Rebel Princess (19 page)

The time for petty jealousies and vanities was past; Catherine's youth and beauty had suddenly ceased to matter. The Empress no longer resented them, and the misunderstandings and wrongs of former years faded and died while the minutes ticked by and only the sound of the younger woman's sobs disturbed the silence in the room.

“Look at me, Catherine Alexeievna.”

The Grand Duchess raised her head, wiping the tears away with her fingers.

“I look at you, Little Mother Elizabeth.”

“Have you been true to me and to your country? Answer without fear or deceit: there is only time for truth between us now.”

“I have been true; I swear it. I vow on my son's head that I have never been false to you, Elizabeth Petrovna, even in thought! As for Russia, for my country …” Catherine's face glowed with genuine feeling; “I would give my life to protect its interests!”

The Empress nodded. “I believe you, Catherine. I shall not ask you about this Poniatowsky; I warned you that there must be no scandal, and since there is a scandal he must go! Get up, child, and draw that stool near. I have been severe with you perhaps.…”

The Grand Duchess dismissed her life with the Tchoglokovs, her pathetic first love, the theft of her child, with a quick gesture of denial.

“But I am an old woman and my body aches and sickens for rest. I see Death before me and, because of the love I bore you when you came here as a girl, I would warn you. Look to yourself, Catherine, for when I am dead, Peter Feodorovitch will kill you. And I fear for the child Paul. It will go hard with both of you when my protection is no more.”

The Empress's carmined lips tightened and she looked past Catherine into the shadows of the big draughty room, her eyes searching unhappily into the future, gazing on the vast rolling lands of Holy Russia and the nameless millions of her subjects.

They were her children and she must deliver them into the hands of Peter, who spoke of the German King Frederick as his lord and master, and whose drunken boasts that he would make a vassalage of her country had come all to frequently to the Empress's ears.

Every drop of Elizabeth's Russian blood cried out in protest of her father's crown being placed upon the head of such a man, and as her eyes settled once more on Catherine's face a fierce unhappy resolve was born in her.

Years ago at the Troitsky Convent she had spared the little Princess Augusta in the hope that she would bear a child, and the faint echo of her own secret thought returned to her. “If Peter has a son, then perhaps he need never succeed to the throne at all.…” Well, he had a son, the boy she had brought up and worshiped as her own, and why should not the diadem of Peter the Great encircle his brow instead of passing to the man whom the world politely acknowledged to be his father?

This clever, sharp-witted young woman who had displayed such admirable courage and resource that very night … who better to destroy Peter and protect the little Grand Duke Paul than the estranged wife who knew her husband's succession to mean her own death?

So Elizabeth Petrovna's mind worked with shrewd and deadly cunning as she stared in silence at Catherine and found words with which to aid her plan.

Suddenly she leaned forward. The candle-light bathed her face in a merciless glow, stripping away the painted façade of youth from her mouth and eyes, exposing the harsh patches of rouge on her sunken cheeks. The Empress reminded the watching Grand Duchess of a terrible animated skull, the bones clothed in flaccid, dying flesh, a glittering Death, grotesquely plump and bedizened like a frightened harlot.

“I fear to think of my country given into Peter's hands. I fear his madness for my enemy Frederick and the harm that he will do my people when the power of the Czars devolves upon him.…

“You, Catherine Alexeievna, you can give peace to my last days! Grow strong while there is yet time; form friends of influence while I still live to protect them and you!

“And not such men as Poniatowsky, for all his pretty looks. You need men of different mettle. One man, if you will, who can stand at your elbow as Bestujev stood at mine in the days of my youth. Before he became corrupted and tried to act against me. I shall send him to Siberia for that! No, you shall not have Bestujev, you must find your own champion. But I should die with an easy mind if I believed that Russia would pass to my little Paul, with you as Regent!”

Despite herself, Catherine started to hear her most secret thoughts spoken aloud.

“We cannot usurp the throne, Your Majesty!”

Elizabeth laughed harshly.

