Empress of the Night (7 page)

The ladies-in-waiting flock around the Empress, clucking their tongues in awe as their mistress stuns the fish with a hammer, cuts off its head, makes a slit through its belly, and empties the bowels. “Follow the backbone to the tail,” she says, as the knife cuts across the body. “This is what Papa always said.”

She, Catherine Alekseyevna, Russia’s Grand Duchess, adds her voice to the cries of astonishment and admiration. She is not fond of fish, preferring boiled beef and pickles, but no one needs to know that. When one of the stunned fishes suddenly begins to thrash about, Catherine gasps like everyone else. For a moment, it looks like the Empress will not let her catch out of her hands, but the fish is slippery and fast. One splash and it is back in the lake.

Peter slaps his long arms along his body and makes a strangely apt imitation of a wiggling fish. No one laughs, but he doesn’t seem to notice.

“What do you find so funny, Peter?” the Empress asks.

The question makes Peter giggle.

“Please, Peter.” Catherine pulls at her husband’s sleeve, but it is a mistake. Her plea—however gentle—makes Peter more reckless. Why? She has puzzled over such moments before, the way one puzzles over the insistence with which moths return to the flames.

“Nothing like country air in the spring, Catherine,” Elizabeth says, ignoring her nephew. She wipes her bloodied hands on a towel a servant girl is holding for her. “Take a long breath. Fill your lungs.”

Catherine obeys. The air is cool, scented with wood smoke, but the act of breathing does nothing to diminish her unease. Spring has made the Empress even more impatient. This is the season for procreation, for newly born colts, yellow chicks, ducklings waddling through mud behind their mother.

“Let the Grand Duchess hold it,” Count Razumovsky says and places a duckling in Catherine’s hands. The duckling turns its little head and bites her thumb, but so lightly that she scarcely feels it. The duckling wiggles in her palms, soft, downy, warm. It is like holding the essence of life itself.

She bends, opens her hand, and lets the duckling slip out and follow the mother.

The house they are assigned for the visit is a three-story wooden one, newly built on a hill. Their bedroom is on the third floor. Nearby is the dressing room and a room where her chief maid sleeps. The second-floor rooms have been readied for the ladies-in-waiting and maids-of-honor.

The first day of the visit is one long feast. The serf men, in their long white tunics with embroidered collars and hems, direct the guests to refreshments, placed in the backyard, along the corridors of the grand house, and in the dining room. “Our simple Russian treats,” their host says. Long tables have been covered with immaculate white cloths and garlanded with wreaths of spring flowers. Silver platters are covered by hillocks of rolled-up
bliny
, layers of smoked fish, roasted pheasants,
glazed hams. Roasted piglets hold pinecones in their snouts, their charred skin precut like checkerboards. On dessert tables, beside enormous cakes, stand bowls of candied fruit dipped in chocolate. Fiddlers play lively folk tunes. Serf girls in embroidered shirts and skirts, wearing red, yellow, and blue beads, sing a melancholy song about
Snegurochka
, a Snow Maiden who is lonely and cold until she falls in love. But when her heart warms up, she melts.

Peter, forbidden to smoke in the Empress’s presence, is sucking on an empty clay pipe. As always when they are in the company of others, he pays his wife little heed. His eyes trail after the peasant girls. Sometimes, like a truant schoolboy, he ventures to one of them and pulls on her beads or the folds of her bulky skirt.

When they are alone together—which is almost all the time, for such is the Empress’s order—deprived of distractions, Peter can be drawn into a conversation. The best topics are always his memories of Holstein. Most of them are fanciful accounts of his Prussian childhood. By the time he turned seven, that imaginary Peter had valiantly conquered a band of brigands that had terrorized the countryside, chased the Gypsies who had kidnapped a little girl, rescued her, and handed her back to her weeping mother. Often in these stories it is Monsieur Brummer, his onetime tutor and now Marshal, who turns out to be his biggest adversary. “Brummer tried to stop me from charging,” Peter would say, “but I ordered him to shut up.”

