Empress of the Night (35 page)

“Not a medical man, per se, Your Highness,” Lambro-Cazzioni says in his halting French. “Which allows me to claim that I’ve inflicted less harm on mankind than others.”

In spite of her misgivings, he pleases her with his rugged looks, his military airs. Keeps himself straight, moves with precision. His hands are well kept, with fingernails clean and trimmed. And he makes no attempt to ingratiate himself by mentioning Grishenka’s past favors.

“You may have a look, monsieur,” she says.

Lambro-Cazzioni kneels on the floor and expertly removes Rogerson’s bindings. Exposed, the leg looks worse than she remembers it. The skin has a bluish hue, the lesions are secreting bloody pus.

The Admiral sniffs at the bindings. He smears the tip of his finger with the bloody discharge and touches it with the tip of his tongue.

“Sweet blood, Your Majesty,” he declares.

“What does that mean?”

The explanation he offers—there is too much sugar in her blood—makes little sense. Unlike Queenie, Catherine doesn’t crave sweets. Rogerson has prescribed one glass of sweet Malaga wine a day to calm her down and strengthen her constitution. She doesn’t even sweeten her coffee.

The Admiral listens intently. “It’s not always what we eat, Your Majesty. The body has its own mysterious ways.”

The word
mysterious
makes her flinch. Perhaps she has been too hasty in her decision to admit the man. What will he speak of next? The power of ancient incantations? Or a witch hiding a ball of hair and bones under her bed?

“Mysteries are merely problems yet unsolved,” she retorts in a terse voice.

The Admiral must have sensed her displeasure, for he straightens. “The Greeks have many faults, Your Majesty, but we have been around long enough to gather some undisputed wisdom.”

Smallpox is his proof. Long before British doctors discovered the miracle of inoculation, Greek and Turkish peasants knew of ways that protected their children.

“You may try your cure,” she decides, in spite of her misgivings, and watches his ruddy face beam.

“The seawater needs to be very cold, Your Majesty,” the Admiral explains, as a servant enters with two basins.

The water will be cold. Chunks of ice still float in it.

He places the empty basin on the floor and rests her leg in it. With a small tumbler, he draws the cold seawater from another basin and dribbles it over her skin.

Catherine closes her eyes. The water still smells of the sea, bringing memories of her childhood pleasures. A run along the Baltic beach, a blackened log covered with seaweed, her bare feet splashing in the shallow waves. Babette’s voice reminding her of the bounty that comes from the sea. Fish, sea salts, amber.

“How does that feel, madame?” the Admiral asks.

“Better,” she says. The leg, numbed with the cold, has yielded. “If this continues, perhaps I’ll make another tour of the Crimea. Would you advise it, monsieur?”

“Excellent idea,” the Admiral says, clucking his tongue. “With Your Majesty’s permission,” he adds, “I’ll come every morning with fresh seawater. So that Your Majesty can continue her work in the service of the Empire, undisturbed.”

In the meantime, he advises against binding and blistering. She should expose the leg to the air whenever she can. Let the skin breathe, let the lesions dry. No matter what mighty Rogerson will come up with to discredit him.

Which he will try.

An hour later, the leg is still free from pain. When Rogerson’s arrival is announced, she sends Queenie to tell him his ministrations are not required.

“ ‘Not ever,’ he asked, ‘or not today?’ ” Queenie relates the exchange. “So I said, ‘not today.’ So he asked ‘Why?’ and I said I have no way of telling what Her Majesty thinks, but that Your Majesty must have her reasons. And he looked as if he had just swallowed a toad.”

Nothing cheers Queenie up like a small act of revenge.

The King, Queenie announces, was particularly impressed by the elegant structures of the Russian bridges. He was also charmed by the dancers on Vasilevsky Island. And amazed by the friendliness of people in the streets. Queenie, whose waist must have gained another few inches in the last week alone, is nearly jumping for joy. “What a kind and considerate young man he is,” she says. “And his uncle bears himself like a true
boyar
.”

