here was to be one more year and one more miscarriage, but then in January of 1754 the Grand Duchess became pregnant again. This time, to my joy, the Empress brought Catherine back to St. Petersburg.here was to be one more year and one more miscarriage, but then in January of 1754 the Grand Duchess became pregnant again. This time, to my joy, the Empress brought Catherine back to St. Petersburg.
The orders were strict. No physical strain, no horse riding, and no dancing. Catherine was never to raise her hands or make any circular motions. She could walk but only slowly, with small steps. To prevent falls, the maids were to rub her thighs and legs mornings and evenings with a mixture of the oil of Saint-John’s-wort and brandy.
There would be no more corsets or masked balls. No wearing of necklaces so that the baby would not have the cord twisted round its neck. No salty foods, for salt could cause an infant to be born without nails or tears. Catherine had to be kept happy, for a crying mother would make a child melancholy.
Elizabeth told the Grand Duke to “approach” his wife at least once a month, to brand the shapeless mass in Catherine’s womb with his own stamp.
And Serge Saltykov?
“No need for the Grand Duchess to make a spectacle of her rutting any longer,” Elizabeth said, when she ordered Serge to stay away from Catherine. To be truthful, she had been cruder than that. By then the very thought of Catherine provoked Elizabeth to use the language of the tavern. Suddenly it was all about cunts and pricks, fucking and sperm. A German mare and a Russian steed. The mechanics of breeding.
I saw Catherine often in these days but rarely without companions. Still, there were moments when—in search of some lost item from the Empress’s ménagement—I was able to sneak into her bedroom alone. It was her departed lover she always wanted to talk about.
“Is Serge missing me? Why did he have to go? Why doesn’t he write?”
Her voice quivered on the verge of tears. She couldn’t believe he had not come to visit her for such a long time.
I thought of Sergey Saltykov’s swagger as he walked along the Great Perspective Road, his obvious delight with himself whenever the Grand Duchess was mentioned.
I spoke of the future of the Imperial Heir, of sacrifices. “Serge cannot see you,” I told Catherine. “He has to keep appearances.” But then she demanded the truth from me.
“She ordered him to stay away from me, didn’t she, Varenka?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“The baby—” I began, but she did not let me finish.
“Why is everybody always talking about this baby, Varenka? Am I not important at all?”
She knew why. In her womb she was carrying a future heir, the ruler of the Empire, the son Elizabeth wished to command her Russia one day.
I often wonder what would have happened if I had not lied about Catherine’s faithless lover. But I, too, believed in the Kunstkamera warning: A mother’s thoughts and fears shape her child. I didn’t want Catherine to torture herself with jealousy and doubt. I wanted her baby to soak up the hope from her heart.
In monasteries and churches throughout Russia, crowds prayed for the safe delivery of the imperial child.
With each month of Catherine’s pregnancy, the Empress grew more hopeful. Her rages shrank into mere bursts of anger, short and fiery, burning themselves out as quickly as they erupted. As soon as the blessed event was mentioned, Elizabeth’s slaps and curses turned into the sign of the cross.
A boy or a girl? Everyone sought to penetrate the secret of Catherine’s womb. Was she favoring her right foot or her left? Was she picking up objects with the right or left hand? When she sat down sideways, which leg touched the ground?
She favored the right side of the body, the noble, stronger side, everyone said. She was carrying a boy.
The Empress bargained with God and fate. Ivan Shuvalov had not been barred from her bed, but more and more often, as soon as he left, Elizabeth called for her confessor. Any time, day or night, a servant might be dispatched to give alms to the poor. A night of drinking would be redeemed with a day of strict fasting and prostration in the chapel. On her knees, in front of the Holy Icon, the Empress of Russia beseeched Our Lady for the safe birth of her child.
Elizabeth called on Catherine every day. She asked if the Grand Duchess slept peacefully through the night. She made certain Catherine was fed rhubarb and stewed prunes; her bowels should not retain waste matter for too long, since this could cause premature labor. She sent Catherine goose lard to smear on her belly, believing it far better than almond or linseed oil. She ordered that the dogskin pregnancy girdle be washed in rose water and softened with fresh butter.
There would be no separate nursery. The Empress could not think of the blessed baby left alone with wet nurses far from her watchful eye. Catherine’s child would sleep in the Imperial Bedroom; the move to the temporary palace would be postponed until the baby was strong enough to bear it. The imperial diviner declared the Imperial Bedroom free of hidden currents, and an old woman was brought to purify the space every Friday with incense of wild herbs, “to keep the Prince of Darkness away.”
I found myself in the heart of these whirlwind preparations. Serf girls about to give birth were brought to the Winter Palace daily, each hoping to be appointed imperial wet nurse. The Empress screened every one of them. They had to be young, healthy and pretty, patient and mild-tempered, with sweet breaths and big breasts. I watched each of them kiss the crucifix and swear they would feed the imperial infant with love and tenderness and never use the herbs and roots of the Devil.