Catherine still believes in patience. In chipping away at resentment.

Catherine is still young.

She listens to her husband’s stories in admiring silence, offering her reassuring nods. When Peter stops, she asks questions. “What did Brummer say when he saw you aim your musket?” is the best one. It always evokes an elaborate picture of the former tutor crushed by awe, falling to his knees, professing his guilt for having doubted his charge. Caught up in these tales, Peter becomes restless. His boasting voice raises and thins, turning into a shrill wail. He waves his hands, or jumps up and down as if he needs to pee. The scenes his imagination evokes soothe him, but he is unable to keep track of what he has told her. So an attack on a Gypsy camp sometimes involves muskets and a regiment of Holsteiners, sometimes
just a few servants with whips. The only constant is Brummer’s humiliation and his admission of blindness for having failed to realize Peter’s true merit.

The feast at Count Razumovsky’s estate lasts all night. When dancing ends, sing-alongs by the bonfire begin. When voices become hoarse, there are games: blindman’s buff, cat and mice, Cossacks and robbers. Or the tongue twisters Elizabeth favors. She, Catherine, causes general merriment when her tongue gets helplessly entangled in:
Stoit pop na kopne, kolpak na pope, kopna pod popom, pop pod kolpakom
.

A tongue twister Elizabeth excels in.

At dawn, when the Empress finally sends everyone away, Catherine and Peter return to their house. The servants draw the thick curtains of their bed tight, so that the light will not disturb them. They are both exhausted from the dancing and the games. Their eyes smart from bonfire smoke. They fall asleep at once.

Catherine wakes instantly when Choglokov, their chamberlain, minder, and one of the Empress’s spies, tears the bed curtains aside. Choglokov is half dressed; tufts of curly gray hair peep through the opening of his nightshirt.

“Get out of here!
Fast!
” he shouts.

She has not time to ask why. An odd grating sound is coming from the fireplace. The walls creak. Heavy objects fall. Glass shatters. Outside, dogs bark in a frenzy. A piece of plaster spirals from the ceiling and crumbles on their heads. One of the ceiling beams begins to crack; chunks of dark wood rain to the floor.

Peter snorts and jumps out of bed.

He doesn’t look at her.

The floorboards sway beneath her, as if she were on a barge in a storm. Her husband dashes out of the room. In his haste, he stumbles over the threshold and hurts his foot. The last she sees of him is his bent figure, limping away.

A window breaks, scattering glass shards. More layers of plaster are falling from the ceiling. Her hands are like two chunks of ice. Her heart pounds.
This is the end
, she thinks, even before she hears the guards outside, shouting, “Where is the Grand Duchess? Has anyone seen the Grand Duchess?”

The door bangs open. The guard who rushes inside her bedroom wears Preobrazhensky greens. He is tall and big-boned, with a mop of dark, thick hair. His arms are strong enough to lift her up as if she were a feather.

She doesn’t know his name. He is one of the many Palace Guards who stand at attention in the corridors. Who stare into the distance, oblivious—it has seemed to her—to all that was happening before them. If she has seen him before, her eyes have not rested on him long enough to etch his features into her memory. It is only now, when he holds her in his powerful arms, that she notes his swarthy, handsome face. The dark shadow on his jowl.

There is something else she sees.

On the face of a man who holds her and sweeps her out of the collapsing room there is no impatience, no petulance, no irritation. His eyes, locked on her, soften and sparkle. There is such delight in them, and such desire for her, that gooseflesh travels up her arms, a shiver through her loins. It softens the lump of fear in her throat. It melts what has been frozen.

It pleases her to see how hard he tries to be somber and dry, all business. Assuring her that she will be safe. That he won’t let a hair drop from her head, for such is his duty to Russia’s Grand Duchess. To die for her, if need be. To save her from all harm.

His name is Serge.

