NINE
1758

very morning Elizabeth’s ladies-in-waiting visited Catherine’s rooms.

Anna’s crib was carved out of an ancient oak, they said, her clothes sewn of the softest cambric. When Anna cried, the Empress carried her in her arms, murmuring endearments. My little soul, my life, my joy. Grand will be your dresses, your jewels. You will be beautiful and full of grace. The Imperial Favorite was constantly at her side, declaring himself smitten by both the aunt and her grandniece.

“A blessed angel child,” they murmured.

“Her cabal,” Catherine called the ladies from Elizabeth’s entourage. “Sent here to spy on me, Varenka.”

By January she had seen her daughter only three times, and each time the baby was damp with sweat.

The questions she asked me were angry, smoldering with hurt. Didn’t the Empress ever allow air in the nursery? Wasn’t there anyone among the courtiers to put one good idea into her mind? Was that so difficult?

Ever since Anna’s birth, Catherine had kept to her bedroom, pleading ill health. Stanislav often stayed there with her, the little closet always a convenient hiding place when anyone came. Prince Naryshkin and his sister Anna, as well as Princess Dashkova, were also frequent visitors. Sometimes I’d hear their laughter, followed by the low murmurs of courtiers well accustomed to eavesdroppers.

“The Grand Duchess is eating for twenty.” The maids winked and giggled as they cleared empty plates. I warned them to keep their lips sealed if they wanted to stay with their mistress.

They swore they would.

Monsieur Rastrelli—so often chastised for the delays—proudly announced that the Winter Palace would soon be ready for the court to move in. In the meantime, to ease the waiting, he invited the Empress and her Favorite to inspect his progress.

Elizabeth didn’t mind that her visits were accompanied by the incessant hammering and banging of the carpenters and masons. She didn’t mind when pieces of plaster stuck to the soles of her shoes, or when her ladies-in-waiting tripped over pieces of tile and discarded stucco moldings. Leaning on Ivan Shuvalov’s arm, trailed by the courtiers, she swept through the finished chambers, gasping with pleasure.

“More light!” the Empress had demanded of her chief architect when he had brought her the plans ten years before. Monsieur Rastrelli obliged with big windows that let in the sun, gilded frames, and the sparkle of precious stones. He gave her gilded ornaments on white walls, mirrors reflecting candlelight, gleaming mosaics, and the rich, translucent glow of amber.

“The Russian baroque,” he told her as she inspected yet another glittering room, “has purity unknown anywhere else. This light will be Your Majesty’s lasting gift to Russia. This sparkle will make all of Europe take notice.”

The Empress liked that.

Monsieur Rastrelli was once again called a genius, even when it became clear that the sections or rooms he presented as finished were far from it. After the Empress left, teams of masons, bricklayers, carpenters, and painters descended on them to replace faux walls, to finish the rough floors hidden beneath carpets, or to swiftly dismantle what the Empress disliked.

Catherine was not impressed by the Russian baroque. “Gaudy and passé,” she told me, after she had accompanied the Empress on one such visit. I tried not to dwell on the venom in her voice. “Wait until another winter, Varenka. When these giant windows freeze over and crack.”

In the steppes of Ukraine, Egor told me once, a single cloud on the winter horizon foretold a blizzard. A traveler could count on a mere few hours to seek shelter before all roads vanished, carriages turned into awkward humps, like grave mounds in a white desert without signposts.

In the first weeks of 1758 the news from the front was greeted with growing disbelief. The spectacular victories of the previous year did not bring the expected offensive farther into East Prussia. Instead, with the first snow, Field Marshal Apraxin had ordered a halt of all army movements for the whole winter.

“He says it’s because of the breakdown in supply lines?” Ivan Shuvalov’s voice soared with a thespian flourish. “How can a victorious army be short of supplies?”

I described it all to Catherine. How when Apraxin’s reports were read aloud to the Empress, Countess Shuvalova raised her eyebrows. How her brother sucked in air through his blackened teeth. “Why is Field Marshal Apraxin giving the Prussian King a break? Is it incompetence or treason?” he asked. “And who is telling him to? Bestuzhev and one of his new friends?”

He means you, I warned Catherine, but she did not look concerned. She had nothing to hide, she assured me. Bestuzhev was forever trying to interest her in some of his schemes, but she always refused to take sides.

