FEBRUARY–MARCH 1744
Less than a week at court in this strange land and Sophie already knows to proceed with caution. All around her is plotting, whispers behind corners, sometimes within earshot. She can hear her name reverberating in the halls in harsh, foreign Russian. That Sophie. Have you seen that bony, oval-faced Sophie? That pale, raven-haired Sophie? That provincial princess? At least that is what she imagines is being said about her in Russian. She is aware of how her fleshless shoulders pop out of sleeves, aware that her dresses are far from the latest style. She has only three or four in a court that changes gowns three times a day. She perceives her hair to be wrong here, is convinced the maids spread word that she uses her mother’s bed linens. She is probably deemed not pretty enough, plain and Germanic.
The place is impossibly cold, impossibly foreign. Outside her window is perpetual winter, stark and thick, the wind so strong it barrels into her room. If it were not for Katerina, lovely, loyal Katerina, her friend in the silver dress, she would be lost, awash in a sea of solitude. She calls for her. Katerina! Is Katerina near?
And here she comes, her Katerina, whom she already calls Katya. A kindred spirit who speaks German, who understands her jokes. Whose eyes she can trust. How lovely she looks rushing into her chambers in that unassuming way, her simple unadorned gown, a single strand of pearls, the modest chignon. She brings with her the sewing that is their pretext—the court must believe their many meetings are about practicing her Russian or sewing a decorative pillow for her groom. It is best not to admit confidences; already she knows the empress’s temperament, her watchful eye. The empress may not want Sophie to have allies, she may want to isolate her, keep her far away from outstretched, helping hands.
“What are they saying about me today?” she murmurs to Katya as soon as the girl settles into the love seat with the sewing.
“That they are still hoping for the Polish Saxon Marianne.”
“They want to get rid of me.”
“If they only knew your temperament and tact, how lucky they would consider themselves.”
“Bestuzhev is at the helm of this thought, I suppose?”
Katya keeps her eyes fixed on the stone floor. The cold, unforgiving floor.
“Never mind,” Sophie says, hurt. She steers the subject to fashion, a topic she cares little about herself but knows her friend follows with interest. “Let us discuss your mantua for the banquet. It can be trimmed with silver silk.”
Only Katya knows her worries about her future husband, her role in this vast unknowable land. That her future husband is beginning to repulse her. Peter, pronounced Pyotor. She has to practice saying it, her lips curling with the unpleasant maneuver of it. Pyo-tor. Vashe Velichietvo, Pyotor Tretii, His Highness.
But the girl is tactful and allows Sophie to change the topic. “I adore silver trim. It is elegant, especially on one of those dresses where the drapery parts to reveal the skirt. But my mother warns it is too naughty.”
The wind laps against the window, fierce and swirling.
“I cannot go back, you know,” Sophie says. The thought has just formed itself inside her; if Bestuzhev’s campaign succeeds, she will be redundant. “I will not go back to Zerbst.”
Katya looks up from the fine underlay of lace. “Oh, my dear.”
They hear steps outside the door. The girls look up and it is Sophie’s mother who has descended into an armchair, her powdered hair smoothed over her left shoulder. “I demand to know what they are saying about us at court. I’ve only a minute.”
There is a long silence, the girls look down at their sewing again. There is only the wind rattling against the drafty windows. “I am sure I have heard nothing but admiration for your ladyship,” Katya says. She is shrewd, Sophie thinks. Is it possible to encounter a sister in just a short month? As her mother closes her eyes, presses her fingers to her temple, the girls exchange a brief look.
Sophie says, “It is remarkably cold in here.”
Katya smiles, her fingers dancing over the needlework.
* * *
“I detest that woman.” Peter leans over the carcass of his fowl. The discarded bones are barely stripped of their flesh. Sophie drags her attention away from his plate but then she becomes aware of his too-long fingers on the table, the curvature of his spine, the outline of his thin mouth. For the sake of the long table of guests watching them, she is careful to retain her smile.
“Which woman do you speak of, Your Highness? My mother?”
He picks up a wing, then flings it back to the table. “My aunt, of course. The wretched empress. If not for her meddling, I would still be in Holstein. This country is backward, loathsome, filled with rude, parochial creatures. I detest it. You will find it to be so.”
“Oh.” She thought she was finally making an impression on him. She ascertained that her body was angled toward his.
The musicians enter, begin the process of unsheathing their instruments. The empress leans over to one of her ladies, whispers in her ear, and the woman scurries to fulfill some command.