Bezborodko’s reports are less starry-eyed. The Regent didn’t like the Bronze Horseman. His arguments: The giant sacred rock brought from Karelia to the bank of the Neva with such effort was twenty-one feet high, forty long, and covered in thick moss. Once it was cleaned, hewed, and polished, it was no longer a giant sacred boulder but just a big rock. Peter the Great, who was to survey the great Empire from its heights, can merely peep into the first floor of the neighboring houses like a second-rate bronze spy.

The court dress Queenie helps her put on replaces her loose morning one. Queenie pats dabs of almond cream onto her mistress’s cheeks.
Smears her temples with oil of verbena, filling the room with its faint citrus scent. Her chatting will stop if not encouraged with questions. A tacit agreement they arrived at years ago, comfortable like the loose gowns, the kidskin slippers. It suits them both.

“Has Bolik returned?”

“Not yet.”

“How is Alexandrine taking it?”

“The sweet lamb is trying not to cry, madame. She had her painting lesson.”

“What is she painting?”

“A birch grove.”

“Good enough to show to the King?”

“It’s not finished yet.”

“Then we shall wait.”

Queenie shuffles through the room, gathering the remnants of the afternoon chores, the silver bowl in which the ice has almost melted, the towels, the jars of creams.

“Are you sure, madame, that you can manage?” She echoes her old question as she fetches the cane. Although it is hard to see of what help Queenie could be if her mistress faltered. Thankfully, only a short corridor separates the Imperial Bedroom from the study. And Catherine’s bad leg is still free from pain.

“Quite sure.”

The gray goose quills are tempting. It would please her to write to her old friend Grimm, describe her plans to replace the remaining rectangular flower beds at Tsarskoye Selo with the natural look that she so much prefers. But Queenie is already presenting the list of visitors awaiting admission. Twenty names at least, a whole afternoon wasted. Chambers’s name, thank goodness, is first on the list. The imperial architect’s report of the Chinese Village he is constructing in Tsarskoye Selo is long overdue.

Queenie has left her post for a moment, drawn by some jingling noise in the antechamber, another palace drama unfolding.

It’s always like this at court, this realm of self-absorption. To be noticed is part of the game. Thus, everything is an outrage, a scandal, an offense, a spite of cosmic proportions. Some armchair traveler to Russia
claims that Grigory Orlov has been strangled by his brothers? Or that Prince Potemkin poisoned Sashenka Lanskoy out of jealousy? Or that he himself had been poisoned by Tofana water? By Platon Zubov, perhaps? Bring it all to the Empress. Lay it at her feet as proof of vigilance or fore-sightedness. Expect praise and reward. And always, always, mind how much Catherine has given to others.

What happened to free spirits, weightless, untethered? The company of the brave? Larger vistas, beyond the confines of these gilded rooms?

Queenie returns to announce that two of the imperial maids-of-honor are waiting to be admitted. They have a request to make. “Important, Your Majesty,” Queenie says, clearly well rewarded for her eloquence on their behalf.

Another tale of desire and delay, ambitions thwarted, merits overlooked? A favor granted deemed too obscure, declared a backwater of the courtly possibilities?

“Let Monsieur Chambers in first,” the Empress decides.

Queenie gives her a hurt look. Her faithful friend, fat and panting after the smallest effort. What was the ditty Platon has come up with?

This ugly maid whose belly goes

at least a step before her nose
.

“Your Majesty,” Chambers says, bowing low to kiss her hand. “Here is what I propose.”

He is a tall, shapely man, her architect. Fond of his fine clothes. Jeweled buckles on his shoes, lace ruffles, white silk stockings. The gleam of gold pleases him, and the smoothness of velvet. But today he has dressed in haste, for Catherine spots a button undone, the white smudge of powder on his shoulders.

The drawings he unfolds are beautifully executed on parchment paper.

She marvels at the neatness of lines. In her Chinese Village, there will be houses, bridges with fretwork railings, a vermilion-colored pagoda, and an observatory. Chambers plunges into praises of single-braced palings, the importance of symmetry. He shows her sketches of temples and
garden pavilions to which many paths lead. He extolls the virtues of garden seats tempting at the end of a long walk, offering respite to the visitor. Of pleasure rooms, palisades, and intricate latticework. Octagons, he says. Painted panels. Patterns that mix Chinese and Gothic designs.

What a pleasure to see an idea take shape!

