THREE
1745–1748
s soon as the excitement of the imperial wedding died out, the Empress lapsed back into her irritable moods. Once again everything was an omen, and every omen was about her. A rattling window, a dead bird falling down a smoking chimney, a riding cloak that had gone missing. Hunts were called off, gowns sent back, questions dismissed with sulky shrugs. Only the cats made her face brighten. She carried them in her arms, called them “her babies,” tossed balls of yarn for them to chase. “You love me for myself alone,” I had heard her croon into Pushok’s silky fur.
The palace rumors swelled. Peter had called his aunt a mare in heat. Then a fat bitch. Words of little wit or imagination, but what can be expected from a half-witted Crown Prince who likes to pour his drinks over his servants’ heads? “Does she think I am her caged monkey?” he’d screamed. He brought a box of his model soldiers to the bedroom. He lectured Catherine on the intricacies of some battle for three hours. He fell asleep drunk.
A month after the wedding, the Grand Duchess was still a virgin.
The Empress was not amused. “Heartless ingratitude after all I had done,” she screamed. “I’ve been too good, too indulgent.”
They were the Chancellor’s words, I suspected, the sweet fannings of revenge, sticky and poisonous. In the Imperial Bedroom I spotted traces of his daily presence: Montpellier gloves scented with nutmeg, his brass spectacles forgotten on the pile of dispatches the Empress ordered me to read to her. Each time he walked into the Empress’s room, his eyes slid over me, narrowing slightly, as if I were made of mist and merely obscured his view.
He had still not sent for me. He no longer wished me to touch him. He no longer cared for my stories or for the news I brought to him.
What of it? I thought.
If fear hovered in my defiance, I pushed it away.
The Empress still sent for me. I was still Catherine’s only friend.
To the Empress I pointed out how diligent the ducal couple had been with their official duties. I praised Peter’s patience and Catherine’s grace. In the past weeks they had been asked to become godparents, witnesses at weddings, guests at churchings and consecrations.
The Empress shrugged and pouted her lips.
“Did he come to her last night, Varvara?”
“Yes, Your Highness.”
“Did he get into her bed?”
“Yes.”
“So why didn’t he lie with her? What did she do to turn him away?”
“She is shy,” I said.
“Shy?” the Empress repeated, before waving me away. On her lips the word was laced with derision.
Outside, in the corridor, the guards were changing their stations. They were from the Preobrazhensky Regiment; their leafy-green coats were faced with red. The smells of snuff, vodka, and sweat floated through the air. Heels clicked, sabers clanked. Silver bandoliers glittered.
I hurried past, unseeing.
Catherine was nibbling on a blade of grass. We sat in the palace garden, where I hoped no one could overhear our words.
The previous night, the Grand Duke had come to bed very late. He’d brushed her off when she tried to touch him. Then he turned his back on her and fell asleep.
“Was he drunk again?” I asked.
“A bit,” Catherine said, tossing the blade of grass down. Her eyes, I saw, were rimmed with red.
Everyone was plying her with advice. Countess Rumyantseva insisted she open her nightdress more, to show her breasts. The imperial perfumer swore by the essences of cinnamon and sandalwood. Only smell, he insisted, was capable of evoking turbulent reactions in the soul. Even the maids dared to suggest she drink tea brewed from dried oat straw.
It was time to stop all this talk.
I slipped a vial of dove’s blood into Catherine’s hand, the kind one can purchase for a few kopecks in the back alleys of St. Petersburg. A simple deception, a ruse to buy her time, to send the imperial tongues on another mission.
“Drink some wine with him, make him laugh,” I told her. “When he falls asleep, smear that blood on the sheets.”
“But he will know—” Catherine protested.
“He won’t be sure. And he won’t say anything. He, too, wants to be left alone.”
This is what they both needed, I believed then. A respite from expectations, from the eyes that always watched. All the Empress ever cared about were her own wishes, and now she wished for an heir to her throne. It didn’t matter how she got what she wanted. It mattered only that she did.
She was not alone. The Chancellor sat in a gilded armchair by the window, holding a roll of papers, striking it against his open palm. He turned his face toward me, giving me a bewildered smile, as if amused at a puppy trying to bite his shoe. I felt the muscles in my jaw clench.
The Empress ran her hand through her hair. It was still thinning, in spite of the birch-bark rinses and a hundred brushstrokes each morning and night. I could smell cherry brandy on her breath. The candle beside her flickered.
My heart was racing. Was it possible the Empress would make me Catherine’s maid-of-honor?
“It’s not good for a woman to be alone, Varvara.”
As soon as she said these words, the Chancellor clapped his hands.
I still didn’t guess, not even when I saw the door open and a young man come in, his leafy-green jacket lined with scarlet. A Palace Guard.
“What a fetching couple you two’ll make.” The Empress’s voice seemed to come from far away, a woman in another room talking to herself.
This is what a cornered animal must feel, the unforgiving harshness of rock at the dead end of the tunnel. Even though it is still there, the fluttering moment of disbelief that this is indeed the end. Even though the blood is still racing. Even though the mind still hopes for miracles—an opening in the wall, the hunter suddenly struck dead.
