Empress of the Night (32 page)

Bolik is a white Bolognese. His hair is a mass of white, wooly ringlets. A smart little dog who never caused trouble. Why would he suddenly bolt and not come back?

The gardener, her granddaughters tell her, has seen Bolik by the garden gate. He tried to corner him, but Bolik was too fast.

“As if a devil chased him.” Yelena repeats the gardener’s words slowly, weighing their significance. Last year, after their sister Olga died, Yelena
started demanding stories of ghosts and witches. The silly maids obliged with tales of black cauldrons in which poisons brew and of pale specters that haunt the empty palace corridors at night. “Possessed,” the maids said of Olga, who could not stop eating before she died. “As if her stomach turned into a bottomless pit.”

“Bolik always came running to me when I called,” Alexandrine reminds her.

“We’ll find him,” Catherine says and promises a rescue team. She warns Alexandrine that red eyes will not make her look pretty for the Hermitage ball she has planned for tomorrow.

She doesn’t mention the Swedish King.

Alexandrine pulls on her braids, a flighty, nervous gesture that mars her serenity. Yelena makes a circle with her foot, tracing the shapes of the mosaic floor. Maria is poking her finger inside her nose. The three of them slouch, and as she studies their appearance she sees the stained cuffs, ink-stained fingers, fingernails bitten to the quick. So much for trusting their mother and governesses to raise them properly.

She has not interfered with the upbringing of her granddaughters. The boys were enough of a responsibility. Her daughter-in-law should have been able to handle the girls. But now she wishes she had been more vigilant. Paul’s wife is too lenient, too trustful of their good inclinations.

“When I was a girl,” she tells her granddaughters, “I would not be allowed to slouch. Or pick my nose like a milkmaid.”

Maria hides her hands behind her. She is a sturdy child, stronger than her sisters. Her face has a rosy hue, as if she spent her days roaming in the garden like a peasant. Yelena straightens instantly and smooths her dress. It is a lovely Indian muslin dress, buttercup yellow, with an embroidered hem. Much nicer than Alexandrine’s pink robe.

“Please, Graman,” Alexandrine manages to say before her voice breaks into a sob.

“Hush, my dear,” Catherine says. “No more tears.”

Silently she curses Bolik, the ungrateful creature. She thinks of the feral dogs that roam the embankment. Palace dogs do not fare well against street mongrels. Bolik might be nothing more by now than bloodied scraps of white fur, a chewed-up bone.

She rings for Zotov and instructs him to start looking for the dog. Her valet nods gravely as Yelena and Maria recount the particulars of Bolik’s escape. Alexandrine is the only one silent.

“I promise.” Zotov’s quiet, capable voice rings in the air, as he escorts the girls outside. “We’ll find him.”

When the girls leave, she finds it hard to concentrate on her work. Where is it coming from, this unchildlike sadness in Alexandrine’s eyes? This stubborn insistence to give alms to the pilgrims herself, oblivious of the grimy hands covered in sores, the stench of the soiled rags on their rotting feet? The conviction that if she omits her morning prayers some misfortune will strike?

“You do this because you are stupid,” Constantine once said, to which Alexandrine replied: “There is the need for stupid people in the world.”

Even the closed windows of the Winter Palace cannot keep away the cries and shouts, the noises of the city. Dogs howl, merchants praise their wares. In St. Petersburg, one is never far away from the crowds. Millionnaya Street gets choked with attendants and hangers-on. Carriages get stuck, drivers curse one another’s incompetence and lack of skills. Horses, frightened by sudden movements, bite and kick. This city is never still and never silent.

Beside her, Doctor Rogerson is expounding on his favorite topic.

“By nature, Your Highness, women are by far more amorous than men. Conjugal embraces please them more. Such is the composition of a female body. A sign of vital forces, of animal magnetism at work.” Human society, he also says, has mostly failed to make allowances for this abundance of female energy.

Catherine braces herself for a lecture. Men like to instruct her how to remedy all problems. One more imperial ukase, Your Highness! A few stern orders! Wiser men than Rogerson believe that ruling a nation is as easy as writing a few sentences peppered with exclamation marks.

But Rogerson is in a humbler mood today, resigned to inform, not offer solutions.

He tells her about static electricity, which he calls “yet another proof of life’s vital force.” He describes an experiment in which a woman’s finger sent pricking shoots accompanied by a crackling noise.

