Transformation
February 1744
We sit covered in furs in our little sleigh-house, which must be drawn through the snowdrifts by a dozen horses. Mama looks out the window, smiling now that we are grandly accompanied by a squadron of cavalry and a detachment of foot soldiers. In four more days we reach St. Petersburg, a fine prospect where the river Neva enters the Gulf of Finland. I am told the Empress Elizabeth’s father, Peter the Great, built the city on numerous islands connected by bridges, like the fabled city of Venice. Here, grand mansions line the frozen river and three broad avenues, at the head of which sits a tall, gold-spired structure, brilliant in the winter sun.
Our welcome is warm: cannons roar in the distance and bells peal as we arrive. A great mass of people have collected on the outdoor staircase of the Winter Palace. The Empress herself, and her nephew, the Grand Duke, Peter, are in Moscow, four hundred miles away, but her Great Chancellor, a stout, bearded man named Bestuzhev, and a number of courtiers greet us with pomp and ceremony — fourteen elephants perform for our amusement in the courtyard of the Palace. Though exhausted, Mama and I bow graciously when we are presented to scores of dignitaries. Sumptuous dinners are prepared in our honour.
Mama and I would like nothing better than to take to our beds, but the Prussian ambassador advises us to leave for Moscow as soon as possible in order to arrive in time for the Grand Duke Peter’s sixteenth birthday. He tells Mama in private that Chancellor Bestuzhev is opposed to my marriage to Peter since I am King Frederick’s choice and thus the union would represent an alliance of Russia and Prussia. The Chancellor would prefer closer ties to England. I am introduced to the world of intrigue.
In order to ingratiate ourselves with the Empress, Mama and I must once again ascend the steps of the royal sleigh. I try, in vain, to sleep. This time we are joined by a prodigious number of officials who fill thirty more sleighs, the whole long procession heading through the snow toward Moscow. We travel day and night at a frightening speed over the frozen wilderness, stopping only to change horses. Warmed by the stove and huddled beneath furs, at least we do not suffer from the cold. Yet this is a god-forsaken country I am so anxious to join.
In a matter of three jolting days we cover the four hundred miles to Moscow. There is little fanfare here for us as we ride through the narrow, crooked streets in the dark. The city has not the glamour of Petersburg and appears dingy. I am disappointed. We stop at a mansion lit with torches, where the Empress’s adjutant general meets us. With little deliberation, he takes us through one grand room after another where hundreds of people are waiting to inspect us.
They bow low as we pass, the prince naming each in a low voice, which I can scarcely hear. I am quite dizzy with fatigue and nerves.
Finally, there he is — Peter. I hold my breath. He is taller than when I saw him last, yet very boyish still, with wispy blond hair, slight of figure. He greets Mama warmly and chatters in a high voice about how impatiently he has been waiting for us. His face is animated, his small eyes looking sideways at me. He is a child! I am not certain how I feel about him. I am… disappointed.
He waits with us in our rooms for the Empress to summon us. I notice he has no shoulders to speak of and a thin chest. It is late in the evening when the Empress is finally ready to receive us. We are led to the entrance of her bedroom.
I am struck dumb by her appearance when we meet: she is a monumental woman, extraordinarily tall and plump, dressed in a silver and gold gown with a wide hoop skirt. Brilliant blue eyes animate a beautiful face, a vision of elaborately piled auburn hair is set with diamonds.
After embracing Mama, she turns her eye on me. I am embarrassed by the scrutiny of this magnificent personage, this divinity, but after a few moments she smiles, and when she smiles, her face lights up the whole room. I have passed the first test.
That evening Peter dines with Mama and me.
“Do you remember the last time we met?” I say. “You were Karl Ulrich then.”
“I still am,” he says in his child’s voice. “Only now I’m a soldier. One day I will have my own Prussian regiment and I’ll drill them all morning and they’ll march around the yard just as I say.”
“A Prussian regiment?”
“Of course Prussian. I’m wearing a Prussian uniform, aren’t I?” He puffs up what little chest he has under the blue wool.
I watch Mama from the corner of my eye. She is prodding at some meat on her plate.
“I suppose you have a Russian uniform as well?”
“Russian? Are you mad? You wouldn’t catch me dead in a Russian uniform. It’s a rag. It’s a disgrace. Like the whole country.” He pokes a forkful of potato into his mouth.
“But surely…” I begin, then think better of it. “You’ve joined the Orthodox church, have you not?”