Egor Dmitryevich Malikin, Second Lieutenant in the Preobrazhensky Regiment, was to be my husband. “A great honor,” the Empress continued, certain of my gratitude. I was to marry one of the proud guards of Peter the Great, the elite corps with two-rank seniority over the regular army, the makers of the Tsars who had brought Elizabeth to the pinnacle of power.
A noble, just like my mother had wished.
“He is an orphan, like you. Look at him, Varvara.”
I did look. At the mop of his black hair, the thick brows, the row of even teeth his smile revealed. One gloved hand rested on his hip, cradling a plumed shako; the other one, bare, hung loosely. I raged at the thought of this hand touching me. I imagined my escape, dressing in men’s clothes, sneaking out of the palace, away from the marriage I had not sought and did not wish. But alone and on the run, a man, like a woman, would end up dead or a slave to masters yet unknown.
“A handsome man, Varvara, wouldn’t you say?” Elizabeth asked.
“Yes, Your Highness.”
From the murky shadows came a tapping sound. The Chancellor was drumming a cheerful beat on his knee with his rolled papers. Some memories do not want to recede: I protect and provide, Varvara, you listen and obey.… Lie to everyone else, but never to me.
I cast my eyes down. I tried to make my face show nothing at all.
“You don’t remember me?” I heard Egor’s voice. Too eager, too pleased.
“No,” I said, although of course I had seen him at the palace. Like the other guards, he had teased me and tried to stop me on my way. Why hadn’t I seen the danger in the grip of his fingers on my wrist when I’d passed him by? “You won’t escape me that easily,” he had once shouted after me.
Clad in benevolence, aimed at the heart. This was my punishment. Punishment worthy of a spymaster, punishment for which I had to thank the Empress on my knees. Now I had to praise my mistress’s generosity, call her my Benefactress, Russia’s “Little Mother” who knows best what is good for those entrusted into her care.
A woman is a vessel to be filled. Her husband’s responsibility if she threatens to believe herself important, clever, irreplaceable.
I burned with anger. Anger at myself, at my own foolish complacency. How easy it must have been for the Chancellor to make Elizabeth do his bidding! A few words of doubt dropped in passing to feed her suspicion, a little sigh of warning to make it linger. Isn’t the world rife with ingratitude, Your Highness? Isn’t loyalty fickle, spoiled by betrayal?
Everyone knew how the Empress liked to marry off her maids, even if only to dance at their weddings. In a simple peasant dress, just like her own mother, who had once bewitched a mighty Tsar, Elizabeth was happiest in the soldiers’ barracks, among dairymaids and stable boys.
If I had paid heed, I could’ve at least fought.
It was too late now. I was to be Egor’s reward for services to the Empress. “Exemplary services,” she had said. There was no chink in her words, no secret passage I could sneak through to escape.
“A son, Varvara.” Elizabeth held out a Holy Icon for me to kiss. “Come back here with a son nine months from your wedding day.”
My hands had gone cold, for it was only at that moment that I realized I would have to leave the palace.
Leave Catherine.
How stiff my lips were when I shaped the words of thanks. How weak my knees when I knelt beside Egor Malikin to thank the Empress and to receive her blessing.
The Indian king also sent out holy spies, trained in enduring hunger and thirst. Taking residence on the outskirts of the city, these men fasted and prayed, read palms, and offered their blessings. To help their fame spread, other spies disguised as merchants and rich men begged for their advice and left praising their insight and divine powers. Soon people thronged to have their fortunes told and to confess their innermost secrets to the king’s spies. What better way, the barbarian monarch bragged, to know who among his subjects were the breeders of discontent?
But it was the women in that kingdom of the Far East who truly terrified the author of this account—not the women posing as vendors, selling poisoned food to the enemy, or sprinkling lethal powder on a sleeping man. It was the vishakanyas, the maidens of death, who were truly to be feared, beautiful girls fed from childhood with small doses of poisonous herbs or the venom of snakes and scorpions. Their bodies absorbed the toxins slowly, leaving them unharmed. But while the touch of their hands could weaken a man’s grip on this world, and a simple kiss could plunge him into a battle for his life, there was no escape from their sensual embrace. The poison seeping through their skin would slow down a lover’s heart, thicken his bile, clot his blood.
Vishakanyas were demon lovers, for a night of passion with them meant death.
The new Chief Maid praised Elizabeth’s thoughtfulness, the size of my dowry, the generous imperial gifts to me. If she knew—as I did—that my husband had managed to borrow money against the prospect of marrying a “favorite of the Empress,” money he doubled at faro, she refrained from saying so.
The white satin dress in which I would stand at the altar was one of the Empress’s gifts. It used to be hers, from the days when she was still slim. It must have been trimmed with precious stones once, but they had been cut off carelessly, leaving small tears behind. “You only see the holes if you know they are there,” the seamstress who did the hasty fitting assured me.
The Grand Duchess came while I was being dressed, the skin beneath her eyes smudged with purple shadows. A new maid-of-honor trailed at her heels, pensive and unsure of what was expected of her.
“My gift is so small, Varenka,” Catherine said, handing me a tube tied with a ribbon. “But I hope it will please you.”
I was not to open it until I arrived in my new home, she told me.
She was happy for me. Marriage was a blessing, she said. A woman’s highest duty, a woman’s happiness.
We both knew she could not say anything else.
