Empress of the Night (4 page)

Peter’s hounds lie by the fireplace, panting. One is sniffing at its balls. The other emits a low growl as she enters, but its tail is wagging, so the growl is not a threat. “Why are you crossing yourself like
them
, Sophie?” Peter asks when she bows in front of the icons in his room and crosses herself in the Orthodox way, right shoulder first, three fingers bunched. “No one can see you now!”

She has come to his room to play chess, a game fraught with dangers. Her silk shoes pinch her toes, so she has kicked them off.

“Why can’t you be more like your mother, Sophie?” Peter asks, as he advances his pawn three squares, hoping she won’t notice. His fingers are long and slightly crooked. His eyelashes are almost white. “Your mother is not stubborn like you are!”

Peter’s uniform, the Preobrazhensky greens the Empress orders him to wear, is unbuttoned and stained at the cuffs. “Speak to him about
Holstein, Sophie, if that’s what he wishes,” Mother urges. “You don’t want to be sent back to Zerbst!”

A game of chess is a game of choices. Sacrifice a pawn to capture a knight. Assess each position, predict the next few moves, watch out for incongruities. Or let your opponent cheat and think himself invincible.

If I please Peter, I’ll displease the Empress
.

If I please the Empress, I’ll displease Peter
.

Peter soon tires of playing. “Look, Sophie,” he says. “Look what I’ve got.”

A black silk kerchief is covering something on the table. No other woman has seen what he is about to reveal to her. It is a hundred-year secret. It has been sent to him from Eutin.

Peter mumbles something, but what she hears makes little sense. “Kaspar—the executioner … with his own hands … at midnight … no moon …” Then, pompously, he asks himself if he should even consider showing his secret to a mere woman.

Sophie waits patiently. Peter is a chatterbox. He doesn’t know how to keep a secret.

Peter lifts the black silk, revealing strips of paper covered with German script. “
Passauer kunst
,” he says in German, beaming with pride. The Art of Passau.

She extends her hand to touch the nearest slip.

“No!” he screams and smacks her fingers.

She hides her irritation, turns it into a question: “What are they, Peter?”

“There is magic in them,” he says, his long fingers hovering over the paper strips. “The one who carries them will become invincible.”

She doesn’t laugh. She doesn’t mock the exultation in his voice.

“Were they made for you?” she asks.

Instead of answering, he points at a piece of paper. “This one has been waiting for me for over a hundred years.”

“How do you know?”

“I know.”

He doesn’t have an answer, so he evades her question. If she persists, he will only grow angry, claim some divine revelation, known only to the initiated. This shouldn’t surprise her. People do the oddest things to assure power. Maids spit over their shoulders when they see a black cat. She has heard of a woman at the Tartar market who ate a candle with a holy image melted into it. One of the Empress’s own maids hid a package with bones and hair under her mistress’s bed.

“What will you do with them, Peter?” she asks instead.

Surprisingly, this time he does answer. Some, he tells her, he will chew and swallow. Others he will carry on his body. Tied by a thin linen strip. Close to the skin.

“Will you tell me what’s written on them?”

“No!” There is a sudden burst of terror in his voice, and he covers the curls of paper with the handkerchief again. As if she could destroy his magic just by looking at it.

Boltun—nakhodka dlya shpiona
. A chatterbox is a spy’s treasure.

Russia is not only ruled by a different calendar, but it also follows her own holy days and sacred obligations. “Lutheran guests do not have to observe our customs,” her tutor announces.

“But they can be told their meaning,” Sophie says.

“Each pilgrimage is a different journey, Your Highness.”

Empress Elizabeth has left for Troitse-Sergieva Lavra, the monastery where St. Sergius had many visions. In one vision, a multitude of birds flocked to him. It was a sign that the saint’s followers would be plentiful.

“How did he know it was a sign?”

“He heard God’s voice and then he became a great teacher.”

“What did St. Sergius teach?”

“That even the Son of Man did not come to earth to be served, but to serve.”

She considers the story of a wise monk who insisted on the importance
of simplicity and service. A life spent in labor and prayer, sustained by plain food and clothes. Far away from the lures of court.

