Great Catherine (10 page)

Riding in her carriage with the irascible Johanna, sharing a tent with her, and trying to keep peace between Johanna and Peter put Catherine under a constant strain. The empress, who had been keeping Catherine by her side and sending her costly presents each day, grew more distant, caught up in her hunting and her strenuous devotions. Elizabeth could not in any case protect Catherine from the rancor of those closest to her, she could only offer her own warmth and ebullience to counteract it. As the long summer's ramble drew to its end, and the first frost chilled the air, Catherine took her place in the huge procession returning to Moscow, feeling more keenly than ever that she was young, vulnerable, and alone.

Chapter Six

>»o«»

In October Peter took to his bed with a dry cough and pains in his side. His doctor watched him closely, and forbade him to exert himself, but his symptoms evoked no great concern as he had been ill many times before and this episode appeared to be no worse than the others. Catherine, perhaps relieved to be free of her fiance's teasing and rough play, sent him notes and went on happily without him.

She had found new friends to replace the Russian girl Johanna had sent away. They were Praskovia and Anna Rumyantsev, daughters of her chief lady-in-waiting Maria Rumyantsev. Close to Catherine in age, the two girls shared Catherine's taste for energetic games and silliness, and in their company she was able to forget the worries that beset her and lose herself in boisterous pleasure. Maria Rumyantsev let the romping and dancing in Catherine's apartments go on, she thought it harmless enough. The empress, who continually told Catherine how pleased she was with her, how she loved her "almost more than Peter," did not inquire too closely into what went on in the grand duchess's apartments. Johanna, who only a few months earlier had stepped in to destroy the burgeoning friendship between her daughter and her young waiting maid, did not intervene this time, preoccupied as she was by her growing involvement with Count Betsky and housed at the Winter Palace in rooms distant from Catherine's.

son

Night after night, when the balls and parties were over, Catherine went back to her rooms and invited Praskovia to sleep in her bedchamber—sometimes in her bed—"and then the whole night went in playing, dancing, and foolishness," she wrote in her memoirs, "sometimes we only went to bed toward morning, there was no end to our mischief."

Weeks went by, and Peter developed chickenpox. Now alarm spread through the court, and fears for his safety. At the same time there were rumors of scandal. People were saying that Johanna's increasingly turbulent affair with Count Betsky had led to complications, and that she was pregnant. Whether or not Catherine believed these rumors, and whether or not she knew the actual truth about her mother, a cloud of dishonor hung over both Johanna and herself, and once again she had reason to be anxious about her situation. If Johanna disgraced the family, or if Peter should die, Catherine would be shipped back to Anhalt-Zerbst at the earliest opportunity.

Winter closed in, another brilliant season of parties and entertainments preoccupied the court, with Catherine drawing admiration for her slender figure, smooth fair skin and long elegant neck. She spent and far exceeded the allowance the empress gave her on gowns and finery—along with expensive gifts for her friends— and, like the other courtiers, developed a consuming passion for French styles. When Peter at last began to improve and was able to join the others at evening gatherings, Catherine was greatly relieved. At the end of November they both appeared at a masquerade, Peter slightly wan-looking but clearly recovered, Catherine brimming with vitality and charm, wearing an expensive gown and looking happier than she had for months.

But this interval of contentment was not to last. Several weeks later, as the court was migrating to Petersburg for Christmas, Peter again became unwell. Two hundred and fifty miles from Moscow the cortege halted while he rested, Dr. Boerhave hovering over him. His fever grew worse, he lay inert, hardly able to move, gripped by stomach pains. A day later skin eruptions appeared, the dreaded indicators of smallpox.

At once Boerhave took extreme precautions. No one was to be allowed in the room with Peter except himself and a few expendable servants. Within hours Catherine and Johanna were in a sleigh on their way to Petersburg, where Catherine would be kept in seclusion, and in ignorance of Peter's condition. A messenger was sent to the empress, who was already in the capital, to inform her of the disastrous turn Peter's illness had taken. She came in haste to his bedside and insisted upon nursing him herself.

