Curse Not the King (29 page)

But at that moment, confronted with the opportunity of every ambitious woman's dreams, Anna Petrovna's cleverness deserted her.

As a child she had heard of the Empress Catherine's son, listening to the adult gossip which described a distant palace framed Gatchina where deeds of terrible ferocity were taking place; and as a young woman she had witnessed the wave of panic that followed his accession, spreading from Petersburg to Moscow, where the local nobility spent weeks in dread of what the Emperor Paul would do on his assumption of supreme power.

In company with everyone else, she had expected a cruel tyrant, and found that when she knelt before him she felt only awe and fascination.

Since that first meeting she had been fascinated by him, his ugly tragic face pursued her in dreams and the memory of his expression when he looked on her made her tremble with an emotion that she could not analyse.

Ambition, recklessness and egotism drew her to him in his absence and these sentiments she understood; but it was another element that urged her to detend him with all the asperity of a notoriously sharp tongue when those who fawned upon him to his face dubbed him a tyrant when his back was turned.

And now, when the object of her plans and fancies held her fingers in his own and danced the leisured figures of the minuet, she only followed him and trembled, her wit and charm dried up into a silence that she could not break.

Yet there was no fear in her heart, and she knew this, knew that this man, whose power could take from her by force what others pleaded for in vain, was shy in his pursuit and strangely humble.

He has been hurt, she thought quickly, and remembered an old half-forgotten legend of his first wife and a lover.…

When the minuet ended he turned to her and offered his arm.

“Will you take some wine with me, Mademoiselle?” he asked her and she nodded, thanking him with a sweet gravity that would have astonished those who knew her.

He ordered a chair to be set for her, and then sat down himself indicating that he wished to speak to Mlle. Lapoukhine without interruption.

Remembering the plain, uncertain Catherine Nelidoff, whose path to Imperial favour had begun on the platonic level of nurse and comforter, Koutaïssof observed Anna Lapoukhine and smiled.

She was extraordinarily beautiful, he admitted, his greedy eyes considering the exquisite face upturned to Paul; and following the lines of her figure, he noted the pale perfect bosom and the narrow waist that a man's hands could measure.

His spies termed her hot tempered, wilful and shrewish, and for a moment his manhood regretted that so much spirit and potential pleasure should fall into the possession of a man who would never know how to tame the one and make the best use of the other.…

For all his innate fear of Paul, Koutaïssof permitted himself the luxury of a secret contempt; his cunning had divined Paul's weakness years before, and he, whose use for women began and ended with the satisfaction of his lust, viewed the Czar's need of affection with cynical scorn.

As successor to that incarnation of sentimental virtue Katya Nelidoff, his master had chosen a black-haired hussy, attracted by some fancy that recalled the passion of his unhappy marriage to an unfaithful slut, and with his gutter estimates of all human values, Koutaïssof judged her reign would last till she was found in bed with someone else.

But for once his calculation erred.

Anna Lapoukhine sat quietly, talking to the man already known as the Death's Head Czar, and found him gentle, unassuming and, despite his dignity, pathetic in a way that made her long to give him tangible comfort.

The impulse to touch his hand, to press her lips to that disfigured left cheek, was so strong that her eyes filled with tears, and the struggling, half-acknowledged feeling which had stirred in her that night so many months ago flooded her heart in a torrent before which ambition, hauteur and self-interest were torn up and swept away.

He had given her nothing and promised nothing, but she, who had reserved herself for wealth and power, sat at his side and fell in love with him, eager to offer rather than receive, aware that had he been the poorest and most unimportant man in Russia, the lack of ceremony would have made her surrender all the sweeter.

“Why have you never come to Petersburg?” he asked her.

“My father's duties keep him here, Sire.”

For a moment Paul's hand strayed to his cravat in the old nervous gesture.

“I could give him a post in the capital, if you would like to visit Petersburg,” he said, and seeing that she hesitated, his confidence began to waver.

“Understand me, Mademoiselle Anna, I do not command,” he told her simply. “Only come if you wish.…”

“I do wish, Sire … with all my heart!”

