, replaced with a Russian gift of an imperial sleigh. “Isn’t it like a big bed, Maman?” Sophie reportedly exclaimed. “Have you ever seen anything like it?” She learned fast how to get in and out of it and declared that for the first time in weeks she was warm right down to her toes. She kissed the sable furs, touched featherbeds and fur blankets and declared “our dearest Empress Elizabeth” the most generous of all people on earth.

“Clever flatterers, the Anhalt-Zerbsts. This much I grant them,” the Chancellor told me, his hand sliding inside my chemise. “But still, our little Figchen with her pointy chin won’t last longer here than a few weeks.”

Chancellor Bestuzhev was not pleased with the steady stream of dispatches about Princess Sophie’s gushing adoration for Her Benefactress and with the Grand Duke’s growing impatience to meet his intended bride. In the Empress’s presence, like everyone else, the Chancellor praised the Princess of Anhalt-Zerbst with all the flattery he could muster, but from me he did not hide his anger.

What the spies were sending him were pitchers of warm spittle. What was he to do? Drink it and smack his lips?

I watched his black eyes, gleaming with indignation and stifled fury. I listened when he complained that reports took forever to arrive. His spies were repeating themselves, sending accounts of the same incidents with insignificant variations, most of them useless. Rulers can be blind and deaf to what is the most important, but the best courtiers cannot be.

“See if there is anything in those the Empress might need to hear,” he said, throwing a bunch of papers on my lap. This, too, was a skill he had taught me—fishing for the important detail buried in the trivial.

I glanced at yet another account of the solemn morning prayers for the health of the Empress and the Grand Duke, of stockings worn three days in a row, one darned at the toe but not too skillfully, of a loose stool and a regular one, of a birthmark on Sophie’s thigh.
Using the pretext of having to treat her swollen legs, I examined the Princess
, Elizabeth’s surgeon wrote.
She has already had her menses. With full authority I can state that she has good bones and will have no trouble giving birth
.

Only Princess Johanna could always be counted on to brighten the Chancellor’s mood. I reached most eagerly for the copies of her letters home and the daily scribbles in her journal.

I was received by Prince Vladimir Dolgoruky
.

It never occurred to me that all this was for poor little me, for whom in some other places they hardly beat the drum and in others sound nothing at all
, Johanna wrote about her reception at Riga.

“Poor Figchen might have fallen out of the carriage,” the Chancellor muttered. “And no one would have even noticed her absence!”

I giggled.

I braced myself for his usual tirade about apples and the apple tree, vain mothers and their daughters, but it didn’t come. I had found a letter that had pleased him more than the sound of his own voice.

Being one of the generals entrusted with the task of welcoming Princess Sophie of Anhalt-Zerbst to Russia, I feel it my duty to inform Your Excellency of a conversation I had with our illustrious visitor.

It was the following demand that I hasten to inform Your Excellency about. Princess Sophie asked if I could supply her with details on the characters and habits of key courtiers. Her questions were: Does the Empress like them? Are they rich enough? Do they have wives and children? Who are their closest friends?

“If you make notes on them,” the Princess added, “and give them to me, I will remember you well, General.”

Knowing that if I refused this unusual request the Princess would find someone else to do it for her, I prepared the notes. An exact copy of them is attached to this deposition. As Your Excellency may be so kind as to observe, they include only the most obvious and easily obtainable facts. If, as in two instances, I included the name of a favorite dog, it was at the Princess’s specific request.

The Princess is
very
fond of dogs.

This was the letter I read to the Empress that night when the maids had been sent away. I read it slowly, the way the Chancellor instructed me to. “Planting a seed of imperial doubt,” he had called it.

The Empress was seated at her dressing table, staring at the coils of her golden bracelet glittering on her wrist.

“Where is Sophie now?” she asked, as if she did not hear a word of what I had just read.

“In St. Petersburg, Your Majesty. For a quick rest before hurrying on to Moscow.”

“Does she like it there?”

“She says it is so much bigger and grander than Berlin. She clapped twenty-five times when Prince Repnin took her to see Your Majesty’s elephants. She could not believe such giant beasts could dance so gracefully.”

“She will make it here in time for Peter’s birthday, won’t she?”

“Yes.”

I saw the Empress bend closer to the silver-framed dressing mirror, lick her finger, and run it along her brow. She was waiting for a night visitor, I realized, someone for whom she was now dabbing perfume behind her ears and on her wrists, someone who would come through the secret passage that led all the way to the courtyard.

“Go now,” she told me.

I set the folder on the small side table by the Empress’s bed. But before I opened the door, she called me back.

“How long have you been at the palace, Varvara?”

“Almost a year, Your Highness.”

“How old are you now?”

“Sixteen, Your Highness.”

“You could be her friend. An older friend she could trust.”

“If this is what Your Highness wishes,” I replied, and paused, waiting for her to say more, but she waved me to hurry out.

The travelers were taking their time. By February 6 the Empress no longer cared to hide her impatience, not even in the Chancellor’s presence. She had hoped that Sophie and Peter would spend a day or two together before the birthday feast. How long could “a quick rest in St. Petersburg” last? Didn’t they know she was waiting?

On February 9 a sleigh passed through the grand entrance of the Annenhof palace and stopped in front to the jingling of harness bells. A sliver of a girl untangled herself from the furs and quickly followed her mother inside the grand entrance, past a throng of chamberlains and Guards officers waiting to greet them.

“How warm it is here, Maman!” she gasped, clapping her hands. “Warmer than the Zerbst palace is in the summer!”

In the grand hall it was Marshal Brummer and not Chancellor Bestuzhev who welcomed the imperial guests.

“An honor,” Princess Johanna said, her voice loud enough for all to hear. “And a source of our greatest joy.”

They were whisked to their rooms to freshen up before meeting the Empress. In the palace corridors, courtiers and chambermaids, cooks, valets, and stove stokers hovered on tiptoes, craning their necks. Having pushed my way forward right behind the guards, all I could see was a disappointing glimpse of a sable pelisse and a brown headdress.

I hurried to the Empress’s side. She was seated in the Throne Room surrounded by her ladies of the court. The Grand Duke Peter stood by his aunt, shuffling his feet, eyes fixed on the door. Chancellor Bestuzhev was there, too, behind them. The expression of stifled amusement on his thin lips could be mistaken for joy. “You should’ve been more blunt,” he’d snapped when I’d told him the Empress paid no heed to the letter he’d ordered me to read to her. “We cannot let this little
Hausfrau
play her little games.”

“They’ve arrived, Your Majesty,” I said, breathless from running, which earned me the Chancellor’s annoyed glance.