The Imperial Wife (32 page)

“Amazing, isn't it, that this object can still exist, that this two-dimensional thing can be touched,” Igor says. I think he's referring to the Order. His hands are light on my shoulders, the tendrils of his odorless breath spiraling close.

“Remarkable.” I feel a surge of triumph. The Order is real. The Order is hers. I can focus on directing it where it wants to go. And what it wants is to be reunited with Catherine.

We walk from room to room, the Nikitin portraits of Empress Elizabeth, the paunchy belly and weak, empty gaze of Peter III upon coronation, the Antropov portraits of Catherine the Great in her prime, the lively one where she wears the ermine cap shaped like a tidal wave, wields an intimidating scepter, and the more stately image, where she sits in profile, a Greek goddess on her throne. We pause before the Torelli ones, Catherine the Great dressed like Minerva surrounded by muses. One could never accuse Catherine of being underrepresented. The queen knew the importance of marketing herself.

Igor stops, gestures to the wall. “How can you say her Order doesn't belong among all these people of her court? Picture it right here in the middle of the room for all to see.”

“It would be perfect.” My clients are wily, I must remember that.

“Then we must work together to make it happen.”

I can feel the excitement in him too, energy vibrating off his skin. We're stopped before Shibanov's
Celebration of the Wedding Contract,
showing the rite of joining Tatar peasants in matrimony. I've always loved the painting for the rich color and detailing of costume. But it's the bride in the center that strikes me now, her body central in the frame, controlled by male hands.

I'm aware of Igor's grip on my forearms. A steel pincer holding me in place. Up close, his skin smells of wooded musk, a sanded piece of new furniture. A scent of menace. I pull him toward me in a single movement, run a finger across the smoothness of his jaw, the cleft of his chin. I think he might take the opportunity to kiss me, but when he doesn't move, I kiss him. The sensation of being single returns in a flash: fear and risk and blind, foolish hope, the feeling of needles pricking at my skin, the throbbing at the back of my throat. The new persona required for a kiss, the peril of believing in that persona once the kiss is over. The yielding and jabbing and play of it, the suspense about its choreography. Everything buried, forgotten.

The way he looked at you.

I realize that the barest of lips met mine before they were withdrawn and when I open my eyes, Igor is farther away than before, a face set square. Mortified, I fixate on the Shibanov painting, examine the woman at its center, her face stony as she faces her inescapable fate.

“That was a mistake. I'm sorry.” I feel like a seeded shame is worming its way inside my belly. “Forgive me.”

“Nothing to forgive,” Igor mutters. But his response is not a moral reluctance or hesitation of temptation. It's empty of charge, of any yearning.

I follow Igor's gaze toward Sergei flitting in and out of the gallery in the crispness of his suit. He is carrying a wide array of items across his arm: a coat, a tray of amber beverages, a candelabra. He is preparing for a party about to launch. As he passes, he measures Igor with his eyes. It's in the particularity of the collusion between them that is visceral, bodily. There's an invisible string that connects them that I didn't feel between Igor and the latest brunette at the Bulgari store. A turning of a key inside me yields to a click. I think of the rotating cavalcade of long-haired women. I think of the laws in Russia banning homosexuality, but really they're not so new. Homosexuality is always a target of the utmost disgust here and, law or no law, it will probably stay this way. My exhilaration is fading. I'm ensnared in a secret I never needed to hear.

“Nothing to forgive,” Igor repeats carefully. He's back looking at the Shibanov, hands clasped behind his back. “Just let me have a real shot at the Order in the auction. That's all I ask.”

I sense the oily mechanics of manipulation, a forced complicity. “Someone else is interested.”

But he's back to being Igor, charming, graceful, flirtatious, but this time with an undercurrent of warning. He probes in his pockets and emerges with a pack of cigarettes. “I've already helped you solve that problem. I hear the Order is not authentic. Have you ever met Natasha Mikhailovna at the Hermitage? A lovely older woman, real Soviet variety, slightly bitter. Can you blame her? Poor seventy-eight-year-old lady works with men like me every day and barely makes two hundred rubles a month. I've ordered her a monogrammed Bottega Veneta tote. You can imagine. She is over the moon. What is it to her if the Order is real or not real?”

