Empress of the Night (10 page)

For the February 10 ball, given to celebrate Peter’s twenty-seventh birthday, she orders a blue velvet gown embroidered with gold oak leaves. Full lace ruffles for the inside of her sleeves. Velvet wrist covers trimmed with marten fur. She ties a scarlet sash around her waist. The months of pining in her room have given her skin a translucent pallor. Giving birth has filled her breasts, added a soft layer of fat on her hips.

At the ball, she walks up to her husband without hesitation. Her birthday wishes for him flow with easy grace. When
Das Fräulein
winces, she, Catherine, Russia’s Grand Duchess, turns to her. “Mademoiselle,” she says, “your malice is taxing your features. If you do not check it, it might cause permanent damage.”

There is silence after these words. Where is this new courage coming from? What has brought it on? Whose secret backing?

Catherine can see these suspicions as if they were squirming worms, wiggling on the moist, freshly dug soil.

Das Fräulein
’s elation disappears, pinched out like a candle flame. She gives her lover a quick, pleading look. But Peter is Peter, the same weak, vacillating man he has always been. He is also a coward, and cowards bow before force and hide behind anyone who offers protection. Nothing for you, from this quarter!

Das Fräulein
is no match for Catherine.

The evening is long and the Grand Duchess of Russia has just begun.

V chuzhom glazu sorinku zametno, a v svoyom—brevna ne vidat’
. In another person’s eye you see the smallest of motes; in your own, not even a log.

Her words, Catherine can tell, are making rounds across the glittering ballroom. Fans flicker, courtiers hurry from one group to another, repeat what she has said.

“You’ve become intolerably proud,” Peter informs her. “Everyone is complaining about you.”

“Who is everyone, Peter?”

Her husband laughs, with dark glee. “I was told you would ask this. That this would be the first thing you would ask. But I know how to bring you to your senses.”

“Let me ask another question, Peter,” she says. “What exactly does my pride consist of?”

He wrinkles his pug nose as if to sniff the air for clues.

“You hold yourself too erect,” he finally says. There is unease in his voice. Whatever words he imagined her to say, these were not it, or he has forgotten the answers the Shuvalovs must have drummed into him.

“Do you then wish me to stoop like a slave?” Her voice is stained with irritation.

“I know how to bring you to reason,” he says. “You are arrogant. You need to be taught a lesson.”

“And how do you intend to do it?” she retorts.

He is not prepared for her calm. She has cornered him; she should remember that even a coward is dangerous when cornered. But she is past such considerations.

Peter, his back leaning against the wall, draws his sword out from his scabbard.

“What do you intend to do with that?” Catherine asks in an icy voice. “Challenge me to a duel, Peter? Then I ought to get a sword, too, don’t you think?”

He slides the blade back inside the scabbard.

“You are always so spiteful,” he says, his face red.

“In what way?”

“You are putting down my friends. You humiliate them.”

“Your friends, Peter?” she asks. “Who are they, these true friends of yours I’m so spiteful toward?”

“Countess Shuvalova says—” he mumbles.

“The Shuvalovs call themselves your friends,” she interrupts him. “But do friends humiliate your wife in public? Do friends spread rumors behind her back? Do friends send a husband to chastise his wife without him really knowing why?”

Peter is staring at her, blinking, his once white skin reddened and pocked. The sour odor around him, vodka mixed with tobacco, makes her stomach churn.

“This is what happens if you don’t trust me,” Peter stammers. “If you had come to me and complained about the Shuvalovs, all would’ve been well.”

This is a withdrawal, almost an apology, she knows. An offering of a truce she would have accepted only a few weeks before. Now she pushes it away.

“What could I complain about, Peter? Rumors? Innuendos? Wouldn’t you wish proofs? Certainty?”

Peter is no longer capable of following her argument. Like a drowning man, he has latched on to the thought of defending her. A notion which is big, noble, and beautiful. “I would’ve warned them not to talk about you.” His tobacco-stained fingers are still clenched on the sword’s handle.

