n Moscow the Grand Duchess Catherine Alexeyevna was buying presents.n Moscow the Grand Duchess Catherine Alexeyevna was buying presents.
A length of muslin for Countess Rumyantseva; a marble egg on a golden base for her mother.
A china vase, a porcelain figurine of a ballet dancer. A necklace of peacock feathers. A set of birch boxes, one nestled inside the other, smelling of mushrooms when you opened the lid to sniff them. A riding habit with tapered coattails and long, cuffed sleeves.
A musket for the Duke, a model cannon, a set of plaster-of-paris trees to put outside the fortifications he was constructing in his room. A helmet stand.
They lined up outside her bedroom, the tradesmen of Moscow, their attendants loaded with bundles and crates. They showed her wooden dolls dressed in the latest Parisian fashions, tempted her with ostrich feathers, lace trimmings, gauzes, and bonnets. They pointed out that Empress Elizabeth thought the world of the Parisian milliners. They coaxed her to touch samples of fabrics, spoke of the luster of pearls, of the stately sheen of rubies, of how the glitter of sapphires around the neck is as subtle as the flutter of butterfly wings.
Didn’t the Grand Duke like dark Prussian blue more than any other color? they asked as they spread shimmering fabrics on her floor. They spoke of a little help every woman needed to entice a man—to conceal and reveal. They offered pomades and perfumes, waters to moisten the skin, essences of rose, narcissus, and orange blossom.
“The Russian people are watching, Your Highness. They must not see Your Highness in the same dress twice. Simple straight sleeves are no longer in fashion.”
She could not afford to be outshone or thought of as stingy. Her new friends were expecting tokens of her affection. Her servants’ loyalty, too, had to be bought. If she didn’t do it, someone else would.
They made her buy bags for needlework, powder puffs, beauty spots, snuffboxes, sachets of perfumes, and white gloves by the dozen. It was not extravagance, they argued. It was necessity. Was it true that at the Prussian court King Frederick measured the cheese left after supper and wrote the measurement down in his notebook? That he melted the ends of candles and sold them?
A costly purchase can entice a merchant to wait a few more weeks for his payment. One creditor can be paid with money borrowed from another—but this cannot go on forever.
“Bankers are a happy lot these days,” the Chancellor told me merrily. “And I was beginning to think that our little Hausfrau would put up more of a fight.”
Debts can so easily be turned into reproaches, an accusation that the Empress has been niggardly with her allowance. Catherine was betrothed, but she was still not the imperial bride.
I looked at the Grand Duchess and thought, There is nothing else I can do for you.
But then everything changed.
In the middle of December the court was in Khotilovo, on its way from Moscow to St. Petersburg, when the Grand Duke fainted during supper. In his room, revived with salts, he complained of pain in his legs and arms. At first everyone suspected measles, but by the time the fever and vomiting started, the doctors had no doubt. It was smallpox.
Empress Elizabeth, who had been traveling ahead and had reached St. Petersburg already, hurried back to her nephew’s side.
We all held our breaths.
The bedside bulletins from Khotilovo spoke of long, feverish nights and of the Crown Prince’s will to live. In churches all over Russia, priests led prayers for Peter Fyodorovich and the safety of the Empress. Like a true mother to her beloved sister’s child, the Empress nursed the Grand Duke herself, sitting by his bedside day and night. She washed the sores on his face and body. She fed him broth and strengthening tonics. She quieted his cries of pain.
Hushed voices in antechambers considered the possibilities. Death might reshuffle the cards. What would become of that other heir, Ivan VI, the child who had been condemned to a prison cell on the day the Russian daughter of Peter the Great seized the throne?
I heard it evoked often in those days, the memory of that November night three years before when the Palace Guards brought Princess Elizabeth back to the Winter Palace on a sleigh, beautiful like a Madonna from an icon, a Russian cross in her hands, a leather cuirass over her shoulders—triumphant but in need of protection, strong but in need of love. One by one, the soldiers had knelt before her, kissed the hem of her dress, sworn to protect her with their lives.
Elizabeth could have had Ivan killed then, but she didn’t. Perhaps for a reason?
As the Grand Duke was fighting for his life, the whispers grew. The Empress was almost thirty-five. There was still time before she would go through the change of life. What if she made Ivan her husband? Perhaps he was soft in the head, but he would be fit to father a child soon enough. A true successor to Peter the Great!
With the Empress and the Grand Duke away from the Winter Palace, official duties were suspended, plans put on hold. Doors once flung open for visitors were kept shut; no music poured from opened windows. In the receiving room, cats were the only guests. They lounged on the ottomans or chased one another across the floor.
Idle footmen and maids sat for hours on the steps of the service corridors, chatting and giggling, scarcely bothering to make room for those who wanted to pass. By the stables, guards gathered to play cards. Fortified with good snuff and shots of vodka, they tried to pinch or fondle any palace girl who walked past.
Everyone waited.
Catherine and her mother had not been given apartments at the Winter Palace but had to take a house on Millionnaya Street. They were fast becoming insignificant, worthy of no more than a passing whisper. If the Grand Duke died, the Empress would have no use of them. The house was two-story, its windows always closed and curtains drawn. To the annoyance of Herr Leibnitz, a German cloth merchant, and the families of Guard officers who lived nearby, day after day creditors banged on the door, cursing their own foolishness in trusting these foreigners, complaining loudly how the mighty of this world did not care to pay their debts.
I thought of the two bees locked in the piece of amber Catherine had given me. We are both foreigners here, she had said.
She soon would be gone. What harm was there in showing her some kindness?
I walked to the house on Millionnaya Street and rang the bell. The day was cold and windy, threatening more snow. A sleigh passed by, its bells jingling. A narrow footpath cleared of ice had been sprinkled with sand and ashes.
The maid who asked me to follow her could not resist asking if I’d heard anything about the Grand Duchess moving back to the palace.
I shook my head. The hall smelled of wood smoke and mold.
“This way,” the maid said, showing me to a small parlor on the first floor.
The room seemed quite dark with its wooden paneling, its front windows hung with velvet curtains. Cheap cotton velvet, I noted, not silk. The only light came from a narrow window facing the backyard with its bare trees. A tile stove took up the whole corner of the room, radiating a pleasant heat. Beside a clavichord, on a side table I spotted a pile of books in plain bindings. When I opened them, they turned out to be tales of pirates, shipwrecks, and kidnappings.
I took it all in. The armchair with frayed covers, a watery mirror, a sewing box with a lacquered lid on which a beautiful firebird glittered, a woolen shawl draped over the chair by the window, two crossed sabers hanging on the wall above a bearskin. From the corridor came the noise of clanking pots, a patter of feet, the soapy smell of boiling laundry.