This, too, is Russia.

“The most pious land in the world,” her tutor assures her. Orthodox Christianity is truer to the teaching of Christ than the Catholicism of Rome or the Lutheran Creed. Because it is not contaminated by worldly pride. Because it is not guilty of the sin of presumption. Even the Tsars have learned that tampering with the Church’s practices will bring the wrath of heaven.

She doesn’t tell her tutor that her father would have disagreed. “Why is the Empress walking to the monastery?” she asks instead. “Why can’t she ride in her carriage?”

“Because deprivation of the body is part of repentance.”

“Repentance for what?”

“That, Your Highness, I cannot tell you. We each sin in our own way.”

Mother is not that reticent. Away from the Empress, she bristles with confidence. Her voice carries through the thin walls of their rooms. “…  on her fat knees … begging the Virgin to forgive her for every time she takes a guard to her bed!”

Deprivations? Fasts? Ha!

The Empress of Russia is insatiable. Elizabeth craves rich food, strong drink, and the caresses of men. Caresses a girl like Sophie should know nothing about.

Now, with the Empress gone on her pilgrimage, Mother lies with Chevalier Betskoy.

They laugh. They whisper. They laugh again.

Her father is not here to stop them.

The Russian maids make signs with their hands, imitating a pair of horns on a man’s head. They wink at one another when they carry out basins of sop water from Mother’s rooms.

Like mother, like daughter, Sophie hears. The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.

Under a tapestry showing a stag pierced by an arrow, there is a hidden
door. It is locked, and nothing but dense, murky darkness is visible through the keyhole. On her dressing table, jars of cream change places. In her drawers, even the locked ones, papers have been moved around. Someone must have opened the box with her beauty spots, for one of them has fallen on the carpet. Someone has gone through her linens, leafed through her books.

The spies are watching her. What are they looking for? A mistake? Or merely proof of her willingness to be worthy?

Bez kota mysham razdol’ye
, her Russian tutor writes in big even letters for her to copy. Without a cat, mice feel free.

With the Empress gone, the palace corridors have emptied. The servants whisper and laugh among themselves. Guards yawn. Pages fidget when summoned, forget what they have been asked to fetch.

Peter has stopped speaking Russian. “Send your tutor to hell, Sophie,” he tells her. His writing table is still covered with papers, but it is no longer Passauer art. Peter has a new project. He wants to gather the maxims from all the letters he has ever received from King Frederick of Prussia:
A general should never engage in battle unless he has an advantage over his enemy. A retreat is sometimes necessary
.

“Copy them for me, Sophie,” Peter orders. “Your mother says you have a very good hand.”

Gde tonko—tam i rvyotsya
. It’ll snap where it’s the thinnest.

“Please, Mother,” she pleads.

But Mother looks at her with the calculating eyes of a rival. “What do you want from me now, Sophie?” she snaps.

“Send Chevalier Betskoy away. People are talking.”

“People are always talking, Sophie.”

Mother’s eyes say more. That her daughter knows nothing of her disappointments.
That a woman’s happiness has to be snatched when it’s still possible. That even a good and honest man can leave a woman empty and wanting.

“What if they tell the Empress?”

Mother’s hand raises too fast for Sophie to duck. The slap across her cheek turns her head sideways. “I’m here because of
you
, Sophie! I’ve dragged myself away from my home for your sake! Is this how you repay me?”

The cheek smarts and swells, pulsates with blood.

“We are in Russia now, Mother.”

“And what is this supposed to mean, Sophie? That we should forget who we are? Let these barbarians turn us into puppets dancing on
their
strings?”

Mother’s hand raises again, but this time Sophie is faster and steps back. The hand hesitates in the air and falls limp to her side.

During the day, when Mother leaves on her errands, elderly court women come and sit in her room. They are supposed to keep Princess Sophie company or watch over her when she rests.

Anyone who matters a smidgen at court has gone with the Empress on the pilgrimage. The women who come to sit with the Princess of Anhalt-Zerbst know that. They have become invisible, they joke. Too old for men, too insignificant for other women to bother with.

