EIGHT
1756–1757
e were all holding our breath, waiting for Russia to declare war, for letters from a lover to arrive, for death to shift the treacherous balance of power. In the summer of 1756 I moved to Tsarskoye Selo with the Empress’s entourage, glad to get Darya away from the heat and noise of the city. In spite of Monsieur Rastrelli’s assurances, the rebuilding of the Winter Palace had not been smooth. Rumors swirled of thievery and chaos. Carpenters ran out of lumber, plasterers of sand and lime. Bills exceeded estimates twofold or more.
“Another curious inconsistency in these accounts, Your Highness,” I heard the Chancellor point out to the Empress. He spoke of deliveries accepted without checking against the orders, workers sitting idle for lack of supplies, sheets of gold leaf missing.
A mistake, I thought.
Excess never offended Elizabeth. Frugality was good for the Prussian King, for his world of thin soups, melted candle ends, a round of cheese measured every evening. Inspecting the ledgers? Searching the workers as they left the site? “Petty actions, worthy of a monarch without vision,” Ivan Shuvalov said, sneering.
If he wanted the Empress’s attention, the Chancellor should have spoken of another winter spent in the cramped palace on the Great Perspective Road.
Of daring to keep the Empress of All the Russias waiting.
Of not trying hard enough.
In the garden of Tsarskoye Selo, Darya was running in search of butterflies through the unmowed patch of meadow behind the pea-tree hedge.
I heard uneven steps behind me, crunching the gravel.
I turned.
The Chancellor of Russia was coming toward me, limping, his right knee stiff, his swollen right hand gripping the handle of his cane. My daughter’s joyful voice trailed in the distance. I stifled the urge to warn her away.
“Proud of yourself, palace girl, aren’t you?” Bestuzhev muttered, with a dark glimmer in his steel-blue eyes.
Catherine has told him, I thought, as we began walking together along the hedge.
“There are some mistakes you cannot afford, Varvara. Underestimating me is one of them.”
I savored the bitterness in Bestuzhev’s voice. Catherine must have been blunt. My thirst for revenge tempted me with possibilities: No, it was never Naryshkin.… Even the Chancellor’s spies can be tricked to sniff at the wrong path.… If you wish to be my friend, prove it.
The Chancellor’s voice broke through my thoughts. “I can be of more use to her than your British fop who thinks he can teach her how to become Empress.”
I quickened my steps. “Sir Charles wants the Grand Duchess to be happy. As do I.”
“This is not about happiness, Varvara,” the Chancellor said, and sniggered. “This is about power. A British Ambassador has his reasons to wish for her rise. Do I have to spell them out for you?”
By then Bestuzhev was breathing hard, his face reddening, but he did not ask me to slow down. And he didn’t stop speaking.
“I did tell you once, Varvara Nikolayevna, that I wasn’t a man without a heart. Remember, we are backing the same horse. I’ve come to warn you. You are forgetting the lessons I’ve taught you. You’ve begun trusting people.”
“Leave me,” I said.
The fury in my voice startled even him.
“Please,” he said. “Not so loud. We are having a pleasant little stroll through the garden, not a spat someone on the other side of the hedge might want to report. And do slow down, will you?”
Darya was waving to me from the meadow, her butterfly net raised in triumph. I stopped and waved back.
“Remind the Grand Duchess that I’m trying hard to do what she wants,” the Chancellor wheezed. “Tell her to be patient. Tell her that what she wants is not easy to achieve.”
A flock of the palace peacocks passed us by, stately, indifferent, their folded tails trailing in the gravel. I stifled the urge to scare them into flight.
“She wants me to persuade the Polish King to send that handsome Pole of hers here as his Envoy. This is not hard to do. But it is Stanislav’s mother who also needs persuading. He fails to mention that in his letters, but my Warsaw spies have been more forthcoming. Countess Poniatowska doesn’t trust the Grand Duchess of Russia.”
His voice rose in a crude imitation of a woman’s plea: “Don’t go back there, I beg of you, my son. She is a manipulator. She cares only about her own pleasure.… She will trample over you once she has what she wants.…”
My thoughts clung to the memory of Catherine and Stanislav, the remnants of their supper pushed carelessly aside, tracing some imaginary journey over a beautiful old map of Russia. Imperii Moscovitici, I read the words on the hand-colored copper etching. Why don’t we just run away? Catherine had whispered to her lover.
“Countess Poniatowska is wrong,” I told the Chancellor.
“In one of those cozy moments when you mistake our Grand Duchess for your sister, Varvara, do whisper to her shapely little ear that I, her lowly servant, will do everything to bring her beloved back to her, but that she should still work with me, even if I fail. Tell her love is not that important, after all, in the scheme of things. She knows that already, even if she is not quite ready to admit to it.”
“Why should I help you?”
“Now?”
“Now or ever again.”
“Now, because she needs me to succeed. Later, because I know what you still don’t.”
I wondered what I hated him more for. The turns my life had taken from that day when I arrived at Elizabeth’s decaying palace, an orphan believing in the power of imperial grace? Or the doubt his poisonous words let creep into my heart?
I looked at his face, blank, inscrutable, aging.
“Maman,” Darya cried from behind the hedge. “Look what I’ve caught!”
As I hurried toward her, the Chancellor of Russia limped back to the palace, the cane that supported him making deep, hollow scars in the gravel.
When the Grand Duchess came to Tsarskoye Selo, the Empress greeted her with affectionate inquires: “Have you slept well? Is your migraine gone?” Catherine responded with compliments. The subtle grace of Elizabeth’s dance steps took her breath away. In her newest ball gown, the Empress looked as beautiful as she had on that winter day in Moscow when Catherine had seen Her Highness for the first time.
Elizabeth returned to calling the Grand Duke and Duchess her beloved children who had pleased her by giving her an heir to the throne. Now she was waiting for them to repeat the act.
Paul was almost two and still walked with cautious, wobbly steps. The nursemaids dressed him in loose smocks and tied his golden baby curls with a blue ribbon. Two of them always hovered over him, ready to hold him up if he merely tottered. Every morning Elizabeth made them bare their breasts for her inspection; any blemish, even the smallest one, was cause for instant dismissal.
And now, when the Grand Duchess came to Tsarskoye Selo, the Empress allowed her to visit her son.
Odd visits, cruel, I seethed, so unlike anything I wished for mother and child. The Empress laid out her conditions: in the afternoon … not longer than half an hour … never when I am away.
The nursery turned into a battlefield.
The stage of triumph had been carefully charted, the roles cast. Elizabeth walking into the nursery, the nursemaids shooting anxious glances at her, hoping she would notice their zeal. Behind her, Catherine, with downcast eyes, mindful of every step, every word she uttered.
“Tyotya,” Paul shrieked, as soon as he saw the Empress, flailing his arms with excitement, like an awkward bird learning to fly.
He wriggled out of his nursemaid’s arms to rush toward her. Elizabeth swooped him up, tickled his belly, laughed when he reached for the pearls in her hair.
Every kiss, every word, measured and weighed, hurled at Catherine’s heart.
“My dove … my prince … Show me your little eye … your little nose … your little toe.”
Catherine stood motionless, in her pale yellow gown embroidered with flowers, hands clasped behind her, lips arranged into a faint smile. I saw her twist the rings on her fingers, as if one of them held a fairy-tale spell, would let her fly into the air, change into a mouse, a cat, a hawk.
Would render all poison harmless.
“Do you know who has come to see you? … Do you recognize your Maman … Where is she? … Where is your Maman? …”
“Maman,” Paul repeated, but the word was an empty husk. Coaxed to look at Catherine, he buried his face in his aunt’s bosom.