I recalled the house on Vasilevsky Island, Papa’s measured steps, Mama’s voice cheerful and brisk. The memory was so vivid that I could almost inch into her arms.
The door opened quite abruptly. In this house a visitor was clearly a rare treat.
“Oh, it’s you,” Princess Johanna said when she walked into the room. She didn’t try to hide her disappointment. “I hope I’m not intruding,” I said.
Catherine was right behind her, her hair hastily coiffed, half hidden under a lace cap. She smiled and made a step toward me, but Princess Johanna held out her hand to stop her. Did she think me common? I wondered. Or merely of no use to them?
“Any change in the Grand Duke’s condition?” Princess Johanna asked.
I repeated the words of the latest health bulletin: There had been another bleeding, but the fever had not come down. “All in God’s hands,” I said.
Catherine lowered her head.
“All in God’s hands,” Princess Johanna repeated.
The maid came with refreshments, slices of fruitcake and hot tea with plum preserves but no sugar. The Princess of Anhalt-Zerbst did not think me that important.
It was an awkward visit. Princess Johanna launched into an elaborate tale of her connections with the House of Brunswick, while Catherine kept motioning for me to have more tea and cake. Her fingernails, I noticed, had been chewed to the quick.
“Are you making progress with Russian, Your Highness?” I asked her.
“Not much,” she replied. “I have so few people to talk to.”
“Nonsense,” her mother snapped. “My daughter has made great progress.”
“Father Semyon is praying for Your Highness every day,” I said, keeping my eyes on Catherine. For her sake, I tried to sound cheerful as I recalled who at the palace inquired about her health and circumstances. The list was not that long, but Catherine blushed with pleasure.
Princess Johanna rose. She was losing patience.
I, too, rose, ready to leave.
“Could Varvara Nikolayevna come back tomorrow?” Catherine asked, giving her mother a pleading look.
“If you wish, Sophie,” the Princess replied. Her eyes slid over me, unseeing. “I don’t see what harm it could do now.”
I was already downstairs when I heard hurried steps and felt Catherine’s arms lock around my waist.
“Your Highness,” I gasped.
“Please don’t mind Maman,” Catherine said, her eyes fixed on mine, a frightened bird. “Please.”
I felt her slender body quiver against mine. I heard a sob.
“Will you come back, please?”
“Your Highness—” I began, but she stopped me.
“Just Catherine,” she said.
“Yes,” I told her. “I’ll come back.”
In the next weeks, every morning I prepared detailed summaries of newspaper articles Professor Stehlin had marked for me the day before, so that I could read them to the Grand Duke once he returned to his apartment at the Winter Palace. By mid-January as the summaries were piling up, unread, I began to arrange them into folders according to subject matter. The Grand Duke’s study, I vowed, would always be ready for the imperial lessons. I kept the quills sharpened, the inkwells full. I carefully dusted Peter’s model soldiers, making sure I did not upset their positions on the plaster-of-paris battlefield.
And all along I thought of Catherine’s joy at seeing me.
“Let’s find out if you look good in blue,” she would say when I arrived, making me try on one of her dresses, rushing to and fro through the room, in search of ribbons and shawls to adorn it.
Resigned to my presence at her daughter’s side, Princess Johanna left us alone. So I have many memories of the two of us in that dark-paneled parlor, two girls trying to ignore what we could not control. We would skip along the corridor, giggling, until the maid chastised us for our foolishness. We would curl up on an ottoman, arms pillowing our heads, whispering in the deepening dusk of a winter afternoon.
Tell me the funniest thing you have ever done.
And the dumbest.
And the thing that you would like to happen again and again.
And the best. And the worst.
But there were times when Catherine would grow solemn. “Tell me he’ll live, Varenka,” she would urge me. “Tell me now, quickly.”
“He will.”
I put all the hope I had into these words to brush aside her terror.
It was so good to talk like that, sitting side by side on the squeaky ottoman, sipping hot tea, eating cucumbers smeared with honey, her favorite dish. Like sisters.
“I’ve never had a home, Varenka, a true home where I felt I could be myself. I’ve always had to think how others see me.
“I’m always a guest, Varenka. A Lutheran among Lutherans, an Orthodox among the Orthodox. German among Germans, Russian among Russians. But who am I when I’m alone? I don’t know anymore.”
I turned my face away to hide my tears.
“Varenka?” she said, taking hold of my hand.
“I had a home once,” I began.
As the health bulletins from Khotilovo became shorter and grimmer, I heard Catherine’s name mentioned in dismissive tones. In the corridors of the Winter Palace, the courtiers recalled the days of Empress Anne, spoke of the hated rule of the Germans. The time when an old noble might find himself ordered to cluck like a hen. Or, like Prince Galitsin, be forced to marry a Kalmyk maid and spend his wedding night in a palace made of ice.
Why would this German princess be any different?
Catherine knew of the rumors. “They don’t want me here, do they?” she asked me.
“The Russians don’t give their trust very freely,” I replied. “They want to watch you first for a long time. They want to be sure.”
“I think of him so often,” she said. “He liked running with me, all the way across the meadow. He didn’t even mind when I won. But now, even if he doesn’t die …”
She took a deep breath before bursting into tears. I drew closer and held her, but the sobs did not stop.
Did the Grand Duke consider closing his eyes and taking his leave in these dark Khotilovo days? Did Elizabeth, always by his side, trick him into returning to life? Did she soften his fear when he woke from nightmares in which his father was pushing him away or his Eutin tutor was whipping him and forcing him to kneel on hard peas? Did she convince him that he could still be loved?
“You have to eat,” Elizabeth coaxed him, a spoonful at a time, her ears deaf to Count Razumovsky’s pleas that she must spare herself, deaf even to the warnings about what smallpox scars do to a woman’s skin.
“One more sip, darling.”
“One more bite.”
“My beloved child.”
“My falcon.”
If he had died then, in Khotilovo, in his aunt’s arms, there would have been a grand state funeral and a public mourning. The whole of Russia would have imagined what the good Peter would have done for his subjects and for the glory of the Empire. His name would be lovingly evoked for years to come.
A carriage would have taken Catherine and her mother back to Anhalt-Zerbst, across the plains of Russia, loaded with presents and memories of splendor that had passed her by. If Peter had died, where would Catherine be now? Married to some princeling, an empress of a crumbling castle and a herd of cows? And where would I be, without her?
But Peter didn’t die.
By the end of January, six weeks after his collapse, the Grand Duke made his first wobbly steps, each of them—the Empress declared—a proof of God’s mercy. She held Peter’s hand when the surgeon removed the bandages from his face. She promised him that the ugly red patches would soon fade.
In the first days of February, the Grand Duke was allowed to return to St. Petersburg and slowly resume some of his duties. The Crown Prince of Russia has fought bravely, the last official bulletin on the state of his health read, like the most valiant of soldiers. He battled the illness with fierce determination and courage until the Lord granted him victory.