“Elevations and lacquered wood are a happy mixture, madame,” Chambers continues, his voice lit with passion. “The Chinese gardeners plant without any order of disposition of parts. They have a different sense of beauty. Asymmetrical.”

Why does it have to be so rare
, Catherine thinks,
a moment like this one?
Hearing something both new and intriguing. She should have made such conversations into a commandment, an imperial ukase:
Thou shalt not bore thy Sovereign
.

“They are called
sharawaggis
of China,” Chambers continues. “A Chinese word to describe the quality of being surprising through graceful disorder.”

Travelers who have passed by her court on their way from China have told her of an Imperial Palace that sprawls over an area that could easily contain a city, of its ornaments, which attract not so much by the costliness of materials as the breathtaking intricacy of work.

Women there, the travelers have said, live in seclusion. Many wives vie for a husband’s eye and design ways of keeping his attention. By any means. One imperial concubine smothered her own son to cast suspicion on the Emperor’s first wife. She succeeded, for who could conceive of a mother sacrificing her own child? A memory of Paul snorting his displeasure over something long forgotten comes as she bends over the blueprints.

“I beg Your Majesty to take a closer look.” Chambers prances as he speaks, bobs his head like a bird in search of worms. He has sketched a handsome pagoda with dragons. With bells in their mouths! His drawings, he stresses, are not the amusing parodies of Chinese buildings that other architects ply, but sincere imitations of style, characteristics. Free but accurate. Not a particular building, he continues eagerly, but the spirit of many. He wants her to notice the pleasing disorder of the grounds around them.

“Garden design should differ from nature,” Chambers says, “like a heroic poem differs from prose. Nature cannot give pleasure without assistance from art.”

It’ll cost
, she thinks, when the architect leaves, happy that his expanding budget has again been approved. But anything of importance and beauty has its price. Chinoiserie is in fashion everywhere now. Russia cannot be backward. She doesn’t want to hear that she fancies the less important, the second-rate.

Queenie comes back but doesn’t mention the maids-of-honor and their quest. They must have resigned themselves to their fate for the time being. Small mercy, but sweet! But her servant has other annoying news.

The parlor where she likes to read in the afternoon is swarming with flies.

The chambermaids left the windows open, Queenie explains. She is flustered with annoyance. Incompetence, laziness, lack of foresight always make her rage. In Queenie’s world, these are major crimes.

“I want to see it,” Catherine says. It must be the lightness in her leg that prompts her to go into the parlor.
Swarming
is an exaggeration, but the flies are there. Buzzy, circling the room, annoyingly close.

Called to the rescue, Zotov paces the room. He scorns rolled newspapers or slippers in favor of fly flaps he makes himself from stiff sugar paper and a wooden stick. He is swift and graceful. He can swat a fly in mid-flight, though most get trapped by the closed window, buzzing against the invisible barrier that has now cut them off from where they’ve come.

Enraged, Queenie leaves to scold the offending chambermaids, who will walk about with long faces for hours, trying to draw everyone’s attention to the injustice of their fate.

One more swat and the last of the unwelcome guests is lying lifeless on the floor. Zotov picks them all up and wraps them in his checkered handkerchief.

“Your Majesty can now read in peace,” he announces.

In this palace, where death has so ruthlessly thinned the ranks, Zotov’s is another comforting face. He was born at the palace, a son of a
valet, and has never lived anywhere else. At the time of the coup, Catherine recalls, he was no older than ten. She remembers him walking behind his father, carrying her fan, absorbed by the utter seriousness of his task.

“I’ve seen a cat in the garden that looked like Pushok,” she tells him. “The same white fur, the same kink in the tail. But isn’t Pushok long dead?”

“Dead and buried,” Zotov confirms. “When Mistress was still with us.”

They talk about the descendants of Elizabeth’s favorite cats, Pushok, Murka, and Bronya, stalking the cellars and back stairs, taking up residence in the attic when the imperial dogs moved into the palace.

“Packs of cats,” Zotov says. “Colonies.”

They eat what they can forage. They shy away from people.

Zotov gives her a cautious look, gauging the level of her interest in his stories. He will stop the moment he discerns the slightest impatience. A perfect servant. Alert. Irreplaceable.

She nods to encourage the words to flow.