“I shall name your son Czar in my will, when the time comes. Then it will be in your hands what you do. If I did not love my country and cherish my people, I would not deliver my sister's son into your mercy, Catherine, for if I'm any judge of woman, I think that you will show him little!”

“It is he who speaks of prisons and death, not I, Your Majesty!”

“Yes, he threatens, but by God you will act! Go now, Catherine Alexeievna, before I repent me of my treachery to my own blood. Go, and hold your tongue about what I have said to you. Those who covet a crown must have strong necks to bear its weight. Mine is already weakened to the point of death. Farewell!”

As the Grand Duchess walked quietly back to her own apartments, back through the same deserted corridors that she had trodden earlier that night, the squad of soldiers who had been kept in weary vigil to arrest her dispersed yawning to their quarters, and the closed carriage which had waited in a back courtyard of the palace, ready to carry the royal prisoner to some living grave, clattered empty away into the early dawn.

With his shaven head cradled on Elizabeth Vorontzov's huge breasts, the Grand Duke Peter wept and cursed himself into an uneasy sleep.

Catherine his wife had returned to her rooms a free woman and all his hopes and plans had come to naught again.

Catherine said farewell to Poniatowsky within a few short weeks. The scandal had subsided a little, and after endless waiting and precautions the lovers met for the last time before his return to Poland.

The separation and anxiety had been a nightmare to the Count Loving Catherine as he did, he yet lacked the initiative and daring that had impelled another man to plan elopement when he knew her to be in danger. So he remained in his house in the capital until at last her messenger assured him that they might meet in safety.

In that same bedroom where he had known his first night of supreme happiness in her arms, Poniatowsky spent his last hours with her.

Elizabeth had spoken truly; with the insight of her long experience she had damned Catherine's lover in one brief descriptive phrase. What use had he been to her that night, what protection in her hour of mortal danger?

Time was short, and her search for the champion Elizabeth had counseled must begin. Bestujev, languishing in Siberia, now relied upon her triumph for release; his support was gone and replacement must be made.

Where in all Russia would she find a man strong enough to shake Peter Feodorovitch off his throne and place her on it, ostensibly deputizing for her son? Only force would avail in the end, and Catherine, bidding farewell to Poniatowsky on that gray morning, with the first streaks of daylight patterning the room, thought of the search ahead of her and despaired.

Where would she find such a man?

But in the end it was he who found her.

Many years earlier, in the days of Peter the Great, soldiers of the Strelitz Regiment had dared to mutiny. The insurrection failed and the ringleaders were lined up on a public scaffold one freezing winter's morning to pay the penalty for their crime. The headsman did his work under the eyes of the Czar, whose love of bloodshed went to such lengths that he had been known to take a hand with the axe himself on occasions.

It came to the turn of a gigantic Russian to kneel for execution, one Orlov, known throughout his regiment as a man without fear or respect for God or man. His booted foot disposed of the severed head of a comrade which happened to lie in his path, and the observation that he must make room for himself came clearly to the ears of his Czar.

Better even than horrors, Peter the Great loved bravery and the mutinous soldier was pardoned on the spot; he was transferred to the Guards, the
elite
regiments of the Russian army, and eventually became an officer and was ennobled.

So on a scaffold the fortunes of the Orlov family were founded, and it was at the Grand Ducal Palace at Oranienbaum that the grandson of the first Orlov and the daughter of the pious, humble Christian of Anhalt Zerbst met for the first time.

“I tell you, Gregory, you must be mad! For God's sake remember that the scandal over that damned Kurakin woman has scarcely died down.”

The speaker lay at full length on a couch, his huge frame clad in military uniform covered the whole structure, and the side of his face, which was turned towards another figure outlined against the window, was fine-featured and singularly handsome. The other side, mercifully pressed against the cushion under his blond head, was scarred from brow to chin by an old saber cut.

Alexis Orlov, one of the three grandsons of the Strelitz ranker, was trying to instill caution into the head of his elder brother, who stood with his back to him, staring moodily out of the window on to the fair, green vista of the gardens at Oranienbaum.