But victory is not everything. It’s just as crucial to consider what has been won.
When Grand Duke Peter returned to the Winter Palace, the Empress ordered Professor Stehlin to put aside all the foreign newspapers and military history books at once. “Let Varvara read him something light,” she commanded. “Something to take his mind away from death.”
In the palace library, I pushed aside the French novels and history books. No star-crossed lovers, no Tacitus, no stories of ancient Rome. The Grand Duke was not to think of plots and murders. I chose the travelers’ tales for him. Sir John Mandeville’s stories from the islands of Andaman. Stories of people without heads, who have eyes in each shoulder, and those whose upper lips are so big that when they sleep in the sun they cover their faces with them.
For many evenings, I sat in the corner of his bedroom, illuminated by a single candle, reading aloud while Peter rested on his bed. The curtains were always drawn; not even moonlight was allowed to come in from the outside. Every time I lifted my eyes away from the book, I could barely see his lanky body sprawled in the thick darkness, his face covered with a gauze kerchief. If I stopped reading, he banged his fist and demanded I continue.
Sometimes I saw him pull on his ear until it bled. Sometimes I heard him sob, long, wolfish howls that ended in a choking silence.
He never asked me anything, but he refused to let me leave.
He’ll get better, I thought. For Catherine. So that the Empress does not send her away.
Once when I thought him asleep I bent over him to adjust his pillow. Under the thin layer of gauze, I could barely discern the redness of swollen skin.
He opened his eyes and stared at me. I kept smoothing the lace of the pillow trim. He didn’t stop me, not even when my fingers brushed his hair.
“Your fiancée is worried, Your Highness,” I said softly. “She wishes to be allowed to see you.”
“I don’t want her here.”
The venom of his words startled me. “Why not?”
“She listens to the Devil.”
“Who says such nonsense to you?” I asked. “Who dares to spread such mean rumors?”
Before I could say anything more, I felt Peter’s long, thin arms around my neck. Sobs racked his thin body, and he would not be soothed. He wouldn’t tell me who spoke of Catherine to him. He shook his head when I described how despondent Catherine had been all these weeks while he lay in fever, how she worried that he still refused food.
He clung to my arm as I tried to soothe him, his fingers digging into my flesh. In the morning I would discover my arm was covered with bruises.
“He is still very weak,” I told Catherine in the morning. “But I’m sure that the worst has passed.”
One late afternoon, as I was reading to the Grand Duke, the guards announced the Empress’s arrival.
I closed the book, stood, and curtsied as she swept in. She did not look at me. Her silk dress rustled as she walked toward her nephew, with the swift, graceful steps of a dancer. He was resting on the bed, his velvet dressing gown tied tight around his thin frame, his face covered with gauze.
She clapped her hands. She had an announcement to make.
“The doctors say that you have been cured,” she told Peter.
“I feel faint,” he muttered.
“You are faint, for you need fresh air,” the Empress agreed cheerfully. “No more of this darkness, no more lying around all day.”
“My throat still hurts.”
But the Empress refused to listen. In spite of Peter’s protests and pleas, she forced him to stand up. She ordered the chambermaids to fling open the curtains, to admit the last light of the day.
The afternoon sun was bright enough to make us squint.
From where I stood I saw the back of a silver-framed mirror the footman had brought. The maids were holding it in front of Peter.
“There,” the Empress said, and lifted the gauze from his face. “Look.”
“I don’t want to,” he mumbled, and covered the scars with his hands.
But the Empress would not stand for it. She peeled his hands away and held him firm so that he could take a good look at himself.
“This is not me!” Peter screamed.
I stole my first glimpse at the gaping mouth, the lips fat and earthworm-pink. His cheeks were swollen, covered with pockmarks, each a bloody stamp of pus. Puffed folds hooded his eyes, made them smaller and empty.
I recognized that vacant gaze.
The Grand Duke recognized it, too—the dead eyes of his grandfather’s monsters. I heard a scream, a long, piercing wail of agony.
“This is not me!”
The Empress held the Grand Duke in her arms as he cried. It would all pass, she crooned. The redness and the swelling. Soon he would put on weight. Of course, not all the scars would disappear, but he was not a woman. Why should he cry over a blemish or two? A man did not have to have pretty skin. A man needed to be strong. Invincible.
I slipped out of the room as swiftly as I could without drawing attention to myself.
I sat on the chair outside the Grand Duke’s bedroom and took a shaky breath. From behind the doors came a wail, and another one, and then nothing but the Empress’s voice, singing a lullaby.
Spi mladenets, moy prekrasnuy
Sleep, my young one, my beautiful
As soon as the doctors declared the Grand Duke cured, the Empress ordered Catherine and Princess Johanna to move back to the Winter Palace.
Slowly, the court returned to its old ways. In the Empress’s suite, doors were left open again for visitors, and music filled the evenings. There was talk of a ball, a masquerade, and a display of fireworks in honor of the Grand Duke’s recovery.
Catherine spent most of the time in her rooms, alone, or praying in the palace chapel while Princess Johanna, eager to celebrate her return from oblivion, threw herself into rounds of important visits. Chevalier Betskoy, whose ardor had visibly diminished during the time of uncertainty, was back at her side. Johanna always looked the other way when I passed her in the palace corridors, as if it would diminish her worth to acknowledge my greetings.
I saw Catherine almost every day, although our time together was brief. The Empress refused to allow the Grand Duchess to visit her fiancé. Each time we met, Catherine would ask if the Grand Duke ate well, which books he liked me to read to him, if he could stand without holding on to a chair.
He was stronger with each day, I assured her.
The story of shipwrecked seafarers who mistook a giant whale for an island was his favorite now.
He listened to music after dinner.
She never asked me how he looked. And I was grateful for it.
Two more weeks passed before Catherine was allowed to see her fiancé for the first time since his illness.
I had just finished my daily reading when the footman appeared in the doorway and announced the arrival of the Grand Duchess. Peter winced, teeth closing on his fingernails. I could see how hard he fought not to cover his face. That day he was wearing a bushy powdered wig, making his head look bigger than it was. Not a good match for his still-scrawny neck.
Catherine walked in, too fast, I thought, too eager.
“I brought you a present, Peter,” she said, halting in mid-step. I saw her face grow pale. I saw her eyes slide away in a revulsion she didn’t know how to hide. I saw the blind, raw fear that made her gasp.
“What is it?” Peter demanded.
“A violin.”
She held out the case. When he touched her fingers, her hand recoiled.
“Do you like it?” she asked.
He didn’t answer.
“I was so worried, Peter,” Catherine persisted, her voice too tight. “It was terrible not to know what would happen. I prayed for you. I was so frightened. They wouldn’t let me see you.”