The cold, dark Christmas season was made somber by the gravity of Peter's illness. Catherine, shut away for six weeks, applied her agile mind to the study of Russian and, with her tutor's help, produced several letters that were sent to the empress and that pleased her. Catherine had begun to understand and speak the language; now she learned, imperfectly, to write it. She saw few people other than her servants during January, as Johanna was kept away from her, even at meal times. The empress had given orders that Johanna be ignored and treated with coldness. Probably she hoped that Johanna would decide to return to An-halt-Zerbst. But Johanna, as stubborn as she was angry, refused to be accommodating. She clung to her rights, as she saw them, determined to stay in Russia until her daughter was married, which would not be for many months. And in defiance of Elizabeth's severe chastisements, she continued to write to Emperor Frederick and to carry on ineffectual intrigues with Frederick's diplomats and others.

Despite his history of chronic illness, Peter proved to have a hardy constitution. He survived his attack of smallpox, and at the end of January 1745 was back at court. Yet he was not himself: his face was misshapen and so swollen that his features were distorted. The marks of the pox made him repulsive, as did the huge wig he wore, his own hair having been shaved off.

"He had become hideous," Catherine wrote in her memoirs. "My blood ran cold at the sight of him." This repulsive creature, his once good-looking face altered beyond recognition, was to be her bridegroom. He supped with her every night, and she, desperately eager to please, swallowed her revulsion and endured his

son

company, but secretly she longed to run away, back to Germany, to someplace where she would not have to face the horrifying prospect of becoming his wife. The closer the date of the wedding came, the more she longed to forget all that had happened in Russia and go home.

In March Elizabeth declared that the wedding would take place in the first ten days of July. Catherine shuddered at the announcement. "I had a very great repugnance to hear the day named," she wrote in her memoirs, "and it did not please me at all to hear it spoken of." She had a presentiment of disaster, she felt more and more certain that she was about to make a very bad marriage. Yet she had too much pride to let anyone see her fears and thought of herself as an embattled heroine, steeling herself to endure what was to come. She knew that Peter did not love her, that at best he showed her a fitful brotherly affection and a qualified friendship, which was clearly to be maintained only at his suffrance; his broad flirting with the empress's maids of honor upset her and made her uneasy, but she knew that to complain about his behavior would be the height of folly, and would do no good besides.

She hid her inner trepidation when in public, but among those closest to her, her maids o{ honor and personal servants, it was difficult to mask her qualms. She tried to dispel her fears by throwing herself into playing vigorous games and tiring herself out striding through the gardens of Peterhof, but her dark moods always returned. "The closer my wedding day came," she wrote looking back on these events many years later, "the more I became dejected, and often I began crying without knowing why." Her women were aware of her crying spells and tried to cheer her up, yet their efforts only lowered her spirits further. She feared that to give in to tears was a mark of weakness, and would lay her open to scorn.

To make matters worse, Peter seemed to become more withdrawn, seeing less of her than previously and treating her with callous disregard. The empress too was for the moment remote and inaccessible. And Johanna, her capabilities as a mother never

very high, was too self-absorbed to provide her daughter with comfort. To solace her own bruised ego she resorted to histrionics.

One spring morning Catherine went to visit her mother in her apartments, and came upon a frightening scene. Johanna, who may or may not have known that her daughter was coming to see her, was stretched out on a mattress in the middle of her room, apparently unconscious, her frantic attendants rushing here and there and Dr. Lestocq bending over her, looking very perplexed. At the sight of her Catherine cried out in alarm and wanted to know what had happened. No one, it seemed, could give her a coherent account, but eventually she gathered that Johanna had felt the need to be bled and had summoned a surgeon. The man was so inept that, having been unable to draw blood from her arms, he attempted to cut into veins in both of her feet, whereupon Johanna, for whom being bled was always a fearsome ordeal, had fainted. Eventually she revived, but instead of being pleased to see Catherine nearby, she told her irritably to go away, bringing tears to Catherine's eyes and reminding her of all that estranged them from one another.