“Let the Shuvalovs talk, Varenka,” she said. “There isn’t much more they can do.”

She was right, I thought. St. Petersburg was preparing for Prince Naryshkin’s wedding. The bride was his mother’s choice, for the son had been taking too long to make up his mind whom to propose to. In the Imperial Bedroom the government papers awaited Elizabeth’s signature, reports lay unread. The Empress sent back dozens of pandoras that modeled her ceremonial gowns before she settled for a sky-blue silk gown with wide hoopskirts, on which garlands of muslin vines sparkled with diamond grapes.

“You can always count on our help,” Alexei Orlov had assured me in these painful days after Egor’s death. He repeated his promise every time he called on me during his visits to the capital.

He would bring gifts for Darenka, a china tea set for her dolls’ house, a silver brush set for her hair. He’d stay to a simple dinner. “Uncle Alexei,” Darya agreed to call him.

Very proper visits they were, chaperoned by Masha’s mute presence, her good eye catching mine when the subject of our conversations strayed to what she didn’t understand, warning me against what she judged to be too much joviality, a gesture too free. For no matter how she liked Alexei Grigoryevich Orlov of the Izmailovsky Regiment, how often she called him Master Egor’s true friend, she would not allow me to become a target of malice.

“People talk,” she grumbled, refusing to tell me what she had heard. “This is how people are. You are a widow.”

One such evening, for Darya’s amusement Alexei Orlov was coming up with one outlandish story after another. The scar on his face, he assured my daughter, came from a unicorn’s horn. It gave him special powers.

“Close your eyes and count to five,” he told her. “And I’ll go to the moon and come back.”

I watched Darenka fight disbelief when our guest presented various proofs of his moon trips: a stone, a feather, a smooth piece of driftwood.

“Is it true, Maman?” she asked. “Do birds fly that far away? Are there trees on the moon?”

“How would I know, kison’ka?” I asked her back, not wishing to extinguish the sparks in her eyes. “I’ve never been there.”

Amid all this merriment, I waited for the conversation to turn to Catherine. I never forgot that the guards were called “the makers of the Tsars.”

The Grand Duchess handled her horse superbly. Her command of Russian was a source of marvel; so was her poise and good humor, especially in Das Fräulein’s presence.

There was no need for words more direct than these. The winter freeze had suspended the hostilities, but Russia was still at war. The time was not right, but that did not mean that it was being wasted. The Shuvalovs were not the only ones making plans. In the games of the court, there were those who—in the hour of need—would stand at Catherine’s side.

On the morning of February 13, Stanislav came to my rooms at the temporary palace shaken and distraught.

“Bestuzhev has been arrested,” he told me, once I’d sent Masha away. “Yesterday. Right outside the Imperial Bedroom.” Fear made his voice waver and break.

I could not believe his words. I’d been at the palace all day. I saw no one running, no signs of agitation that would indicate an event of such magnitude.

“Keith told me,” Stanislav continued, trying to steady his voice.

The new British Ambassador had kept Sir Charles’s allegiances, but he didn’t tell Stanislav much beyond the basic facts. Bestuzhev had been stripped of his office and his rights, and questioned about his friendship with Field Marshal Apraxin. Bernardi, the jeweler who carried Catherine’s notes to Sir Charles and to Stanislav, and Abadurov, Catherine’s Russian tutor, had been arrested as well.

The old spymaster beaten at his own game?

I felt a thump of fear as my mind rushed to consider the consequences. My heart was racing. The Shuvalovs were no fools. They knew I was Catherine’s friend. Bernardi used to carry my letters, too.

Catherine didn’t know anything of these events, Stanislav continued. He’d wanted to warn her himself, but her maids told him she was with the Grand Duke. In the temporary palace, the Grand Duke’s room was next to the Imperial Suite. Stanislav didn’t want to go there himself. He didn’t want to cause Catherine more trouble. He pressed a folded note into my hand and closed my fingers tightly around it. His fingers were sweaty and cold. “You have to warn her, Barbara,” he urged me. “Please, hurry.”

I asked him to wait for news at the Saxon Mission.

I slipped the note into my pocket. Darya was calling me from the other room. On my way out I motioned for Masha to go to her.

Before we parted, Stanislav put his hand on my arm.

“Tell Sophie that all will be well—in the end.”