“Who wouldn’t?” He opened the case but did not remove the violin.
“The Empress. My mother. Everyone. I tried to learn to play the clavichord, but I’m not musical like you.”
She spoke fast, words meant to cover her unease, but how could he not see the quiver of her lips, the forced smile?
“You cannot stay very long,” he said. “I’m still weak.”
“I prayed for you, Peter.”
“You said that already.”
The Grand Duke pushed the violin case aside. He picked up one of his model soldiers. “I may still die. I have to be careful.”
“Then you will be careful,” she said. “We’ll both be very careful. You won’t die.”
The right words, I thought, but they’d arrived too late.
From the field that stretched in front of the Winter Palace came loud barks. Dogs were chasing one another out there, as they often did. From time to time a squeal marked a moment when play turned to menace.
In the silence that followed, Peter gave Catherine a fleeting, ferrety look.
“Don’t come any closer,” he snarled when Catherine approached his bed. She stopped.
He knocked a toy soldier from the side table.
“Pick him up.”
She bent obediently. When she handed the figure to him, he wouldn’t take it.
“Put it where it was.”
She set the toy soldier on the table. I could see how she willed herself to look at Peter’s pockmarked face.
“Go away. I don’t want to see you anymore.”
She did not move.
“Go,” Peter insisted, his voice higher, more shrill.
She bowed.
“Go!”
Slowly, she turned and walked away.
Later that night, I slipped into Catherine’s room. She lay motionless, her eyes wide open. Her left foot, bandaged, was elevated on two pillows.
She had been bled again.
I didn’t have to ask her what had happened. I had already heard the maids whisper that as soon as the door to Peter’s chambers closed behind her, the Grand Duchess had clutched at her stomach. She had barely made it to the privy before she vomited the omelet she’d had for breakfast. In her room, she vomited again. Her body trembled, her face was flushed, but her hands were chill as ice.
The maids gossiped that her mother had ordered her to stop crying. When she couldn’t, Princess Johanna had slapped her daughter’s face. “If he sends you away now, you fool, there is nothing but shame for you back home,” she screamed.
The Grand Duchess, the maids whispered, didn’t calm down until the surgeon opened her vein, until his bowl filled with four ounces of her blood.
I took Catherine’s hand in mine. I felt the gentle squeeze of her fingers, still cold to the touch.
I gently wiped tears from her face.
She turned to me. And then in that full, soft voice, she said, “I don’t know what I would do without you, my Varenka.”
That night, I took out the piece of amber with the two bees. Through the cracks of the paneled walls seeped the smell of incense the maids burned in the Grand Duke’s room to sweeten the air. A candle sputtered. An owl hooted somewhere on the palace roof.
Could life ever be simple again? Will I ever wake up with a light heart?
I thought of the Chancellor’s hands, the brush of his fingertips on my skin. I thought of Purgatory, where the tally is kept of all our sins to be measured against our good deeds. What would be heavier, compassion or greed? Mercy or betrayal?
I thought of the living praying for the dead.
Would anyone pray for me?
I don’t recall falling asleep, but when I woke up the piece of amber was still in my hand.
At midnight of the first Sunday of March 1745, Great Lent began with the solemn tolling of the cathedral bell.
The Bible, the priests reminded the faithful, says that before the deluge man ate nothing but the fruit of the earth, extracted through backbreaking labor. This is why foods not absolutely essential for the maintenance of life must be given up at Lent in penance for human sins.
The Empress, still exhausted after the Great Duke’s illness, abstained from her annual pilgrimage and was allowed to eat fish twice a week. The convalescing Duke was fully exempt from the fast and took Communion in his bedroom.
Only Catherine ate nothing but bread and boiled vegetables. She drank water instead of wine and took her coffee without cream. She stood by the Empress’s side at Liturgy and took Communion before gathering her maids-of-honor in her rooms for daily prayers.
She was still sending the Grand Duke presents. A set of model soldiers for his re-creations of the famous battles. A Polish guitar strung with catgut instead of wire.
The Grand Duke refused to see his fiancée. If he spoke of her, he never called her Catherine or even the forbidden “Sophie.” It was always “she.”
“She is here again? Does she have nothing else to do? Tell her I am busy with my music. Tell her I have an important letter to write.”
I longed to scold him, but you cannot scold a Crown Prince. You can only ignore the petulant sneer on his lips and repeat, “The Grand Duchess asked if she could come back later. The Grand Duchess said she didn’t mind waiting.”
In the antechamber to his rooms, Catherine sat patiently for hours until he relented and ordered me to allow her in. When he did, I would open the door to the sight of her face, white and drawn.
I hoped I was the only one to notice her tears.
Sometimes he turned his back on her and refused to talk. Sometimes he would order her to make herself useful. That meant arranging troops on the model battlefield he was working on or holding the pieces of fortifications he was gluing together. “You’re so clumsy!” he yelled when she put soldiers in the wrong place.
When he told her the visit was over, she left, her pale face serious, composed, impossible to read.
“The redness will go away,” she would say when anyone asked her about her fiancé. “The hair will grow back. He is alive. This is all that matters.”
To the Empress, she said that the Grand Duke often spoke about his gratitude. “Your Majesty saved his life. No mother could have done more for her son.”
She kissed the Empress’s hands. “Now it is my turn to make him happy,” she told Elizabeth.
I noted the blush, the modest bow, the flash of eyes widened with awe and gratitude. She had learned her lesson: No one would ever again see her disgust or fear.
If you act long enough, acting becomes part of you.
I was not the only one to take note of the changes in the Grand Duchess. Even the Chancellor stopped calling her a little Hausfrau, and he no longer smirked when he mentioned her name.
But just when I began thinking that Catherine had a chance, the Chancellor played his trump card, the one I wanted so badly to forget.
I was with the Empress in the low-ceilinged garret at the west wing of the palace when the Chancellor came with Johanna’s letters.
“Stay,” he said when I rose to leave.
I froze.
“Your Majesty should take a look at this,” he said, handing her the pages covered with Princess Johanna’s crooked scrawl.
“What is it?” she asked.
“Prussian gratitude,” he answered.
She gave him an impatient look but took the letters and motioned for him to hold a candle closer.
He stood beside the Empress as she read, his red velvet jacket unbuttoned, a monocle in his right eye flashing every time he moved his head. The Empress emitted grunt after angry grunt.
Giving us her sweat-stained dresses, as if we were beggars. Making us sing praises of this filthy palace … this daughter of a peasant … playing an Empress when she would be happier in a stable …
“The messenger was stopped,” the Chancellor told the Empress. “None of this filth got out of Russia. But that’s not everything. Tell Her Majesty what you’ve seen, Varvara.”
I prayed the earth would open and swallow me. I wished I would die before my words would hurt Catherine’s future. But I had no choice.