The pillows, quilts, coverlets were ordered, though not yet delivered, for fear of tempting bad fortune. Silver fox fur would line the ornately carved cradle; soft lace trimmed tiny bonnets and silken gowns; new curtains of quilted velvet would keep the draft away.
When the child is born, the old saying warns, beware the gust of cold air.
Catherine had become a vessel, a womb. But as Darya snuggled at my side, as I felt her warm, plump arms around my neck, I truly believed that the moment Catherine held her own child would repay her for all the betrayals of these days.
In the summer, when Catherine was six months pregnant, the Empress refused to let her out of her sight. She ordered the ducal pair to move with her to Peterhof, where she could see Catherine every day. A midwife was to stay with the Grand Duchess at all times.
I spent most of that summer in St. Petersburg, where Monsieur Rastrelli, ordered to postpone the grand rebuilding for yet another season, was hastily completing the most pressing repairs of the Winter Palace. Charged with the preparations of the confinement room in the Imperial Suite, I watched the progress of repairs with growing concern. After weeks filled with noise and dust, in the Imperial Bedroom plaster still fell from the mold-eaten ceilings, newly laid wallpaper peeled off from dampness. By the end of August, when it became clear that the repairs would not be completed on time, the Empress abruptly changed her orders. Catherine would give birth in the small Summer Palace at the edge of the Summer Garden.
Egor was still awaiting his transfer to the army. His request had been languishing on yet another desk. Colonel Zinovev had died unexpectedly in a riding accident, and Egor’s new commander created difficulties. A commendation was lost. Yet another copy of his service record had to be ordered. My husband had already spent a small fortune in bribes.
With so much talk of the imperial baby, Darya was getting jealous. She wanted to know why she did not have brothers or sisters. Ever since Masha told her that storks brought babies through the chimneys, she checked our chimney daily. Once I saw her leave an apple there, for the stork. She was ecstatic to find that the next day it was gone.
It would be a painful delivery, I heard, every time I visited Peterhof to report to the Empress on the progress of the preparations. The mother’s body would be slow to adjust. The first child carried an extra duty of charting the way for its brothers or sisters. Once I overheard the Empress tell the midwife that in the event of unforeseen trouble, the child’s life was to be saved at all cost.
That, too, I kept to myself.
Catherine’s gowns grew fuller, their folds more supple. Her face was pinched with worry. In the Empress’s company she hardly ever stood up from her chaise longue. For fear of startling her, all loud noises were forbidden. The courtiers moved carefully, spoke in whispers.
Serge Saltykov was still at court, in the Grand Duke’s entourage, though the Empress had threatened to send him away. I see him, Catherine wrote to me, but never alone.
This was not for the lack of Serge’s trying, she assured me. The midwife, the dullest woman imaginable, as Catherine described her, was spying on her for the Empress and never left her long enough for anyone to come in unobserved.
Autumn had come early that year. On the last day of August the wind from the river was already biting and raw, tearing leaves off the trees. I was in the yard of the Summer Palace when I saw a carriage stop. Catherine’s voice called my name.
“I couldn’t let you know, Varenka,” she said, seeing my surprise, once Prince Naryshkin helped her from the carriage. Her little white dog, Bijou, was jumping about her ankles, happy to be let out.
“He kidnapped me, you know.” Catherine pointed at Prince Naryshkin. Her eyes were impish with mischief, making the dark stains under them disappear. She arched backward as she walked toward me, and I caught a glimpse of peach-colored silk underneath her woolen traveling cape. Loose and bulky—the child was a mere month away.
“Entirely my idea,” Prince Naryshkin said, laughing, as he described his clever subterfuge. He’d persuaded the Empress to permit this trip from Peterhof so that Catherine could see for herself the progress of preparations. Then he’d invited the Grand Duchess for a brief stroll with her dog so that the midwife would let her out of sight. Together, they had rushed to his carriage.
It was a washday. In the yard of the Summer Palace, giant vats were heated over outdoor fires. The air smelled of suds. The servants were everywhere, carrying baskets of sorted and unsorted linen, bringing out the washboards and barrels for the leftover soapy water that would then be given to the poor.
I led Catherine into the room that was being prepared for her delivery. A room with a small antechamber, alongside the Empress’s apartments, crimson damask on the walls, a table. A bare mattress stuffed with horsehair lay on the floor, as the imperial custom demanded. Bijou sniffed it again and again, making me wonder if the mice had not nestled in already.
“The linen will be soft, Your Highness,” I said, trying to sound cheerful. “Well worn. And there will be a bed, for the time after.…”
Catherine surveyed the room, frowning. After the splendors of Peterhof, I knew how stark it seemed to her. In the corridor, someone was scolded for treading on table linens. Bijou began to bark.
“If I die, Varenka …” Catherine said. Her face turned so pale that I felt a stab of fear.
