Curse Not the King (32 page)

Women of that kind were always inimical to her; incapable of placidity or moderation where emotions were concerned, Anna Lapoukhine had already made up her mind to hate Marie Feodorovna, unaware that her enmity had its roots in jealousy, that she, beautiful, witty, unscrupulous and indulged in everything by Paul, was bitterly envious of the plain German princess for the simple reason that she was her lover's wife.…

Any hopes of conciliation that Marie nursed concerning her rival were finally dispelled that evening in the Winter Palace.

The famous Mlle. Lapoukhine was dressed with exotic magnificence, her dress cut outrageously low, while the Czar, whose prudery was a byword in the uncomfortable Court, watched her admiringly; and as a supreme impertinence she wore a set of the old Empress Catherine's priceless jewels, jewels which should have been given to the Emperor's Consort.

When Anna was presented, she curtsied briefly, and her dark eyes stared up at Marie Feodorovna with an expression of open hostility.

Still the Empress delivered her set speech of welcome and preserved her bovine calm, while she fought down and mastered her anger and her fear, knowing that this fierce and lovely Russian could never be won over, that this was no Nelidoff, who would respond to a favour with endless loyalty and gratitude.

Alexander, standing close to his mother, considered his father's mistress and frowned uneasily. She would be difficult, he decided; a haughty, ambitious, ruthless woman, equipped with every weapon that the Empress Consort lacked. And Paul Petrovitch worshipped her. Perhaps her fearlessness was the secret, the Grand Duke thought; everyone trembled before the Czar; even the gayest became stiff and uneasy in his presence. The gloomy, stern man who ruled in Catherine's place punished crudity or moral vagaries as promptly and harshly as he dealt with the dishonesty, sloth and inefficiency which had been a privilege of the well-born for countless generations.

Also he was religious, and, most ridiculous of all, tolerant to those whose faith differed from his own. Even the Catholics, so savagely oppressed in former reigns, were permitted to worship as they pleased under his protection.

The effect of such a personality, backed by the power of such men as Araktchéief, had paralysed the Court with fear, beneath which the bolder members matched their dread with boiling resentment of the change in their mode of life enforced by his rule.

Yet it was typical of his father, that paradoxical, damnable man, with his Puritan dislike of promiscuity, to fall in love with an impudent wanton, to make her his mistress openly, to overwhelm her with treasures, and to laugh indulgently when she snubbed his nobles, affronted his wife, and took personal liberties that no one else in Petersburg would have dared to contemplate.

“She's a danger,” the Grand Duke decided; “a great danger. I hope Pahlen realizes that a woman of that character could ruin everything.…”

But he need not have worried. Von Pahlen had been watching Anna Lapoukhine for weeks, and his estimation of her quickness and ambition were on a par with Alexander's. Also she disliked him, not openly, for he guessed that Paul had spoken in his favour, and she was still trying to fathom him, hoping to find the quality that had captured the friendship of the Czar.

That achievement was his greatest triumph; often, lying awake in his room, Pahlen thought of how much Paul Petrovitch seemed to like him, and smiled unpleasantly in the dark. The incident at Riga never left his mind; his humiliation festered in his imagination like a sore, and nothing the Emperor did to make amends could heal or alleviate that constant stinging need for vengeance.

Also Pahlen hated him as a man; despised him for his ugliness, watched the signs of nervous strain that often eluded his self-control; and, conscious of his own iron stability, sneered inwardly. He dismissed Paul's reforms as the whims of an irresponsible madman, an opinion justified by this absurd decree to lighten the load of the serfs; detested his military innovations, not for their severity, but because they demanded discipline for the officers as well as the men; and considered him a tyrant consumed by bourgeois morality which he did not apply to himself.

Pahlen had made a shrewd study of Anna Lapoukhine, but his prejudice refused to admit the possibility that anyone could find the Emperor tolerable, far less love him.… She slept with him for wealth, for power, for advantages for her family, and for the sheer love of notoriety. At the moment her influence was unbounded, but with every day and hour his own was growing, and that was a fact Mlle. Anna had yet to learn.…

“How beautiful she is, Sire,” he said quietly, and Paul nodded, still watching her where she stood in the centre of a group of fawning courtiers.