Did he win me in the lottery of Elizabeth’s bedroom on the nights when she was drunk, giddy, and insatiable? Or was I merely a consolation prize?
They all dreamed of it, the guards, as they brushed their uniforms and polished the silver buttons, young men rinsing their mouths with vodka and chewing on parsley sprigs to sweeten their breath. The night duty was the most sought after, an investment worthy of a hefty bribe that would make their commander rich.
I had often seen the doors of Elizabeth’s bedroom open silently right after midnight. “Go on,” the guards would urge one another, knowing that nothing but humiliation awaited those who did not please her. They had heard stories of naked men clutching their uniforms, dressing hurriedly in the musty dusk of service corridors, ears red with shame. But in the taverns, after a few shots of vodka, no guard spoke of defeat. “You get better broth from an old hen,” they claimed. “From the belly down, women do not age.”
On my wedding day, as my fingers brushed the smooth white satin of my dress, I promised to honor and obey the man who stood beside me, in sickness and in health. Twice for good measure, once in front of an Orthodox priest and then before a Roman Catholic, for, as the Empress realized to her displeasure after having blessed me with the icon of St. Nicolas, I had never converted from my father’s faith.
I felt my husband’s hand pulling me down, to my knees. I heard his voice praising the Tsarina’s generosity.
Catherine and the Grand Duke came to my wedding. She in a sapphire-blue dress lush with silver embroidery, he in the green Preobrazhensky uniform the occasion demanded, with his wig freshly curled and powdered, a gold-tipped cane in his hand. The Duke said something to his wife. She nodded and gave me a quick look before she lowered her eyes.
He had come, too, the Chancellor of Russia. When the ceremony ended, I saw him tap on his snuffbox, open it, and offer some to Egor. “Queen’s Scotch, perfumed with bergamot,” he told my new husband, taking a fat pinch for himself. “A gift from one of my new English friends.”
I had a swift, piercing memory of my hands touching him and suddenly found it hard to breathe, as if each of my breaths could turn into tears. When the Chancellor stepped toward me, I fixed my eyes on the silver buckles of his shoes, shiny against the scuffed leather.
“Happiness, prosperity, advancement.” He delivered his list of wishes as if talking to himself. I turned away, but I was not fast enough. “You can thank me now,” the Chancellor murmured in my ear, “for not taking more than you could spare.”
I felt color rise from my cheeks to the roots of my hair.
“Pity that you’ve backed the wrong horse,” he whispered, then walked away.
There was no proper wedding feast at the palace; we were not that important, although the Empress had a fiddler brought so that she could dance with the groom. “A good Russian husband, Varvara,” she declared, panting with exhaustion when the music stopped and she’d lowered herself into an armchair. “Just the thing to dilute that Polish blood of yours.”
I saw the Empress run her fingers through my husband’s hair when he bowed in front of her, and only then did I know the depth of my own illusions.
Only a few weeks before, I thought myself indispensable. But in my mistress’s eyes, here was the sum of my worth: a discarded lover and a dress she no longer wished to wear.
How reckless he was on that day, how sure of his immense good luck, Egor Dmitryevich Malikin, a man of unbounded optimism, secure in his conviction that all obstacles could be eradicated. Had he not been blessed by fate? Rewarded handsomely for his service?
Egor’s comrades followed us in a merry convoy to our home on Apothecary Lane just off Millionnaya Street, filling the rooms with banter and jostling. On our way we passed the house Catherine and her mother had occupied during the months of the Grand Duke’s illness, and I tried desperately to think of the time I’d spent with Catherine there, the happiest time since my parents died. In our new apartment, Egor’s servants lined up in the hall, eyeing me with apprehension, wondering what kind of mistress this new bride would turn out to be. A woman with a lazy eye whom I took to be the cook held out a basket tray with bread and salt. A brown hound growled at me from under the table.
I had been well instructed in my wifely duties. In the bedroom, I knelt to remove Egor’s boots. As the custom demanded, a whip was hidden in one of them, to remind me of the price for disobedience. My husband was my master. Without his consent, I could do nothing.
I was not a death maiden. My body did not kill. My thoughts poisoned nothing but my own heart.
“How did it happen?” I could not stop myself from asking Egor that night.
He had been standing guard outside the Imperial Bedroom with others when the Empress opened the door, he told me. She had asked who would like to marry one of her maids. She’d even said my name: Varvara Nikolayevna.
He’d seized his chance.
Like a serf woman auctioned off by her owner to breed more slaves, I thought.
“Why me?” I heard myself ask.
“I can spot a good racehorse when I see one,” my new husband told me in a voice he must have thought tender. It was the way I walked through the corridors of the palace. Head high. Chest forward. My eyes bold. My heels hitting the floor with assurance.
“Home,” I would say to myself, for what had I ever wanted but a place to call my home? But the word sounded hollow, as if spoken into a well. My husband had bought the ornate mahogany furniture, the ottoman and armchairs, in the parlor. The only thing I could call my own was the old trunk I had brought from the palace.
The lid gave a squeak when I lifted it.
I took out my mother’s muslin dress and pressed it to my face. I could no longer recall her voice, or the touch of her hand. When I felt tears run hot from my eyes, I blinked them away angrily. I looked at the rose-colored walls, the heavy burgundy curtains, the golden tassels reflecting candlelight. Not mine, I thought.