“You want her to go away, don’t you, little man.… You want her to leave you alone.”
That summer Elizabeth had commissioned a portrait of the Grand Duke Paul in the Preobrazhensky uniform, sitting on his rocking horse, a wooden sword in his hand. The painter had asked for only two sittings. He vowed, “A child with such remarkable features I can paint from memory.”
In the picture, Paul’s face looked bold and determined against the leafy-green tunic of his uniform. The Empress had been particularly smitten with the pink hue on his cheeks and the touches of silver paint that had rendered the wooden sword real.
She liked to hear the courtiers declare how Paul resembled his great-grandfather. How the Romanov blood flowed in his veins.
The portrait, its gilded frame studded with diamonds, hung in her bedroom, next to her own likeness as a round-faced little girl resting on an ermine throw, a miniature of her father in her right hand like a trophy, her white naked body curving gently, her hair adorned with pink flowers.
Two children, beside each other.
Would she name Paul her successor? I wondered. Would she pass Peter by?
At night when the Empress could not sleep, she called me to her side.
Unsure when these summonses would come, I took to sleeping in my clothes, the stays loosened, the hooks of my bodice half undone.
“Where have you been?” the Empress snapped, no matter how quickly I arrived. Often I noticed that cold glimmer in her eyes, the only sign of drinking I could detect then. Ivan Shuvalov was never there on these nights. He’d been dismissed, I presumed, to his own rooms.
“Who comes to see her, Varvara?”
In the shadowy darkness, stretched on her bed, the Empress wanted to hear about Catherine lost in the mazes of jealousy and lust, in the glitter of jewels, in the heat of summer nights. She still wanted stories that would justify taking a son away from his mother.
“Princess Galitsina is her best friend now, Your Highness. They see each other every day, I hear. Princess Dashkova, too. The Grand Duchess always sends everyone away when they come. Then the jeweler arrives, and they look at necklaces and earrings.”
“Does she buy anything?”
“Oh, yes. She likes big stones. She wants them noticed.”
“Is she still borrowing money?”
“Monsieur Bernardi has advanced her more credit.”
“What else does she do all day?”
“She has started writing a Russian play, but this is still a secret. A surprise for Your Highness. It’s about the Time of Troubles, but I don’t think it’s very good. Far too long, and there are too many speeches. She also wants to give a big party at Oranienbaum this summer. For the Grand Duke. She wants all the ladies to wear white taffeta with flowing tulle and the gentlemen blue velvet with white.”
“Does the Grand Duke lie with her?”
“He does.”
“And she is still not pregnant?”
“No. She has put on weight, though. The maids complain that it is harder and harder to lace her properly. And her right shoulder is crooked. Her teeth are beginning to hurt again, but she refuses to let the dentist see her. She says that all doctors do is cause more pain, so she chews cloves instead.”
“Who else comes to see her? Bestuzhev?”
“Yes.”
“What does that old bastard want from her?”
“They close the door when they speak, but I know she wants him to find her a new lover.”
In the garden pavilion, dahlias and nasturtiums spilled out from stone planters, and flowering vines climbed on wrought-iron grilles. In birdcages suspended from the ceiling, canaries and parakeets chirped and hopped about, breaking into song. Embroidered shawls covered the tables and shelves, on which lacquered boxes, birch-bark baskets, and candy bowls crowded. In the corners, in big copper watering cans, red and yellow begonias bloomed. The iron furniture had been replaced by gilded armchairs and cushions embroidered with images of the firebird.
On the trays that footmen carried about, many colored vodkas glittered in crystal carafes: beet, cranberry, lemon, horseradish, plum, cherry. The guests were offered sushki, pirozhki stuffed with cabbage and wild mushrooms, smoked pork-belly slices arranged in the shape of a horn of plenty, adorned with grapes.
Such were the Empress’s wishes. “Just like in a skazka,” she had demanded. Elizabeth always craved the simplicity of fairy tales, good triumphant, a wise cat fooling a conniving magician, an overlooked princess rewarded with the throne.
“Another grand delusion,” the Chancellor had quipped. I rubbed the place on my arm where he had held me before I wriggled away. In Warsaw, Stanislav was still awaiting the King’s orders. The Old Fox was not trying hard enough, Catherine had told me. Last time he pleaded with her to be given more time, she told him that if he could not bring Count Poniatowski to St. Petersburg, perhaps the Shuvalovs might be of more use to her.
Sprawled in her gilded armchair, chewing on a pork-belly slice, the Empress surveyed the scene of her making. Her feet rested on an embroidered footstool; folds of her purple dress framed her like soft drapery. “Keep everyone away from me, Varvara,” she had ordered. Her red-rimmed eyes were nobody’s business. Even a sleepless night, I thought, had become a state secret.
I hovered behind the Empress, a guard dog and a spy, knowing that what she wanted from me was a story to her liking. A bad mother and a good aunt … a foolish prince unworthy of his inheritance … a blessed baby who would save the Empire.
The Grand Duke, having taken a seat underneath a birdcage, to the Empress’s right, clasped his hands tightly to stop them from fidgeting. Catherine had persuaded him to wear the Preobrazhensky greens. He had been with her to the nursery once—a reluctant visit, for, as he told Catherine, what can a father do with a child who is not old enough to march?
The Grand Duchess praised everything. The flowers, the birds, the breeze coming from the garden carrying the scents of roses and honey. Her dress was plain, a summer dress of white muslin and satin ribbons, but all eyes naturally turned toward her. Even Ivan Shuvalov leaned to whisper something, words Catherine acknowledged with a graceful nod and a flutter of her fan. As she moved from one group of guests to another, she offered nods and smiles, a touch of her hand, a kind comment.
It was only the Chancellor whom she visibly ignored, her eyes sliding past him when he bowed to her, darting in the opposite direction if he made the slightest effort to move closer.
He frowned. He shook his head.
He tried again, and again was snubbed.
It turned into a game, an amusement for the court: Catherine’s half-smiles, her swift turnabouts, the Chancellor’s persistence, Ivan Shuvalov’s chuckles.
The Empress wiggled in her chair. She didn’t like attention to flow away from her. I propped up her pillows. The one behind her back was damp with sweat.
I was relieved when the Imperial Favorite stood up and—hand resting on his chest—began reciting an ode to the Illustrious Minerva of the North:
May the Lord to the end of our days
Multiply your cherished years
To the joy and defense of the world!
A lively round of applause brought a smile to Elizabeth’s lips. When the applause faded, Count Razumovsky, his voice rich and low, intoned one of his Ukrainian dumas about lovers parting in sorrow.
The Empress tossed him a handkerchief. He kissed it before sliding it into his breast pocket.
The Chancellor stood next.
“A speech would be too long, Your Highness,” he said, “so I’ll be brief.”
He was brief. Russia was ready to teach Frederick of Prussia a lesson he would not forget. The troops reported their readiness; peasants gathered at the recruiting stations, singing songs to the Empress’s glory. Field Marshal Apraxin was waiting for the chance to prove himself to His Beloved Sovereign and his Motherland.
I stifled a temptation to laugh. A few words, maybe, but none idle.
At the mention of his beloved King of Prussia, the Grand Duke lowered his head. Beside him, Ivan Shuvalov winced when he heard Apraxin’s name. He was still hoping the Empress would not appoint the Chancellor’s protégé to the post of supreme commander of the Russian army.
“The whole nation, Your Highness, is ready,” the Chancellor continued. “We merely await your command.”
The Empress slapped her hand on the arm of her chair. In her eyes I saw a flicker of dark glee.
“If Russia has to enter the war,” she announced, the purple sleeve of her gown shimmering with diamonds, “I’ll lead the troops myself.”