“You won’t die. You are strong.”
It was Prince Naryshkin who took her by the arm and led her to the window.
“Look,” he said.
In the Summer Garden, Serge Saltykov in a purple velvet ensemble bowed very low. His plumed hat swept the ground. Catherine gasped softly and clapped her hands.
“My second surprise of the day,” Prince Naryshkin announced, throwing the window open so that Serge could climb inside. “Remember this, Princess. Reward me with at least one smile.”
It took one jump, a quick turn of his lithe, muscular body, and Saltykov was in the room with us. His smile was triumphant.
“Serge!”
I saw Catherine throw her arms around her lover’s neck. I heard her pleading, “I wait every night … I cannot … please … it hurts so much.…”
“But I’m here now.”
Catherine’s fingers adjusted the embroidered edge of her lover’s collar, lingering there. Beside them, Bijou stood on his hind legs, ignored, dancing for a treat.
I gave Prince Naryshkin a warning glance and stepped back. As we left, I caught a glimpse of Serge Saltykov, his handsome face soft with concern. He took Catherine’s hands gently and clasped them between his.
“Shh …” I heard his thick murmur. “Haven’t I found a way? Just as I’ve promised.”
“It has begun.”
The midwife sent her message at dusk. With it came a request for fresh butter, ashes, rhubarb water, wine and vinegar.
The Empress rushed to the delivery room. The midwife was proud to announce that the waters in which the child had bathed in his mother’s womb were reddish, a sure omen that Catherine would deliver a boy.
In the Empress’s rooms the court ladies-in-waiting gathered to wait and pray. They were all from Elizabeth’s entourage, I noted, when I took my place in the corner, awaiting my summons. Only five of Catherine’s maids-of-honor were there, heads bowed, prayer beads slipping through their fingers. The crowded room smelled of jasmine and candied orange peel, the Empress’s latest weakness.
The walls of the Summer Palace were thin, and we could hear Catherine groan. Sometimes she gave a yelp of pain like a dog struck with a sharp stone. A few times the Empress urged her to be brave, but mostly we heard the midwife’s voice instructing her to breathe deeply, to swallow what she was given to drink, and to push, push.
It was a cool September night. Restless, I rose and parted the curtains. Through the crack I could see the moonlit branches of an oak swaying in the wind.
Let this child come fast, I prayed. Let it bring her peace.
The Grand Duke arrived. I could hear him step noisily into the delivery room, mumbling something that I hoped was encouragement. I heard the Empress ask him where he had been and why he was not wearing his Russian uniform.
He said he had been mustering his Holsteiner troops. They had to be ready for a parade. “For there will be one, won’t there?” he asked in a petulant voice.
Minutes later we heard him depart.
After an hour, the Empress, warned that the waiting would be long, emerged from the delivery room. Countess Shuvalova hurried toward her with a small comfit pot.
She would retire to her bedroom, the Empress announced, slipping a piece of candied peel into her mouth. She would wait there until the labor came to fruition.
By midnight we were still waiting. Unable to sleep, the Empress had called her ladies-in-waiting into her bedroom, to pray with her, but Catherine’s maids-of-honor had been sent away. The Summer Palace, Elizabeth declared, was not built for crowds. The baby would need air to breathe.
By two in the morning I ventured into the delivery room, to ask if anything might be needed. The mattress on the floor was circled by ten thick wax candles, and I crossed myself, unable to stop the thought that it resembled a catafalque. Moonlight bathed the room. Apart from the midwife and her attendant, a young kerchiefed woman, no one else was allowed to stay while the labor was in progress.
The crisp, clean sheets that had been laundered and scented for the imperial delivery were now crumpled and stained. Catherine, her robe opened, her dark hair loose and matted with sweat, lay shivering. Her flesh was pasty, her breasts swollen.
Seeing me, she gasped and tried to lift herself. “No one told me it would hurt so much,” she said and moaned, pointing at the huge mound of her child. “Do you think I’ll just burst?”
“A few more hours and you won’t even remember.”
“When will the Empress come?”
“Very soon.”
“Varenka, please. Don’t you lie to me. Not you.”
The midwife clicked her tongue in annoyance, so I didn’t reply. Her reddened hands were gently bringing the baby down the birth passage.
“No danger of breech birth,” the midwife told me. “You can tell that to Her Highness.”
The floor squeaked as I knelt beside the mattress. On the table, by a porcelain basin, lay white swaddling clothes.
“Be off with you,” the midwife snapped.
I rose and left.
Two of Catherine’s chambermaids lingered in the hall, pretending to dust the railing or wipe some invisible stain from the floor. I wondered which one of them was a tongue.
“What do you think you are doing?” I snapped. They scattered like rabbits chased by a hound.
No one but the Empress, the Grand Duke, and five of Elizabeth’s ladies-in-waiting were allowed to witness the final moments of the delivery.