Come back here with a son nine months from your wedding day, the Empress had ordered me when she’d blessed me with the Holy Icon.
I thought of her command each morning when I woke and in the evenings before I fell asleep. Could it be a promise that I would return?
“How often did you have to mount her to get all of this?” I screamed at Egor once. My hand made a circling motion to include the apartment, the servants, his promotion to lieutenant. I saw the shock blaze in his eyes. His lips curled. I saw the glitter of his teeth. His body—the sinewy body of which he was so proud—stiffened.
I thought he would hit me.
Instead, he laughed. A clipped, sour laugh, but in his eyes I saw the flicker of doubt that told me I had won.
It was a hollow victory. I remember the emptiness of waking up every morning, with Egor snoring beside me, muttering something under his breath. I shook off the memory of his greedy touch, even as it etched itself into my breasts, my belly, the pelt of hair between my legs.
I took in the shape of my marital bed, the heavy carved frame, the curtains that could not keep the drafts away. Drawn, our window shutters turned deftly into mirrors that made the room look like a cage, without a way out.
The wedding gift from the Grand Duchess lay safe in my escritoire. It was a drawing in brown ink of a compass, a skull, a roll of paper, and quills, all scattered across the page in a haphazard manner, separated with a thicket of curving lines.
Not a proper wedding present, she wrote, but something I’m sure you’ll like.
I studied the sketch for a long time, intrigued by the strangeness of the design, but I could not understand it. And then, one day, as I was bending over to pick something up from the floor, my eyes caught the drawing from an angle. The picture was a clever puzzle, one of many I’ve seen since. The odd objects I stared at for so long, struggling to penetrate their meaning, were all part of a figure: a woman wrapped in a cloak, a roll of paper in her left hand, her right hand holding a quill. She stands triumphant, undefeated, resting her foot on the skull at her feet.
It never crossed Egor’s mind that I might not share his enthusiasm. Russia was his Motherland, and she had spoiled him rotten. He was young and strong. “I could eat a horse with hoofs,” he bellowed as soon as he entered the house each evening, delighted to hear the cheerful commotion in the kitchen. He patted his belly after meals, to the joy of the cook and the maids. He boasted of his hangovers for which he demanded large quantities of kvass, straight from the cellar—it had to be cool and frothy—and a raw egg that he emptied with a loud suck through a punctured shell. I don’t think he ever knew pain that was not inflicted by a sword or a bullet, pain caused by his own decay. Scars of his fights and skirmishes were badges of honor, evidence of how fast his body healed itself. “Feel it,” he would urge me, and I’d be forced to run my fingers over a scar on his arm, a curious zigzag he swore came from a knife.
My few attempts to open his eyes to the underbelly of our lives were met with incredulous laughter. “We could be watched? Our servants could be reporting everything we say? Is this what you find in these books you read all day, kison’ka?”
Was I but a kitten? My anger but a hiss?
He was my husband, the man of the house; he was taking care of all that was important. “How like a woman, kison’ka,” he would tease me, “to argue about what she doesn’t understand.”
The woman with a lazy eye who had greeted me with bread and salt on my wedding day was not a cook. Her name was Masha, and she was our housekeeper, the only one of our servants who faced me without apprehension. Judging by her wrinkled face, she had to be well past fifty, though no one knew her exact age. “Mashenka, dushenka,” Egor teased her, planting a loud kiss on her cheek every time she warned him he was ruining his health by drinking too much or cutting down on his sleep. “Don’t listen to me, and you will listen to a whip,” Masha grumbled, as if Egor were still a reckless boy climbing fences, upsetting cucumber frames, chasing partridges through the fields.
Egor’s father had found her years ago on some deserted northern road, a girl alone, starved to the bone, clad only in filthy rags. “I wouldn’t have lived to see the next day,” Masha told me, still awed by the miracle of the stranger’s mercy.
Master covered her with his own coat and took her home. Mistress, big with the child who would become my husband, fed her warm gruel and chicken broth. Thick and yellow with silky grease.
It takes a long time to get the chill out of the bones.
“Leave me alone, Masha,” I’d say as she trailed me with her stories.
But she wouldn’t.
“It’s not good to sleep so much, Varvara Nikolayevna.”
“Don’t stare into mirrors. It’s easy to get lost in there.”
In the world in which I’d once lived, rife with traps and lures, I had lingered in doorways and had not turned away from black cats. I’d paid no heed to the last thought that came just before sneezing. Had I been stubborn? Foolish? Or fatally careless?
I tried to hide from Masha. In my bedroom, I stuffed a handkerchief into a keyhole. I closed my ears to the sound of her shuffling feet. But nothing I did would silence the sharp clucks of her warnings.
“Don’t you care, kison’ka?” Egor asked once.
“Would it change anything if I did?” I shot back.
“Like a little boy … just like Old Master … act first, think later,” Masha grumbled as she was drying Egor’s hair with a towel, bemoaning the good undershirt, now torn, the town uniform soiled. The missing silver button.
“I’m not sick, Mashenka,” my husband insisted. “Just a bit wet.”
“What happened to you?” I gasped. “What kind of foolishness—?”
I didn’t finish. Masha shot a warning look at me with her good eye. This is not the time for interrogations. The body has to warm up through and through.
I didn’t give up.
