Great Catherine (9 page)

Peter became at once menacing, with his talk of beatings and subjection, and distant. Catherine did not expect fidelity from him, he had confided to her his infatuations with various women of the court and she knew that men were rarely faithful to their wives—her conscientious, virtuous father being a notable exception. Yet she must have begun to feel apprehensive about her future. What would Peter be like once they were married? Before she left home her father had given her a letter of advice, which she reread from time to time. He told her to look to Peter as "her

Lord, Father, and Sovereign." "His will is to govern all," Christian August had written, and she had taken the phrase to heart. But what if Peter, willful as he was, became capricious and decided to mistreat her? Could she rely on the empress to protect her?

Women had very low status in Russia, as Catherine was beginning to find out. Until very recently, in the time of Elizabeth's father, Peter the Great, they had been kept in Oriental confinement in terems, or upper rooms, of Russian houses. In these women's quarters they lived out their lives, kept away from all men other than their relatives, shielded from prying eyes and from the temptations of the world, to which they were believed to be far more susceptible than men. The higher a woman's social class, the more complete her confinement was; only the poorest peasant women, whose labor was necessary to the survival of the family and whose living conditions did not permit segregation, were allowed to mingle freely with men.

Emperor Peter had done his best to put an end to the terem, though his female subjects resisted his efforts and clung to their familiar confinement. In his daughter's reign, however, they were becoming emboldened, and were accustoming themselves to joining in public life. But though women were no longer kept physically confined, at least in Moscow and Petersburg where the impact of Emperor Peter's reforms was greatest, they were still in thrall to the teachings of the church, which viewed them as weak, vapid and prone to sin, especially sexual sin, and were still subject to the constraints of the law, which virtually enslaved them to their husbands and fathers and threatened them with barbarous punishments if they failed to be obedient to their natural masters.

When a young woman married, it was customary for her father to touch her lightly with a whip, and then to pass the whip on to the husband he had chosen for her—a reminder that she was exchanging one form of physical subjection for another. During the wedding ceremony itself the bride demonstrated her subjugation by prostrating herself before her husband and touching her forehead to his feet. While she lay at his feet he covered her with one of his garments in token of his obligation to care for her.

Later, as he led her away to her new home he struck her gently with the whip, saying with each stroke, "Forget the manners of your own family and learn those of mine." When the couple entered their bedroom together for the first time, the groom ordered the bride to take off his boots. She knelt to remove them, and discovered in one of them a whip, yet another reminder that, in the words of the Russian proverb, "the wife is in the power of her husband."

Throughout her married life a wife could expect to be on trial, constantly in danger of being sent away if she displeased her husband. The Orthodox church permitted a man to divorce his wife by sending her to a convent, where she became as one dead to the world, entombed among other rejected women and wives who had run away from their abusive husbands. The husband was then free to remarry. Many husbands took advantage of this expedient to rid themselves of unwanted spouses, but many more took out their frustrations on their hapless wives by beating them, frequently and brutally. Peter's valet was giving conventional advice when he told his master to give Catherine a few blows to the head from time to time. Such punishment was mild compared to the beatings some men administered, hanging their wives by their hair and stripping them naked, then beating them until their flesh was raw and their bones broken.

Though many women died under such punishment, the law did not view their husbands as guilty of any crime. Should a wife turn on her tormentor and kill him, however, the law was severe: a pit was dug in the earth and the guilty woman was buried in it, with only her head above ground, and left to die of thirst. Nor was this cruel punishment rare; one visitor to Russia in the early eighteenth century wrote that he often saw such burials and that the women he observed sometimes took seven or eight days to die. An even more common sight were women who had had their noses cut off for offending their husbands.

To a young woman as strong-willed, intelligent and opinionated as Catherine, the thought of being subject to the callow Peter must have made her shudder. Yet her desire to please the empress

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was overwhelming, and it was Elizabeth's pleasure that Catherine marry Peter. Besides, if not Peter, some other man would one day claim mastery over her, unless she chose to live like the outlandish (though enticing) Countess of Bentinck, free of all conventions and viewed with horror by nearly everyone. And she could not, except in fantasy, envision that.

