The Imperial Wife (13 page)

She rose, turned to face George. “Clever, you mean. Or arrogant and prideful if you listen to Mother.” Whether he possessed intellect or not, she has never seen eyes like his. Two changing sapphires.

“No, but pretty. A man would be very lucky to call you wife.”

“What about my pointed chin?” Dimly, she was aware of the cross behind her, the sound of cartwheels rolling over the cobblestones in the square. His hair was tightly slicked back, his moustache draped over his lips like a hasty arrangement of bedclothes.

“I do not find your chin wanting. It is the chin of perfection.”

She edged herself closer to the corner, a thin pain of dizziness overtaking her. Back in the privacy of her bed, she liked to adjust a pillow between her legs, achieving a related sensation. She was aware of the lowering of their voices, the vapor of their words compared with the substantial shuddering inside. She tried a saucy: “How do you feel about the return of Communion vestments? Are you in agreement with our new monarch on the issue?”

He was stalking closer, the room suddenly smaller. She held her breath, held her gaze on the looming cross. “Sophie,” he said, his hand reaching for her chin, the overly pointed one, her mouth greeting his.

A clanging series of knocks returns her to the room with Peter. Her betrothed.

“Ah, at last. Here you are.” He opens the door, the servants on the other side dressed in the same uniforms as his soldiers. They stiffen before him in a neat row, these human replicas of toys. Peter assesses each one individually for appearance. “You. Your pigtails are the wrong length. You are demoted to musketeer. And you. You better improve your firing time or you will be demoted too. Let us begin our military exercises.” He turns to Sophie with a definitive clearing of the throat—you may go.

“May I stay and join you?” she attempts, but he looks at her as on a madwoman. But she has achieved her goal. His trust. Allies. A small step, but a step nevertheless.

She fetches her riding habit and meets her friend at the stables. Katya is a remarkable horsewoman. She is remarkable in all ways, but is confined to the tight boundaries of her gender. Sometimes, Sophie wants to push her to read, to think outside the vapor of love and balls and fashion, but Katya gently steers her back to her own interests, to the way their two worlds intersect. When will a betrothed love you? What are a wife's responsibilities? Whom do you find more handsome: Razumovsky or Volokhin?

Now, she admires the balance of her friend's sidesaddle position, her ability to give all of herself to the horse, an instinct for when the creature softens beneath her touch. Rastrelli's overwhelming Summer Palace recedes behind them in the usual contrast of glorious and fetid: the majesty of its sweeping Venetian façade at the bank of the foul Fontanka Canal. Sophie is relieved when she can barely see it. She breathes into the depths of her fur. It is an off-putting February; still no snow, only the placid whiteness.

“So the rumors are true? He just plays with soldiers all day?” Katya says.

“And he starts drinking early in the morning.” Only with Katya does she allow herself the wrench of self-pity.

“You poor dear. But he must outgrow it. From what my mother tells me, men are like this, children. He needs a woman to set him straight, and who better than you?”

“But he is no boy. He is fifteen years old, Katya! Next in line to be monarch of all the Russias. When will he grow up?”

The air is piercing, clawing at her face, the wind slapping her cheeks. The gun rests, futile. Not a single duck when usually she shoots at least three by midday. But as she trains her head toward the sky and the possibility of prey, it occurs to her that Peter is only the beginning of her story. She has watched how the court treats Peter as dispensable symbol and perhaps a fool is preferable to a wily despot. It did not take long to see that his behavior is being ridiculed at court, that the empress has hoped Sophie's arrival will mature him. That everyone at court pities and respects her at his expense.

She feels a new burst of hope that might be her first political realization at court. Of course, she thinks, it is so simple, and yet she keeps forgetting it in her childish search for love. It is the one who reigns on the throne who holds all the power. She must focus her energies on the empress. She pushes her horse onward.

“Look at me, Katya,” she cries, and swings a leg over the seat so she is riding the horse like a man.

“Should you? Oh, you shouldn't!” her friend cries. The canter is choppy, tides of cold air gripping at the throat. It is time to head back, she can hear them calling for her to turn around, but she ignores the cries and presses on, farther, farther from the gleaming complex.