He chews, watching me with blank eyes. “My aunt insisted. She wanted to rename me after her father. I must have a Russian name, how else can I be the Tsar, you see. Even the churches are a disgrace. The priests are ridiculous in their black gowns and beards to their waists. And that stink of incense. Oh, and those bloody icons everywhere. My skin crawls when I’m forced to go. My aunt is very devout.” He rolls his eyes to the ceiling. “Her mother was a peasant, you know. The country is filled with peasants. You must continue to call me Karl. Otherwise I shall not speak to you.”
At the beginning of Lent the Empress leaves Moscow on a pilgrimage to a monastery fifty miles away where she will do penance and pray. Meanwhile, she has arranged for my instruction in the Orthodox faith to begin. I have anticipated the process but am nevertheless taken aback that my instructor is the Archimandrite, a severe but cultivated man. I suppose some minor priest would not have done. He is patient with me and answers my questions frankly. For my part, I fail to mention Father’s exhortations to me to never give up the Lutheran church.
I am in a turmoil of my own making. It is more difficult than I expected, this alteration of religion. Akin to trying to alter my heart.
I wake up one morning with a start: where am I? My skin is on fire. The room swims before me and my head aches. Are we still thrashing along the frozen rutted roads? No, I see high ceilings, long windows that let in a faint blue light. And someone stands by my bed. Mama? She is wringing her hands. What are you doing here? She doesn’t hear me because I cannot form the words. They die on my tongue, which refuses to move. However, I am able to hear.
“Princess,” an older man says to Mama, “I must bleed her or she will die.” I recognize the voice of the Empress’s Dutch physician, Boerhave. “Her blood is inflamed from the rough journey.”
“No!” cries Mama. “Decidedly no! If you bleed her she will surely die.”
“When the Empress returns tomorrow, she will decide on the treatment.”
“She is my daughter.”
I fall into a deep, warm sea where my head and limbs float. I am not in pain. I am not anything. The numbness is a relief. I no longer feel the distress from… from what? From my new life? The lessons in how to live my new life? Can a German princess become a Russian Grand Duchess? There is so much to learn. The Russian language — earthy and lilting compared to the guttural German. The Orthodox faith — it is not the lessons that distress so much as Father’s letters still arriving from the home that seems so far away now. I am certain I shall never see it again. The Lutheran faith I must leave behind like my home. Have I left behind my heart as well? No, because Father says God searches the heart and our secret desires and He cannot be deceived. Am I deceiving Him? Am I deceiving me? The Archimandrite who instructs me does not ask questions like these. Nor does he ask why I am marrying the boy soldier. We both know why.
I am being pulled from my warm, benumbed sea to wake again with a start. This time the Empress’s large, beautiful face hovers close to mine, her eyes filled with concern. I am cradled in her ample arms.
“Dear Boerhave, it is working.”
“Yes, Your Imperial Majesty. I shall bleed her some more in the evening.”
I feel a pain in my foot; something is dripping, dripping close by. I picture the blood pooling in a basin.
“Dear, dear Sophie,” she says, rocking me gently next to her large bosom. “You must be strong.”
Still in her arms I sink back into that delightful numbing sea that takes away all pain. However, though my limbs float, my head is not as deep this time and I can hear whispering around me, the rustle of skirts moving past.
“Where’s her mother?” someone murmurs.
“The Empress ordered her to her room. She argues against the bleeding.”
Perhaps I am dreaming but I feel the Empress close by. I smell her perfume, like roses. Will she be my mother now?
When I open my eyes again, it is the Empress’s mouth I see. At first it looks uncertain. Then the edges lift up into a smile. “Boerhave!” she cries. “She is awake!” The Empress gazes at me more fondly than my own mother ever has.
I struggle to sit up, helped by some ladies-in-waiting.
“Bring some food!” the Empress says. “She must eat.”
“Only clear soup, Your Majesty,” says Boerhave.
The Empress glowers at him. “How can she recover her strength with soup?”
“Only for today, Your Majesty,” he says, bowing from the waist.
I feel great affection for her at this moment.
I have been ill for three weeks. Someone says it is spring.
Though still weak, I am soon hungry and eat everything set before me while sitting in bed. After a week of gobbling up every delicacy out of the royal kitchen, I begin my lessons anew, both the Russian language and theology. The date for my conversion is set. I am resolved to carry on.