There was a moment of uncertain silence, but it ended as abruptly as it began. Praises flowed, just as Elizabeth wished them to, lavish, exuberant. She would be magnificent. She would astonish the world.
Our little mother.
Beloved.
Merciful.
Virtuous.
I didn’t see the Grand Duke rise. His voice made me look at him. It was piercing and high-pitched, a shiver in the marrow of the bones. There is something deadly in foolishness that takes no notice of the dismayed faces, faces that hide in the shadows the instant your eyes touch them.
“How can Your Majesty even think it possible?”
The Empress cocked her head, puzzled, as if her nephew spoke some foreign tongue whose meaning had to be pieced together word by word. A patch of color appeared at the base of her neck.
“My father headed his troops,” she seethed. “Do you think I’m not as good as my father?”
I watched Peter’s scarred face turn crimson. He flung his long hands about him. Such is the bitterness of a foolish prince, I thought, the disappointment of the one less able. Like a marsh, deep and treacherous, reeking of rotting leaves.
“He was a man, and Your Majesty is a woman,” Peter shrilled.
Before the Grand Duke managed to say anything else, Ivan Shuvalov pulled at his sleeve so hard that the seam tore.
Too late.
I saw the footstool overturn; I saw the kick that sent it flying. I saw the Chancellor rise and lunge toward Elizabeth, as if his touch could contain her rage.
It was Catherine’s voice that stopped them all.
“Please, Your Highness! Promise us you will not put yourself in the path of danger. We beg of you, in our times of trouble, have mercy on your children.”
A voice soft and pleading but irresistible.
The Grand Duke opened his mouth again, but Catherine didn’t give him a chance to speak. “We may not be your soldiers,” she continued, throwing herself to her knees in front of the Empress, “but we need your guidance. Rule the generals who lead the troops, but stay with us here, we implore you.”
The Empress sank back into her cushions. Two tears rolled from her eyes. She let them trickle down her rouged cheeks.
The foolish prince from the Russian skazkas is always saved by a wise princess, I remembered.
“Enough, my child,” the Empress said. “Get up.”
I rushed to help the Grand Duchess to her feet. I felt her hand squeeze mine. If she expected her husband’s gratitude, it did not come. “I’m not like Madame Resourceful,” Peter had said to me before he left, recalling his old name for Catherine. There was a dangerous note of resentment in his voice when he said it.
“She’s been like this before,” I answered. “Don’t believe all you hear.”
Catherine’s face sharpened in disappointment.
“It’s all this talk of the war,” I continued. “She is afraid.”
The imperial terror of reckoning, I called it. The judgment card of the monarch’s tarot deck. This is what brought drops of sweat to Elizabeth’s forehead, darkened the puffed skin under her eyes. In the Empress’s mind, God decided a nation’s fate by weighing the sins of its ruler. Which would matter more—French sloth, Prussian greed, or Russian pride? “Have I not been merciful?” I heard the Empress mutter as she prayed.
In one of the letters Catherine showed me, Sir Charles urged her to give up the part of a friend and take up that of heir of Russia. You are more powerful than you think, he had written. You can have all you want. At night, with Darya tossing in her sleep, still grinding her teeth in spite of Masha’s wormwood infusions, I savored the promise of his words.
In the sparsely furnished guest suite at Tsarskoye Selo—a reminder of the Grand Duchess’s position at court—Catherine continued her questions.
“Does she sleep at all, Varenka? Is she often in pain? Does she talk about me?”
I looked at the room: two gilded chairs, a small table, a bed, a chest of drawers. A window overlooking the kitchen garden, from where a scent of something unexpected floated in—cinnamon and cloves, as if it were Christmas.
Catherine, in her light summer gown, stood by the open window, her fingers twisting the gold tassels of the curtains.
“You miss him,” I said softly. “Have you not had a letter?”
She turned her head toward me, and I saw the glitter of tears. “I don’t want to talk about Stanislav. Please, Varenka. I can’t.”
So I spoke of the Imperial Bedchamber instead. Of peasant singers, bandura players, children with voices the Empress might call “angelic.” A roster of ladies-in-waiting eager to amuse her with gossip until suppertime, when the Imperial Favorite arrived. Well rested, glowing, like her cats.
“The Empress refuses to be alone,” I continued, pleased when my words made Catherine smile. “So I make sure she isn’t.”
At night, when Ivan Shuvalov was sent back to his rooms, when the palace slumbered, I found the Empress leafing through the St. Petersburg Gazette, scrutinizing the caricatures of the Prussian King through her magnifying glass. Frederick II on a stool, a sack between his knees, packing the lands of Silesia, Bohemia, and Saxony into a grab bag with one hand, picking bits that have fallen to the ground with another. Frederick, in his scanty frock coat, licking his lips as he peered through a spying hole at the naked flesh of reclining Austria.
“What do they write of him now?” the Empress asked, pushing the newspaper into my hands.
A bandit and a thief, I read, treacherous … conniving … insatiable … claims that his army of two hundred thousand men can be at his enemy’s throats in three weeks.
Elizabeth bit her fingernails when I read, and then rubbed at them, as if she could make them longer. Underneath her dressing gown, a frill of Belgian lace revealed the etchings of blue-green veins under the paper-thin skin.
So that Frederick might rob a neighbor whom he had once sworn to defend, black men are fighting on the coast of Coromandel and red men scalp each other by the Great Lakes of North America.
I spiced the essential with pinches of the trivial. In the Prussian army, officers eat on tinplate. Silver spoons are forbidden.
“A miser,” Elizabeth muttered. “A highway robber with no conscience.”
There was hatred in the Empress’s face, hatred like fire to be fanned and kept burning. She would never forget that the King of Prussia had once called her “an illiterate cunt ruled by pricks.”
We, too, talked about the war.
The price of salt soared from twenty to fifty kopecks per pud. The price of liquor doubled. The Russian treasury was raising money.
“Not fast enough,” Egor said.
Now that the Prussian King had the backing of the British, the Prussian army would go on the offensive. “Russia doesn’t have much more time to get ready,” he said.
Masha kept the tally of chores. Master’s dress uniform had been torn at the sleeve and had to be mended. His pockets were stained, for he had carried carrots and lumps of sugar there, for his horse. He needed fresh handkerchiefs. He needed a few jars of her own shoe polish, which she concocted from wax, tallow, and tar, so much better than what the army could provide.
Our bedroom smelled of saddle soap and snuff. I’d return after my shift in the Imperial Bedroom to hear Egor’s triumphant grunts as he counted out the last of the hundred push-ups with which he started his days. Next door, where his valet slept, my husband’s trunks were filling up, but the things he always kept with him were neatly lined on the side table. The toiletry set, his saber, his pistols, all in cloth covers that Masha had washed and ironed, all tied with string.
During the day Darya never left his side. She carried a doll he had bought for her, refusing to part with it, even when Masha was giving her a bath.
“Flowers have roots that drink water from underneath the earth. Birds eat seeds, Papa.” I heard her voice, serious, insistent. She never stopped, as if every thought had to be turned into words, every mystery examined.
“Masha says that swans lose their feathers every spring and then they cannot fly. Is it true?”
“Yes.”
“Can they not find them?”
“They have to grow new feathers. They have to wait.”
“Why?”
“It takes time to grow.”
“How much time?”
With Egor there was no shyness in her, I thought, no hesitation. She either knew something and announced it or did not know and wished to find out. If an answer did not satisfy her, she would not stop. Precision pleased her, certainty of facts that fitted together snugly.
“Sometimes she is no longer a child,” Egor said.
“Only sometimes,” I said, laughing.