*   *   *

That night, she tries to dress for dinner but cold is shivering up her body, making it spasm, convulse. She alternates huddling under soaking sheets and pulling them off in order to breathe. She should have never gone riding in the chill, she thinks. She is not accustomed to the Russian climate. Then she loses the thread of the idea. Her mother is speaking—
we're late, the grand duke is waiting for us
—but to Sophie, her face is swimming, distorted.
The empress has gone to the monastery, so there is no need to play the convalescent.

“Please,” Sophie says, the ache deeper now, somewhere at her side. This infection, whatever it is, has wormed itself to her very bones. “I would like to return to bed.”

“Then I will attend alone,” Johanna announces. She is dressed in the most spectacular brocade gown and is appraising the folds beneath her eyes in a gold hand mirror, a gift from the empress. Sophie tries to hoist herself up in bed in order to allow herself to be dressed—she can imagine how her mother will translate this illness to the mercurial grand duke—but the pain strikes below her right breast. She gives herself over to it.

Fine, fine, go without me
. Sophie lies back down, wraps herself in covers, draws knees to her chest. She is cold, her very flesh exposed. If she could only sleep. A rapid scan of the room confirms her mother is gone. Sleep demolishes her, then she awakes to a cavalcade of faces. George returns through the waves of cold pulses. He pulls her behind the door, against the wall. The silver edge of her favorite tapestry of armies straddling earth-colored horses is scratching at her cheek.

“You shall marry me. My sister will be pleased.”

“I suppose so. Johanna will at least be rid of me. Would I not make an ideal wife?”

“Indeed, most ideal.”

He plants a kiss to her nose, to the swell of her earlobe. Then the scene shifts and it is that final night at home before the eastward journey. Downstairs with the nurse, she hears the voice of her little sister, a bubbling over of baby glee. In a wedge of the opposite wing, her father scratches at papers on his secretary desk, accepts visitors into the library, a long trail of appointments sprinkled across walnut chairs. The entire castle runs on schedule but there is an air of impending change. Sophie is leaving but she is not sure who knows about it. Her father does, yet he is buried away in his office. Babette was not told. Babette, innocently urging her to the Corelli on the violin with those soft fluttering hands. She certainly would have wondered at the commotion but was too afraid of Johanna to inquire.

“The idea of it. Being rid of you.” Submerged in her neck, George's lips tracing some distant moon behind her ear.

She awakes and sleeps again. She is aware of arguments taking place beside her bed. Her mother is pressing some case with doctors, Katya is patting cool cloth to her forehead. Even Peter appears above her as concerned observer. The pain in her side worsens, radiating to the rest of her body. Her sheets are soaked with sweat. So this is dying, she thinks. A messy struggle, this.

She moans and is shushed. “Suffer quietly,” she thinks her mother commands her. “What kind of report do you want to reach the empress?” Her jaw is inflamed, so tight and filled with fire she imagines it snapping off onto the floor. Humans or ghosts populate the room, she is not sure which. Strange, she thinks, that death stands on no ceremony, conveys no formal invitation. It simply blocks her view of living. Eventually, she feels herself placed into a substantial lap, an expansive bosom, finds herself under the caress of warm, pliant hands. She looks up to find it is the empress herself. She is murmuring, “My dearest, I will not let you slip away,” and she is commanding someone, “Bleed her at once.”

“Please. No bleeding.” She can hear her alarmed mother. “That is how her little brother died.” But her voice is extinguished, pushed back.

“She will be bled. Right now.”

The prick begins with arms but attacks various points in her body—the feet, thighs, her posterior. She slips in and out of consciousness. Lestocq is gone, another doctor in his place who speaks Russian in a thick Spanish-sounding accent. And the empress never abandons her side, replacing the wet cloths on her forehead, holding Sophie's head in the crook of her elbow. There is a continued litany of comfort, a soothing string of words whose meaning she has only begun to learn. She jolts up in bed and vomits, a long expulsion of her insides. She imagines it as a fury of blood.