Mama comes to see me, but the Empress is furious with her. She has discovered that Mama is meeting with the Prussian and French ambassadors. Worst of all, Chancellor Bestuzhev, who sides with the English against the French, has told her that Mama corresponds with King Frederick and relays to him the goings-on of the Russian court. The Empress will brook no spying or interference from either side, but at the moment leans toward the English. There is no end to the intrigue.
They continue in politeness before the court, but the Empress vilifies Mama to me in private. King Frederick continues to play a role in my life, writing to Father deliberate nonsense — that the differences between the Orthodox church and the Lutheran church are insignificant. He does not want to impede my progress in the Russian court, since I will be his friend. And well he knows his influence with Father. His king has promoted him to field marshal after nominating his daughter to marry the heir to the Russian throne. There is the little matter of religion. How can Father refuse to acquiesce to a conversion that apparently means so little?
At the end of June I am ready. I have committed to memory the confession of faith written by my instructor, the Archimandrite. Fifty pages of words that are not my own, but which become my own.
When I am led into the palace chapel I am dizzy from three days of fasting in preparation. The sanctuary is quite overwhelming, thousands of candle flames wavering, trying valiantly to reach into the shadows to illuminate the mosaics and sacred icons. As I kneel into the silk cushion, my crimson gown spread around me like a fan, the voices of the choir echo against the dim walls and pillars. The heavy fragrance of incense hangs in the gold air. My head spins.
I must repeat the words with conviction, and the Russian pronunciation with care. A multitude of spectators fills the chapel among the pillars. At first I hide my uneasiness behind a brave voice. But then something beneath my ribs lifts me up, like wings, and I hear my voice echoing among the stone walls, reaching out to the people and returning to me strengthened. Sophie is folded up within my heart like a map, her religion, her language, her parents. A new page begins, a new geography, where Sophie Augusta becomes Catherine Aleksayevna, whose clear, certain voice resonates among the astonished crowd.
The next morning I am to be betrothed to the Grand Duke. The Empress strides majestically before us into the cathedral beneath a great silver canopy held by eight officers. Peter and I follow. Once inside the Empress takes us by the hand and leads us to a dais in the centre of the church. Again a great assembly of spectators. After hours of exchanging vows of betrothal, kneeling and standing, standing and kneeling, bathed by the music of the choir, the Empress gives us our betrothal rings. We exchange them, Peter and I, and for the first time, I am addressed by my new title: Grand Duchess.
At first the new deference with which I am treated disturbs me. At the ball later that evening even people of rank bow and kneel and call me “Your Imperial Highness.” My face aches from smiling. I am only fifteen years old but I am the second-highest ranking woman at the court. No one but the Empress and Peter may sit in my presence.
Lest I become too high and mighty, Peter brings me down to earth. His valet, Roumberg, fills his head with advice on how to treat a wife.
“After we are married,” Peter says one day, “you shall not breathe unless I first give you permission. You shall say what I tell you to say and think what I tell you to think. A woman is her husband’s possession, nothing more. In any case I shall have to beat you now and then. Roumberg knows of such things and he says a wife must be given a few blows to the head to remind her of her place.”
I begin to fear our wedding night. I have come so far. So close to what I want. And what is that, I wonder at last. To please the Empress, a more affectionate mother than the one who bore me. To marry the man she has chosen to inherit her empire. To sit high among the stars. To shine.
During July the Empress leads her huge entourage, both court and household, into the countryside. Thousands of servants oversee a snaking train of carts filled with clothing and provisions, for she leaves nothing behind, not her gowns, not her icons, not her dogs.
Our noble procession denudes the countryside as we travel from town to town: all grain, livestock, cheese, fruit, and vegetables are devoured in a wide swath. The Empress enjoys herself with obvious ebullience. One day she hunts; another day she dances in peasant costume at a festival. The people worship her.
In August everything changes. The Empress puts on simple clothes, pulls on boots, and stamps along on foot to a shrine, a monastery, a convent. The whole court continues to follow now that she is a pilgrim, only they remain in their carriages, not quite so intent in their devotions. I marvel at the vastness of the land: the endless forests redolent of fir, the wheat fields swaying in the sun, the dewy meadows of chicory and daisies. I might have enjoyed it all if not for the presence in my carriage of Peter and Mama, the two never ceasing to find fault with each other and quarrelling without stop.