I walked along the corridor in measured steps, anxious to hide my own terror. I recalled the Shuvalovs’ contempt for Apraxin’s reports. “Let them talk,” Catherine had said. She was wrong. I knew that now. The Shuvalovs had the Empress’s ear.

As I moved along the hallway, I passed old tapestries depicting familiar hunting scenes: A stag pierced by an arrow. A bear, upright and bloodied, tearing dogs off its chest. Through the window, I saw a water carrier rolling a large barrel through the path cleared of snow, whistling a loud tune. By the palace kitchen a beggar woman with a bandaged face and two slits for her eyes stood patiently for her share of stale pies and hardened bread.

I recalled the anguished face of Madame Kluge, her loud screams, her limp body dragged to the scaffold.

When would the guards come for me? At dawn, so that no one would see? No one but my child.

Before the Grand Duke’s suite I pinched my cheeks to get some color in the pale face I glimpsed in the ornate mirror.

The Grand Duchess was having a private breakfast with the Grand Duke. The papers they had been working on still covered part of the table. She brightened at the sight of me.

“It’s Varenka, Peter! What a lovely surprise.”

“I told you she would come by.” The Grand Duke brushed bread crumbs from the front of his silken waistcoat. “We were just talking of Lev Naryshkin’s wedding feast. Have you heard that the bride’s mother demanded twenty barrels of oysters?”

“Twenty-five,” Catherine said, laughing.

I walked toward her. When Peter motioned for one of the footmen to bring more coffee, I slipped Stanislav’s note into her hand.

“My stockings are ruined again,” Catherine complained, bending, so that the table would hide her from her husband’s sight. I saw her unfold the note and scan it quickly before slipping it underneath her garter. Her face did not change.

“How is sweet Darenka?” she asked. “Will you let her stay with me in Oranienbaum this summer? Tell her she can help me take care of the birds. She’ll like that.”

The servants brought another plate for me. Would I have bliny with caviar? Cucumbers with honey? There was no hurry in Catherine’s voice, no note of alarm.

It was only when we reached her room that I saw the white knuckles of her clenched fists.

For the next hour, in silence, we fed the fire with her papers, all of them, no matter how innocuous. Letters, receipts, pages of her writing. Notes on her readings. She opened her drawers one by one and handed me the contents.

I recognized Stanislav’s handwriting, but mostly I recognized that of Sir Charles. Many of the letters from him were pages long. Catherine had not destroyed them, as I had urged her to.

How slowly paper burns, I fretted, as the flames licked the edges of the sheets, as singed words turned from brown to black, soot flowers I shattered with the poker until only ashes were left.

There would be no sudden change of plans, we agreed. Catherine and Peter would go to Naryshkin’s wedding. There would be no note for Stanislav. Just a message I was to pass to him in utter secrecy: Keep silent at all cost. Deny everything, until she learns more.

“Tell him there is nothing he can do to help me. Tell him not to do anything without word from me. Tell him to trust me, Varenka.”

I hurried to the Imperial Bedroom. It seemed to me that the guard at the door gave me a vacant but irritated look, as if struggling to recall who I was.

I tried to pay him no heed.

The chambermaids informed me that the Empress had left for the day, and that she had taken the baby with her. Ivan Ivanovich Shuvalov was with Her Majesty. They didn’t know more than that.

Awaiting the Empress’s return, I couldn’t keep still. Restless, I ordered a thorough cleaning of the fireplace in the Imperial Bedroom. I sent the footmen outside with the carpets, to spread them on the snow and beat the dust out.

I was praying the Empress would allow me to stay with her that night, to entice her with my stories. I would tell her of a woman on Moskovskaya Street, her swollen breast flattening, the ugly tumor melting into nothingness after Blessed Ksenia touched her. The same Blessed Ksenia, I would tell her, who had given away all she owned to the poor and now walked barefoot through the streets of the city, dressed in rags. Then I would mention Bestuzhev’s name and watch Elizabeth’s face, read the shape of her frown.

But the Empress did not come back. That evening one of her ladies-in-waiting dropped by for the brushes and combs. I arranged them on a silver tray, adding a jar of Elizabeth’s favorite cold cream. The lady-in-waiting took the tray and said that the Empress would stay in Count Shuvalov’s suite for the night.

When she left, I sat down at the Empress’s dressing table. My body felt as though it were made of stone. In the gold-framed mirror, my own face stared back at me, haggard-looking and strange. My black mourning dress was speckled with ashes from the fireplace.

