Curse Not the King (2 page)

He had expected consort's rank as the reward for his services, but equal power was the one favour Catherine would never give him. Money, lands, palaces and serfs were poured into his discontented hands, but nothing removed the stain of favouritism from his manhood. In the arms of countless mistresses, Catherine's lover sought revenge and consolation, and for ten long years she had suffered agonies of helpless jealousy, too much in love with him and too afraid of his power to discard him and end her servitude.

The previous year had seen the final outrage against her in the seduction of his thirteen-year-old niece, and Catherine, driven beyond caution, sent him on a mission and then banished him to his estates.

Her chief lady-in-waiting was securing a diamond coronet in her hair; the huge stones flashed brilliantly in the candlelight; a magnificent necklace was already gleaming around her throat. The Empress reflected suddenly that she would gladly exchange every jewel in her possession if she might safely return to Gregory Orlov's arms. But whatever the loneliness and nostalgia she felt, Catherine knew better than to weaken. Knowledge of her own temperament had dictated a measure which made Orlov's return impossible. She had taken another lover in his place.

“Your Majesty looks beautiful to-night. More beautiful than ever. Will you choose a fan?” Catherine looked into the mirror and smiled at the speaker's reflection. The Countess Bruce, her friend and confidante, the personification of discretion and loyalty; few people understood the needs of Catherine as she did, or pandered to them so efficiently. “Have you selected some for me to see, Bruce?”

“Yes, Madame. With that red gown, I thought perhaps one of these …” The Empress considered some half-dozen fans, a sample of the hundreds in her possession, most of which she would neither see nor use. After a moment she chose a painted chicken skin on gold sticks inset with diamonds.

“I wish to look well to-night. Remember, my daughter-in-law is very pretty!” Catherine laughed.

“No woman in all Russia can compare with you, Madame!”

“Now you know this little Natalie is quite charming! She's been much admired, and my son is infatuated with her.… It's strange, I never thought him capable of anything but hate.… Bruce?”

“Yes, Madame?”

“Could any woman care for him, do you think? Speak honestly. Everything may depend upon this marriage.”

The Countess paused and met her mistress's eye in the mirror.

“Since you ask me, Madame, I don't think it's likely. No. I'm not squeamish, but even I wouldn't fancy him as a lover.… But she's young and pliable. They tell me she was carefully watched in Germany and nothing could be found against her. She may be content enough with him.”

“I made sure of her virtue,” the Empress remarked grimly. “I want no whores intriguing here, neither in politics nor in love.”

At the stroke of twelve she rose.

Countess Bruce smiled admiringly at her.

“Shall I send for M. Vassiltchikov, Madame?”

Catherine Alexeievna nodded, unaware that this was the first of many names that the Countess would mention in the years to come.

“Yes,” she said. “I am ready now. Call him to escort me to the banqueting hall.”

In the ante-room the new favourite waited. He was a young man in his early twenties, tall, well-built and handsome, and he bowed low over his royal mistress's hand.

On his arm, the Empress left her suite; she walked to the banqueting hall in a growing mood of optimism. It was the night of her son's wedding; all over Russia the people feasted and rejoiced; the streets of Petersburg were full of happy crowds, celebrating the event with the Imperial gift of free wine and bread. From that moment she would put the past behind her; the shadowy end of Peter the Third, the death of Ivan; her lover's defections and final downfall—these would be forgotten. She smiled warmly at Vassiltchikov, and tried to summon a fleeting affection for the cause of her happy presentiment.

Paul Petrovitch and his new bride were waiting, waiting as she and Peter had done nearly thirty years ago on the night of their marriage, seated in the same chairs in the same banqueting hall.

But the resemblance would end there. The union would be successful, and fruitful, and she would try once more to make peace with her son.

Filled with these intentions, Catherine passed on to the banquet unaware that, three thousand miles away, the skies over the southern Urals flamed red with the fires of rebellion.

The heir to the throne of Russia was then nineteen years old, and that night, for almost the first time in his life, he found himself the centre of attraction in his mother's Court.