In October Peter becomes ill and is confined to his bed. At first I am relieved by his absence: no more talk of beatings or wifely obedience. But if he should die, my role here is finished. I am disquieted that I may be sent back to Anhalt-Zerbst, a German princess among many, all equally low of rank. To my relief Peter recovers. For a time.
A week before Christmas he becomes ill in earnest. It cannot be worse: he has smallpox. He is confined to his room with Dr. Boerhave and a few servants. No one is allowed in the room, but the Empress disregards the doctor’s protests and nurses Peter herself.
I continue to study Russian. I also pray for Peter’s recovery. Not entirely for unselfish reasons.
Peter is stronger than he appears, for after six weeks, he survives the smallpox. However in the battle for his life, the illness has scored some victories. His appearance has become hideous, his face still swollen and distorted with purplish scars from the pox. He wears a huge ridiculous wig since his own hair has been shaved off. How did this happen? How can I marry this revolting apparition?
His wispy hair grows back and his face returns to normal size, but he is no less vicious. His only saving grace is that he is not interested in me. On the dreaded wedding night I wait for him for hours with rising anxiety. I need not have worried. It is near morning when he staggers into the bedroom. Grunting in German, he falls dead drunk into the bed.
The evening is finally drawing to a close and I am bored to a stupor with all the noblewomen in attendance around me. The weekly royal ball is opportunity for them to gossip and spread rumours about who is carrying on an affair with whom this week. Only half the nobles can read, and none, it seems, are interested in discussing art or philosophy.
Despite the high ceiling, the room is stifling hot and swelters with dancers swathed in many layers of silk, the air thick with sweat. Whenever I get up to dance, the eyes of those around me are drawn to my waist. Some aim at discretion behind their fans, but I know they are watching and whispering. A year after my marriage there is still no sign of a child. I am still thin and agile and wretchedly unhappy. The Empress has become impatient but I dare not confess to her that her nephew does not try to make love to me. That we have never made love. That he is, indeed, incapable of it. He is a child in all ways including the physical sphere.
He does, however, know how to torment me. There he comes with his narrow shoulders and plump belly dressed in his blue Prussian uniform, still bearing some scars from the pox. He is ready for the final salvo of the evening.
Stopping within my earshot he says to his servant, “Did you notice how pretty Fräulein Hesse is looking tonight? Far prettier than my wife. In fact, my wife looks inferior this evening, not at all pleasing.”
He delights in his petty cruelty. Fräulein Hesse is his current infatuation. Next week it will be another. Of course he is incapable of doing anything about it.
The Empress’s women prepare to find her a safe room for the night. Her anxiety rises toward the end of the evening when she must retire: will she survive another day? She sleeps in a different room each night to thwart the assassins that she is certain plot her death. Her scowling, muscled bodyguard lies at the foot of her bed. Even then she is afraid of the dark, afraid of being murdered in her sleep. She makes her women talk to her half the night, all the court gossip and rumours that stave off the dark. Do they repeat the murky intrigues of which I have caught whispers? That I am the chief spy, consorting with Frederick against the English faction? The Empress watches me with more and more suspicion, and I wonder which of the scheming courtiers have bent her ear. I no longer know whom to trust. I hear mutterings of “Traitor” behind my back. I have heard that the Empress suspects me of being a spy like Mama. Poor Mama, sent back to Germany in disgrace for her disobedience and disloyalty. The Empress’s eyes accuse me of the same. Disobedience, disloyalty.
My head aches constantly. I steel myself against the pain. One day I can endure it no longer and I call in the court surgeon. He cuts a vein in both my arms to bleed me. The women around me go pale while the blood drips into a basin. He has just finished wrapping bandages round my arms, the vise of pain circling my forehead is starting to abate, when all of a sudden the door to my room flies open and in marches the Empress. Her eyes are wild. I have never seen her so furious.
“The secret is out!” she cries. “You have been seen together, you and your lover!”
The surgeon and all my servants flee the room, terrified, abandoning me to the Empress’s wrath. How am I to defend myself?
“I have no lover,” I say, trying to remain calm.
Her face scarlet, she shakes her fist at me and steps closer, her huge figure looming. I take several steps backward. She prepares herself to strike me; her arms aquiver.
“Don’t lie to me! You have been seen! You are betraying your husband with Andrei Chernyshev. This is the reason you are not pregnant.”
Peter’s valet! Ridiculous. If I were going to betray Peter I would find someone more appealing.