I thought of the Chancellor, locked in some room, answering or refusing to answer questions. I thought of Catherine’s calm and of her clenched fists.

The chair underneath me moaned as I rose.

I walked to my own rooms swiftly, through the long corridor of the temporary palace, my black-clad figure duplicating in the mirrors as I passed.

The rumors ranged from plausible to ridiculous. The accusations were vague but serious: misrepresentation of imperial orders, conspiring with the enemy, treason. The most serious ones spoke of the Chancellor ordering General Apraxin to stall the Russian offensive against the King of Prussia. Someone had heard him say that the Empress had only weeks to live, that it was now up to the Young Court to secure Russia’s future.

Depending on whom one listened to, Bestuzhev had acted at Catherine’s request or out of his own conceit. He was tortured or he was not tortured. They’d found incriminating papers or they’d found nothing. He’d confessed or he’d insisted on his innocence.

The rumors grew wilder, but there were no more arrests.

We had no choice but to think of this time as a time of trial.

We were watched. We had to act our parts.

Stanislav stayed home, feigning illness. Catherine and Peter went to Lev Naryshkin’s wedding, where she laughed heartily when Count Nebalsin rejoiced that he would not have to pay Bernardi for the necklace the jeweler had delivered to him the day before he had been arrested.

The Empress returned to the Imperial Suite two nights later. She paid no heed to the brightness of the freshly brushed carpets. She did not wish me to massage her feet. When the evening came, she sent me back to my rooms.

Countess Shuvalova, she told me, would stay with her at night from now on.

I went about my daily duties and held my daughter close every night. The Grand Duchess and I kept our conversations brief and trivial when we met. A week later, I saw her in the corridor with one of her maids-of-honor. When I passed her, Catherine murmured, “It’s not as bad as I feared, Varenka.”

I stopped.

Catherine motioned for her maid-of-honor to move on.

The news was vague, but vagueness, too, could bring comfort.

Catherine had asked Prince Trubetskoy, the Procurator-General charged with conducting the inquiry into the affair, what the charges were against the Chancellor. The old Prince had a soft spot for the Grand Duchess ever since word reached him that she had cried when his youngest son was killed at Gross-Jägersdorf.

He told her, “The Shuvalovs had Bestuzhev arrested. Now I’m supposed to find out why.”

The message from the Chancellor came hidden inside a snuffbox. The messenger who brought it insisted on handing it to the Grand Duchess herself. She was not in her rooms, and he didn’t want to ask any of her maids-of-honor where she could be. The person who trusted him with the note mentioned my name, so he came to me.

In the palace chapel, where I took him, Catherine was bowing in front of the icon of the Lady of Kazan, touching the ground with the fingers of her right hand, the Orthodox way.

The messenger placed the snuffbox in her hands. As soon as he left, she opened it and extracted a note from the double lid, reading it quickly.

I saw the relief on her face.

“The Chancellor managed to burn his papers before they came for him, Varenka,” she murmured. “The Shuvalovs have nothing but gossip.”

She rolled the note and used it to light a candle of thanksgiving for a favor granted.

I nodded, but I could not coax a smile onto my lips. In Elizabeth’s bedroom, gossip could still maim.

“Cheer up, Varenka.” Catherine squeezed my hand. “Now I know what to do.”

That evening everyone in the palace who passed by the Grand Duchess’s rooms heard her anguished sobs. Her maids-of-honor rushed in and out, fetching laudanum and smelling salts. The Grand Duchess fainted, I heard. The Grand Duchess asked for her confessor.

Someone was trying to destroy her reputation, Catherine sobbed when Father Semyon arrived. Someone was trying to drive a wedge between her and Her Majesty, Her Benefactress.

Her voice wavered and broke: “If only Her Majesty would hear me out.… I cannot live like this anymore.… I want to fall asleep in a snowbank .… I’ve heard that it doesn’t hurt to die from the cold.”

Before Father Semyon left her room, he made a sign of the cross over her and ordered the maids-of-honor to pray for the souls in despair.

At midnight on April 13, two months after Bestuzhev’s arrest, I heard the Empress dismiss her ladies-in-waiting and her maids.