“Yes,” he said. “Yes, Pahlen. Everybody spoils her, but who can blame them? … Imagine it, the child wants to waltz!”

The Count raised his eyebrows in surprise, well aware that Paul had forbidden the new dance as immodest.

“But surely that's prohibited, Sire?”

“Not if she wants it, my friend. If it will really please her, all Petersburg shall dance nothing else! Come; let us go over and talk to her.”

Von Pahlen followed Paul across the room, and after a few moments managed to speak to the Empress Marie, who was sitting by her eldest son, pretending that she was impervious to the success of the Lapoukhine.

“Your Majesty,” he said, kissing her hand, and bowing deeply to the Grand Duke Alexander.

“I believe that I owe you a debt of gratitude that I can never hope to repay. Your intercession with the Czar secured my pardon.”

“It was my son's suggestion, Count Pahlen,” she said quickly. “And since you seem to have His Majesty's ear, I hope you will recommend the Grand Duke to him. That will balance the little favour we did you.”

“Be assured of that, Madame.”

Then seeing Anna Lapoukhine's eyes on them, the Count withdrew. The evening ended in triumph for Paul's mistress, and tears for his wife, which she shed profusely in the privacy of her rooms, while the poisonous suggestion first voiced by Alexander returned to her mind and deprived her of sleep for the rest of the night.

Supposing Paul decided to divorce her.…

“Oh, my God,” Marie wailed into her pillow. “What would happen to me and to Alexander then? …”

That notion, so dreaded by the Empress, was just beginning to occur to Anna Lapoukhine.

But his love and the wish to protect her from scandal drove Paul into making a fatal error. Before he had time to realize that he wanted her as his wife, he arranged a marriage of convenience which raised Anna to the rank of a princess and invested her position at Court with an outward respectability.

At first she resisted his wishes; she wept and stormed, terrified that this passion for convention was only the initial stages of dismissal, and when he finally convinced her that the marriage must be in name only, she still refused, afraid to admit to him that a husband was an extra bar to the plan on which she had set her heart.

“I won't marry, I won't!” she raged. “I don't want a title, and I don't want to be tied to someone else.…”

He, who for two years no man had dared to contradict, took her in his arms and reasoned with her gently.

“Please, my darling, do what I ask. You can't live at Court in this position, at the mercy of every scandalmonger in Petersburg; you have no rank, no proper status. If you marry Gagarine you'll have both, and you need never see him afterwards.… You must do it, Anna. It's the first favour I have asked of you.…”

At last she gave in, still reluctant and angry, while Paul's love for her increased by reason of the opposition he had tried so hard to break down; he thanked God for her jealousy, which found vent in accusations that he was tired of her, that this marriage was only the beginning of the end.… She behaved with the recklessness and rage of a woman in love, deluging him with tears and fits of savage sulking, often refusing his embraces, unaware that her hold on him was enormously strengthened by this conduct.

In return for her obedience, she extracted one promise, a promise which left the door to her ambition still unlocked.

“Give me your word that you'll have this miserable marriage annulled if I'm unhappy,” she demanded, and he agreed instantly, wondering why the loophole pleased him, still ignorant of the desire to fulfil his love for her by placing her on the throne at his side.

And while he arranged his domestic affairs, and decided that war with France must be declared, while the reorganization of the army proceeded under the efficient eye of Araktchéief, and the Ambassadors who had written home that Russia's Czar was mad, after witnessing that ghastly funeral, now worded their reports more cautiously, Paul's son Alexander and Paul's good friend von Pahlen began to plot against him.

The conspiracy was slow in starting; the Grand Duke, always unwilling to commit himself, talked to Pahlen for hours on end, probing and calculating, waiting for the older man to make the first move.

For his part, Pahlen played Alexander's game for several months, determined to force that evasive personality into a position from which it could not retreat, wondering whether he dared presume upon the hatred that he sensed in Paul's son, and reveal that his sentiments towards the Emperor were the same.

