Rebel Princess (14 page)

“Thank you, Excellency. Those are words I never thought to hear, but they have made me happy indeed. I never wished to be your enemy, and yet it seemed I could do nothing right. However, I have had eight years in which to remedy my faults,” she added slyly, and only the glint of mockery in her eyes showed the remark to be without malice.

Bestujev accepted the rebuke with a wry smile, and then judged the time ripe for frankness.

“Forgive me, Madame, if I remind you of the reason for my apparent harshness and for Her Majesty's disappointment in you. Oh, I know the Grand Duke to be far from ideal as a husband, but none the less the crown will one day pass to him. His health is poor; it is vital to the peace of Russia that he should have an heir.”

Catherine looked him straight in the face.

“As I told you and the Empress one night a long time ago, the lack of a child is not my fault!”

“I know that, Madame, and the time has come when your duty to Russia must outweigh your married scruples,” he said gently. “There are two men, I believe, who are very much in love with you?” Despite herself Catherine blushed; she knew of one at least.…

“Saltykov is a handsome fellow, I have heard tell he worships you, or perhaps it is Narychkin you prefer.…”

At last the Grand Duchess saw the two-fold purpose behind Bestujev's visit; the peace he offered her after their long feud was a conditional one, and the price he asked was the fulfillment of her heart's desire … but he spoke of Leo. He was surely mistaken? Leo was a dear friend, but as a lover …

“No, Excellency, I assure you Narychkin means nothing to me,” she said quickly. Bestujev rose and kissed her hand.

“Then it is Serge that pleases you; I commend your taste. As a proof of my friendship I will send him to you this evening. As a proof of yours, give Russia an heir!”

With that promise he was gone.

The Grand Duchess ran to the bell-rope and pulled it vigorously. Vladyslava.… Where was she? She must make a toilette, the most important of her life. This night she must be worthy of her lover.

Catherine hurried into her robing room and chose a loose gown of red velvet hung with lace, while the impassive waiting-woman let down her hair. When she left, Catherine paced the room in a fever of happiness, remembering her cold, distasteful vigil on her wedding night, contrasting it with her present state of ardent impatience.

This was what it meant to wait for a lover, this terrible tumult of tenderness and desire, the faint tinge of fear common to all women who have yet to know the ardors of the final embrace.

She turned quickly as her door opened and closed softly. Saltykov stood there, his arms wide, his handsome face aflame with the longing reflected on her own.

Without a word she ran to him and his embrace crushed the breath out of her body; in a curious haze she felt herself lifted into his arms and knew that he was taking her to that inner room which had been the grave of her marriage with Peter Feodorovitch.

In the spring of 1794 Bestujev went in person to Elizabeth and informed her officially that the Grand Duchess Catherine was pregnant at last.

Chapter 7

In her bedroom in the Winter Palace at St. Petersburg, the Grand Duke stood looking down at his wife. He stood in the forefront of a pressing crowd of courtiers grouped about the mattress on the floor, placed according to custom beside the state four-poster bed; the Empress Elizabeth was kneeling at his side, and he could hear her intoning prayers under her breath.

The atmosphere was stifling and Peter unbuttoned his uniform coat for greater comfort. His back ached with standing, and he longed for his comfortable bed, but so long as the Empress continued her vigil, so must he.

How much longer, he wondered savagely, would that gasping, writhing creature on the mattress keep them all waiting before she gave birth? He raised his eyes from the contemplation of Catherine's sufferings, and looked round at the other watchers with cynical amusement.

How many of them, he wondered, had been duped into believing that the woman whose birth pangs they were witnessing bore anything but a bastard in her womb.

Saltykov's child was rending its adulterous mother in two; soon now the spectacle would be over, and the waiting crowds of St. Petersburg would hurry home to toast the birth of an heir to their “beloved Grand Duke and Duchess.…”

Peter's grim amusement deepened; the utter falsity of the situation appealed to his warped sense of humor. He had kept them all dangling for eight years by adhering to the policy formed on his wedding day—never to lay a hand on his bride except to knock some sense into her with his fists.