Now that she was grand duchess Catherine was given her own household, with three chamberlains, three chamber gentlemen, three waiting maids and, as mistress of the household, Countess Maria Rumyantsev, once mistress of Peter the Great and a commanding personality. All but one of her menial servants were Russian, and among them was a girl only a year older than Catherine who quickly became a friend. Like Catherine herself the girl had extremely high spirits, and loved to have fun. The friendship was limited to giggles and horseplay and dumb show, since, as Catherine recalled later, she still knew very little Russian. But it was genuine enough, even without words, and it brought relief from the tensions of court life.

Johanna, smarting and raw from the empress's rebuke and indignant over being reduced to insignificance in her daughter's entourage, attacked the innocent friendship between Catherine and the young Russian girl in an effort to reassert her importance. Johanna lectured Catherine on the unsuitability of showing special favor to her inferiors—something Catherine was prone to do— and insisted that she treat all her woman servants with the same degree of distant affability. Catherine protested, but in the end, chastened, she complied.

Meanwhile Johanna, elated by her one small success, sought others. Having won over Catherine's chamber gentleman Count Zernichev, and relying on him to do her bidding, she insinuated herself into every small intrigue and ongoing quarrel in Catherine's establishment and where there was harmony, introduced discord. Slighted by many of the courtiers, she continued to find a haven with the Prince and Princess of Hesse-Homburg, and confined herself to their circle. Spiteful gossip said that she found

more than a haven there. The princess's handsome brother Ivan Betsky was a frequent visitor to the Hesse-Homburg apartments, and Johanna was attracted to him. Ignoring the letters that arrived periodically from Zerbst, in which Christian August urged his wife to return home immediately, Johanna lingered at the imperial court, determined to stay on as long as she could, unwilling to leave before Catherine's wedding though it was clear that no one, apart from Catherine herself, the Hesse-Homburgs and probably Count Betsky, would mind a bit if she did.

Summer had arrived with its long, hot days and warm scented nights. Elizabeth, as was her custom in warm weather, became a nomad, camping in the countryside and playing at peasant life. Her mother, Peter the Great's second wife, had been a Lithuanian peasant, radiant, flower-faced, buxom, and unaffected, to whom the pretenses and artificialities of court life were foreign. Elizabeth took after her, and was at her happiest when away from her palaces, exploring the sparsely populated hinterlands, living as she had in her childhood among the villagers who made up the vast majority of her subjects.

And where the empress went, the court followed. Hundreds of carts, piled high with trunks, boxes and chests of clothing and provisions, trundled along freshly repaired roads to the vicinity of where the empress was staying. Thousands of weary, dust-covered servants clung to the carts or walked along behind them, coughing and wheezing and slapping at the thick black clouds of gnats that rose up from the dust and seemed to attack everything that lived. Elizabeth never traveled without her court and household, and she never left anything behind. Her enormous wardrobe (with four thousand fewer gowns than usual—they had been destroyed in a huge palace fire earlier in the year), her linens and plate and woven hangings, her icons and chapel furnishings, her dogs and hunting mounts and hairdressers all followed her, as did each member of the government and each household officer, no matter how menial.

Like a swarm of locusts the migration of the courtiers spread

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itself out over the countryside, engulfing every available horse and cart in its path, devouring sheep and chickens by the thousands and commandeering every sackful of stored grain. Two thousand gallons of wine, beer and honey were needed each day to quench the thirst of the travelers, and uncounted thousands of pounds of meat and cheese, eggs and vegetables to satisfy their insatiable hunger. Provisioners rode ahead of the main columns of riders, stopping in each village to strip barns and granaries of their contents, leading away horses and seizing carts, all but stealing the unripened crops from the fields.

The villagers endured these visitations without outward complaint, gaping open-mouthed at the parade of dignitaries and liveried retainers as they rode by in all their dusty splendor, dropping worshipfully to their knees or prostrating themselves when the empress came into distant view.