Later, there will be many stories of that day. How Russia’s Grand Duchess had been rescued from a collapsing house by Serge Saltykov. How Peter, her husband, stretched on a crimson chintz-covered ottoman and wrapped in a sable blanket, kept asking what manner of vanity and silliness could make a woman take so long to get out of her bedroom. How Count Razumovsky threatened to blow his brains out when he heard that his own builders had removed the supporting beam. How the Empress—worried about her lover—refused to admit that the Grand Duchess had ever been in real danger at all.

But she, Russia’s Grand Duchess, will remember the feel of a man’s hand around her waist, the smell of snuff in her nostrils. Her own arms locked around his neck as he carried her to safety. His voice, as he raged against building a house in winter, over the frozen ground. “When the earth begins to thaw,” he said, “the limestone boulders that held the foundations will no longer stay in place.”

And then, with his eyes lingering over her, he added, “Only a fool wouldn’t know this.”

A game of chess is a game of choices. Sometimes you have to sacrifice a knight to checkmate the king. A game of chess is long. It’s not wise to make your moves predictable. Not when change is still possible. When time is on your side.

Many traps have been laid. Many eyes and ears have been charged with following her every move. Many tongues repeat her every word.

But she is no longer alone. Now she, too, has her eyes and ears, tongues and gazettes, spies who steal their way into the inner rooms of the Winter Palace. The stories they bring back to Catherine come from dusty corridors and palace alcoves, from servant rooms and the Imperial Wardrobe. These stories are more precious than jewels. They tell her whom to stay away from and whom to bribe. Whose lies triumph in the gossip circles that gather nightly in the Imperial Bedroom. Who will be grateful for a kind word, a discreet loan, a whisper of warning.

Knowledge is power. That much she has always known.

Armed with her spies’ stories, she can weave in and out of traps. Offer bribes that are neither too big nor too small. Rewards that please, not disappoint. Warnings that are heeded with gratitude she hoards against the future.

Power lies in hearing what is not meant to be heard. In understanding what motivates those who plot against you. In knowing what could make them turn about-face, come to your side.

A maid-of-honor who has reported your words to the Empress can be swayed with a ruby ring and promises of gratitude. A princess of the realm whose family hates you can be charmed with an unexpected visit and assurances of special friendship. Maids caught sifting through hidden
drawers covet a trinket, or fear an exposure of some indiscretion. A stolen ribbon can condemn a seamstress; a broken china cup, a scullery maid.

The best of spies, Catherine has also learned, are not bought or tricked into compliance. The best of spies believe in her. See in her the answer to their dreams. Want her to save them from their own fears. To reach for the crown of Russia.

In the darkest hours before dawn, Varvara Nikolayevna, who is back at court, says, the Imperial Bedroom is lit by thick wax candles. Maids trim them constantly, for Elizabeth believes that flickering flames bring bad luck. The Empress is superstitious: If an owl hoots, servants with muskets are dispatched to scare the bird away. If a raven lands on the palace yard, it, too, is shooed away.

The Empress of Russia is terrified of the dark. Of an assassin’s dagger. Of the Prince of Darkness, who can take many shapes. And of a twenty-three-year-old Grand Duchess who watches her from the wings, counting her gasping breaths.

“You know what she wants,” Varvara Nikolayevna whispers to Catherine.

When Elizabeth’s young lover leaves her bedroom, the Empress of Russia falls on her knees in front of the Holy Icon and begs Our Lady of Kazan to forgive her sins. It is then, her eyes softened by the sight of the divine baby nestled in the Virgin’s arms, that Elizabeth, drunk on cherry vodka and lust, seethes. “Why can’t that runt of a husband give her a child?”

Her slurred voice is steeped in derision. “And why doesn’t that stupid
Hausfrau
know what to do?”

A drafty room in the Summer Palace is lit like a stage. Candles are placed on the windowsills, on tables, on a plank suspended from the ceiling. Thick wax candles that will last the whole night if need be. From the Holy Corner, Our Lady of Kazan gazes with her soulful eyes on the Grand Duchess Catherine, who, after nine barren years, will finally give Empress Elizabeth her precious heir.