The whispers grew still, and then I heard it: the baby’s first shaky cry, drowned in explosions of joy.
In the Imperial Bedroom I crossed myself and gave thanks. It was a boy.
I imagined what I couldn’t see: Catherine’s son placed between his mother’s legs, the cord around his body. The midwife waiting for the first cry so that the cord could be cut and removed.
There were three knots on it, I heard, predicting three future pregnancies. The afterbirth was expelled swiftly, without much pain. The infant was given a spoonful of warm red wine sweetened with honey to cut through the phlegm. He was washed and swaddled.
Through the wall I could hear Catherine’s joyous sobs.
In the Imperial Bedroom the curtains were pushed open. The dawn was milky and shrouded in fog. Outside, cries of joy mingled with musket shots and cheers. And then the church bells rang, one by one, announcing the good news.
There are so many words for love: my dove, the apple of my eye, my honey, my falcon, my hawk. The Empress muttered them all as she came back to her bedroom, the swaddled newborn in her arms, her ladies-in-waiting behind her. I had never seen her look so ecstatic.
A tiny reddened face, eyes squeezed tightly shut. A whimper chased away with a kiss.
I lingered as visitors arrived, declaring themselves speechless with awe. The little Tsarevitch, Peter the Great’s great-grandson, was a marvel of strength and beauty. Russia’s great future was secure. “So handsome … so peaceful … a little man already.”
They all crowded around the Empress, making sure she was aware of their presence. Princes, counts, courtiers. The Chancellor of Russia peeled off his gloves, easing them off finger by finger, before making a sign of the cross over the infant’s head. Ivan Shuvalov, newly appointed the curator of Moscow University, his voice rich with emotion, recited an ode To the precious one who brought Minerva joy.
Satisfied, Elizabeth waved them all away. Even Ivan Ivanovich was told to leave. In the gray light of dawn, the canopied crib where she carefully placed the baby seemed to take up half of the room. Settling in a chair beside it, she began rocking it gently.
I turned to depart with the rest, but the Empress stopped me.
“Go to her now, Varvara,” she ordered, in a small, strained voice.
I thought: She cannot even bring herself to say Catherine’s name.
“What shall I tell the Grand Duchess, Your Majesty?”
“Tell her that I’m pleased with her.”
I nodded.
“Tell her that I’m tired. That she kept me waiting all night.”
The baby was quiet. The Empress rose and let her loose velvet cape slip off her shoulders. In a white shift of quilted cambric, she looked like an awkward moth. From the shadows of the bedroom came the rustling sound of a mouse scurrying along the wall. Where are the cats when one needs them? I thought.
Then came the words I dreaded.
“This child is mine. And you make sure she doesn’t give me any trouble.”
This is what it means to be Empress. Take what you want, discard what you no longer need. Live in a world that allows you to do as you please, for in this world fortunes and lives depend on your whims.
I knew it, and yet I still lingered, hoping the Empress would offer some consolation I could take to Catherine. A time for her visit, perhaps, a promise of a swift reunion with her own child.
For a moment, Elizabeth looked as if she might toss Catherine some scraps of her benevolence, but then the baby whimpered in his crib, and she turned away to bend over him.
I entered the delivery room with a heavy heart. I had not expected Catherine to be alone, but to my astonishment she lay without even a maid to assist her, shivering from the cold. The bed linen was soaked from her sweat. Even the candles had vanished.
She had wrapped her arms around her chest, her empty arms.
I smoothed Catherine’s moist hair and tried to comfort her sobs. “He will die,” she insisted. “He’ll die without me.”
“The Empress won’t let any harm come to him,” I assured her. “He’s safe and warm. His cradle is lined with silver fox.” I described her son to her. The tiny face, the pink lips, the big, gray eyes.
“Did she say when I can see him?”
I shook my head.
“Why, Varenka?”
“You know why.”
Catherine’s fingers dug into my arm, deep into my flesh. I heard her gasp. I heard her wail.
She had been robbed and left for dead. She was bleeding, not the woman’s blood that had to flow but the man’s blood that called for revenge. In the chilly light of dawn, I caught a glimpse of her hatred.
“I want her to die, Varenka.”
She let go of my arm. I covered her lips with my hand, to silence these dangerous words, but she pushed it away.
“I want to see her take her last breath. I want to look into her eyes when she does it. I want to watch when she struggles for air that will not come.”
I made another gesture of warning—the walls were too thin, the shadows not dense enough—but Catherine would not be silenced.
“I don’t care if anyone listens. I want her dead. I can’t live like this anymore.”
I let her cry in my arms until we heard the steps of Madame Vladislavova, the Chief Maid, who entered and declared herself on an imperial errand to check on the Grand Duchess.
She gave me a reproachful look. “The Empress wants you back with her, Varvara Nikolayevna,” she said sharply.
Already? I thought. Another whim? Or suspicion that I might disobey her? No—I was certain it was merely the desire to hear that I had carried out her cruel wish.