I thought of Catherine, about to receive her summons. I thought of the power of gossip. I looked at the ceiling. Even above the Empress’s rooms, the carpenters had not been too thorough. After the summer heat, the cracks in the floorboards had grown wider. Enough moonlight would come through attic windows for me to see my way.

In the service corridor I dipped a handkerchief in a bucket of water. Then I took off my shoes and crept up the narrow steps to the attic.

I lay on the dusty floor, my nose covered with a wet handkerchief to stop myself from sneezing. I did not move. Below me, I could see the marble tabletop lit by two candelabras, unfolded papers spread between them. The Empress was sitting in her armchair, a fan in her hands. I could tell she was not alone. In the dark, behind screens brought in for the occasion, shadowy figures crouched. Some of the Shuvalovs? I guessed. The Grand Duke?

I didn’t have to wait long before the door opened and the guard announced the arrival of the Grand Duchess.

Before Catherine had time to utter her greetings, Elizabeth pointed to the papers on the table.

“What do you have to say about these?” she asked.

Catherine made a step toward the table. Her skirts rustled.

“These are my letters,” she answered, a moment later. In her voice there was no hesitation and no fear.

“Letters to whom?”

“To General Apraxin.”

“You have no right to send letters to my general. I expressly forbade you to concern yourself with politics.”

“I merely congratulated the general on his victory, Your Majesty. I wished him a successful campaign.”

“Bestuzhev says there were other letters.”

“The Chancellor is wrong. There were no other letters.”

“Should I have him tortured for lying?”

“If Your Majesty wishes.”

I held my breath. In the cellars of the Secret Chancellery, there were many ways of ensuring confessions. Its chief, one of the Shuvalovs, had bragged of blows that left no traces on the skin. Elizabeth could order Catherine tortured, too. She could, like the Great Peter had once done to his own son, grab the knout from the executioner’s hands to strike the first blow.

Behind one of the screens, someone moved.

I heard Peter’s voice. “Don’t believe her, Your Majesty. She knows how to twist the truth so that everyone believes she is right.”

So the Grand Duke, too, had been summoned. What had the Shuvalovs promised him? A triumph over his wife? A triumph he feared was slipping out of his grasp?

The Grand Duke emerged from his hiding place, his movements jerky and agitated. “Elle est méchante,” he stammered, and stamped his foot.

He was calling his wife mean and deceitful.

Catherine fell to her knees. “I displease you, my Benefactress. I displease the Grand Duke, my husband. Your Highness can see it for yourself. There is nothing for me here. No one at this court will speak to me. No one trusts me. All I do is wrong. Every day I pray for Your Majesty’s health and for the health of my children. I pray for Russian victory in this war. I don’t know how else to please you and my husband. Let me go back to my family. Let me do some good with what is left of my life.”

Was it Peter’s clumsy abruptness that tipped the scales? Or was it Catherine’s ultimate act of surrender that Elizabeth could never resist?

I heard a softening in the Empress’s voice. “How can I send you back? What will you live on?”

“Anything my family can spare. I have no great needs. There is nothing here for me.”

“You have two children.”

“They are in excellent hands, Your Majesty. I’m not allowed to see them, anyway. Please let me go. It’ll be best for me to go.”

“You won’t go anywhere. This is your home.”

Peter grunted in disbelief. The floorboards squeaked under his shifting feet. It is over, I thought, as I watched the Empress motion for Catherine to stand up, extending her hand to be kissed. Catherine had won. She would again be welcome in the Imperial Bedroom, asked to soirees and games of cards.

Behind one of the screens, someone stifled a cough.

“You can see your children.…” I heard Elizabeth pause, negotiating the extent of her magnanimity. “Every other day.”

There is distraction in relief. Time to notice the smudges of dust on my sleeves, to feel how my hands grew stiff from cold. To hear something move, scurry along the wall, underneath the white sheets hanging on strings, like giant sails.

The Grand Duke had been dismissed. Below me, Catherine was explaining something to the Empress, but I couldn’t hear what she said. Once or twice it seemed to me that she uttered Stanislav’s name.

Every time the Empress laughed.

There were more night summons to the Imperial Bedroom, sudden, urgent, unpredictable. Elizabeth did not like to give warnings. She trusted tears, confessions by candlelight, oaths on the Holy Icons. Catherine took to sleeping in her clothes, shoes by her bed, a basin with cold water nearby to wash the sleep from her eyes.

