Curse Not the King (19 page)

Outwardly serene, as secure in her power and as clear in her vision as a woman half her age, Catherine's inward disintegration only became apparent when Paul Petrovitch was mentioned.

The reminder of his existence was a searing irritant. He still lived, enjoying the sights and sounds of changing seasons, using the gift of the senses which she prized for herself above all others, while she had fought down the impulse to imprison and then to exterminate his hated person from the world for nearly forty years.

Potemkin had stopped her, thwarted her sovereign will, she reflected angrily, aware that at last she really did resent his interference, and that the extraordinary domination he had exercised over her seemed to be fading.

So the germ of wrath grew in her mind, nurtured by the stories of her spies in Paul's household, who reported that Catherine Nelidoff had stood the test; that though she wept and lost weight, she stayed under Marie's rule, until the Czarevitch had stepped in and rescued her. Now she occupied a nominal post with the Grand Duchess, and Paul's extramarital idyll was resumed. Consequently his health had improved, they told his mother regretfully, but in spite of the Nelidoff, M. Araktchéief's influence was still very strong. He was encouraging his master into greater severities and was even rumoured to be jealous of the gentle Katya's influence. But it was yet too soon to be certain about that.

Catherine listened and then began to storm with anger. It was the fault of Marie Feodorovna, who had mismanaged her opportunity, and of Gregory Potemkin for suggesting compromise as usual.

To intervene now, when the breach was outwardly healed, would make her look ridiculous, and to remove Mistress Nelidoff privately would only provoke her besotted son into rebellion. And she had promised Alexander that there should be no violence in order to achieve their aim. His father should disappear quietly when the time came for Alexander to step into his shoes. That was agreed and Catherine loved her handsome grandson too much to risk losing his affection by breaking her word in this respect.

Paul's future was secure; it had all been planned and discussed down to the last detail, and it was amazing how shrewd the fifteen-year-old Grand Duke proved himself in this matter of his father's disinheritance and death.

He begged her to avoid a scandal, and while expressing the most pious sentiments about his savage and unpopular parent, suggested that a group of gentlemen should be secretly nominated to arrest him in the future, adding that he should have the list of their names so that he himself could give the order in an emergency.

Potemkin was present at these interviews and listening to the soft-voiced suggestion, he glared at the beautiful, beardless boy with astonishment and contempt in his one eye.

For all his ruthlessness, his immorality, his cunning and his greed, there was a strong vein of natural sentiment in the great Tartar and the sight of Paul's first-born eagerly consigning his father to an early grave revolted him. There was something effeminate about the boy which he disliked, something opaque and unspeakably deceitful in that smooth, fine-featured face. And on occasions he suspected cruelty and cowardice existed in that secretive nature. But the impression was a fleeting one; in fact everything about the Grand Duke Alexander was shifting and indefinable, so that Potemkin, who loved reading men and putting them to his own uses, hated Catherine's grandson far more strongly than he hated Paul.

For almost the first time in nearly twenty years, Catherine did not consult her Minister about the domestic situation at Gatchina.

Instead she decided not to interfere, to leave Catherine Nelidoff in Paul's household, thereby punishing the Grand Duchess for her inability to dispose of her rival herself. And the Empress consoled herself with the fact that her son was surrounding himself with men of the worst possible character; she thought of Alexei Araktchéief and was comforted.

While Catherine Alexeievna contemplated Paul's destruction, while she discussed the manner of it with her grandson and kept a careful watch on that distant household, whose ill fame increased with every passing month, the pattern of life at Gatchina developed along ominous lines.

In his personal life Paul Petrovitch was happy, he found solace and pleasure with Catherine Nelidoff, and for a long period her influence over him was unchallenged.