“I will fetch the Lutheran pastor,” her mother cries, but the heat of Sophie's body is subsiding and she is becoming sensible to her surroundings. A tableau of people occupy every inch of the room, some are wringing bloodstained handkerchiefs, others just gaping at her. But she stares up into the worried blue eyes of the empress and remembers. The one who reigns holds the power.

She clears her voice. “What is the use of the Lutheran when I mean to convert? Send instead for Simeon Teodorsky. I will be happy to speak with him.” There is a stunned silence and the generous bosom does not move from her side; if anything, it presses itself closer. Exclamations of joy wash over her.

“What a charming accent our little pupil displays. She has been studying her Russian,” the empress exclaims.

“An unusually adept and eager student,” Teodorsky confirms when he arrives, giving a nervous laugh. He looks more skeletal and pared away than usual. He might be frightened for his own survival.

With fresh lucidity, Sophie examines the empress's face. It is blotched and discolored by sun spots, lined with age. The empress is human. The woman has been crying out of fear for
her
health, Sophie's! She clasps the empress's hand, presses it tightly to her cooling cheek.

“It is you who healed me,
matyushka
.”

“Oh, my darling.” The empress is covering her face with relieved, exultant kisses.

And Sophie allows herself to be lowered back inside the foul-smelling sheets. No one will be sending her back to Zerbst. For now.

 

Tanya

PRESENT DAY

When I enter the Four Seasons restaurant, Igor is seated at a corner table by the window. It's the oligarchs' favorite table. A potted tree hides these particular men from the other patrons but allows them a view of the pool in the center of the room. He stands, pulls out my chair, and continues to dress somebody down over the phone. A loop of his finger brings us sparkling water and a tray of lime.

By now, I know the identity of the man sitting across from me. Igor Yardanov, multibillionaire real estate developer, media darling. A graduate of Mendeleev Institute, a child of engineers, trained as a mathematician. His story parallels that of many other younger oligarchs after the fall of the Soviet Union: he made his fortune by seizing a majority share in the country's aluminum production, settled into his wealth by becoming an owner of a chain of restaurants in Moscow, a movie studio, an avant-garde ballet theater, and a soccer stadium in St. Petersburg, a new development project in midtown Manhattan. A close confidant of Russia's president. Embroiled in a well-known rivalry with former partner Alexander Medovsky, according to a series of high-profile court cases in London over the carving up of the empire they launched in 2000. The only detail that sets him apart from the rest of his cohorts is his single, childless, never-married status. It is this, in addition to his scathing, bronzed looks, that tends to receive the lion's share of press, the speculation about his girlfriends, a swarm of rotating models draped over him at openings.

What my predecessor at Worthington's never understood, what Marjorie always found so mysterious, was that clients crave personal relationships. These are men with hundreds of daily supplicants, these are men sold to constantly, who sit on the receiving end of demands from colleagues, enemies, wives, and mistresses. When I first meet potential clients, I don't try to sell my expertise or the prestige of the company or why they should choose Worthington's over Sotheby's. Do they enjoy their home in Greece? Did they make it to Formula One this year? If Jewish, do they travel regularly to Israel? Only once the wine is flowing, a rapport established, can I gently move toward, what kind of art are you drawn to? Are you considering building up a collection? What period excites you? Anything in the London auctions that appealed lately? From the answers to these questions, I can size up the kind of man I'll be working with and tease out allies in preserving Russian culture.

Our table is arrayed with appetizers, slivers of duck prosciutto resting on feathers of wilted greens, morel mushrooms dotting a shallow bowl of asparagus soup. A pair of glasses arranged in front of us, a bottle of wine uncorked. He gestures for me to begin eating.

In the early days, I was less cheerful about these lunches, disturbed by the coarseness of the men sitting across from me. I'd have to suffer an entourage of goons passing around porn videos on their phones between courses, or berating the waiter for not bringing him “the best” this or “the top-of-the-line” that. Luckily, there are fewer of those around; the old guard is being replaced by those who know the best is not the flashiest, who have slowed their gorging after a lifetime of deprivation.