Through gritted teeth, I say, “How generous of you. But it's authentic. It's been proven by experts beyond Natasha.”

“Tanya, Tanya.” His voice is softer, as if we finally made it to the precipice together, and our only viable route is down. I can almost swear the tone of his voice is confirming my hunch. He's gay, an unthinkable thing for an oligarch to be.

I'm being eased down the stairs toward the exit. The first of the hired staff, young, leggy creatures dressed as 1920s flappers, are stepping through the threshold pushing trays of china and heavy glass. It is yet another party to which I was not invited.

“You see what is at stake, don't you?” Igor moves aside to welcome the women and snaps them toward Sergei. When they are out of earshot, he lowers his voice. “I am putting my very reputation in your hands as you are putting yours in mine.”

“There's nothing I can do. I can't manipulate an auction. Our calls are recorded.”

“Let's not be starting from scratch as if we just met each other. Don't forget, if I get the Order, a check will be immediately wired to your mother-in-law. New York Children's Foster Alliance, yes? We are good in business, you and I.”

Deals like this are made all the time at the higher levels of Worthington's. When clients are wealthy or powerful enough, contracts are broken for their sakes, binding confidentiality agreements are ignored, enhanced-hammer deals mean the seller waives all commissions. In the gallery's gardens, I remind myself to put the entire thing in perspective. The decision has been made; only my marriage matters, not an auction. Carl and his family will be grateful; it will be a new beginning for us all. But as I walk to the Tretyakovskaya metro station, a tendril of doubt is worming its way inside, circling, before dissipating again in the red glow of a Moscow night.

 

Catherine

JUNE 1762

“Matushka, matushka,”
a voice repeats. Catherine protests on the fringe of sleep, trying to remember where she is, what circumstances she is entering. A quick glance around the room confirms that it is Alexis Orlov, her lover's brother, inside her private chambers at Peterhof, where her husband has practically imprisoned her. She notes the worn paisley chair by the window, the outdated curtains, the dead empress's gold easing stool, that particular quiet of an underused palace. The empress insisted on bringing all her furniture when she changed residences, not noticing when chairs arrived broken, amputated of legs.

“What is it?”

Alexis's face is either blanched of color or overly powdered but his eyes are inflamed. The entire thing is too intimately close to her own, projecting a spray of spittle on her cheek.

“
Matushka,
the time has come. Everything is ready.”

“Today? Right now?” The sun barely tipping over the sky, and her mind is still glued to the confusion of horses, the voluptuous ride of it, then death. Her dreams lately are a series of fragmented scenes in which someone gets hurt.

Alexis is trying to hurry her along with a steady drilling of words. “The time to act is now. Right now. Passek. He's been arrested.”

She attempts to rise as the consonants continue to fire at her. Passek, a guard they've secretly informed of their plans to overthrow the emperor. Why would he be in custody unless he's confessed something? She quickly understands that it will be a matter of mere hours before news of the conspiracy leaks to Peter. For now the emperor is still at Oranienbaum, which leaves the capital wide open. By the end of this day, she might be either regent or empress or dead.

She unlatches the window. The remnants of the nightmares are gone and she shoots up in bed, calling for her maid. Alexis excuses himself, an embarrassed squint at the ceiling before darting out. For a second, she is alone, frozen in the middle of the room. Then her girl arrives with a dress, corset, toiletries. She is a skinny slip of a thing, all jutting bones, but loyal and asks no questions. There is brave determination in her eye, a spark of coiled action.

“I thought this one would be right for the special day,” she says. Among the fold of clothes, Catherine glimpses dove gray with pink silk.

“No, not this one.” Her mind is racing now and she calls for the simplest in her closet: black, unadorned. She can almost hear her mother's voice advising her:
An appearance of strength and seriousness will be required before the masses, Figgy. You must fulfill your destiny, Figgy.
The girl returns with the correct dress with an urgent alacrity as if Catherine is already the empress.

She allows the gown to be fastened upon her, and when the girl approaches with makeup, she rejects most of it.