Caution and Alexis were strange bed-fellows, and he inwardly despaired of dissuading his beloved brother from a course of action which he would most probably have pursued himself, had that accursed saber scar not marred his chances.

“Wait until you have seen her yourself before you deliver any more of your damned lectures!” Gregory Orlov turned and faced his brother. He was startlingly handsome, fair and light-eyed and possessed of a magnificent physique. “As for the Kurakin, I got out of that, didn't I?”

“I could never understand why you didn't just seduce the woman instead of risking your neck by kidnapping her under the nose of your Colonel. And you escape the consequences of abducting his mistress because the Prussians were considerate enough to kill him for you at Konigsberg!” returned Alexis shortly.

He laughed and seated himself at the head of the couch.

“She wouldn't be seduced, my dear Alex, and how was I to know that she'd sicken me within a week? Enough of that any way! Since I came here I've had no room in my head for memories of the fair Kurakin or any other woman. By tomorrow night you will have the evidence of your own eyes to convince you that our half-witted Grand Duke is married to the most fascinating creature in Russia!”

Alexis rolled over on the couch and closed his eyes.

“And he has an ugly, pock-marked mistress! But that doesn't mean he would lend his Grand Duchess to warm your sheets, my friend! Have affairs with every woman in Oranienbaum, you never have any difficulty, but for God's sake be wary before you begin pursuing this one. I can think of better ways to lose my head than over a wench, however highborn!”

Gregory swore and stamped out of the room.

He had been presented to her for the first time at a ball, and had never seen a more beautiful figure than the Grand Duchess in her crimson and gold brocade dress as she had proceeded down the lines of courtiers waiting to be received by her.

He had bowed low and kissed her hand like the rest, while his looks expressed admiration and desire with the boldness which had proved the downfall of so much female virtue in the past.

For a single moment her eyes, blue and vivid as his own, had met that impudent hunter's glance, and he knew beyond doubt that his message had been understood.

Since then he had seen her almost every day, at court, out riding, and walking with her ladies in the garden. She had conversed with him, graciously and without apparent guile, while the atmosphere of unspoken tension grew between them.

He wanted this woman; her tall, voluptuous body tormented him with angry longing, and the haughty, calculated wariness of her manners towards him filled him with a savage masculine desire to crush it out of her in the one situation where her sex and weakness could find no refuge in their different status.

Also he hated his Grand Duke and future Emperor.

To Gregory Orlov as to many others, Peter Feodorovitch was a German whose years in Russia had never succeeded in teaching him the language properly, whose habits and dress were insultingly foreign, and whose puny physique and drunken eccentricities were contemptible and strange to a people familiar with the bloody caprices of the Great Czar Peter and his daughter Elizabeth.

As a man, the Grand Duke's choice of mistress filled Gregory Orlov with angry scorn; he had a beautiful wife, and the pick of numerous pretty women if he liked variety, but the embraces of Elizabeth Vorontzov betokened a depravity beyond the healthy lusts of the handsome Gregory.

While Orlov fumed and sweated, Catherine Alexeievna was torn with doubts. The image of the blond Lieutenant of Guards burning into her brain, his hot blue eyes following her out of the shadows, the insistent voice of her own heart which declared that men of his kind were rare and valuable, urged her to make a move.

But yet she hesitated. Here was no powerful diplomat such as her necessity demanded, and there would not be room for two lovers in her life. She ought to wait, counseled her head, enquire about him and decide whether a few weeks of summer madness would be worth the risk.

He was superbly handsome, powerful as a bull, deep-chested and broad-shouldered; he towered above her and touched her with impudent design, and at the thought of him she trembled and grew strangely weak.

No man had ever mastered Catherine, and though, woman-like, she loved the domineering male in theory, her independence shrank from him in the flesh. She had heard a great deal about Gregory Orlov and his brothers. The exploit with the lovely Countess Kurakin had caused a tremendous scandal, and the man capable of such brutal recklessness was not one to be trifled with or underestimated. If she relented and yielded to the undoubted fascination she felt for him, her freedom might be difficult to regain. All these considerations tormented her and fought against the growing inclination to be as other women and surrender.