I didn’t dare climb to the attic again. During the days that followed, I didn’t seek Catherine’s company, either, but when I did see her, she seemed calm and composed. We didn’t talk about much other than our children and books, though she did mention Sir Charles. He did not write to her. She knew he had reached London only from his daughter’s brief note of thanks. The presents the Grand Duchess of Russia had sent Lady Essex through her father were exquisite, and she was very grateful for them. Sir Charles was not well, she wrote, quite exhausted after his long journey and unable to hold a quill.

Neither of us mentioned Stanislav’s name.

I didn’t know if Stanislav had tried to see her, or had even tried to smuggle a letter. Once, passing by the Saxon Mission, I thought I saw him looking through the upstairs window. I stopped the carriage and told the driver to wait, thinking Stanislav might send his servant for me, but no one came.

In the Imperial Bedroom I was again ordered to massage Elizabeth’s feet. A good sign, I told myself. After relaying the choicest of the palace gossip, I regaled the Empress with the rumors of the streets. The Chancellor’s fate was the source of many wild speculations. Was he a Prussian spy in Frederick’s pay? An English toady? An old courtier past his prime trying to force her hand?

The Empress hardly listened. Not as swollen as he had hoped, her eyes mocked, as she twisted the rings on her fingers, her hand holding an emerald ring she had slid off her finger as if it were a die to be cast.

Once she ordered me to stand by the window and tell her what I saw there. The Palace Guards marched in formation. A carriage sped by.

“Nothing else?”

“Nothing, Your Highness.”

Sometimes it seemed to me that we were not alone, that behind one of the screens that now always stood in the bedroom, someone was hiding, listening to my every word. But I never saw anyone.

Soon the news from the Prussian front replaced the rumors of the Chancellor’s fate. After Apraxin’s arrest, the imperial soldiers were again beating the Prussians, proving to Europe that Russia was not to be ignored.

Catherine was back in Elizabeth’s favor, and the court took notice. The bows that greeted her deepened; the smiles grew wider; the inquiries about her health became loud enough for everyone to hear.

It was a muted, gray morning in early May when I entered her room, the day’s sudden chill signaling the annual breaking up of the ice fields on Lake Ladoga. In a few days the whole city would turn out to watch the ice floes noisily grinding against one another as they piled up on their way to the sea.

Catherine was hugging Bijou in her arms, letting him lick her hands. Old faithful Bijou, wheezing and smelly, more and more wobbly on his feet.

She had bad news.

Two letters from Stanislav, Catherine told me, had been discovered among the former Chancellor’s papers. They were formal letters of little significance, yet they reminded the Empress that it was Chancellor Bestuzhev who insisted on bringing Count Poniatowski back to St. Petersburg as the Saxon Envoy.

Stanislav, she said, had been ordered to leave.

“When?” I asked.

“Before the end of August.”

“Could he not resign his position and stay?” I asked, knowing it was impossible. Poor Stanislav, I was already calling him in my thoughts.

Catherine gave me an unseeing look and lowered Bijou, letting him settle on his velvet pillow.

I can still hear her voice, terse and somewhat stiff, as if she had practiced her reply for too long and had grown tired of it already. “The Empress cannot do anything else, Varenka. The Empress must consider the future.”

In the spring, the newly laid ceiling stuccos in the Winter Palace had begun to crumble and would have to be replaced. The long-promised move had been postponed once again. The Empress raged. Rastrelli was declared an incompetent liar, his workers a bunch of deceitful thieves. For weeks we all tiptoed around her, mindful of every word. Catherine and Peter were relieved when the time came to move to their Oranienbaum palace for the summer. I was not that lucky. When the Empress departed for Tsarskoye Selo, I was ordered to go with her.

The aftermath of Bestuzhev’s fall was felt in St. Petersburg for some time, even though his interrogation yielded no results. Bestuzhev was not tortured. He would have said too much, gossips said.

After months of Apraxin’s interrogations there were no proofs of treason, but no exonerations, either, only suspicions allowed to fester. Then, at the beginning of August, the Field Marshal died of a stroke. Bestuzhev was stripped of his position and banished from court to his country estate. He was forbidden from contacting anyone in the capital.

He left St. Petersburg in the second week of August. No one dared to see him off. His name would never again be mentioned in Elizabeth’s presence. It was not the first such banishment. Nor would it be the last.