Sophie follows the empress’s every move. The woman’s gaze slides over each guest, missing nothing. “I find there is much beauty in this land, this language. I look forward to being fluent very soon. I’m studying with your tutor.”
“I am proud to say that despite his best efforts, Teodorsky taught me nothing. Nothing! And I would fight it too if I were you. Hold on to your German and your religion. The Russian language is ugly and so is their crude, backward Orthodoxy.”
She wonders if the future king should speak this way of a realm he will someday inherit. Outside the window, she hears the first sign of fireworks and she longs to ignore propriety and run out to watch the show.
“In that case, I shall interpret Russian for both of us.”
Peter slumps down in his seat. “I suppose I will have to marry you since She wishes it. But I want you to know I love another. Her mother was sent to Siberia as soon as the witch found out about my affections.”
Sophie pretends to take great interest in his confidences, the pickled goose oily and slick inside her belly. She can see the empress turning to watch them, so she bends closer to her husband-to-be, inhales his sour breath of wine. Another firework explosion startles the party. The sound is sharp, sudden, tinting the window green with artificial light.
He says, not unkindly, “I hope you understand that I confide in you because you are my second cousin and I am simply being truthful.”
There are needles poking at her heart. Her tongue is momentarily trapped in the cave of her mouth. “You are very right to do so.”
“Would you look at them together, how perfect they are in each other’s company,” her mother says, bending toward the empress. Her breasts are in danger of spilling out of her gown’s décolletage. “What a handsome pair they make.”
Sophie sighs. So many meals to attend and the empress demands they drag on into the morning hours and turn into dance parties. She is dizzy from exhaustion. Birds arrive whole and return carved. Plates whisked away. Music followed by cards followed by gossip. The empress can outstay the entire court, reluctantly retiring to her bedchamber as dawn breaks. “Rouse yourself,” she commands, to anyone that dares nod off in her presence. Sophie wonders when the actual governance of the kingdom takes place.
Now that she examines the castle more closely, all the furnishings, so opulent on first inspection, reveal their flaws. Chairs missing legs, doors hanging off hinges, the bottom of drapes dirty and fringed, bronze handles of cabinets broken. Glossy on the outside, rotten underneath. Marred, decaying.
* * *
The next time she sees Peter, it is only ten in the morning, but he is already trembling with two glasses of wine and has lined up his toy soldiers for the practice drill. They are made to stand at glassy-eyed attention in their blue military uniforms. “We’re drilling formation today,” he explains. Sophie drapes herself over the settee the way she saw her mother do, examining her pale arms, the light hairs dotting her forearms. She tries not to look up at the ceiling where a row of rats dangle by their necks, poor creatures executed for unwittingly playing the role of disobeying officers.
Peter is marching back and forth. Without his wig, he appears even slighter, barely more imposing than his toys. They make kings of men like these? But she is starting to understand that simply waiting for a spark in his affections is foolishness; she must play her own game, parallel to his.
“I thank you for your trust in me the other day, Grand Duke.” She bows. “You can rest assured I will safeguard your confidences.”
He pauses, lifts his eyebrows. “You are my only playmate here. We must be allies.”
“Allies, of course I trust that’s what we are.”
He has transferred his concentration to his Holstein soldiers, the precision of their stance. Not a single toe out of formation. “Don’t you love their flintlock muskets? Isn’t Prussia an amazing place? How I wish I were back there.”
Her voice softens. “Yes, I imagine it is hard for you, to be so far from home.”
Of course he has asked her nothing about her own ennui, her homesickness. He appears to her from time to time, George, her uncle. Watching her bowing in the chapel, his head leaning against the doorway. She sensed his approaching footsteps as she kneeled, no prayers emerging from her mouth. Knowing instantly the slow approach belonged to him, his particular leonine stalk. Frozen, unmoving. His voice, when it darted across the walls, flung like silk on the surface of her skin. “I have said it many times, you are very pretty.” At times, she wished her destiny would have her satisfied with a man like that, a man whose intellect she was already on the verge of surpassing.
She rose, turned to face George. “Clever, you mean. Or arrogant and prideful if you listen to Mother.” Whether he possessed intellect or not, she has never seen eyes like his. Two changing sapphires.
“No, but pretty. A man would be very lucky to call you wife.”
“What about my pointed chin?” Dimly, she was aware of the cross behind her, the sound of cartwheels rolling over the cobblestones in the square. His hair was tightly slicked back, his moustache draped over his lips like a hasty arrangement of bedclothes.