“What is it, Varvara?”
The Empress frowned, both curious and disdainful. In her loose silk dishabille, she looked enormous and fluid, her body threatening to spill its boundaries at any time.
“Princess Johanna, Your Highness—” I said.
“A midwife came. I saw her leave Princess Johanna’s room with bloodied rags and a bowl covered with a cloth.”
“Princess Johanna? How do you know that she wasn’t bled?”
“The midwife, Your Highness … I saw her bury what was in the bowl in her own garden. The Princess paid her a hundred rubles and promised her another hundred after her daughter is married.”
“Where does this midwife live?”
“On Monetnaya Street, Your Highness. Her house is painted blue. She buried the thing in the back.”
The Empress, flushed, rose from her bed and began to pace the room. Her hand clenched at her skirts.
“A woman who murders her own child!” the Chancellor began. “Who lets the midwife’s knife cut up the life God entrusted her with!”
He was driving his point home, without subtlety. Daughters are like their mothers. Ruthlessness runs with filial blood. “Is nothing unthinkable, Your Majesty? Is nothing sacred anymore?”
The Empress was breathing heavily, her eyes puffy and red from all the sleepless nights. Hell was on her mind, the sulfurous fumes of eternal damnation, devils in short German jackets poking out the eyes and tongues of sinners.
She picked up a fan, her newest, made of swanskin and black feathers, a gift from Count Razumovsky. She drew her neck down between her shoulders like a giant tortoise.
The Chancellor took her silence as a good sign. The glint of pleasure in his eyes meant that he could already see Catherine and her mother in tears, packing their trunks.
Disgrace brings forth the vermin, he had told me many times. When the mighty fall, enemies crawl out of darkness.
I watched the Empress break her fan in half and throw it to the floor, like a bird’s wing, maimed, useless.
Russia would soon turn to England or Austria for her allies, just as the Chancellor had wished. All would be well in the mighty Empire of the East.
The spring would come. At night the ice on the Neva would crack like musket shots, and big pieces of drifting ice would float out to the sea.
But I would no longer have a friend.
In the morning, Catherine went for a walk by the banks of the Neva, with just a maid at her side, away from the hollow walls, away from the two-sided mirrors, spying holes, and treacherous ears of the palace. Snowdrops, Catherine’s favorite flowers, were beginning to pierce through snow in the meadows, and she was eager to find them.
I waited until the maid with her tarried, her skirt snagged by the sharp prickles of a thistle, and then I approached the Grand Duchess.
“Please, I don’t have much time. It’s better that no one should see us.”
She gave me a playful look. “But why, Varenka?”
“Something terrible has happened. I’ve come to warn you.”
The smile waned on her lips.
The maid was heading back toward us, a crushed thistle head in her hands. I put my finger to my lips.
Catherine asked the maid if she had seen her kerchief. “I must have dropped it,” she complained. “The red one Maman gave me.”
It was a thin excuse, but the maid had no choice but to turn back to look for it.
I spoke hurriedly. I was blunt. “Your mother has written letters to the King of Prussia. Letters the Empress will never forgive.”
Fear gushed into Catherine’s eyes.
“How do you know?” she asked.
“I heard the Chancellor speaking with the Empress. A messenger has been intercepted at the border.”
Catherine bit her lip, hard.
“The Empress is furious. She will summon you tonight. Both of you. The Chancellor is certain she will send you back home.”
Catherine cast a furtive glance behind us. The maid was still far enough away for us to speak.
“I don’t want to go back, Varenka.” I felt her gloved hand clasp my arm and quickly let it go. “Not in disgrace.”
“The Empress doesn’t want you to go back. But you have to make her see that you are not like your mother.”
I couldn’t tell her everything. I could not confess to spying. All I could offer was a gambler’s bet. Point to a narrow path away from the brink and pray it would work.
“Fall to your knees, Catherine. Kiss her feet. Cry. Tell the Empress that you have no mother but her. This is what she wants to hear. If you don’t …”
Catherine flinched.
“Fortune is not as blind as people think, but you have to take your own steps,” I insisted. My voice was strong, unwavering, as if I had not just told her to cut herself off from the woman who had given birth to her.
The maid had tired of searching for the phantom kerchief and was approaching fast. I bowed my head.
“I have to go now,” I told Catherine.
“Thank you, Varenka. I’ll never forget your kindness. I’ll repay it, too. I promise.” She turned to the maid. “Never mind the kerchief,” she called. “I’m so forgetful. Perhaps I didn’t take it with me, after all.”
I lingered in the antechamber that night, waiting to be summoned, but the Empress was in no mood for gossip. Inside the room where the Empress would sleep, I heard the Chancellor’s voice followed by someone’s nervous laughter, but I couldn’t tell whose it was.
The service bell rang, and I watched a footman, a young, lithe man I had not seen before, go in. “Get both of them here,” I heard the Empress yell. “Immediately.”
It didn’t take long. Footsteps became louder, heels pattered on the bare wooden stairs. A scream, a stumble. Another scream, closer now.
I slipped behind a curtain, my heart hammering. Johanna and Catherine came running, escorted by two sentries, mother and daughter yanked out of their beds, hastily dressed, with buttons and clasps undone—disheveled and terrified, just the way Elizabeth wanted them to be.
Princess Johanna was thrashing her arms about her like a bird shot down from the sky, but I gave her only a passing glance. It was Catherine I watched. Her face was flushed from running, her eyes red-rimmed. Her whole future depended on what would happen next.
The door opened, and the sentries led them in to the Empress.
Outside the antechamber where I hid, the muffled steps of the Palace Guards thickened. Humiliation of the mighty always made for excellent entertainment. In the morning, I knew, everyone would hear of undergarments stained from fright, of fingernails bitten to the bloody quick, of trembling hands unable to hold a cup of coffee.
The Empress’s voice was a roar. Barbarian land? … a vain, deluded woman who thinks herself worthy to rule it!
She had been deceived. She had allowed a viper to coil itself on her breast. Russia had been slighted, maligned, humiliated. By a nobody. By a German whore.
Is this how Germans repay hospitality?
Is this how Germans treat their benefactors?
Is this the German understanding of loyalty and gratitude?
Ungrateful bitch!
Traitor!
Then I heard Catherine’s voice.
“Your Highness, you saved my life. You treated me like your own beloved child. Like your own daughter. You have done so much for my family, and I have tried to be worthy of your trust, but now I’m left with nothing!
“I don’t have a mother, for I cannot call a mother a woman who has betrayed my Benefactress. I’ll leave with her, as Your Highness has commanded, but please do not make me leave without your blessing.”
“Listen, you ungrateful wretch!” I heard the Empress scream. “Listen to the words of the daughter you don’t deserve! Get out of my sight! Out!”
Something crashed to the floor, and then came the words I, too, had been waiting for.