The details came one by one, between hurried sips of scalding borscht. A walk by the river, a wager that grew. A fellow guard who said no one would swim to Vasilevsky Island …
Watch me, my husband had said.
“Look at this, kison’ka.” Waving aside Masha’s protests, Egor demanded his shako. Inside, there was a leather purse. Bulky, heavy with his winnings.
There it was again, the conviction in his voice. A few more months was all he needed. We would leave this rented apartment, the smoky air of the city. Buy a country estate. Small at first, perhaps, but with a pond, and a meadow for the horses to graze. He already had an eye on a steed he would buy. The owner was broke. He would give him a good price.
In the memory that haunts me, the kitchen smells of wet wool and tar. His undershirt is drying by the stove. Egor looks at me, his eyes gleaming.
“There will be mushrooms to pick, kison’ka. Partridges to shoot. Masha could have her kitchen garden.”
“And how will you pay for it all?” I retort as I turn away. “With your gambling? Or do you still count on the Empress to open the door for you at night?”
Is this what Egor had thought of when he’d first seen me at the Empress’s side? A wife who knew the palace ways? A wife who would help him assure that his son—if God granted him one—wouldn’t have to defend his honor with fights?
I could’ve asked him, but such thoughts did not cross my mind then.
How tedious I thought it all, instead. Visits to pay and receive. Name days to remember. Soirees and concerts to attend. The dragging talks of rank and four-horse carriages, days reduced to bone-china cups steaming with tea, or watermelon ice melting on hot summer days. What did they know about me? What could they tell me, these “new” friends who praised the cut of my dresses and asked what the Empress was like when she was in her own chambers, away from the eyes of the court?
I answered their questions vaguely. If I could, I slipped away from these gatherings, pleading a fainting spell, or a migraine headache. If I couldn’t, I listened and kept silent until the whispers around me thinned and chipped away.
This is not the life I wished for, I thought. But nothing will change it.
I had not forgotten Catherine.
When Masha arrived from the Tartar market, I followed her into the kitchen, praising the cut of the roast, the clarity of broth simmering on the stove. I asked for the servants’ gossip. Masha’s lazy eye almost disappeared inside her skull as she looked at me, but she did not disappoint.
There was trouble in the palace, she told me. Too many people were sniffing around the Grand Duchess’s bed. Didn’t they know that a watched pot never boils? Why not leave the young ones alone for a while?
They were under guard, Catherine and Peter. Their wing of the palace was like a prison. The Choglokovs, Masha said, were their jailers. Madame and Monsieur Choglokov, high and mighty now. No one can get past those two to the ducal couple. Acting as if they were royalty themselves, though everyone knows how they got their position. With a hefty bribe and their eight children. As if the Grand Duchess could get pregnant by watching a bunch of snotty brats.
At the Tartar market, Masha told me, there had been much laughter at the expense of the Choglokovs. Monsieur pinching every servant girl, while Madame is assuring everyone how her husband sees nobody but her.
At the end of each day the Choglokovs escorted Catherine and Peter into their bedroom and locked the door. Until morning.
“They say it is the Chancellor’s doing,” Masha said.
I didn’t doubt it. I could imagine his canny arguments. “Constant proximity, Your Highness. No distractions. Daily reminders of the Young Court’s supreme duty to their Sovereign. Your Highness has already done enough.”
Having exerted her will, I knew, the Empress would turn her mind to other things. Once again, pleasure would consume her—a new dance step, a shipment of French silks, a new Favorite. The “moon children” would be allowed to visit her from time to time, dressed in their finery, to declare their gratitude in front of the whole court before being dismissed.
I imagined Catherine alone with her husband, watching the Grand Duke arrange his soldiers into formations or reading to him, perhaps, just the way I used to from the book of Russian fortresses. Were the Choglokovs really that strict in following the Chancellor’s orders, I wondered, or would they take a letter to her if I offered them a bribe? Twice I even started to write to the Grand Duchess, just a few words of encouragement, but they both ended in the fire, these notes of mine. I was too aware of the many eyes that would read them before hers.
“Let me see him,” I begged Masha, but she refused. It was not good for a mother to see a fetus yet unformed. “Nothing wrong with him,” she assured me, when she saw my frightened eyes. “Just not ready for this world.”
But I would not be soothed. As I lay feverish, racked by pain, it came back, the memory of the Kunstkamera monsters in Peter the Great’s museum. Why did you come? their voices taunted me. To spy on us? To see what is not meant to be seen?
Laudanum didn’t help. I lost weight and grew pale, for I would not eat. The servants tiptoed around me with grim faces, crossing themselves as if I were already dead. Masha tried to force some bitter-tasting teas into me, muttering that I needed to cleanse my blood, but I spat them out.
I do not recall much of the weeks that followed. Whispers and distant screams, and a wormwood taste on my tongue. Once it seemed that my mother was sitting by the window, bent over her embroidery hoop. She turned her face to me, but when I lifted myself up from my pillows to reach out to her, I saw she had Madame Kluge’s eyes.
I heard Egor’s voice in the corridor, ordering the servants. I heard his hurried steps and the sound of doors closing. Once I woke to the feeling of his presence. He was sitting on the edge of our bed, his fingers stroking my hand, but I kept my eyes closed until he sighed and went away.