But not even she could persuade him to abandon the Prussian discipline he believed in so fervently, and when she tried, he countered with stories of that distant visit to Frederick the Great, now dead but not forgotten while his disciple lived. As for the punishment system devised by Araktchéief, Paul sometimes modified it to please her, but his defence of it threatened to dissolve into an admission that he dared not make even to himself. Brutality appealed to him. It gave him a tremendous sense of power to see the sufferings of another human being and to know that he could increase or diminish them at will. Years of inferiority and the appalling strain of living under the shadow of imprisonment and death had culminated in this terrible reprisal against all men for what he himself had been forced to endure. Happiness, security, dignity and respect had all been stripped from him, first by the fate which fashioned him into a travesty of ugliness and by his mother who had deprived him of his father and his birthright. Her power and the malice of the men who surrounded her had never ceased to hound him, and Natalie Alexeievna, whose devotion would have saved his balance, had rewarded his love with selfishness and treachery.

Now Catherine Nelidoff gave him comfort, cradled his head in her arms when the attacks of blinding pain beset him, nursed him devotedly in his periods of sickness and, when he recovered, abandoned that gentle rôle and willingly assumed the guise of a passionate, adoring mistress.

And with all the strength of her love for him, she tried to save him from himself.

Often when she came to him in the evenings, she besought him for an act of mercy, risking his impatience, even his anger, to turn him from some savagery devised by Araktchéief.

“Paul, my beloved; is it true the sentry is to die?”

“You mean the man found sleeping at his post outside the stables? Yes, Katya, he has been sentenced.”

“But they say he's to die by running the gauntlet.…” she whispered, looking into her lover's face, dreading the signs of implacable resolve she knew so well.

The unfortunate soldier was to run for his life between two lines of some three hundred men, all armed with clubs and flails, there to be beaten to death for the crime of dozing while on guard over the Czarevitch's horses.

“That is the penalty.…”

“But, Paul, it was only the stables, not even the household! If he must be put to death, couldn't you just have him shot?”

For the first time in their liaison, Paul answered her abruptly. The affection and indulgence always accorded her requests had vanished and an impatience that was nearly anger rose in him.

“Military discipline is not your concern, my dear. Oblige me by not interfering!”

She said no more, aware that the ties of their love were far more tenuous than she believed, and for a moment she shivered, remembering that she was not supposed to hector or advise. She was his mistress and her only hold on him lay in her own arts and his affection.

The lesson was a sharp one for Katya Nelidoff, and seeing her pale, downcast face, the Czarevitch relented, filled with his genuine love for her, admiring the qualities of womanly gentleness which prompted her to offer him advice he had no intention of following.

But he had hurt her, and like all lovers he was remorseful and full of the desire to make amends.

As usual, when anything upset him, his wrath fell on Marie Feodorovna, whose treatment at his hands was beginning to arouse even Catherine Nelidoff's pity.

Frantic with grief and humiliation, the Grand Duchess wrote to the Empress at Petersburg. Her position was intolerable, she wailed; the Czarevitch treated her with increasing harshness despite all her efforts to placate him and her toleration of his mistress. The letter declared hysterically that Mistress Nelidoff's influence was transforming the Czarevitch into a monster of violence and tyranny, as no doubt Her Majesty had heard. Therefore the Grand Duchess besought her to dismiss the woman and punish her accordingly.…

Catherine read the missive, and visualizing the misery and discord of that unhappy household, shook her head over Marie's pleas, and smiled. A monster of violence and tyranny. That was his own wife's opinion of him. “He
is
going mad,” the Empress said to herself. “Nature agrees with me that he's unfit to rule and he himself is proving it.… A hundred Nelidoffs would fail to save him now.…”

And she told the Grand Duchess, when next they met, that there was nothing she could do to help her; and she sent her back to Pavlovsk, where Paul and Catherine Nelidoff were living throughout the summer.

In the spring of 1791 the Czarevitch received two messages. One was the official notice of his eldest son's forthcoming betrothal to Princess Louisa of Baden and the second was a private letter from his personal friend and partisan Rastopchine, who had left Gatchina to pay a dutiful visit to the Court. In it, the courtier begged Paul to come to Petersburg as quickly as he could. For it was rumoured that after twenty years of supreme power and favour, the mighty Gregory Gregorovitch Potemkin was about to fall.