After a few postponements blamed on illness, in the third week of August, in Tsarskoye Selo, the Saxon Envoy presented his final report to the Empress and offered his profound thanks for the Russian hospitality.

The Empress presented Count Poniatowski a snuffbox with her portrait on the lid, studded with sapphires and rubies, and wished him a safe journey home. That same day, Stanislav traveled to Peterhof. Catherine had slipped out of Oranienbaum to be there with him for a few stolen days. They stayed in the Monplaisir Pavilion by the sea. Alone.

I saw Count Poniatowski at the Saxon Mission in St. Petersburg on the morning he left.

It was the last day of August. The day promised to be beautiful, in spite of the chill brought by the northern wind. In the courtyard of the Saxon Mission, two of Stanislav’s servants were checking the straps on the coffers and trunks. Another was spreading a travel rug on the carriage seat.

I walked past them, into the mission.

Stanislav was waiting for me in the parlor. The portrait of Augustus II was in its usual place, but darker patches of color marked places from which paintings from Stanislav’s own collection had been removed.

“This is not how I imagined leaving,” he said.

“No,” I replied, fighting an urge to place the palm of my hand on his forehead, the way I did with Darya when I wanted to test for fever. He was wearing the cambric shirt Catherine had given him when he came back last December. It had a letter S embroidered on the collar. No one else called her Sophie.

I had brought him presents. A basket holding Masha’s preserves, and a drawing Darya had made for him, a cat in a velvet outfit, bowing in front of a Queen.

“Tell Darya that I’ll put it in a gold frame when I get to Warsaw.” Stanislav’s voice was strained.

“I will.”

“I’ll be back, Barbara. I’ll be with her when she needs me most. Don’t let her forget that, will you?”

I walked with him to the yard. The horses neighed when they spotted him. He had a chunk of apple for each of them.

The carriage door was opened, the step extended.

How can you help her? I thought. What can you do for her? What can she do with your love? Go. It’ll be easier for her if you are not around.

Stanislav put his foot on the carriage step, a polished tip of a black jackboot with silver trim. Inside the carriage I spotted an open trunk filled with books for the long journey to Warsaw.

In the end, he couldn’t stop himself. Some thoughts are like aching teeth one probes with one’s tongue.

“She wants me to come back, doesn’t she?”

“Yes,” I lied.

It was not for me to reveal Catherine’s hand.

“Will you let me know if anything changes?”

“Of course.”

I waited until the carriage started to roll away into the busy street before I walked back to the palace. I thought I would never see him again. Nothing else—no other future—seemed to make sense.

In the streets of St. Petersburg the beggars who sang war ballads and ditties were filling their pockets with coins. Old Fritz, who lost his wits. Can’t beat the Russians, he admits. At the Tartar market vendors hawked battle scenes on which the paint had not yet dried, studded with miniatures of the new war heroes: By the fall of 1758 Grigory Orlov was among them. A hero from the Battle of Zorndorf.

“Orlov?” the Empress asked. “Handsome?”

“Yes, Your Highness.”

“Tall?”

“Yes.”

“A hero?”

The war was not yet over, but the Orlovs’ army career had proved a disappointment. “Still a Lieutenant, though others became Majors and Colonels,” his brother Alexei had said, bitterly, when he called on me at the palace. “Hiding from creditors and licking his wounds.” His own commission had ended, and he was back in St. Petersburg, at the Izmailovsky Regiment. He would not seek another. It was back to the palace duty for him.

“Lieutenant Orlov captured the King’s adjutant,” I told the Empress. “He refused to leave the battlefield in spite of seventeen slashes of a saber on his body. But then there was this scandal.”

“What did our eagle do?”

“He seduced his commander’s mistress. Princess Kurakina. Ran away with her, but then he gambled away all his money and the Princess went back to her parents. His brother had to pay his debts.”

“Tell me more,” the Empress said, and laughed.

A soldier, brave and reckless. Strong enough to stop a runaway horse with bare hands. Eyes brimmed with glee when he walked into a room, dulled with dismay when he left.

Just like the men she always wanted to hear about.

“Give it to him.” The Empress took a small ring off her finger and tossed it to me. The ruby, I noted, would not be worth more than two hundred rubles.

The limits of the imperial attention. “Advancement in the Russian army does not come on merit,” Alexei had said. “It is either favor or bribe.”