Evenings that August were chilly. On Egor’s last night at home, we sat on the garden bench, watching the deepening shadows. Darya, the doll propped beside her, was drawing something in a sketchbook Egor had given her, the tip of her tongue extended in fierce concentration. She was already trying to contain his looming absence, asking when he would come back. “How many weeks?” she would ask, spreading the fingers of her right hand, hiding her left hand behind her.
The birch leaves were already beginning to yellow. Soon the earth would be carpeted with amber and gold.
I told Egor about the dancemaster I intended to hire soon, to give our daughter dancing and deportment lessons. I wondered if the one hour a day I now made Darya walk in high heels, with a book on her head, was enough to keep her spine straight.
The gardeners had been burning twigs and dead leaves, and the air carried the sharp bite of smoke.
“It’s not right,” Egor said, as if he hadn’t heard me.
I fell silent.
He lowered his voice as he spoke, staring at the polished tip of his jackboot. “Bribery and soul-buying,” he muttered.
On his knee, his hand curled into a fist. On his tensing jaw, a shadow of black stubble quivered.
He had seen deserters, he told me. Many more than he’d thought possible. Men were poking out their eyes, crushing their toes, cutting off their fingers, or knocking out their teeth. Anything to avoid the army.
The Yaroslavl’ villagers had been caught buying serfs in another village to serve in their place. “Three hundred and sixty rubles,” Egor continued. “That’s the going rate for a good recruit.”
The villages that did send their own recruits did not give them adequate provisions, often less than half of the flour required for the simple bread the soldiers baked in earth ovens. How long would it last them? A month? Two? How was he to keep his men strong on flour and water? Soldiers needed vegetables and some meat or fish. The Russian army would starve even before the marching orders came.
Why was there money for a new palace when the soldiers didn’t even have enough bread? Why had Apraxin been made Field Marshal? That old fart who forbade his aide-de-camp to wake him up before ten?
He was struggling to understand.
He was failing.
He believed that virtue, not fickle fortune, made the army.
“Remember the Orlov brothers, kison’ka?” he asked, his fingers skimming over his chin.
I remembered the two young officers who had listened to Egor so intently at the gatherings in our parlor. Grigory, the handsomer of the two, Alexei with the scar on his face. The Orlovs were no longer in St. Petersburg, Egor said. They had followed his example and had applied for active duty with the army.
“Excellent officers, both of them, but only Alexei shares my worries,” my husband continued. Alexei didn’t have Grigory’s devil-may-care conviction that everything would turn out well in the end, that victory came to those who dared. “We rage,” Egor confessed, “while Grigory is chasing another mistress. Time will tell who has got it right.”
He halted for a moment to seek my eyes. I looked at the weathered skin of his face, at his thin lips, set tight, steeling for a bad situation to become worse.
“True nobles … service nobles.” I heard Egor’s bitter voice. The likes of the Shuvalovs and the Vorontzovs on one side, the likes of the Malikins and the Orlovs on the other. The old distinctions refused to go away. True nobles grew up hearing stories of great deeds done by those whose names they bore, whose flesh made theirs. Service nobles rose up the ranks through merit or favor, not birth, accused of pandering to the Sovereign’s passions, using base means to acquire the Empress’s goodwill.
Allowed to imitate their betters but not to be one of them.
“Until we force our way,” Egor said, words spoken too loud, making Darya flash us a quick look before returning to her unfinished drawing.
I placed my finger on my lips, but Egor shook his head. “You know that, too, kison’ka,” he said. “You have always known it. Haven’t you?”
I felt a knot of tension dissolve in my throat when his hand touched mine.
In the morning, after Egor’s carriage left, Darya was silent and pensive. “You have to be strong,” Egor had told her. “You are a soldier’s daughter.” She nodded nervously when I assured her that Papa would be back soon, but she didn’t ask when it would be.
It was the absence of Egor’s things that I recall, the empty bedroom table, the fading scent of saddle soap and snuff. And the thought that Russia is not yet at war. The belief that a recruiting station is out of harm’s way.
The Empress wished to hear of little else. Saxony was an Austrian ally. Maria Theresa of Austria may be a liar and a hypocrite, but she had been wronged and slighted. The Prussian bully had crossed one line too many. Russia wouldn’t stand idly by.
The Chancellor of Russia was no longer kept waiting in the antechamber. I’d hear his voice from Elizabeth’s inner room, praising the wisdom of her decisions. Field Marshal Apraxin was reporting the Russian army ready for combat. As soon as winter was over it could start marching west. “The whole world awaits Your Majesty’s command.”
Catherine was growing impatient. The Chancellor still had no news for her about Stanislav’s appointment, and the invasion of Saxony meant another delay.
“I’m asking for so little,” Catherine had told him. “If you cannot do this for me, what is the value of your help? Perhaps I should listen to Ivan Shuvalov, after all? Consider his offer of friendship?”
There had been no offers, just hints, but Sir Charles’s letters made Catherine bold. She would show them to me. Letters in which she underlined whole sentences: Claim the throne of Russia, and make Stanislav King of Poland. This is a destiny worthy of your talent.
I turned the pages in my hand, hoping Sir Charles did not keep copies and that Monsieur Bernardi was not losing his touch. It did not soothe my worries to notice the old subterfuge: Sir Charles had addressed the Grand Duchess as Monsieur. I resolved to urge him for more secrecy next time I saw him.
“Please burn these letters,” I pleaded with Catherine. The lock in her escritoire could be picked with a flick of a hairpin. Her secret drawer opened with a push of one of its wooden columns.
“Sir Charles is quite sure the Empress doesn’t have long to live,” Catherine said, ignoring my plea. “Do you think he is right, Varenka?”
I shrugged. “I don’t claim I can predict the future. But I know she is thinking of Christmas. She is being fitted for a cream satin dress, with ermine trim.”
Finally, in November, the Chancellor told Catherine the good news.
The King of Saxony and Poland had appointed Count Poniatowski his Envoy extraordinaire to the Russian court. Stanislav set off for St. Petersburg at the beginning of December, promising in his letter to Catherine to arrive before Christmas. But Christmas came and Stanislav still was not here.
Catherine tried not to worry. Winter was harsh; delays were inevitable.
Every day I sent a servant to the Saxon mission, only to be told that Count Poniatowski was on his way. Then, on December 28, at midday, he arrived.
The boom of the midday cannon still lingered when I rushed to Catherine’s room. The day was very cold but bright, the snow piling up alongside the Great Perspective Road. The Saxon mission was a short carriage ride from the temporary palace.
“Take this to him, Varenka,” Catherine ordered, placing a sealed letter in my hand. “Tell him I’ll come as soon as I can.”
Stanislav was still wrapped in furs when he entered, as if unable to believe that his long journey was truly over. A powdered wig made his handsome face leaner than I recalled it, older and more thoughtful. His hands were warm when he held mine and raised them to his lips.
“Dear friend,” he said. “How is she?”
“Better. Now that she knows you are here.”
I handed him the note from Catherine and watched him break the seal with trembling hands. He kissed it after he read it.
“You surely kept us waiting,” I teased.
“I had to take a longer route.” He turned his face toward the fireplace, toward the dancing flames. “I had been warned of an ambush … right after I crossed the Russian border.”
“Warned?” I asked, concerned. “Who warned you?”
He gave me a bemused smile. “Let me tell her that myself.”
I felt a pang at these words, a reminder not to feel more important than I was.
Outside the receiving room, something heavy was being dragged along the floor. We heard footsteps approaching. The door opened, and one of the mission servants appeared, asking if refreshments would be required. Stanislav looked at me, but I shook my head. I had to hurry back to the palace.