9

When Paul reached the Winter Palace, he sensed a subtle change; it was an indefinable atmosphere, suggested by the whispering, apprehensive members of Catherine's Court and by an air of frantic gaiety. Petersburg's cherished reputation as a centre of brilliance and culture was no longer maintained by those who knew how to please their Empress. Instead, the motif was amusement. Paul found the Court engaged in a series of feasts and balls, each function out-rivalling the last for magnificence and licence.

He reached the capital early in the morning, having travelled from Gatchina without waiting for more than a change of horses at posts along the way; for some time a sense of urgency possessed him, often he felt as if some tremendous tide of energy were bottled up within his chest, threatening to burst the confines of the flesh with its need of an outlet, forcing him to run rather than walk, to ride at breakneck speed with the wind tearing at him like a living thing. To hurry, hurry, because time was short and his life already half spent in fruitlessness and inactivity.…

The Grand Duchess Marie followed at a more civilized pace, while the vanguard of his household rode ahead with their impatient master.

Paul's fierce sense of propriety forbade him to take his mistress to Court and flaunt her publicly; any hint of open condonation smacked of Catherine and her intimates, and the comparison decided Katya Nelidoff's fate. She was to stay behind, he told her regretfully, assuring her that his thoughts would dwell upon her constantly.

The first morning in Petersburg he hurried to his own suite, a suite seldom occupied, but now prepared for his reception, and there changed his travelling clothes for a dress cut in the Prussian fashion that so irritated the Empress. Rastopchine was not there to meet him, and Paul frowned, his sensitive pride touched to immediate anger.

Then they gave him a message from Rastopchine and he puzzled over it, his cheek twitching with nervous tension.

“I suggest that your Imperial Highness pays the new Adjutant General a visit. There he will find his most obedient and loyal servant, Rastopchine, who dared not omit this daily attendance to greet his master.”

The Adjutant General. Paul Petrovitch tore the small piece of paper into shreds and threw them on to the fire. He understood that message well enough, and his sallow face flamed with shame and anger.

Even Rastopchine had been forced to bow, but not to Potemkin as of old; and there lay the clue to the rumoured ruin of the Prince of Taurus. Another had taken his place. The Adjutant General. For a long moment pride warred with expediency, until a third element, malice, came down on the side of common sense and decided him to take his friend's counsel and pay the visit he advised.

It was as well to see this new enemy and get his measure; and it would be a long-delayed revenge to witness his enemy's humiliation.

When he came to the ante-rooms of that infamous suite situated under Catherine's rooms, he could see a great crowd of people that filled the room and overflowed into the corridors. Paul might have been approaching the Empress's own suite so great was the number of her subjects who pushed and elbowed each other in order to squeeze into that anteroom.

The loud hum of laughter and talk ceased abruptly as his chamberlain announced him, and two of his household gentlemen pressed through the throng round the door, clearing a path for him.

“Make way for His Imperial Highness the Czarevitch! The Czarevitch! Make way there!”

They stepped back hurriedly, stumbling against one another, and, having curtsied as he passed, the women stared after him and the men grimaced. The notoriety of Gatchina and the man who ruled it made him a figure of morbid curiosity, and for a moment the carefree self-seeking nobles of Holy Russia experienced an uncomfortable twinge of awe; a sudden gloom had descended upon the packed chamber, stilling the shrill voices and causing every knee to bend. Those who had laughed at Catherine's ugly, unimportant son in the days of his youth, now looked into that flat-featured face with the disfiguring pulse beating steadily in the left cheek, and meeting the fierce, cold stare of those prominent blue eyes, looked hurriedly away, aware that in their hearts there was anything but laughter.

Thank God, they murmured to themselves, thank God, he would never be Czar.…

Paul stopped before Rastopchine, and the soldier went down on his knees and kissed his hand.

“God's blessing on the Czarevitch,” he said, and Paul raised him up, unable to conceal his affection for the man.