“Everything must be simple, honest. Do you understand me?”

The girl blushes, bites her lip, and Catherine reaches toward her to reassure them both. What she would give for the girl to transform into Katya, but Katya is dead of smallpox, dead at least five years now. They informed her when she finally found the voice to ask.

The palace seems to stir to life, a parade of feet rattling its floors, the sound of pouring water. She examines herself in the flimsy, grimy mirror. “There. That is fine.” The age of thirty-three suits her, and black lends her the perfect austerity.

“I'm ready,” she calls out the door, to Alexis lurking somewhere on the other side of it.

Through the gardens, along the main path, a carriage is waiting. In front of it, the horses already look exhausted, heads hung low to the ground. The carriage cramped with little legroom is far from the luxury she has become used to. This one lacks a berth for reclining. But Alexis is waving her inside, the driver already in his box.

As they clop toward the capital, Alexis is recounting a string of recent events. The cause of Passek's arrest was some idiot soldier who confronted Passek with rumors of a coup d'état. Of course, Passek denied everything, but the soldier went ahead and ran to his superior anyway.

“The grand duke is foolish if he denies the threat, but surely his advisors will make him see sense,” she agrees. “You were right to fetch me now.”

Alexis, pleased, pulls the cabin's curtain aside. A spray of voluminous sunlight fills the carriage, masking half his face. It is far less handsome than his brother's, crude and rough where Gregory's charm and good humor soften his asymmetrical features.

The carriage slows its pace until it barely moves forward. Then it stops. They are stuck on a dirt road on the fringes of a forest. Alexis springs out the door.

“What in God's name is going on?”

She can hear the outline of an exchange between him and the driver in the box.
What can you do? Ustali,
she hears.
You try traveling all night and then are forced another ten kilometers in the morning.
She smooths out her tousled black skirts as she climbs out onto the soiled tan of pebbled road.

“He said the horses will not move and that's that,” Alexis says, bulging with frustration. He is battering the side of the carriage with his fists.

Entire lifetimes, it seems, have been crammed into this moment.

“Castrated piglet,” he keeps cursing, either at himself or the driver. She wipes her brow from the heat. The horses are breathing deeply beside her, their eyes impassive. They have no idea that the fate of an entire country rests on their spasming backs. She pats the smaller one's flank, his rounding, rasping barrel.

“Maybe once they have regained their strength,” she says. “Poor things.”

“But we are losing precious time. We can be arrested any minute. All will be lost.”

Men
, she thinks. Always panicking, impatient, all that unbridled melodrama at the most crucial of moments. She misses her lover, Stanislaw, how the world simply flowed through him, how cheerfully he greeted obstacles. He had no stamina for something like this, had no illusions about his own limitations. The body of the carriage is starting to buckle beneath Alexis's fists.

“Stop it, Alexis.” He is infecting her with his mounting hysteria. “For God's sake, we have to think.”

“My brother will hire a carriage if we do not arrive. He knows the situation.”

“There,” she says, soothingly, a maternal pat. “Resolved. We have no choice but to wait.”

All this unexpected heat and smog, and here she is in somber black under the broiling sun. Alexis drops his fists, and they both listen. For what? The word of God? Her lover? Salvation? She looks up. The light filtered through the thick mass of trees creates shifting shapes on the grass. She watches them dance and dissolve.

For a while, she tunes into the whistle of flirting cardinals, to the rotation of the world and not much else. Then they make out the sound of horse hooves, a musical symphony of metal against ground, its rhythmic elegance. A cart rolls into view, trotting with brisk nonchalance.

“Wait here.”

She can see Alexis through the spiral of rising dirt. He is impressing a cartful of peasants with his uniform. He is pointing in her direction, calling her grand duchess and then empress, and insisting that they need the means to enter the city. To fit the name of empress, she channels Elizabeth. She forces herself to rise tall and imperious, haughty. The peasants look her over. They are doubtful, hands folded over their chests in self-protection. At last, Alexis engages in the final acts of bartering, and the amount of financial renumeration escalates. There is also the exchange of horses, the peasants' fresh ones attached to their carriage.