Her doctor’s lectures are far more useful than his potions and bleedings. To prepare for them, he pores over books in the Imperial Library and carries on correspondence with English doctors. He is smart this way. He knows the Empress judges a conversation by the amount of information she learns from it. There is no cure for curiosity, she likes to say.

“It’s a terrible waste.” Rogerson shakes his head as he comes up with medical examples of harm caused by suffocating what is natural. Clogged passages of life force cause the eruption of boils. Diminish efficiency in other faculties. Disrupt sleep, cause dryness in the mouth and
passages intimes
. What is not used either withers or gets irritated. Great ills come from both in the end.

Rogerson looks up, seeking her gaze as his hands busy themselves with her sore leg.

The sores do not heal. The edges of the wounds redden and exert yellowish pus. The dressings need to be changed daily. The swelling never goes away. Is this why impatience sets in? The need to point out the limitations of medical knowledge?

“Why am I growing heavier?” She interrupts Rogerson’s musings. “I’ve never eaten much. I’ve never drunk more than you, monsieur, have advised. What is happening in the depth of my flesh?”

Doctor Rogerson’s chin bears the nicks of a dull razor or a careless barber. Vishka reports that he is sending money back to Scotland. A cousin on his mother’s side is searching for an estate there. A few years ago, she thought that her Scottish doctor would make a decent husband for Queenie. Until Bezborodko pointed to a sentence in Rogerson’s letter to his Edinburgh friend:
The Empress wishes me to court a woman whose interests clearly lie elsewhere
.

Her doctor is convinced oxygen is the culprit. “Pneumatic chemistry, Your Majesty,” he answers. “The respiratory tract takes oxygen from the body and mixes it with the carbon from food.” Normally this carbon should be expelled, he explains, but in some organisms, the process has been obstructed. The cure is introducing more oxygen into the system.

“How?” she asks.

“By breathing treated air, madame.”

“Why should I believe you?”

“A wise question, Your Majesty. Your Majesty knows more than I do of the limitations of the human mind.”

Rogerson is a smart courtier. He doesn’t tell her to believe in his theories. He claims a scientific mind:
Until it is proven otherwise, I shall assume this to be plausible
.

With deliberate movements, Rogerson unpacks his case. A lancet for cutting the vein on her leg, the bowl for her blood. He places them carefully on a clean linen napkin, making sure the lancet is positioned just so. Medicine is not above borrowing from magic tricks.

Abracadabra?

Mankind enjoys deceiving itself?

“May I, madame?” he asks, before removing her slippers and scrutinizing her toes. One of them attracts his attention. He fishes for a magnifying glass.

“Cure by treated air.” She returns to the conversation. “How is that achieved?”

His eyes still fixed on her toe, Rogerson describes a chamber from which air is either pumped out or in with bellows, installed to increase or decrease pressure. According to Boyle’s Law, as the pressure increases, the gas volume is reduced. He reminds her of an experiment she has seen before: a ticking clock placed in a glass tube. After the air is pumped out of the tube, the ticking of the clock is seen but not heard.

“Doctor Beddos, madame,” he says, finally putting the magnifying glass aside, “is the one who proposes this English cure.”

Catherine finds herself listening closely. The elastic properties of air have always intrigued her. Matter that can be shaped, molded. “But wouldn’t it be dangerous?” she asks, recalling a court demonstration her grandsons’ tutor had arranged once. “I’ve seen how quickly a vacuum brings on a dove’s death.”

Doctor Beddos, her court doctor assures her, is not creating a vacuum in his chambers but merely adjusting the pressure of the air. But when she asks, in all seriousness, “Should I try it then? Shall I send for Doctor Beddos?” Rogerson advises her not to waste her money and precious
time. “Doctor Beddos, madame,” he says, “is so enormously fat that he is called a walking featherbed.”

The lancet has a carved ivory handle.

The doctor is so fast with the cut that she misses the moment when the edge of the lancet slashes her skin. “Only two ounces, madame,” he says. “Moderation is the best policy.”

It is when her leg is bandaged that she asks: “I’ve lost all pleasure of desire. Is there anything you can do to bring it back?”

Rogerson frowns. “Is this a recent development, madame?”