She frowns. “You shouldn’t say anything else, Peter. You’ve had too much to drink.”

The harshness in her voice surprises him.

“You … you …” he stutters. “Why have you …”

“Go to sleep,” Catherine interrupts and walks away.

Later that evening, she is in a drawing room, playing cards with Lev Naryshkin and the British Ambassador. Lace ruffles enhance the shape of her hands. The wrist covers stop the cold from entering her bones.

The cards land on the table with a soft thud.

She has just let her companions win another round, three hundred rubles each, so they are both in an excellent mood when Alexander Shuvalov approaches them. An ugly man, with bulging eyes and a twitching cheek. Shuvalov is the head of the Secret Chancery; he’s accustomed to seeing fear in those he merely glances at. Her spies tell Catherine that he can kill a man with one blow to his temple.

Before he speaks, she points at the tray on which bottles of champagne and Malaga wine have been placed side by side.

“I’ve heard that champagne spoils your blood,” she announces. “Doctor Halliday advises me to drink Malaga, instead.”

Alexander Shuvalov’s twitching cheek makes him look like a maimed Cyclops.

“The Empress has asked me if I agree,” Catherine continues. “I said I wasn’t sure yet.”

Lev Naryshkin chuckles. Her threats are plain: Everyone knows that champagne is the Shuvalovs’ monopoly.

She picks up her cards, unfolds them slowly, one by one, and deals the queen of spades. “Can you beat this, Lev?” she asks, as Alexander Shuvalov bows stiffly and takes his leave.

Tsarevich
, she thinks.

Paul is such a small child, lanky, with eyes that narrow and harden when anything new appears in front of them. His wet nurses never stop fussing. Never let him stand on his own feet without hovering over him like clucking hens. Clutching his elbows at the slightest sign that he might waver, let alone fall.

Is this why, after making a step or two on his own, he lifts his hands to be picked up and carried around? Whines and whimpers at the slightest delay?

Elizabeth is ruining him
, Catherine decides.
Indulged at every step, how can he ever learn anything of use?

The Grand Duchess is allowed to see her son only once a week. She steels herself for these visits, cordons off thoughts of regret, of what could have been but won’t. The child is always dressed in too many layers, his face flushed and sweaty. He knows no solitude, no silence, no boredom that would force him to come up with his own amusements. Someone is always cooing to him, singing, filling his mind with peasant tales. The nursery is so crowded with toys that nothing holds his attention for long.

What can she bring him that he doesn’t have already? A bunch of wildflowers? A pinecone? A handful of shiny chestnuts?

“Look! Don’t you want to touch it? Feel how smooth they are?”

Paul shakes his head or claps his hands over his eyes. Or buries his face in his nurse’s apron, to titters of approval.

What have they been telling him? That his mama is a witch? A Baba
Yaga of fairy tales who fattens children before she eats them up? Is this why he spits out the apricot confit she has brought?

“I don’t know what the wet nurses tell him,” Varvara says. Her eyes are sad, for she does know, but she has taken it into her heart to be a savior, a guardian angel who keeps bad news away.

“Can you not find out?”

Children outgrow their fears, Varvara assures her. Children forget what they have been told. Children change. A mother’s love always wins.

There are so many questions the Grand Duchess shouldn’t ask, her friends warn her. Does my son eat well? Does he wake up at night? Does he cry much? Why is he so timid? The Empress should have no reasons to think that the Grand Duchess doesn’t trust her. “My son is in the best of hands,” she should say. Or “No one on earth would care for Paul better than Her Imperial Majesty does.”

She should smile, too, when she says it. A broad smile of carefree confidence. Of trust. Of maternal gratitude.

She listens to these admonitions. She must. No one survives alone. Fortune needs to be nudged along. The Empress is ailing. The crucial moment is near. It won’t be long now.