“I do not find your chin wanting. It is the chin of perfection.”
She edged herself closer to the corner, a thin pain of dizziness overtaking her. Back in the privacy of her bed, she liked to adjust a pillow between her legs, achieving a related sensation. She was aware of the lowering of their voices, the vapor of their words compared with the substantial shuddering inside. She tried a saucy: “How do you feel about the return of Communion vestments? Are you in agreement with our new monarch on the issue?”
He was stalking closer, the room suddenly smaller. She held her breath, held her gaze on the looming cross. “Sophie,” he said, his hand reaching for her chin, the overly pointed one, her mouth greeting his.
A clanging series of knocks returns her to the room with Peter. Her betrothed.
“Ah, at last. Here you are.” He opens the door, the servants on the other side dressed in the same uniforms as his soldiers. They stiffen before him in a neat row, these human replicas of toys. Peter assesses each one individually for appearance. “You. Your pigtails are the wrong length. You are demoted to musketeer. And you. You better improve your firing time or you will be demoted too. Let us begin our military exercises.” He turns to Sophie with a definitive clearing of the throat—you may go.
“May I stay and join you?” she attempts, but he looks at her as on a madwoman. But she has achieved her goal. His trust. Allies. A small step, but a step nevertheless.
She fetches her riding habit and meets her friend at the stables. Katya is a remarkable horsewoman. She is remarkable in all ways, but is confined to the tight boundaries of her gender. Sometimes, Sophie wants to push her to read, to think outside the vapor of love and balls and fashion, but Katya gently steers her back to her own interests, to the way their two worlds intersect. When will a betrothed love you? What are a wife’s responsibilities? Whom do you find more handsome: Razumovsky or Volokhin?
Now, she admires the balance of her friend’s sidesaddle position, her ability to give all of herself to the horse, an instinct for when the creature softens beneath her touch. Rastrelli’s overwhelming Summer Palace recedes behind them in the usual contrast of glorious and fetid: the majesty of its sweeping Venetian façade at the bank of the foul Fontanka Canal. Sophie is relieved when she can barely see it. She breathes into the depths of her fur. It is an off-putting February; still no snow, only the placid whiteness.
“So the rumors are true? He just plays with soldiers all day?” Katya says.
“And he starts drinking early in the morning.” Only with Katya does she allow herself the wrench of self-pity.
“You poor dear. But he must outgrow it. From what my mother tells me, men are like this, children. He needs a woman to set him straight, and who better than you?”
“But he is no boy. He is fifteen years old, Katya! Next in line to be monarch of all the Russias. When will he grow up?”
The air is piercing, clawing at her face, the wind slapping her cheeks. The gun rests, futile. Not a single duck when usually she shoots at least three by midday. But as she trains her head toward the sky and the possibility of prey, it occurs to her that Peter is only the beginning of her story. She has watched how the court treats Peter as dispensable symbol and perhaps a fool is preferable to a wily despot. It did not take long to see that his behavior is being ridiculed at court, that the empress has hoped Sophie’s arrival will mature him. That everyone at court pities and respects her at his expense.
She feels a new burst of hope that might be her first political realization at court. Of course, she thinks, it is so simple, and yet she keeps forgetting it in her childish search for love. It is the one who reigns on the throne who holds all the power. She must focus her energies on the empress. She pushes her horse onward.
“Look at me, Katya,” she cries, and swings a leg over the seat so she is riding the horse like a man.
“Should you? Oh, you shouldn’t!” her friend cries. The canter is choppy, tides of cold air gripping at the throat. It is time to head back, she can hear them calling for her to turn around, but she ignores the cries and presses on, farther, farther from the gleaming complex.
* * *
That night, she tries to dress for dinner but cold is shivering up her body, making it spasm, convulse. She alternates huddling under soaking sheets and pulling them off in order to breathe. She should have never gone riding in the chill, she thinks. She is not accustomed to the Russian climate. Then she loses the thread of the idea. Her mother is speaking—we’re late, the grand duke is waiting for us—but to Sophie, her face is swimming, distorted. The empress has gone to the monastery, so there is no need to play the convalescent.
“Please,” Sophie says, the ache deeper now, somewhere at her side. This infection, whatever it is, has wormed itself to her very bones. “I would like to return to bed.”
“Then I will attend alone,” Johanna announces. She is dressed in the most spectacular brocade gown and is appraising the folds beneath her eyes in a gold hand mirror, a gift from the empress. Sophie tries to hoist herself up in bed in order to allow herself to be dressed—she can imagine how her mother will translate this illness to the mercurial grand duke—but the pain strikes below her right breast. She gives herself over to it.