A confession is called for. An admission of another loss. Harder to bear than she has ever expected. No, it is not recent. It came about in ebbs and flows. Now even these have ceased and she has shriveled inside, dried up. It is as if some careless maid scrubbed her skin too hard with ashes. Nothing can evoke the old sweet pleasures. Even in Tsarskoye Selo, in the love rooms she has furnished with such great care, her body defies her. Nymphs and satyrs can couple all they want. Sculptures can open up to reveal the thrills of passion. Books can depict the tugs of desire, but in her nothing stirs but memories of what has once been.

“Why?” she asks her doctor.

But Rogerson never has answers that satisfy. All he can speak of is her womb shrinking, one humor that needs boosting at the expense of another.

From his array of tonics he picks three bottles with white labels:
Teriac Farook. Tribulus Terrestris. Ginger and Epimedium Extract
.

She is to drink thirty drops of each, with water, three times a day.

If this won’t work, he will get a fresh supply of salep, restorative marmalade made with Satyrion roots. And the eryngo candy he has brought with him from his last trip home.

“Any news about Bolik?” Catherine asks Queenie.

“Not a sight of him.” Queenie shuffles to the window to air the room after the doctor’s visit. She eyes the tonic bottles Rogerson has lined up from the tallest down with suspicion. Just breathing these, her maid claims, gives her a headache.

“Is Alexandrine still crying?”

“All the time. Nose red. Eyes swollen. Nails bitten.”

This is not welcome news. Not now when Alexandrine must look her best.

Alexandrine is Queenie’s favorite among the Grand Duchesses, so what she says next is even more troubling. “The sweet child has asked me about Xenia again.”

Blessed Xenia is the source of many stories, old and new. A reckless husband’s sudden death, without time to repent his sins, makes his young wife put on his Preobrazhensky coat, green with scarlet facings, and give up all her earthly possessions to roam the streets of St. Petersburg in penance for his sins. Now an old woman, her hair long, gray, and matted, Xenia walks barefoot summer or winter, through snow and mud, streets and fields, not minding the sharp pebbles or harvest stubble. When Xenia tells people to go home to cook
bliny
, someone in the family is going to die. Xenia performs miracles. Mothers follow her, begging her to bless their children. “Blessed Xenia can see the future,” Alexandrine insists.

For Alexandrine, Blessed Xenia is a forbidden subject. It hasn’t always been so, but it is now, after too many requests to be allowed to see the madwoman. Some souls have to be protected against themselves. For their own good.

“The young mind, Your Majesty, is impressionable.” Queenie offers her consolations. “Soon enough other concerns will prevail.” But in her voice there is doubt. Queenie has been at court far too long to dismiss the dangers of innocence. Or the desire for sainthood that leads to renunciations. More dangerous, indeed, than others, for fortified by faith.

It isn’t hard to see why Alexandrine is captivated by Xenia’s tale. Sudden death is what her granddaughter fears. A bolt from above. An unexpected summons to the hereafter. An account of her days. Explanations of all actions.

The summons her poor sister Olga received.

In a child still so young, pain and fear grow deep roots. Especially if her confessor does nothing to stop them.
When I was Alexandrine’s age
, Catherine thinks,
it was life that excited me, not saintly deprivations. My fears were not of the hereafter but of this world
.

Sophie of Anhalt-Zerbst was not born a Grand Duchess of All the Russias. Sophie of Anhalt-Zerbst could have ended her life in some forsaken castle, in a freezing turret, ruling over cabbage fields and herds of cattle.

Insignificant, forgotten.

Alone.

At her request, it is beaming Le Noiraud, the dark blue ribbon of the Order of the White Eagle across his chest, who escorts the Swedish guests to the Diamond Room.
Are you happy now?
Catherine thinks, as Platon’s eyes dart toward the glass cases where the crown jewels glitter on red velvet. A hint to the guests to do the same. Which they don’t.

At seventeen, the King of Sweden is indeed exceedingly handsome, in the smooth, crisp way of the young. A tall, graceful prince with a pale, drawn face, long hair brushing his shoulders, clad in black velvet, he approaches her with remarkable dignity.

“Dear Count! We all welcome you to Russia!”

She calls him Count, for Gustav Adolf IV of Sweden is traveling incognito. For the Russian trip, the King calls himself the Count of Haga. His uncle, who stands right beside him, barely reaching his nephew’s shoulder—the Regent until the King’s majority—chose the name of the Count of Wasa.