The Imperial table was at the head of the immense banqueting hall; above it, a crimson velvet canopy rose to the ceiling, surmounted by a golden double-headed eagle, supporting the crown between its dual beaks and clasping the royal insignia in each claw; directly underneath this Imperial emblem, the Empress sat on a magnificent throne, raised above the level of the other diners. Paul Petrovitch was seated further down the table, aware that hundreds of curious eyes were fixed upon him, and despite his pretence of arrogant composure, his sallow face flushed and one hand tugged nervously at his lace cravat. He was dressed with all the splendour of his state and with the elegance of an age of lavish male attire. His tight blue satin coat was fastened with large diamonds, and his broad chest blazed with an array of Imperial and foreign orders. The lace at his neck was priceless and secured by an enormous sapphire; all the wealth of Catherine's kingdom was symbolized in the person of her son, and with it the pitiable spectacle of a disinherited puppet, placed on show.

Since Catherine's accession Paul had been thrust into the background; insecurity had been the corner-stone of his early years and growing manhood, and parental love had been denied him. Ill health had weakened him and ravaged his features with convulsions that left a permanent nervous twitch behind them. Inevitably his stability had suffered; deprived of love and normal interests, Paul's thwarted mind had seized upon the dim memory of the man he thought to be his father, and his childish need had invested the cowardly, effeminate Peter the Third with an aura of martyrdom and fanatical worship.

Peter Feodorovitch had become his idol; in the end he had sunk to bribing his servants to tell him those things about his father that he wished to hear. The sordid, tragic history of Catherine and Peter had reached him through the medium of ignorant lackeys, and their stories raised the figure of a maternal demon to rank beside his paternal god. His mother was a usurper, they whispered, and the listening child would sit and clench his fists at the thought of her treachery.

When the tale of his father's murder was repeated to him, the Czarevitch was often seen to weep, though he knew every detail of the tragedy by heart; so, over a period of years, Paul's hatred of his mother grew in violence until it could no longer be concealed.

She had killed his father, taken the Crown which was his rightful inheritance, ignored and despised him, while she kept a low-born lover in the state which would have done honour to a king. It had become necessary to exclude the Czarevitch in order to avoid scenes which he never shrank from making, and Catherine added to his grievances by banishing him out of her sight as much as possible.

Despite his youth, Paul Petrovitch fully recognized the danger which threatened him as a result of his attitude and the Empress's dislike, and it was characteristic of his reckless courage that the knowledge urged him to try the patience of his mother and her ministers to the limit, daring them to take the course of imprisonment and death which he knew they contemplated.

But on this night he wanted neither recognition nor revenge. His only desire was to be alone with his new wife.

With his first sight of her, a weight of unhappiness seemed to have lifted from his life. Shyness, stammering, all the inherited curses of a shattered nervous system had impeded him in the early weeks of his courtship, and the timid little seventeen-year-old Princess from Darmstadt lacked the confidence to make the necessary advance.

Strangely, this inexperience drew the Czarevitch out of the shell of his own fierce prudery. His first reaction to the mention of a wife had been typically violent. No woman chosen by his mother would be acceptable to him, and only when he was presented to his betrothed did his hostility waver and finally collapse.

They had baptized her into the Orthodox Church, changing the harsh German names and titles to the flowing Russian of Natalie Alexeievna. Paul leant towards her and smiled, some formal query on his lips, love and admiration in his heart.

The new Grand Duchess was small and delicately made; her proportions were almost child-like in their fragility, and the oval face upturned to her young husband was exquisitely pretty.

Her dark hair was piled unpowdered on her head, Paul's wedding gift of pearls and diamonds blazed round her throat and cascaded down over her breast; white ostrich plumes and a white satin dress embroidered with silver and pearls emphasized the bridal motif. She sat at his side, as pale and fragile as a creature of the Russian snows and gazed at her young husband with eyes as blue as sapphires. Never had Paul seen anyone whose beauty so conformed to his ideal; pride swelled in his heart as he looked at her, increased by the knowledge that all men's eyes were turned on him in envy. She glanced up at him and smiled and his new-found solicitude sensed weariness, so that he touched her arm with a comforting possessive gesture.