To them the empress was a divinity, yet a divinity of a remarkable sort. She passed among them quite without hauteur, taking a kind and sincere interest in their crops and their children, talking to them knowledgeably about their fruit trees and their breeding stock. She liked to stride from cottage to cottage, impulsively entering one after another to sample the housewife's blinis and cabbage soup and pickled pork. She drank kvass with the men and went mushrooming with them, leaving them in no doubt as to how much she enjoyed their company and basking in their unabashed admiration.

For in truth she preferred handsome, lowborn men to aristocrats, and she flaunted her opulent charms, gratified when she attracted gazes that were more than worshipful from her admiring subjects. Elizabeth was well aware that, should her passion for her morganatic husband Alexei Razumovsky wane, she could easily find a replacement for him. As she made her swift way through the villages, ordering cottages renovated and new ones built, instigating new agricultural ventures with a wave of her imperial wand, she kept an eye out for attractive men.

For the first month of the summer the empress contented herself with her rural rambles, driving her troika at a reckless pace

along the narrow roads, her head thrown back and her whip flicking over the lathered backs of her fleet horses, hunting wolves and hyenas, putting flowers and ribbons in her hair and dressing in peasant costume to join in the dancing at local festivals. Folk songs delighted her, she had her court musicians write them down and attempted to compose at least one herself.

But when August came she put her hunting and dancing clothes aside and became a pilgrim. Without her customary finery, with boots covering her sturdy, fleshy legs she set out to walk to her favorite shrines, keeping a fast pace while an entourage of hundreds followed in her wake in case she should have need of a drink of water or a change of boots or a frugal meal. She walked for hours, covering seven or eight miles before halting to rest, eventually reaching a monastery where she would stay several days and make her devotions.

The entire court did as the empress did, though most people did not follow her example to the extent of descending from their carriages to tramp the roads on foot. Towns offered hospitality— Serpukhov, Tula, Sefsk, Glukhov, Baturin, Negin. They stayed for three weeks at Kozelsk, where Razumovsky had a huge mansion, and there, Catherine recalled, they enjoyed constant music, balls and gambling for high stakes. The monasteries and convents at which the travelers halted sometimes put on entertainments, mounting ballets and comedies, mock battles and grand fishing scenes. After many hours of such spectacles Elizabeth grew weary, and commanded the actors to quit the stage. Even so more entertainments followed: banquets and masquerade parties, magnificent albeit dangerous fireworks displays, expeditions to local landmarks and visits to churches.

The summer's peregrinations gave Catherine the opportunity to see more of the country over which her husband would one day rule. Thick forests of birch and pine, so dense they seemed never to end; fields of yellow wheat and rye stretching to the horizon; fresh meadows, full of blooming daisies, lilac and cornflowers, their grasses tall and ready for harvest; cool lakes bordered by stands of sycamore and willow; marshy swamps,

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overgrown with brown reeds and waist-high sedge: all this she drank in, her eye caught by tiny deserted churches, farmsteads and millponds, villages whose wooden houses, black with age, leaned at crazy angles and huddled together as if for protection against the surrounding emptiness. The holy city of Kiev inspired her awe, with its splendid churches and whitewashed, slate-roofed monasteries, their golden cupolas shining in the warm sunlight, their well-watered gardens in full summer bloom.

The vastness of Russia, and the vastness of the empress's entourage, dwarfed Catherine despite her newly acquired stature. She was but one among thousands in the great imperial household, one more mouth to feed, one more young body requiring shelter. That she was now grand duchess did not stop Peter from teasing her roughly about how he would have to keep her in line once they were married, nor did it stop Johanna's persistent incivilities and irritating moodiness. Johanna, who had not wanted to come along on the summer wanderings of the court because Ivan Betsky was not included, took out her irritation on her daughter, and on Peter, coming close to slapping him when he provoked her, and on the ladies in waiting, with whom she quarreled constantly.