They speak of the Moscow chill, hard on the bones. Of the servants, lazy at all times, who skimp on the logs to sell them on the side. Of the lackey who sold a canary at the market and replaced it with a dead bird, thinking his mistress wouldn’t tell the difference. Then they sigh and grow silent, racking their brains for topics that might amuse the young Princess of Zerbst.

When she relieves them from their duty by pretending to fall asleep, they talk about her.

“Poor Sophie. Weak, isn’t she? A child, really. At fourteen, they tell you how you are a woman, but you are not.”

“Imperial marriages are bargains, and this one looks like a bad one …”

With her eyes closed, her breath even and deep, Sophie listens.

“Grave mistakes are easy to make, and even easier to notice and report. Servants have big eyes and keen ears. No one is ever alone here.”

“The Empress wants her? But the Empress is fickle. It’s not hard to change the imperial mind.”

The mere mention of Mother makes their voices break into merry laughter. They imitate Mother’s gasps and haughty declarations of superior German ways.

They shake their heads with amusement at Mother’s wanton foolishness. Mockery of one’s betters? Hints of imperial shortcomings? Pray, how does it differ from slashing your wrists with a knife and letting yourself bleed to death?

Only a deluded fool entrusts gossip to paper and ink. Hides it in her own bedroom. For any spy to find.

Poor Sophie. So eager to please, that child.

It’s not the first time and not the last that a child will have to pay for her mother’s sins.

“No more rubbing my daughter’s cheeks with ice!” Mother, tense and stony-eyed, screams at the maids in the morning. Everything irks her. The soft Russian wraps, the velvety coverlets, the pelisses of silver fox fur. The gilded doorframes. The gold-plated basin. “No more Russian dishes, either!” From now on, her child will eat simple plain food. Boiled beef. Bread soaked in broth and red wine. Half a glass of weak ale to quench her thirst, sweetened with a spoonful of honey.

The maids scurry like frightened rabbits in front of a galloping horse. “Your services are no longer required,” the court doctor has been told. Princess Johanna of Anhalt-Zerbst is no fool.

“You are not really sick, Sophie,” Mother seethes. “You just want me to fuss over you. I know you!”

“My daughter is perfectly well,” her mother declares when the doctor arrives. “She is just tired. Aren’t you, Sophie?”

The court doctor wears a pair of tight silk gloves, which he peels off
with ceremonial slowness. He has quickly glanced at the contents of her chamber pot and smelled her vomit. Now his fingers probe her tongue, the inside of her lips.

“Please, madame. Let me examine the patient.”

The doctor scrutinizes the skin on her neck and arms, feels the glands on her neck. “No traces of smallpox,” he announces cheerfully. A young woman, he explains to Mother, possesses a delicate and fluid constitution. The balance of humors is easily upset. An emetic will purge the digestive tracts of poison. A concoction he calls the vinegar of seven thieves for rubbing onto the skin to quicken the flow of blood. Venetian tonic for building up strength.

The doctor trusts the Princess of Anhalt-Zerbst would find nothing amiss in these remedies. He is delighted to see that he is right.

The light is miserly, filtering through curtains drawn to keep the drafts away. Wrapped in a thick dressing gown, Sophie sits on a daybed, her feet buried in furs.

Peter hasn’t come by, but he has sent his servant girl with an inquiry.

The servant girl is tall and bone thin. Her hair is tied back, hidden under a lace bonnet, but in her eyes there is energy and brightness. And a warm flicker of curiosity as she casts a quick glance toward the bed.

“Who are you?” Mother asks sharply.

The servant girl does not lower her eyes. “The Grand Duke has sent me to say that the Princess of Anhalt-Zerbst has promised to copy Frederick the Great’s maxims for the Grand Duke,” she recites in a measured voice. “The Grand Duke wishes to know if the Princess intends to be indisposed for much longer.”

Mother scowls. Even in Russia, a servant girl should know her place. “I asked you who you were!”

The girl hesitates, not too long but long enough to earn Mother’s huff of annoyance. “A reader to His Highness, the Grand Duke. Her Majesty wants to make sure the Grand Duke doesn’t tire his eyes.”

“What do they call you?”

“Varvara Nikolayevna, Your Highness.”