Stanislav waved the servant away and offered to walk with me along the Great Perspective Road.
The glittering winter sun had been swallowed by a heavy cloud, and now big flakes of snow were falling on our faces as we walked. He asked me many questions, and I answered them all.
Catherine was well. She was wearing her hair shorter but still unpowdered, just the way he liked it. No, he could not go to see her right away. It was too dangerous. She would come to the Naryshkin palace as soon as she could. Not earlier than eleven, though.
He should wear a disguise and come through the service door. A musician’s costume would be best.
I would tell her he was well. I would tell her he would be counting every second that kept him away from her.
I did not let Stanislav walk with me for more than a few minutes. Even in the street, too many curious eyes lurked.
When it was time for him to turn back, I watched him walk away, slowly. A beggar stopped him, and Stanislav extracted a coin from his pocket. A moment later, the beggar’s wail turned into a loud litany of blessings.
With the anticipation of Catherine’s joy came the thought of my own unease. Egor had sent a note that he’d been ordered to take his recruits west, in the direction of East Prussia. The Orlov brothers, he assured me, had sworn to take care of me and Darya, should anything happen to him.
In the light cast by a lantern, Catherine’s face wavered. Impatience suited her. Her cheeks, reddened with frost, needed no rouge; her eyes needed no belladonna to glitter.
No more loneliness for her, I thought. No more waiting.
Catherine glanced at me only once before hurrying inside. “Thank you, Varenka,” she breathed, smiling. “I’ll never forget what you’ve done for us.”
Something about her troubled me, but I couldn’t think what it was. Only later, I realized that her lips were drawn in what looked to me surprisingly like her mother’s selfish smile.
How droll, I thought, and how impossible.
Seventeen fifty-seven would be the year of victory.
I thought of Egor, in the army camp, of his letters, simple and spare. Winter is harsh, but I’m of good thoughts. Tell Darenka that I like her drawing of a horse best.
After the New Year celebrations ended, I often saw Stanislav in Elizabeth’s antechamber, standing among other Envoys and Ambassadors, awaiting an audience.
Elizabeth never made him wait long. He had pleased her with his first official speech, with which he assumed his Envoy duties. Invasion of Saxony was not just an outrage but a sign of the future, he had said. Frederick of Prussia was a Hydra with many heads. If one of them was chopped off, two more grew in its place. This was why Prussia deserved no mercy.
The Empress liked that.
She was not the only one. A fluid, passionate speech, I heard it described. Loud enough to be heard but calm enough not to be dismissed as a young man’s rant.
As soon as I had the opportunity, I congratulated Stanislav on his success. “The Empress talks of little else.”
“The Empress is very kind,” he replied. “I watch the Russian court and I learn. Each day a new lesson.”
Lessons tailored for a star pupil, I thought. Sir Charles had begged Stanislav not to try to see him. Not even in secret. Ever since Prussia invaded Saxony, the British Embassy had been under tight surveillance. Every embassy servant was a Russian spy. It is with a heavy heart that I stay away from both of you now, Monsieur, hoping it won’t be for long, Sir Charles had written to the Grand Duchess. One day Catherine the Empress of Russia and Stanislav the King of Poland will rule together, and I’ll be able to offer my help and friendship to both. But for this to happen, I cannot have other masters. This is why I’ve submitted my resignation, and I’m now awaiting a letter from London freeing me from my embassy duties.
Stanislav called Sir Charles La Sagesse—Wisdom—and a true friend. Catherine told me that she would always consult him like the Delphic Oracle.
And I?
I thought of the force of words, repeated, mulled over. I thought of how they swelled, turning possibilities into desires. The Philosopher Queen. The Philosopher King. Vanity replaced by wisdom, sloth by hard work.
A better world. A world more just.
What else could be more worthy of my efforts?
The ancient lineage, I heard, could not be suppressed for long.
I saw the Empress place her hand on the Grand Duchess’s belly, smiling as if she could already feel the child kick. Fears and ill humor ebbed from her. Birth trumped death, banished it to the shadows. Elizabeth never asked who was responsible for Catherine’s “delicate condition.” Appearances had been kept. The “moon children” shared their marital bed. Peter could not deny that the child might be his, and in the Winter Palace, that was good enough.
Stanislav, the Envoy extraordinaire of the Saxon King, attended all required audiences and receptions. In Elizabeth’s presence the Count used every opportunity to draw her attention to Saxony’s plight: Dresden destroyed by cannon fire, released criminals setting fires to houses and fields, Frederick issuing false Polish coins to buy supplies for his army.
The Empress praised Count Poniatowski’s deportment, his youthful charm, his impeccable elegance. If any of the Shuvalovs hinted at his passion for Catherine, the Empress changed the subject. She had more pressing matters on her mind.
In June, at Kolin, Frederick suffered his first defeat. He had not been such a great strategist, after all. The Austrians had forced him into an attack. His flanking strategy failed. It was the perfect time for Russia to deliver her blow.
The Chancellor spent more and more time with the Empress. I saw him enter her inner room with rolls of maps under his arm and papers to sign. Field Marshal Apraxin was marching the Russian army toward East Prussia. Egor would not come to St. Petersburg this summer. His letters were even briefer now—lighthearted accounts of blisters upon blisters, the long-forgotten joy of sleeping in a haystack. There was always a drawing for Darenka: Papa by the bonfire, drying his breeches. Papa picking wild blueberries for dessert.
I heard the Chancellor’s voice quieting Elizabeth’s doubts: Her officers were the best in Europe; her soldiers would die with their Tsarina’s name on their lips.
At dawn, drunk on cherry brandy, Elizabeth demanded my stories of Lev Naryshkin disguised in a musician’s garb, his carriage stopped by the Oranienbaum sentries. The Prince declared himself a member of the orchestra in the service of the Grand Duchess.
“What do you play?” the guards had asked him.
“A flute,” he responded.
“Show us your instrument, then.”
Imperial laughter, I thought, was as good as permission, as good as a truce.
He bade an official farewell to the court. He was a free man.
“I don’t intend to leave, pani Barbara,” he told me. “Please assure the Grand Duchess that I’ll do everything to be around when she requires my counsel.”
It was Sir Charles’s choice, the tavern where we met, beyond the Anichkov Palace. The windows were steamy, the floors sticky from spit and spilled beer. On my way there, I saw dogs fighting over kitchen scraps and neighborhood boys pelting them with stones.
Sir Charles’s enthusiasm was contagious. On his lips, even the sordid accounts of Peter’s drinking bouts carried a tinge of promise about them. Debauchery was shortening the Grand Duke’s life. If he died, Catherine and Stanislav would be free to marry.
“I advise the Grand Duchess to watch and wait, assess all options, but hide her cards,” Sir Charles said. “To improve her relations with the Shuvalovs. To cultivate everyone. Not to reveal her position too early.”
In the murky corner by a window smeared with oily fingers, I nodded my agreement. On the thick wooden table, someone had carved a crooked heart pierced with two arrows. In his last letter, Egor had mentioned that his regiment had crossed the border of East Prussia, without even a skirmish. He had missed the siege of Memel by a few days, arriving in time for the victory celebrations. We are heading west soon, he had written, though I won’t know when and where for some time yet.
“The Grand Duchess can count on me,” Sir Charles continued. “Now that I am free, I intend to postpone my departure until I’m needed.”
He bent toward me, his eyes shining. “We are not soldiers, pani Barbara.” There was urgency in his voice. “You and I don’t fight a war. But we can improve the world our children will one day inherit.”
That summer I, too, thought myself indispensable.