Fine, fine, go without me. Sophie lies back down, wraps herself in covers, draws knees to her chest. She is cold, her very flesh exposed. If she could only sleep. A rapid scan of the room confirms her mother is gone. Sleep demolishes her, then she awakes to a cavalcade of faces. George returns through the waves of cold pulses. He pulls her behind the door, against the wall. The silver edge of her favorite tapestry of armies straddling earth-colored horses is scratching at her cheek.
“You shall marry me. My sister will be pleased.”
“I suppose so. Johanna will at least be rid of me. Would I not make an ideal wife?”
“Indeed, most ideal.”
He plants a kiss to her nose, to the swell of her earlobe. Then the scene shifts and it is that final night at home before the eastward journey. Downstairs with the nurse, she hears the voice of her little sister, a bubbling over of baby glee. In a wedge of the opposite wing, her father scratches at papers on his secretary desk, accepts visitors into the library, a long trail of appointments sprinkled across walnut chairs. The entire castle runs on schedule but there is an air of impending change. Sophie is leaving but she is not sure who knows about it. Her father does, yet he is buried away in his office. Babette was not told. Babette, innocently urging her to the Corelli on the violin with those soft fluttering hands. She certainly would have wondered at the commotion but was too afraid of Johanna to inquire.
“The idea of it. Being rid of you.” Submerged in her neck, George’s lips tracing some distant moon behind her ear.
She awakes and sleeps again. She is aware of arguments taking place beside her bed. Her mother is pressing some case with doctors, Katya is patting cool cloth to her forehead. Even Peter appears above her as concerned observer. The pain in her side worsens, radiating to the rest of her body. Her sheets are soaked with sweat. So this is dying, she thinks. A messy struggle, this.
She moans and is shushed. “Suffer quietly,” she thinks her mother commands her. “What kind of report do you want to reach the empress?” Her jaw is inflamed, so tight and filled with fire she imagines it snapping off onto the floor. Humans or ghosts populate the room, she is not sure which. Strange, she thinks, that death stands on no ceremony, conveys no formal invitation. It simply blocks her view of living. Eventually, she feels herself placed into a substantial lap, an expansive bosom, finds herself under the caress of warm, pliant hands. She looks up to find it is the empress herself. She is murmuring, “My dearest, I will not let you slip away,” and she is commanding someone, “Bleed her at once.”
“Please. No bleeding.” She can hear her alarmed mother. “That is how her little brother died.” But her voice is extinguished, pushed back.
“She will be bled. Right now.”
The prick begins with arms but attacks various points in her body—the feet, thighs, her posterior. She slips in and out of consciousness. Lestocq is gone, another doctor in his place who speaks Russian in a thick Spanish-sounding accent. And the empress never abandons her side, replacing the wet cloths on her forehead, holding Sophie’s head in the crook of her elbow. There is a continued litany of comfort, a soothing string of words whose meaning she has only begun to learn. She jolts up in bed and vomits, a long expulsion of her insides. She imagines it as a fury of blood.
“I will fetch the Lutheran pastor,” her mother cries, but the heat of Sophie’s body is subsiding and she is becoming sensible to her surroundings. A tableau of people occupy every inch of the room, some are wringing bloodstained handkerchiefs, others just gaping at her. But she stares up into the worried blue eyes of the empress and remembers. The one who reigns holds the power.
She clears her voice. “What is the use of the Lutheran when I mean to convert? Send instead for Simeon Teodorsky. I will be happy to speak with him.” There is a stunned silence and the generous bosom does not move from her side; if anything, it presses itself closer. Exclamations of joy wash over her.
“What a charming accent our little pupil displays. She has been studying her Russian,” the empress exclaims.
“An unusually adept and eager student,” Teodorsky confirms when he arrives, giving a nervous laugh. He looks more skeletal and pared away than usual. He might be frightened for his own survival.
With fresh lucidity, Sophie examines the empress’s face. It is blotched and discolored by sun spots, lined with age. The empress is human. The woman has been crying out of fear for her health, Sophie’s! She clasps the empress’s hand, presses it tightly to her cooling cheek.
“It is you who healed me, matyushka.”
“Oh, my darling.” The empress is covering her face with relieved, exultant kisses.
And Sophie allows herself to be lowered back inside the foul-smelling sheets. No one will be sending her back to Zerbst. For now.