“Then I am very happy,” he said, and he turned the great sapphire in and out upon his finger; it was a trick he often used in order to conceal that his hands shook.…

“It would please me very much to present you with what you need for the long journey,” he added.

Anna Petrovna looked at him and smiled for the first time, and the gentleness of her expression softened her lovely mouth and bold black eyes, endowing her with something more than beauty.

“I need nothing, Sire, except to be near you. But I fear my family will prove very greedy.…”

“They shall have whatever they ask. And I repeat, you have only to express a wish and I will see it gratified … it would please me very much if I could grant you something.”

“You can,” she whispered. “Let me be near you here in Moscow.”

The time spent in Moscow was the happiest Paul Petrovitch had known for almost twenty years, and to those who knew him he seemed a man transformed. Anna Lapoukhine, already his acknowledged mistress, was as gay as she was beautiful; no sign of melancholy was allowed to develop into moods or depression once her sharp eyes detected it, and Paul was teased, and caressed into laughter, until he took her in his arms in token of capitulation. From the moment of their first illicit meeting after the Kremlin ball, a meeting contrived by Koutaïssof on the Czar's instructions, a fierce mutual passion had flared up between them, and the difference in age and temperament dissolved before the intensity of their desire for one another.

Whatever Paul's dignity in public, or the hauteur and wilfulness of Anna Petrovna, who was making scores of powerful enemies, the moment the doors of the Imperial suite closed behind them, they forgot everything but the need to rush into each other's arms, and there acknowledge that the longing had tormented them all day.

He was bewitched sensually, fascinated by her boldness with others and her unfailing tenderness with him, gratified by her refusal to take money and mystified by the contradiction when she greeted the gift of some of Catherine Alexeievna's marvellous jewels by dancing round the room with pleasure.

And sometimes, when she was quiet, and thought herself unobserved, the memory of the woman she resembled so much in face and yet differed from so sharply in character, returned to him as he watched her features in repose, so that the pain of that old heartbreak stabbed at him and made him wonder why he didn't hate her.

But for some strange reason it only served to increase his love and sometimes an odd fancy entered his head that Natalie had come back to pay her debt and erase the wrong she had done him, content to be a mistress whose pedestal was no higher than her Emperor's bed.…

And what a mistress she had proved to be!

“I am the happiest of men,” he told Koutaïssof. “Come, help me think of something else to give her.…”

“Jewels, Sire,” the Turk murmured, and his master shook his head.

“I've given her my mother's rubies; she shall have the rest later, when we get to Petersburg. No, something different. Think, man, think.…”

Koutaïssof wetted his lips; it was the only sign of nervousness he ever gave, but every instinct warned him that now was the moment to complete the plan worked out by Rastopchine and himself, with Araktchéief's sanction.

“If I may suggest, Sire, your best gift to the lady would be Mlle. Nelidoff's suite in the Winter Palace.…”

Paul turned and stared at him, his blue eyes narrowing, all his good humour gone.

“What do you mean by that?”

But the Turk's courage held and he continued.

“It may be a little difficult for Mlle. Anna with the Empress, and I venture to suggest—most humbly, Sire—that you remove the Nelidoff to some convenient place before Mademoiselle arrives in the capital. That should resign Her Majesty and convince the lady that you do not intend to abandon her.… I am sure, Sire, that she would prefer not to find Mlle. Nelidoff still in Petersburg.”

It was a daring move, but at the same time insinuating and shrewd. Paul's heart was soft where a weeping woman was concerned, even an outworn mistress might prove troublesome if her pleas were fortified by tears and the entreaties of that pompous, pandering wife.… He had been tired of Catherine Nelidoff for countless months, yet out of sentiment he kept her in her old estate. Therefore it was imperative to place her out of sight and reach, to prevail upon the Czar that it was necessary to be cruel and forceful in order to be kind.…

“Why don't you send her to a convent?” the Turk whispered.