“Alone!”
The door opened and Princess Johanna stumbled out, humiliation a hard lump in her throat, like a nut swallowed whole.
I slipped out of my hiding place, my heart pounding. I walked past the footman and the guards, ignoring their avid looks. I found myself praying: Let this be the new beginning, an omen for the future. Let it be a lesson learned and always cherished. A lesson remembered when the times turn black again.
I walked, the floorboards creaking under my feet. In the dry winter air, the wood was losing its moisture. By the time spring came, the paneled corridors of the Winter Palace would be even more porous and cracked.
Let us be watchful, I prayed. Let us hide our true hearts from those who think they know us so well. Those who believe they own our bodies and souls.
I didn’t have to see the Chancellor’s face to know he had covered his disappointment well. He would have gathered Johanna’s foolish letters, bowed, and left. He would be in his room, staring into the flames, a bottle of vodka on a tray.
He would not summon me for a while. He needed lips more pliant, hands more willing to soothe him, thoughts he didn’t have to watch and stamp out. He needed to see himself in eyes empty of doubt, in a heart softened with fear.
Don’t ever cross me, he had said. Don’t get too clever, Varvara.
I didn’t care. Catherine would not be sent away. She was safe.
I was no longer alone.
That night I waited for her outside her room for hours. Finally, released by the Empress, she arrived, tears glistening on her cheeks. I cradled her in my arms as if she were a child, hushing her sobs, smoothing her silky hair.
“It’s all over,” I murmured. “You are safe now, Catherine. Everything will be fine. Did the Chancellor say anything before he left?”
“He said that he trusted Elizabeth’s judgment. That he knew the Empress had nothing but Russia’s precious future in mind. But he kept showing her the letters.”
His was the cleverness of a fox, I thought. Guilt by association. Guilt by the ties of kin. He could not oppose Elizabeth’s mercy, but he could fan her anger.
“She told him to take his filthy letters away, Varenka,” Catherine said. “She threw them to the floor, and he bent and picked them up. One by one.”
Catherine raised her head and smiled for the first time. I felt an instant of surprise, for it was the mischievous smile of a child.
For three April days in 1745, to the sound of drumrolls, heralds rode through the streets of St. Petersburg announcing that the imperial wedding would take place on August 21. Soon, by the imperial order, top nobles would receive advances to equip themselves for the great day. As soon as the Baltic thawed, ships began bringing in cargoes of cloth, carriages, French toiletries and wines. In St. Petersburg only English silks were more popular than silken cloth from Zerbst, especially white and light colors decorated with large flowers of gold and silver. Catherine’s father sent a shipment of Zerbst beer, but it was declared thin and flat.
The Empress supervised every detail, changing her mind at the slightest pretext. For a time the Amber Room was where she wished to bless the young couple before they left for the cathedral. Then she decided it too small. A berline was ordered in France, with glass panels that would make the coach look like a giant jewel box so that the people of Russia could admire the ducal pair as they rode with her in the wedding procession. Should it be adorned with flowers, she fretted, or should the elegance of its golden trim be its only decoration? Then, on the day she was to sign the order for the carriage maker, a bird crashed against her bedroom window and there was no more talk of glass panels.
The Chancellor had not sent for me since Princess Johanna’s humiliation, but the Empress kept me too busy to give this but a passing thought. Losses never stopped him before, and this time—as he always did—he had recovered his balance quickly. With each visit to Elizabeth’s receiving room, he praised the soon-to-be imperial bride as if he had never wanted her gone.
You do not have friends, Varvara, he used to tell me. You have aims and goals. Time changes them all. Learn from both the fox and the lion. For a fox cannot defend itself against a pack of wolves, and a lion does not know how to avoid a snare.
The Empress decided that Princess Johanna would not leave before the wedding. “I don’t want any vile rumors,” she said. Not all daughters were like their mothers, her eyes said each time she took the measure of her defeated rival. Betrayal was not contagious.
For her part, Princess Johanna did what she was told. She suffered the sugar-sweet praises of her child and the Empress’s sharp looks. She turned away all visitors. Every time I passed by her rooms, I heard the sounds of packing. Maids hurried in and out with baskets; footmen brought trunks and braids of straw.
I spoke to her only once before the wedding day. She had ventured outside of her room on some errand, furtive and uneasy, her pupils enlarged with belladonna. When she saw me she stopped abruptly and—perhaps noting that two Palace Guards were within earshot—forced herself to greet me.
“Are you well?” she asked, her voice tight with strain.
“Yes,” I answered. “How kind of you to inquire, Princess. I trust you, too, are well?”
“I am. I’m glad to be going home. I have other children who need me. More than Sophie does.”
I fixed my eyes on the moon-shaped beauty spot glued to her upper lip, ignoring the sarcasm in her voice. I didn’t even care if she suspected me of betraying her. This woman had very nearly destroyed her daughter’s life. And for what? Her own vanity, her own lust.
Princess Johanna glanced in the direction of the guards, and I followed her gaze to see that they were watching us intently. The taller one winked at me and placed an open palm on his heart.
The Grand Duke’s face gradually lost some of its redness. But as the swelling subsided, one of his eyes seemed to hang lower than the other. It gave him an air of perpetual bewilderment. I tried not to think that it reminded me of a clown.
Catherine did not look away. She did not flinch when Peter complained that she was too skinny, that her chin was too pointed, or when he told her that the Princess of Courland was the prettiest woman he had ever seen.
She made him laugh with her cat concert. She drew for him the layout of Frederick of Prussia’s Berlin palace: the White Hall, the Golden Gallery, the Throne Room. She nodded and smiled when he said that the Prussian uniforms had better cuts and were made of sturdier cloth than Russian ones.
Her visits to the Grand Duke grew longer.
He let her read him his Holstein papers: leases about to expire, a table of fees for disposing of animal cadavers, petitions to lower the toll tax, to build another brewery. Gothic script, he claimed, was hard on his eyes. She offered to write his letters for him. All he would have to do was sign and seal them.
Women are clever that way, he said. They have more patience with what is trivial.
Once, when Catherine suggested he should cross himself more often during Liturgy—“To make sure the people see you do it, Peter. You’ll be their Emperor”—he agreed.
Hearing exchanges like this, I grew bolder. Elizabeth would not live forever. The Grand Duchess would one day be the Emperor’s wife.
With her I had a future.
By June, as the wedding preparations intensified, regular palace business came to a standstill. The Empress left documents unsigned; negotiations stalled, foreign diplomats awaited official audiences for weeks, without success. She had no time for such matters, the Empress responded in answer to the Chancellor’s pleas. There were guest lists to decide upon, seating arrangements to approve, the composition of corteges to discuss, favors to bestow or withhold. “Splendor is hard work,” the Empress said, sighing with exasperation.