Of all the time’s currents, I decided, the imperial ones run swiftest. Patience is not an imperial virtue.
My hand was still smoothing Catherine’s hair, and I could feel the velvet softness of her ear underneath my fingers. I knew that in my absence she would not be able to ask anyone about her child. If she did, her questions would be reported to the Empress.
“Tell the Empress I’ll be there soon,” I told Madame Vladislavova, knowing I was merely buying a few more moments. “The Grand Duchess still needs me here.”
An hour later when I returned to Catherine’s side from Elizabeth’s room, I discovered that Madame Vladislavova had been of no help. “The midwife will come soon” was all the wretched woman had said. She didn’t order the wet linen changed. Later, I learned that she didn’t even give Catherine a drink of water or help her move to a bed away from the drafts. I returned to find Catherine still on the blood-soaked mattress, shivering from exhaustion and pain.
Ringing for maids, ordering fresh linen, water, and a heavy throw, I raged. Where were they now, I thought bitterly, all these grand friends of hers? Those who fed on her largesse? Where was Naryshkin or his sister? Where was Saltykov?
Did they all wish her dead?
I kept these questions to myself as I helped Catherine rise from the mattress and wash. Her emptied belly still swollen, a brownish streak running like a gash from the navel down. Leaning on my arm, she got into a freshly made bed.
“Varenka?” she asked.
“She named him Paul Petrovich,” I answered, knowing what she sought.
“Paul,” she repeated.
“He is strong. He is not crying. He would not suckle, though. He fell asleep as soon as the wet nurse pushed a nipple into his mouth.”
Catherine’s eyes were on me, greedy for every word.
“The wet nurse is clean,” I assured her. “Not a spot on her body. Her milk is plentiful. Everyone rejoiced at the full moon last night. It will bring him strength. He has tiny, perfect fingers, with rosy nails.”
“Perfect,” she repeated. Her smile trembled.
“Are you in pain?” I asked.
She shook her head, but I could tell by the pallor of her skin that she was lying.
I thought of the moment the midwife had placed Darya in my arms, my daughter’s first soft whisper of a breath. I couldn’t be the one to tell Catherine that these would not be her pleasures.
“I’m strong, Varenka,” she said huskily. “For I have you. I ask for nothing more.” She took my hand in hers and kissed it. “You will help me. And my son.”
“Yes,” I said. “I will.”
Journal of the Court Quartermaster reported that on September 20, 1754, toward morning, Her Imperial Highness Her Majesty Grand Duchess Ekaterina Alexeyevna gave birth successfully to a son. God has sent His Imperial Highness Grand Duke Paul Petrovich.
The cannonade from the Petropavlovsky Fortress announced the birth of an Imperial Heir. Throughout the city, banners were raised. Jubilant crowds cheered.
In the eleventh hour—the Journal reported—in the presence of Her Imperial Majesty, the child was carried from the chambers of Their Imperial Highnesses to the inner chambers of Her Imperial Majesty.
A lie, I knew.
Not in the eleventh hour, but the moment the cord that attached him to his mother had been cut.
“Tell me everything, Varenka,” Catherine pleaded. “I don’t want you to spare my feelings.”
The Grand Duchess is making a spectacle of herself.… Poor Saltykov is trying his best to free himself, but a man has his limits.…
At the beginning of November the court moved back to the Winter Palace, patched up for the coming months, awaiting the time when proper renovations would begin. Half of the Imperial Bedroom had been turned into the nursery, and this was where Elizabeth spent her days, with the baby, jealous of the wet nurses. Little else interested her. I even saw her shake off Ivan Shuvalov’s hand.
When the Grand Duke Peter visited, the Empress allowed him to hold his son for a few moments, until the first whimper, then sent him away. He didn’t mind, he had told Catherine. Infants belong to the women. His time would come. His son would grow up a soldier. “His son,” Catherine said to me, bitterly. “As if I didn’t count.”
“The pride of Their Highnesses, their greatest achievement and mighty Russia’s hope,” the Chancellor of Russia had called Grand Duke Paul Petrovich in his speech at the baptismal feast.
In the Empress’s antechamber, my conversations with the Chancellor followed the usual court exchanges of vague illusions. It is easy to be distracted from what is important, but awakening always comes in the end. In Russia one takes what looks like the worst road and it turns out to be the best.
“I have something for you to take to the Grand Duchess, Varvara Nikolayevna,” he said, when I was alone with him. “My own elixir of gold, tincture toniconervina Bestuscheffi. A remedy for catastrophes of love and strewn nerves. Indispensable in such trying times.”
When he’d left me to retrieve what turned out to be a small bottle filled with a yellow liquid, I took a quick look at his desk. There was a large folio sheet there with headings printed in bold type:
Sergey Vasilyevich Saltykov … age: 26 … handsome physiognomy … a lecher who has had Madame … Countess … Princess … amiable character … inclined to pedantry … for his mission received 6,000 rubles from the Empress and a promise of an appointment at the Court of Sweden.