But Paul scarcely listened; instead he pictured Katya Nelidoff waiting in the Winter Palace, prepared by advance rumours for the coming of a young and lovely rival, and envisaged the bitter struggle for his favours which Marie Feodorovna would force on the unhappy woman. Whatever his past feeling for her, it was irrevocably dead, blighted by doubt of her motives, by an utter satiation of her body that he only fully realized since the advent of Anna Petrovna into his life.

She must go, he decided, and go before his adored Anna could be angered by the sight of her; and he appeased his conscience with the promise that she should have all the money, luxury and favours she desired to soften her dismissal.

And his wife, that pious procuress of dubious loyalty … she should accept Anna Lapoukhine and do as she was told, or else prepare to be got rid of in her turn.…

The day that Catherine Nelidoff left Petersburg, the Empress and her eldest son were sitting together in her rooms as usual.

Marie had been weeping; even her stolid, calculating nature had been stirred by the sight of her old enemy and recent ally going into exile. She had been very brave, the Empress admitted to her curious son. She had not railed or wept, but her acceptance of Paul's gently worded order reminded Marie of a woman hearing the sentence of her death pronounced. And in that same, listless obedience, his mistress and companion of ten years packed her possessions and departed, her narrow shoulders bowed, and a message of loving submission to the Emperor on her lips.

She travelled to the Löhde Fortress, where magnificent apartments in the palace buildings were prepared for her, equipped with every luxury and treasure that the orders of the Emperor could devise; she resided there in freedom, wealthy and assured of his protection, and until her voluntary retirement to the convent of her distant youth, Catherine Nelidoff slept in a soft gilded bed, a few hundred yards from the fetid cell which Catherine Alexeievna's will had designated as the tomb of her son Paul.

The Emperor did not return to Petersburg immediately. He went on manœuvres, an innovation detested by the Russian army and abhorred by the guards regiments whose former indolence and inefficiency were being remedied by exile and the knout. Then he visited Kazan.

In the meantime the Lapoukhines prepared to move to the capital, and while Anna controlled her impatient heart and senses as calmly as she could in the interval, Paul's wife and eldest son sat in Petersburg and trembled.

“What a misfortune!” Marie Feodorovna raved, twisting her plump hands in despair, while the impenetrable Alexander listened. “This woman Lapoukhine is most undesirable! I've heard all kinds of disquieting things about her. They say she's arrogant and vain, that her family are swallowing money and honours as fast as your father bestows them … and I'm told he's completely under her sway. Oh, my God, Alexis, why couldn't he have remained with the Nelidoff!”

Alexander put his arm round her unwillingly, somehow revolted by the lack of pride in his mother that bewailed her late rival so openly.

The fact that most of the wretched Marie's anxiety was actuated by her fear for him counted for nothing with her son.

“I should never have written that letter forbidding the creature to come here, after Katya left,” the Empress mourned, “it made your father so angry!”

“It
was
foolish,” Alexander agreed coldly, knowing that the tactless impulse had made an enemy of this powerful new mistress and infuriated her royal protector.

“But I did it for you, Alex! Nelidoff was your friend as well as mine.… I didn't want a different influence being exerted over the Czar. Supposing this woman dislikes you, my dearest boy? Supposing your enemies, Rastopchine and that vile Araktchéief, bribe her to work against you … Oh, merciful God! Even I mightn't be able to protect you then!”

The Empress had begun to weep, and her son, always the victim of surface emotion, wiped his own eyes.

“Whatever my father does, my conscience is clear,” he said. “But I'm not really frightened for myself. Dear Mother, have you never thought that if this Anna Lapoukhine is as beautiful, and my father is as infatuated, as they say, he might end up by divorcing you and marrying her?”

Marie Feodorovna's face turned deadly white for a moment, then a reserve of stolid German courage aided her and she released herself from her son's treacherous embrace and began to walk up and down.

“No, I had never thought of that,” she admitted. “Not even in the worst days, when he was so ill at Gatchina and so strange, and so violent over that miserable Nelidoff, I never thought he'd put me away if he came to the throne.”