“Are you very tired, Madame?” he asked anxiously.

Natalie Alexeievna managed to smile in denial.

“No, thank you, Highness. You show me too much kindness.…”

That at least was true, and as she looked at him, Natalie's heart softened in gratitude and pity. For all his chivalry, his assumption of courtesy and grandeur, Paul Petrovitch of Russia was perhaps the ugliest man she had seen in her life. So ugly, indeed, that unlike his delighted reaction to their first meeting, his future bride had wept with disappointment. From his earliest years, the extraordinary likeness to his dead father Peter the Third had been a source of comment to the Court and of horror to his mother. Since birth, rumour had declared him a bastard, son of Catherine by a Russian lover, but seeing him there were few who doubted his paternity.

The Mask of Peter the Third, so a tactless observer had named him, and the remark was repeated to the Empress. It did nothing to lessen her hatred for the innocent boy. A reminder of treason and murder was growing up in her sight and in the view of all those who cared to remember the past.

But Natalie Alexeievna saw her husband with an unbiased eye; there was no memory of the dead Czar to influence her judgment. Paul Petrovitch strongly resembled his mother.

Every feature of the Empress was reproduced in her son; her broad forehead was there, only accentuated to the point of baldness, her fine Grecian nose had been inherited, but flattened and misshapen, giving the Czarevitch a cruel, juvenile look, and her splendid eyes were set in his head. They might have redeemed the travesty of his appearance, had their expression been less fierce and tragic.

To such a man Natalie Alexeievna had been delivered, and despite the heat of that vast banqueting hall and the weight of her elaborate clothes, the Grand Duchess shivered at the thought. His gentleness and generosity made the burden of her state a little easier to bear; in all the strangeness of that teeming Court, she had one friend. It was her misfortune that he must also be a lover.

From the comparative peace and security of Darmstadt, the seventeen-year-old Princess had been thrust into this background, and the only support offered to her had been the blind, clumsy devotion of the overshadowed Paul.

Instinctively she feared the Empress. Her youth and inexperience shrank before the immense personality of the older woman, and her narrow judgment recoiled in loathing from the crimes attributed to her.

Paul was frighteningly ugly, and physically the thought of him repulsed her, but she clung to him desperately, and in the few weeks before their marriage, a strange bond of fear and dependence had been forged between them. Left undisturbed, it might have grown into mutual love, but already events were moving to determine otherwise.

Among the young men who attended upon the Czarevitch was a certain André Rasumovsky. Son of a family ennobled by the late Empress Elizabeth, Paul's equerry was gifted with good looks only exceeded by his charm. Some four years older than his master, he was the perfect model of a young nobleman who had grown to maturity under the protection of Catherine Alexeievna. Cynical, gay and without moral scruples, he liked Paul Petrovitch as little as he understood him.

He was tall and gracefully built, carefully veneered by the manners and dress of western culture, but the narrow, hot, black eyes and sensual mouth betrayed him. A scratch upon the polished surface quickly revealed the lustful unscrupulous barbarian, true descendant of the savage Muscovite boyars whose adoption of European customs dated back less than a hundred years.

Fate opened the first phase of triple tragedy when it sent him among the escort which brought Paul's bride by ship to Russia. Rasumovsky had noticed her immediately, drawn by her personal beauty and by the novelty of her obvious virginity. Desire was easily kindled in him; but the treasure destined for his hated master was strictly guarded, so that the equerry was left at the mercy of his own sensual imaginings and a longing increased by the knowledge of the difficulties in his way.

In Petersburg, his duties kept him chained to Paul's side and he came near enough to Natalie Alexeievna to inflame his interest to the point of frenzy. Day by day he watched the Czarevitch with his beautiful betrothed, watched and listened to the clumsy, boyish gallantries that he longed to be allowed to make to her himself. Perhaps the greatest irritant was Paul's gruff admission that he was very much in love, accompanied by his usual nervous blush. Instinctively Rasumovsky had drawn himself up to his full height, conscious of the other's short stature, and congratulated him with an angry sneer that his master failed to notice.