I visited Catherine each day. She was still feverish, staring for hours out the window at the river, Bijou at her side. My assurances that Paul was thriving did not ease her worry. “Go back to him, Varenka,” Catherine would plead. “They wouldn’t tell me even if he were dying. You know they wouldn’t.”
In the Winter Palace, Catherine’s bedroom was three doors away from the Imperial Suite, close enough for the Empress’s spies to keep an eye on her. This is where she stayed most of the time, in the company of her maids-of-honor. Sometimes I slipped in there at dawn, sometimes in the middle of the night. I cultivated opportunities that allowed me to be alone with her, even for an instant, enough to whisper a quick reassurance.
Once or twice I could smell a man’s scent around her, snuff and wet leather of the road. “Serge was here. No one saw him,” would be all I could get out of her.
Outside the Winter Palace, the first snow fell on the city, blanketing the frozen roads, the roofs, and the Neva. The sun set early. By afternoon only the torches burning in wall brackets and the bonfires of the sentries made the palace yard visible. Darya had just turned four, and she liked to finger through old books, looking for pictures. “Is it me, Maman?” she’d ask if she spotted a child in them, relieved when I assured her she was not among the innocents slain by Herod’s soldiers and that the mother throwing her hands out in despair was not me.
At the end of November, at the churching ceremony when Catherine was allowed to take Communion for the first time after giving birth, she could stand without pain. She was healing, I told myself. All poison has an antidote. She would soon forget Saltykov.
At the beginning of December, Serge Saltykov left St. Petersburg for his country estate. His departure, surprisingly, was not by the Empress’s order. “Too many women chasing him here,” the Chancellor told me. His eyes were full of malice.
What did I tell Catherine in these last weeks of the year?
That fortune is not as blind as people imagine; it requires a long series of well-chosen steps.
That the Shuvalovs had not yet triumphed. For now that she had her heir, Elizabeth might turn her back on Peter.
“She has choices now she didn’t have before,” I reminded Catherine. “If she chooses Paul Petrovich over his father, you will be Regent.”
“Is that what Elizabeth says?” Catherine asked. There was a flicker of hope in her eyes.
“No,” I said. “But that’s something to think about.”
“I don’t need such consolations, Varenka,” Catherine said with a frown of disappointment. “I need to know what the Empress says.”
The last days of the old year demand the settling of debts. In the Church of Our Lady of Kazan, the Empress gave thanks for the blessed year that had brought her the infinitely precious Imperial Heir.
Her gifts were worthy of a Romanov: a new oklad for the Holy Icon, studded with pearls, diamonds, rubies, and sapphires; a jeweled gold altar cross; an engraved censer. In the final days of 1754, we were all summoned to admire her offerings, to exclaim over the clarity of the fat stones, the perfection of silk needlework, the intricate patterns etched into the blue enamel.
Catherine was seldom seen in public. Claiming that she was still sore from her labor, and that migraines plagued her, she had obtained Elizabeth’s permission to abstain from attending court balls and masquerades.
The maids whispered that the Grand Duchess sobbed when she believed herself alone. The Empress was not concerned. All she wished from me was one thing: “If anyone dares to call the Grand Duke Paul Saltykov’s bastard, Varvara, I want to know right away.”
I found Catherine in bed, cradling little Bijou. “Is it you, Varenka?” she asked as I entered, her voice blurred with laudanum. “Have you got something for Bijou? The little darling has been waiting for you.” Bijou slipped his wet nose inside my palm, in search of a treat. I pushed him away.
“Varenka is so mean to my little Bijou,” Catherine murmured, picking the dog up and raising him. “So mean.”
I watched her smile at the sight of Bijou’s legs dangling helplessly in the air. The dog was staring down at her with big, astonished eyes, patiently waiting to be restored to dignity. “Don’t ever go to mean Varenka,” she crooned. “Stay with me.”
The bed smelled of camphor. Beside it, Catherine’s petticoats lay in a disorderly heap. She must have dismissed the maids in a hurry.
“Your son slept most of the day, without crying,” I told Catherine, picking up her silk underclothes. Her petticoat was yellowed and torn in a few places. I resolved to have a talk with her chambermaid.
Catherine lowered Bijou. The dog began licking her nightshirt, stained from the milk. Her breasts were still swollen. She didn’t move him away.
“The wet nurses change every two hours,” I said. “They pick him up the moment he starts crying. The Empress sits by the cradle. The nursery is kept very warm; the stokers have been ordered never to let the stoves cool. Little Paul is covered with a satin quilt filled with cotton wadding, and then with another, of pink velvet lined with ermine.”
I put the folded petticoats on the chair. I ran my finger over the night table, checking for dust.
“They carry him around too much,” Catherine murmured. “It’s not good for a baby to be always rocked to sleep.”