Preparations went forward as the wedding day approached. Many nobles, in anticipation of the coming celebrations, had already ordered sumptuous finery for themselves and elegant livery for their servants. Some had sent orders to master wagon-makers in Paris and Vienna for new carriages, all were awaiting shipments of fine fabrics from Europe, Naples silk and English brocade, along with soft gloves and satin slippers from France and golden saddles and stirrups from the armorers of northern Italy. The empress dictated that those belonging to the highest grades of the nobility were to be attended by no fewer than twenty footmen, runners, pages and other servants during the wedding festivities, and that all the servants had to be expensively turned out in velvet coats and breeches with metallic trim, fine bag-wigs, silk stockings and lace cuffs.

Elizabeth had made up her mind to stage the most splendid

wedding ever seen at any European court. Taking as her model the wedding of the French dauphin, the son of Louis XV, she wrote to Versailles for details of the ceremony and aimed to surpass them. It was a lofty ambition, for the French court at that time was a gilded fairyland of ornament and bauble and decoration. There were said to be five hundred goldsmiths in Paris, all of them engaged in producing exquisite jewels and trinkets to embellish the wardrobes of the aristocracy. Hundreds of skilled craftsmen devoted their labors to carving wood and shaping metal, hundreds more turned out fine china, delicate furniture and objets d'art. The extravagance of Louis XV's courtiers was becoming legendary, and they had outdone themselves in celebrating the dauphin's wedding.

Renewed warfare in Europe threatened to involve Russia but Elizabeth resisted the pleas of her chancellor that she turn her attention from wedding preparations to affairs of state. Emperor Frederick, whose incursions against Austria had begun five years earlier, was once again attacking the territories of the young Empress Maria Theresa and he had captured Prague. Bestuzhev was urging Elizabeth to face the danger to Russia which Frederick's aggression implied, and to send Russian troops to Maria Theresa's aid, but to his infinite frustration she all but ignored the Prussian onslaught. When in May 1745 the armies of Prussia's ally France won a stunning victory over the Austrians and their British allies at Fontenoy, Elizabeth was bemused—but fleetingly. She soon immersed herself in the wedding once again, and let the chancellor do her worrying for her.

The effort to create in Petersburg an opulent and magnificent spectacle akin to that of Versailles led to difficulties. Not all the shipments of goods from the Western capitals arrived on time, workmen were slow, there were not enough seamstresses to cut and stitch the elaborate gowns or embroiderers to sew on the thousands of beads and jewels and seed pearls. No matter how keenly the empress supervised the renovations and repairs to the Winter Palace, the decorating of the cathedral, the plans for the

banquets, balls and other entertainments to be attended by the wedding guests, things went wrong, and there were unavoidable delays. The date of the ceremony had to be changed, not once but twice. And still it was not certain that all the boatloads of foodstuffs arriving from the south would reach the capital in time, or that there would be enough fresh meat for all the guests, or that the actors, singers and dancers hired to put on operas and plays would be ready to take the stage.

All but lost in the maze of arrangements were the future bride and groom. Peter, recovering his strength and his volatile temper, able to abandon his ill-fitting wig as his pale hair grew in once again, had a new obsession: his role as Duke of Holstein. He was emerging from the unwanted tutelage of Brummer, asserting his ducal authority, strutting through his apartments with a look of hauteur and giving orders. A troupe of Holstein soldiers had been sent to him, and he became their drill master, marching the men up and down for hours, making them stand at attention and perform guard duty, lecturing them in his high voice and playing at warfare. He no longer had his valet Roumberg at hand to advise and teach him; the empress had had Roumberg sent away to prison. But his newfound experience of command was teaching him how to govern a wife, and he included Catherine in his military games, instructing her to obey him as his Holsteiners did.