“Catherine?” I whispered through parched lips.
On the Empress’s birthday, when the official banquet ended, the Grand Duchess had walked up to Master Egor, Masha said, and had asked about me. When he told her I was not well, she gave him this gift to take to me.
Tears stung my eyes.
“Master said you would like it,” Masha continued. She must have noticed how I frowned when she mentioned Egor, for she adjusted the nightcap on my head and clucked her tongue, her lazy eye retreating into her skull.
I struggled to gather my thoughts, to break through the fog that muddled them. The Empress’s birthday meant that it was December already, that I had been ill for a whole month. Hoping to amuse me, Masha repeated what she had heard of the banquet. The Empress, the Grand Duchess, and the Grand Duke had been seated at the head of the table like three jewels in a crown from which four long tassels trailed, each leading to one of the Guard regiments. The table was adorned with confections made entirely out of sugar, gates opening to wide sugary avenues, wondrous miniature palaces complete with terraces and gardens. “Who gets to eat it afterward?” she wondered, licking her lips. “The Empress herself?”
I held Catherine’s gift in my hands. My fingers took pleasure in the smoothness of birch bark, in the shape of a flowery design pressed into it. With Masha’s help I sat up. I never would have thought sitting could require so much strength. I felt another welt of pain in my belly and suddenly remembered my dead baby brother, buried in some Warsaw cemetery. No one, I thought, will light a candle for him on All Souls’ Day, and my own unformed child will not even have a grave.
“Open it,” Masha urged.
I opened the birch box and breathed in the scent of wild mushrooms, the scent of an autumn I had no memory of because of my illness. Outside, the snow was piling up along the streets, carriages had long been replaced by sleighs. I thought longingly of a ride through icy, silent fields.
Inside the box there were sharpened quills and a crystal inkwell with a silver lid. Catherine’s mute invitation for me to write to her.
“I’m thirsty,” I said to Masha. “Bring me some hot tea.”
Masha turned her beaming face away, to the corner, where a Holy Icon hung, and crossed herself, bending to touch the floor.
“Praised be the Lord’s mercy,” she said.
If I was strong enough to stand through the Orthodox Mass.
In March, Anna Leopoldovna, the mother of the imprisoned baby Emperor, died. The news was repeated in hushed voices, for any mention of Ivan VI’s name was forbidden. “Prisoner Number One,” I heard him called, or simply “Ivanushka,” though even these references were dangerous. Only months before, a wine merchant had been arrested when a dismissed servant denounced him for hoarding old coins with Ivan’s image.
Knowing that for Catherine the news spelled trouble, I began waiting for Egor when he came home from his guard duty. Had he seen the Empress, I wanted to know. Was she angry? Had the Grand Duchess been summoned at night again? Was she crying?
His answers were flippant and dismissive. Why should I care if the Grand Duchess was still not with child? Don’t I have my own home to care about?
“It’s Russia’s future,” I said once, boldly.
Egor slapped his forearm, as if to swat a mosquito.
“Russia is too great to be weakened by one barren womb, kison’ka,” he replied.
I felt my head spin. Dark spots fluttered before my eyes, obscuring my vision. Beads of sweat gathered on my forehead. Had I been foolish to think myself cured?
I clenched my teeth. I fixed my eyes on the beam of light that came through the stained-glass window high above. A rainbow of colors whirled and danced. The weakness passed.
Around me the officers’ wives honored with invitations to the banquet that would follow the Liturgy whispered excitedly of tables surrounded by fragrant orange and pomegranate trees, of fountains set up in the palace halls, of a pyramid of fire created by burning wax poured through glass domes.
I would not see any of it. The Grand Duchess, I heard, had been ordered to keep most select company. Only mothers of healthy babies could be admitted to any room she was in.
I wouldn’t have admitted it to anyone, but I hoped for the sight of the imperial carriage. Catherine would spot me, too, I dreamed, and she would stop, even if for only a few moments, even if all I could do was urge her not to lose hope.
Masha, her feet swollen from too much walking, grumbled at my recklessness. I was like a northern wind, she complained, blowing any which way, as if ghosts were chasing me.
“And what kind of wind are you, Masha?” I taunted her in anger, but she took my measure placidly with her good eye. Ever since I had “come around,” as she put it, she made me wash my hair in kvass to give it a reddish hue. “Master likes it,” she would repeat with a sly smile when I protested.
I let her do as she pleased.
As part of the celebrations, the Russian Theater put on a play for the Empress. Susanin’s Revenge was one of those historical dramas that Elizabeth loved. It was set during the “Time of Troubles,” when Russia was teetering on the verge of extinction, before it would be saved, in the nick of time, by Elizabeth’s great-grandfather Mikhail. The first Romanov to become a Tsar.
Officers and their wives were invited to the third night of performances.
In the play, a detachment of the Polish army was on its way to murder the rightful Tsar and put a false one on the throne. The Polish hetman was haughtily predicting Russia’s downfall, the eradication of the Orthodox faith, and his own rise to glory. Then Ivan Susanin, a handsome young peasant, offered to guide the Poles through the swamp. Before the curtain fell for intermission, in a long soliloquy, Susanin revealed his strategy. The swamp would suck the enemies of Russia to their deaths.