I did not see us for what we were. A cabal of a former Ambassador and a bookbinder’s daughter turned imperial tongue, two figures willing the future to bend to their own grandiose wishes, while the truly important events of the time were relentlessly unfolding in their own way.
I never knew what the Empress wanted from me when I entered her bedroom. Would she talk or would she want to listen? To judge or to plead? Sometimes she insisted I search her maids’ trunks for a missing comb, a bottle of infusion, a hairpin, or a ring. Sometimes she announced some newest order, such as forbidding court ladies to include pink lace and ribbon in their finery, for she wished to be the only one wearing it. One night she asked me if I ever dreamed of my father, but before I could answer she hid her face in her hands and began to sob. Once I found her sniffing the inside of her shoe, wrinkling her nose with disgust. “Is anything the matter, Your Highness?” I asked, but she looked at me as if she did not see me. “How difficult,” she muttered, “to keep the past away from the present.”
I thought of sand silently trickling in an hourglass. Perhaps Sir Charles is right, I thought. Perhaps death and change are not that far away.
I had just unfolded a pink damask dressing gown, one of Elizabeth’s favorites, when the Chancellor walked into the room, a dispatch in his hand. The Empress closed her eyes and clasped her hands in a silent prayer.
“Smashed, Your Majesty,” he cried, beaming with joy. “Decimated. And this is just the beginning. Your Majesty’s absolute victory is now assured.”
The Russian forces had defeated Frederick of Prussia at the village of Gross-Jägersdorf.
“Field Marshal Apraxin promises a proper report with next post. For now he sends a summary.”
“Read it,” the Empress ordered.
The Chancellor read slowly, each sentence a triumph. The Prussians attacked first. The Kalmyk cavalry and the Don Cossacks lured them into a trap, under artillery fire. The battle lasted the whole day. The surrounding villages had been set on fire to further disorient the Prussians. In the smoky fog the Russian bayonets had been far more lethal than Frederick’s muskets. Elizabeth Petrovna, the daughter of Peter the Great, had taught Frederick his first lesson. Now Prussia stood naked and helpless before the might of the Empire of the East.
When the Chancellor finished, the Empress ordered everyone in the room to pray with her to the Virgin of Kazan.
To give thanks for Russia’s triumph.
I listened but did not respond, in the strange, unreal way one hears such news. The messenger had perfected the somber look, the respectful glances, the bows and discreet withdrawal, and when he departed, I sat on the ottoman, too heavy to move.
In the room next door I heard steps followed by the governess’s voice. A plea to try harder. Darya was practicing her deportment.
I stood up and opened the door. My hand was trembling.
“Look, Maman,” Darya said when she saw me. She was walking across the room in her high heels without stumbling, her back perfectly straight, her curls tightly tucked under her laced cap.
I motioned for Mademoiselle Dupont to leave us alone.
Then I told her that her Papa was dead.
Darya stood motionless, frowning, trying to make sense of what I’d said. She knew of battles and wars. She had seen paintings of slain soldiers, hands still clinging to their muskets, left behind as their comrades charged bravely on.
She stepped out of her high heels gingerly.
“I must put my shoes away,” was all she said. She picked them up and wiped them against her sleeve.
I took her in my arms. I waited for her tears, but they did not come. Through the thin wall I could hear Masha scolding the maid.
“Cry, Darenka,” I whispered. “Cry.”
But she wouldn’t. Not until she heard Masha’s wailing, piercing and raw.
Only then did tears come, hers and mine. Silent and hot.
I stayed at Darya’s side that night until she fell asleep, one hand cradling her doll, another softening in mine. Our small rooms smelled of ladan, the Russian herbs of mourning, sweet and pungent, meant to dull the pain.
“Battlefields stink like a dunghill,” Egor told me once. “The dead soil themselves. Men and horses.”
Among the things returned to me were my husband’s sword, his seal, his pistols, and a wooden box with the two jars of Masha’s shoe polish.
They found his body three days after the battle ended. The army surgeon informed me that a bayonet gash had split Egor’s right thigh. There was a bullet wound in his left arm; the bone was smashed. If my husband had survived, he would have lost both his arm and his leg. I was to consider this very carefully, to think what kind of life would be his, had he lived.
“Oh, Varenka,” Catherine said. “My dearest girl.”
She had brought lace and satin ribbons for me, black for my mourning dress. She hung a golden cross around Darya’s neck. “I’m not even allowed to come to the funeral,” she told me, hand resting on her growing belly. “She says that a cemetery is not a place for me now. But why should I be surprised, Varenka? Did she not forbid me to wear mourning for my own father, for he had not been king?”
There was such warmth in her embrace when I sobbed.
In the Court Journal my husband’s name was inscribed well below Prince Trubetskoy’s youngest son, who had also died at Gross-Jägersdorf. A true noble and a service noble would never be equal, I thought with bitterness. I had been granted two months’ leave from my duties. The Empress did not wish a fresh widow around her. In the Imperial Palace, death was considered contagious.
With Masha’s help I turned all mirrors in our rooms against the wall so that my husband’s soul would not get trapped. We tied a black crepe ribbon at the corner of Egor’s portrait. As custom demanded, I sent out mourning cards, their border ornamented with a death’s-head and crossbones, announcing Egor’s passing, inviting visitors to pay their respects.
My daughter held my hand all through the service. A tight grip of a child’s small hand. I did not have the heart to scold her for her chapped knuckles, her bitten nails. Before the casket was closed, I kissed Egor’s cheek. It was hard and cold. I lifted Darya so that she could kiss it, too.
“You are a hero’s daughter, Darenka,” Catherine had told her. “You have to be brave.”
At the St. Lazarus cemetery with so many fresh graves, we prayed by the simple headstone with brass letters: Egor Dmitryevich Malikin, May 15, 1725–August 30, 1757. May the Lord grant him eternal rest.
On our way back, the city smelled of refuse and pine resin, of wet cloth and smoke. By the embankment the scaffolding around the new Winter Palace had been mostly cleared, but workers still carried lumber inside, and the courtyard was littered with bricks and broken tiles.
When we got home I cradled my daughter’s small body in my arms, and she clung to me as if she were about to drown. Later I discovered bruises on my arms where she had dug her fingers into my flesh.
He had come to St. Petersburg as soon as he could after hearing the tragic news. Grigory, too, was on his way. They had not been at Gross-Jägersdorf, and their leaves were short, but the eldest Orlov brother, Ivan Grigoryevich, had already pledged his assistance. The house on Millionnaya Street was at my disposal. A messenger from the temporary palace could reach it in minutes.
I let Alexei speak. The last time he had seen Egor, the three of them went to a banya. My husband had just received the marching orders. He was in excellent spirits. He spoke of me and of his daughter. He had asked Grigory’s advice on what gift to get for me on his return. He joked that he was asking a man nine years his junior. “But my brother, Varvara Nikolayevna”—Alexei flashed a pale smile—“is quite a ladies’ man.”
He had promised Egor that no harm would come to me or Darenka. I must remember that. Always.
My eyes rested on Alexei Orlov’s scar as he spoke, a wound now completely healed.
That day, before leaving, Alexei Orlov asked to be allowed to say one more thing. He had made inquiries and learned that Colonel Zinovev, Darya’s godfather, had been dead for three years.
“You would do me a great honor, Varvara Nikolayevna, if you would think of me as Darya Egorevna’s godfather.”
I nodded.
He clasped my icy hand and pressed it to his heart.
The honey Masha sweetened our tea with came from the Orlovs’ country estate. So did the chunky white cheese and cured hams. “Day after day, without fail,” Masha said, as baskets from Millionnaya Street arrived at our door. “Always with a kind word.”
All five Orlov brothers signed the notes that came with the gifts: Ivan, Grigory, Alexei, Fyodor, Vladimir.