In the early part of 1799 he was made Military Governor of Petersburg, a position that raised him to real power, and ranked him among the men who helped Paul rule his kingdom. Pahlen accepted the honour with every appearance of gratitude, and went out of his way to be gracious to the new Princess Gagarine, whose dislike of him was becoming very obvious.

Then, backed by the authority his victim had vested in him, he revealed himself to Alexander.

They both attended parades, an exercise which the Grand Duke enjoyed in spite of himself, and which Pahlen loathed as synonymous with Paul, and it was after they left the parade ground one morning that the new Governor suggested a walk in the palace gardens.

“I love Petersburg,” he remarked as they turned down a broad path flanked by trees and lawns that swept down to the carved river parapet beyond which the great Neva flowed.

“It has many happy memories for me, Highness. Memories of your illustrious grandmother, and of the days of Russia's glory.…”

Alexander's fair skin flushed red and then faded into a pallor that indicated his mingled excitement and fright.

“No one here speaks of Catherine the Second,” he said.

“I speak of her,” Pahlen retorted. “And I think of her often. I look on this city, I listen to the endless drilling, marching, I see the lines of
khibitas
¹
leaving for Siberia with your father's prisoners closed inside them, and I remember Russia as it used to be when Catherine Alexeievna reigned!”

“Why do you say this to me, Count?” Alexander questioned, still hedging, tormented by a sudden impulse to withdraw from the situation he had schemed so long to bring about. He had sent for Pahlen, knowing his nature, and had prayed that a means might be found to pull Paul off his throne and kill him, so that he might ascend it himself; and it was typical of him that when his desires were on the point of being forced into the light, he could not bear to acknowledge them.

“Because you remind me of the Empress,” Pahlen answered. “Because when I heard of her death I expected to come here to do homage to you as Czar of all the Russias. I never thought to find your father in your place.…”

“It's not my place, Count Pahlen,” the Grand Duke whispered. “That is treason.…”

Von Pahlen stopped and faced him, gazing directly into Alexander's averted face. His flat, cold eyes were glittering with excitement; for the first time he portrayed himself and gloried in the moment of revelation. He stood before the Grand Duke as the man he was in fact, hard, proud, merciless, a man for whom risk or humanity were of no consequence at all.

“It was treason to the Empress to let her son ascend the throne. It was treason to you, Sire, and treason to Russia.… Now I have said what all Petersburg thinks. You can go and denounce me to your father if you wish!”

Slowly Alexander looked up at him, his handsome features haggard, his blue eyes pained. Pahlen, the consummate actor, was not deceived by this hypocrisy, and seeing the signs of sorrowful reluctance put on for his benefit, knew that he was safe and Alexander's complicity assured.

“I would never betray you, Pahlen. You know how my father's severity sickens me; I can't bear to think what he would do to you.”

“What he has done to others,” Pahlen said grimly. “Death by flogging. A thousand lashes with the knout, watched by friend Araktchéief. That's how I should die, Highness, for
I'm
not a prince of the royal blood. But when his hatred of you ends with your being taken to the Schüsselburg, you'll be as helpless as I am at this moment, having talked treason to you, and put my life in your hands!”

“You have nothing to fear, Pahlen, I swear it! I am your friend.”

Pahlen bowed and lifting the Grand Duke's hand, he kissed it as if he did homage to a ruler rather than a prince.

“I only fear for you, Highness, and for your brothers and sisters, and for the Empress Marie. I know the Emperor's mind, God help me, and I tremble for all of you!”

“We all live in fear, Count,” Alexander answered. “The Imperial family, the whole Court, the army, everyone! He's a sick man, very sick … my grandmother used to tell me that even as a child he was violent and unreasonable, that he suspected plots against his life.… We must have pity for him, Pahlen; we must remember that these fancies of the mind make him severe.”

“He isn't fit to rule,” the Count said, and his little eyes watched Alexander closely. “A sovereign sick in mind is worse than one crippled in body; and no one can cure him now, Highness. Princess Gagarine knows now, if she did not before; she's nursed him when his head has troubled him, she's seen him blind with pain, wandering in his thoughts like a man with some fever.… The others know his condition, Araktchéief, Rastopchine, but they only think of themselves! They don't care what happens to Russia or to you while a madman holds the power of life and death!”