I had never seen her in such high spirits. Russian steam banya replaced the portable baths. In the morning, she walked barefoot, swearing it improved her circulation. She insisted on keeping the palace windows open, even on the hottest of days, so her rooms held the permanent stink of cow dung from the Tsar’s meadow. The vases had to be filled with field flowers—wild daisies, goldenrod, chamomile—the scents, she said, of her childhood.
There was no escape from the planning frenzy. Soon the bushes and hedges around the palace were covered with linen bleaching and drying in the sun. From the kitchens came bad-tempered shouts, clanging of pots and saucepans. Maids rushed around with red-rimmed eyes and reddened hands. From the Oranienbaum orangery, gardeners sent blossoming lemon trees in thick silver pots to keep the palace air sweet.
The Empress’s cats were banished to the anterooms, for every inch of the Imperial Bedroom was covered with swatches of fabric, lace, ribbons, leather, skeins of wool. The five footmen the Empress often asked to sing for her were obliged to bring a long bench to stand on.
Pandoras modeling wedding clothes were presented and summarily rejected, as the new Chief Maid stood by, trembling with unease. Didn’t she know that frothy flounces were passé, too many jewels on silver cloth would make the gown stiff? Were there no softer hues of white? Watching her bow and withdraw, promising to do better next time, I, too, began to doubt if there was an outfit worthy of Elizabeth’s approval. But as the nights began to grow shorter, the Empress summoned Catherine and Peter to announce her decision.
Two big pandoras stood on the table. Catherine’s wore a gown of silver cloth, richly embroidered on all the seams and the hem. Over the dress flowed a cloak of web-thin lace. Peter’s pandora wore an ensemble of the same cloth, but its sword and trim glittered with diamonds. The Empress leaned the two dolls toward each other in an imitation of an embrace, beaming at the ducal pair.
Catherine touched the fabric of the dress, exclaimed at the intricate silver needlework. The Grand Duke poked his pandora stiffly with his finger.
“What do you think, Peter?” the Empress asked.
The Empress had ordered him to rub a concealing cream on his cheeks and forehead. From a distance it made his face look smooth enough, but up close the cream looked caked and crumbly, and it stained the collar of his jackets.
“Ask her,” he said, pointing at Catherine.
Catherine bowed. “The dress is beautiful, Your Highness. The most beautiful I’ve ever had.”
“The moon children,” the Empress said. “You will look like a pair of moon children.”
They both bowed and left the room together, holding hands.
The Empress sighed with pleasure, but my eyes were on the Chief Maid. She was wiping away a tear. There was nothing in her fresh, trim looks that resembled her predecessor’s, but suddenly I remembered Madame Kluge’s face, pale and terrified as the guards dragged her to the scaffold. To ward it off, I recalled the red welts on my shins, the lash of her derision, but these memories seemed like bits of fluff gathering under beds.
Her fall had been my gain and my warning. As soon as her back had healed well enough for her to sit up, she had been sent back to Zerbst. “Better than to Siberia,” the Chancellor had told me.
Later that day, in his own quarters, I heard the Grand Duke say that he wished his aunt would not insist on horn music for the wedding. Violins were far superior. He also wished Catherine smelled better. She should rinse her mouth with vodka, like he did.
Never mind, I thought.
There will be a wedding.
There will be a wedding, I muttered, as I rushed about on one of my many errands. When the Empress called for me now, it was to look for some lost samples, or to write hastily dictated notes to her jeweler or perfumer. The pantry attendant had been caught stealing partridges. Half of a wine shipment had disappeared.
No task was too trivial for her. She demanded to see the polished tabletops, spotting scratches and chips that had to be filled. She decided which portraits needed to be washed with milk, which cracked windowpanes must be replaced. She interrogated the cooks, the wine merchants, the gardeners; assured herself that there would be no shortage of grapes, pineapples, oranges, or candied fruit. She fretted that the smokehouses were behind with their deliveries of smoked sturgeon and balyk. No foreign guest must have the slightest reason to deride Russian hospitality.
Not when the future Tsar married his bride.
Hurrying down the hallway, I heard the Chancellor’s voice behind me.
“There is something quite touching about young girls and weddings, Varvara, don’t you think?”
I stopped and turned toward him.
“The Grand Duchess is looking splendid these days,” he continued. I heard the sarcasm in his voice, a thin note of warning.
“Yes.”
“And the excitement has rubbed off on you,” he continued, blocking my way. “Well, well, who would have thought?”
He had not summoned me since the day of Johanna’s disgrace. Warding off unease, I pressed my lips together, sifting through what his words meant. But I knew. The spymaster of the Russian court had been watching me, and he was not pleased.
I made a step forward.
With a mock bow, he stepped aside to let me pass.
By July, the Empress sent for Catherine every morning, making her sit beside her and showering her with praise. She plaited colorful ribbons into her dark hair, made her try on a red kokoshnik adorned with fat pearls that had once belonged to her mother. She made her learn Russian dance steps and taste the dishes the cooks brought for approval. The Empress chose the church for the ceremony, the Church of Our Lady of Kazan, consecrated in the name of her favorite icon. The Kazan Madonna had healed the sick and turned near defeats into victories, crushing the enemies of Russia. Elizabeth craved miracles as much as she craved the embraces of her Palace Guards.
On the nights the Empress dismissed me, Catherine and I made plans. The Grand Duchess needed someone to trust.
She needed me.
“As soon as I’m married, I’ll ask for you,” Catherine told me. “I’ll say my eyes ache in the candlelight and that I need a reader who can read to me in French and in Russian.”
I nodded.
“As soon as I can, I’ll make you my maid-of-honor, Varenka. I don’t know how, but I will. We’ll always be together, then. You’ll always help me, won’t you?”
I pressed her hand to my lips.
Next door, Princess Johanna was ordering her maids around. “Not like that, you fool, be careful,” we heard through the thin wall.
I glanced at Catherine.
“Let’s not talk about her,” Catherine said, and looked away.
She was right, I decided. Her mother was her past, not her future. And the past mattered less and less.
Did I grow careless in these days? Heady with the thought that after the imperial wedding day I—a bookbinder’s daughter—might walk behind the Grand Duchess as one of her noble maids?
Did I become too caught up in Catherine’s joyful smiles and girlish fears?
“What will he do when we are left alone, Varenka?”
“Kiss you.”
“On the lips?”
“Yes.”
“And then?”
“On your breasts.”
“What do I have to do? Kiss him back?”
“Yes.”
“Will it hurt?”
“A kiss?”
“No, you know what! Maman says that it’ll hurt, but that it is my duty to endure it.”
“It might hurt.”
“Much?”
“Not much.”
It’ll be over quickly, I thought, a groan of his pleasure, his release.
“Soon there’ll be a child there,” I said, gesturing at her belly. “And then nothing else will matter.”