I thought the play particularly crude but refrained from commenting on it, for I heard that the Empress had relished it. After the opening night the author had been raised through the Table of Ranks and received a gift of an estate.
“I need some fresh air,” I said to Egor and hurried away.
The door to the imperial box was flung open, and a crowd of well-wishers had already gathered. I recognized Prince Naryshkin, Countess Rumyantseva, and other court ladies, gushing praises of the actors, the name-day celebrations, and the Grand Duchess. There was no sign of the Grand Duke and, to my relief, the Empress’s seat, too, was empty.
I stood in the doorway and waited, but moments passed before Catherine saw me.
“Welcome, Varvara Nikolayevna,” I heard. “What an unexpected pleasure to see you looking so well.”
“I, too, am glad to see Your Highness,” I replied carefully. Her face was cheerful and animated. Perhaps the rumors of Elizabeth’s rages were exaggerated, or perhaps Catherine was with child at last.
I couldn’t ask. I could only listen and watch.
Prince Naryshkin launched into some elaborate story of mushroom picking that ended with him and his sister getting lost in the woods. “Lev, the wanderer,” Countess Rumyantseva teased. “Do you always manage to be so careless?”
Catherine stepped closer toward me. Her scent was all spring flowers: hyacinths, violets, and daffodils.
“How are you feeling, Your Highness?” I asked her, unable to keep my voice from shaking.
“Well,” she answered, letting her shawl fall loosely over her shoulders. Prince Naryshkin, tangled in his tale, roared with laughter.
“And the Grand Duke?”
“My husband, too, is well.”
This is all we had: a few minutes, a few words. Nothing that could not be overheard, reported back.
“I read a lot now, Varvara Nikolayevna. No more French novels, though. Tacitus.” Catherine’s smile gave her blue eyes a mischievous tilt. “Count von Gyllenburg suggested I should start reading Tacitus. And Montesquieu. But those books are not easy to find.”
“I’ll look for them, Your Highness,” I promised.
“I’d be most obliged,” Catherine said, extending her hand as if to touch me. She withdrew it before anyone could notice.
I watched her turn away from me to greet another visitor, and then I took my leave.
I scarcely watched the rest of the play. Onstage, Ivan Susanin was leading the invaders into the swamp. The Poles discovered his trick too late and decided to kill him before they would perish themselves. Susanin welcomed his own hero’s death with a long list of accusations against the enemies of Russia. The Poles were trying to convert the Russians to their Latin faith, to steal their souls and make them their slaves.
“They’ll promise us everything to get what they want. In Polish schemes we count for nothing,” Susanin declared, hands raised to the heavens, a loud gust of wind bending the stage trees to add weight to his words.
I heard murmurs of approval in the audience, followed by a storm of applause. Beside me, Egor clapped vigorously.
I thought of the brave cheerfulness of Catherine’s words, the hand that almost touched mine. When the play ended, I walked out of the theater to our carriage as if in a dream. I was grateful when Egor, spotting a fellow officer in the throng, announced that he would not accompany me home.
I had no doubts that the Choglokovs carefully examined each book I sent to the Winter Palace. Or that Catherine’s notes on the elegant vellum paper with gilded edges assuring me of her gratitude went through the same scrutiny.
One dark November day, Egor returned from the palace with news that the Grand Duke and his wife had departed for Oranienbaum.
“Why?” I could not help asking.
“Bestuzhev’s order,” he said. “The Chancellor thinks there are too many distractions at court.”
He screwed his eyes in mock horror.
“Now, let’s see—what distractions could possibly stop the Grand Duke from getting his wife with child? A masquerade? A drill? I can’t think of any more. Can you, kison’ka?”
I ignored the glee in my husband’s voice.
Forty-three versty of country roads would now stand between Catherine and me, I thought. A whole day’s carriage ride. There would be no theater, no visits. The Chancellor would make sure of that. What would she have to keep her from despair besides books?
The bearer of this note is a purveyor of many exquisite treasures, many of which would become you. I shall be waiting for the result of his efforts with great impatience. Please remember that I’m as certain of your devotion to me as I’m sure of my friendship with you.
It was not signed, but I recognized Catherine’s hand instantly.
A jeweler, Monsieur Bernardi, had brought the note on the pretext of offering his services. After all, I was an officer’s wife, a tribute to my husband’s rank. Had Egor not been promoted to Lieutenant Captain? He would not want me to be outshone by other ladies. Would I allow Monsieur Bernardi to examine my jewels?
Monsieur Bernardi was not surprised to discover that many pieces had to be cleaned and repaired, clips had to be adjusted, pearls restrung.
He never mentioned Catherine or his visits to Oranienbaum. But every time he came, he slipped a letter from the Grand Duchess into my hand and took the one I had prepared.
Don’t trust anyone, I wished to write. Nothing has changed. You are in a gambling house where every player is cheating.
But she knew that already.
She knew which of her maids checked her underclothes for the blood of her menses. She knew who went through the pages of the books she read, hoping to find a forgotten note. She knew who spied on her for the Empress and who carried her secrets to the Chancellor of Russia. She had discovered all the spying holes in her rooms and never left her fireplace until the thing she wanted burned had turned to ash.