Dressed in black, I sat on the ottoman in my tiny parlor, my thoughts slowed with laudanum. At times the visitors resembled marionettes, powdered heads bobbing on their shoulders in some grotesque dance, each repeating its scripted phrase. Consider your blessings. Submit to God’s will. The hammer shatters glass but forges iron. Think of the strength of friendships and the consolations of motherhood.
It was the laudanum, I thought, that made me wish them all to leave. Laudanum made me long for sleep, night and day alike, with Darya beside me, my knee touching the tender crook of her leg.
And yet on the day the mourning visits ended, I found the emptiness unbearable. Masha had taken Darya to the market, and I had no duties to attend to. I tried to read, but the words swam in front of my eyes.
In the street someone laughed. A horse snorted and neighed. I closed the window and drew the curtains. By then Grigory and Alexei Orlov had already left the city, assuring me that my husband’s name would not be forgotten.
I sat in the empty parlor in my widow’s weeds, staring at Egor’s portrait, the bright reds and greens of his uniform. The painted face resembled the original vaguely. Was it the fault of the wrinkles on his forehead Egor had demanded? Or was the nose too straight? The chin too rounded?
I thought of the palace girl I had once been, orphaned, lost, hugging myself in the dark, shivering for attention. I thought of the palace spy seduced with promises of her own importance, her eyes set on the life that wasn’t hers. I thought of a young bride blinded by grand thoughts of her own destiny, unable to see happiness within her grasp.
I thought of what might have been but never would be.
The agony of loss that washed over me was unstoppable, like an ocean wave after the earth shakes.
Seated on a small wooden bench, he cut a poor figure. Bloodshot eyes, razor nicks on his chin, his gray traveling coat crumpled and not too clean. Sir Charles rose and extended his arms when I approached, as if he meant to embrace me, before dropping them abruptly.
Darya’s hand tightened in mine.
“He is an old friend,” I whispered to my daughter. “It’s all right.”
“Papa’s friend?” she asked, still doubtful.
“Yes,” I said, lifting the black muslin veil from my face. “And ours.”
Sir Charles offered his condolences and apologized for not visiting me earlier. “I had not been well. I hope I can make up for it now.” His voice was hoarse, feverish, almost.
This is not why he came here, I thought.
But it was only on our slow walk back to the carriage, with Darya ahead of us, that Sir Charles asked me to warn the Grand Duchess.
“Tell her not to write to me, pani Barbara. My letters are being opened. My servants have all been bribed.”
The Shuvalovs were poisoning the Empress’s mind against Field Marshal Apraxin. The victory of Gross-Jägersdorf paled beside the rumors of the Russian commander’s massive incompetence. Supplies missing, detachments sent into the wrong towns, orders signed too late, for the Field Marshal refused to be woken up before ten in the morning.
I winced at the mention of Gross-Jägersdorf, but Sir Charles was not looking at me. He spoke in short, abrupt sentences.
“I only hope that the Grand Duchess didn’t do anything rash,” he said. She had been seen with Bestuzhev far too often. What was the Chancellor pushing her to do? She wasn’t foolish enough to show her support for Apraxin, was she?
I felt a pang of impatience. Is that all that mattered? Palace rumors? Intrigues? Is nothing more important?
In front of us Darya skipped, only to stop and cast me an uneasy look. Can Papa’s soul see me? she had asked that morning.
“Will you remind the Grand Duchess that Apraxin is thought of as Bestuzhev’s man?” Sir Charles continued anxiously. His fingers toyed with the silver buttons on his coat. I smelled the mustiness of wool.
“Yes,” I said, not trying to hide resentment in my voice. “I will.”
Beside me, Sir Charles stopped abruptly and gripped my arm. He was not wearing gloves, and I caught sight of his whitening knuckles.
“You haven’t been in the palace, pani Barbara, so you don’t know,” he said, and I felt the fine mist of his spit on my face. “The Empress is dying, and no one but Catherine is capable of ruling Russia.”
I put my finger on my lips to warn him to lower his voice, grateful that only a few steps separated us from the wrought-iron gate of the Lazarus cemetery.
“Tell the Grand Duchess,” Sir Charles continued, ignoring my gesture, “that I’ll never abandon her. I’ll help her when the moment comes. And, dear pani Barbara, that moment is coming soon.”
She closed the book.
“I don’t need his warnings, Varenka. I’m not witless. I’m sorry he put you through so much trouble on my account.”
I looked at the mound of her belly. The baby was due in two months.
An image flashed through my mind, a gardener in Oranienbaum with his bucket of brine, plucking the snails from a bed of dahlias and drowning them. Catherine, straightening to ease her back, complaining that the Lower Gardens had been infested all summer.
“The Empress is dying? When the moment comes?” I repeated Sir Charles’s words. “What was he talking about?”
Catherine motioned for me to sit beside her. “Sir Charles has been odd in the last weeks. I didn’t tell you, for you have enough of your own troubles.”
“Odd?”
“Forgetful. He ordered his china plates to be packed, and then accused his servants of stealing them. Stanislav, too, is worried.”
I waited for her to say more, but Catherine took my hand and placed it on her belly, so much bigger than it had been when she was pregnant with Paul.
“The midwife tells me to keep warm, Varenka. Do you think there might be twins inside?” she asked with a smile.
In November, the court celebrated Elizabeth’s accession to the throne, the thirteenth year of her reign. She was forty-eight years old.
I had turned thirty, a widow of three months, with an eight-year-old daughter and no family. Only a few friends and an old servant to look after her if I died.
I resumed my court service. The chambermaids let it slip how in my absence the Imperial Bedroom had not functioned as it should. This or that lady-in-waiting had not come when she was meant to, another left too early, as soon as the Empress dozed off, and was not there when the Empress awoke. Cats had been locked out, left meowing in the cold. Candles smoked. Another thief had been caught hiding in the closet, his pockets padded with the Empress’s silks.
“Madame Malikina,” the hushed voices of the chambermaids trailed me. “A terrible loss,” they called Egor’s death, while their faces urged me to remember their sympathetic words, to judge them worthy when the time came to assign duties, distribute rewards.
The Empress let her gaze slide over my black dress.
“Bring Darya to the nursery,” she told me. “The Tsarevitch knows that soon he will have a little brother. He is jealous. Darya can play with him.”
“My daughter is not well yet, Your Highness. She won’t eat,” I said, thinking of how Darenka’s bony shoulders stuck out of her dress.
You are contradicting me, the Empress’s face said. I waited for her voice to harden, but to my surprise, it didn’t.
“Bring her tomorrow, Varvara,” she said gently. “Children need to play.”
The banquet room was scrubbed and polished. No chip in the gilded chairs went unnoticed, no crack in the paneling unpatched. The maids burned sweet perfume pills to infuse the room with the scent of roses. The footmen, in felt slippers, walked on the giant banquet table, waxing and buffing the surface inch by inch.
In the churches across the land the Russian people prayed for the safe delivery of the Grand Duchess and for another grandchild of Peter the Great.
“I want Stanislav to be with me when it happens,” Catherine told me.
“Think of a way, Varenka,” she ordered, when I raised my eyebrows. “You do everything she asks of you, don’t you?”
“He’ll have to hide.”
“Then he’ll hide. I don’t want to be alone! Not this time.”
The bedroom in the temporary palace where she would give birth was large and drafty. It was not difficult to persuade the Empress that it needed a screen that would make it warmer. With a few adjustments, a small closet attached to the bedroom could be easily turned into an antechamber, with a narrow bed Stanislav could use. This is where Catherine’s lover would hide, in the closet, behind the screen, able to come out the moment Catherine was left alone.