The Empress presses closer. I keep stepping backward until finally there is nowhere left to go and her large body pins me to the wall.
“You cannot be a wife to Peter,” she is shrieking in my face, “if you love someone else!”
My chest convulses and I start to weep uncontrollably. This is the mother I thought would love me. I cannot breathe through my tears.
“It is your own fault you have no child!” the Empress cries, so close to my face that her hot breath sears my skin.
My servants have rescued me after all. They have summoned Peter, who walks in coolly in his robe. The Empress abruptly steps back from me. Her face softens, becomes normal, and she speaks to Peter with affection. Suddenly she is gone.
Great Chancellor Bestuzhev, the man who advised the Empress against my marrying Peter, is up in arms. It seems that the only reason I have been brought to this godforsaken country is to bear a child and thus provide the empire with an heir to the throne. According to Bestuzhev, Peter and I are two wayward, spoiled children who need strict direction and discipline in order to fulfill our duty. Therefore, we are to be appointed guardians who will suffer no frivolity but will steer us toward our solemn obligations.
My heart falls when the Empress chooses as my chap-erone her first cousin, Maria Choglokov, a pretty but humourless young woman who takes her assignment seriously indeed. Maria is tiresomely fertile herself, ever pregnant by her husband, Peter’s new guardian. No doubt the Empress hopes Maria’s fruitfulness will be catching, like a cold. Maria suffers no nonsense. No one in the household is allowed to speak with me on pain of being reported to the Empress as an intriguer. I am left in stony silence most of the time. With the result that during the day I am quite alone and find myself more and more in front of my mirror, my only company the young Kalmuk boy who arranges my hair so skillfully. I have grown weary of staring at my own long, thin face, my jaw still pronounced, but now trembling too often with tears.
Any time that I feel even a little light-hearted about something and forget to dissemble, Maria announces, “I’m going to make my report to the Empress!” I must learn to better conceal my thoughts.
The Empress insists Peter and I attend not only mass daily, but now we must also go to chapel for matins and vespers. Peter despises the church but is too much of a coward to protest. He is unwilling to bring down yet another rant from the Empress that she will disinherit him after all.
When her temper is unavoidable and he is in distress he seeks me out. At such times I take pity on him and pet him like a lapdog for I am the only person he can talk to without risking committing an offence. Though he does go on and on about grenadiers and artillery manoeuvres until I am bored to distraction. I am so bored that sometimes I humour him and let him make me into a soldier. He teaches me to march and obey field commands in my silk gown. Then he hands me a musket and orders me to stand guard at the door of his room with the heavy gun on my shoulder. It amuses him to leave me thus for hours.
Sometimes when he comes back to dismiss me, I smell wine on his breath. He does not bother to moderate his drinking but indulges in it both in public at the Empress’s table and in private where bottles stand hidden in cupboards waiting for him. I have learned to avoid him after he has spent an evening of unbridled drinking with his servants.
The man who was supposed to tame Peter, Nicholas Choglokov, Maria’s husband, has failed utterly to bring him under control. Together, the Choglokovs have not found a way to resolve the impenetrable task at hand: to bring about my pregnancy.
February 1748
I have just had a bad shock after delivery of a letter: my dear beloved father is dead. I shall never see him again, the ballast of my childhood. The blunt, upright, scrupulously honest man whose face I have trouble calling forth now, after a separation of four years. My tears start to flow and no one can comfort me. He had none of the guile or deceit that surrounds me here but was the most genuine of men. He acted and spoke in a straightforward manner that would be all but incomprehensible in this court.
My tears do not abate. I weep copiously for eight days, but then Maria Choglokov tells me that I have cried enough, that the Empress orders me to end my tears since I am a Grand Duchess and my father was not a king. I am allowed to wear mourning, but only for six weeks.
July 1752
The insolent chamberlain called Sergei Saltykov watches me from beneath black eyebrows and lashes when he thinks I do not see. He is arresting with his swarthy complexion, such a startling contrast to Peter’s sickly white skin. Sergei is high-born like his wife, who is a lady at court. He attends every function and charms the Choglokovs with his compliments. I notice that my temple begins to throb when he enters the room. He is a known seducer — I have been warned about him, but he is relentless. He will not give up.