He glanced down at Elizabeth, noting her closed eyes and the desperate look of concentration as she prayed, and his ugly face twisted in an open grin.

This was one night the imperial strumpet would spend out of Ivan Shuvalov's embrace.

Peter had found a communicating door between one of his antechambers and the Empress's bedroom. Several small holes had been bored in that door, and an inquiring eye saw scenes of his aunt's middle-aged passion that caused him convulsions of laughter. He had even invited one or two of his most trusted friends to avail themselves of this privilege.

His Aunt Elizabeth was getting plump and her once lovely face was lined aud rouged till it resembled a withered, painted apple. She had frequent fits of violent colic and her tempers were more hysterical and less effective.

Rumor said that she saw Ivan's image, chained and blinking like a blind man from his twenty years in captive darkness, and that she screamed for wine to stupefy her senses and banish the specter of her guilt. In every room in her apartments there was always a quantity of wine.

Looking down at the Empress, Peter hoped with all his heart that she would not live long. The moment she died, he knew what he would do.

He would become Emperor for just long enough to declare war on the foes of his idol Frederick the Great, and he felt that never would worthless Russian blood be spilled to better cause; he would murder and imprison his enemies, and the first person on whom his wrath would fall would be that woman on the mattress.

Then he would retire to Holstein and leave Russia to her fate. Catherine gave a sharp cry and the midwife hurried close to her.

The Empress opened her eyes and started up; Peter leaned forward.…

She had made him suffer, and perversely he hated her because she had betrayed him with another man, because he knew that other to be handsome as he was hideous, strong and tall as he was thin and weakling. Now she was giving birth to the child of that betrayal, and he must call it his before the world for as long as Elizabeth Petrovna lived.

At twelve o'clock on that morning of September, 1754, the Grand Duchess was delivered of a baby boy. The midwife and the doctors exclaimed over him, kissed Elizabeth's hands and placed the infant in her arms.

The Empress held the tiny, crying bundle close, and a flood of fierce affection for it, mingled with a passion of relief, swept through her.

The dream of ten years ago was realized at last, her childless arms were filled, her throne had an heir; God in His mercy had heard her prayers, and only the wicked obstinacy and ingratitude of her nephew and his wife had made it necessary to achieve these things by adultery and deceit.

The need for self-justification roused a cold rage within Elizabeth's breast; Bestujev's opinion of Peter had since been proved disastrously wrong, for the widow Grooth had made a man of the twenty-four-year-old Grand Duke at last, as the Empress knew beyond possible doubt, and Catherine had enjoyed her adultery with Saltykov unnecessarily. What was worse, she had made the Empress a party to the crime; and for that Elizabeth would never forgive her.

As for Bestujev, he had added one more portion of guilt to her tormented conscience, and the fruition of his cherished plan was in fact to be the downfall of his ministry.

With a single, frowning glance at the exhausted Catherine, the Empress swept out of the room, the new-born baby in her arms.

One by one the courtiers followed her; Peter shambled out to receive congratulations and then fall into bed; the midwife and the doctors hurried after Elizabeth and her wailing burden. The whole great room emptied in the space of a few minutes, leaving the mattress and its occupant alone.

Catherine lay back exhausted; two tears of pain and weakness coursed down her sunken cheeks, the black hair was soaked and matted to her head with sweat, and a burning thirst tormented her.

For a while she lay very still, dimly conscious that the nightmare of pain she had endured so long seemed to have ended, and that her tongue was swelling in her mouth for want of water.

At last she turned her head, very slowly for it felt heavy as lead, and her eyes scanned the empty room. There must be someone there, in a part of the chamber that she couldn't see, perhaps, but some servant at least, who could give her a drink of water.…

With a great effort she called out, but there was no reply, no movement. They had all gone. The child was born and they had all left her as if she had died once her purpose was fulfilled; Catherine began to sob with thirst. A fearful abyss of loneliness and fear opened up before her as the hours went by and no living soul entered that room.