Day after day, her friends sneak into Catherine’s inner rooms. They have learned to become invisible. A scratch at the door is a sign. A cat’s meow. A red handkerchief under her pillow. A pat on her shoulder at the Russian Theater. A note pressed into her hand, with “
La Grande dame
is on her way” hastily scribbled across it. A warning delivered not a moment too early so Catherine would know the Empress has just set off for what she believes is a surprise visit. A visit that will find the Grand Duchess alone, not lost in some forbidden book but bowing to the Holy Icons, lost in fervent prayers.

Without her friends, Catherine would have perished long ago.

Lev Naryshkin whispers: “Not all men are like Serge, Catherine … One bad apple doesn’t have to spoil the whole barrel,” and he devises elaborate escapes from the palace for a few hours of freedom. Katya Dashkova knows what the Shuvalovs tell Peter. Varvara Nikolayevna hears the Palace Guards laughing behind Peter’s back, mocking his tight Holsteiner uniform, which forces him to mince his steps like a child who
needs to pee. Saying that her husband resembles Frederick the Great as much as an orangutan resembles a man.

Not all men are like Serge
, she repeats to herself.

Stanislav, loving and beloved, is—like her—a foreigner at this court, a traveler from Poland in search of knowledge. Lost, he confesses, in Russia’s vastness. Bewildered by the sublime happiness he has not dared to expect.

In the winter dark, broken by flaring lampposts that fill the streets with rank hempseed scent, these words send gooseflesh up Catherine’s arms.

On this sleigh ride, they cuddle under fox furs, submerged in their own heat, oblivious to the frost that pinches their cheeks. Their smells mingle, an intoxicating mixture of perfume and sweat. Their hands burrow inside the furs.

Outside the city gates, the sleigh picks up speed. Soon they fly through the frozen fields. The harness bells tinkle. The driver—bribed into secrecy—never once turns toward them.

Her hand is on Stanislav’s thigh, fingers spread, bearing down. It is all there, the melting and the longing, the words of love whispered with burning intensity. At moments like these she almost believes that they will never part.

And then darkness strikes, thick and sticky and impenetrable. Catherine is lying flat on the snow, her body bruised, her head throbbing with pain. Above her, in the sky, the Big Dipper is speckled with silver leaf. Stanislav is kneeling over her, his hands clasped in a prayer, a supplication for her to live.

She has no memory of what has just happened, so she must piece it together from the broken whispers of her beloved. The horse stumbled and fell, the sleigh toppled; she slipped out of his arms, catapulted into darkness.

“My head,” she whispers. Her eyes feel heavy; her thoughts thrum.

“You must’ve hit a boulder,” Stanislav says. “I thought I’d lost you.”

She lifts her head in spite of the wave of nausea that travels up to her throat. Her lips are parched; her tongue tastes blood. The driver, frantic
with fear, is urging them to get back into the sleigh, which he has managed to set straight. The man is thick-skinned, with ruddy pockmarked cheeks. “Your Highnesses,” he pleads, ready to fall on his knees, prostrate himself, “have pity on me.”

The snow feels impossibly soft and soothing. Stanislav has placed some of it on her forehead, where it now melts and trickles down her neck.
What now?
his eyes ask.

“Help me up,” she whispers.

He extends his hand, and she grips it. Carefully she lifts herself up, waving the terrified driver away. The first steps are painful. Her ribs hurt, and so does the small of her back. Her right knee is throbbing. She limps toward the sleigh, leaning on her lover’s shoulder. Stanislav’s chin trembles; his teeth chatter. He has prayed for her to live. He has offered his life and his happiness to God in exchange for hers. This is what he is telling her now, a list of his wishes for her, who is more precious to him than his own soul. “If you died,” he promises, “I would’ve drowned myself in the Neva.”

When she is back in the sleigh, seated, wrapped with furs, Catherine closes her eyes and tries to recover the moments erased from memory. But there is nothing there.

Her friends, her spies, her confidants report every shortness of the imperial breath, every fainting spell, every cough. “Elizabeth woke up screaming,” they say. “Refused to say what she had dreamed about!”