Serge Saltykov returned to St. Petersburg. I saw him in Elizabeth’s antechamber, awaiting summons. He did not come to see Catherine.
“Please, Varenka,” Catherine begged. “He knows I’m being watched. He doesn’t want to put me in danger. Let him know that I can get out of the palace. I need to see him, Varenka. Take a note to him. From me.”
My chest grew tighter.
“No need for a note. Let me talk to him,” I said.
I found Sergey Saltykov in the guard room, showing off a card trick to a young officer. With his impudent glee, smelling of vodka, snow, and juniper-scented smoke, Serge looked as if he had just risen from a bonfire at some winter hunt. As I walked in, he was motioning for the guard to lift the card on top of the deck. A sigh of bewilderment greeted the appearance of an ace.
“One word with you, Monsieur Saltykov,” I said. Our eyes met. I felt his assessing my low-cut dress.
“Will you excuse me, Grigory Grigoryevich?” he said to the guard, and rose.
“She is waiting for you,” I said through clenched teeth after he had followed me to the corridor.
“Is she?”
His hand was on my arm, and I felt his fingers brush the nape of my neck. Serge Saltykov believed no woman could resist his presence.
“Then why is she hiding in her room? I’d hoped to see her at the last ball.”
Catherine would ask me to repeat his every word, every excuse Sergey Saltykov could invent. She wanted to hear of confessions of disappointment, fear of the Duke’s jealousy, the danger to her. “Does the baby look like me at all?” she kept asking me. “Does anyone say he might not be Peter’s? Is this why Serge doesn’t want to see me?”
She knew what a stain on her son’s birth would mean. Any pretender could rise from the shadows and claim to be the forgotten Tsar, the true descendant of Peter the Great. Any pretender could gather the troops and proclaim Grand Duke Paul Petrovich Saltykov’s bastard. And yet she was still waiting for her lover’s visit. Passion had replaced reason, had made her desperate.
“She is alone now,” I told Saltykov. From another room I heard Egor’s voice commanding the guards to shape up. “I’ll take you to her. No one will see us. Please.”
Serge Saltykov gave my arm a gentle squeeze. His wrist, I noticed, was covered with a mat of fine black hair.
“I’m not the master of my time, or my affections,” he said. “Tell her that, Varvara Nikolayevna. It’s better for the Grand Duchess to know.”
In the streets of St. Petersburg, the fortune-tellers pointed to the double five in the coming 1755. It meant hope, openness to new experiences. Five is an adventurer, they said, pushing life to the limits. Five is “five senses.” Five longs for freedom.
Before the celebrations began, the Empress—her evening gown stiff with diamonds and bristling with golden thread—blessed baby Paul and presented him with a large crystal pendant. Hung in the window, it would delight his eyes with bouncing rainbows.
The Empress decided to greet the new year in the Amber Room. She wished to feel its healing powers one more time, she announced, before Monsieur Rastrelli moved the amber panels to Tsarskoye Selo, the first step of the renovations that would begin soon.
Lit by five hundred candles, the walls of the Amber Room, a gift from the Prussian King to Peter the Great, glowed with golden and brown flecks. The air was thick with perfume, snuff, and spirits. A small army of footmen hovered by the door, like crows on carrion, swooping on the slightest traces of sawdust carried in from the restrooms. Darya had watched with rapture as I dressed for the ball. She made me promise I would let her dry the flowers of my corsage. Now, in my tightly laced court gown, I stood beside my husband, making plans for the future. Egor’s transfer to the army had finally been approved; his new commission would soon follow. It would mean long absences Darya was not yet aware of. It would be just me and Masha for her for a long time.
Catherine had once again asked the Empress to be excused from a public appearance. The request had been granted with a few caustic comments about her haughtiness. “What is she moping about now, Varvara?” Elizabeth asked me. “She doesn’t think herself mistreated, does she?” The mockery in her voice made me cringe.
Radiant and sumptuous, the Empress scrutinized the courtiers. Ivan Ivanovich Shuvalov stood at her elbow, whispering to her from time to time. I saw him kiss her hand and press it to his chest with a triumphant grin. In the last weeks he had kept to himself, praising the Imperial Heir loud enough for everyone to take note, mocking those dim-witted enough to believe that the Shuvalovs’ star might be fading. To the Chancellor’s annoyance, Ivan Ivanovich had chased away the dark-eyed beauty Bestuzhev had sent to seduce him. “You can’t touch me,” the Imperial Favorite had told the woman. “And neither can he who sent you here.”
At midnight, fireworks exploded with sparkling cartwheels, shooting stars, and turning wheels. Molten wax was poured over cold water to reveal the future. When the wax hardened, we turned it in our hands, looking for clues in its shape or the shadow it cast. A sword for the Empress, a horseshoe for the Grand Duke. A letter for me.
War? Journey? Good news? Or bad?