Even in her secret letters to me, Catherine was taking precautions. She wrote them as if she were writing to a man whose name was never mentioned. She referred to the Empress as La Grande Dame. Peter was the Soldier. The Choglokovs were referred to as the Peacock and the Hen. The Chancellor was the Old Fox. Her awaited pregnancy became “the great event” or “the awaited news.”
I’m very sorry, Monsieur, not to have had the pleasure of seeing you for such a long, long time. Even a quick glimpse of your figure would have been a consolation. I long for a time when I will again be allowed to walk up to you and express my happiness at the sight of you.
For these dark days cannot last forever, can they?
I did what she asked me and burned them. But they are in my memory, as if I still held them in my hands, each word read and reread, releasing its dose of sorrow.
I was pleased that Catherine was far away from the intrigues of the court. She wrote that the Oranienbaum gardens were giving her unexpected pleasure and a sense of growing calm. There was still no “awaited news” but the long days in the country allowed for a lot of good reading and thinking. She was not wasting time, she assured me, but was using it to reflect on her mission in life, her duties, her obligations. More and more she was convinced that friendship and loyalty were the most priceless possessions she could ever have.
For a time, I took solace in these words.
In the salons of St. Petersburg, the officers’ wives talked of little else. It was Catherine whom the Empress blamed, they gossiped.
“I brought her here to breed, not to read,” she screamed for everyone to hear when yet another monthly report of Catherine’s reoccurring menses reached her. “Who does she think she is?”
The Grand Duchess was becoming the target of malice. Everyone had a theory of why she was not conceiving. “It’s because Her Highness refuses to use a woman’s saddle when she rides,” I heard. “It’s because Her Highness laces herself too tight.” “What is the use of a barren womb?” people asked. “A fruitless tree?”
There were other rumors, too. At the latest palace ball, the Grand Duke danced with his wife only once. Didn’t Catherine notice that her superior airs were making her husband angry? That Peter had begun praising the virtues of his wife’s maids-of-honor when he was sure she would hear him? Princess Kurakina had most delicate bones; Countess Vorontzova had the best ear for music of anyone he knew. After all, what kind of man likes a woman who outshines him?
Why cannot she smile more? Make a joke? Drink some wine and stop talking of books?
My father used to say that if a tree is bent, every goat will jump on it.
In her letters to me, Catherine wrote that she had overheard courtiers calling her cold and haughty. Her hand, they whispered, was like a tiger’s paw, her smile tight-lipped and cruel.
She was hardly ever allowed to leave Oranienbaum. And when she did, solely to accompany the Empress and the Grand Duke during the most important of court functions, she had to be cautious. Don’t try to approach me, Monsieur, she wrote to warn me. This may put in danger one of the few consolations left to me. And so I saw her only from afar.
She wrote of hours spent alone, staring at a book, often uncut, on her lap. The Empress seldom addressed her, and when she did, Elizabeth’s voice was gruff and impatient. I’m quite convinced that the Old Fox does me harm with La Grande Dame. But what can I do? I’ve never given him any cause to be my enemy, Catherine wrote. My few references to the likelihood of the “awaited news” met with either silence or an admonition: Please, Monsieur, do not ask of what I cannot control. The happiness of friends is the only comfort for those who have no other comfort.
They cheered one another on, the officers of the Imperial Guards.
Fortune is a woman; she yields only to the bold.
Good luck rubs off.
No one, the officers bragged, knew horses like my husband. Many could spot muscular necks and strong hind legs, heads with large nostrils and well-set ears. Many could point to the cannon bones that were too short, angles of joints that broke the proportions. But it took Egor’s master eye to assess which promise would live up to the challenge of the race, which flaw would cause damage on the track.
“Come with us, Egor Dmitryevich,” they called from the street, laughing and whistling with impatience. “Hurry up.”
A man, unlike a woman, did not have to grow bitter, I thought, sitting alone in our front parlor, flipping cards in the game of solitaire, staring at the unsmiling faces of queens, kings, and jacks.
The clock struck midnight. I pushed the cards away and stood. The sound of scurrying feet came from the hall. There would be whispers in the kitchen. The servants were taking sides, bestowing the blame.
I walked to the window and opened the shutters. Apothecary Lane, silvery with lingering moonlight, was deserted, covered in a layer of thick, wet snow.
In the morning I took a sleigh to the Great Perspective Road. In the French perfumery I bought eau de fraîcheur, smelling sweetly of cinnamon and cloves. In the Merchants’ Hall I chose a length of muslin and a pair of red silk stockings embroidered with jasmine blossoms.
Only a foolish gambler holds nothing back.
In the afternoon, when Egor came home from palace duty, I ordered Masha to bring us hot tea and some caraway-flavored vodka. I poured some vodka into my tea and drank it. It made my voice soft.
I spoke of the January freeze that painted ice gardens on our windowpanes, of the fox trails on the banks of the Neva I wished he had seen.
I closed the windows and the shutters. I let my hair escape its confining combs.
I laughed.
You have your world, I thought. I’ll have mine.
I placed my hand on Egor’s, and I thought how we might look to someone watching us: a husband and his loving wife, sharing a moment of closeness at the end of the day.
That night, scented with my best perfume and dressed in the turquoise nightdress that set off my eyes, I tempted him to lie with me.
It was a child I wanted. “Only mothers of healthy babies are allowed in the presence of the Grand Duchess” was the Empress’s order.