In these nervous days Catherine burst into sobs for the most trivial of reasons—a torn ribbon, a broken tortoiseshell comb she had brought with her from Zerbst. Once she bit her hand so hard that she drew blood.
Diversion was the remedy I sought, a quick walk in the garden, faster and faster until we ran out of breath, a litter of kittens I found in the attic and brought down in my arms, the mother trailing me suspiciously as I put the warm wriggling bodies in Catherine’s lap.
I tried not to think how bemused the Chancellor’s smile looked.
On the wedding day, Friday, August 21, the Empress herself assisted with the bride’s makeup and wardrobe. She dabbed a touch of rouge on Catherine’s cheeks, placed the ducal crown on her freshly curled hair, and embraced her before the dressmaker was allowed to do the last fitting.
“A joyful day,” Elizabeth declared. “A new beginning.”
It was a day of trumpets and kettledrums, of one hundred and twenty coaches leaving the Winter Palace for the church. Palace Guards in rich new uniforms stood at attention. Cheers rose above the din of voices in the teeming crowds. Catherine and Peter rode with the Empress in the berline, which looked like a small castle. It was pulled by eight white horses in golden harnesses, tall feathers dancing in their manes.
The wedding was splendid. The priest chanted, “O Lord, our God, crown them with glory and honor,” as two glittering crowns were switched over the heads of the bride and groom, crowns that would be placed in a display case over their marriage bed. The rings of plain gold were blessed and exchanged.
The bride and groom fell to the floor to ask for the Empress’s blessing. The cannons roared, bells clanged in all the churches of St. Petersburg. Father Theodorsky spoke of the miracles of Providence that united the offspring of Anhalt and Holstein and would protect them as they reigned over the Russian people. The Chancellor of Russia offered his congratulations in a flowery speech, praising Elizabeth’s womanly intuition and evoking the legacy of the other Catherine Alexeyevna, Peter the Great’s beloved wife, the Empress of Russia. He spoke of the Grand Duke’s tenacity of spirit, a clear sign that the blood of the Romanovs was in Peter’s veins. This is a momentous day, the Chancellor said, one that filled him with pride and hope for Russia and profound gratitude to His Sovereign.
“Old flatterer,” the Empress muttered under her breath.
She was beaming.
There had been no omens. The groom was first to step on the piece of white cloth on which the couple were to stand. The rings did not fall to the floor; the flames of the candles did not falter and die.
From the flurry of balls and amusements that followed on that magical night, I recall an odd array of incidents—a drunken Frenchman insisting that in his travels he had seen a witch that would not burn, a morose-looking Austrian choking on greasy chunks of sausage, the stink of urine coming from the fireplace in the great hall, someone’s too eager hands groping my breasts, a cat chased by a squealing piglet across the courtyard.
I remember Catherine’s face, her eyes wide with belladonna, her gleaming white dress smudged with soot at the hem. She had a giddy bout of hiccups that wouldn’t go away. And I recall Peter’s huffy protestations when anyone mentioned his understandable impatience for Cupid’s den.
Princess Johanna made a show of praising everything around her in a loud voice. The wedding dress is breathtaking. The Empress is most merciful and kind. My daughter is in excellent hands. Russia is a country with a glorious future, a mighty Empire with no equal.
She was grateful, she repeated, for her time in Russia, but now she was looking forward to going back home.
The huge silver disk of the moon hung above the Neva, right behind the Petropavlovsky Fortress. The chill in the air was a faint reminder of the northern winds that would soon come. In the streets, jugglers had long exchanged balls and rings for flaming torches. Fireworks exploded with showers of sparks.
The two wedding crowns had been placed in a sturdy case and nailed to the wall above the marriage bed.
It was the Empress who led the newlyweds to their bridal chamber that night and closed the door.
In the morning, I snatched a bowl with ice from the chambermaid. I knocked softly on the door of the bridal chamber.
Catherine was sitting on the floor by the bed. Through the opening of her cambric nightshift I saw the flash of white skin and the pinkish round of her nipple. There was no sign of Peter.
“What happened?” I asked.
She shook her head.
“I saw a rat,” she said, pointing at the corner near the fireplace. “It came from there.”
“It’s gone now,” I said. I took a chunk of ice and rubbed the skin beneath her swollen eyes. The ice had begun to melt, and a frigid stream made its way down my sleeve.
“I know,” Catherine said and sighed. She did not move.
I summoned the lively chatter that came so easy to me in those days. I rattled on about Countess Golovina stumbling on the dance floor, the beatific look on old Count Shuvalov’s face every time he caught a glimpse of a shapely ankle.
I let my voice sparkle.
I laughed at my own jokes.
She was not listening.
“It’s like a stone here,” she said, pointing to her chest. Her voice was anguished. She sniffed her arm, her sleeves, the inside of her nightshift at the cleavage. She looked up at me then, her face nakedly hurt.
I knelt beside her and took her strong, white hand, adorned now with her wedding ring, in my own hand.
“He had a flask of vodka hidden in the folds of his dressing gown. He gave me some to drink. He said that a wife had to listen to her husband, that if on a bright day a husband said to his wife, ‘Look how dark it is,’ she should say, ‘So dark that I cannot see a thing.’ And if, a moment later, he said, ‘But it is bright daylight,’ she should say, ‘Indeed, how silly of me not to have noticed.’ Then he drank more and more until he fell asleep.”
“Did he touch you?”
“No.”
“No.”
“Not even when he woke up?”
“No. I don’t even know when he left.”
“Has anyone come in here today?”
“Countess Rumyantseva and Princess Galitsina. They took the sheets away.”
I lifted the coverlet. The mattress was bare.
She began to cry.
“It’s nothing,” I said, lifting her up from the floor, making her sit on the edge of the bed. “It happens all the time.”
“How do you know?” she wept.
“Men get scared. They grow soft and uneasy and ashamed of their own weakness. It is just one night. It doesn’t matter,” I told her. “It means nothing.”
At the time, I even believed it myself.
Princess Johanna left three days later, at dawn. I passed by her room and saw the doors opened wide. The room was empty but for a braid of straw, a few broken plates, and some torn lace that even the maids did not want.
Later, I would learn that the Empress gave Johanna a letter to the King of Prussia that demanded the immediate recall of the Prussian Ambassador. Rumor had it that in Berlin a Russian spy was to be beheaded. In St. Petersburg a Prussian agent was being sent to Siberia. As the Chancellor had wanted, there would be no more talk of closeness between Prussia and Russia.
Princess Johanna never said goodbye to her daughter. In a parting note she wrote that she didn’t wish to upset a happy bride with the sadness of separation.
Catherine read the note and threw it into the fire.
“Race me, Varenka,” she said, and ran down the corridor.
I followed.