Right after midnight the Empress asked the Crown Prince to open the ball. She was pleased when he danced with Countess Vorontzova. Das Fräulein burst into giggles of delight every time Peter looked at her.
I danced and lingered in the antechambers, among tinkles of epaulettes and roars of laughter, collecting gossip the Empress would demand from me the following day. Who had to use the reviving salts? Whose dress needed last-minute letting out? Who still looked plebeian in spite of the latest change of wardrobe?
In her room Catherine was waiting, but Serge Saltykov had no intention of going to her. I watched him dance with Princess Lenskaya, two times in a row. Then I saw him slip out with Prince Naryshkin. “I think the gentlemen are a bit merry,” a chambermaid whispered to me with a sly grin.
The thought of Catherine alone, still believing Sergey would come, was too cruel. I slipped out of the ballroom and knocked on her door. She opened it quickly, too quickly, her French dressing gown of pale blue silk opened at the front, revealing the curve of her breasts. A soft scent of birch leaves from the banya was floating in the room.
“Oh, it’s you, Varenka,” she said, her voice flat. I resolved to check how much laudanum was still left in the last bottle.
The wind was howling outside. The Winter Palace was never more aptly named than at this time of year, when all its windows froze into crystal ice gardens. Outside, the cannon shots boomed.
My mother used to say the first person who entered your home in the new year foretold your fate. A dark-haired man brought good luck. A woman was always the harbinger of bad news.
I thought: Forget Sergey. He is not worthy of you.
“May I stay here?” I asked.
“If you wish,” she said, looking away.
I pulled Catherine down on the rug by the fire. Bijou gave us a tired look and curled into sleep at her side.
“I still remember seeing him for the first time, Varenka.” Catherine’s voice was slow, lingering. “At the stables. I had just come back from a long ride. The horse stopped and neighed. Serge was bending over something the groom was showing him. Then he straightened and looked at me. Just an instant, and I knew that he knew.”
Love was like an illness ravaging her body. If, at that moment, Sergey opened the door and walked in, she would not have resisted him. There was enough poison in her to make her listen to some tall tale of why he could not come. A chance encounter, an order from the Grand Duke that he could not disobey.
Catherine lifted her head. Her hair, escaping her combs, covered her neck and shoulders, thick and dark and silky. Shadows danced on the walls, waves of warmth touched us from the flames.
We both heard the sound of steps outside the door. Had Sergey come, after all?
Catherine froze.
The steps continued past the room, toward the Grand Duke’s apartments. A knock on the door was followed by a howl of laughter. I recognized Das Fräulein’s giggling.
“Did you know, Varenka?” Catherine asked softly.
“That he wouldn’t come tonight?” I asked. I leaned over and placed my hand on her forehead. It was hot.
“You know what I’m asking. Did she order him to seduce me? Was this her plan all along?” Tears were rolling down her cheeks, but Catherine made no effort to wipe them.
I couldn’t speak. On the night table, a half-burned candle was smoking, for the chambermaid had not trimmed the wick. Is it so important to know everything? Aren’t lies sometimes the kindest response?
“Look at me, Varenka. I’m her cow. Worse than a cow, for even a cow does not have her newborn calf stolen from her right away!”
She put her hand on mine, her skin hot and dry. “Did you know?”
I nodded.
“Why didn’t you tell me, Varenka?”
I could not answer her.
“In the future, would you be so good as to let me be the judge of what’s best for me? From now on and always.”
Was it her voice that hurt me the most? So cold and harsh that it didn’t seem to be hers at all? Or was it the fury in her eyes? She rose and walked away to open a window, letting in loud whistles and cheers, musket shots and bursts of fireworks that greeted the dawn of New Year’s Day.
“I wanted to protect you,” I muttered. “That is all I ever wanted to do.”
I must have wept then, for the next thing I remember is the window closing and feeling Catherine’s fingers touching my face.
I didn’t have a choice. I told her her own story as seen through the spying hole from the moment she arrived at the palace. I told her of the wagging tongues, of the schemes to defeat her, and the bragging of the seducer. Of the Empress’s order to send her lover away from her to Sweden, as soon as the New Year’s festivities ended.
Catherine sat motionless as I spoke. Only her fingers moved, running over and over Bijou’s fur, twisting it into curls.
“Is that everything?” she asked, when I’d finished.
“Yes,” I said.
In the glow of the fire I saw that she was biting her lip so hard a spot of blood had appeared.
I tried to say more, to remind her how far she had come since those dark days ten years before when she could have been sent home at a moment’s notice, but she stopped me. “Go, Varenka,” she ordered. “I need to be alone.”
I obeyed her.
I did not return to the ballroom. Around me, in the cold, drafty corridors of the Winter Palace, merry voices exploded, feet pattered down the wooden stairs. I hurried to my quarters, deaf to Masha’s warnings, her talk of God’s will, inscrutable in its intent. I slept deeply, and did not remember my dreams.