The sound of cannon shook the windows, as the fortress guns of St. Peter and Paul fired a salute to the royal baby.

A hot wave of fever enveloped her, shot with sudden pain, and the thought came to her that this was Elizabeth's answer to her affair with Saltykov.

She was being left deliberately alone to die.

Towards evening one of the court ladies looked casually in through the chamber door and reported that the Grand Duchess was unconscious.

Two hours later the midwife left Elizabeth and went to her patient. While the court and the city celebrated with feasts and bonfires, while prayers for the baby Grand Duke were offered in churches all over St. Petersburg, the mother lay on her mattress, senseless and racked with fever.

From the depths of her heart the Empress hoped that Catherine would die; her beauty, her cleverness and the scandal of her adultery would all be conveniently buried in an elaborate tomb, while the tiny creature to whom she had given life would belong to Elizabeth alone.… Peter got hilariously drunk on the strength of the news, and the court shrugged indifferently and went on amusing itself.

Only the people of Russia heard that the Grand Duchess was likely to die, and in their thousands the people mourned. They remembered her wedding day: her smiling beauty had become almost a legend. The great silent masses of the people kept the image of the sick mother in their hearts, and they went in confident supplication to that other Mother who had also borne a Son.

One month later Catherine was sitting up in bed. She was out of danger physically, but her spirits were weighed down with depression, and for once her abundant energy seemed to have drained completely away. Vladyslava waited on her, and her ministry was kind and efficient.

The Grand Duchess had charm; even in her feeblest moments she had managed to thank Vladyslava courteously and to apologize for the trouble she was giving. The waiting-woman's Russian heart warmed to her mistress under such unaccustomed treatment, and pitied the mother who had never been permitted to gaze on her own child since the day of its birth.

The Empress had taken full possession of the baby; it was wet-nursed and kept in her apartments. Elizabeth, herself the thwarted mother, refused to let the infant out of her sight, and after a while Catherine ceased to ask for her son; she only turned her face to the wall and wept.

Now she no longer cared. It was not her child, her arms had never held it, her fingers had never stroked its head; she knew it only as discomfort and suffering that was mercifully difficult to remember, and slowly, inexorably, the maternal instinct died in Catherine as she lay alone in her great bed.

She had no son, no husband, for now Peter had vacated her apartments altogether, but there was one who cared for her, one who had held her close, who had kissed her lips till they ached and pulled the pins out of her hair like a mischievous boy.

She had not seem him and he had sent her no word.

In her loyalty Catherine applauded his discretion, until the empty hours and lengthening days of silence bred a fear for his safety.

What if Elizabeth had harmed him, now that he, too, had served his purpose? Catherine knew well enough that the Empress had been aware of Bestujev's arrangement, and her terror for Saltykov compelled her to confide in someone.

Vladyslava, faithful, silent Vladyslava, who had shown him to her bedroom that night so many months ago.… She could be trusted.

“Find him,” she begged. “I will give you money to send messengers to his home if he is not at court, only let me know that he is well, Vladyslava, bring me one word, one letter from him!”

The waiting-woman patted her mistress's thin hand and promised speedy news, while the expression of desperate pleading in Catherine's anxious eyes caused her to curse the heartlessness of men.

When Vladyslava returned that evening, Catherine sat up eagerly.

“What news, is he in St. Petersburg? Have you seen him?”

Her waiting-woman came towards the bed and sat down on the edge of it without speaking. A spasm of fright clutched at Catherine's heart and she went pale.

“Have you a letter from him?” she whispered.

Vladyslava cleared her throat and her dark eyes met her mistress's gaze squarely.

“Forgive the bearer of bad news, Highness. Monsieur Saltykov is not at court; he is not even in Russia by now. The Empress sent him on a mission to Sweden, just after your son was born.…”

“No!
No!
I don't believe it!”

The Grand Duchess's voice rose in a shiek; she seized the older woman by the shoulders and tried to shake her.

“He wouldn't go like that! He wouldn't leave without a word to me … he could have sent one word. Oh, God, why do you tell me this? Where did you hear this lie?”