In the mission parlor, with its portrait of Augustus II, the Elector of Saxony and the King of Poland, proudly displaying his double chin, Stanislav made a sign of the cross: “May the Lord keep her in his mercy,” he murmured.
He fixed his solemn black eyes on me, as if I knew what the next hours would bring. Around his neck there was a golden chain, but whatever pendant it carried was covered by the folds of his cambric shirt.
“Please hurry,” I urged him.
As he was getting ready, I walked to the window and parted the curtain just a crack. Down in the street an open sleigh sped by, its harness bells ringing softly. Moonlight glittered on the thin layer of fresh snow. Egor loved to bring it to Darya, the first snowball of the season, melting in his big hands.
I didn’t wait long. In the last days, Stanislav had kept his clothes laid out, his carriage at the ready. All he had to do was gather a few things. Books to read to Catherine, paper and quills. Smelling salts.
“She is strong,” I promised him. “The second time is always easier.”
He gave me a grateful look, but I could tell my words did not reassure him.
During the short carriage ride along Great Perspective Road, the lifted curtain revealed the fleeting spectacles of the streets: a squealing pig escaping its owner, murziks in coarse knee-length sheepskin coats hauling bales of wool from the ship.
“I wish he were here,” Stanislav said, as we passed the British Embassy, its brown façade lit by smoking lanterns.
A month before, in spite of all his promises, Sir Charles had exhausted all means to postpone his departure. In the end even a feigned illness didn’t work. Now he was somewhere on his way back to London. There had been no letters.
“Did you see him before he left?” I asked Stanislav.
“Only for a hurried moment.”
“Did he seem odd to you?”
“Odd?” He laughed. “No. Sad, perhaps. Resigned. Why? Have there been more malicious rumors?”
The carriage swayed. If the snow holds, I thought, we would soon change into sleighs. I pulled the fur blanket over my lap, feeling the soft warmth of sable on my feet.
“There are always rumors,” I said.
Only one candle burned in the candelabra, casting restless shadows on the wall. Catherine was lying in bed, her knees bent.
“Is he here?” she demanded, lifting herself up on her elbow. I saw her wince in pain. The contractions were getting stronger.
“Outside,” I said. “In the carriage. I’ll send the maids for the midwife and bring him in.”
Her face lit up with relief, but her hand when she squeezed mine was hard and moist, like a whetstone.
“Are they pink?” she asked, holding them to the light for everyone to examine them. “Will it be another boy?”
“Pink,” the ladies-in-waiting assured her one by one, telling the Empress what she wanted to hear.
Elizabeth nodded and asked how long it would take before the new Tsarevitch would arrive.
“A few more hours, Your Highness,” the midwife said. “Your Highness should rest.”
The Empress asked three more questions. Was the Grand Duke told? Why was he not here? When was he coming?
As I hurried with answers, from behind the screen I heard Stanislav’s muffled stumble. I breathed a prayer, hoping that there was too much commotion in the room for anyone to notice, but the Empress turned her eyes toward the screen.
This is when Catherine gave a yelp of pain and rose from the mattress.
“Please,” she stuttered, her teeth chattering. “Please. It hurts.”
The Empress turned toward her with some soothing words. Moments later, she was gone and the midwife was waving everyone away. We were taking up too much air. The Grand Duchess needed to breathe. The Grand Duchess needed to concentrate.
In the room next door, among the throng of restless courtiers, I thought of Stanislav. The folly of Catherine’s need for him suddenly terrified me. What if he cannot stay hidden?
But he did.
He stayed there, silent when the Grand Duke came to tell Catherine of a great parade he was planning as soon as he had another son. A hundred cannons firing all at once.
He stayed there when he heard the midwife say the word breech, and Catherine’s sobs that followed.
I wondered if his presence was helping her. If when the pains gripped her she looked in the direction of the screen.
Hours passed. Long, sweaty hours of birth. Hours of pain and fear and uncertainty. It was ten o’clock the next morning when the midwife opened the door and screamed for someone to fetch the Empress.
The bedroom maids were evasive in their answers. The doctor said it was nothing, just a fainting spell. The doctor bled her right away, and Her Highness had been resting ever since. They were not to talk about it to anyone.
I approached the bed.
“Your Majesty,” I said.
Elizabeth stirred.
“The midwife says it’s time,” I continued. “Is Your Highness able to walk?”
The Empress opened her eyes. Her sagging cheek was reddened where it had pressed on the pillow.
“Why wouldn’t I be?” she asked.
When she sat up, I saw that the maids had not removed her evening gown but merely opened it at the back. I fastened the hooks as quickly as I could. When I extended my hand to her to help her from the bed, Elizabeth slapped my hand and told me to stop fussing.
“Your Highness. Paul Petrovich has a sister!” the midwife exulted, as she washed the slime and blood from the tiny body.
“A sister?” the Empress repeated.
The baby gave a soft squeal.
The midwife had not been able to keep the spectators away. Elizabeth’s ladies-in-waiting had poured in behind the Empress. Now they huddled, craning their necks. Keys, seals, looking glasses suspended from their chatelaines, tinkled softly.
I heard Catherine moan.
I held my breath.
“Perhaps this is for the better,” the Empress finally said. “Paul won’t be so jealous of a girl.”
A murmur of applause followed, whispers of approval.
I cast a quick look at the Grand Duchess. Her skin was blanched, her lips pursed to stop her teeth from chattering. She looked frail and feverish.
I was still hoping that the Empress might let Catherine hold her daughter. I thought of the sweetness of the moment when I’d cradled Darya for the first time, so small, and so very much mine. But as soon as the baby girl was swaddled, the Empress took her away from the room, her cooing voice fading in the distance. She didn’t even wait for the afterbirth, which did not come on its own and had to be extracted by hand.
The courtiers followed.
Go with them, Varenka, Catherine’s eyes pleaded. I need you to tell me what you have seen.
I left.
It was an endless day. Footmen had to fetch cots from the attic for the wet nurses. Furniture had to be rearranged, the place for the cradle found, not too close to the fireplace but away from the draft.
The visitors thronged to see the baby, delivering their predictable praises. “Beautiful … graceful … angelic … her face just like her aunt’s.”
Elizabeth beamed. Other than the bandaged arm, I thought, her fainting spell had left no trace.
No one mentioned the Grand Duchess. I comforted myself with the knowledge that this time, Catherine was not alone. Stanislav would wipe the sweat from her brow. He would hold her in his arms when she wept for their child.
In our small parlor, Masha hung a paper star and tied fir branches to the backs of chairs. In a leather-bound notebook Catherine had given her, Darya had drawn a manger with the Holy Mother and Child, surrounded by the shepherds and the animals who came to visit them.
It was our first Christmas after Egor’s death. I thought of Catherine’s baby, who would never feel the closeness of her own parents, and of my daughter, who would grow up without a father.
Elizabeth’s heart, I told myself, had known no laws but her whims. Her heart craved secrecy and deceit, for in secrecy and deceit lay her power. As long as she ruled, more soldiers like Egor would die, more children like Darya and little Anna would grow deprived of their parents’ love.
Death, I thought. Death has to take the Empress away and give a new Empress a chance. A crack in the darkness, a mere slit, but the new Sovereign will make good use of it. She’ll force her way, and I’ll follow in her steps. Her helper. Her friend.
If she succeeds, Darya and I would never go without.
For a moment I glimpsed it: a world beyond deceit and malice, beyond fear. A new world, where words like a bookbinder’s daughter or a service noble were not the shackles that bound our steps. The vision may have been fleeting, but to me it shone like the tooled letters of gold on the spines of my father’s bindings.