He must know, as does the entire court, that my marriage to Peter is a sham, that I am as virginal now as I was seven years ago when we married. Then Sergei also knows about the change of climate in the court. The Empress has had a bout of some illness of which she will not speak but which has made her all the more anxious about the succession. If she dies suddenly, what will become of the throne? There must be an heir, or all the rival factions at court will fall over each other to push Peter aside the moment the Empress is dead. Yet even she finally realizes that her nephew cannot father children. Her anger against him has been mounting.
One day, while passing the door of a room where she converses with an advisor, I overhear her say, “My nephew is a horror. May the devil take him!”
I am no longer watched for signs of flirtations with courtiers. Indeed, the Choglokovs, in an astonishing about-turn, encourage my attentions to Saltykov. They are quite impatient to leave us alone together. Since they take their orders from the Empress, it follows that the Empress has decided I must take a lover. She can wait no longer for an heir, and if my husband is unable to father a child, then someone else will have to.
The new desperation at court is not lost on Saltykov. He knows how to use it to his advantage. The Choglokovs arrange opportunities when Saltykov may seek me out without disturbance. A hunting party on an island in the Neva where only select courtiers are ferried for the day. While the others are off hunting hares in the field, Sergei pulls me playfully behind a thicket and confesses his ardour with long, honeyed phrases that reach into my heart. I am twenty-three years old and have never been made love to like a real woman.
His persistent attentions and declarations of love enthrall me. By September I succumb to his wooing. Within months I conceive a child.
In December the court sets out on the journey from Petersburg back to Moscow. The impatient drivers whip the horses over the rough, craggy roads at a frenzied pace. My carriage shakes and hurtles with a fury and I am thrown about without mercy. Before we arrive I am seized with pain and lose the child.
The Empress lodges me in a newly built wing of the Golovin Palace for my recovery. Its construction is so slipshod that the rats scuttle in and out of the already rotting wainscotting. That winter fires break out all over Moscow. One night, alone and ignored, as I have been since my return, I stand by the palace window to view the panorama of rooftops. I cannot believe my eyes: in the distance four — no, five — blazes are raging in different quarters of the city, sending up vicious flames, while smoke blooms into the black sky like a vengeful flower.
One spring day I enter Peter’s apartments and am startled to see a giant rat hanging from a gallows constructed inside a cupboard. Peter leans nearby, his head tilted back as he gulps from a bottle of wine.
“You see,” he says, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, “this creature chewed into my favourite fortress and ate three of my best tin soldiers, though I scarcely think they tasted of much. A criminal act by any standards. Under the military code, the laws of war demand he must be executed and left on the gallows for three days as an example to other rats.”
During the summer Sergei is inconstant and temperamental. I have trusted him, but he toys with my heart. I do not enjoy the games he seems intent on playing. Yet I must persevere if there is to be an heir to the throne.
That November the unthinkable happens. I am listening to Maria Choglokov in her salon describing a dress she is having made, when shouts rise in the corridor. All of a sudden Sergei and Leon Naryshkin fly into the room. They scream, “Fire! A wing of the palace is on fire!”
I rush to my own rooms, where my servants are already removing as much as they can carry. I venture into the hall, where dense smoke immediately invades my throat. Twenty feet away the balustrade of the grand staircase is on fire. I am struck dumb to see thousands of rats and mice file down the staircase in an orderly procession. The flames have spread rapidly from room to room, engulfing the worm-eaten wood in an instant. It is a picture of hell I pray I shall never see again. Maria and I run from the palace and find refuge in a carriage, from which vantage point we watch the devastation.
The fire burns for three hours. By nightfall there is nothing left of the magnificent Golovin Palace but an orange glow hovering over the smouldering, charred embers. While sitting benumbed in the carriage, gazing mutely at the walls as they crumble into nothing, I am filled with hopelessness. My life, like the palace, is collapsing into nothing.
January 1753
Six weeks after the destruction of the Golovin palace, a new palace has been erected by carpenters working furiously at the Empress’s command. I must take my lead from her. I must not allow obstacles to bar my way.
Though the Empress puts a cheerful face forward at banquets and balls, her health is declining. She can no longer climb stairs on account of the weakness in her legs. Special lifts have been constructed in her palace to take her from one floor to another. I have heard rumours about secret dispatches sent by foreign ambassadors at the court who conjecture how the new regime will take over when the Empress dies. All the court begins to look upon me differently. They know I would assume a large role next to Peter in the succession. My one failing — I have no child. I must find a solution for that.
I set my sights on Saltykov, my inconstant love, and early in the new year I am once again pregnant with his child. This time I am resolved not to lose it.